Saudi Arabia tells citizens to ignore latest WikiLeaks release

61,000 leaked cables give rare insight into kingdom’s habit of buying influence and monitoring dissidents

The Guardian, Ian Black Middle East editor, Sunday 21 June 2015

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who died in January. Photograph:
Hassan Ammar/AP

Saudi Arabia has warned its citizens to ignore thousands of its diplomatic documents leaked by the transparency site WikiLeaks, which give a rare insight into the kingdom’s habit of buying influence and monitoring dissidents.

The 61,000 Saudi cables, the first tranche of 500,000 promised by Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, also show the country’s sharp focus on its strategic rival Iran and the revolution in Egypt, and support for allies and clients in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Nothing yet published matches embarrassing revelations about the Saudis in WikiLeaks’ 2010 release of US diplomatic documents, which reported King Abdullah calling to “cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake” as well as drink- and drug-fuelled partying by minor royals in Jeddah.

But routine secret correspondence from the foreign ministry in Riyadh and embassies abroad, some from as recently as April this year, catalogues many of the preoccupations of the conservative monarchy, the world’s biggest oil exporter, especially during the turbulent period of the Arab spring from early 2011.

According to one document, Gulf states were prepared to pay $10bn (£6.3bn) to secure the release of the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, which appears to support a previous claim about this by a leading Muslim Brotherhood politician.

A 2012 cable reveals concern that Iran was receiving “flirting American messages” that suggested the US did not oppose a peaceful Iranian nuclear programme so long as it had guarantees, including from Russia. Others from that period show Saudi plans for an anti-Iran satellite TV channel to broadcast in Persian from Bahrain, and plans to disrupt Iranian channels.

The cables show Riyadh often seems worried about any advantage for Tehran: one document explains that if an Arab summit conference were held as scheduled in Baghdad in 2012, it would mean “handing Iraq to Iran”. Cables also show efforts to back opponents of Nouri al-Maliki, the then Shia prime minister of Iraq, who was close to Iran.

Correspondence from the embassy in Beirut shows contacts with the Lebanese Forces leader, Samir Geagea, over cash payments to ease financial problems. Geagea had publicly defended Saudi Arabia and opposed president Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and generally shown “readiness to do whatever the kingdom asks of him”, the cables say.

Al-Akhbar, the Beirut newspaper that is publishing the documents with WikiLeaks, is a supporter of Assad and Iran’s Lebanese militia ally Hezbollah. The documents examined so far do not mention Saudi backing for anti-Assad rebels, most likely because these are handled by the country’s intelligence service.

Correspondence from the Saudi embassy in London shows filming of protesters and a discussion of legal action against the Guardian over an article by Saad al-Faqih, an Islamist. An appearance by Faqih on Egypt’s ON TV channel brought a proposal to “find out how to co-opt it”. But the billionaire owner of the station, Naguib Sawiris, did not want to be “opposed to the kingdom’s policies” and he ordered that Faqih never be interviewed again.

“The extent of Egypt’s ruling establishment’s self-prostitution to Saudi money is both embarrassing and unsurprising,” commented the writer Iyad al-Baghdadi, in one of many weekend social media reactions since the documents were released. Ala’a Shehabi, a Bahraini dissident concerned by the Saudi intervention in her country, called the trove a “rare insight into the most opaque regime in the world”.

Toby Matthiesen, a Cambridge University academic, said: “For Saudi experts there is little surprising so far … but the details will hurt a lot of corrupt people.”

The documents include several references to “hostile” media. An undated note describes the influence of journalists sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood on the Qatar-owned channel al-Jazeera, which has often fallen foul of the Saudis. The papers also show how in 2010 they purchased hundreds or thousands of subscriptions to publications in Damascus, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Kuwait, Jordan and Mauritania in order to secure favourable coverage.

Influence and money are recurring themes. Reports from Sana’a state that the proceeds of the sale of 3m barrels of oil given to Yemen in 2012 never reached the country’s treasury. Another document accuses Qatar of paying a Yemeni sheikh to foment rebellion in the army and to prevent the 2012 presidential election of Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The Sydney Morning Herald found documents with instructions from the Saudi government to its Canberra embassy relating to the payment of large subsidies to prominent Arabic newspapers and media organisations in Australia.

The Sunday Times reported that a document in the cache showed Saudi Arabia was prepared to pay the BBC correspondent Frank Gardner £1m in compensation after he was shot in Riyadh by al-Qaida. Gardner told the newspaper the compensation never materialised.

On Sunday the Saudi foreign ministry spokesman Osama Nugali warned citizens not to “allow enemies of the state to achieve their intentions in regards to exchanging or publishing any documents,” many of which, he said, had been “fabricated in a very obvious manner”.

WikiLeaks did not say where it obtained the documents, but it referred in a press release to Riyadh’s statement in May that it had suffered a breach of its computer networks – an attack later claimed by a group calling itself the Yemen Cyber Army.

The Guardian has not been able to independently verify the authenticity of the documents.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Saudi Arabia executed 87 people in 2014, ranking it third in the world for use

of the death penalty (AFP Photo/Fayez Nureldine)

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