The ongoing revelations of WikiLeaks have been great fun and a welcome antidote to the somber end of Fall. It’s been like People Magazine meets Foreign Affairs Magazine.

Ignore all the screams from official Washington about violations of security. Bureaucrats the world over hate like crazy to see their blunders, double-dealing and incompetence exposed to public gaze.

But far from the “9/11 of diplomacy,” as the over-excited Italian foreign minister proclaimed, so far the WikiLeak revelations don’t offer much that is new – at least to this veteran journalist and intelligence observer. Much amusing gossip, yes, but no bombshells – yet.

Most decent people may be shocked by reading about Washington’s heavy-handed treatment of friends and foes alike, its bullying, use of diplomats as junior-grade spies, and snide remarks about world leaders.

The 19th century American cynic Ambrose Bierce aptly defined diplomacy as, “the patriotic art of lying for one’s country.”

However, WikiLeaks has given the public a sharper view of Afghanistan as a cesspool of corruption and drug-dealing.
Naïve Canadians, who believed government agitprop that they were building democracy and human rights in Afghanistan, were particularly shocked and dismayed.

It was also interesting to see US diplomatic cables showing many of Pakistan’s politicians and senior generals revealed as little better than obsequious house servants for Uncle Sam. More Pakistanis will now believe their nation has indeed been virtually occupied by the United States.

As the old calypso song goes, “They’re working for the Yankee dollar!”

For cynical professionals, WikiLeaks showed business as usual. They reaffirm that great powers really want obedience, not international cooperation or improved relations.

Having almost joined the US State Department, I can attest that the cables released by WikiLeaks were written by career diplomats who almost always follow the State Department’s current party line. These cables are official bureaucratic reporting, not independent fact, as most people believe. They tell Washington exactly what it wants to hear.

For a diplomat, telling Washington it’s wrong is a sure-fire way to get transferred to the US Embassy Ulan Bator, Mongolia, or Monrovia, Liberia. Or face the end of one’s career. That’s why I decided not to take up a job offered me on State’s Mideast desk.

I’ve seen US and British diplomats fired or sidelined who dared speak the truth or oppose the party line. When Hillary Clinton tells you Uzbekistan is a flowering democracy, you better believe her and keep repeating this canard.

That’s why so far there have been no big surprises from WikiLeaks. Note the total absence of any criticism of Israel in spite of the fact that it is so deeply involved in making US Mideast policy.

US Arab allies were also treated with kid gloves. Not a peep to date about rigged elections in Egypt, human rights violations by Israel, torture by Morocco or about Algeria’s exceptionally brutal regime.

It’s all Iran, all the time. Yes, Arab rulers fear and hate Iran and they bad mouth it constantly. But they do not speak for their people, merely for US-backed ruling oligarchies that are petrified Iranian-style popular revolution will come to their nations.

But there’s also something about WikiLeaks that smells nasty to me. I sense the leaks have been heavily censored, or cherry-picked before the public saw them. Much seems to be missing.

For example, the New York Times, one of the recipients of the entire leak package of thousands of cables, appeared to use them selectively to push its pro-war position in Afghanistan and press for war against Iran. The `revelations’ brought cheers from the Israel lobby which has been beating the war drums against Iran.

The massed neoconservative-dominated US media and Congress have jumped on the bandwagon, simultaneously blasting WikiLeaks for “treason” or “terrorism” and demanding it be silenced – while gleefully using parts of the leaks to promote war against Iran. US media and Congress seem to have forgotten about free speech.

Some of America’s dimmer Republican politicians called for charges of “terrorism” against WikiLeak founder Julian Assange. Terrorism has become America’s catch-all charge for annoying or rebellious activity, much as the Soviets used to charge people with being “enemies of the state.”

The uproar over the leaks comes as the combined 16 US intelligence agencies are reportedly preparing to release a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) unanimously concluding Iran is not building nuclear weapons. Interesting coincidence, to say the least.

Washington sources say this NIE reconfirms the 2007 finding that Iran had ceased all development of nuclear arms four years earlier. Before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, CIA and UN reports that Saddam Hussein’s regime had no weapons of mass destruction were ignored or covered up by the White House, which was racing toward war.

Now, a fierce struggle over the next NIE is raging in Washington between groups urging war against Iran and the US intelligence community and Pentagon. There are still officials in Washington who put America’s national interests first and resist bending to political pressure or financial inducements.

The upright Adm. Dennis Blair, the last US national intelligence director, was ousted because he refused to endorse claims Iran was making nuclear weapons.

President Barack Obama appears to have ducked this explosive issue. Politically wounded and unable to fully control all the levers of presidential power, Obama seems unwilling or unable to stand up to Israel’s powerful partisans as the war drums beat ever louder.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks is at least doing in part what America’s elected leaders and supposed free media should have been doing: telling citizens what’s really going on. Let’s see what other squirmy secrets will be exposed when the next rock is turned over.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010

NEW YORK – During the 1930’s, a Soviet agent of NKVD foreign intelligence ( the predecessor to KGB) was given a message from his controller at Moscow Center written on thin rice paper. He read the message, crumpled it up into a tiny ball, and dropped it into the Paris sewer.

Days after, the agent was recalled to Moscow – and promptly shot.

Another NKVD agent assigned to shadow him had reported improper message disposal. Moscow Center’s standard operating procedures were clear and pitiless: all messages were to be burned. No violations were tolerated.

Consider this grim episode in light of the recent case of ten or perhaps eleven undercover Russian “illegals” in the United States rolled up and deported by the FBI.

Remember all those 1950’s era scares about “Reds under our beds?” Well, it seems they were right. There are Reds under our beds…and Muslims under our mattresses!

As a long been a commentator on intelligence matters and a KGB-watcher, I’m appalled by this spy case.

In 1988, I was the first western journalist admitted to KGB headquarters at Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, a name so dreaded by Muscovites they called it by the name of a nearby toy store, “Detsky Mir.”

I interviewed two senior KGB lieutenant generals, and sat at the desk of the founder of the Cheka, or Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinski, and his blood-stained successors, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria, sadistic monsters who sent millions to their deaths or slavery.

I saw the notorious prison’s blue-tiled execution cellars, and was taken on a tour of the KGB’s top secret museum of espionage by its curator.

In the museum, were mementos of great Soviet spies like Sorge, Gordon Lonsdale, George Blake, Kim Philby, Burgess and MacLean.
According to the KGB curator, the British-based Gordon Lonsdale was one of the most effective Soviet `illegal’ agents.

I listened to accounts of how KGB had penetrated, disrupted, and nearly destroyed CIA, Britain’s MI5 and MI6, and France’s intelligence service, SDECE (now DGSE). I was awed to see personal effects of the great British agent, Sidney O’Reilly, who nearly overthrew the Bolsheviks.

I even managed to wake up the head of KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, at 0400, but that’s another story I’m saving for my new book, working title, `Camping with Khadaffi.’

I’ve always considered KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign operations) as the world’s most professional, efficient spy organization. The USSR lost the Cold War but KGB’s agents won the spy wars with Western intelligence hands down.

The First Directorate’s men and women were drawn from the elite of Soviet society know as the “nomenklatura.” Its agents were taught near flawless American English in a special, top-secret village in Ukraine built to look like an American suburb. KGB’s foreign intelligence enjoyed special privileges, exclusive stores, foreign travel and unique access to domestic intelligence and international media.

As a result, it was no coincide that KGB was the first to see the oncoming collapse of the Soviet Union. After 1991, KGB’s senior officials decided to move en masse into privatized industry. KGB’s First Directorate staged a palace coup against Boris Yeltsin and installed agent Vladimir Putin. Today, over half of all senior positions in Russia’s government are held by former KGB men.

The last batch of Soviet/Russian agents uncovered in the United States, John Walker, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, inflicted untold damage on American security interests. Top secret data stolen by Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard which was then reportedly sold by Israel to Moscow is believed to have wrecked US intelligence operations in the Mideast and Russia, and led to the deaths of scores of agents working for CIA and other agencies.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, KGB was broken into FSB domestic security, and SVR foreign operations. The number of SVR agents abroad increased, but the quality declined. KGB’s bitter rival, GRU military intelligence, also became even more active. In 2004, two GRU agents assassinated Chechen leader Zelmikhan Yandarbayev in Qatar.

Fast forward to today’s spy case. I was appalled by this gang of bumbling suburban spies and their inept controllers in Moscow.

In the past, Moscow Center rarely had more than one or two illegals in a given country. So what on earth were ten or eleven Russian spies doing in darkest American suburbia for the past ten years?

FBI had them under surveillance for a decade. Imagine the brain-destroying work of FBI phone tappers listening to the suburban chitchat of Desperate Russian Housewife spies exchanging recipes for tuna casserole, complaining about insensitive husbands, or their kid’s sniffles.

From what we so far know, these spies who couldn’t spy straight were never plugged into any useful sources and had no particular mission beyond monitoring shopping malls. Only one showed any personality, a red-headed Moscow Mata Hari, who will inevitably become the subject of an American made-for-TV- movie.

By contrast, the four Russians exchanged for these drones in a major spy swap were involved to varying degrees with US or British intelligence. The Obama administration should have secured the release of at least six more political prisoners in Russia.

What were these Russians doing? Maybe just collecting money from Moscow and enjoying the good life in America. Concocting bogus reports to Moscow Center like Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana,” or were they simply forgotten? Perhaps they had defected without telling Moscow Center.

Why did the FBI go public with this spy story at a delicate time when Washington was trying to improve relations with Moscow and forge a new nuclear arms reduction treaty? Curious. Was the US hard right, which opposes the new arms treaty, trying to sabotage US-Russian relations?

This case seems an awful embarrassment to SVR. “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky must be rolling in his grave. I don’t envy SVR’s director when he goes to the Kremlin to face former First Chief Directorate agent, and now prime minister, Vladimir Putin, to explain this comic fiasco worthy of the Russian writer Gogol. I hope he enjoys Siberia in the winter.

Perhaps there’s more to this story. Maybe the bumbling Russian agents were decoys to divert attention from real agents. Another worry: the US spends $75 billion annually on what it calls “intelligence.” Could our spies be as bumbling as theirs?

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010