The WikiLeaks Files

What holds together an empire built on embassies, intelligence agencies, and corporate power? The answer, Julian Assange argues, is communication. The modern United States does not project power merely through armies or trade treaties—it rules through the control of information flows. Cables, databases, and classified channels form its nervous system. WikiLeaks' Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), which collects over 2.3 million State Department records, reveals this inner anatomy: an empire structured by communication, secrecy, and the translation of words into power.

At its core, the book teaches you that the State Department operates less as a collection of people than as a communications organism. The system’s health depends on message routing, classification, and storage. Henry Kissinger’s 1970s reforms digitized this process, centralizing diplomatic traffic and preserving searchable memory across thousands of embassies and missions. Today, roughly 71,000 people inside 191 countries generate daily message streams that inform Washington’s decisions. When these cables leaked, they revealed how communication itself defines imperial reach.

The archive as living memory

PlusD should be read not as a bucket of scandals but as a structured archive—a living institutional memory. Its cables use dense metadata and tags (‘PROP,’ ‘IZ,’ ‘CHEROKEE’) to map the State Department’s perception of the world. Each cable’s ID (for example, 09CAIRO1) represents a node within a massive communication graph linking embassies, consulates, and headquarters. Reading one cable in isolation is like hearing one heartbeat—you need the whole pulse pattern to understand how the body moves.

Secrecy and ritual

After WikiLeaks exposed this archive, the US system reacted with what Assange calls a ‘security priesthood.’ Classified documents were treated as contaminated once seen publicly. Agencies blocked access, students were warned not to cite WikiLeaks, and employees were ordered to destroy leaked files. This reveals the psychological depth of secrecy culture: information itself carries symbolic power beyond its content. The ritual of classification sustains bureaucratic authority even when the public already knows the facts.

Connecting empire, economy, and control

From these cables emerges a portrait of empire as both ideological and infrastructural. Ambassadors sell Boeing aircraft and Monsanto seeds while intelligence officers run surveillance networks from embassy rooftops. The cables show diplomacy entangled with commerce, finance, and covert action. Trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) function as legal enclosures protecting corporate interests; ICC immunity campaigns and rendition cover-ups reveal how law is bent to serve power. In each case, communication systems—classified cables, diplomatic pressure, or economic drafts—translate national strength into global leverage.

A reader’s approach

To read these archives meaningfully, you must balance micro and macro views: trace individual cables but also see collective patterns. Follow reftels (reference telegrams) across months, map tag frequencies, and note which embassies communicate intensely at pivotal historical moments. Each message string is a pixel in a larger portrait of policy logic. (Note: Sarah Harrison advises approaching PlusD as a structured dataset, not a gossip trove.) Used properly, PlusD lets you reconstruct how institutions think, not just what they say.

The overarching insight is simple but profound: empires live through communication architectures. When those architectures are exposed, the moral and political contradictions of power also surface—between democracy and coercion, public speech and secret action. The cables make blueprints visible, showing how ideology travels through wires disguised as technical procedure. Reading the archive becomes an act of critical archaeology, uncovering the circuitry of global influence.

In sum, the book reframes WikiLeaks not as disruption but revelation: a mirror held to the infrastructure of empire. Through it, you see how secrecy sanctifies authority, how communication builds coercive capacity, and how the simple act of message exchange sustains vast systems of control. Once you grasp that pattern, everything from war planning to trade negotiation appears as part of the same communicative anatomy.

You soon realize that the greatest shock of the WikiLeaks disclosures was not the content itself but the institutional panic that followed. When classified cables entered public space, the US government treated them as possessed objects—unchanged in data, yet suddenly forbidden. Libraries filtered them, universities cautioned students, and employees risked disciplinary action for reading publicly available files. This reaction exposes not empirical concern but metaphysical fear: secrecy as a faith system.

The contamination paradox

Assange’s chapters describe how cleared personnel were instructed to self-report if they viewed leaked cables. The notion was that leaks contaminate what they reveal, making identical information magically “classified” again. It’s a ritual logic—the bureaucratic equivalent of religious taboos that preserve hierarchies through purity rules. Inside security circles, power depends not on knowing but on who may know.

Hysteria and practical censorship

The reaction extended into academia and the press. Columbia’s SIPA warned students against linking WikiLeaks material, while the Library of Congress banned searches for “WikiLeaks.” The International Studies Association forbade scholars from submitting papers based on leaked cables—even though they represented the richest empirical diplomatic dataset in history. Such restrictions turned public knowledge into forbidden research, revealing how censorship can operate through institutional compliance rather than overt bans.

The 'WikiLeaks fatwa'

One of the strangest episodes was the Pentagon’s 2011 directive nicknamed the “WikiLeaks fatwa.” Contractors were ordered to delete leaked materials via SHIFT+DELETE and purge caches. Email filters even blocked phrases like “WikiLeaks,” hindering internal legal correspondence. The logic was symbolic: eradication rituals prove loyalty, transforming security clearance into moral identity. (Note: Foucault or Weber might read this as rationalized priesthood—bureaucracy sanctifying its own taboos.)

Academic blind spots and implications

The censorship aftermath produced a secondary loss: scholars and analysts ignored vast evidence. While journalists mined stories selectively, entire academic fields avoided primary sources that could challenge official historiography. In contrast, non-political disciplines—linguistics, conflict studies, data science—embraced the material and built quantitative corpora. The dissonance shows how knowledge itself bends under the gravity of secrecy norms.

For you as a researcher, this episode teaches caution: silence and omission are themselves data. Whose voices are excluded, which journals refuse evidence, and how institutions define “legitimate sources”—these signals reveal more about power structures than the cables alone. Ultimately, secrecy proves self-preserving: the more its myths are exposed, the more aggressively bureaucracy asserts faith in its sanctity.

Wars are fought not only with weapons but with categories. The cables reveal that US operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo hinged on labels—“terrorist,” “enemy combatant,” “military-age men”—that legally authorized violence and stripped civilians of protection. These classifications created bureaucratic legitimacy for brutality, turning moral outrage into operational procedure.

Guantánamo and the manufactured combatant

The Guantánamo files list 779 detainees, including over a hundred proven civilians. Notes like “HIGH risk” or “HIGH intelligence value” were attached with little evidence—journalists, taxi drivers, children treated as threats. Torture became systemic, rationalized by the Bybee/Yoo legal memos redefining pain thresholds. Psychologists were paid millions to design methods of “enhanced interrogation,” later discredited by Senate investigations. You see how euphemism converts cruelty into sanctioned policy.

Iraq and the Salvador Option

War logs described US-backed Iraqi paramilitaries—the Wolf Brigade, Badr Organization—trained for counterinsurgency modeled on 1980s Central America. Pentagon order FRAGO 242 instructed troops not to investigate torture by Iraqi forces unless Americans were directly involved. Impunity became built into procedure. This continuity between Latin American death squads and Iraqi “special police” exposes imperial muscle memory: violence outsourced but orchestrated through messaging and field orders.

Counting the dead through language

The category “military-age men” shows how language disguises casualty reality. Adult males in strike zones were counted as combatants unless proven innocent, inflating success statistics. The “Collateral Murder” video exemplified this semantic violence—soldiers narrating a killing as routine engagement while reporters lay dead on the ground. Labeling becomes a moral anesthetic.

These archives teach a grim linguistic lesson: when the state owns definitions, it owns legality. Terms dictate who can be bombed, detained, or erased. To study modern warfare, you must read its paperwork—the lexicon of justified harm. Assange’s framing forces you to confront the power of language as weapon, a reminder that bureaucratic words often kill more quietly than bullets.

One recurring pattern in the cables is moral duplicity. The United States publicly champions democracy but privately props up authoritarian allies whenever strategic interests dictate. Leaked embassy assessments lay bare this calculation: rhetoric versus reality, ideals versus logistics.

Autocrats and alliances

Tunisia’s Ben Ali regime, described by Ambassador Robert Godec as corrupt and brittle, continued receiving US support until collapsed by the Arab Spring—an uprising partly fueled by leaks themselves. In Turkmenistan, diplomats called President Berdimuhamedov “vain, suspicious, not a bright guy,” yet Washington increased his aid budget because of transit access to Afghanistan’s war theatre. Such contradictions illustrate foreign policy realism in practice: strategic geography outweighs moral rhetoric.

Cold War carryovers

The Kissinger cables reveal continuity from Cold War coups to neoliberal globalization. In Chile, Allende’s fall and Pinochet’s rise were engineered through covert support and economic sabotage. Operation Condor linked dictatorships region-wide under US intelligence umbrellas. You watch ideology bend toward the same outcome—market stability and containment of socialism.

The neoliberal toolkit

Later decades replaced coups with contracts: structural adjustment, IMF pressure, and free trade deals. Whether through economic carrot (MCC aid) or legal stick (ASPA sanctions over ICC), US diplomacy recalibrated control mechanisms but kept imperial goals intact. The cables draw this through-line vividly: coercion evolves, principle stays.

Realpolitik explains much of the hypocrisy exposed in PlusD. It teaches that empire rules by flexibility—denouncing tyranny while renting its services. For a critical reader, understanding this duplicity sharpens insight into how moral narratives legitimize material interests.

Diplomacy often masquerades as legality, and the cables expose how Washington bends law to protect its agents and allies. The campaign against the International Criminal Court (ICC) illustrates this perfectly: a global legal institution met by systematic US pressure to secure exemptions.

Article 98 agreements

After “unsigning” the Rome Statute, the US launched bilateral Article 98 treaties forbidding partner states from surrendering Americans to The Hague. Embassies offered aid or threats—military waivers for compliance, sanctions for refusal. Romania signed first; Bahrain did so secretly to avoid public outrage after Abu Ghraib. Paraguay designed executive workarounds to dodge Parliament. These cables chronicle diplomacy as coercive transaction: immunity purchased with assistance.

The policy’s backlash

By 2006, even Condoleezza Rice admitted the campaign “shot ourselves in the foot.” Losing cooperation from Latin American and African partners dented strategic programs. When sanctions were lifted, the episode stood as a study in self-defeating dominance—legal evasion undermining influence.

European accountability and rendition

Parallel cables show similar tactics against European investigations of CIA kidnappings. Irish, German, Italian, and Spanish officials were pressured to curb judicial action against US operatives. Ambassador Foley heard Irish PM Ahern confess he “put his neck on the chopping block.” German arrest warrants for CIA agents led to uneasy diplomacy; Italy prosecuted abductors of Abu Omar while Washington invoked immunity. Each case proves that when law confronts power, diplomacy intervenes not to uphold justice but to nullify it.

In these stories you see law as pliable clay molded by hierarchy. International norms survive only when politically convenient; immunity becomes another arm of empire. Reading these cables, you grasp how “rule of law” functions rhetorically abroad while subverted in corridors of policy.

Assange calls the modern U.S. hegemonic system an empire of free trade: diplomatic, corporate, and financial strands woven into one project of market control. Leaked TPP, TISA, and embassy cables on Boeing and Monsanto make visible the machinery behind globalization’s moral language.

Intellectual property as enclosure

In the leaked TPP draft, U.S. negotiators pushed extreme copyright terms and DRM rules—an extension of enclosure from land to knowledge. Intellectual property becomes geopolitical resource management: by locking drug patents and cultural products, corporations monopolize creative commons worldwide. WikiLeaks turns this into a teachable example—how secrecy hides privatization of ideas.

Corporate diplomacy

Cables show ambassadors lobbying for Boeing aircraft and GMOs as if they were national interests. Diplomatic offices morph into sales departments, mixing politics and commerce. When France banned MON810 maize, the U.S. embassy advised retaliation. Embassies secure deals while defending finance and IP regimes—the soft infrastructure of empire, more durable than bases.

Dollar power and finance

Assange ties financial imperial reach to post–Bretton Woods arrangements. Ending the gold standard centralized the dollar’s dominance; IMF and World Bank mechanisms enforce market liberalization globally. Structural adjustment and bailouts serve as non-military tools of submission. Dollar supremacy functions as invisible empire—a system sustained by contracts, not colonies.

Through this lens, economic globalization reads as the continuation of imperial practice by financial and technological means. The cables strip away ideology to reveal the transactional skeleton underneath: power disguised as policy, monopoly rewritten as trade liberalization.

If the twentieth century saw empire through war, the twenty-first shows it through realignment. The Obama administration’s Pivot to Asia reveals how strategy shifts from Middle East turmoil toward East Asian containment of China—combining trade pacts, basing, and alliance engineering.

Trade as geopolitics

Leaked TPP drafts expose economic motives of the Pivot: create a Pacific bloc excluding China, with U.S. multinationals dictating IP and labor standards. Economic rules become security architecture—opening markets while reinforcing dependence. Trade text secrecy mirrors cable secrecy, both protecting elite negotiation.

Alliances and bases

Cables from Japan and Korea show pressure to maintain alignment. Washington warns against political reform that threatens base permanence, as in Okinawa’s Futenma disputes. Korea’s Lee Myung-bak receives praise for reversing rapprochement with North Korea. In crisis moments, such as Yeonpyeong shelling, generals publicly intervene to temper conflict—balancing deterrence and escalation.

Containment through communication

The Pivot relies on trilateral security dialogues (US-Japan-Korea) and maritime “freedom of navigation” rhetoric to frame China as a challenge. Diplomacy, aid, and trade orchestrate perception management rather than open confrontation. (Note: echoing Cold War logic, but now waged through ports and patents.)

For you, this part shows how strategy has evolved: from bombing campaigns to spreadsheets, from overt wars to rule-writing contests. The empire’s frontier now lies not on battlefields but in trade tables and data cables across the Pacific.

Latin America provides the clearest window into twenty-first-century imperial tools. Gone are the Marines; in their place stand NGOs, development compacts, and information shaping. USAID, NED, and OTI act as conduits for influence dressed as democracy promotion.

Case studies of manipulation

In El Salvador, ambassadors synchronized Millennium Challenge Corporation aid openings with election calendars to favor ARENA. In Nicaragua, embassy cables proposed “rap sheets” on Ortega, funding opposition candidates, and uniting anti-Sandinista factions. Ecuador and Bolivia saw decentralized aid redirected to provincial governors opposed to central populists. Each instance blurs the line between assistance and interference.

Venezuela and regional containment

The most developed case is Venezuela. A classified cable outlines a five-point plan: strengthen institutions, penetrate Chávez’s base, divide his movement, protect U.S. business, and isolate him internationally. USAID/OTI grants funded opposition training, NGOs, and student movements. Parallel cables document lobbying against Petrocaribe and Mercosur integration—regional attempts to escape U.S. orbit. Diplomacy and aid merge into regime-change ecosystem.

These documents prove soft power is never innocent. Dollars speak the language of democracy while pursuing hegemony. Understanding this architecture lets you see influence hidden behind cooperation—the empire’s velvet glove fitting perfectly over its iron hand.

When secrecy collapses, systems reveal themselves. WikiLeaks forced the United States to confront what its own cables said about its conduct. The results were paradoxical: embarrassment, reform debates, and new measures of control. Yet the disclosures redefined transparency itself.

Changing perception

Leaked documents transformed diplomacy’s aura—from discreet professionalism into visible machinery of narrative management. The public learned that embassy cables are scripts for persuasion as much as analysis. Once known, their moral opacity triggered discussion about journalism, whistleblowing, and civic responsibility.

Media mediation and selective filters

Mainstream outlets published partial sets, redacted politically sensitive portions, and reshaped interpretation. Assange urges readers to study the full corpus via PlusD, not rely on editorial condensation. The lesson: transparency filtered through institutions becomes partial truth.

Accountability and limits

The prosecutions of whistleblowers, tightening of classification protocols, and surveillance of journalists followed swiftly. But equally, civil societies learned to read power empirically—grounded in documents rather than slogans. The archive granted evidence that abstract theories of empire could now be quantified and analyzed.

In closing, the book suggests that exposure does not destroy systems but teaches how they endure. Reading leaks trains you to see governance as communication and moral authority as editing. Truth, once systematized, demands public literacy to interpret—and that is where your role begins.