There aren’t too many people who can say they changed the course of history. Daniel Ellsberg was one of them. The famed whistleblower sadly died of pancreatic cancer on June 16 surrounded by loved ones at the age of 92.
A man of immense dignity and moral courage, Ellsberg stared down a possible 115 year prison sentence when in 1971 he released the ‘Pentagon Papers’, a top secret study he himself was a part of on behalf of the RAND Corporation, a US global policy think tank and research institute, to the New York Times.
The study was in relation to US decision making regarding the Vietnam War, which among other things, exposed President Nixon’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. The release of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ helped end the Vietnam War.
Born on April 7, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois, Ellsberg graduated with a PhD in Economics from Harvard in 1962. Before that he had spent three years in the US Marine Corps from 1954 – 1957, serving as a platoon leader and company commander before being discharged as a first lieutenant. He began working for RAND in 1958 while working on his PhD.
He continued to work for RAND for two more years after completing his studies until 1964 when he joined the Pentagon as a special assistant to John McNaughton who was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He then spent two years working in Vietnam on behalf of the State Department during the Vietnam War.
In 1967, he returned to work for RAND, which is when he began working on a top-secret study of classified documents that concerned America’s conduct of the War in Vietnam. These top-secret documents would become known as the ‘Pentagon Papers’, which Ellsberg released to the New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg left RAND in 1970 to work for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a senior research associate until 1972. At this point he was heavily disaffected with the Vietnam War.
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times published what would be the first of nine parts of the ‘Pentagon Papers’. On June 28, 1971, Ellsberg turned himself in to the US Attorney’s Office for the district of Massachusetts in Boston. He was subsequently charged with the Espionage Act of 1917 and faced 115 years in prison.
Thankfully on May 11, 1973 all charges were dismissed by judge William M. Byrne Jr. before the case went to a jury, primarily because a joint FBI/CIA operation to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to obtain damaging information on Ellsberg came to light during the trial and evidence of illegal wiretapping against Ellsberg was also presented in court.
Daniel Ellsberg would spend the rest of his life speaking out against unjust US government action- Mark Manduca
Ellsberg would spend the rest of his life speaking out against unjust US government action. He was an outspoken critic of the Iraq war; as well as being a staunch support of whistleblower Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
While the ‘Pentagon Papers’ is what Ellsberg is most famous for, he would probably see his most important contribution to civil society and the world as his revelations to the public of the threat of nuclear war. He outlines in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner the insane system in place in America that allows for nuclear war to take place. Concerning who has the authority to launch nuclear missiles, he states:
“It was not only the President who could make the decision and issue the orders, and not even (as most people probably presumed, if they had thought about it) the Secretary of Defence or the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, but commanders in the field thousands of miles away in Washington who thought their forces might be about to be destroyed.”
This presented another problem: How would commanders know if a nuclear strike had been launched by an enemy? Ellsberg stated that this would be done by having a “strategic warning of an imminent enemy attack;” i.e. “an intelligence warning received prior to any enemy weapons having been launched.” This would be in the form of signals received on radars. However, as Ellsberg noted in his book, the intelligence received would not always be accurate:
“The radars of the Arctic Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line) had more than once, I soon learned, been fooled by a flock of high-flying geese into warning that Soviet bomber planes were coming toward us over the North Pole. In the pre-ICBM era, that still allowed hours in which to discover the error, and meanwhile to get our planes on alert off the ground.
“But just a year after I joined RAND, the higher-tech radar and computer system Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), designed to detect incoming ICBMs, in its week of operation reported that a missile attack was under way. That called for decisions in under 15 minutes.”
Thankfully, no nuclear strike was launched by America that time or at any other time when the intelligence received proved to be inaccurate. One such other occasion Ellsberg notes was when the “BMEWS radar signals were bouncing off the moon as it rose over Norway,” with the return echo looking like incoming missiles.
No nuclear missiles were launched. What made the situation even more dangerous was the Soviet Union had a similar nuclear strike system with the same flaws were similar close calls had taken place. Both systems remain in place in America and the USSR’s internationally recognised legal successor, Russia, to this day.
The purpose of Ellsberg writing the book was to warn the world of the perilous danger of nuclear Armageddon in the hope that both Russia and the United States could engage in dialogue to make sure that such a situation never comes to pass. Considering the current state of US-Russia relations, it would be foolish not to heed the warning from the late great Daniel Ellsberg.
Mark Manduca has a Master’s degree in Diplomatic Studies from the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies.