Egypt’s Vice President Omar Suleiman was long seen by Israel as the preferred candidate to succeed President Hosni Mubarak, secret U.S. diplomatic cables published Monday suggested.

The cables, released by Wikileaks and published Monday by the Daily Telegrah Newspaper, quote a conversation between a senior adviser from the Israeli Ministry of Defense and U.S. diplomats in Tel Aviv. In the cable, the Israeli official, David Hacham tells his American colleague that Suleiman would likely serve as “at least an interim president if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated.” Hacham also said that the Israeli delegation led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak was “shocked by Mubarak’s aged appearance and slurred speech,” when it met him in Egypt.

Omar Suleiman was the head of the Egyptian spy agency in 1993 which brought him into close contact with the Central Intelligence Agency. Recently he took up a more public role as chief Egyptian interlocutor with Israel to discuss the peace process with Hamas and Fatah, the rival Palestinian factions. Suleiman’s name appeared in many American diplomatic cables, leaked by Wikeleaks,  and he is described there as “ the most successful element of the relationship (between the US and Egyptian intelligence Agencies)”.

However, a cabled from May 2007 that was composed by the US Ambassador to Cairo, Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr., describes Egypt as a “dictatorship” suffering from “paranoia” noting that political analysts were hard pressed to predict the future.

“Presidential succession is the elephant in the room of Egyptian politics,” Ricciardone wrote. Discounting the possibility of Mubarak being succeeded by his younger son because of Gamal’s failure to complete his military service, the ambassador once again pointed to Suleiman as the most likely successor as a “rock-solid” loyalist to Mubarak.