Turkey Checks Leaked U.S. Cables Against Own Records
Turkey is scouring diplomatic cables from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara published by WikiLeaks.org, and will be comparing them with its diplomats’ own versions of events covered, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.
“All of the documents we’ve obtained are being examined down to every last comma,” Davutoglu told Turkish reporters after meeting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington yesterday, according to the state-run Anatolia news agency. “We’re comparing them to our own notes, because those documents also have an Ankara version that has never been leaked and God willing, never will.”
Turkish President Abdullah Gul said the effect of the leaked cables would be only psychological. “These can increase insecurity, arouse suspicions,” he said to reporters at Ankara’s airport. Gul said he believed the documents were leaked with a “motive,” without elaborating.
Davutoglu said Clinton had apologized to the Turkish government and to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the leaked documents. Almost 8,000 of them originated from the embassy in Ankara, more than from any other single location, according to WikiLeaks.
The leaks are “a great misfortune in the history of diplomacy” and will have no effect on Turkey’s foreign policy perspective or positions of principle, Davutoglu said.
Among the documents published by WikiLeaks was a 2009 cable recording a meeting between U.S. and Israeli diplomats in Ankara. The diplomats agreed that worsening ties between Turkey and Israel were mainly caused by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hatred of the Jewish state, the cable shows.
The U.S. Embassy said in the cable that discussions with Turkish government officials and other contacts confirmed the view expressed by the Israeli ambassador that “Erdogan simply hates Israel.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Benjamin Harvey in Ankara at bharvey11@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net.
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page