Why do diplomats send cables

Governments produce literal mountains of paper, most of which is never seen by the public. This is a blessing, as almost every single piece of it is turgid nonsense. The files contain either the dullest mechanical recording of the mundane, or the most cautiously worded analysis, written to ensure no one could ever accuse the author of having anything resembling an opinion. And they are very much worth reading—being disarmingly frank, entertainingly worded, often shocking, and occasionally even funny.

This is for a few different reasons. First, diplomats are unique among bureaucrats as they are typically recruited based on their ability to communicate. And, once in the Foreign Service, diplomats are specially trained to write well. This includes an emphasis on being able to pour as much meaning into as few words as possible — an anachronistic virtue from the days when classified telegrams were encrypted by hand, a time-consuming process.

Second, diplomats tend to be extremely well briefed. Embassies are privy to all the gems of their intelligence services, and in the case of Canada and the other Five Eyes members, to the most interesting surprises collected by their closest allies. But they also get private and detailed briefings, directly from the mouths of foreign officials. A diplomat can literally walk into the highest offices in the land, ask the most frank questions, and expect reasonably honest answers.

More significantly, diplomats are masters of the dark arts of the late-night drink. As a result, foreign diplomats frequently know more about what is going on in their host country than the local government does.

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Sanger and Steven Erlanger claimed that thousands of EU cables are believed to have been hacked over the years by Chinese intelligence agencies. Area 1, a firm founded by three former officials of the U. National Security Agency who discovered the breach, made more than 1, of the hacked cables available to the New York Times [iii]. The cable is an integral part of the institutional, organisational routines of diplomacy and timely, impactful reporting is particularly prized within the diplomatic community.

Diplomats aim to be as exhaustive as possible in relaying information from the field back to their home foreign ministries, and regularly draft cables after meetings and events, or to comment on important foreign policy developments or trends in their host country. I also draw on data gathered through several interviews with British diplomats conducted between and My corpus includes American and EU cables, not British, but the cable is an international diplomatic genre and follows similar structural and stylistic constraints across countries.

Cable writers seem to prefer evaluative markers of doubt over expressions of certainty. This is probably due to the fact that cables are written in order to enable decision-makers to craft policy, which can result in significant consequences or costs.

It is therefore essential that the content or advice given in the cables be framed with the appropriate degree of caution. The main aim of the reporting cable is to shape future foreign policy outcomes. What we find in the cables is the expression of a difficult balancing act: the diplomat needs to acknowledge a degree of uncertainty inherent in unforeseeable situations whilst providing timely, policy-relevant analysis.

This explains the presence of reporting hedges in the cable corpus such as allegedly , reportedly or supposedly. The cable corpus appears to rely heavily on hedges associated with witnessing and interpreting human behaviour. Similarly, we find a significant number of hedges in the cables that suggest that diplomatic analysis is reliant on the senses envision, hear, indicate, perceive.

The second type of evaluative markers I looked at for this study was stylistic markers, which draw attention not to the accuracy of the information itself, but to the way in which it is presented by the writer. They can include adverbs interestingly, surprisingly , text connectives or references to text construction aforementioned, as follows , or attributors according to.

Stylistic markers can be considered metadiscursive in that they help readers to organise, interpret and react to texts. This is particularly important in the field of diplomacy, where information overload is a constant risk and some policy decisions may need to be made extremely quickly.

The diplomatic cable is characterised by visual signals that assist the reader, including explicitly labelled summary and comment sections, headings, numbered paragraphs, and bullet points.