When Ellsberg did return to Michigan, he was suddenly freed from piano practice and instead began to hungrily consume books. He dramatically accelerated his progress as a student and, two years later, won a scholarship from the Pepsi-Cola Corporation to attend Harvard. One evening early in his time at the university, while sitting on a bench with a beer and a Hemingway novel, he had an epiphany. “It felt so strange, I couldn’t figure out what it was,” he told a biographer. “Then I realized: I felt free, for the first time in my life.”
Ellsberg married his college girlfriend, Carol Cummings, graduated from Harvard, and won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to spend a year studying at Cambridge University. When he returned, he was more than ready to join the war in Korea, a conflict he saw through the simple Cold War lens of a Communist aggressor pushing into a would-be democratic state. He enlisted in the Marines, prepared to fight alongside his brothers at the forty-ninth parallel. But instead, he spent the next two years in officer’s training in Quantico, Virginia, long enough that when he emerged, the war was over. He had graduated, again, at the top of his class of a thousand soldiers.
Just months into that military career, Ellsberg was handed his first top-secret security clearances.
Many years and many layers of privileged knowledge later, Ellsberg would have a conversation about that rite of passage with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, one that he documented in his memoir. Kissinger was about to receive his own high-level clearances, and Ellsberg wanted to prepare him for the heady effects of that rarified information. So he described for Kissinger the experience of entering a world of secrets.
At first, Ellsberg said, he’d felt exhilarated at the enormous bounty of incredible facts that flooded into his intelligence. But that initial feeling soon gave way, and instead he felt like a fool for having worked for so long without those secrets, under such a veil of illusions and ignorance. A couple weeks later, he began to see everyone else as fools, watching them labor under that same malformed knowledge he had suffered from for years.
It would take years more, Ellsberg recounted, before he finally began to see the limits of his top secret information, the ways that it blinded him and led him astray with the sense of omniscience it offered. In the intervening time, he says, those secrets often prevented him and other secret keepers from learning anything from anyone who didn’t have their clearances. Knowing secrets, Ellsberg told Kissinger, requires a person to lie to and distrust everyone who advises him.
“I ended by saying that I’d long thought of this kind of secret information as something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island, which turned them into swine,” Ellsberg wrote of his warning to Kissinger. “They became incapable of human speech and couldn’t help one another to find their way home.”
If Ellsberg’s path to becoming the most prolific leaker of his age began with a steep upward trajectory fueled by Ivy League ambition, Bradley Manning set out from far more common circumstances: destitute, middle-American aimlessness.
Manning grew up in Crescent, Oklahoma, a tiny conservative town that had one stop sign and fifteen churches, “more pews than people,” as Manning would later write. He was a bright child who could read at three, built his first website at ten, and won the top prize at his school’s science fair three times. He also had a rebellious streak that led him to ask hard questions of religious neighbors, argue with Sunday school teachers, and even remain silent during the Pledge of Allegiance in school to avoid its “under God” doctrine. But those from his hometown described him to the local magazine This Land as a quiet, good-natured boy, small for his age, who studied hard, played saxophone in the school band, loved video games like the military simulation Command and Conquer, and talked sometimes of joining the army one day.
Manning’s father, Brian, had a more mixed reputation in the neighborhood where Manning grew up. A gruff former navy computer analyst who worked as an IT manager for Hertz car rentals, he was also a strict and unforgiving father. One neighbor has described him as “demeaning,” another as simply “a dick.” Brian Manning would leave on business, sometimes for months at a time. His wife, a woman named Susan Fox, whom Manning had met while stationed in the United Kingdom in the late seventies, couldn’t drive, and they lived four miles from town. So the older Manning would stock up the house with food and supplies and leave them largely isolated. Fox filled the void of her loneliness with alcohol, starting with vodka in her morning tea.
When Manning was thirteen, his father announced one evening that he was separating from Manning’s mother. Fox would bring Manning back to her hometown, the Welsh village of Haverfordwest, not much larger than Crescent.
If growing up as the only American in a small British community hadn’t been alienating enough, Manning now faced another new emotional challenge: Just before leaving Oklahoma, he had announced to friends that he was gay.
Manning never publicized his homosexuality in Wales, but he was treated as an outsider nonetheless, teased for his accent, his effeminate mannerisms, his small size—even as an adult, Manning would only measure five feet two and 105 pounds. Manning’s inability to fit in wasn’t helped by a fierce sense of American patriotism that he inherited from his father. One friend from Crescent described him as “basically really into America,” particularly Americans’ sense of political and economic liberty—not often an outlook shared by the residents of parochial ends of the United Kingdom.
Alienated from most of his peers, Manning turned to the outlet of so many other young men: computers and the Internet. He spent his lunch periods in the school’s computer lab, coding a website that functioned like a primitive version of Facebook, allowing users to create communities and find local news. In the process, he learned about the basics of Web servers and Internet routing.
When he graduated from high school, Manning’s strong connection to the United States brought him back to Oklahoma to live with his father and now two stepbrothers in Oklahoma City. He put his computer skills to use at a software start-up called Zoto. The tech firm was a more politically liberal setting than Manning had ever been exposed to, and co-workers remember him speaking out loudly against the deteriorating war in Iraq and criticizing President Bush. In his work, he was a competent coder, but his loneliness and angst sometimes hampered his productivity: One manager, Kord Campbell, has recalled Manning’s “thousand mile stare” and described him as “quirky as hell.” Manning developed a reputation as odd and unreliable. After a shouting match with his boss, he was fired.
At the same time, the young man’s relationship with his restrictive father and new family was fraying quickly. Manning would say years later that he was kicked out of his home because he was gay. But his father told a PBS Frontline reporter that he had always accepted his son’s sexuality. And a 911 recording of a call from Manning’s father’s second wife describes Manning throwing objects and threatening her with a knife. “I have been telling him he needs to get a job and he won’t get a job!” Manning’s stepmother says frantically in the recording. “He said he thinks he should just be able to take money from us.” Manning wasn’t arrested, but he was escorted from the house by police. Days later, he left in his Toyota pickup truck and drove to Tulsa, homeless, directionless, and largely alone in the world.
For the next months, Manning slept first in his truck and then later in the room of a friend from Crescent, Jordan Davis, hiding in the bedroom from Davis’s father until he could find a bare-bones apartment in town. He flitted between menial jobs, working first in a Chucky Cheese–style entertainment center called Incredible Pizza as a waiter, later at a music and video game store. He drifted to Chicago and then to Maryland, working retail jobs at Guitar Center, Starbucks, and Abercrombie & Fitch before finally moving in with his aunt near Rockville and enrolling in a local community college.
Manning had learned the exhaustion of life without a degree
. He writes that he was “in desperation to get somewhere in life.” But he couldn’t afford a four-year university. When he turned to his father for help, the elder Manning told him to take a well-worn path for resourceless and lost young men: the military. Despite Manning’s patriotism and admiration of the armed forces years earlier, his opposition to the war in Iraq left him conflicted. Brian Manning, years later, would say of his son that he “twisted his arm.”
“He didn’t want to join,” Manning’s father would tell the PBS show Frontline. “But he needed structure in his life, he was aimless. I knew in my own life that joining the navy was the only thing that gave me structure.”
The army, as promised, swiftly imposed direction on Manning’s career. After Manning enlisted in August 2007, he spent the next year in basic training and then, when his superiors recognized his computer skills, specialized education in intelligence analysis. In October 2009, he shipped out to Iraq, a twenty-two-year-old soldier—slight of frame and short on experience—inducted suddenly into wartime’s wealth of secrets.
Daniel Ellsberg read as much paperwork on the war in Vietnam as practically any Pentagon analyst. For one stretch in his first years at the Department of Defense, he requested that all new documents on the war be sent to his in-box, and he spent practically every waking moment digesting thousands of pages. But his real education on the war would come later: in the passenger’s seat of a jeep, traveling the roads of the countryside around Saigon with a rifle in his hand and a grenade in his lap.
In 1962, Ellsberg had completed a doctorate at Harvard in economics, focusing on decision theory. His dissertation honed in on what would come to be known as the Ellsberg Paradox, a strange glitch in the way that humans make choices: Show someone two opaque jars with ten stones in each, one with five black stones and five white ones and one with an unknown number of white and black stones. Then tell the test subject he’ll be rewarded for picking a white stone. Experiments show that he’ll tend to choose from the jar with a known, equal number of black and white stones. But tell him a second later that he’ll be rewarded for choosing a black stone, and he’ll again choose the jar with known numbers of black and white stones. In both cases, human brains make the assumption that the uncertain jar is less likely to have a favorable ratio of stones, even when those assumptions contradict each other from one second to the next.
When Ellsberg arrived at RAND as an analyst, the White House was already making its choice about which opaque jar it would rather gamble on: armed conflict in Vietnam, or the seemingly riskier idea of letting it fall to Communism and increase the red blotch spreading across half the world map.
Ellsberg spent years at the Pentagon-tied think tank RAND and then as a military analyst in the Pentagon itself, inhaling war files and occasionally digging up documents to justify President Lyndon Johnson’s moves to slowly widen the war in Vietnam. But he sensed that the paperwork he was sifting through wasn’t the real war, and in 1965 he took a new job at the State Department. Soon he shipped out as a boots-on-the-ground analyst, eager to see the war for himself. He was entrusted with go-anywhere-see-everything status on the irregular banana-shaped landmass known as South Vietnam, and within weeks he was in the field, accompanying troops on operations.
Ellsberg found that he was considered a liability if he didn’t carry a firearm or even if he hesitated to use it in combat situations. So despite his State Department civilian observer status, he started carrying a Swedish K submachine gun alongside the soldiers he accompanied, even as he took notes and photographs as an analyst.
The former soldier was soon adopted by John Vann, a seasoned retired lieutenant colonel in the army who had also come to Vietnam as a civilian observer. Vann became Ellsberg’s roving guide, mentor, and driver. That was no common privilege: Wheels were a risky way to see the country, and most officers didn’t even dare to drive the roads through the swamps and jungles that Vann frequented, instead flying between bases by helicopter. At one point, the utility vehicle that Ellsberg and Vann traveled in momentarily broke down in the same spot where, three months later, Vann’s assistant would be captured by Vietcong and kept as a POW in a cramped bamboo cage for the next seven years.
But Vann believed that driving was the only way for an officer to understand the real truths of the war, and he had learned that a single, nimble jeep could evade Vietcong mines. He taught Ellsberg the roadside clues that the VC firmly controlled certain areas, despite official reports to the contrary. Ellsberg learned to see freshly cut barbed wire fences, dug-up roads, and destroyed buildings just a few feet away from outposts supposedly held by U.S.-friendly Vietnamese.
As Ellsberg interviewed more advisers on the ground, he found more wishful thinking on the part of the U.S. forces: American bureaucrats were told, for instance, that pro-U.S. militias patrolled their territory at night. In reality, much of South Vietnam was handed over to the Vietcong from sundown to sunrise.
When Ellsberg stayed at a base in the town of Long An on Christmas Eve 1966, a very drunk South Vietnamese major began ranting about American arrogance and stupidity. Later, outside, he took several shots with a pistol at Ellsberg and his companions, missing them in the dark before other soldiers could restrain the enraged major. When Ellsberg quizzed a Vietnamese lieutenant about the incident later, the younger man reluctantly admitted that the resentment against American intervention wasn’t unique. In fact, many of the other officers felt the same way.
But Ellsberg’s notion that Vietnam was an unwinnable war wasn’t confirmed for him until New Year’s Day 1967, the day he first came face-to-face with Vietcong soldiers. Or rather, face to back. As Ellsberg and three other soldiers walked ahead of a platoon of troops, they suddenly heard firing behind them. Three Vietnamese boys in black shorts had hidden in the grass just feet from where the four men’s boots passed, popping up to fire their AK-47s at the troops behind Ellsberg’s group. The four Americans didn’t dare fire back toward their own men, and instead had to take cover from the hail of bullets sent back from the American platoon.
The three Vietcong boys disappeared into the jungle brush, only to hide and jump up fifty meters behind Ellsberg’s forward group and pull the same trick again before vanishing. Three half-naked kids had shown a kind of fearlessness, cunning, and mastery of the terrain that an entire platoon couldn’t counter. Later in the day, a pair of Vietcong outfits performed an even more wily maneuver against Ellsberg’s platoon, alternately firing on the Americans and then fading into the jungle, first from the left, then from the right, then from the left again. Each burst dragged the platoon toward their imagined attackers to counterattack, and they found themselves moving in a futile zigzag shape as they sought an efficient and ghostly enemy. “I was very, very impressed,” wrote Ellsberg in Secrets. The “morning’s work had sown in my guts a thought that had been only in my head before: These opponents were going to be very hard to beat. Or to put it another way, we were not going to defeat them.”
Over the next months, Ellsberg’s feelings were reinforced with impossible missions, disappointing interviews with officers, and repeated glimpses of corruption among the military regime the United States supported. When he returned to RAND in the middle of 1967, he had decided: He would work within the system to end this futile war.
Ellsberg became a hard-nosed critic against the war effort within the think tank’s walls. But his arguments merely convinced most colleagues that his experiences had destroyed his objectivity. Despite now working under Special Assistant for National Security Kissinger and others at that near-presidential level, he found that his pessimistic comments regarding Vietnam fell on deaf ears.
Still, his time in Vietnam served a purpose beyond grim education: It made him one of the few RAND analysts chosen to work on a landmark study on the evolution of America’s involvement in the country, a classified history that would trace the story of Vietnam’s endless wars back to the French occupati
on and the Japanese invasion that preceded it. At the time, it was known as the McNamara study, named for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who launched it before leaving government to become president of the World Bank. Today, that report is known as the Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg agreed to help write a portion of the study because he knew that the assignment would also provide him the access to read the entire report, a multivolume, comprehensive effort with the full analytic weight of RAND’s brains behind it. And what he found, as he dug into historical documents and then got his hands on the first volumes of the papers in the following months, put his antipathy toward the war in a new light: The American quagmire in Vietnam wasn’t an honest mistake, or even a mistake at all. It was the result of a decades-long policy, the tip of an ugly iceberg older and more trenchant than the Cold War itself.
To summarize seven thousand pages in a few words, the United States had controlled and incited the war in Vietnam—and it was a single war, not a series of wars against different regimes—for nearly twenty-five years. And its motives had always been those of geopolitical empire, never the democratic well-being of Vietnamese citizens.
It started in the mid-forties, when the United States had financially and militarily supported France’s control of Vietnam as a colony, and then backed its bloody reconquest of the country after French forces were temporarily interned and pushed aside by Japanese invaders. Despite pleas from Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh to recognize Vietnamese independence, America’s motivation was always, simply, to support its Western ally as a colonial power.
Only after the rise of McCarthyism and the Maoist takeover of China did any question of Communism versus democracy in Vietnam arise. And by then it was too politically painful for any president to retreat from the country and allow the Communist hemisphere of the globe to grow one sliver larger. Meanwhile, as every president from Truman to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon sank deeper into the widening war, they had known that the conflict was inherently imperial from the start, and even seen State Department reports that showed that Ho Chi Minh had the majority support of the population.
This Machine Kills Secrets Page 3
