His government mistrust endures

He leaked the Pentagon papers. He topped the Nixon Enemies A-list. His just-released memoir has been made into a Hollywood movie. He’s an icon -- depending on how you see him -- as hero, whistleblower or traitor.

So what more does one of the world’s most famous non-incarcerated document thieves want?

Daniel Ellsberg still wants to matter.

The silver-haired 72-year-old former RAND policy wonk is as anti-establishment as ever. Since December he’s been arrested three times in protests against the war in Iraq. He says he’d gladly go behind bars again if it would help dissuade the Bush administration from widening its involvement in the Middle East.

Why not? He’s been arrested maybe 70 times -- and jailed 50 -- by his own reckoning, in obeisance to his conscience. In recent years he has protested for antinuclear causes. And this year, he has become a ubiquitous antiwar speaker, pingponging across the country calling for government officials to leak more documents -- now! -- while the information still has the power to temper Bush Middle East policy.

“I’m a living protest at the moment,” said Ellsberg, who was driving across the heartland to a speaking engagement at Cuyahoga Community College, near Cleveland, on Wednesday. When a police car drove up, “I thought, I just got here. I’m in trouble already? I reflexively put my hands behind my back.”

It was his campus police escort. After a rousing meeting with students, he flew on to Miami for a luncheon appearance.

“I’m talking almost every day of the week,” he said. “I’ve been doing that for six months, trying to stop this war. During the war I talked just as much, hoping to avert the use of nuclear weapons. Now I’m trying to avert the expansion of this war into Syria and Saudi Arabia.”

He also has a new book out, and is sitting on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA Saturday morning as the author of “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” “Secrets” tells the story of how he came to leak 7,000 pages of classified Pentagon documents to the New York Times in the hopes that the secrets they revealed -- what went wrong in the Vietnam War -- would prompt the nation to demand a withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

He will be returning to one of the few places where l’affaire Ellsberg is not deeply buried in the past tense. A few years ago, as television trucks crowded the Santa Monica Courthouse for the O.J. Simpson civil trial across the street, Ellsberg happened to be in town and was invited to visit the RAND offices by a staff researcher.

A few minutes into the visit, Ellsberg said, the phone rang: It was RAND President James Thomson. Ellsberg was “not welcome” in the building. The president elaborated that several RAND scholars who had just had lunch with Ellsberg “did not represent the sentiment of most people at RAND,” Ellsberg said. (A RAND spokesman said Thomson had no recollection of the incident.)

“I didn’t jump out or rush out, but I left,” Ellsberg said. “This is the state of anxiety at RAND, that I might endanger their aircraft contracts, years later.”

It didn’t entirely surprise him. After he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he said, it took 25 years for most of his co-workers to contact him. These were men with whom he had shared cocktails, dinners, baby pictures.

“It was as if they had all died,” he said. “They treated me as if I had moved to another planet. ... In effect, I lost every friend I ever had.”

Until that moment, Ellsberg had been a defense consultant at RAND, with a house in Malibu just a short, spectacular drive up the coast.

Outside his privileged bubble, it was a turbulent time.

American campuses were exploding in antiwar demonstrations. Buddhist monks and nuns were setting themselves on fire in protest in Vietnam, their stoic calm a disturbing sight in U.S. news images, as their flaming robes unfurled around their shoulders like a hideous garland.

Ellsberg was not a member of any movement. He had married (and later divorced) the daughter of a Marine colonel and “enjoyed” a stint in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine company commander. In 1968 he met an Indian woman who introduced him to the Ghandian philosophy of civil disobedience. And later, on his first date with his current wife, Patricia Marx, she took him to a rally against the Vietnam War.

He said he knew the rationale for the Vietnam War was a sham back in 1964, when he was a Pentagon analyst.

And it burned him that right there, in his safe at RAND, was “evidence of lying ... by four presidents, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder,” he said in his book.

“I decided I would stop concealing that myself,” he wrote. “I would get it out somehow.”

One night in 1969, after his colleagues had gone home, he and a former RAND employee, Tony Russo, drove to the advertising agency of a friend and ran an armload of confidential documents, a study directed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, through a Xerox machine. Eventually, Ellsberg would copy 7,000 pages.

The New York Times published the first of a nine-part presentation on June 13, 1971, but the 54-page series was interrupted by a federal injunction. That injunction was lifted two weeks later by a crucial Supreme Court ruling that was a landmark against government censorship.

Ellsberg’s life fell apart. Eventually, he would be indicted for 12 felony charges, carrying a possible total sentence of 115 years.

Not all his former colleagues abandoned him. Mort Halperin, a RAND consultant then at the Brookings Institute, and now the director of the Washington office of the Open Society Institute, spent several months at the trial, recruiting witnesses, and testifying that there was “nothing in [the Pentagon Papers] that would cause harm to the national security.”

But, Halperin said, “people at RAND felt, with some justification, that he had done something that jeopardized RAND, and that he had betrayed a trust at the RAND Corp.”

Meanwhile, Watergate burglars, at the behest of an anxious President Nixon, orchestrated a break-in of the office of his former Los Angeles psychiatrist, to see if they could come up with something damaging they could use to smear him. Revelation of this burglary helped unravel the legal case against Ellsberg. He was acquitted -- as would be his former colleague, Russo -- on May 11, 1973.

Today, Ellsberg is encouraged that a handful of U.S. diplomats have stepped down to protest the attack on Iraq. They have accused the Bush administration of misrepresenting intelligence information, and Ells- berg has some words of advice: Leak any documents you can while the information still has the power to change history.

Had he leaked documents he had in his possession as early as 1964, he said, “there wouldn’t have been a Vietnam War.”

“Hundreds of other people knew, just like me,” he said. “Colonels, majors, deputy assistants, secretaries -- at least dozens of people, maybe a couple hundred. Any one of us could have stopped that war, and not one person broke the ranks and told when it would have made the most difference.”

This, he says, is his greatest regret.

“I was aware the president was blatantly lying to the American people,” but by the time he leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, “I knew those documents had very little chance to stop the war. They were just history.”

That is why, today, he would like to encourage the U.S. diplomats who resigned -- and anyone else -- to leak documents they feel could avert America from involvement in another geopolitical quagmire they view as mistaken as Vietnam eventually came seen to be.

“Those resignations were very creditable,” he said. “There was no precedent for that in Vietnam. I hope someone reveals documents to Congress and the press. To be willing to do that, you don’t have to resign.”

Some of those who did resign said they believed the Bush war on Iraq was increasing the danger of another attack on the scale of Sept. 11.

“They didn’t just reach the decision while shaving,” he said. “They reached it during months and months of viewing documents, some of which they had probably written. There may come a day when they look back and say they wish they had taken a drawerful of documents with them.”

“The lesson of this now, to all these people, is: Don’t resign without taking documents with you,” he said.

“I think that’s incredibly irresponsible,” said Peter Brookes, a senior fellow for national security affairs at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. “It may undermine American interests. It could undermine sources of intelligence. It could put agents at risk, depending on how old the information is.”

For years, Ellsberg said, he had elaborate dreams about his cushy life at RAND, the friendly collegiality he shared with other smart men. Today, he divides his time between Berkeley and Washington, D.C.

And the war on Iraq is far from his only historic preoccupation. He’s still upset about Ralph Nader stepping into the slim electoral margin between President Bush and Democratic Party contender Al Gore -- and the Green Party’s contention during the campaign that it really didn’t matter which side won.

“I think his political campaign was inexcusable,” Ellsberg said. “To say that there was literally no difference between these two candidates was a falsehood as great as I have ever heard in electoral politics.”