On the day of the release, I was arranging by phone to meet an American official for an unattributable briefing. I told him in the course of our conversation what I had just learned from the news wires.

He was intensely interested and asked me what was known about the degree of classification of the files. When I told him, he said in a relieved tone: "no real secrets then."

When we met later in my hotel I asked him why he was so dismissive of the revelations that were causing such uproar in the world?

He explained that the US government was not so naive that it did not realise that making these documents available to such a wide range of civilian and military officials meant that they were likely to leak. Any information really damaging to US security had been weeded out.