Historian leaked Pentagon Papers
A former Cambridge University fellow has come forward after 46 years to reveal his role in the most celebrated act of whistleblowing in American history.
In June 1971, Gar Alperovitz outmanoeuvred the FBI and the Nixon administration to mastermind the covert distribution to 19 US newspapers of what became known as the Pentagon Papers: a topsecret 7000-page government history of the Vietnam War.
The battle to publish the revelations led to a landmark Supreme Court judgment on the freedom of the press, and forms the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Oscarnominated film The Post.
The documents had been stolen and copied by Daniel Ellsberg, a disillusioned military analyst at the RAND Corporation, a defence think tank. Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, told his staff that Ellsberg, whom he knew quite well, was ‘‘the most dangerous man in America [and] must be stopped at all costs’’.
Until this week, Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia, were the only conspirators in the leak who had been identified. However, for three weeks in 1971 the couple relied on a small group of anti-war activists, including Alperovitz, to help them to provide newspapers across the US with the papers.
By early June 1971, Ellsberg had tried to leak the papers to members of Congress, and had passed a copy to a reporter from The New York Times but had not heard from him in months.
So he invited Alperovitz to a dinner party. The historian told the New Yorker magazine he was recruited days later.
‘‘I’m a very cautious person, but I didn’t blink,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m surprised I didn’t just say, ‘I’m busy tomorrow’.’’
At the time, Alperovitz was a 35-year-old father of two who had held a fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, and had worked in Congress and at the State Department.
Today, at 81, he is a globally respected expert on nuclear diplomacy and economic inequality and a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics.
He said he decided to reveal his involvement because he was ‘‘getting old’’, and because he was disturbed by President Donald Trump’s ‘‘outrageous and destabilising’’ nuclear brinkmanship towards North Korea and wanted ‘‘to suggest to people that it’s time to take action’’.
On June 13, 1971, The New York Times published its first front-page story about the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon administration secured an injunction and began pursuing the Ellsbergs.
It fell to Alperovitz to devise a means of getting the documents to other newspapers. His elaborate methods involved furtive conversations on pay phones, aliases, secret rendezvous, and dead drops of documents.
Ellsberg gave himself up on June 28. Two days later, the Supreme Court let The New York Times and The Washington Post resume immediate publication of articles based on the documents.
Ellsberg faced 115 years in jail for espionage and conspiracy, but in 1973 a judge threw out the charges against him after Watergate investigators found that Nixon operatives had broken into the offices of his psychiatrist in search of compromising information.