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The 'most dangerous man in America':
gulfnews
Daniel Ellsberg, former US military analyst, speaks during a press conference in London to endorse the WikiLeaks publication of almost 400,000 Iraq war logs last week
The 'most dangerous man in America' is how former US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger once described the man. But in person Daniel Ellsberg is anything but. Down to earth, friendly and a bit jetlagged is how I find the 79-year-old former military analyst when we meet in London — where he had journeyed to attend the largest intelligence leak in US history by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Nearly 40 years ago, long before Julian Assange became a household name, Ellsberg famously leaked 7,000 pages of Pentagon documents which are said to have helped bring to an end the Vietnam War.
There are, of course, key differences between the ways the two leaks were conducted. For one, in Ellsberg's case, back in 1969, the internet wasn't an option when it came to spreading the word. He had to copy the Pentagon Papers on a slow Xerox machine in the small advertising agency of a friend while his 10-year-old daughter cut the words "Top Secret" off the top and bottom of the pages. His son helped too.
It wasn't a decision he had taken lightly. Ellsberg risked life in prison for carrying through with the task he had set himself. Yet he wanted his children to know their father wasn't a traitor, that he felt what he was doing was right for the country. A top Pentagon official at the time, working for the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg spent months smuggling out the papers in his briefcase after becoming deeply unhappy with the long war in Vietnam which was ongoing under President Nixon at the time. The documents exposed the lies and cover-ups the American people had been fed about the war.
He initially tried releasing the documents through politicians, but when that didn't work out, Ellsberg got the New York Times and Washington Post involved. With some difficulty, the information was finally released in 1971. Ellsberg went on the run but was eventually arrested and charged under the Espionage Act. He was acquitted in 1973 after gross government misconduct and illegal evidence gathering were revealed.
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