Julian Assange's security over the diplomatic cables, which he once described as worth at least $5m to any foreign intelligence agency, seemed less than watertight. At Ellingham Hall, the Norfolk country house where he is staying while on bail, Assange was seen handing over batches of them to visiting foreign journalists, including someone who was simply introduced as "Adam".

"He seemed like a harmless old man," said one staffer, "apart from his habit of standing too close and peering at what was written on your screen." He was introduced as the father of Assange's Swedish crony, journalist Johannes Wahlström, and took away copies of cables from Russia and post-Soviet states. According to one insider, he also demanded copies of cables about "the Jews".

This WikiLeaks associate was better known as Israel Shamir.

Shamir claims to be a renegade Russian Jew, born in Novosibirsk, but currently adhering to the Greek Orthodox church. He is notorious for Holocaust denial and publishing a string of antisemitic articles. He caused controversy in the UK in 2005, at a parliamentary book launch hosted by Lord Ahmed, by claiming: "Jews … own, control and edit a big share of mass media." Internal WikiLeaks documents, seen by the Guardian, show Shamir was not only given cables, but he also invoiced WikiLeaks for €2,000 (£1,700), to be deposited in a Tallinn bank account, in thanks for "services rendered - journalism". What services? He says: "What I did for WikiLeaks was to read and analyse the cables from Moscow."

Shamir's byline is on two previous articles pillorying the Swedish women who complained about Assange. On 27 August, in Counterpunch, a small radical US publication, Shamir said Assange was framed by "spies" and "crazy feminists". He alleged there had been a "honeytrap". On 14 September, Shamir then attacked "castrating feminists and secret services", writing that one of the women involved, whom he deliberately named, had once discussed the Cuban opposition to Castro in a Swedish academic publication "connected with" someone with "CIA ties".

Subsequently, Shamir appeared in Moscow. According to a reporter on Russian paper Kommersant, he was offering to sell articles based on the cables for $10,000 (£6,300). He had already passed some to the state-backed publication Russian Reporter. He travelled on to Belarus, ruled by the Soviet-style dictator Alexander Lukashenko, where he met regime officials. The Russian Interfax news agency reported that Shamir was WikiLeaks' "Russian representative", and had "confirmed the existence of the Belarus dossier".

According to him, WikiLeaks had several thousand "interesting" secret documents. Shamir then wrote a piece of grovelling pro-Lukashenko propaganda in Counterpunch, claiming "the people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government".

Assange subsequently maintained he had only a "brief interaction" with Shamir: "WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region."

One can only speculate about whose interests Shamir was serving by his various wild publications. Perhaps his own personal interests were always to the fore. But while the newspapers hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a responsible fashion, Shamir's backstairs antics certainly made WikiLeaks look rather less so.