The New York Times revealed the secrets yesterday after the exclusive Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War obtained by its journalist Neil Sheehan, who died on Thursday, January 7 at the age of 84 and who wanted to keep them secretly until his death.
The Pulitzer Prize winner, who was a correspondent in the Vietnam War between 1962 and 1966, died at his home in Washington due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, his wife Susan told the newspaper.
Sheehan got a former Department of Defense analyst opposed to the conflict, Daniel Ellsberg, to leak thousands of secret reports showing how the United States became involved in the war for two decades while hiding from society its doubts about the chance to win.
The largest leak of classified documents in the country’s history resulted in a series of Times exclusives in 1971 that the Richard Nixon government tried to curb by ordering a temporary blockade, which was lifted in a historic court ruling. Supreme on press freedom.
Sheehan refused for years to give explanations on how to obtain the Pentagon Papers until 2015, when he agreed to be interviewed at home by a newspaper reporter on the condition that the story not come to light while he was alive.
The veteran journalist reported that he defied the explicit instructions of Ellsberg, his confidential source, who illegally copied all government documents and told him he could read them, but not reply.
Sheehan noted that the ex-analyst did not “give” the papers to him, but secretly took them from the Cambridge (Massachusetts) apartment where he had kept them, copied them illegally as well, and ‘ He took them to the Times.
Initially, they agreed that Ellsberg would be given to them and that if the newspaper agreed to publish the story, he would do his best to protect his identity, but at the last moment he backed down because he assumed he would “lose control. “of the papers in terms of reaching the newsroom.
The ex-analyst went on holiday for a few days and allowed the journalist to stay in his apartment to read and take notes, reiterating that he could not make copies, at which point he followed the advice of his wife, a reporter for the New Yorker magazine: “Go through Xerox.”
“He had known Ellsberg for a long time and thought he would operate under the same rules he used to: the source controls the material. He didn’t realize I had decided, ‘This guy is just impossible. You can’t leave him in hands. It’s too important and too dangerous, ”Sheehan told the NYT.
The correspondent closed himself to work in a Manhattan hotel alongside a growing team of reporters and editors while giving Ellsberg lengths without knowing that months ago he had given an extract of the documents to one of his colleagues, who was preparing a book .
It was this colleague, Anthony Austin, who had not told anyone in the newspaper and realized that they were going to step on the exclusive, which warned Ellsberg that the first publication of the Pentagon Papers in the Times was imminent. , June 13, 1971.
Ellsberg tried to contact Sheehan, but Sheehan ignored her calls until she learned that the exclusive was in print and that it would be too late to intervene, so she asked an editor to tell her when they had printed 10,000 copies, he recalled.
“I had to do what I did,” the journalist stated in the 2015 interview to justify his deception in Ellsberg, which was divided between his desire to make the documents public and his fear of going to jail. , as he explained, and could have given information to someone involuntarily.
“It was pure luck that he did not sound the alarm to the whole damn thing,” he added.