October, Westerwelle was sworn in as Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor, becoming the head of the Foreign Office. His deputies at the Foreign Office were his close political ally Cornelia Pieper and foreign policy expert Werner Hoyer as Ministers of State. Hoyer had previously held the same office in the Cabinet Kohl V. In a much-discussed move, Westerwelle travelled to Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium before visiting France. On 19 November 2009, Westerwelle joined around 800 dignitaries from around the world – including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband – to witness Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s swearing in for a second term in office. WikiLeaks controversy and election defeats In late November 2010, leaked U.S. diplomatic cables revealed that American diplomats considered Westerwelle an obstacle to deeper transatlantic relations and were sceptical of his abilities, with one cable comparing him unfavorably to former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. On 3 December 2010, Westerwelle dismissed his personal assistant Helmut Metzner following a WikiLeaks diplomatic cables release which led to Metzner admitting that he regularly spied for the U.S. By May 2011, opinion polls ranked Westerwelle as one of the most unpopular and ineffective foreign ministers since the late 1940s. At the time, his party had collapsed in several states, including Rhineland-Palatinate and Bremen where they failed to secure the 5% threshold necessary for a seat in parliament. Analysts said one of the main reasons Westerwelle had become so unpopular was that he had been unable to fulfill the expectations of his voters, the majority of whom were middle-class professionals or entrepreneurs. Westerwelle subsequently stepped down as party leader. By July the party was only receiving 3% support in opinion polls, a record low, reflecting what political insiders had called his "last stand" in January, comparing Westerwelle and his party to Captain Ahab and the Pequod. International crisis During his tenure as foreign minister, Westerwelle prevailed over lawmakers in his party who opposed bailing out Greece during the European debt crisis. Amid efforts by the United States and European nations to isolate Iran's then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Westerwelle traveled to Tehran in February 2011 to bring home two journalists for the weekly newspaper Bild am Sonntag who were released after being arrested in October 2010. After weeks of negotiations, the Iranians reached out to discuss the release of the pair, the reporter Marcus