Exposed: Prince Andrew's four-letter tirade that shocked the American ambassador
By Fay Schlesinger and James ChapmanLast updated at 6:44 AM on 30th November 2010
Prince Charming? Andrew was branded 'cocky' and 'rude' by the U.S. ambassador
During a raucous brunch, the ‘cocky’ and ‘rude’ Duke of York railed against Britain’s Serious Fraud Office and suggested France was riddled with corruption.
In a show of ‘unmitigated patriotism’, he even attacked the U.S. in front of one of the country’s ambassadors, claiming ‘the Americans don’t understand geography’.
The disclosures – among a new tranche of revelations made by whistleblowing website Wikileaks, raise questions about Andrew’s future in his role as a government trade representative, and there were calls for him to quit. Critics warned the comments by the fourth in line to the throne risked severely damaging the Special Relationship with the U.S..
Buckingham Palace aides last night admitted the Duke would be embarrassed by his ‘choice language and manner’, but defended him for ‘banging the drum for British industry’.
The leaks have plunged America into an unprecedented diplomatic crisis as its astonishing secret verdicts on Britain and other countries around the world are exposed.
Most seriously for Washington, the embarrassing missives showed the U.S. ordered a spying operation on diplomats at the United Nations, including British officials, in apparent breach of international law.
The disclosures are particularly embarrassing for the U.S. government as some three million of its personnel and soldiers, many extremely junior, have clearance to access this material.
They can view the identities of foreign informants, often sensitive contacts in dictatorial regimes, in cable messages not intended for their eyes.
Downing Street – which branded the wider disclosures by Wikileaks a threat to ‘national security’ – braced itself for another round of revelations in what has been dubbed ‘the 9/11 of world diplomacy’.
Secret cables from U.S. diplomats are understood to include ‘serious’ criticisms of David Cameron before he became prime minister, and frank assessments of the downfall of an ‘unstable’ Gordon Brown.
Critical: U.S. documents are understood to contain unflattering observations of Prime Minister David Cameron and his predecessor, Gordon Brown
Prince Andrew’s comments were made during a round-table brunch with Tatiana Gfoeller, the U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, and British and Canadian businessmen at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek on October 28, 2008.
The day after the meeting, the ambassador sent a detailed memo to Washington describing Andrew’s ‘astonishingly candid’ words and ‘cocky’ manner in a discussion that ‘verged on the rude from the British side’.
Mrs Gfoeller, a career diplomat who speaks six languages, wrote: ‘Rude language a la British ... (Andrew) turned to the general issue of promoting British economic interests abroad. He railed at British anti-corruption investigators, who had had the "idiocy" of almost scuttling the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia...
‘His mother’s subjects seated around the table roared their approval. He then went on to these (expletive) journalists... who poke their noses everywhere and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business.’
The duke, who was in Kyrgyzstan in his role as our Government’s official trade representative, also joined in discussions about alleged corruption ‘with gusto’.
On duty: Prince Andrew acts as a 'special representative of government's business promotion body UK Trade and Investment. He is seen here speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2008
The Serious Fraud Office’s six-year investigation into BAE was triggered by allegations of billion-pound bribes and prostitutes supplied to members of the Saudi royal family.
It ended with the defence giant pleading guilty to minor accounting offences. BAE has always denied involvement in bribery or corruption.
Mrs Gfoeller wrote: ‘One businessman said that doing business here is “like doing business in the Yukon” in the 19th century, i.e. only those willing to participate in local corrupt practices are able to make any money... At this point the Duke of York laughed uproariously, saying that: “All of this sounds exactly like France.”’
Andrew was also said to have ‘reacted with almost neuralgic patriotism whenever any comparison between the U.S. and UK came up’.
The report is the first time his tactics in his role as ‘special representative’ with Whitehall’s business promotion body UK Trade and Investment have been laid bare.
The post is unpaid but Andrew spends about £150,000 of taxpayers’ money a year on hotels, food and entertainment, plus hundreds of thousands of pounds on foreign travel.
Graham Smith, of the campaign group Republic, said: ‘He was there to represent Britain, not criticise British institutions and undermine their credibility.
'He has shown a complete lack of judgment and, frankly, a level of stupidity. He is clearly not fit for the job and his role could now have become untenable.’
Hillary's humiliation as U.S. vents fury at the Wikileaks 'terrorists'
By TOM LEONARDHillary Clinton said last night that the WikiLeaks revelations were ‘an attack on the international community’ and not just the U.S.
In the first response to the leaked cables by senior member of the Obama administration, the U.S. Secretary of State said her government ‘deeply regrets’ the release.
And in a move to reassure allies, a grim-faced Mrs Clinton insisted America was taking ‘aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information’.
Sorry I spoke: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pictured yesterday, has called foreign leaders to apologise for comments contained in the leaked cables
Peter King, a Republican congressman and incoming chairman of the House homeland security committee, said the documents on the internet had put ‘American lives at risk all over the world’.
‘This is worse even than a physical attack on Americans, it’s worse than a military attack,’ he said.
Mr King said he had asked Mrs Clinton whether WikiLeaks should be treated as a terrorist organisation.
Doing that would allow the U.S. government to ‘seize their funds and go after anyone who provides them with any help or contributions or assistance whatsoever’, he said.
Mrs Clinton will be the first American politician to gauge the international reaction to the furore for herself as she is setting off today on a potentially embarrassing tour of central Asia.
She will be at a summit which will also be attended by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and German chancellor Angela Merkel.
And she will end the four-nation tour in Bahrain by delivering a speech to Middle East leaders from many of the countries whose confidences were compromised by the leaks.
Mr Medvedev was portrayed as being the Robin to Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin’s Batman in the Kremlin and his country was described in the leaked cables as being a ‘virtual mafia state’.
Mrs Merkel was portrayed as an unimaginative leader who ‘avoids risk and is rarely creative’.
Awkward moment: Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and German chancellor Angela Merkel - both criticised by U.S. officials according to the leaked documents - will be attending a summit with Mrs Clinton in Asia
Mrs Clinton has already apologised to Russia and Germany for the leaks, but aides fear it could still be ‘uncomfortable’ for her during the trip.
Last night she said: ‘This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community: the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.
'It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.’
Mrs Clinton said she and Barack Obama were confident that the diplomatic partnerships they had built around the world would survive the embarrassing disclosures contained in the cables.
She said she had been making many calls to foreign leaders to repair any damage caused by the leaks.
She dodged questions from reporters about whether she felt personally embarrassed about the revelations, which included her ordering U.S. diplomats to spy on senior officials, including British representatives, at the United Nations.
‘I want to make clear that our official foreign policy is not set through these messages but here in Washington,’ she said.
Mrs Clinton refused to comment on individual documents.
‘But I can say that the United States deeply regrets the disclosure of any information that was intended to be confidential, including private discussions between counterparts or our diplomats’ personal assessments,’ she said.
Is Ivan the hound dog minister?
By GERRI PEEV
No comment: Ivan Lewis
Political websites last night named him as Ivan Lewis, who served as the Foreign Office minister for Libya in the last Labour government.
The name, contained in a cable from the U.S. embassy in London, was withheld by the Guardian newspaper, which obtained the full dispatch from WikiLeaks.
Mr Lewis – the Labour MP for Bury who is now his party’s culture spokesman – declined to comment last night. The secret dispatch said that a Labour minister had been ‘forced to apologize to a female… who accused him of sexual harassment’.
The embassy passed on ‘intelligence’ from a civil servant contact that the politician ‘reportedly remains a bit of a hound dog where women are concerned’.
Last night the Guido Fawkes political website said Mr Lewis was the likely subject of the cables.
He was a health minister in 2007 when he apologised for sending suggestive text messages to Susie Mason, a pretty 24-year-old assistant who worked in his private office in Whitehall. After taking another civil service position, Miss Mason later quit to go to the private sector.
The case was revealed in national newspapers and diplomats would not have had to go very far to look up the allegations.
Mr Lewis would have angered the U.S. because in 2009, when he was the Foreign Office minister responsible for Libya, he wrote to Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill, giving him the green light to release Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi under the prisoner transfer agreement.
Iran: It's American mischief
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last night accused the U.S. of stirring up ‘mischief’ in the Middle East with the release of the WikiLeaks cables.He claimed America was playing propaganda games with the release of documents revealing demands by Arab leaders for the U.S. to destroy Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
‘We don’t give any value to these documents,’ he said. ‘It’s without legal value. Iran and regional states are friends. Such acts of mischief have no impact on relations between nations.’
Friends: Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, seen here at a 2007 meeting with Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, insists that Iran is on good terms with its neighbours
‘These games will not affect relations,’ the president added.
Several U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks revealed the considerable anxiety among Arab leaders over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia implored Washington to ‘cut off the head of the snake’ while there was still time. According to another message, King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifah of Bahrain told U.S. general David Petraeus that America must take whatever action was necessary to stop Iran’s nuclear programme.
*One Iranian nuclear scientist was killed and another was injured yesterday in simultaneous attacks on their cars in Tehran.
The co-ordinated hits were both carried out by gunmen on motorbikes who attached bombs to each car and then riddled them with bullets from a semi-automatic weapon before speeding off.
Dr Majid Shahriyari, a professor in the nuclear engineering department at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, was killed, while Dr Fereydoun Abbasi, a professor at the Iranian defence ministry, was injured.
U.S. criticism of British troops in Afghanistan angers families of the fallen
The families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan last night hit back after U.S. military chiefs and Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai were revealed to have criticised UK efforts in Helmand Province.The dispatches, published by Wikileaks, criticised the UK’s failure to secure Sangin, the deadly Taliban stronghold which was handed over to U.S. Marines in September.
Alun Hicks, whose son Captain David Hicks, 26, was mortally wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack at a base near Sangin in 2007, said: ‘The U.S. takes a different view of how to approach these things.
‘We don’t have as many troops so we have to take a step-by-step approach to try and win people over. They throw everything at it and try to blast their way through.’
Titter ye not, but gossip is the key to diplomacy
COMMENTARY by Christopher MeyerWhen, a few years ago, I wrote a book called DC Confidential about my time as a diplomat, I was accused, among other things, of peddling gossip.
But, as the leaks of U.S. diplomatic cables reveal, a big chunk of diplomacy invariably includes tittle-tattle about people in high places. It always has done.
At the Congress of Vienna in 1814, which settled the map of Europe after the Napoleonic wars, the Prussian foreign minister reported most ungallantly to Berlin that the wife of Lord Castlereagh, the leader of the British delegation, ‘…is very fat and dresses so young, so tight, so naked’.
Our man in Washington: Sir Christopher Meyer says that gossip is an essential part of the diplomatic merry-go-round
Fast forward 196 years and what do we find but a similar appetite for scurrilous revelation in the U.S. State Department.
After the U.S. embassy in London reported that a Labour cabinet minister was a ‘hound dog’ around women and had to apologise to one for harassing her, the reply from the State Department was that the ‘…analysts appreciate the excellent background and biographic reporting’ (the blogosphere appears pretty confident, by the way, about the identity of the philandering mutt).
In similar vein, the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is called ‘feckless, vain and ineffective’, with ‘a penchant for partying hard’. President Sarkozy of France is ‘thin-skinned and authoritarian’. North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is ‘a flabby old chap’.
And so it goes on, giving an impression that American diplomats and the State Department itself are more interested in gossip and personalities than geo-politics and international relations.
But, of course, these things cannot be separated. When I was appointed ambassador to the United States in 1997, I was told by Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, to ‘get up the a**e of the White House and stay there’.
'In 2002 I spent almost as much time reporting on the clash of personalities inside the U.S. foreign policy machine as I did on the preparations proper for the Iraq war'
Behind the crude language was an excellent, crisp instruction. I was not only to report, and try to influence, White House thinking, but also to get alongside the main personalities from the President downwards and to report on them too.At this point, policy, politics and gossip come together. Soon after I arrived in Washington, the Monica Lewinsky scandal exploded.
Since Bill Clinton’s survival in office (a major British interest at the time) depended in large part on whether he had had sex with Lewinsky, and, if so, what kind, I found myself reporting to London the results of delicate inquiries into certain sexual practices and how Lewinsky had managed to get stains on her favourite blue dress.
If these reports were to be leaked in isolation, they would read like prurient gossip from some drooling diplomatic voyeur.
The truth is that personalities and high-grade gossip play an indispensable role in diplomatic reporting.
Governments and their leaders need to have accurate pen-portraits – warts and all – of the people they may have to deal with across the negotiating table.
I sent Tony Blair a detailed picture of President George W. Bush before their first meeting in 2001. The U.S. ambassador in London did the same from his end, briefing President Bush about Blair. Governments and their leaders need to have accurate pen-portraits – warts and all – of the people they may have to deal with across the negotiating table.
Our leaders need also to understand who is up and who is down in an administration. In 2002 I spent almost as much time reporting on the clash of personalities inside the U.S. foreign policy machine as I did on the preparations proper for the Iraq war.
When I was a young man in our embassy in Spain in the early 1970s, the big question was who would take over from the ageing dictator General Franco. Madrid was abuzz with speculation.
I was fortunate enough to become friends with one of Franco’s granddaughters, who passed me gossip from inside the family of the highest grade.
Despite rumours to the contrary, I was able to reassure London that Juan Carlos would become king on Franco’s death.
So, as Frankie Howerd might have said, ‘Titter ye not’ at the gossipy bits in Wikileaks. They may not be the most important in a set of revelations which I have so far found fairly underwhelming. But that may change after a week of further disclosures.
Will confidential diplomacy survive this episode? Of course it will because it is indispensable to global relations. But the U.S., and maybe other governments, need to review urgently how they circulate, store and protect classified electronic communications.
As to gossip, I am sure the ‘analysts’ in the State Department will kick themselves not to have known that, when in Washington as Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Mandelson liked nothing more than to talk to his dog from the phone in the ambassador’s Rolls-Royce.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334223/Exposed-Prince-Andrews-letter-tirade-shocked-American-ambassador.html#ixzz16kXSu8ma
