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Daniel Ellsberg’s First Leak Helped Prevent War With China

by Ray McGovern Posted on April 12, 2023

Those unaware of Dan Ellsberg’s 2002 Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers may think the leak of the Pentagon Papers was Dan’s first unauthorized disclosure. Not so. Arguably, his first such leak, in March 1968, was even more consequential.

After the Viet Cong shocked most observers by mounting a countrywide offensive in South Vietnam at Tet (late Jan./early Feb. 1968), Dan leaked to the NY Times chapter and verse on how Gen. William Westmoreland had “cooked” intelligence, lowballing data on insurgent strength to create the impression the U.S. was making “remarkable progress” in the war.

The Only Thing Needed: More Troops

Unembarrassed by the Tet offensive, Westmoreland was asking for 206,000 additional troops. Dan knew that and expected President Lyndon Johnson to grant that request. In Secrets Dan writes:

“I wanted to deter him from it. I feared that once he had sent even more troops and called up the reserves, the public and Congress would demand an all-out attack against the North, up to and perhaps beyond the Chinese border. …

“This was what the JCS expected. … Whether or not some of the joint chiefs actually wanted war with China and use of nuclear weapons – I’m not sure on that question to this day – that is what we would be actually risking.

“The striking impact of [an earlier] unauthorized disclosure [in the NY Times on March 10] of the request for 206,000 additional troops – at the time one of the most closely held secrets in the administration – suddenly opened my eyes to my responsibilities as a citizen. I had never considered up till that point leaking classified information” …

“As I observed the effect of this leak, it was as if clouds suddenly opened. I realized something crucial: that the president’s ability to escalate … had depended on secrecy and lying and thus on his ability to deter unauthorized disclosures – truth telling – by officials.”

Sweet Irony

Dan did not find out who the first leaker was; that is, who leaked the Westmoreland request, until after the leaker, Leslie Gelb, died in 2019. Gelb was a senior Pentagon official in 1968. Now, ready for this? It was Gelb who was put in charge of compiling the Pentagon Papers – which were leaked three years later – but this time not by Gelb! He remained in good odor as President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations until he died. Even so, we are indebted to Les Gelb and for the good example (incognito) he gave Daniel Ellsberg.

Ellsberg Wins the Sam Adams Award

At a small gathering today (April 11, 2023) in the Bay area of California, Dan Ellsberg, patron saint of whistleblowers) was presented with the traditional Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder – the “Oscar” accompanying the Sam Adams annual award. Below is the award Citation:

Sam Adams Associates for Integrity

Presented this 11th day of April 2023 in the Berkeley Hills of California by admirers of the integrity of former CIA analyst, Sam Adams.

Know all ye by these presents that Daniel Ellsberg is hereby awarded the Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity.

Mentor, Mensch, “Most Dangerous Man,” Friend: We honor Dan for setting the standard in exposing government lies and – although he himself never worked for an intelligence agency – for giving unflinching support to intelligence officials who blow the whistle.

Earlier Awardees: From Katharine Gun (2003) to Daniel Hale (2023); from Julian Assange (2010) and Chelsea Manning (2014) to Sy Hersh (2017) – all took courage from Dan and from one another. Ed Snowden (2013), having watched the “Justice” system abuse Tom Drake (2011), decided he had to go abroad in order to expose “turnkey tyranny.” And, citing the patriotic example of Bill Binney (2015), Ed declared: “Without Bill Binney there would be no Ed Snowden.”

Poetic Justice: CIA analyst Sam Adams, for whom this award is named, proved in 1967 that the US Army in Saigon was falsifying the number of armed insurgents in the South. Adams’s count was almost double the 299,000 Gen. William Westmoreland insisted on for political purposes.

Felicitous Leaks: The countrywide insurgent offensive during Tet (Jan/Feb 1968) proved Adams right. Still, President Johnson planned to escalate until leaks to the NY Times thwarted this risky plan. A story by Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, “WESTMORELAND REQUESTS 206,000 MORE MEN, STIRRING DEBATE,” led the Times’s front page on March 10, 1968, revealing plans to widen the war into Cambodia and Laos and noting the increasing opposition to escalation.

The Coup de Grâce: Enter Dan Ellsberg with his very first leak. Dan gave Neil Sheehan the damning data on Westmoreland’s lowball estimates designed to demonstrate “remarkable progress.” On March 19, the Times front-paged Sheehan’s story headlined: “US UNDERVALUED ENEMY’S STRENGTH BEFORE OFFENSIVE: CIA REPORTS FORCES WERE SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER.”

Escalation Thwarted: On March 25 the President complained privately: “The leaks to the NY Times hurt us. … We have no support for the war. … I would have given Westy the 206,000 men.” On March 31, Johnson paused the bombing and announced he would not run again for president. Westmoreland was pulled out of Saigon and ‘promoted’ to army chief of staff.

Dan Ellsberg has never rested on his laurels. Those who take seriously the danger of nuclear war are also deeply indebted to him for his The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017). That unique book is even more important today than when first published.

https://samadamsaward.ch/

a message....

Daniel Ellsberg Has Passed Away. He Left Us a Message.

by Norman Solomon Posted on June 17, 2023

When Daniel Ellsberg died on Friday, the world lost a transcendent whistleblower with a powerful ethos of compassion and resolve.

Ellsberg’s renown for openly challenging the mentalities of militarism began on June 23, 1971, when he appeared on CBS Evening News ten days after news broke about the Pentagon Papers that he’d provided to journalists. Ellsberg pointedly said that in the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents, "I don’t think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There’s neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever."

And he added: "The documents simply reflect the internal concerns of our officials. That says nothing more nor less that that our officials never did concern themselves with the effect of our policies on the Vietnamese."

Ellsberg told anchor Walter Cronkite: "I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions."

The functions of overseeing the war on Vietnam had become repugnant to Ellsberg as an insider. Many other government officials and top-level consultants with security clearances also had access to documents that showed how mendacious four administrations had been as the U.S. role in Vietnam expanded and then escalated into wholesale slaughter.

Unlike the others, he finally broke free and provided the Pentagon Papers to news media. As he said in the CBS interview, "The fact is that secrets can be held by men in the government whose careers have been spent learning how to keep their mouths shut. I was one of those."

Ellsberg’s mouth, and heart, never stayed shut again. For the 52 full years that followed his release of the Pentagon Papers, he devoted himself to speaking, writing and protesting. When the war on Vietnam finally ended, Ellsberg mainly returned to his earlier preoccupation – how to help prevent nuclear war.

This spring, during the three months after diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, Ellsberg made the most of every day, spending time with loved ones and speaking out about the all-too-real dangers of nuclear annihilation. He left behind two brilliant, monumental books published in this century – "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" (2002) and "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" (2017). They illuminate in sharp ghastly light the patterns of official lies and secrecy about military matters, and the ultimate foreseeable result – nuclear holocaust.

Ellsberg was deeply determined to do all he could to help prevent omnicide. As he said in an interview when "The Doomsday Machine" came out, scientific research has concluded that nuclear war "would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn’t be rained out in the stratosphere. It would go around the globe very quickly and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not."

During the profuse interviews that he engaged in during the last few months, what clearly preoccupied Ellsberg was not his own fate but the fate of the Earth’s inhabitants.

He was acutely aware that while admiration for brave whistleblowers might sometimes be widespread, actual emulation is scarce. Ellsberg often heard that he was inspiring, but he was always far more interested in what people would be inspired to actually do – in a world of war and on the precipice of inconceivable nuclear catastrophe.

During the last decades of his life, standard assumptions and efforts by mainstream media and the political establishment aimed to consign Ellsberg to the era of the Vietnam War. But in real time, Dan Ellsberg continually inspired so many of us to be more than merely inspired. We loved him not only for what he had done but also for what he kept doing, for who he was, luminously, ongoing. The power of his vibrant example spurred us to become better than we were.

In a recent series of short illustrated podcasts created by filmmaker Judith Ehrlich – who co-directed the documentary "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" – Ellsberg speaks about the growing dangers of global apocalypse, saying that nuclear war planners "have written plans to kill billions of people," preparations that amount to "a conspiracy to commit omnicide, near omnicide, the death of everyone." And he adds: "Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance."

Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine was published this week by The New Press.

https://original.antiwar.com/solomon/2023/06/16/daniel-ellsberg-has-passed-away-he-left-us-a-message/

READ FROM TOP.

PLEASE SEE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmvPp_3elfk

AND VISIT:https://raymcgovern.com/

By Gus Leonisky at 19 Jun 2023 - 4:35pm
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