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Pak, US in worrying stand-off over nuclear fuel: WikiLeaks

WASHINGTON: A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables from the past three years, released by WikiLeaks on Sunday despite a hacking attack on its website, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world and brutally candid views of foreign leaders. The documents show Saudi donors remain chief financiers of militant groups like al-Qaida and that Chinese government operatives have waged a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage, targeting the US and its allies, according to a review of the WikiLeaks documents published in the New York Times. One of the revelations was a dangerous stand-off with Pakistan over nuclear fuel. Since 2007, US has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, "if the local media got word of the fuel removal, 'they would portray it as the US taking Pakistan's nuclear weapons,' he argued." The White House condemned WikiLeaks' "reckless action" in releasing classified diplomatic cables, repeating its charge that the leak endangered lives and risked hurting relations with allies. Here are just some of the startling revelations that have emerged from the new WikiLeaks release: * American and South Korean officials discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North's economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. South Korea was even willing to offer economic incentives to China. * China's Politburo directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems in the country, as part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. * The Yemeni government has sought to cover up US role in missile strikes against the local branch of Qaida. At a January meeting, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh tells Gen David Petraeus: "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours". * When Afghanistan's vice president visited the UAE last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money "a significant amount" that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, "was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money's origin or destination" (Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan). * American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian PM, including "lavish gifts", lucrative energy contracts and a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Berlusconi "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin" in Europe. The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to NYT by an intermediary. Many are unclassified, and none are marked "top secret," the government's most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified "secret," 9,000 are labelled "noforn," too delicate to be shared with any foreign government.

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