I have to correct you there. The full unredacted cables are still online on various sites. Including cryptome. They have been online this entire time. Yes, no-one was harmed, but not because they put the cat back in the bag (you can’t). Once other sites had published it, WikiLeaks republished the full trove as a risk-mitigation measure so that the compromised names could quickly make themselves aware that their name was out there. WL also contacted the State Department to try and warn them of the risk. There is footage of this.

The US spent tons of money trying to find anyone who’d been harmed by Manning’s leaks but found no-one.

WikiLeaks had been drip-feeding big stories based on the cables. The compromise of the encryption key to the full unredacted archive by Luke Harding and David Leigh of the Guardian put a stop to this unfortunately. They stupidly published the encryption key in their book. Once people found the encrypted file online it didn’t take long to put 2 and 2 together.