In 2010, WikiLeaks published more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables, the largest leak in State Department history, and turned a wall of classified memos into front-page news worldwide. Reporter Richard Bilton spends this two-part series talking to people at the top of the US government about what it was like to have private cables go public, and to diplomats dealing with the fallout inside embassies. He travels to a country where the leaked cables are credited with helping spark an uprising, tracing the line from a diplomatic memo to street protest. Bilton's focus stays on the gap the cables expose between what American officials say in public and what they write to each other in private, from candid assessments of foreign leaders to blunt strategy talk. The series treats this as the first serious television account of the material rather than a rehash of the initial headlines, weighing what the leak actually changed against the outrage it caused at the time.