GUARDIAN, David Smith, June 16, 2023

Fifty years after exposing US lies about the Vietnam war, Daniel Ellsberg said the culture of official secrecy had gotten worse. He urged whistleblowers: ‘Don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying’

[Daniel Ellsberg died June 16, 2023 at the age of 92. This interview was conducted by the Guardian in June 2021, on the fiftieth anniversary of Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers. — moderator.]

When the police arrived, a 13-year-old boy was photocopying classified documents. His 10-year-old sister was cutting the words “top secret” off each page. It seemed their dad, Daniel Ellsberg, had been caught red-handed.

But the officers were responding to a false alarm and did not check what Ellsberg and his young accomplices were up to. “It was a very nice family scene,” the 90-year-old recalls via Zoom from his home in Kensington, California. “It didn’t worry them.”

After 50 years, the Pentagon Papers give up their final secrets

So night after night the photocopying went on, the crucial means that allowed strategic analyst Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret report that exposed government lies about the Vietnam war. The New York Times began publishing excerpts 50 years ago on Sunday.

The papers, a study of US involvement in south-east Asia from 1945 to 1967, revealed that president after president knew the war to be unwinnable yet continued to mislead Congress and the public into an escalating stalemate costing millions of lives.

After their release Ellsberg was put on trial for espionage and faced a potential prison sentence of 115 years, only for the charges to be dropped. Once branded “the most dangerous man in America”, Ellsberg is now revered as the patron saint of whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

So, half a century on, is he glad he did it? “Oh, I’ve never regretted for a moment doing it from then till now,” he says, wearing dark jacket, open-necked shirt and headphones against the backdrop of a vast bookcase. “My one regret, a growing regret really, is that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.

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