KENSINGTON, Calif. - On an evening 35 years ago, a high-level Pentagon analyst named Daniel Ellsberg carried a briefcase filled with documents stamped "Top Secret" out of his office with one clear plan: Leak them to Congress, leak them to the media, and get the truth out about the Vietnam War.

On a recent sunny afternoon, sipping green tea and eating organic salad in a hilltop cafe overlooking the San Francisco Bay, Ellsberg said his only regret is that it took him so long - two years - to copy and leak the 7,000-page study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam to Congress and the press.

Now Ellsberg is launching "The Truth-Telling Project, a call to patriotic whistleblowing," encouraging Pentagon, White House and other national security insiders to reveal secrets that involve alleged government cover-ups and lies.

"My message to people in the Pentagon, the State Department and the administration is this: If you have information, especially documents, that the public is being lied to about war or other matters of life and death, then I urge you to consider doing what I wish I had done much earlier than I did," said Ellsberg. "We need to delegitimize silence that costs lives."

The call is not without risk, including the potential of dishonor, prosecution and shame. Critics say national security leaks can be illegal and put soldiers' and civilians' lives in danger.

Ellsberg concedes the risks are great, and that whistleblowers need to weigh both the public benefits and risks of disclosure. And he warns that there are also personal risks. Ellsberg was indicted for espionage and at one point faced 115 years in jail. Charges were dropped when it was revealed that President Nixon's operatives burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in order to discredit him.

"Leakers have to think long and hard about this, but it can be worth it if a lot of lives are at stake," he said.

Ellsberg, 73, is a slender, energetic man who bodysurfs for fun and walks with long, strong strides reminiscent of the three years he spent as a Marine rifle platoon leader. In recent months, he has drawn cheers during speeches around the country at college campuses and anti-war rallies, and he says he's been arrested more than 60 times at protests and demonstrations during the past two decades.

He is also reviled - former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once called Ellsberg a drug-using pervert, "the most dangerous man in America."

"Dan is way beyond a megalomaniac, he has a weird attitude toward himself, an unbounded ego," said Anthony J. Russo, who worked with Ellsberg to copy the Pentagon Papers and said they still run into each other at occasional conferences.

Author Tom Wells, who in 2001 published "Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg," said he began the project as "sympathetic politically" to his subject, but the two broke off during the project and the resulting book portrays a brilliant narcissist.

Despite the fallout Ellsberg faced, his actions did make whistleblowing more mainstream - if still a highly controversial path.

Washington is now home to four national nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations dedicated to supporting government and corporate whistleblowers - the National Whistleblower Center, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the Project on Government Oversight and the Government Accountability Project.

"We were all inspired by what Daniel Ellsberg did, and we certainly agree with his observation that whistleblowing can be a patriotic act," said Government Accountability Project president Louis Clark. "But for every whistleblower out there, there are groups of people waiting to call them traitors, finks and tattletales. There is always opposition."

Recent months have brought almost daily leaks of documents and information.

There was the investigative report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba that brought wide attention to Iraqi prison abuse scandal in April. There was a leak earlier this month to Court TV that pop star Michael Jackson settled a child molestation case in the 1990s for $23 million.

"I think this is a precipitous time for whistleblowing," said Clark.

Ellsberg, who holds a doctorate degree in economics from Harvard University, became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation in 1959, and was soon consulting to the Department of Defense and the White House about the problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans and crisis decision-making.

He joined the Defense Department in 1964 and transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification on the front lines. On return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, he worked on former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's top secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam.

Ellsberg leaked the study to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later 19 newspapers. The publication added fuel to an already politically charged debate over U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and set legal precedents for freedom of the press.

Christopher Preble, a historian and Gulf War veteran who now directs foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that while the Pentagon Papers did broaden public understanding of the Vietnam War, he would be cautious about this new call for leaks.

"There are good and just reasons for some material and information to be kept secret, good national security reasons," he said. "Leaks have a tendency to be selective and they tend to be done for political purposes, and that's why I'm reluctant to argue broadly for the release of information in a haphazard way."

© 2004 Associated Press

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