WikiLeaks: Breach made all cables public

LONDON - Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said Thursday that its massive archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been exposed in a security breach which it blamed on its one-time partner, Britain's Guardian newspaper.

In a 1,600-word-long editorial posted to the Internet, WikiLeaks accused the Guardian's investigative reporter David Leigh of divulging the password needed to decrypt the files in a book he and another Guardian journalist, Luke Harding, published earlier this year.

WikiLeaks said in its statement that Leigh had "recklessly, and without gaining our approval, knowingly disclosed the decryption passwords" in a nonfiction book about the organization published by the Guardian back in February.

In comments to The Associated Press, Leigh dismissed the charge as "time-wasting nonsense."

He said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had supplied him with a password needed to access the U.S. embassy cables from a server back in July, 2010 - but that Assange assured him the site would expire within a matter of hours.

"What we published much later in our book was obsolete and harmless," Leigh said. "We did not disclose the URL (web address) where the file was located, and in any event, Assange had told us it would no longer exist."

Leigh said it was now being claimed "that Assange somehow left this file of his lying about instead of deleting it."

Repeated attempts to reach WikiLeaks staffers for an explanation of why the file was apparently left online were unsuccessful, although on its Twitter feed the group described one of Leigh's previous statements as false and warned of "continuous lies to come."

In its statement, WikiLeaks said that knowledge of the leaked password had been spreading privately for months, but that the organization was forced to come out with a statement Thursday after news of the breach began spilling into the press.

"Now that the connection has been made public by others we can explain what happened and what we intend to do," the group said, claiming that it had tried to warn the State Department about what was happening.

In Washington, the State Department did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment. U.S. officials have previously said that WikiLeaks' disclosures could have potentially serious consequences for informants, activists and others quoted in the cables.

"What we have said all along about the danger of these types of things is reinforced by the fact that there are now documents out there in unredacted form containing the names of individuals whose lives are at risk because they are named," Defense Department Col. Dave Lapan said Wednesday, before the full scale of the issue became known.

"Once WikiLeaks has these documents in its possession, it loses control and information gets out whether they intend (it) to or not," Lapan told Pentagon reporters.

Later Thursday, WikiLeaks posted a threat to publish its entire archive in an unencrypted form. A review of file sharing sites appeared to turn up hundreds of encrypted copies of the files circulating freely around the Web, although the AP could not immediately determine their authenticity.