BY EARLY 1971, Henry Kissinger’s daily life as national security adviser had a staggering complexity. There were the bad secrets, the continuing effort to undermine Salvador Allende in Chile and the continuing White House wiretaps. There were the good secrets, such as the backchannel negotiations with China and the Soviet Union that would lead to breakthroughs—without any State Department involvement—before the year was out. And there were the routine secrets, the enormous flow of documents and cables that Kissinger and his staff handled as the national security adviser expanded the influence of his office. Even in early 1971, the full sweep of Kissinger’s authority was still unknown to much of the public; some newspaper correspondents were still capable of believing that Rogers had a major role to play in the foreign affairs of the Nixon Administration.I
As the flow of secrets intensified, so did Kissinger’s concern about the security of his own office. His telephones were still repeatedly swept for signs of wiretapping, but Kissinger insisted that such surveillance not be placed on a routine basis with any single agency. Special Secret Service, CIA, FBI, or National Security Agency teams would be summoned at random and on short notice to inspect the telephones. This raised the inevitable question: Who was the enemy? David Halperin, the former Navy officer who became Kissinger’s personal aide in late 1970, recalls Kissinger’s constant fear that he was being wiretapped. And yet, asked why Kissinger did not simply assign the FBI to monitor his phones, Halperin responded: “Who trusted Hoover?” Rumors about Kissinger’s paranoia were rife among the NSC staff. One senior NSC aide remembers being told that Kissinger’s office telephones were swept immediately after every meeting with Ambassador Dobrynin. He was convinced it was so.II
By his own account, the first months of 1971 were dark ones for Richard Nixon. The congressional elections in November had not produced a Republican triumph. Vietnam was still politically damaging, despite the unilateral withdrawal of more than 250,000 American GIs. In his memoirs, Nixon spoke of early 1971 as “the lowest point of my first term as President. The problems we confronted were so overwhelming and so apparently impervious to anything we could do to change them that it seemed possible that I might not even be nominated for re-election in 1972 [emphasis added].” There was much basis for his concern. By early spring, the Gallup poll reported that Nixon’s midterm popularity had sunk to the lowest level of any President’s since Harry Truman. And the Harris poll showed him losing ground to Edmund G. Muskie, the Democratic senator from Maine, in the early months of the year. George Wallace, the Alabama governor, was another potential headache. He was expected to wage a strong fight for the presidency in 1972 and cut deeply into Nixon’s strength among southern and conservative Democrats.
Nixon found succor that winter in his national security adviser—as well as a path to reelection. Political success would lie not in Vietnam but with Communist China and the Soviet Union. In early December, the Chinese climaxed months of public and private gestures by secretly inviting Nixon to send a personal envoy to Peking. Nixon and Kissinger, of course, kept the message to themselves. A breakthrough in China meant everything: more leverage against the Soviets in the SALT talks, more leverage against the North Vietnamese in the secret peace negotiations, and a political triumph. A few weeks after the message from China, Kissinger won Nixon’s approval for backchannel negotiations with Dobrynin that might bring a private agreement on SALT and also get the White House more involved in the ongoing four-power talks in Bonn with the Soviet Union, France, and England. Those talks, which were initiated by Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, were aimed at finally resolving the Berlin crisis by legitimizing access rights for West Berliners and establishing the city’s formal ties to the Federal Republic. If there was to be a diplomatic resolution of the Berlin problem and a breakthrough in SALT before 1972, however, the White House wanted to be sure that it, and not Rogers’ State Department, received full credit.
By early 1971, Kissinger wrote, he had been granted free rein in the backchannels by Nixon: “[W]e had talked at length almost every day; we had gone through all crises in close cooperation. He tended more and more to delegate the tactical management of foreign policy to me. . . . He did not believe that the conductor need be seen to play every instrument in the orchestra.”
The bureaucracy was the most important part of this orchestra, and Kissinger turned to an old standby, Morton Halperin’s revised National Security Council system. By early 1971, NSC staff aides had long realized that Kissinger was using the Halperin plan to create make-work for State and Pentagon officials that got them out of the way. “What we did was kill them with NSSMs,” one NSC aide recalls. Kissinger had given up dealing seriously with such studies, but the secret negotiations with China and Russia called for more analyses than his staff could manage. He ordered State and Defense to prepare elaborate studies of policy options that, unbeknownst to them, were no longer options but policy. “The control of interdepartmental machinery . . . enabled me to use the bureaucracy without revealing our purposes,” Kissinger wrote. “I would introduce as planning topics issues that were actually being secretly negotiated.” Kissinger blamed the President for such deviousness: “These extraordinary procedures were essentially made necessary by a President who neither trusted his Cabinet nor was willing to give them direct orders. Nixon feared leaks and shrank from imposing discipline.”
Nixon and Kissinger were conducting the orchestra together, of course, as they had been for two years. In mid-January, Kissinger, acceding to Harvard’s rule barring its faculty from extended sabbatical leaves, resigned his tenured professorship. Nixon issued a public letter of gratitude in response: “Frankly, I cannot imagine what the Government would be like without you. Your wise counsel and strong support over the past two years have meant a great deal to me.”
There is no reason to doubt that the President meant what he said. And yet a month later, as the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos was beginning to flounder, Nixon decided to install the infamous taping system in the White House; he did so, according to Haldeman’s memoirs, largely because of Henry Kissinger. “Nixon realized rather early in their relationship that he badly needed a complete account of all that they discussed . . .” Haldeman wrote. “He knew that Henry was keeping a log of those talks, a luxury in which the President didn’t have time to indulge. And he knew that Henry’s view on a particular subject was sometimes subject to change without notice.” Haldeman wrote that only he, of all the senior advisers to the President, was to know about the system. Kissinger, so warmly praised in January, was to be tape recorded in February.
Kissinger apparently did not learn of the taping until May 1973, along with other senior members of the Watergate-besieged White House staff, and once again was outraged at someone else’s successful use of his methods. Even in early 1971, there was little about Nixon’s personality that Kissinger did not know, understand, and emulate. David Halperin, who monitored many of Kissinger’s telephone conversations with the President in this period, describes Nixon as “swinging from trust to lack of trust” in his dealing with Kissinger—a description that perfectly matches Kissinger’s attitude toward Nixon. If the President coped with their unstable relationship by secretly tape recording all conversations in his office and on his telephone, Kissinger coped by tape recording his telephone talks with the President—and with everybody else—and by continuing to smuggle important national security documents and papers to Nelson Rockefeller’s estate in New York. Both men soon accumulated far too much—in writing and on tape—on each other.
Kissinger had yet another means of insuring his importance to Richard Nixon; he continued to try to exclude his staff from any contact with the President. He was able to do so, with one exception: Alexander Haig. Haig’s relationship with Nixon had become close because of the Cambodian invasion, when Haig was outspoken in the White House in defense of the invasion. His militarism and his hardline approach to foreign policy problems, which Kissinger had seized upon as a shield, were attractive and reassuring to Nixon. Haig began appearing more frequently on Nixon’s appointments calendar in early April of 1970; there were days—when Kissinger was also in Washington—when Haig would spend more time alone with the President. David Halperin recalls with a visible shudder the first time the President directly telephoned Haig: “There was more tension than I can ever recall in that office,” he said. Kissinger was in his outer office, conferring with his secretary, Julie Pineau, when Nixon’s direct line rang. “Julie picked it up,” Halperin says, “and Henry started walking back to his office [Kissinger always took the President’s calls in privacy]. Julie said, ‘It’s for you, General Haig.’ Haig went to his office and Henry stood by the door [of Haig’s office] as Haig and Nixon talked.” After a moment or two, Kissinger resignedly “walked into his office and shut the door. He stayed in there for hours.” Haig, meanwhile, was “drenched in sweat” by the time he hung up. Halperin is convinced that neither Haig nor Kissinger discussed the call that day. “From Henry’s point of view, someone else now had access to the President,” Halperin says—and thus Kissinger had suffered a loss of personal power.
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By late 1970, Haig had become the indispensable man on the National Security Council staff, the man whom everyone else had to see to get position papers and cables approved. Kissinger, caught up with backchannel negotiations and his eternal cajolery of the press, stopped even pretending to administer day-to-day operations. What began after Cambodia as a delegation of power to Haig became an abdication. Young men such as Chester A. Crocker, an African expert with a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, were added to the NSC staff without even a perfunctory interview by Kissinger.III Haig moved quickly to set up firm command. Jonathan T. Howe, a bright Navy officer who had earned a doctorate in international relations at Tufts University, was recruited to serve as his personal aide, and Richard T. Kennedy, a soon-to-be-retired Army colonel, became his main operative. It was Kennedy, fervently loyal to Haig and his values, who controlled the flow of documents and papers to Haig, just as Haig had once controlled it for Kissinger. New staff members soon learned that nothing could get to Haig’s desk, let alone to Kissinger’s, without first being cleared by Colonel Kennedy.
Kissinger was aware of the loss of control, and made at least one effort to do something about it. In early 1971 he urged Laurence Lynn, then teaching at Stanford University’s graduate school of business, to write an “Eyes Only” proposal for redesigning the functions of the NSC staff, just as Morton Halperin had done in late 1968. Kissinger made it clear, Lynn remembers, that if he would rejoin the staff he could create his own supervisory position. “Henry knew what was happening in the Executive Office Building. He knew what Haig was doing behind his back and he knew he was letting it get away from him.” Kissinger also remembered, obviously, Lynn’s dislike for Haig. “The thing that Henry stressed to me,” Lynn says, “was his fear that Haig would take it over. He didn’t think Haig was that smart; he thought he was an ideologue. He told me he needed someone who was strong enough to stand up to Haig.” Kissinger told Lynn that if he returned, “I could, in effect, run the whole substantive side of the staff.”
Despite the enticing offer, Lynn balked. He’d had enough of the bad smell in Washington. But he did write a four-page critique of the NSC staff system, urging Kissinger to create two deputies—one for operations and another for policy evaluation and analysis—as a means of avoiding overreliance on Haig. Having made it clear he would not take either of these jobs, Lynn heard no more from Kissinger.
The possibility exists that Kissinger had no intention of making any changes and sought Lynn’s advice simply to flatter him and insure that he would not begin to talk.IV Despite his doubts over Haig’s growing influence, Kissinger could not afford to turn openly on Haig, just as Nixon would not be able to turn on Kissinger; each knew too much about the other. Kissinger knew that Haig was a double-dealer who had ingratiated himself with Nixon, Haldeman, and other senior aides by savaging Kissinger behind his back and spying on him. But Kissinger also knew that Haig’s expertise on the Pentagon was invaluable if he and Nixon were to maintain their ability to circumvent Melvin Laird and Robert Pursley and directly order military action in the Middle East or Southeast Asia. Haig could also be trusted, as he had demonstrated during the CIA’s efforts in Chile, to execute orders in the backchannel conscientiously and discreetly. Haig, for his part, was aware of the complications in the Nixon-Kissinger relationship in a way no one else in the White House could be, since he constantly heard each man’s complaints about the other. Nixon did enjoy the savaging of Kissinger that went on in his office, Haig knew, but the President also realized that among his aides only Kissinger had the intellectual stamina and the nerve to successfully conduct simultaneous backchannel negotiations with the Soviets and the Chinese. Still a one-star general, Haig understood in early 1971 that future promotions lay with Kissinger as much as with the President.
Kissinger and Haig also shared knowledge about the White House wiretapping that, they knew, would cause serious—perhaps fatal—problems for themselves and the Nixon presidency if made public. The wiretapping must have been particularly sensitive for Kissinger in early 1971, because the main target of the White House program, Morton Halperin, was a constant reminder to Nixon, Mitchell, and Haldeman of Kissinger’s poor judgment in initially filling his office with liberals and Democrats who were not loyal to Nixon and his policies. Kissinger was saying little by early 1971, at least to the NSC staff, about Halperin and the three close aides who had resigned over Cambodia. But Haig could be irrational about them. Watts, Lake, and Morris were “traitors” to Kissinger and the NSC staff, Haig told one NSC newcomer in a rage, and Halperin was a “Communist.” Haig had a special reason for being exceedingly angry about Halperin; he knew what the former Kissinger aide was saying about him on the telephone. In one conversation with a former colleague, for example, Halperin referred to Haig as a “blabber mouth who hears everything . . . all phone conversations to the President and everything.”
The wiretapping remained an important program for Kissinger and Haig through early 1971, although both men later denied any significant involvement after May 1970, when Nixon ordered Haldeman to assume full responsibility. Kissinger no longer received direct “Eyes Only” letters from J. Edgar Hoover summarizing important conversations, but he was still very much in the flow. The conduit was Haig, who continued to maintain the NSC’s wiretap files and to visit FBI headquarters to read verbatim transcripts of conversations. William Sullivan, in charge of the wiretap program for Hoover, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1974 that Haig had visited his office “about 12 to 18 times between May, 1969 and February, 1971,” when the wiretaps were turned off at Hoover’s request. Sullivan, whose memory seemed to grow more vague every time he was ordered to testify, also told the committee that his estimate of the number of Haig’s visits was a “guess,” and could be off by as much as ten visits. Asked specifically whether Haig continued to visit his office to read transcripts after May 1970, Sullivan said, “Yes, he did come to my office after May, 1970.”V
Just why Haig and Kissinger were so adamant in denying involvement with the wiretap program after that date is not clear. Whatever moral or legal stigma they incurred would not be mitigated by their having stopped midway. In an Oval Office tape recording supplied to the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office in 1975 but not made public, Nixon briefly discussed Hoover’s desire in early 1971 to stop the taping and said the taps were “knocked off after the hullabaloo out there.” The Special Prosecutor’s Office was unable to learn what that “hullabaloo” was all about.VI
The wiretap on Halperin’s home telephone, which continued for twenty-one months, was in many ways the most significant. Halperin, no liberal when he joined Kissinger’s staff, had become increasingly outspoken in his opposition to Nixon’s and Kissinger’s Vietnam policies since leaving the White House. By mid-1970, he was a member of the foreign policy group advising Senator Muskie, the Democrat who was considered Nixon’s strongest challenger for the presidency in 1972. FBI summaries sent to Haldeman in the fall and early winter of 1970 showed that Halperin was heavily involved in Democratic and anti-Nixon politicking. On October 14, for example, Hoover told Haldeman that Halperin had discussed publishing an article on the workings of the National Security Council with a reporter for Der Spiegel, the German weekly news magazine—a prospect that must have filled Kissinger with dread. A few weeks later, Halperin published a trenchant analysis of Vietnam policies in the New York Times. Nixon was refusing to force a political settlement upon Saigon, Halperin wrote, and his Vietnamization policy “will at best lead to an indefinite presence in Vietnam of thousands of American troops. It could well drive the President to massive escalation, the mining of Haiphong Harbor and saturation bombing of North Vietnam.” Such escalation, the cornerstone of the 1969 November ultimatum, was still a constant subject of debate among Nixon, Kissinger, and their key aides. The men at the top in the White House had to conclude that Halperin had somehow learned of the 1969 Duck Hook planning. Halperin’s essay undoubtedly helped insure that the wiretap on Winston Lord, the former Halperin protégé who had become one of Kissinger’s closest aides after Cambodia, would remain active until the very end. Six days after the Halperin piece appeared, Hoover reported to Haldeman that Halperin had been in frequent contact with Leslie Gelb, his former Pentagon deputy whom he had rejoined at Brookings; the two, Hoover said, had discussed a Muskie advisory group meeting on “China policy.” The FBI report came to the White House just as Kissinger’s secret contacts with China through the Pakistani government were reaching fruition. In December came another FBI report on Halperin, this one dealing with a visit to Moscow that Senator Muskie was planning. The trip had been recommended, so Halperin told Gelb, by Averell Harriman, Nixon’s nemesis, who was to go with Muskie. Harriman so alarmed the White House that the FBI was instructed to report verbatim every conversation in which his name was overheard.
On December 30, another FBI report on Halperin and Gelb came to Haldeman: Robert Pursley, Laird’s military assistant, who had been promoted to brigadier general in late 1969 and was still being wiretapped at his home, had sent some papers over to Clifford’s law office. Gelb told Halperin that Clifford had asked him to look over “about 20 pieces of paper that Pursley sent over.” Gelb, Halperin, and Pursley had worked together in the Pentagon during the last years of the Johnson Administration, and also shared detailed knowledge of the conclusions of the Pentagon Papers. The Papers, a 7,000-page top-secret study of the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam, had been undertaken in 1967 at the request of Robert McNamara and assigned to Gelb, then deputy director of the Pentagon’s policy planning staff.VII
The Halperin wiretap reports were useful not only to Haldeman, who maintained strong control over all White House political operations, but also to Kissinger, who learned through them that approaches to China and Russia were being discussed by Muskie’s advisers and that Halperin was still in touch with at least one NSC staff member. In early November, the FBI reported that Winston Lord had made uncomplimentary remarks about Kissinger and Nixon on his home telephone. A summary published by the House Impeachment Committee did not give details, but Lord was still in touch with Morton Halperin, and, according to Halperin’s wiretap logs, would occasionally share some gossip with him. David Halperin, Kissinger’s personal aide, remembers this period as one of “general paranoia” inside Kissinger’s office. A steady flow of FBI reports was hand carried into the office by Russell Ash, the NSC official in charge of staff security, and Kissinger and Haig each carefully read them.
“Ash would come in with a folder,” David Halperin says, “wait outside, and then go in and out of Henry’s office with the folder in his hands.” Halperin never learned what was in the folders, he says, but assumed the Ash documents had to do with leaks of classified information. In 1974 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kissinger repeatedly sought to minimize his interest in such unseemly issues. “After May of 1970,” he said, “I had no basis for knowing whether a tap had been initiated or was continuing. . . . I construed my instructions from Mr. Haldeman to mean that my tangential connection with the program was being terminated.” In mid-October 1970, Kissinger testified, when a second wiretap was authorized for Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who was then Kissinger’s closest friend on the NSC staff, his role was even more tangential.VIII “[I]t is hard to imagine the flood of material that goes across my desk. I am apt to look at something and say this is for somebody else and throw it into my out basket. Most of these documents are not noted for extraordinary precision.” The less than precise document in question in Sonnenfeldt’s case, however, was a summary of a wiretap on the Israeli Embassy in which Richard N. Perle, a foreign policy aide to Senator Jackson, was overheard discussing classified information that had been supplied to him by someone on the National Security Council staff.
Haldeman and Nixon must have hit the roof. In a telephone call to Hoover on October 15, 1970, Haldeman invoked the name of Henry Kissinger in asking for another wiretap on Sonnenfeldt. Hoover, in a subsequent memorandum to William Sullivan and other FBI officials, quoted Haldeman as explaining that Kissinger—perhaps seeking to ward off a Nixon explosion—had handed him the FBI wiretap on the Israeli Embassy and requested that the FBI be assigned to determine which NSC staff member was in contact with Richard Perle. Kissinger had to realize that Haldeman and Hoover would suspect Sonnenfeldt, who was known from previous wiretaps to have close ties to the Israelis as well as to Perle. Sonnenfeldt had been repeatedly investigated by the FBI for other suspected leaks early in his State Department career, and Kissinger, as he told the Senate Committee, was aware that Sonnenfeldt had “been the subject of a malicious campaign by a group of individuals who had been out to get him for a long time.” But Haig was now part of that group, too—another fact Kissinger surely knew. Sonnenfeldt had been among Haig’s early rivals in 1969 for the job as assistant to Kissinger; that, plus Sonnenfeldt’s continued closeness to Kissinger—despite the mistreatment Kissinger handed out—was enough for Haig to mark him permanently as an enemy.IX
At a minimum, then, Kissinger had to know that Haig was still actively plotting against Sonnenfeldt as of midsummer 1970; he also had to know the consequences of turning over the Israeli Embassy wiretap to Haldeman, who would certainly link Sonnenfeldt, a Jew, to the intercepted conversation. Kissinger was, in essence, turning in his closest remaining friend on his staff. It must have been a painful moment. Kissinger handled questions about the Sonnenfeldt wiretap from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his usual fashion. “I have no recollection of this at all,” he testified. “All that could have happened is that the FBI sent over something off a tap on the Israeli Embassy which I did not think was relevant to my concern and on which I wrote, ‘Give this to Haldeman.’ ” The committee members apparently accepted that explanation at face value.X
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Kissinger’s handling of the Sonnenfeldt wiretap epitomized his attitude toward such eavesdropping after two years in the White House. He was still very much a Nixon team player, but far more aware than anyone else of the public relations disaster that could result if the wiretapping ever became known. It was clear by late 1970 and early 1971 that the wiretaps had little to do with national security. There had been no significant leaks of highly classified information in 1970; publication of the Pentagon Papers was yet to come. Far more significant was the fact that some of those who were still being wiretapped in 1971 were now dealing not in national security secrets but in presidential politics. Halperin and Lake had become deeply involved in Muskie’s foreign policy planning; through Halperin’s wiretap, the White House was also learning a great deal about Leslie Gelb’s political activities. The continuing wiretap on Lake was particularly ironic, since Lake had been one of the few on the NSC staff to have good reason to suspect the wiretapping of Halperin. Kissinger and Haig must have had similar thoughts: Would Lake tell? Wiretapping him was one means of finding out. Equally difficult to explain would be the continuing wiretaps on Pursley at the Pentagon and Richard Pederson and William Sullivan at State. None had been even remotely linked to a significant national security leak, and all were close associates of Henry Kissinger’s key competitors inside the bureaucracy. Two journalists were also among those wiretapped until February 1971, but for differing reasons. William Beecher, the New York Times’s expert on strategic military issues, was perhaps the one reporter capable of penetrating the backchannel negotiations with the Soviets. But how could a wiretap be justified in terms of what a reporter might do? Beecher was not wiretapped until May 1970, fully a year after he wrote the B-52 bombing story that helped trigger the wiretap program. The other journalist, Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times, was a mainstay on the Washington social scene and a friend of many of Kissinger’s newly won friends in Georgetown. When Brandon was first wiretapped, in late May of 1969, it served multiple purposes: appeasing Hoover, Haldeman, and others in the White House who saw Brandon as a dangerous liberal and potential foreign spy, and also providing Kissinger with a chance to learn what was being said about him as well as about others important to the White House, such as Senator Kennedy.
Brandon’s wife, Mabel, whose first husband had been a Washington newspaperman, was extremely friendly with Joan Kennedy, the wife of Senator Kennedy, and many of their most intimate conversations were monitored by the FBI. Not everything got to the White House, however. The Watergate prosecutors later learned that one discussion of Joan Kennedy’s “problems with Teddy” was typed up and delivered to Courtland J. Jones, a supervisor in the FBI’s Washington Field Office, for transmission to higher officials. Jones told the prosecutors that he destroyed the transcript instead of sending it to the White House. “I knew what those people would do with this stuff,” he explained.
Kissinger had no fears about what he said over the telephone: He knew that William Sullivan and the others involved in the FBI would be terrified, as would any careful bureaucrat, at the prospect of confronting a superior in the White House with evidence of indiscretion. Even after May 1970, when the wiretap summaries were provided directly to Haldeman, Kissinger continued to talk—and gossip—on the telephone with Brandon and others he knew were wiretapped; to do otherwise might possibly have provided a clue that a wiretap was in place. A review of some of the transcripts shows that Sullivan and his FBI subordinates were indeed careful to protect Kissinger by not including some of his remarks—such as his words of praise to Morton Halperin in August 1969—in the summaries prepared for the White House. Similarly, none of Haig’s telephone conversations with Pursley, many of them dealing with classified material, was included in the telephone summaries Pursley obtained from the government after the wiretapping was made public in 1973.XI The FBI’s Sullivan was clearly responsible for protecting Kissinger and Haig in the first year of the wiretaps, and apparently he protected them throughout the twenty-one-month program. If so, the only person outside the FBI to know what Kissinger was actually saying—and what wasn’t being reported to Haldeman and the President—was Haig, the tireless deputy who made trips to the FBI to read the verbatim transcripts. It is not known whether Haig’s knowledge played a part in the increasing tension between the two men, but there is a possibility that Kissinger suspected Haig of making some of his more outrageous statements—as overheard by the FBI—available to Haldeman.
The wiretap on Morton Halperin was useful not only because it provided valuable political information about Senator Muskie’s foreign policy planning, as discussed with Gelb and others. The tap also kept the White House informed about one former insider who was capable of leaking genuinely major secrets—Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, like Halperin, was a source of embarrassment for Kissinger. He had, after all, permitted Ellsberg—dovish reputation and all—to write some of the Nixon Administration’s early Vietnam option papers and to be involved in the preparation of NSSM 1, the exhaustive Vietnam study. During the twenty-one months of the Halperin wiretap, Ellsberg was overheard fifteen times. The conversations between the two men revolved around Vietnam, and what both correctly perceived as the administration’s secret plan to escalate the war. The close-mouthed Halperin was careful, of course, on his telephone but Ellsberg was not. He talked openly about drug use and sex. On August 30, 1969, for example, Ellsberg, visiting Halperin in Washington, was overheard talking about a “trip” and urging someone named Harry, “who may be his brother,” not to take a trip at the same time as his wife. “Ellsberg subsequently mentioned to another individual,” the FBI summary said, “that he had left a satchel filled with ‘stuff’ at his friend’s house. . . .” Four years later, the FBI clerks who monitored that conversation were able to recall it clearly.XII
It is not known how Nixon, Haldeman, or Mitchell reacted to the link between Ellsberg, drugs, and Morton Halperin; such revelations, however, could not have enhanced Kissinger’s reputation as an employer of prudent aides. Halperin and Ellsberg knew hundreds of government secrets, ranging from the most specific information about America’s nuclear targeting procedures to the working of the NSA’s far-flung electronic eavesdropping operations. The White House’s concern, however, was not limited to past secrets that Ellsberg and Halperin could expose; the men at the top were worried about what Ellsberg and Halperin thought the administration’s future policy in the war would be. Late in the summer of 1969, Ellsberg had visited Halperin, who was in the process of resigning from the NSC, to discuss war policy, and it was then, Ellsberg recalls, that Halperin first told him of the B-52 bombing of Cambodia and of Kissinger’s direct warning to the Soviets about escalation in Vietnam. Halperin also described Kissinger’s repeated studies on the mining of Haiphong Harbor, and speculated that Richard Nixon would not go into the 1972 election campaign without putting his escalation plan into effect.
Both men knew, from their work on the Pentagon Papers, that the Johnson Administration had tried to bully North Vietnam into accepting a defeat in the South. Diplomatic documents, still unpublished then, showed that Ho Chi Minh was warned in August 1964 that unless his nation ceased its support of the Vietcong in the South, “it can expect to continue to suffer the consequences.” The warning, delivered by J. Blair Seaborn, the Canadian member of the International Control Commission, came a few days after American warplanes bombed the North for the first time, in retaliation for what Washington said was a North Vietnamese attack on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Ellsberg had known of the Seaborn mission, and he recalled the response to the threat: Within months, one of the best North Vietnamese battalions had begun infiltrating into the South. “They did it when they were staring right down the barrel at LBJ’s threats,” he said. He was convinced, after his talks with Halperin, that Nixon and Kissinger were going to make the same threats, with the same results. Ellsberg began to brood about doing what Halperin would not—talk publicly against the war.
At this point, another Vietnam scandal broke. Stanley R. Resor, Secretary of the Army, announced on September 29 that he had decided not to file charges against six U. S. Special Forces men accused of assassinating an alleged South Vietnamese double agent. Ellsberg recalls his rage at reading Resor’s insistence that he had taken the action on his own authority, and not—as the media reported—at the direction of the President. “This is a system that I had served for fifteen years,” Ellsberg thought. “It is a system that lies automatically from top to bottom to protect a cover-up murder. I’ve got a safe full of documents that are full of lies.” He was talking about the Pentagon Papers, and his top-secret safe at the Rand Corporation. It was in the aftermath of Resor’s announcement, Ellsberg says, that he telephoned a colleague at Rand, Anthony Russo, “and asked him if he knew where there was a photocopying machine.” Russo knew he was taking an enormous risk in photocopying top-secret documents: “I expected with certainty that what I was doing would put me in jail for the rest of my life.” (He would become a codefendant in the Pentagon Papers case.) A few days later, Ellsberg flew to Washington and met with J. William Fulbright, the Senate’s leading dove. He told the Senator about the papers and what they revealed about the American involvement. Fulbright had already scheduled a series of public hearings on Vietnam before his Foreign Relations Committee; Ellsberg could be a witness, if he chose, and make public what he wished. Ellsberg did not know that Fulbright was still in close contact with Henry Kissinger.
In October, a few days after the first Moratorium, Fulbright abruptly backed away from his commitment to stage the hearings and publicly voiced his support for the President’s policies. “I believe the President’s own statements that he is trying to wind down the war in Vietnam and I assume his November 3 speech [which had been announced on October 13, two days before the Moratorium] will provide further evidence of his determination to liquidate the war,” he declared. The Foreign Relations Committee hearings were to have explored legislation to cut off congressional funding for the war. At the time, Washington was full of rumors, many of them the work of Henry Kissinger, suggesting that a new peace initiative was in the offing. After the Nixon speech, Fulbright again delayed his hearings, telling Ellsberg that there was no support for critical testimony on the war “in my own committee.” At that moment, Ellsberg was carrying the first 1,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers in his suitcase. The New York Times subsequently quoted Fulbright as explaining that he had delayed the hearings for a second time because “We want to be responsible and careful. . . . [The committee] didn’t want to do anything at this stage that might be interpreted as antagonistic. These are very difficult times.”
Frustrated by Fulbright, Ellsberg took the next step and began meeting privately with influential journalists and business groups, trying to describe the real Nixon strategy of coercion and escalation. “People knew my reputation on Vietnam,” he recalls. “No one questioned my credentials; that was no problem. But when it came to my assertions that Nixon’s policy was not a disguised retreat but a plan for staying in and escalating as necessary, I discovered that I couldn’t make anyone believe it.” Ellsberg told all those he met with that Nixon’s coercion strategy was a contingency plan that would go into effect only if the threats against the North Vietnamese did not work. “I wasn’t saying that they had a conscious plan that on a certain date they would enlarge the war. Escalation was not in their thoughts, but they were committing themselves to threats that would fail.” The administration, he said, was being honest, to a degree, in publicly claiming that it did not want to enlarge the war and did not expect to do so. But there was a missing link, one he sought futilely to provide to his listeners: “They were making explicit threats which they expected to be effective without being carried out and it was this that they were not hinting at or telling anybody.”
No one paid much attention.
It is not known how much the White House was able to learn about Ellsberg’s contacts with Fulbright and his private warnings. In mid-1969, however, Ellsberg and five Rand colleagues published their letter attacking the administration’s Vietnam policy. Although the letter received little publicity, it appeared at a critical time for Nixon and Kissinger: Was it to be yes or no on the November ultimatum, with its provisions for intensive B-52 bombing and the mining of the harbor at Haiphong?
By early 1970, Ellsberg had repeatedly photocopied relevant sections of the papers and had given thousands of pages to Senator Fulbright for storage in the classified safe in the Foreign Relations Committee office.XIII Ellsberg’s two children from his first marriage helped photocopy the papers; his former wife thus heard of the project and told the FBI that Ellsberg had given a set of documents to Fulbright. Two months later, Ellsberg learned from his fiancée, Patricia Marx, that FBI agents had been around to question him. “I assumed I’d be arrested within days,” Ellsberg recalls, “and I didn’t want to embarrass myself or Rand by being arrested while at work.” He resigned and accepted a long-standing offer to become a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The FBI got to Rand on April 27, twelve days after Ellsberg had resigned, and was told by senior officials that the papers were merely a history of the Vietnam War that did not involve national security. If Senator Fulbright had asked for a copy of the study, the FBI was told, he would have been routinely given it. Fulbright, as the FBI agents obviously did not know, had been doing just that—asking Laird’s office for a copy—with no success. Ellsberg filed a Freedom of Information request years later and learned why the FBI dropped its inquiry so quickly in April of 1970: out of fear of the link to Fulbright. It wouldn’t do to investigate such a powerful senator. Officials decided, the FBI documents showed, that further inquiry could “embarrass the bureau.”
Throughout this period, the FBI never questioned Ellsberg, nor did his Rand colleagues tell him they had been questioned. Continuing his seemingly futile efforts to alert the country to Nixon’s and Kissinger’s real plans, he took his antiwar belief to the public on May 8, 1970, just after the invasion of Cambodia. His denunciation of the war at a teach-in at Washington University, in St. Louis, marked an evolution; years earlier, he had been sent to teach-ins by the Johnson Administration as a defender of the war.
On May 13, Ellsberg finally testified before the Foreign Relations Committee, and discussed with Senator Fulbright the significance of the Pentagon Papers. Once again no one paid much attention—except the Rand Corporation, whose officials finally removed all the classified materials, including his original copy of the Pentagon Papers, from Ellsberg’s safe. By mid-June, Ellsberg was back at Rand for a visit and—still unaware that the FBI had been around—had the Pentagon Papers retrieved from Rand’s top-secret files and again began photocopying. Ellsberg says the reckless invasion of Cambodia reinforced his conviction that Nixon and Kissinger “were going to go all the way on the escalation.” He had spent much of the past ten years studying presidential behavior for government officials, and had concluded that presidents, once having issued threats, were compelled to carry them out.
That summer, Ellsberg was obsessed with the thought that the papers he was photocopying could alter that conclusion by provoking a massive antiwar reaction. He continued his talks with journalists and others who would listen. They listened, but did not believe. In August, while in Los Angeles, he chanced to visit Lloyd Shearer, the editor of Parade magazine, just as Shearer was about to drive to San Clemente to interview Kissinger. Ellsberg asked if he could come along. Shearer, who was friendly with both men, hesitated for only a few seconds before telephoning the California White House. Kissinger was adamant, Shearer recalls: “No, under no circumstances. I don’t want to talk to him. He’s a madman; he likes to argue.” When Shearer insisted, Kissinger relented: “All right, Lloyd, we’ll stick him with Al.”
Arriving at San Clemente, Ellsberg got a glimpse of Nixon, driving a pink golf cart, “scowling and looking very grim.” Behind him came Bébé Rebozo in another pink cart. Kissinger appeared and began the conversation with his usual flattery, telling Shearer, “I have learned from Dan Ellsberg more than from any other person on the subject of bargaining.” Ellsberg, with surprise and some unease, remembered his lectures on bargaining theory to Kissinger’s Harvard seminar, lectures that had dealt with Hitler’s use of madness to take over other nations without firing a shot. “The very thought that an adviser to a President had those lectures in his mind in 1970 . . . It was one of those moments with the hair rising on the back of my neck.” A few weeks earlier, Kissinger had announced that the United States was seeking to “expel” the Soviets from the Middle East—a word he later retracted—and Ellsberg had speculated at the time that the overreaction was linked to the Vietnam War. And Kissinger himself had written on the use of bargaining with threats. What all this meant, Ellsberg concluded, was that he had been right—the White House was consciously using a threat strategy and Kissinger had been unable to resist alluding to it.
At lunch, Shearer tried to discuss the Vietnam War, a subject Kissinger obviously didn’t want to talk about in front of Ellsberg. Moments later, Ellsberg was indeed shunted off to Haig, who said little as Ellsberg recited his views. Before the visit ended, Kissinger agreed to see Ellsberg when he was next in California.
Why Kissinger agreed to the second meeting is not clear—needless to say, Ellsberg is not mentioned in the Kissinger memoirs. In any case, there was nothing outwardly unseemly about their meeting. As of September 1970, Ellsberg had yet to be linked to any leak of classified materials and he was widely known inside the government as a leading theorist on decision making. Ellsberg took the meeting, for which he interrupted his honeymoon (he and Patricia Marx were married on August 8), very seriously. His goal was “to scare Henry with the thought that his strategy might not be viable. I was going to leak into the White House what I had been saying outside.”
The evening before, Ellsberg recalls, he went to a party in Los Angeles with some friends from his days at Rand, including Konrad Kellen, the Rand expert on the North Vietnamese. Did he have any advice for Kissinger? “Tell him that he does not understand the enemy,” Kellen responded. “Tell him he is confronting the most popularly supported government in the world.”
Ellsberg’s appointment in San Clemente coincided with the burgeoning crisis over the PLO and Jordan in the Middle East. Kissinger began, Ellsberg recalls, by saying, “I’m very worried about Bill Rogers’ policy in the Middle East. I’m afraid it’s going to explode.” Ellsberg responded: “Well, Henry, I’m here to talk about your Vietnam policy. I’m afraid it may explode.” For the next ten minutes or so, Ellsberg summarized his view of the White House threat strategy in Vietnam, which hinged on a series of escalations that included an invasion of Laos and the mining of Haiphong Harbor. “I thought to myself,” Ellsberg recalls, “if I’m right, he’s got to be hemorrhaging inside.” Kissinger was silent, drumming his fingers on a table and staring intently as Ellsberg talked. When Ellsberg stopped, Kissinger said only, “I do not want to discuss our policy; let us turn to another subject.” Ellsberg, who was not easily put off, turned the talk to the Pentagon Papers. He remembered that Kissinger had been invited to be a consultant in the initial stages. Kissinger acknowledged that there was a copy in the White House safe but said he had not looked at it. Should he? Ellsberg urged him to “at least read the summaries.” Kissinger obviously did not want to: “Do we really have anything to learn from this study?” he asked. At this point, Ellsberg says, “My heart sank. The major lesson of the study was that each person repeated the same patterns in decision making and pretty much the same policy as his predecessor without even knowing it. I thought, ‘My God! He’s in the same state of mind as all the other makers of decision in this long process, each of whom thought that history had started with his administration, and had nothing to learn from earlier ones.’ ”
Kissinger seemed anxious to set the date for another meeting and Ellsberg agreed to call for an appointment, but over the next few weeks three dates were fixed and canceled by Kissinger. Ellsberg stopped calling. He decided that Kissinger had wanted to see him “so he could say he listened to ‘everyone—a whole range of opinion—for example, Dan Ellsberg.’ ”XIV
The futile raid on the empty Son Tay prison camp near Hanoi in late November of 1970, and the heavy bombing of North Vietnam that accompanied it, convinced Ellsberg once again that he and Halperin were right in their perceptions. He began working closely with antiwar activists, and continued his efforts to get someone in the Senate to publish the Pentagon Papers in the Congressional Record. When it was clear that Senator Fulbright was not prepared to act, he went to others. Gaylord Nelson, the liberal Democrat from Wisconsin, turned him away; so, after a week of hesitation, did George S. McGovern, the Democrat from South Dakota. Senator Mathias of Maryland expressed eagerness to do something, but lost interest when he learned the Pentagon Papers dealt largely with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations: “Can’t you get me something on this administration?” he asked. Ellsberg’s final step, months away, would be to approach a newspaper reporter he knew from Vietnam—Neil Sheehan of the New York Times.
On November 22, two days after the Son Tay bombing raids, Ellsberg telephoned Halperin again. The FBI wiretap logs reported that the two men agreed, “This is the time to act, to get people activated; that if this doesn’t move people nothing will until the holocaust—the destruction of Hanoi or the invasion of Laos [emphasis added].” At that point, White House plans for the Laos invasion were not yet completed, but the men running the war knew that more escalation was coming. “The enemy had to be prevented from taking over Cambodia and Laos if Vietnamization was to have any chance of success,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, summarizing his views as of late 1970. Kissinger first thought “the best place” for an offensive in early 1971 would be Cambodia, he wrote, but he was persuaded, without too much difficulty, by Haig and the military in Saigon that an attack on Laos would be more damaging to the North.
Kissinger and Ellsberg met face to face once more before publication of the Pentagon Papers, at a private conference on the war held at MIT during the last weekend in January of 1971. The meeting was sponsored by a group of moderate student leaders, academics, journalists, businessmen, and former government officials. Kissinger, still carrying the banner for the administration with such groups of Establishment liberals—as Nixon viewed them—flew from Washington to speak. It was a tour de force at first, with Kissinger being charming and disarming as usual, confiding to the group that Richard Nixon had not been his first choice for the presidency, and telling a questioner that he would resign his position when the “whole trend of the policy became morally reprehensible to me.” Even then, he added, he would not publicly attack the President if he did resign—“unless gas chambers were set up or some horrendous moral outrage.” Finally Ellsberg rose. The NSC staff, he said, was known to have made estimates on the number of Americans who would be killed during the next year of the war. “What is your best estimate of the number of Vietnamese who will be killed in the next twelve months as a consequence of your policy?”
Derek Shearer, a Yale University student who attended the conference, described in the Nation magazine what happened next: When Kissinger responded “his voice sounded suddenly less certain; he hesitated, then called Ellsberg’s question ‘cleverly worded.’ ‘I answer even if I don’t answer,’ he said. Ellsberg interrupted to say that he had no intention of being clever, that this was a basic question—were such estimates made? Kissinger started to say that one had to consider the options. ‘I know the options game, Dr. Kissinger,’ said Ellsberg, ‘can’t you just give us an answer or tell us that you don’t have such estimates?’ Kissinger again evaded the question; he said the question had racial overtones. Ellsberg pressed him again. For the first time the meeting took on the air of confrontation—then the student moderator stood up abruptly and ended the questioning, saying that Dr. Kissinger was tired, and thanked him for coming. The audience, save a few of us, applauded.”
A few weeks later, Ellsberg published a bitter essay, “Murder in Laos,” in the New York Review of Books, in which he again criticized the administration’s failure to estimate civilian casualties of the war. “How many will die in Laos?” he asked. “What is Richard Nixon’s best estimate? . . . He does not have an estimate. He has not asked Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger has not asked the Pentagon.”
Ellsberg’s continuing attacks on the administration’s policy created a stir in the academic community in Cambridge, and in March 1971, the Boston Globe published a front-page story by Thomas Oliphant on his emerging role in the antiwar community, focusing not only on the Laos article but also on Ellsberg’s role in preparing the Pentagon Papers, and the fact that only a few had actually read all of the secret study. Within days, Kissinger’s office asked the Globe’s White House correspondent for a copy of the story. Ellsberg, told about that by Oliphant, immediately began making more copies of the Pentagon Papers. “My nightmare had been that someday the FBI would come to get all my copies,” Ellsberg says. He and his wife spent thousands of dollars making as many as eight more complete sets of the Papers.XV
Ellsberg and his complaints about the lack of civilian casualty estimates were of more than passing interest to Kissinger that spring. Ellsberg’s name was raised, for example, at a small off-the-record lunch with a group of Washington journalists on March 21. “Dan Ellsberg never worked for me,” Kissinger said, “except on one project during the transition. He has no idea what records are kept. As a matter of fact, no civilians are in the area of Laos where this operation has been conducted.”XVI Ellsberg’s criticisms, Kissinger went on, were “the new line of attack—that we are causing the civilian casualties. No one mentions that the only place the fighting is occurring is where the North Vietnamese have invaded first.”
Questions about civilians may have been upsetting to Kissinger at the time, but they were quickly rationalized. Kissinger was able to tell journalists during the lunch that attacks by Ellsberg and other critics were the result of a conspiracy of the left: “What they really want us to do is to conspire to defeat Saigon and that is something I cannot justify.”
—
The full range of Kissinger’s influence and his extraordinary ability to manipulate the press while wiretapping two of its leading members were impossible to comprehend at the time, mainly because so much of what he did was skillfully hidden. On March 22, the day after he seemed so open in discussing the Laos operation at the press lunch, he chaired a meeting of the 40 Committee in which the CIA was given an additional $185,000 for its ongoing campaign against the Allende government. Allende had been President for less than five months, but the 40 Committee, at Kissinger’s and Nixon’s continued urging, had already approved $2 million in covert funds for the CIA to put to use against the new Chilean government. Allende had defied the White House by winning the election and becoming President in the fall of 1970, but the CIA—always sensitive to the orders of the men at the top—was still trying.
On March 23, a seemingly relaxed and friendly Kissinger received Orlando Letelier, the Chilean Ambassador to Washington, at the White House. In a report cabled later that day to Santiago, Letelier was enthusiastic about Kissinger, who, he wrote, “reflected a more positive attitude than could have been expected.”
Kissinger emphasized, Letelier reported, that “his government did not desire for any purpose to interfere with the actions that the Government of Chile adopted internally. In this context he commented that the United States already had too many enemies abroad and did not want to do anything to turn Chile into an enemy.” Letelier took advantage of the meeting’s warmth, he wrote, to inquire gently about newspaper stories speculating that the Nixon Administration had promulgated a “secret document” calling on the international financial community to shun Chile—a reference, although Letelier of course did not realize it, to NSDM 93. “Kissinger told me he was aware of that information and called it ‘absolutely absurd and without grounds of any kind,’ ” Letelier reported.
“At the end of the conversation,” Letelier added, Kissinger “was emphatic in indicating his desire to maintain a permanent dialogue with me, not only for the purpose of discussing specific issues but also as a way to get to know better the Chilean political process, which he repeatedly described as of the most extraordinary interest.”
Letelier, with his old-world manners and civility, was no match for Kissinger. But even a tougher, more diabolical emissary from Santiago would have been in a difficult position in Washington.XVII Nixon and Kissinger, determined to have their way in Chile, left nothing to chance. By early 1971, the CIA had installed a wiretap inside Letelier’s embassy. The White House was learning—and passing on to its friends in the corporate world—the nationalization steps contemplated by the new socialist government in Chile. The wiretap would stay in place for the next eighteen months.
I. Many reporters and bureau chiefs knew of Kissinger’s primacy and his hatred for Rogers, but they paid a price for their insight. Max Frankel, concluding a New York Times series on Nixon’s foreign policy in late January 1971, correctly reported that Nixon and Kissinger were in firm control of all aspects of policy making. Frankel was also a conduit for much White House misinformation in the dispatch. For example, he reported that Nixon did not “act on—or even betray—his private fear and sense of challenge when Chile elected a Marxist government last fall.” Frankel also described the SALT talks with the Soviet Union as having been briefed with “extreme care” to America’s allies in Europe, at a time when not even Gerard Smith, the head of the American delegation, was aware of what was really going on.
II. Believing the worst seemed to be a widespread phenomenon among the NSC staff. Andrew J. Hamilton, formerly a reporter for the defunct New York Herald-Tribune, joined the staff in 1970 to handle NATO and force-structure issues. These were areas of minor significance to Kissinger, and Hamilton thus had little direct contact with him—a common situation for many staff aides. One afternoon, he bumped into Kissinger returning from his lunch, surrounded by the usual retinue of Secret Service men. “I said, ‘Hello, Mr. Kissinger.’ I had a beard and he didn’t recognize me. He looked startled.” Hamilton thought nothing more of it until, months later, as he was briefing an interagency meeting, Kissinger interrupted to say, “My Secret Service agent nearly shot that man.” Hamilton realized that Kissinger was joking, but he also suspected there was an element of truth in the remark. Dismayed at the “bad atmosphere” inside the NSC staff, Hamilton resigned in 1971.
III. Crocker, after being hired to replace Morris as the NSC staff expert on Africa, was unceremoniously shoved into an office in the Executive Office Building that was shared by Rodman, Kissinger’s personal amanuensis, and Kissinger’s long-time friend, Nancy Maginnes. Maginnes, then working for Nelson Rockefeller, was being provided with free office space. Crocker met Kissinger for the first time only when he “came to see Nancy and made some jokes before we were introduced.”
IV. By 1971, Kissinger had developed what amounted to a pattern of flattering his former aides. Thus, bumping into William Watts and his wife at a Washington party, he told Watts’s wife that her husband had “behaved with great dignity and honor.” Watts was pleased, despite his lingering suspicions about Kissinger’s motives. Later, after Kissinger became Secretary of State, he unfailingly sent Roger Morris personal notes of praise for his commentaries on foreign affairs—some of them exceedingly critical of Kissinger—when they appeared in magazines such as the New Republic.
V. Attorneys for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force later came to doubt that Haig had visited the FBI building as often as Sullivan suggested. The prosecutors were unable to find memoranda noting each of Haig’s visits; such important missions, they believed, would have been recorded somewhere in the files. Another argument against the extended series of visits was their awkwardness. It was unlikely, given Haig’s growing prominence in official Washington, that he would have been able to visit Sullivan’s office regularly without someone raising questions.
VI. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee looked into the Hoover decision in late 1973, before its hearings on Kissinger’s nomination as Secretary of State, and concluded that the wiretaps were stopped shortly before Hoover was to testify before Congress at the annual FBI appropriations hearings. Hoover traditionally discontinued wiretaps before congressional hearings, the Senate report said, so “he could report minimum taps in effect if he were questioned.” Nine White House wiretaps were in existence as of February 10, 1971, the cutoff date. Another factor in the decision to cut off the wiretaps may have been the chronic Nixon anxiety over Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practice. On February 5, the subcommittee requested FBI statistics on the number of wiretaps that had been authorized since June 1968. The information supplied did not include the White House wiretaps. Charles Colson dates this period—when the White House wiretaps were cut off—as the time when Nixon began to demand a special internal police unit. By June 1971, when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, Colson recalls, “Nixon had been asking Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger for four months to get an intelligence and operational capability in the White House.” A few days later, Colson heard Nixon complain bitterly to Haldeman about his failure to “get this capability in place.”
VII. Gelb, who taught a foreign policy course at Harvard in the early 1960s, immediately tried to involve Kissinger as a consultant. The two had been colleagues for years. Gelb earned his doctorate in 1964 at Harvard’s Government Department, was Kissinger’s assistant there, and helped teach his Defense Policy seminar. He had worked as a Senate aide before joining the Pentagon’s Office of International Security Affairs in 1966, which was then one of the most powerful offices in the Defense Department. The office was headed by Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton, a former Harvard Law School professor (McNaughton was killed in an airplane crash in 1967). Ellsberg had served earlier as McNaughton’s special assistant, a position Halperin had also held. Gelb, suddenly handed the responsibility for the Pentagon Papers, instinctively reached out for Kissinger. “It was utterly natural to think of him,” Gelb says. “He was my professor at Harvard and I wanted somebody outside the system to get involved.” Kissinger spent a day in Gelb’s office discussing the project with Gelb and Halperin, and, although he decided against joining Gelb’s staff, he maintained a special status with the project. Later in 1967, Kissinger began his first negotiations with Hanoi through the two Frenchmen in Paris, as part of the Johnson Administration’s secret efforts to end the war. As a matter of necessity, he was later given access by Gelb to the most sensitive volumes in the study, those dealing with previous negotiations with the North Vietnamese. These studies were considered so secret that many of Gelb’s thirty-six-member staff were denied access to them. When Ellsberg decided to make the Pentagon Papers public in 1971, he did not release any of the diplomatic volumes and, as of mid-1983, some portions still remain classified. Ellsberg and others presumably withheld those volumes because many non-U.S. citizens had been involved in trying to negotiate an end to the war, and public disclosure of their activities might have embarrassed them. (The diplomatic volumes, ironically, were routinely available to newspaper reporters covering Ellsberg’s trial in 1973, but were later placed under court seal.)
VIII. Sonnenfeldt was first wiretapped May 12, 1969, in the wake of the May 9 New York Times report on the B-52 bombing of Cambodia. That wiretap was removed after five weeks.
IX. Earlier in 1970, Haig had sought out Donald Lesh, Sonnenfeldt’s former NSC aide who was then working on Capitol Hill, and urged him to come to a meeting with Kissinger. Lesh went to the White House but found only Haig waiting. “Sonnenfeldt’s got to go,” Lesh recalls Haig’s exclaiming. “Henry wants you to come back to take over the European area. We can’t do this right from the start,” Haig added. “You’d come back in about six months. Hal will be gone and you’ll be the man.” Lesh was tempted, but only briefly. He decided to turn down the proposal in a letter to Kissinger but realized that he had no evidence Kissinger even knew of the offer. Lesh decided to “sandbag” Haig, and on July 24 sent a courteous letter of rejection to Kissinger, pointedly noting that he had been “very flattered by the invitation recently extended to me on your behalf by Al Haig . . .” Lesh heard no more but, describing the incident later, concluded that it could well “have been another of Al’s machinations.” If so, Kissinger did nothing about it.
X. David Halperin recalls that Kissinger “knew Sonnenfeldt was a double agent” in terms of his personal loyalty, a colleague and friend who was capable of ridiculing Kissinger with other White House aides behind his back. Kissinger in turn seemed to get pleasure from teasing Sonnenfeldt, and he was the permanent butt of many of Kissinger’s jokes. By late 1970, Sonnenfeldt—always anxious for social success—had taken to hanging around Kissinger’s office in the White House on the afternoons of formal White House dinners waiting to see if he could obtain a last-minute invitation, Halperin says. (Such waiting was known as “rug time” among NSC staffers.) Sometimes Sonnenfeldt’s goal was simply to cadge a ride to an embassy party in Kissinger’s White House limousine. Kissinger would respond in kind by permitting Sonnenfeldt to read and analyze only a portion of a backchannel document, making it clear there was more that was not being shown. Nevertheless, according to Halperin, Kissinger valued Sonnenfeldt’s analytical ability very highly, perhaps because the two men had similar views about the Soviet Union. Trying to summarize their complex relationship, Halperin put it this way: “Henry had bested Sonnenfeldt in life. He went to Harvard; Hal went to Johns Hopkins. Henry got a doctorate; Hal stopped at an M.A. Henry had an appointment at Harvard; Sonnenfeldt went into the bureaucracy.”
XI. In mid-1970, Pursley took a brief sailing vacation with his wife, the first such trip they had taken together in years. The morning after his return to Laird’s office, his wife telephoned and asked him how it felt to be back. Miserable, said Pursley, not unnaturally. “I wish I wasn’t here.” At this point in the transcript of the call, an FBI agent noted: “He appears to be a disgruntled employee.” Morton Halperin’s wife, Ina, constantly told callers that her telephone was wiretapped. In a conversation in the fall of 1969, Mrs. Halperin suddenly exclaimed, “You hear that beeping?” At this point the agent noted: “There isn’t any beeping on the line. Ina has a complex her phone is being tapped.”
XII. Ellsberg later told me that the telephone call was to his brother, Harry, who was living in a New York suburb. It was no secret to Ellsberg’s friends and associates that he and other Rand employees had participated in a series of UCLA-sponsored research tests into the effects of psychedelic drugs, including LSD, in the early 1960s. In the later summer of 1969, Ellsberg recalled, he had been given a gift of mescaline and it was that drug which he proposed to give to his brother, who did not use such substances and declined the offer.
XIII. Fifteen copies of the papers had originally been distributed inside the government, and only two men—Ellsberg and Gelb—had read all the papers and analyses as of early 1970.
XIV. Kissinger, it turned out, did drop Ellsberg’s name a few months later. In an interview with Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post, who was writing an assessment of the first two years of the administration’s Vietnam policies, Kissinger cited Ellsberg and Halperin as being among those who were “great critics” of the administration who “had been crucial in the development of the policy.” Oberdorfer telephoned Ellsberg to ask his reaction. “I was absolutely amazed by this,” Ellsberg says. “I asked, ‘What did Kissinger say the policy was?’ Oberdorfer said, ‘It’s the policy of negotiating in Hanoi while withdrawing the troops from Vietnam.’ I said, ‘Look, if that were the policy, I would still be at Rand and Mort Halperin would still be in the White House. This guy is trying to smear me as being implicated in his rotten policy.’ ”
XV. It was those extra sets, whose photocopying was inspired by the call from Kissinger’s office, that were provided by Ellsberg and a group of friends to seventeen newspapers across the United States after the Justice Department obtained a temporary restraining order on June 15 barring the New York Times from continuing to publish the Pentagon Papers. The Times, which had begun publishing the papers on June 13, acceded to the order after some internal debate over the unconstitutionality of such prior restraint. The Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that the government had failed to prove the necessity of prior restraint in the case, permitting the Times and other newspapers, including the Washington Post, to publish the remainder of the Papers.
XVI. None of the reporters challenged that statement, although Kissinger had acknowledged to them moments earlier that the intelligence was poor for the Laos operation; the North Vietnamese were found to have dozens of tanks that were not anticipated, and had committed four divisions to the battle when only one and a half were reported to be in the area. Why the Pentagon’s intelligence on civilian settlements in the area would be any better than its intelligence on the enemy’s military forces was a question unasked and unanswered.
XVII. Letelier was serving as Chile’s Defense Minister at the time of the military overthrow of Allende in 1973. He survived that event and his subsequent imprisonment by the ruling junta, headed by General Augusto Pinochet, and eventually returned to Washington, where he became active in the Chilean exile community and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank. In 1976 he was assassinated by a car bomb while driving two colleagues to work; one of the passengers was also killed. Federal investigators determined, after a lengthy investigation, that the killings had been authorized by DINA, the secret police agency of the Pinochet government.