US diplomats in Beijing have linked China's top propagandist to the cyber attacks that prompted Google to take down its search engine in China early this year, leaked diplomatic cables show.

"A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems," a cable dated earlier this year said.

"According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level," the cable said, referring to the ruling body of the Chinese Communist Party.

Posted by The New York Times on its website Saturday, the cable was from a trove of 250,000 US diplomatic messages leaked by WikiLeaks, whose contents were dismissed Thursday by a Chinese foreign ministry official as "absurd."

That cable and others pointed to Li Changchun, the Politburo member in charge of propaganda, as the overseer of the cyber attacks that Google has charged penetrated its systems and those of 20 other US companies.

According to the cables cited by the Times, the attacks were coordinated out of the State Council Information Office with the oversight of Li and Zhou Yongkang, who is China's top security official.

A May 18, 2009 cable quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li was taken aback when he Googled his own name in Chinese and found "results critical of him," the Times said.

A cable dated early this year quoted a Chinese person with family connections to the elite as saying that Li had personally directed an attack on Google's servers in the United States.

But the contact cited in that cable told the Times in an interview that Li oversaw a campaign against Google operations in China but the person did not know who directed the hacking attack.

Google charges in January that it had been the victim of a highly sophistiated cyber attack in mid December, apparently to access email accounts of Chinese human rights activists, set off a huge battle with Beijing.

In March, Google began redirecting queries from Google.cn to Google.com.hk, allowing uncensored Chinese search results. But it ended the automatic redirect to the Hong Kong site in June to avoid having its license suspended by China.

The confrontation underscored longstanding US concerns about hacker attacks emanating from China going back to 2002, but also reflected China's fears that an uncontrolled Internet posed a threat to its control over information flows.

Last month, Google decried restrictions on the Internet by China, Vietnam and other countries, calling them the "trade barriers of the 21st century" that should be addressed by new trade rules and talks.

The cables show that Chinese officials complained to the US embassy about Google Earth, demanding US action to get Google to reduce the resolution of imagery showing sensitive Chinese government installations.

An unidentified Chinese official told the embassy's deputy chief of mission there would be "grave consequences" if terrorists exploited Google Earth imagery to hurt China. The US response was non-committal.

The cables also make clear that US diplomats suspect that Chinese authorities have made use of an army of private "patriotic" hackers to delve into US computers.

The cables refer to a previously unreported hacker attack in 2008 that American investigators code-named Byzantine Candor, according to The New York Times.

Carried out by intruders based in Shanghai linked to the People's Liberation Army, the attack yielded more than 50 megabytes of email messages and a complete list of user names and passwords from a US government agency, according to a November 3, 2008 cable.

In June 2009, a secret State Department cable warned about email "spear phishing" attacks during climate change talks with China, the Times said.

The attacks, which failed, involved emails sent to employees in the office of the State Department's climate change envoy, with a PDF file containing a malicious software program that if activated would give the hacker complete control of the victims computer.

According to the Times, the cables also reveal that a surveillance system that stole information from computers used by the Dalai Lama and South Asian governments, was also linked to a broad series of break-ins in US government computers code-named Byzantine Hades.

The Times said US investigators made a "tenuous connection" between those attacks and the People's Liberation Army.