see also: http://www.reddit.com/user/ellsbergd from thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vahsi/i_am_pentagon_papers_leaker_dan... --- PulvisEtUmbraSumus When did you first become aware that there had been an attempt to seize your medical files from Lewis Fielding's office, and what was your reaction to the administration going that far? In general, how aware were you of surveillance and character assassination attempts against your person, such as the attempts to tie you to communist groups in Minnesota as per this conversation between Nixon and John Mitchell? --- ellsbergd WOW! That link is absolutely fascinating! (Even though I don't have the time just now to go through it in detail, as I will shortly). Thank you for the link! I have to ask, where is it from, where did you get it (on the White House transcripts)? Well, in answer to your question, I just became aware of some surveillance on me (BEFORE the Pentagon papers came out) ten minutes ago, from your link. I was being surveilled because I was a witness in a criminal trial of draft resisters, some of the Minnesota Eight. Their very good lawyer has been accused, I don't know on what basis, of having been a Communist. And that allegation was not of particular significance to the DOJ UNTIL, months later, he was associated with me, after the Papers came out. Likewise, the president is heard discussing with Haldeman on these transcripts the need to go back over earlier (illegal, warrantless) wiretaps--of journalists and White House officials, on which I was overheard--to see what might look significant now, in light of the release of the Pentagon Papers. That's what I've been talking about in earlier answers: the ability of the government to go back to taps collected years earlier to look for material with which to influence potential witnesses in the present. (See their interest in the allegation that the wife of one journalist may have been accused of shoplifting in her past). So people who have "nothing to hide" should ask themselves if that is equally true of their spouses or children, or neighbors, who could possibly be turned into informants by threat of their private lives being revealed. (The Cuban CIA assets who burglarized my psychoanalyst's office were interested in my children and wife as much as me, a reporter who interviewed them was told; they had been told of the precedent of Alger Hiss' step-son who was crucially deterred, at Hiss' insistence, from testifying in his defense at his trial on a crucial point, because he would have been questioned about his alleged homosexuality). My analyst later apologized to me for not telling me about the break-in--which he was sure was aimed at me, by the White House--because his lawyer had advised him not to "get involved." So I didn't know about it until it came out in my courtroom, thanks to John Dean's revelation. All for the best. If he had told me and we had raised it in the court-room, the plumbers would not have been kept on the White House payroll (via CREEP) and would not have been ordered into the Watergate. Nixon would have stayed in office, and the war would have continued for years.