Cable leaks prompt US envoy shuffle

The US will effect sweeping changes in its embassies around the world — including Nairobi — following the leaking of its diplomatic cables by whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

The transfers will target desk officers, military personnel and intelligence operatives whose work has been laid bare by WikiLeaks.

According to The Independent, the Obama administration was on Monday facing a crisis in its diplomatic service, amid growing evidence that the ongoing publication of the supposedly-confidential communiqués will make normal work difficult, if not dangerous, for important State Department employees across the world.

There are 1,821 cables from the US embassy in Nairobi covering the period 1996 to February this year and whose content has been described as “unpleasant” and “explosive”.

None of the Nairobi cables has been released yet. The cables contain analyses of key issues and personalities in countries to which the diplomats are accredited.

A mere 1,100 of the roughly 250,000 secret documents obtained by WikiLeaks have been published, leading to fears that the revelations will continue for months to come.

“In the short run, we’re almost out of business,” a senior US diplomat told the Reuters news agency, saying it could take five years to rebuild trust.

“It is really, really bad. I cannot exaggerate it. In all honesty, nobody wants to talk to us... Some people still have to, particularly (in) government but ... they are already asking us things like, ‘Are you going to write about this?’” The Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department are reported to be identifying which members of staff have been outed.

Among those whose private thoughts have been embarrassingly revealed is Gene Cretz, the US ambassador to Libya, who wrote to Washington in 2009 noting that the country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi never travels without his “voluptuous blonde” Ukranian nurse.

America’s envoy to the United Nations has also been criticised following the revelation that Hillary Clinton instructed them to procure credit card passwords and other data from foreign diplomats and top UN officials, including the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The difficulty regarding the future of America’s diplomatic service is the fact that the authors of many of the most important emails in the WikiLeaks tranche are among their most-experienced senior staff, and will therefore be tough, if not impossible, to replace.

None of the countries that were affected by the WikiLeaks cables had requested the withdrawal of any American diplomatic staff.

“That’s another part of the tragedy of this,” a senior US national-security official told The Daily Beast website, which on Monday detailed the extent of the crisis on the ground and claimed that the reassignment of affected diplomats had already been planned and would take place in the coming months.

“We’re going to have to pull out some of our best people — the diplomats who best represented the United States and were the most thoughtful in their analysis — because they dared to report back the truth about the nations in which they serve.”