Where to find wikileaks cables

It's a unique picture of US diplomatic language - including over 50, documents covering the current Obama administration. But what does the data include? Since the attacks of September , there has been a move in the US to link up archives of government information, in the hope that key intelligence no longer gets trapped in information silos or "stovepipes". An increasing number of US embassies have become linked to SIPRNet over the past decade, so that military and diplomatic information can be shared.

By , embassies were on SIPRNet: by , the number had risen to , and by now the vast majority of US missions worldwide are linked to the system - which is why the bulk of these cables are from and From there, it can be accessed not only by anyone in the state department, but also by anyone in the US military who has a security clearance up to the 'Secret' level, a password, and a computer connected to SIPRNet - which astonishingly covers over 3m people.

Instead, they are supposed to be read by officials in Washington up to the level of current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The cables are normally drafted by the local ambassador or subordinates. This article includes content provided by Spotify. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. Technical users can also use Tails to help ensure you do not leave any records of your submission on the computer.

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WikiLeaks publishes documents of political or historical importance that are censored or otherwise suppressed. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA were denied blueprints for a secret nuclear reactor near Qom and told by Iran that evidence of bomb-grade uranium enrichment was forged. Saudi Arabia complained directly to the Iranian foreign minister of Iranian "meddling" in the Middle East.

Britain's ambassador to Iran gave the US a private masterclass on how to negotiate with Iran. How a year-old American of Iranian descent rode a horse over a freezing mountain range into Turkey after officials confiscated his passport. The story of how the , US embassy cables were leaked. Background on Siprnet : where America stores its secret cables. Editor's note : publishing the cables. Explore the Guardian's searchable database of the leaked embassy cables. A long piece in English primarily about the US view of Germany , including some bracing views of Berlin's leadership and the description of Chancellor Angela Merkel as "risk averse and rarely creative".

The New York Times highlights US intelligence assessments that Iran has acquired missiles from North Korea which could for the first time enable Tehran to strike at western European capitals. A trawl through the 3, documents in the haul originating from the US embassy in Madrid, dating from to this year in Spanish.

The French paper also leads on the allegations of US spying on UN leaders but also covers Washington's view of France , as gleaned from the cables in French. China is ready to accept Korean unification and is distancing itself from North Korea which it describes as behaving like a "spoiled child". Cables say Kim Jong-il is a "flabby old chap" losing his grip and drinking.

Prince Andrew attacked a Serious Fraud Office anti-corruption investigation during a meeting with British businessmen in Kyrgyzstan and criticised a Guardian investigation — and the French — in what the US ambassador there described as "an astonishingly candid" performance verging on the rude. He is also reported to like big game hunting and falconry.

An official from the Commonwealth secretariat claimed Prince Charles is not respected in the same way as the Queen and questioned whether the heir apparent should necessarily succeed his mother as the head of the Commonwealth. Hillary Clinton wanted a briefing on the mental health of Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner and asked whether she was taking medication to calm her down.

The German government would not accept 17 Uighur prisoners, despite the support of the Uighur exiled community in Munich, for fear of upsetting the Chinese government. There is an extensive network of informants in Berlin, informing the US about Angela Merkel's coalition negotiations.

Merkel is described as an enigma, and sceptical about the US. The US administration doubts the Turkish government's dependability as an ally , describing it as having little understanding of the outside world and its foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu's "neo-Ottoman visions" as exceptionally dangerous.

It describes a Muslim fraternity within the governing party and an "iron ring of sycophantic but contemptuous advisers". In , US diplomats reported France as being a difficult ally in the fight against international terrorism , because its specialist investigating magistrates were insular, centred on Paris and operating in "another world".

Spain's political situation and public opinion made this "almost impossible", an official said. The head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, privately criticised David Cameron and George Osborne now the prime minister and chancellor before the election for their lack of experience , the lack of depth in their inner circle and their tendency to think about issues only in terms of their electoral impact.

Osborne lacked gravitas and was seen as a political lightweight because of his "high-pitched vocal delivery" according to private Conservative polling before the election. US and British diplomats fear that Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme could lead to terrorists obtaining fissile material , or a devastating nuclear exchange with India.

Also, small teams of US special forces have been operating secretly inside Pakistan's tribal areas , with Pakistani government approval. And the US concluded that Pakistani troops were responsible for a spate of extra-judicial killings in the Swat Valley and tribal belt, but decided not to comment publicly. David Cameron said British people generally believe McKinnon is guilty "but they are sympathetic". The US ambassador to Pakistan said the Pakistani army is covertly sponsoring four major militant groups, including the Afghan Taliban and the Mumbai attackers, Laskar-e-Taiba LeT , and "no amount of money" will change the policy.

Also, US diplomats discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan earmarked for fighting Islamist militants was not used for that purpose. Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, considered pushing President Asif Ali Zardari from office and forcing him into exile to resolve a political dispute, the US embassy cables reveal. Separately, Zardari once told the US vice-president, Joe Biden, he feared the military "might take me out". He told the Americans his sister would lead if he was assassinated.

Another cable revealed that the Pakistani president was described as a "numbskull" by Sir Jock Stirrup, Britain's then chief of defence staff. Senior Lib Dem officials, who now work in No 10 and the Cabinet Office, planned a campaign to depict David Cameron as "fake" and "out of touch" during the election campaign, but abandoned the strategy because it was deemed too aggressive after the death of his son, Ivan.

The Tories told the US before the general election that a Conservative government could be tougher on Pakistan as it was less reliant on votes from people with a Pakistani connections than Labour. Referring to Muslim extremists coming to Britain from Pakistan, Cameron said that under Labour "we let in a lot of crazies and did not wake up early enough". Zardari claimed that the brother of Pakistan's opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, "tipped off" LeT about impending UN sanctions after the Mumbai attacks , allowing the group to empty its bank accounts.

British diplomats feared India would respond with force to the attacks but the US thought the UK was "over-reacting". The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is portrayed as a self-absorbed, thin-skinned, erratic character who tyrannises his ministers and staff but is also a brilliant political tactician, in US memos.

The Saudis were irritated by Sarkozy planning to take Carla Bruni on a state visit to their country before she was married. Sarkozy invited Gordon Brown and the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, to last year's D-day commemorations because "the survival of their governments was at stake". The British government promised to protect US interests during the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has been sheltering the leader of the nationalist insurgency in Pakistan's Balochistan province for years.

Le Monde focuses on what the cables say about Sarkozy , notably his pro-Americanism, his idea that an international force could replace the US in Iraq, and the US view on his election that he was "a novice" in international affairs with a poor grasp of English.

The paper has significant coverage of Pakistan, with a story that the Pakistani military and secret service are heavily involved in the country's politics and often work against US interests. A subsidiary of the US private security firm Xe then known as Blackwater flouted German arms export law. It transported German helicopters to Afghanistan via Britain and Turkey without a permit because it was taking too long to get the German export papers. Russia is a "virtual mafia state" with rampant corruption and scant separation between the activities of the government and organised crime.

Vladimir Putin is accused of amassing "illicit proceeds" from his time in office, which various sources allege are hidden overseas. And he was likely to have known about the operation in London to murder the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Washington's top diplomat in Europe alleged. British and US officials colluded to manoeuvre around a proposed ban on cluster bombs , allowing the US to keep the munitions on British territory, regardless of whether a treaty forbidding their use was implemented.

Parliament was kept in the dark about the secret agreement, approved by then-foreign secretary David Miliband. US diplomats believed that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, bore responsibility for a massacre last year that is the subject of a UN war crimes inquiry. Russia armed Georgian separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and carried out a wave of "covert actions" to undermine Georgia in the runup to the Russian-Georgian war, according to US diplomats. Moscow's veteran mayor Yuri Luzhkov was accused by the US ambassador of sitting on top of a "pyramid of corruption" involving the Kremlin, Russia's police force, its security service, political parties and crime groups by the US ambassador.

Miliband's campaign to champion aid and human rights during the Sri Lankan humanitarian crisis last year was largely motivated by a desire to win favour with Tamil voters in the UK , according to a Foreign Office official. The US is sceptical that Russian President Medvedev has much of a future , believing Putin to be "in the driver's seat".

Having helped to build up Georgia's military capabilities, the US made last-ditch diplomatic attempts to try to prevent it going to war with Russia in Washington's envoy to the Caucasus warned Georgia that war would "cost it valuable support in Washington and European capitals" , while publicly George W Bush and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, continued to give their unqualified support to Georgia.

The US has long been trying to loosen Russia's grip on Ukraine, according to diplomatic cables. On the inauguration of the new Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, they sought to make him a US partner thereby striking a diplomatic blow against the Kremlin. One of the biggest objectives at the US embassy in Madrid over the past seven years has been trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of the killing of a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad.

US diplomats held a host of meetings about the case with high-ranking members of the Spanish government. The Russian prime minister, Putin, often did not show up at his office , according to rumours cited in a document titled Questioning Putin's Work Ethic.

US diplomats warned of increasing distrust of the United States in Canada. They described "negative popular stereotyping" of Americans on Canadian TV. They also said Canadians "always carry a chip on their shoulder" in part because of a feeling that their country "is condemned to always play 'Robin' to the US 'Batman'". The British military was criticised for failing to establish security in Sangin by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the US commander of Nato troops, according to diplomatic cables.

Gordon Brown was written off as prime minister by the US embassy in London a year into his premiership. It concluded that an "abysmal track record" had left him lurching from "political disaster to disaster", according to cables released by WikiLeaks. He briefly earned some praise when he led the recapitalising of banks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers but within months his government was deemed a "sinking ship".

Brown's international initiatives, from food summits to global disarmament and a UK national security council, were treated with indifference bordering on disdain by the Americans, according to US embassy cables.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is erratic, emotional and prone to believing paranoid conspiracy theories , according to frustrated diplomats and foreign statesmen. He has also been accused by his own ministers of complicity in criminal activity, including ordering the physical intimidation of the top official in charge of leading negotiations with the Taliban.

US diplomats have reported suspicions that Silvio Berlusconi could be "profiting personally and handsomely" from secret deals with the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin , according to cables released by WikiLeaks. They centre on allegations that the Italian leader has been promised a cut of huge energy contracts.

Another memo quoted a friend of Berlusconi saying the Italian prime minister's fondness for partying had taken a physical and political toll on him.

American officials dismissed British protests about secret US spy flights taking place from the UK's Cyprus airbase , amid concerns from Labour ministers, upset about rendition flights going on behind their backs, that the UK would be an unwitting accomplice to torture.

The British Foreign Office misled parliament over the plight of thousands of islanders who were expelled from their Indian Ocean homeland — the British colony of Diego Garcia — to make way for a large US military base , according to secret US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. It has privately admitted its latest plan to declare the islands the world's largest marine protection zone will end any chance of them being repatriated. Publicly ministers have claimed the proposed park would have no effect on the islanders' right of return.

The cables reveal Washington's opinion on Gordon Brown's potential successors. David Miliband was deemed "too brainy", Alan Johnson had a "lack of killer instinct" and Harriet Harman was a "policy lightweight but an adept interparty operator".

A scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young "dancing boys" to entertain them in northern Afghanistan caused such panic that the interior minister begged the US embassy to try to "quash" the story, according a US embassy cable. The Afghan government feared the story, if published, would "endanger lives" and was particularly concerned that a video of the incident might be made public. Germany has threatened to cancel contributions, raising concerns that money is going to the US treasury.

Iran is financing a range of Afghan religious and political leaders , grooming Afghan religious scholars, training Taliban militants and even seeking to influence MPs, according to cables from the US embassy in Kabul.

The US has lost faith in the Mexican army's ability to win the country's drugs war , branding it slow, clumsy and no match for "sophisticated" narco-traffickers. The US is convinced that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president's younger half-brother and a senior figure in Kandahar, is corrupt , according to embassy cables. He is described as dominating access to "economic resources, patronage and protection".

Two of Hamid Karzai's brothers planned to ask for asylum in the US, while other family members stayed away and kept their money out of Afghanistan — so anxious were they that the Afghan president would lose last year's election. The Obama administration and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, are determined to reject talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and have consistently worked to split his movement , according to US diplomatic cables.

Karzai has sometimes publicly floated the idea of dialogue with Omar and other top Taliban, but the cables show his private position is the opposite. A Kremlin campaign to airbrush Stalin's role in Russian history by dictating how academics write about the past is only half-hearted , US diplomats believe.

They also feel there are enough Russians striving to remember the purge victims to combat any rewrite. The cable concerns the so-called "history wars", a nationalist campaign to defend Russia's honour. Turkmenistan's president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, is "vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, very conservative", a "micro-manager" and "a practised liar" , US diplomats say. Four months before his death the Nobel-prize winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered qualified praise for Vladimir Putin , arguing that he was doing a better job as Russia's leader than Boris Yeltsin or Mikhail Gorbachev.

Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in and returned to Russia 20 years later. Afghanistan emerges as a land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm. Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan's new cabinet last January, the US embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, "appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist".

A top German diplomat complained the fee would be a tough sell to taxpayers. Karzai is convinced the US has thrown its backing behind his rival Abdullah Abdullah. The leaked cables contain allegations of personal business interests that both politicians deny.

US diplomats are concerned about the growing power of Russian organised crime and believe it has contacts with the highest levels of government in Moscow. France is committed to staying the course in Afghanistan even though public opposition to the war and electoral considerations have weighed heavily on Nicolas Sarkozy. Amid concerns that the French president was trying to distance himself from the US to improve his popularity, Barack Obama was advised that a phone call to him could have a decisive impact.

The US president was told: "Flattery would lead very far. Iran is extending its influence in Afghanistan in the same way it did in Iraq. It has been supporting insurgent groups as well as financially backing politicians. Conservative party politicians promised before the election that they would run a "pro-American regime" and buy more arms from the US if they came to power.

The president of Yemen secretly offered US forces unrestricted access to his territory to conduct unilateral strikes against al-Qaida terrorist targets. Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is variously labelled as "petulant" and "bizarre" in his negotiations with US security officials who met him. The EU president, Herman Van Rompuy, has predicted "disaster" at the latest round of global climate change negotiations in Mexico.

The US seeks to manipulate nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming. The US backed a bid by the United Arab Emirates to host a major international agency promoting green energy. The Foreign Office has privately admitted to a plan to declare Diego Garcia , from which thousands of people were expelled from their homeland to make way for a large US military base, the world's largest marine protection zone, ending any chance of them being repatriated.

A potential "environmental disaster" was kept secret by the US last year when a large consignment of highly enriched uranium in Libya came close to cracking open and leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere. Details of the US's at times tricky relationship with Yemen's president , Ali Abdullah Saleh, a key anti-terrorism ally. A Mexican official told US counterparts more than a year ago that the government feared it could lose control of parts of the country to rampant drug cartels.

How US diplomats in Libya deal with Muammar Gaddafi , "a man plagued by paranoia, anxiety and neuroses, a man who only trusts his closest advisers, a man whose pride is easily wounded and a man who will suffer no criticism". President Sarkozy's new openness will allow the US to gain more influence in Africa without meeting resistance from French vested interests on the continent.