The exposure of wiretaps in the Nixon administration’s national-security leak investigation transformed a hidden intelligence practice into a constitutional and criminal-justice crisis. Reporting in May 1973 established that the government had monitored a former National Security Council official’s telephone for 21 months, had ordered 17 wiretaps during its search for news leaks, and had failed to disclose relevant information to Daniel Ellsberg’s defense. The revelations tied executive-branch surveillance to the prosecution of the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, and they helped bring that prosecution to an end.

From the Ellsberg case to the wiretap investigation

The disclosures emerged where two stories the reporters called Watergate East and Watergate West met. E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had supervised the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, linking Watergate to the trial in Los Angeles. In early May, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued a related lead: two New York Times reporters’ telephones had allegedly been tapped as part of the investigation into the Pentagon Papers leak. Deep Throat had supplied the reporters’ names months earlier, but the Post could not find a second source and left their names out of its story. Instead, the reporting established a possibility that Ellsberg himself had been overheard on a tap.

That possibility mattered because the prosecution had insisted at trial that there were no taps involving Ellsberg. Judge Matthew Byrne asked the government to search its records again. The resulting inquiry did not confirm that Ellsberg had been overheard on either reporter’s telephone. It uncovered a different connection: he had been heard at least once on the home telephone of Morton Halperin, a former National Security Council staff member who had worked under Henry Kissinger. The distinction between the initial lead and the confirmed finding was significant; the evidence identified Halperin’s home phone, not the phone of either New York Times reporter.

A hidden program comes into view

The records that could have clarified the surveillance were missing. William D. Ruckelshaus, the acting FBI director, announced that aides had told him Ellsberg was overheard on Halperin’s telephone. He also disclosed that the phone had been tapped for 21 months. This was the first confirmation that the administration had used wiretaps to investigate news leaks. More gravely for the Ellsberg case, the disclosure established that the government had illegally failed to provide his defense attorneys with all wiretap information.

Several days later, on May 14, Ruckelshaus widened the picture: 17 wiretaps had been ordered between 1969 and 1971 as part of the leak investigation. The missing logs had been found in John Ehrlichman’s safe in his White House office. Ruckelshaus did not identify the 13 government officials and four reporters whose telephones had been tapped, and he did not say who had authorized the surveillance. The recovered logs gave the inquiry documentary ground, but the path from the records to the people who approved the taps remained incomplete.

Tracing authorization

Woodward called a senior FBI official directly and was told that some authorizations had reached the FBI orally or by letter from Henry Kissinger. A former FBI official then confirmed that Kissinger had given some authorizations. These accounts established a reported route from the national-security adviser to the bureau, while leaving unresolved which particular taps he had approved and on what terms.

When Woodward called Kissinger’s office, Kissinger did not give an unequivocal denial. He said, “I frankly don’t remember,” and allowed that he might have supplied the FBI with names of people who had seen or handled leaked documents. He suggested that officials might have construed such information as authorization, or that he might have identified document handlers to his deputy, General Alexander Haig, who then passed the information to the FBI. After Woodward said two sources had specified that Kissinger personally authorized the taps, Kissinger answered, “Almost never.” The exchange preserved a distinction between providing investigative leads, the FBI’s interpretation of those leads, and personally authorizing wiretaps; it did not settle the dispute.

Consequences and significance

On May 11, Judge Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg. He ruled that government misconduct had “incurably infected the prosecution.” The dismissal followed the disclosure that surveillance information relevant to the defense had not been fully disclosed, turning the wiretap story from an account of government monitoring into a direct challenge to the fairness of the trial.

The episode also showed how the scope of a secret program could become visible in stages. A lead about two reporters’ phones could not be published with their names because it lacked a second source; renewed scrutiny in court produced confirmation of a different tap; the FBI director’s announcements then revealed the program’s duration, overall number of taps, and missing logs. Even after those records surfaced, the identities of those monitored and the precise chain of authorization remained partly undisclosed. The investigation exposed both the reach of the leak inquiry and the limits of what officials had yet made public.