The US Justice Department filed an injunction against the country's two leading newspapers to force them to stop publication of "top secret" documents and has charged two men with theft and espionage that could lead to life sentences.
No, this is not the story of Thomas Drake, who stands accused of passing classified documents to a newspaper (presumably the Baltimore Sun), shredding documents, deleting computer files, and lying to investigators.
This is an eerily similar story.
Daniel Ellsberg
Meet Daniel Ellsberg. Dr. Ellsberg (he holds his doctorate in Economics) was the consummate Cold Warrior. He worked for an outfit called The RAND Corporation. RAND, short for "Research and Development" was started after World War II to continue the sort of research and war planning that won the war. RAND not only allows its researchers a free hand to do their work, but also reserves the right to refuse proposed projects in order to maintain the sort of atmosphere that is conducive to academic research. (source, pdf)
Ellsberg went to Vietnam in 1964 and stayed until he came down with a bout of hepatitis the following year. During that time, he befriended Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, the third most important American official in country. Vann was one of the few commanders who would tell the media that the American strategy in Southeast Asia was not working. Ellsberg and Vann shared a revulsion about the killing of civilians by all sides.
As an aside: around the same time, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan met Lt. Col. Vann. Vann was a fascinating man and Sheehan wrote 768 pages about him.
Ellsberg returned to Washington and RAND, perhaps a little disillusioned, but still committed to the war against the Communists. A job's a job. Sometime in 1965, he started seeing Patricia Marx, an anti-war activist whom he later married. At the time, they had some fierce arguments about the war. The Pentagon Papers probably quite literally saved their relationship.
The Pentagon Papers
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson commissioned a report on the history of American involvement in Vietnam. This was just a year after Johnson escalated involvement with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Ellsberg was one of the researchers who contributed to the report. He decided to work on the portions covering the Kennedy years because he knew little about that period.
The report was completed in 1969, after Richard Nixon had taken office, and Martin Shapiro wrote in his 1972 book The Pentagon Papers and the Courts that only about 0.5 percent of the 7000+ pages contained information that could be classified. The rest was culled from publicly available sources.
Sheehan later wrote: "Ellsberg, being Ellsberg, read all 43" (volumes) of the report in the late summer and early fall of 1969. He learned, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had been looking for an excuse to bomb North Vietnam for some time and that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was substantially written months before the actual incident. All the Administration needed was an incident to plug in to the document.
Background on Vietnam 1945-1964
Following the second World War, the great powers agreed to a policy of self determination for the colonies. The British had the most to lose, but they were already an empire in decline and ready to cut the colonies loose. The Americans had few significant colonies other than the Philippines to lose. Considering the brutality of the occupation, Truman was probably eager to give the islands their independence anyway. The Soviets had every intention to "allow" Eastern Europe to "choose" Communism. The Germans, Italians and Japanese were in no position to argue self determination.
However the other colonial powers -- the French, Dutch, and Portuguese in particular -- were not really privy to these negotiations. After the war, Ho Chi Minh had as much interest in French rule in Indochina as he had in Japanese rule: exactly none. Nonetheless, even as France was recovering from a four year German occupation they were reasserting their authority in the colonies.
The United States all but ignored the self determination doctrine and funneled money and war supplies to the French until their final disastrous stand at Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam was divided into north and south a la Korea until a reunification vote that would never happen. (Not learning their lesson, the French lost another colonial war in Algeria in 1962.)
The Americans sent advisers and money to the South Vietnam government and conducted all manner of clandestine activities. When Johnson was running for President in 1964, he promised not to unilaterally escalate the war while secretly making plans to escalate the war.
The Papers are released
To say that Ellsberg was pissed would be the understatement of the 20th Century. However, the report was immediately classified "Top Secret." (Ellsberg had clearance.) Ellsberg started out going through official channels. Senate Foreign Relations Chair William Fulbright would not declassify the document and make it fair game for the newspapers (see Article I, Section 6).
Frustrated, Ellsberg and his friend Anthony Russo worked late at night making copies of the report. In March, 1971 Ellsberg took the documents to Sheehan at the Times after reading one of his book reviews. Sheehan took several months to review the study. He eventually concluded that most of the people conducting the war, excepting a few people like Vann, were not lying about the situation on the ground. Sheehan thought "My God, they believed in these delusions."
In the meantime, Ellsberg got involved in the peace movement. The timeline that unfolded could not have been more perfect priming for the anti-war movement.
-- March 29, 1971: William Calley is convicted for his role in the Mai Lai massacre.
-- April 22, 1971: A young John Kerry testifies about the war and throws his combat ribbons away.
-- May 4, 1971: Ellsberg participates his first war protest, one of many that disrupted traffic in DC in April and May.
-- June 13: The New York Times publishes a story titled "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement," (archived here)
In addition to the story, the Times devoted many pages to printing numerous documents and messages included in the Pentagon Papers.
Interestingly, the same issue of the Times included extensive and fawning coverage of Tricia Nixon's wedding held at the White House the previous day.
According to the tapes that eventually emerged in the Watergate inquiry, Nixon was vaguely aware of the existence of the report. (At the time, Ellsberg was one of maybe three people who had read a substantial part of it.) Nixon was ambivalent about the newspaper report. His initial instinct was to tell military adviser and later Chief of Staff Al Haig to "Start at the top and fire some people."
On one hand, it made Democrats Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson (not to mention Eisenhower, who did little to help Nixon's 1960 presidential run) look bad. It did not cover the Nixon years. Tricky Dick even toyed with the idea of calling the report the Kennedy-Johnson Papers.
On the other hand, it did not look good for the White House to have so little control over leaks of classified information, even if it was not particularly detrimental to national security. Nixon, like George W. Bush after him, was an absolutist about secrecy. The presumption in both Administrations was that everything is secret unless it has to be released.
Nixon ordered Attorney General John N. Mitchell to seek an injunction against the Times and later the Washington Post, who had also started publishing their own series. The case was expedited to the Supreme Court which ruled 9-0 in favor of the newspapers to continue publishing documents in the Pentagon Papers citing restrictions on prior restraint. In the meantime, other publications like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Christian Science Monitor started publishing their own stories.
In the meantime, Senator Mike Gravel attempted to make the case a moot point. He tried to read the papers as a filibuster against the draft June 29, but there was no quorum. So Sen. Gravel convened the Subcommittee on Buildings, which he chaired, and read the document through his own tears until 1 a.m.
Watch it:
So why did Ellsberg release the papers?
I released the papers because concealment of this information over the past 25 years has led to the deaths of 50,000 Americans, several hundred thousand Vietnamese in the past few years and a couple of million in 20 years. Judgment at this point whether the American public is to be trusted to make these decisions versus the executive branch can now be judged by you, the citizens, and by the courts and Congress in the light of where secrecy has led us in the last 25 years.
No link, but it was published in the Times July 2, 1971.
For views like this, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called Ellsberg "The Most Dangerous Man In America." This is also the title of a 2010 Academy Award nominated film about the affair.
The Aftermath
Nixon's paranoia got the best of him at this point. Ellsberg and Russo were charged with espionage and theft. (Another aside: I just learned that a political scientist that I highly respect, Samuel Popkin, was jailed for a week for withholding information about the investigation.) Nixon ordered the formation of the Plumbers to "fix leaks." During that summer, the Plumbers broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office looking for dirt to discredit Ellsberg.
They didn't find anything, but did leave Ellsberg's file out as something of a calling card to led the world know they were there. They didn't find anything primarily because, as Ellsberg later lamented, his psychiatrist didn't want to discuss the issue.
Still, the damage was done. Ellsberg and Russo were facing life in prison. Public and Congressional opinions were turning against the war. Nixon's paranoia hit new heights and he continued his domestic spying that eventually culminated in the Watergate scandal.
It was not until 1973 that Ellsberg and Russo were acquitted. The acquittals did not necessarily excuse them for releasing classified documents, even if they had no business being classified "Top Secret." Instead, it was Nixon's extralegal investigations -- a violation of the defendants' rights -- that got them off the hook. In a tragic Coda, Vann was scheduled to appear as a character witness. He opposed the release of the Papers, but supported his old friend. Vann had actually retired from the military, but could not adjust to civilian life. He went back as a military contractor and died in a helicopter crash June 9, 1972.
Since then, Dr. Ellsberg has become a peace activist and has been arrested more than 70 times for his activities. He was one of the leaders against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle asked Is Daniel Ellsberg Right ... Again?
"We were lied into both wars in every aspect - the reasons for going in, the prospects, the length, the scale and the probable costs in lives and dollars," he tells the crowd as rain puddles the sidewalk on Shattuck Avenue. "With Iraq, the big lie is that it represented the No. 1 security threat to the U.S. That's not just questionable, it's absurd. We live in a dangerous world with al Qaeda terrorism, more than 20,000 poorly guarded Russian nuclear weapons and the unstable, nuclear-armed state of Pakistan, where Osama and other al Qaeda leaders are probably hiding. Saddam was a tyrant, but he was never linked to 9/11, and the talk of weapons of mass destruction was at least exaggerated. He wasn't even a threat to his neighbors."
And that, my friends, are the stakes of leaking "classified" information.
Crossposted on Progressive Electorate