[Fifty years after exposing US lies about the Vietnam war, Daniel
Ellsberg said the culture of official secrecy had gotten worse. He
urged whistleblowers: ‘Don’t wait years till the bombs are falling
and people have been dying’ ]
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‘I’VE NEVER REGRETTED DOING IT’: DANIEL ELLSBERG (1931–2023)
 
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David Smith
June 13, 2021
Guardian
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_ Fifty years after exposing US lies about the Vietnam war, Daniel
Ellsberg said the culture of official secrecy had gotten worse. He
urged whistleblowers: ‘Don’t wait years till the bombs are falling
and people have been dying’ _

Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo,

 

_[Daniel Ellsberg died June 16, 2023 at the age of 92. This interview
was conducted by the Guardian in June 2021, on the fiftieth
anniversary of Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers. -- moderator.]_

When the police arrived, a 13-year-old boy was photocopying classified
documents. His 10-year-old sister was cutting the words “top
secret” off each page. It seemed their dad, Daniel Ellsberg,
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red-handed.

But the officers were responding to a false alarm and did not check
what Ellsberg and his young accomplices were up to. “It was a very
nice family scene,” the 90-year-old recalls via Zoom from his home
in Kensington, California. “It didn’t worry them.”

After 50 years, the Pentagon Papers give up their final secrets
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Read more
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So night after night the photocopying went on, the crucial means that
allowed strategic analyst Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers,
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secret report that exposed government lies about the Vietnam war. The
New York Times began publishing excerpts 50 years ago on Sunday.

The papers, a study of US involvement in south-east Asia from 1945 to
1967, revealed that president after president knew the war to be
unwinnable yet continued to mislead Congress and the public into an
escalating stalemate costing millions of lives.

After their release Ellsberg was put on trial for espionage and faced
a potential prison sentence of 115 years, only for the charges to be
dropped. Once branded “the most dangerous man in America”,
[[link removed]] Ellsberg is now revered as the
patron saint of whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange
and Edward Snowden.

So, half a century on, is he glad he did it? “Oh, I’ve never
regretted for a moment doing it from then till now,” he says,
wearing dark jacket, open-necked shirt and headphones against the
backdrop of a vast bookcase. “My one regret, a growing regret
really, is that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I
think they would have been much more effective.

By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly there was no
prospect of progress so the war should not be continued

“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, don’t do what I did, don’t
wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.”

Ellsberg’s own experience in Vietnam was formative. In the mid-1960s
he was there on special assignment as a civilian studying
counter-insurgency for the state department. He estimates that he and
a friend drove about 10,000 miles, visiting 38 of the 43 provinces,
sometimes linking up with troops and witnessing the war up close.

“By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there
was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be
continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American
people before the Pentagon Papers came out.

“By ’68 with the Tet offensive,
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’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but
that had no effect on [president Richard] Nixon. He thought he was
going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it,
however long it took.

“But the other side of it was that Vietnam became very real to me
and the people dying became real and I had Vietnamese friends. It
occurs to me I don’t know of anyone of my level or higher – any
deputy assistant secretary, any assistant secretary, any cabinet
secretary – who had a Vietnamese friend. In fact, most of them had
never met a Vietnamese.”

Only recently, as he prepares for the 50th anniversary, has Ellsberg
dwelled on how doubts about the war went higher in the political
hierarchy than is widely understood. “The Pentagon Papers are always
described as revealing to people how much lying there was but there
was a particular kind of lying that’s not revealed in the Pentagon
Papers.

“Yes, everybody was lying but for different reasons and for
different causes. In particular, a very large range of high-level
doves thought we should get out and should not have got involved at
all. They were lying to the public to give the impression that they
were supporting the president when they did not believe in what the
president was doing.

“They did not agree with it but they would have spoken out at the
cost of their jobs and their future careers. None of them did that or
took any risk of doing it and the price of the silence of the doves
was several million Vietnamese, Indochinese, and 58,000 Americans.”

But Ellsberg did break the silence. Why was he, unlike them, willing
to risk life imprisonment for a leak that he knew had only a small
chance of ending the war? He says he was inspired by meeting people
who resisted being drafted into military service and, unlike
conscientious objectors, did not take alternative service.

I said I’ve got in my safe at Rand 7,000 pages of documents of lies,
deceptions, breaking treaties, hopeless wars, killing, et cetera

“They didn’t go to Sweden.
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didn’t get a deferment. They didn’t plead bone spurs like Donald J
Trump. They chose a course that put them in prison. They could easily
have shown their protests in other ways but this was the strongest way
they could say this war is wrong and it’s a matter of conscience and
I won’t participate in it.

“That kind of civil courage is contagious and it rubbed off on me.
That example opened my eyes to the question, what can I do to help end
this war, now that I’m ready to go to prison?”

In 1969 Ellsberg was working as a Pentagon consultant at the Rand
Corporation [[link removed]] thinktank in Santa Monica,
California, and still had access to the secret study of the war, which
by this time had killed about 45,000 Americans and hundreds of
thousands of Vietnamese. He decided to take the plunge.

“I said I’ve got in my safe at Rand 7,000 pages of documents of
lies, deceptions, breaking treaties, hopeless wars, killing, et cetera
and I don’t know whether it’ll have any effect to put it out but
I’m not going to be party to concealing that any more.”

Ellsberg had a friend whose girlfriend owned an advertising agency
with a photocopier, or Xerox machine. Over eight months he spent many
nights making copies of the Pentagon Papers, twice with the help
of his 13-year-old son Robert.
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He explains: “He was going to hear that his father had gone crazy or
was a spy or was communist and I wanted him to see that I was doing
this in a businesslike way because I thought it had to be done. And
also to leave him with the precedent in his mind that this is the kind
of thing he might have to do some time in his life and that there were
times you had even to go to prison, which I thought would happen
shortly.”

The owner of the agency often mis-set the office alarm and so often
the police would come, including twice when Ellsberg was at work. But
he kept his cool. “The first time I was at the Xerox machine. I look
up at the glass door, there’s knocking on it and two police outside.
‘Wow, these guys are good, how did they get on to this?’

“But I remember covering the top secret pages with a magazine and I
closed the Xerox cover where I was copying these things and opened the
doors and, ‘What can I do for you?’ But there were a few seconds
there of thinking, ‘Well, this is over.’”

Ellsberg tried and failed to persuade members of Congress to put the
papers in the public domain. On 2 March 1971 he made contact in
Washington with Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter he first met
in Vietnam. After Sheehan’s death aged 84 earlier this year, the
Times published a posthumous interview
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him suggesting that Ellsberg had felt conflicted over handing over the
documents.

Ellsberg responds: “He seemed to believe, according to that story,
that I had been reluctant to give it to the Times. It’s hard to
imagine that he believed that but maybe so. At any rate, that was not
the case. I was very anxious for the Times to print it.”

The New York Times did so on 13 June 1971. The night before, Ellsberg
had gone to the cinema with a friend to see Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. “We stayed up
and saw the early morning edition around midnight and so that was
marvelous.”

The initial reaction was nil on the Sunday when they came out

The Nixon administration obtained a court order preventing the Times
from printing more of the documents, citing national security
concerns. But Ellsberg leaked copies to the Washington Post and 17
other newspapers, prompting a legal battle all the way to the supreme
court, which ruled 6-3 
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allow publication to resume.

This stirring showdown over press freedom – retold in Steven
Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post,
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which Ellsberg is played by the British actor Matthew Rhys – had a
bigger impact that the Times’s first article. “The initial
reaction was nil on the Sunday when they came out,” Ellsberg says.
“The Times was baffled and dismayed. Nobody reacted at all.

“It was Nixon’s fatal decision to enjoin them and the willingness
across the country to commit civil disobedience and publish material
that the attorney general and the president were saying every day,
‘This is dangerous to national security, we can’t afford one more
day of it.’ Nineteen papers in all defied that. I don’t think
there was any other wave of civil disobedience like that in any
respect I can think of by major institutions across the country.”

But the government wanted revenge. Ellsberg spent 13 days in hiding
from the FBI but eventually went on trial
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1973 accused of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government
property. The charges were dismissed due to gross governmental
misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him – crimes which
ultimately contributed to Nixon’s downfall.

The high-profile trial had ensured huge media coverage of the Pentagon
Papers. But Ellsberg says: “The effect on Nixon’s policy was zero.
The war went on: a year later, the biggest bombing of the war and
then, at the end of that year, 18 months later, the heaviest bombing
in human history.

“So as far as one could see, as I said at the time, the American
people at this moment have as much influence over their country’s
foreign policy as the Russian people had over the invasion of
Czechoslovakia.”

Nixon resigned over Watergate in 1974 and the Vietnam war ended the
following year. In the decades since, Ellsberg has continued to
champion Manning, Assange, Snowden and others charged under the
Espionage Act.
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climate, he warns, has become more restrictive and punitive than the
one he faced 50 years ago.

“The whistleblowers have much less protection now. [President
Barack] Obama brought eight or nine or even 10 cases, depending on who
you count, in two terms, and then Trump brought eight cases in one
term. So sources are much more in danger of prosecution than they were
before me and even after me for 30 years.”

Last month the nonagenarian Ellsberg returned to the fray
by releasing classified documents
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that US military planners pushed for nuclear strikes on mainland China
in 1958 to protect Taiwan from an invasion by communist forces, a
scenario that has gained fresh relevance amid rising US-China
tensions.

It is a dare for prosecutors to come after him again. If they do, he
wants to see the Espionage Act tested by the supreme court. He argues
that the government is using it much like Britain’s Official
Secrets
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even though America, unlike Britain, guarantees freedom of speech
through the first amendment to the constitution.

“We don’t have an Official Secrets Act because we have a first
amendment but that has not been addressed by the supreme court,”
says Ellsberg, still going strong after an hour-long interview. “So
I’m willing to see this case go up to the supreme court. Not that I
have any desire to go to prison or not. And it would have to move
fairly fast to get me in prison in my lifetime.”

* Daniel Ellsberg
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* Pentagon Papers
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* whistleblowers
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