HE ALTERED the Vietnam War by releasing classified information. Now Daniel Ellsberg wants others to do the same to change the course U.S. policy in the Middle East.

He leaked the Pentagon Papers. He topped the Nixon Enemies A-list. His just-released memoir has been made into a Hollywood movie. He's an icon — depending on how you see him — as hero, whistle-blower or traitor.

So what more does one of the world's most famous nonincarcerated document thieves want?

Daniel Ellsberg still wants to matter.

Daniel Ellsberg is shown being taken into custody on April 27, 1987. Ellsberg has been arrested about 70 times during his lifetime, including three times in recent months during protests against the war in Iraq.

The silver-haired, 72-year-old former Rand policy wonk is as anti-establishment as ever. He's been arrested three times since December in protests against the war in Iraq. He says he gladly would go behind bars again if it would help dissuade the Bush administration from widening its involvement in the Middle East.

Why not? He's been arrested maybe 70 times — and jailed 50 — by his reckoning, in obeisance to his conscience. He has protested for anti-nuclear causes in recent years. And he has become a ubiquitous anti-war speaker, pingponging across the country this year calling for government officials to leak more documents — now! — while the information still has the power to temper Bush Middle East policy.

"I'm a living protest at the moment," said Ellsberg, who was driving across the heartland to a speaking engagement at Cuyahoga Community College, near Cleveland, on Wednesday. After a rousing meeting with students, he flew on to Miami for a luncheon appearance.

"I'm talking almost every day of the week," he said. "I've been doing that for six months, trying to stop this war. During the war I talked just as much, hoping to avert the use of nuclear weapons. Now I'm trying to avert the expansion of this war into Syria and Saudi Arabia."

He also has a new book, and sat on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA yesterday as the author of "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers."

"Secrets" tells the story of how he came to leak 7,000 pages of classified Pentagon documents to The New York Times in the hopes that the secrets they revealed — what went wrong in the Vietnam War — would prompt the nation to demand a withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

He will be returning to one of the few places where l'affaire Ellsberg is not deeply buried in the past tense. A few years ago, as television trucks crowded the Santa Monica courthouse for the O.J. Simpson civil trial across the street, Ellsberg happened to be in town and was invited to visit the Rand offices by a staff researcher.

A few minutes into the visit, Ellsberg said, the phone rang: It was Rand president James Thomson. Ellsberg was "not welcome" in the building. A Rand spokesman said Thomson had no recollection of the incident.

"I didn't jump out or rush out, but I left," Ellsberg said. "This is the state of anxiety at Rand, that I might endanger their aircraft contracts, years later."

It didn't entirely surprise him. After he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he said, most co-workers didn't contact him for 25 years. These were men with whom he had shared cocktails, dinners, baby pictures.

"It was as if they had all died," he said. "They treated me as if I had moved to another planet. In effect, I lost every friend I ever had."

Until then, Ellsberg had been a defense consultant at Rand, with a house in Malibu a short, spectacular drive up the coast.

Ellsberg was not a member of any movement. He had married (and later divorced) the daughter of a Marine colonel and "enjoyed" a stint in Vietnam as a Marine company commander. In 1968, he met an Indian woman who introduced him to the Ghandian philosophy of civil disobedience. Later, on his first date with his current wife, Patricia Marx, she took him to a rally against the Vietnam War.

He said he knew the rationale for the Vietnam War was a sham back in 1964, when he was a Pentagon analyst. And it burned him that right there, in his safe at Rand, was "evidence of lying by four presidents, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder," he said in his book.

"I decided I would stop concealing that myself," he wrote. "I would get it out somehow."

One night in 1969, after his colleagues had gone home, he and a former Rand employee, Tony Russo, drove to the office of a friend and ran an armload of confidential documents, a study directed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, through a Xerox machine. Ellsberg eventually copied 7,000 pages.

The New York Times published the first of a nine-part presentation on June 13, 1971, but the 54-page series was interrupted by a federal injunction. That injunction was lifted two weeks later by a crucial Supreme Court ruling.

Ellsberg's life fell apart. He was indicted for 12 felony charges, carrying a possible total sentence of 115 years.

Not all his former colleagues abandoned him. Mort Halperin, a Rand consultant then at the Brookings Institution and now the director of the Washington office of the Open Society Institute, spent several months at the trial, recruiting witnesses and testifying that there was "nothing in (the Pentagon Papers) that would cause harm to the national security."

But, Halperin said, "people at Rand felt, with some justification, that he had done something that jeopardized Rand, and that he had betrayed a trust at the Rand Corp."

Meanwhile, Watergate burglars, at the behest of an anxious President Nixon, orchestrated a break-in at the office of his former Los Angeles psychiatrist, to see if they could come up with something damaging. Revelation of this burglary helped unravel the legal case against Ellsberg. He was acquitted on May 11, 1973.

Today, Ellsberg is encouraged that a handful of U.S. diplomats have stepped down to protest the attack on Iraq. They have accused the Bush administration of misrepresenting intelligence information, and Ellsberg has some words of advice: Leak any documents you can while the information still has the power to change history.

Had he leaked documents he had in his possession as early as 1964, he said, the Vietnam War would have been kept in check.

That is why he would like to encourage the U.S. diplomats who resigned — and anyone else — to leak documents they feel could avert America from involvement in another geopolitical quagmire they view as mistaken as Vietnam came seen to be.

"I think that's incredibly irresponsible," said Peter Brookes, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "It may undermine American interests. It could undermine sources of intelligence. It could put agents at risk, depending on how old the information is."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

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