Cablegate: 251,287 US embassy cables

The Cablegate archive comprises 251,287 cables – the State Department's formal telegrams – exchanged between Washington and 274 US embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions. They range from routine reporting to frank assessments of foreign leaders, accounts of private conversations with officials and sources, and instructions from Washington. According to us, 15,652 were classified Secret; the Guardian reported that more than 11,000 were marked secret and around 9,000 'noforn' (not for foreign nationals).

The first stories, published on 28 November 2010 by the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País, covered Arab leaders' private calls for military action against Iran, a directive asking US diplomats to collect information on UN officials, concerns about Pakistan's nuclear material, and candid portraits of world leaders. Over the following months we and a growing number of partner publications released cables country by country, among them embassy reporting from Tunisia that circulated widely before the uprising of January 2011.

On 2 September 2011 I published the entire archive without redactions, after an encrypted copy and its passphrase had separately become available online. The five original media partners jointly said they 'deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk'.

I began publishing the cables on 28 November 2010, working with the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País; the newspapers selected cables for publication and removed details that could identify sensitive sources. The circumstances of the full release in September 2011 were disputed between me and the Guardian: the Guardian said the passphrase had been published unwittingly in its journalists' February 2011 book on the understanding that it was temporary, while an encrypted copy of the file had separately been circulated online.

The source of this material was established in court. Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning), a US Army intelligence analyst, was convicted by a military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, on 30 July 2013 of offences including Espionage Act violations relating to the leak of the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the State Department cables and the Guantánamo files; she was acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on 21 August 2013; President Barack Obama commuted the sentence in January 2017. The 2019 US indictment against me alleged that Manning provided approximately 250,000 State Department cables to WikiLeaks. The US government has not authenticated individual cables.