By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday condemned the disclosure of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables, saying that it was an attack not only on American foreign policy interests but on the international community.
But Mrs. Clinton said she was confident, based on conversations in recent days with foreign ministers of several countries, that the administration’s relationships with other governments would survive any upheaval.
“The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of these classified documents,” she said at a news conference at the State Department. “It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.”
Immediately after the news conference, she left for a trip to Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, where she will encounter officials from countries that figure prominently in the diplomatic cables.
While declining to comment on the details of the cables, Mrs. Clinton said the disclosures painted a picture of American diplomats doing their jobs: collecting information and impressions and communicating them in an unvarnished way to policy-makers in Washington.
She even used the occasion to plug the “robust” diplomacy of the Obama administration, noting that it assembled an international front to react to Iran’s nuclear program. Fears about Iran’s intentions run through many of the cables, some of which have been published by The New York Times and other news organizations and were originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization dedicated to exposing secret documents.
“I am confident that the partnerships that the Obama administration has worked so hard to build will withstand this challenge,” Mrs. Clinton said.
In one conversation with a foreign official, she said, he laughed off the disclosures, saying, “Don’t worry — you should hear what we say about you.”
The New York Times and the other news organizations who have been reporting on the diplomatic exchanges have so far published only a few hundred of the cables, out of about 250,000 obtained by WikiLeaks, and some of those The Times has posted have been redacted to address security concerns. WikiLeaks has so far posted on its web site only the cables that have been reviewed by and in some case redacted by The Times and the other news organizations; so far, the rest of the trove of cables remain unpublished.
Still, Mrs. Clinton expressed regret over disclosures in the cables that might embarrass or anger officials in other countries.
“We don’t want anyone in any of these countries to have any doubts about our intentions,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton also made clear that whatever the contents or conclusions of the cables, American foreign policy was made in Washington, not in its embassies, and that the published documents should not be read as a guide to that policy.
Mrs. Clinton indirectly rejected comparisons of the leaked documents to the Pentagon Papers, saying that the latest leak of documents was not intended to highlight or prevent wrongdoing, as the leak of the Pentagon Papers was.
In a reference to the news organizations that published excerpts of the WikiLeaks material, she said that confidentiality was a necessary element in many fields beyond government, including journalism.
Mrs. Clinton left directly from her news conference on a trip that will give her a first-hand flavor of the foreign reaction to the disclosures in the cables. On her first stop in Kazakhstan, at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, she will encounter European allies, some of whose leaders and senior officials were described in cables in unflattering terms.
For example, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was characterized in the cables as “risk averse and rarely creative,” and Mrs. Clinton’s counterpart in Germany, Foreign MinisterGuido Westerwelle, was dismissed as having little power. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy was described as “feckless” and “vain,” while President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was called thin-skinned.
On Friday, Mrs. Clinton will attend another security conference in Bahrain, a Persian Gulf state that figures prominently in cables dealing with the nuclear threat from Iran. Bahrain’s king, Hamad bin Issa al Khalifa, urged the United States to act against Iran, according to the documents.
Tehran’s nuclear program “must be stopped,” he said. “The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.”
Mrs. Clinton is scheduled to meet the king in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, on Friday afternoon, and to take part in a town hall-style meeting where people are likely to ask her about the WikiLeaks disclosures.
While the fears about Iran’s nuclear program held by Persian Gulf states was not a mystery, the blunt comments of Bahrain’s king, as well as those of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, could roil relations between Iran and its neighbors.
State Department officials said Mrs. Clinton called foreign ministers of several countries in advance of the publication of the diplomatic cables to warn them about what was coming. Some of those conversations came in the midst of delicate diplomatic efforts. With China, for example, the administration is trying to marshal a firm response to North Korea’s recent artillery shelling of a South Korean island.
Mrs. Clinton asked China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, to use its influence to send the North Korea a clear message that its behavior was unacceptable, said the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley. But she also took a few minutes to brief him about China’s part in the cables.
In one, the American embassy in Beijing said a Chinese contact had told officials that the Politburo authorized the hacking into Google’s computer network. The cable went on to describe a broader campaign of sabotage carried out by the government or its agents against American government agencies, private companies, and political foes like the Dalai Lama.
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