You just had to hold your hat under there for long enough” ALAN RUSBRIDGER, THE GUARDIAN Viewed on screen, the unkempt, silhouetted figures looked like hostages held in the basement of a terrorist group’s safehouse. One of the stubbly, subterranean figures moved closer to the camera. He held up a sheet of paper. Written on it was a mysterious six-digit number. A secret Swiss bank account, perhaps? A telephone number? Something to do with The Da Vinci Code? The shadowy figures had not, in fact, been seized by some radical faction, but were a group of journalists from Spain’s El País newspaper. Nor was their note a ransom demand. It was the index reference of one of more than 250,000 cables. Since being invited to join the existing British-US-German consortium – or “tripartite alliance” as the New York Times’s Bill Keller dubbed it – El País had wasted no time in setting up its own underground research room. The paper – and France’s Le Monde – had joined the WikiLeaks party late.
