The recent spate of diplomatic phone calls intercepted and then uploaded on the internet could be viewed as a benign, even amusing, form of cyber warfare.



What began as an act of apparent Russian chutzpah, in the leaking of US diplomat Victoria Nuland’s “fuck the EU" comments in February, has quickly escalated into something resembling a trend. In the months since, recordings posted on YouTube have made public the private calls of top diplomats, politicians and even heads of state from the US, EU, Estonia, Ukraine, Russia and Turkey.

In every case, the calls have been dismissed by the victims as a hoax, or simply left unverified, although most analysts believe they are authentic. Whoever is responsible for the respective leaks has not yet confessed.

The latest call to appear on YouTube is a leak with a twist. For the first time, Russia was not the suspected culprit behind the hacking and release of a call, but the target.



Immediately it led to speculation that Washington might be entering what might be termed a “calls race”, reaping retaliation on Russia for its suspected role in the other leaks.

Of course, diplomatic calls have been monitored since the invention of the telephone. But leaking intercepted calls on YouTube, for no reason other than to embarrass an adversary, opens a new and potentially incendiary front in the world of diplomatic skullduggery.

The video purporting to show two Russian ambassadors bragging about their imperial ambitions after the conquest of Crimea went viral as soon as hit YouTube on Friday. “We've got Crimea, but that's not fucking all, folks. In the future, we'll damn well take your Catalonia and Venice, and also Scotland and Alaska,” joked one of the men, said to be Igor Chubarov, Russia's ambassador to Eritrea.

The voice on the other end of the line, identified as Sergei Bakharev, the ambassador to Zimbabwe and Malawi, replied that it might be better to take over California or Miami. “Exactly! Miamiland is fucking 95% Russian citizens,” said Chubarov. “We have a full right to hold a referendum.”

But was the US, or one of the other 'Five Eyes' allies its works in concert with, behind the leak? And could YouTube become a digital battleground for leaks between countries such as the US, UK, France, China or Russia, which have strong enough surveillance capabilities to tap one another's phones?

The Obama administration denied any involvement in posting the video of the Russian ambassadors.“The United States had no role in posting leaked calls between Russian diplomats,” Caitlin Hayden, the White House national security spokesperson, told the Guardian. “We spoke out against that practice a few weeks ago and our view is unchanged.”

If the National Security Agency was behind the leak, it would be under no legal obligation to confess its role. Given the US is usually non-committal when it has something to hide, Hayden's firm denial probably indicates the NSA was not involved.

Jim Lewis, a senior fellow and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at CSIS, and a former State Department official, said another western state was “probably” behind the leak of the Russian call. A non-state actor, like the hacking group Anonymous, would by now have claimed credit, he said.

“It looks like someone is doing a bit of payback here,” he said. “But the Russians kind of unleashed this. It is part of their doctrine. When they think about hacking, they think about getting information they can use for political advantage.”

Lewis doubts whether the US was behind the leaked Russian call, saying “a more likely suspect” is the UK, not least because the two ambassadors were in former British colonies unlikely to be of much interest to the NSA. And he agreed it could be the start of an escalation.

“You’ve seen in the past tit-for-tat exchanges like this, which could signal: pull back, or it will get worse,” he said.



The potential ramifications for an escalating war in leaked phone calls is far-reaching, not least in Washington, which hosts embassies from around the world and is reputed to be systematically bugged.

Asked for their thoughts on the recent trend in leaking intercepted calls, one senior diplomat in the city told the Guardian they were keen to share their concerns. Just not over the phone.