Washington: US State Department documents released by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks provided candid views of foreign leaders and sensitive information on terrorism and nuclear proliferation, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
The documents show Saudi donors remain chief financiers of militant groups like Al Qaida and that Chinese government operatives have waged a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage targeting the United States and its allies, according to a review of the WikiLeaks documents published in the Times.
The collection "provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats," the paper reported.
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The WikiLeaks documents also show US Defence Secretary Robert Gates believes any military strike on Iran would only delay its pursuit of a nuclear weapon by one to three years, the Times reported on its website on Sunday.
The cables also showed that Iran has obtained sophisticated missiles from North Korea capable of hitting western Europe and the United States was concerned that Iran was using those rockets as "building blocks" to build longer-range missiles, the Times said.
The advanced missiles are much more powerful than anything US officials have publicly acknowledged that Iran has in its arsenal, the newspaper said.
The Pentagon immediately condemned WikiLeaks' "reckless" dump of classified State Department documents and said it was taking steps to bolster security of US military networks.
The White House said the leak of the diplomatic cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders and may put at risk the lives of named individuals living "under oppressive regimes."
Earlier on Sunday, the WikiLeaks website appeared to be inaccessible, and WikiLeaks said in its Twitter feed that it was experiencing a denial of service attack.
"We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack," the whistle-blower website said in a statement on its Twitter feed, just hours before the expected mass release of the documents.
The group's founder, Julian Assange, also tells the US ambassador to Britain that WikiLeaks won't bow to Washington's demands.
The Obama administration has been bracing for the release for the past week. Top officials have notified allies that the contents of the diplomatic cables could prove embarrassing because they contain candid assessments of foreign leaders.
In Jordan earlier on Sunday, WikiLeaks founder Assange said the looming release of classified US documents by the whistle-blower website would cover "every major issue" in the world today.
"The material that we are about to release covers essentially every major issue in every country in the world," he told reporters in Jordan by video link when asked if the new leaks again focused on US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange told the conference of investigative journalists that he was speaking to them by video link because "Jordan's not the best place to be with the CIA on your tail." It was unclear from where he was speaking.
WikiLeaks was reportedly hours away on Sunday from releasing hundreds of thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables, with several governments fearing damaging revelations.
Assange put the number of documents to be released at more than a quarter of a million.
"Over this last month much of my energy and activities have been spent preparing for the upcoming release of a diplomatic history of the United States," he said.
"Over 250,000 classified cables from US embassies all around the world, and we can see already in the past week or so that the United States has made movements to try to disarm the effect that this could have," Assange said.
Senior US officials have raced to contain the potential damage by warning more than a dozen countries, including its key allies Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel and Turkey.
