The U.S. Embassy in Beijing was told by an unidentified Chinese contact that China's Politburo "directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems," the , citing a single leaked State Department cable.

"The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said," the Times reported.

The cable is another piece of evidence, albeit thinly sourced, linking China to the Google attack. Wikileaks is gradually releasing this latest set of cables, and the document in question was not available on WikiLeaks' Web site at press time. The Times, along with a handful of other newspapers, was given early access to the documents.

Security experts have linked the attacks to , and both Google and the State Department implied that they thought China was behind the attacks when they were first disclosed in January, but nobody has produced conclusive proof that they were state-sponsored.

Google was one of more than 30 companies targeted in the attacks, known as Aurora. Google said and that the attack apparently failed.