Here I am, quoted in the Guardian a few days ago, on the interesting subject of the overlap between diplomacy and spying:

"There is a degree of overlap. Diplomats, spies and journalists are all basically nosy people. They all want to find out things that are not generally known," said Charles Crawford, a former British ambassador to Sarajevo and Warsaw. "What distinguishes them in practice is the methods used. When it steps into impropriety and illegality you can just feel it."

This is a good article  on diplomatic tradecraft – Julian Borger talked to me but evidently also with some others who know what they are talking about:

Approaching foreign nationals and asking them to work for your government is generally agreed to lie in the realm of espionage. In the case of a "walk-in", an approach from a foreigner offering his or her services, British diplomats are drilled in a procedure that entails handing off the person concerned to the embassy MI6 officers as soon as possible.

A procedure which of course can hit the jackpot, if the MI6 people concerned grasp what they are being offered.

The distinction between spies and diplomats is at root simple.

Diplomats are expected to operate within local law when gathering information – analysing local media, asking local politicians questions.

Spies are all about rooting out material likely to have been supplied to them unlawfully or acquired using unlawful means.

Things can get blurry when the spies ask the diplomats to do something which in itself is lawful but which is part of a wider scheme to pursue an unlawful goal (the diplomats themselves typically will not be told exactly what that is):

In the mid-1990s, for example, MI6 asked British diplomats in Moscow to organise a birthday party to provide cover for contact with a Russian official. The incident led to the expulsion of some of the diplomats concerned and the foreign office subsequently drew up new procedures to stiffen the diplomat-spy boundary further.

This is what the Wikileaks cables revealed the Americans to be doing in New York – the CIA asking diplomats to acquire different sorts of openly available information (to be precise ‘private’  information, not officially classified) about various UN and other officials:

Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and even frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures and "biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives"

What’s odd about this is the CIA idea that career diplomats would be able to get such information in the first place. And not blab about being asked to do so.

Al in all, this looks like a naive round-robin CIA wish-list which was unlikely to generate much if any product. No diplomat is going to ask a UN official or other foreign diplomat for stuff like this, or indeed ever be in any position to get it:

… details on private networks used for official communication, "to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys and virtual private network versions used". 

Come on, folks. Let’s use some common sense here.