Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who in 1971 leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers detailing the history of U.S. policy in Vietnam, tells NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday that unlike Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, he “did it the wrong way” by trying first to go through proper channels — a delay that he says cost thousands of lives.
“I really regarded [it] as anathema … leaking as opposed to working within the system,” Ellsberg says, speaking to NPR’s Linda Wertheimer. “I wasted years trying to do it through channels, first within the executive branch and then with Congress.”
“During that time, more than 10,000 Americans died and probably more than a million Vietnamese,” Ellsberg says.
“That was a fruitless effort, as it would have been for Manning and Snowden,” he says.
Ellsberg, then an analyst with the RAND Corporation, leaked a study of U.S.-Vietnam relations from 1945-1967, known colloquially as the Pentagon Papers, handing over the document to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers.
The release of the Pentagon Papers proved politically embarrassing for President Richard Nixon and the Watergate break-in, which eventually led to Nixon’s resignation, was part of a broader White House effort to identify the source of such leaks.
