Daniel Ellsberg was Not a Hero, and the "Pentagon Papers" was a Psyop

A fake whistleblower is a common propaganda technique

Today, the internets are lamenting the passing of Daniel Ellsburg, the so-called whistleblower/leaker behind the so-called Pentagon Papers of 1971. The papers were published in the context of a notable Supreme Court case by the propaganda establishments of the Washington Post and the New York Times. In fact, in the course of Pentagon Papers litigation, attorney Daniel Sheehan took an affidavit from Jimmy Carter’s future CIA-director nominee, Theodore Sorensen, that the CIA regularly briefed New York Times editors about covert operations and had the authority to shut any story down. As depicted in the fictional film, “The Post,” editor Katherine Graham was a personal close friend of Robert McNamara who supposedly commissioned the Papers as well as an ardent admirer of Kissinger. There were other outlets at the time that could have ensured security for publication of the Pentagon Papers such as Ramparts Magazine. For Ellsberg to run into the heart of the establishment in a carefully constructed scandal represented by Cahill law firm makes no sense.

The official story goes something like this: in 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara commissioned from the RAND corporation an allegedly “massive top-secret history of the United States in Indochina.” The Pentagon Papers “revealed that the United States government had been misrepresenting the facts of the Vietnam war’s chances of success.” DoD employee and one-time hippie (we are told) Daniel Ellsberg leaked the trove of “top secret” papers to his friend Neil Sheehan at the Washington Post who, in turn, passed them onto the New York Times. These papers were banned by the Nixon Administration until the Supreme Court intervened and ruled in favor of the newspapers.

Deep state commentators immediately noticed some flaws. Peter Dale Scott pointed out the papers went remarkably silent in the period surrounding November 22, 1963 - the assassination of President Kennedy by the Central Intelligence Agency. Moreover, the papers did not reveal anything substantially new: the War in Vietnam was not being won, was essentially unwinnable, and was an awful cost of human life. The April 1974 issue of Campaigner magazine, published by the published by a labor organization, carried an analysis by Lyndon LaRouche:

The essential thrust of the [Pentagon Papers] project was the assembly of selected actual documents (many initially created by the CIA or based on the CIA briefings) and supplementary materials whose overall intended effect was to exonerate the CIA from responsibility for a wide variety of unpopular military and related developments which the CIA itself had chiefly authored. In essence, the effect of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ was - for anyone credulous enough to believe them - to whitewash the CIA for its own activities.”

This could be, of course, professional disinformation from the time intended to discredit the authenticity of the papers; however, the analysis was echoed by Colonel Fletcher Prouty, author of The Secret Team and famous as the “Mr. X” in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Prouty was the liaison between the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for covert operations in the 1950’s and 60’s. In The Secret Team, published 1973, Prouty points out that the Pentagon Papers had been a deliberately engineered psychological operation to shift political responsibility, in the public eye, for the colossal intelligence and policy failures in Vietnam, stating “This psy-ops trick does not conceal the policy failures, that cannot be done. What is actually happening here is a deliberate twist put on the facts to further the political agenda of one party undermining another party with dirty tricks.”

The intelligence “community” is defined by factionalism, and Watergate, clearly, was an intelligence war waged in plain sight. LaRouche asked a number of questions: “Can it be believed that such an effort was undertaken with the intended purpose of concealing a false report under a ‘top secret’ seal?” The entire concoction is in the fine old tradition of the czarist Okhrana’s notorious anti-Semitic pioneering venture into modern ‘Black’ psychological warfare, the Czarist-authored ‘protocols of Zion.’ Such ‘secret’ documents are are written for the purpose of affording them the widest possible public attention. The ‘top seret’ classification is the fine hand of the public relations specialist, who thereby assures himself that his handywork will receive the widest circulation and simultaneously evoke the maximum awe from among the credulous public.”

The Pentagon Papers are not the Pentagon papers. They were compiled by and on behalf of the CIA by the Rand Corporation. They were made public under the gung-ho American Hero story of a conscious-stricken CIA operative taking an astonishingly courageous move after a road to Damascus moment. Per Prouty, the Papers are “unreliable, inaccurate, and marred by serious omissions. They are a contrived history.”

Ellsberg was a nuclear weapons planner for RAND and a member of Kissinger’s staff at the White House. Today, he is the darling of many controlled leftists who seemingly support war and covert operations in the name of human rights. LaRouche explains, “to explain how and why a right wing CIA operative, Ellsberg, an associate of general Ed Landsdale [who coordinated the Kennedy assassination], could be converted, the public has been told that the convenient ‘Damascus Road’ transformation was accomplished under the influence of Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT, and individual with a credible standing as a leading anti-war activist. Chomsky’s role as the official dupe in the affair grows murky when we note Chomsky’s endorsement of the hoax after its publication. As a leading anti-war activist, Chomsky had abundant access to all the knowledge necessary to spot the whitewashing of all the CIA as a blatant fraud.”

Even the way the Pentagon Papers were read into the congressional record was a psyop. They were handed over to US Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, a US Army communications specialist with a top-secret national security clearance. In a classic spy-vs-spy truce, Gravel and his team spent an evening taking scissors to the CIA-created “Pentagon” papers to excise anything that was overly objectionable to the Pentagon. This is the version of the Papers one buys on Amazon. The unredacted version remains locked up in the legal offices of the New York Times.

The Real Daniel Ellsberg was NOT an American hero, was NOT anti-war, and was NOT influenced by the left. He was a tool of imperialism and propaganda, using his carefully constructed heroic perch to make legitimate activists think he was looking out for them - holding out false hopes in his watery criticisms of the CIA’s torture program and living high off a lecture circuit and various memoirs he probably did not even author himself. Ellsberg could have used his gravitas to call out the obvious false flag of the September 11th terrorist attacks launching the phony “war on terror.” Even Mike Gravel called for a new 9/11 investigation. When the Anti-war left needed Ellsberg to lend credence to the Truth, he was not there.