Some interesting snippets here:

Assange threatened to sue the The Guardian over leak of cablegate docs
 http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/assange-threatened-sue-iguardiani-leak-cablegate-docs/

The above is based on:

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets
 http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102?currentPage=all

Which contains:

"Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience"

"The Guardian was the lead organization from the outset: it came up with the idea of a collaboration with WikiLeaks, and it made the arrangement work."

Of course describing the pro-establishment Guardian as "One of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards", is a joke...

"The origins of the collaboration between WikiLeaks and its “media partners” date back to June 2010, when Nick Davies read a four-paragraph story in his own paper about the arrest of Private First Class Bradley Manning, an American soldier who had allegedly passed along hundreds of thousands of classified military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks. Davies resolved to find Assange."

"In October, while The Guardian was preparing to publish the Iraq War Logs and working on package three, Heather Brooke, a British freelance journalist who had written a book on freedom of information, had a copy of the package-three database leaked to her by a former WikiLeaks volunteer. Leigh shrewdly invited Brooke to join the Guardian team. He did not want her taking the story to another paper. Furthermore, by securing the same database from a source other than Assange, The Guardian might then be free of its promise to wait for Assange’s green light to publish. Leigh got the documents from Brooke, and the paper distributed them to Der Spiegel and The New York Times. The three news organizations were poised to publish the material on November 8."

"That was when Assange stormed into Rusbridger’s office, threatening to sue. Rusbridger, Leigh, and the editors from Der Spiegel spent a marathon session with Assange, his lawyer, and Hrafnsson, eventually restoring an uneasy calm. Some in the Guardian camp had wanted to break off relations with Assange entirely. Rusbridger somehow kept all parties at the table—a process involving a great deal of coffee followed by a great deal of wine. Ultimately he agreed to a further delay, allowing Assange time to bring in other media partners, this time France’s Le Monde and Spain’s El País."

More interesting is the bigger picture -- see this great article on wikileaks and the nature of the free software mode of production:

Wikileaks: a Political-Economic History By Alistair Davidson
 http://www.libertyandsolidarity.org/node/104