The editor of Der Spiegel on how the head of the office of the party chariman lost his job over the revelations

When Der Spiegel appeared with its cover story on the cables on Monday 29 November, Germany had a new "most wanted" figure. Who, wondered the media, was the mysterious man who had been briefing the American embassy about the coalition negotiations in the immediate aftermath of the German general election in 2009?

The man had been described only as a "well placed source" within the Free Democratic party (FDP), which had just become the junior partner in the new conservative German government. After several days of denying the significance of what came to be known as the "FDP Spy Affair", the party started to interview "suspects" and found the culprit, who, it turned out, had even supplied the Americans with copies from its negotiations folder: it was Helmut Metzner, head of the office of the party chairman and vice-chancellor Guido Westerwelle. The FDP removed him from Westerwelle's office, and this week his contract was cancelled completely.

The position of US ambassador Phil Murphy is also precarious. Though the official line is that he will stay, privately, many politicians believe Murphy has to go. But Hans-Michael Goldmann, an FDP member of the Bundestag spoke out in public: "Mr Murphy's behaviour is unseemly. A mission chief like him has to be recalled."

And as for the papers, who didn't get access to the cables? In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Stefan Kornelius writes: "Publishing the cables in the name of freedom is damaging. They destroy politics, they endanger people … and they could influence economies." Ulrich Greiner in the weekly Die Zeit, compared Julian Assange to Zorro the avenger, accusing Der Spiegel and the other publications which published the data of destroying trust.

But Jakob Augstein, the son of the Spiegel founder Rudolf Augstein, wrote in his publication Der Freitag on 3 December: "Any journalist whose first reaction to the Wikileaks data is to talk about national security, or even worse, the security of the western world, is not doing their job — and damaging press freedom to boot."