Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg is presented as a central figure in the collision between the Pentagon Papers prosecution and the covert operations later exposed through Watergate. The book records little of his personal life or voice; instead, it traces how his leak of the Pentagon Papers, his friendship with Morton Halperin, and the government’s surveillance and burglary operations brought the two controversies together. That convergence had a direct legal consequence: after misconduct involving wiretap information came to light, a judge dismissed all charges against Ellsberg.

Identity and Background

Ellsberg enters the account as the person who leaked the Pentagon Papers to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. The reporting on the leak investigation also identifies him as a friend of Halperin, formerly a member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff. These details place Ellsberg at the intersection of two kinds of government concern: the disclosure of classified material and the effort to identify the people involved in news leaks. The narrative does not elaborate on Ellsberg’s private motives or provide a personal account of the leak; it follows the institutional response and the evidence that emerged around his prosecution.

Surveillance and the Ellsberg Trial

The connection between Ellsberg and the leak investigation became concrete through telephone surveillance. The prosecution at his trial had insisted that no wiretaps involving Ellsberg existed. After Judge Matthew Byrne asked the government to search its records again, acting FBI director William D. Ruckelshaus announced that Ellsberg had been overheard at least once—not on Sheehan’s telephone, but on Halperin’s home telephone. Halperin’s line had been tapped for 21 months. The logs were initially missing, and the administration had not disclosed all the wiretap information to Ellsberg’s defense attorneys. The newly confirmed surveillance therefore did more than reveal a monitoring program: it raised the question of whether the defense and the court had been given a truthful and complete account of the government’s evidence-gathering.

The broader record grew more troubling as the search continued. Ruckelshaus announced that 17 wiretaps had been ordered during the administration’s 1969–71 news-leak investigation, involving the telephones of 13 government officials and four reporters. The missing logs were found in John Ehrlichman’s White House office safe. The book notes that the names of those monitored were not disclosed in Ruckelshaus’s announcement, and that the question of who had authorized the taps remained consequential. Ellsberg’s case thus became a test of what the government had withheld as well as what it had collected: information about surveillance had not been fully disclosed to the defense, while records documenting the surveillance had been kept in a senior White House aide’s safe.

Covert Operations Around Ellsberg

The surveillance disclosures were not the only link between Ellsberg’s case and the operations associated with Watergate. In April 1973, at Ellsberg’s trial in Los Angeles, Judge Byrne announced that he had learned from the Watergate prosecutors that E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy had supervised the 1971 burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. That disclosure connected a covert break-in aimed at Ellsberg’s private medical records to the same two operatives whose names were central to the Watergate investigation.

A separate operation discussed in the book concerned Halperin. He was believed to have kept classified documents after leaving Kissinger’s staff for a fellowship at the Brookings Institution, and the White House wanted the documents returned. According to an account relayed to Carl Bernstein, the institution’s security was considered too tight for a straightforward burglary; a fire was proposed as cover for breaking into Halperin’s office. The source described the idea as a firebombing and attributed it to Charles Colson, while also reporting that John Caulfield had said the operation had gone too far. The account describes a contemplated plan, not a completed fire or burglary. Its relevance to Ellsberg lies in the recurring reach of the leak investigation: his friend’s telephone and office, like Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, became associated with efforts to locate or recover information.

Dismissal and Narrative Significance

Several days after Ruckelshaus’s announcement about the taps, Judge Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg. He concluded that government misconduct had incurably infected the prosecution. The decision made the concealed surveillance and the incomplete disclosure of wiretap information consequential within the courtroom, not merely damaging revelations in the press. Ellsberg’s trial ended because the government’s handling of the case had compromised its legitimacy.

The narrative explicitly links what it calls Watergate East and Watergate West: the Washington investigation and the Los Angeles trial could no longer be treated as separate stories. The disclosure about Hunt and Liddy’s supervision of the psychiatrist’s-office burglary joined the cases in public view; the Halperin wiretap then supplied evidence of a wider news-leak surveillance program and of failures to disclose relevant information. Ellsberg’s role in this account is therefore less that of an actor in the Watergate break-in than that of a connecting figure whose prosecution exposed how far the administration’s leak investigations and covert methods extended. His case transformed that connection into a judicial consequence when the charges were dismissed.