Pakistani media publish fake WikiLeaks cables attacking India

In the weeks following WikiLeaks' mass release of US diplomatic cables in late 2010, Pakistani media outlets published what they claimed were cables revealing damaging American assessments of India. The cables turned out, upon examination, to be fabrications.

The episode was a textbook case of how a genuine information event creates the conditions for disinformation. The WikiLeaks releases were real, voluminous, and genuinely contained embarrassing candor about many countries including Pakistan itself. In that environment of information chaos, fabricated cables designed to fit the narrative had a plausibility that they would have lacked in calmer times.

The faked cables, published by four Pakistani national papers and credited to an Islamabad-based news service called Online Agency, portrayed American diplomats describing senior Indian generals as "vain, egotistical and genocidal," claiming India's government was secretly allied with Hindu fundamentalists, and asserting that Indian spies were supporting Islamist militants in the tribal belt and Balochistan. One report even likened an Indian general to Slobodan Milosevic over alleged war crimes in Kashmir. These claims aligned neatly with long-standing Pakistani government and ISI positions, which should have been the first red flag for any journalist applying basic verification standards.

The fraud unraveled fast. The Guardian ran an extensive search of the WikiLeaks database by date, name, and keyword and failed to locate any of the incendiary allegations: the first documented case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda. Within days, The News acknowledged that "on further inquiries, we learnt from our sources that the story was dubious and may have been planted."

The incident illustrated the challenge facing news organizations in the WikiLeaks era: the sheer volume of authentic documents made exhaustive verification of every claimed cable impossible, and bad actors understood and exploited this limitation.

Pakistani commentators and international outlets who called out the fabrications were vindicated when the papers themselves walked the stories back. The broader lesson — that document dump events require more rigorous verification, not less — took years to properly absorb across the global media ecosystem.