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In most cases, cables are marked secret not because the U.S. requires it but because those speaking to us - the foreign leaders across the table - do. They are not keeping secrets from us, but from two other groups: their enemies and their subjects.

I will not comment on or confirm what are alleged to be stolen State Department cables. But I can say that the United States deeply regrets the disclosure of any information that was intended to be confidential, including private discussions between counterparts or our diplomats' personal assessments and observations.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.

Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.

It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.

Frankly, most governments are used to lying to each other - to a degree that most people would find shocking. Part of diplomacy is the art of strategic lying.

I'm not always the most diplomatic person.

Like Prince von Bismarck in diplomacy, I have no secrets.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.