Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg
692
Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg
692Paperback(2001)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780230619791 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan US |
| Publication date: | 09/22/2009 |
| Edition description: | 2001 |
| Pages: | 692 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PROLOGUE
Break-in
Bernard Barker was a 54-year old real estate broker in Miami when E. Howard Hunt approached him in August of 1971. Born in Cuba, Barker had worked for the CIA for almost seven years in the 1960s and had been Hunt’s principal assistant during the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Hunt, who had used the code name Eduardo during the Bay of Pigs mission, commanded Barker’s unswerving loyalty." Eduardo represents the liberation of Cuba," Barker would say. So when Hunt asked him if he would participate in a surreptitious entry to obtain information on a traitor who had apparently passed classified documents to a foreign embassy, Barker was eager to help. He hoped to obtain Hunt’s help in overthrowing Fidel Castro. Hunt, who believed that killing Castro was the route to liberating Cuba, informed Barker "that he was considered the expert in the White House on Cuban affairs." Barker was eager for clandestine action again. "In the process of doing these things in the past, you get to like the adventure," he said later. Hunt, too, desired action. After being recruited the previous month to participate in a secret White House Special Investigations Unit that was investigating the traitor, he had been " dying to get with it" but had then begun complaining about his job, saying that the unit wasn ’t doing enough.
Hunt informed Barker that he would need the assistance of two of his experi- enced associates for the covert entry. He wanted dependable men who, like Barker, had been through the Bay of Pigs and who had received CIA training. Barker recruited Felipe DeDiego and Eugenio Martinez, two salesmen in his real estate company. Martinez had worked for the CIA since 1961 and had been on re- tainer to the agency since 1969, though Barker was apparently unaware of this last fact. All three Cubans " were really highly motivated," G. Gordon Liddy, an- other member of the Special Investigations Unit, remembers.
After getting a look at Martinez and DeDiego, Hunt prepared a memo to David Young, the cochairman of the Special Investigations Unit with Egil Krogh, that included enough " vital statistics " to allow for a " five-way index check " on the three Cubans. Hunt and Liddy also viewed their CIA training files, which showed that they could perform covert entries. According to Liddy, their CIA training " final exam " was breaking into a building in New York City — " getting in and getting out." The men were cleared in Washing- ton. Hunt stressed to Krogh that they would accept only expense money for their work, as the bag job was a contribution to national security and no protest should be obtained.
At CIA safe houses, Hunt and Liddy obtained pocket litter (i. e. , false iden-tification), a small experimental camera concealed in a tobacco pouch, wigs, thick glasses, two sets of false teeth, and a limp-producing shoe insert. For a related covert operation, Hunt obtained a tape recorder from the CIA. His CIA contact person considered that transaction " an unmitigated pain in the neck " and perceived Hunt to be " an over-graded semicompetent case officer" whose clandestine request for the recorder was " ridiculous since he could have pur- chased it himself in an untraceable manner by paying cash over the counter." Following other unreasonable requests by Hunt, including one that the CIA immediately recall a 24-year-old secretary with an " average IQ " from Paris for his use " and explain to all concerned that she was urgently needed for an un- specified special assignment," the CIA cut off relations with Hunt. CIA Direc- tor Richard Helms told John Ehrlichman, a top White House official who was supervising the Special Investigations Unit, that Hunt was " bad news " and that the CIA " had perhaps kept Mr. Hunt on a little longer than we should have but that we had several years ago separated him from more operational tasks be- cause he was overly romantic, and at the same time we had continued him be- cause he had some serious financial problems relating to a sick child and we did not want to have a disgruntled ex-employee."
In the late afternoon of August 25, Liddy and Hunt flew from Washington to Los Angeles for a reconnaissance of their target. They took a taxi to the comfortable Beverly Hilton, where they registered under aliases. On the travel request he filed with the White House before leaving that day, Liddy stated that the purpose of his trip was a " meeting with Bureau of Customs official re drugs." David Young informed John Ehrlichman at the White House," Hunt and Liddy have left for California." In his hotel room, Liddy did around a hun- dred push-ups before retiring.
The next morning, after putting on their disguises, Hunt and Liddy cased the building that housed their target. The target was the small Beverly Hills office of a private, shy, scholarly man of 62 years who had a slender build, leathery dark skin, and egg-shaped bald head. He looked a bit like Yul Brynner." He walked with a certain confidence, which in a sense belied his quietness," recalls Dr. Alfred Goldberg, who was probably his closest friend in Los Angeles, at least until 1967 when Goldberg moved from an office adjacent to his." There was a kind of, at times, a swagger, but not in an obnoxious way." He was " quietly self-confident. He was not a cocky person." The man was not easy to get to know and, in fact, very few people knew him." He kept most things to himself,"Goldberg remembers. He "was not a hail-fellow well-met. He was like a Buddha. He’d sit there like that, you know, with a knowing smile on his face, as though he knew something, but he wasn ’t telling." He possessed superior intelligence, which was well recognized by those around him." He was very wise," Dr. Roger Gould recalls." He spoke sparingly, but when he spoke, people listened very carefully. He had a great deal of respect. . . . This was a man of great integrity and great depth." Although he had earlier owned a home in Beverly Hills and he was not hurting financially, he now lived modestly in an apartment in West Los Angeles, and his office was also decorated simply. He was a highly principled man of liberal political beliefs with, some suspected," a lot of very pent-up passion —for human dignity and for honesty —and a lot of sympathy for the underdogs," Gould remembers. Yet few actually knew his political views. Even Goldberg, who used to ride to and from work with him every day for years after they opened their adjacent offices on the same day in 1950, didn ’t hear a lot about them." He kept his political views to himself," Goldberg reminisces." He was very discreet."
The man whose office Hunt and Liddy were targeting was a psychoanalyst, Dr. Lewis Fielding. He had been Dr. Gould ’s personal analyst for his psychoanalytic training; Dr. Goldberg was also a psychoanalyst. Born and raised in New York City, Dr. Fielding had received his medical training in Switzerland and Vienna. He had served as a psychiatrist in Patton ’s Third Army during World War II. He had left the army as a lieutenant colonel in 1946 and joined the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles as a staff psychiatrist and instruc- tor in clinical psychiatry. In 1971, the year Hunt and Liddy were casing his of-fice, Fielding was probably the most highly regarded psychoanalyst in Los Angeles. The internationally known psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph " Romy " Green- son, who was a friend of his and of Goldberg, and who directed some patients to them, was probably the most prominent analyst in Los Angeles. But Fielding commanded the highest respect from his fellow analysts, including Greenson, even though few knew him personally." Fielding was not a Hollywood doctor," Goldberg recalls." He would avoid the limelight. That ’s one of the things I think people respected. . . . You knew Fielding was there, but he was quietly on the side."
The traitor who had allegedly passed classi . ed documents to a foreign em- bassy was a former patient of Dr. Fielding. Gould had trained under Fielding at the same time the traitor had seen him, so Gould and the traitor had lain " on the same couch probably within the same two-hour period several days a week," Gould surmises.
The traitor was an odd man with an intriguing past. He was a genius who had been raised to think of himself as special and marked for major achievement. But his considerable academic accomplishments aside, he had experienced dif-ficulty realizing his gifts. Following impressive successes as a student at Har-vard, and despite an enduring reputation for brilliance, enormous ambition, and a substantial capacity for personal charm, his once promising career had fallen short of expectations. First as a defense intellectual at the RAND Corpo- ration, then as a lowly Pentagon staffer, and later back at RAND, he had prob- lems completing work. Though unusually creative, energetic, and brimming with ideas, he was chronically disorganized and lacked self-discipline. He had a hard time sitting still. He was self-indulgent, and he habitually ran late. His judgment was questionable. After his work habits had damaged his reputation in the Pentagon, and following a devastating marital breakup and other disap- pointments in his love life, he had behaved recklessly and exhibited a death wish during a stint as a gun-toting warrior in Vietnam." He had sought to dis- charge internal tension by taking action; his analytic treatment was unsuccess- ful in altering this propensity," Dr. Bernard Malloy, chief of the CIA ’s psychiatric staff, later analyzed. He had even fantasized about being the first American killed by regular North Vietnamese Army units. That would be one hell of a way to go, he thought. He felt he had already lived long enough.
The man had developed a harmful reputation among colleagues for indis- cretion. He enjoyed letting others know about the high-level state secrets he learned. He reveled in working with highly classified material and loved know- ing secrets. He also enjoyed telling colleagues about his personal life." It was very important for him that we, us men, knew that he was a stud," one former RAND man recounts." And that these beautiful women really went for him. And that he was not really bound by the normal rules and conventions of tedious society. That he needed it, he kept saying." His indiscretion about sexual matters and seemingly rich sex life became widely known. The Special Investi- gations Unit showed interest in them." I have been advised by a neutral source who directly observed the premises that the bedroom of the subject’s California oceanfront former home contained an extraordinary amount of mirrors," G. Gordon Liddy transmitted to Dr. Malloy in October 1971 for the CIA’s work on a psychological profile of him." The source, a moving man, said that in all his experience he had never seen so many mirrors in a bedroom."
The man also had a marked need to be prominent. There was something almost childlike about his zeal to be close to power and part of important events. In the early spring of 1971, after undergoing a 180-degree about-face on the war in Vietnam, this man, Daniel Ellsberg, then aged 40, had provided a top-secret history of U. S. decision making in Vietnam to a reporter from the New York Times. The June publication in the Times of reports on the history had alarmed the Nixon White House. It was a cataclysmic event in the history of leaks of government secrets to the press — " the most extensive release of classified documents and information ever to occur in this country," U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wrote President Richard Nixon. The White House feared that Ellsberg might also release other state secrets. And it worried he might be part of a communist spy ring. According to a Soviet double agent who reported to the FBI, an unidentified man using an alias had provided a complete copy of the history to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Ellsberg was the prime suspect, though intelligence was murky." We did not know whether Ellsberg was what he was purporting to be — a romantic loner of the left acting out of conscience — or whether he was in with the show with the KGB," G. Gordon Liddy told me." We also didn ’t know what else he had. We didn ’t know where he had it. Nor did we know what his intentions were." There were even doubts inside the government that Ellsberg himself had pro- vided the documents to the Times. Maybe a co-conspirator had done so and he was just trying to take credit for it to become a hero. Nixon told an aide," If you could get him tied in with some communist groups, that would be good. . . . That ’s my guess, that he ’s in with some subversives."
Now, after publication of the top-secret documents in the Times, Ellsberg ’s emotions were in great conflict. He was reveling in the limelight — which he had long considered his due — generated by his release of the documents." He loved it," one of his lawyers, Charles Nesson, remembers." He just plain loved it." He had always sought praise, and he was now getting it in spades. And he felt the satisfaction of having accomplished something big. He struck some as quite self-important about it all. But Ellsberg ’s anxiety and frustration were immense. Although he had striven to secure legal cover for his act and thereby to avoid jail, he had been indicted and faced a possible long prison sentence. Virtually all of his ex-colleagues and friends had disowned him over his disclosure. "I lost every friend I had in the world, at least every male friend," Ellsberg would recall.
His pain was gargantuan. One of these friends had been perhaps his best friend, Harry Rowen, who lost his job as president of the RAND Corporation largely because of Ellsberg ’s release of the documents. Many former colleagues doubted Ellsberg ’s character. Ellsberg ’s ex-wife was furious with him. He had involved their two children, ages 10 and 13, in copying the documents. She thought that psychotic. "You do not take children along to commit felonies," Carol Cummings says evenly. Though antiwar, she also opposed the release of top-secret material. A Ph.D. student in psychology, Carol Ellsberg (she later reassumed her maiden name, Cummings, because of unwelcome attention from the whole affair) had been concerned that Dan had started "flipping out" years earlier. She had testified about his copying before a grand jury and in a federal affidavit. That was a "bonehead" move, Dan had told their children during a visit in early July of 1971. He informed Carol then that she had made a bad mistake, although he was friendly and he wrote around six checks to her for expenses, she told the FBI. He also " appeared to be seeking her approval for the disclosures he had made," she reported to the bureau." He just can ’t stand the idea that I won ’t praise him," Carol told Charles Nesson a year later. Ellsberg informed Carol around this time that it was her fault he was on trial. He couldn ’t understand why she was angry at him — nor did he seem to understand just how angry at him she was." Can you relax and enjoy it now?" he would say to her.
Infuriatingly, Carol was refusing to cooperate with Dan or his lawyers, who considered her possibly the most damaging witness of all. She was also spilling to the FBI (at least insofar as she had information to spill). During her initial meeting with FBI agents four days after the documents had first been published, Carol had "expressed a desire to cooperate with the FBI " and said that she was " willing to furnish information regarding Daniel Ellsberg," an FBI document reveals." She stated that she is completely patriotic and if Daniel Ellsberg is responsible for disclosing classi . ed information, he should be in jail." On several occasions in the days that followed, Carol had even phoned the FBI ’s office in Los Angeles (where she lived)and " volunteered information" about her former husband. She provided information on a range of matters, including his finances, lifestyle, former girlfriends, and, most extensively, his copying of the documents. Many girlfriends and associates she named were quite self-important about it all. But Ellsberg ’s anxiety and frustration were immense. Although he had striven to secure legal cover for his act and thereby to avoid jail, he had been indicted and faced a possible long prison sentence. Virtually all of his ex-colleagues and friends had disowned him over his disclosure. "I lost every friend I had in the world, at least every male friend," Ellsberg would recall.
His pain was gargantuan. One of these friends had been perhaps his best friend, Harry Rowen, who lost his job as president of the RAND Corporation largely because of Ellsberg ’s release of the documents. Many former colleagues doubted Ellsberg ’s character. Ellsberg ’s ex-wife was furious with him. He had involved their two children, ages 10 and 13, in copying the documents. She thought that psychotic. "You do not take children along to commit felonies," Carol Cummings says evenly. Though antiwar, she also opposed the release of top-secret material. A Ph.D. student in psychology, Carol Ellsberg (she later reassumed her maiden name, Cummings, because of unwelcome attention from the whole affair) had been concerned that Dan had started "flipping out " years earlier. She had testified about his copying before a grand jury and in a federal affidavit. That was a "bonehead" move, Dan had told their children during a visit in early July of 1971. He informed Carol then that she had made a bad mistake, although he was friendly and he wrote around six checks to her for expenses, she told the FBI. He also "appeared to be seeking her approval for the disclosures he had made," she reported to the bureau." He just can ’t stand the idea that I won ’t praise him," Carol told Charles Nesson a year later. Ellsberg informed Carol around this time that it was her fault he was on trial. He couldn ’t understand why she was angry at him — nor did he seem to understand just how angry at him she was." Can you relax and enjoy it now?" he would say to her.
Infuriatingly, Carol was refusing to cooperate with Dan or his lawyers, who considered her possibly the most damaging witness of all. She was also spilling to the FBI (at least insofar as she had information to spill). During her initial meeting with FBI agents four days after the documents had first been published, Carol had "expressed a desire to cooperate with the FBI" and said that she was "willing to furnish information regarding Daniel Ellsberg," an FBI document reveals." She stated that she is completely patriotic and if Daniel Ellsberg is responsible for disclosing classified information, he should be in jail." On several occasions in the days that followed, Carol had even phoned the FBI ’s office in Los Angeles (where she lived)and "volunteered informa- tion" about her former husband. She provided information on a range of matters, including his finances, lifestyle, former girlfriends, and, most extensively, his copying of the documents. Many girlfriends and associates she named were Pentagon Papers (as the top-secret documents became known), had secretly copied them behind his back and then neglected to forewarn him of their publication. Adding insult to injury, Times articles were describing Ellsberg as the man who said he gave the Papers to newspapers, failing to give him certain credit for his act." It drove him nuts," remembers the Times’s Marty Arnold. Ellsberg came to believe the Times hated him. He was also frustrated that newspapers weren’t publishing more of the documents and that his disclosure wasn’t having greater political effect." That was always a discouraging point with him, "Russo ’s lead attorney, Leonard Weinglass, reminisces." That it didn’t move people as much as he thought it should have."
In addition to all of this, Ellsberg was by nature a restless man never really at peace with himself. Wearing their disguises, Hunt and Liddy took photographs of Lewis Fielding ’s office building from all sides. Liddy posed as a pipe-smoking tourist to allay suspicion. In one photo, Liddy stood next to Fielding ’s parking space looking "proud as punch," White House Counsel John Dean would later inform President Nixon. Hunt and Liddy also timed the drive between Fielding ’s home and his office; that might prove useful if the psychoanalyst unexpectedly got "out of pocket" during the actual entry. Upon returning to their hotel, Liddy angrily jettisoned the shoe insert he had received from the CIA, which had turned out to be painful. Still wearing his wig, he decided to go for a walk in the park, only to be "cruised" by another man. Liddy decided not to wear the wig again. 20 The risk that the operation could be traced to the White House thereby increased. Liddy and Hunt had assured David Young and Egil Krogh that they could carry out the mission without it being traced to the White House. After all, they had both had experience with bag jobs in the past. Hunt, a secretive man who "had a habit of locking himself in his office," had participated in break-ins overseas during his many years as a CIA operative. Liddy, an intelligent and articulate gun freak who played Nazi songs in the Special Investigations Unit ’s offices, had some experience with break-ins from his earlier work as an FBI agent.
Liddy had hoped that his former employer, in fact, might be able to obtain Fielding ’s files on Ellsberg. He had approached the FBI about it.
But the approach the bureau took (on its own initiative)had been unsuccessful. After Carol Ellsberg had named Fielding, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had sent an " Urgent " teletype to the Los Angeles FBI office directing," You should immediately interview Dr. Fielding to obtain any information he may be willing to furnish regarding his knowledge of background and activities of Daniel Ellsberg." Perhaps Fielding could shed light on Ellsberg ’s suspected communist connections, the bureau believed. Hoover and other FBI officials surmised that if Fielding had "only a Ph.D." he might talk, but that if he had a medical degree he might refuse on the grounds of doctor patient confidentiality. When FBI agents attempted to interview Fielding, the psychoanalyst turned them down;he refused to even acknowledge that Ellsberg had been his patient." Fielding would never tell anybody who his patients were," Dr. Alfred Goldberg recalls. Fielding ’s attorney told the FBI that Fielding did not wish to discuss any matter with the bureau. (When Fielding again refused to talk to the FBI two years later, after the penetration of his office had been revealed publicly, the FBI felt that "indicated strongly that Fielding is in complete sympathy with Ellsberg.")
This was not the sort of thing Liddy and Hunt had had in mind. "We were hoping the FBI would do what, when I was back in the FBI, back in the earlier days, they did on a regular basis, which were called black bag jobs — would go in and out," Liddy remembers. "But they were no longer doing that." The "specially trained cadres" who used to conduct entries for the FBI had "been allowed to wither on the vine" and had "lost their skills," Hunt perceived. The White House may also have been concerned that if the FBI undertook the job, Hoover might later use it as "leverage" against Nixon, perhaps even as insurance against being fired. The Plumbers, as the Special Investigations Unit later became known, would have to become operational." It occurred to me, ‘Well, if they won ’t, I ’ve done it in the past, we can do it again,’" Liddy recalls. "‘We will do it.’"
To assure that the operation would not be traceable to the White House, Hunt and Liddy had agreed, they would use some of Hunt ’s former Cuban associates in the CIA to actually enter the "target area." They would use "the Cuban asset." If captured, these men could be relied on not to talk. On a memo he llater attempted to remove from the Plumbers’ files, John Ehrlichman signed off on their plan "if done under your assurance that it is not traceable."
By that stroke of his pen, the White House had authorized a burglary. After casing Fielding’s office building in broad daylight, Hunt and Liddy returned to the building that night under the conditions in which the actual break-in would be made. They entered as if they owned the building, then walked down a hallway and up the stairs to the second floor, where Fielding ’s office was located. Maria Martinez, a cleaning woman, noticed them there." I am the doctor," Hunt announced in Spanish before she could say anything. Hunt told her that he and Liddy (also purportedly a doctor)had to leave something for Fielding that he was expecting. After eyeing them "suspiciously," Martinez let them into Fielding ’s office. Liddy snapped pictures of the inside and the lock on the front door while either Hunt engaged her in conversation (his version)or she "went on to another office to do my cleaning" (her version). According to Hunt, Martinez asked after a time, "What’s he doing in there?" Martinez later said she noticed Liddy "taking pictures of the walls of [Fielding’s ]office." If so, so much for the tobacco pouch. Liddy observed that Fielding had "files equipped with locks I saw I could defeat easily with a torsion bar and pick." After Hunt slipped Martinez some money (effectively a bribe and thus possibly a crime in itself), the two covert operatives retreated to their car. From there they noticed that both the front and rear doors of the building were "kept open as late as 1:00 o ’clock in the morning." Hunt would say later, "We did a rather thorough, I think, professional study of the objective."
Hunt and Liddy then immediately flew back to Washington, arriving at 6:20 A. M. At Hunt ’s request, they were met by an employee of the CIA ’s Technical Services Division, whom Hunt directed to promptly develop their film. Hunt picked up the photos at a CIA safe house later that day. The CIA made copies of the photos and later gave them to the Watergate prosecutors. "These fellows had to be some idiots," John Dean would say to President Nixon of Liddy and Hunt.
Upon returning to Washington, Hunt and Liddy met with Krogh and Young to discuss the break-in. They passed their photos of Fielding ’s office around a table in a small room in the Plumbers ’offices and presented a detailed entry plan and a diagram of the target area. The plan included a proposed budget and " a simple plan for escape by using 30 feet of nylon rope." Young was bothered that Liddy and Hunt had encountered the cleaning woman and had actually been in Fielding ’s office;that increased the risk that the operation could be traced. Liddy and Hunt emphasized that they could carry out the entry in a way that no one could tell anyone had been in the office. It would be a clean in and out. Hunt said to Young words to the effect," I think we have a perfect situation here for a clandestine surreptitious entry." "Good," Young replied. Given Liddy and Hunt’s assurances, Krogh thought the chance of their getting caught was " very remote." Ehrlichman would later tell Krogh that, if they were caught," we can always say that Hunt and Liddy were out in California on an investigation and went beyond anything we contemplated."
Liddy and Hunt decided that Labor Day weekend would be an optimal time for the break-in. For three days, doctors and cleaning people would be away. "D Day," Hunt called the weekend. In military fashion, he and Liddy began subtracting the days to go.
In the minds of the Plumbers, there was a mix of reasons for the break-in. They thought Fielding ’s office might contain a "rich lode of material" on Ellsberg, "the best instant source of a full read-out" on the man. The material might help determine his motives, capabilities, and intentions, as well as his co-conspirators." The FBI told us — they didn ’t identify this as having come from a wiretap, but I ’m morally sure that it was from a wiretap — that although Ellberg had terminated the services of a psychiatrist named Fielding in Beverly Hills, he still would call the doctor at all hours of the day and night, almost on a daily basis, to discuss with him the most intimate details of his daily life," Liddy remembers. "That being the case, it seemed to us logical that he might have discussed with the doctor what else he had, what he intended to do with what else he had, and whether he was involved with the KGB." Hunt later testified: "Dr. Ellsberg, by virtue of his contact with foreign nations, particularly foreign women . . . his experimentation into hallucinogenic drugs, all of this created to me a pattern of bizarre conduct that I thought the Soviets, at the very least, would be quick to take note of." That Ellsberg " consorted with females of foreign birth and extraction . . . was a danger signal to anybody in the counter-espionage field," Hunt said. Krogh thought it imperative to determine whether Ellsberg was acting in concert with a foreign power.
The Plumbers had hoped the CIA might be able to illuminate Ellsberg ’s character and motivations by constructing a psychological profile of him. The profile could also be used to smear Ellsberg through leaks to the press, they envisioned. "Hunt was heavily into that," Liddy recalls. Hunt hoped to be able to use the study "to refer in a knowledgeable way to Dr. Ellsberg ’s oedipal conflicts or castration fears." The CIA ’s psychiatrists had produced the first profile two weeks before Hunt and Liddy ’s reconnaissance mission to Fielding ’s office. They had done so with great reluctance. The information they had on Ellsberg was quite sparse (it came largely from the media and FBI reports), and studying a U. S. citizen violated the CIA ’s charter, which " might come to light during any legal proceeding," the CIA ’s psychiatrists feared. Also, their efforts "could be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and mistakenly considered to have derived from the doctor patient therapeutic relationship which was in fact far from the case," Dr. Bernard Malloy, who directed work on the study, later said. "All concerned were very uncomfortable and uneasy about this task and strongly desired and preferred to have the Agency relieved of responsibility for meeting it," another CIA staffer stated.
The CIA ’s assessment of Ellsberg had been handed to David Young by a special security courier on August 11. It observed: There is nothing to suggest in the material reviewed that Subject suffers from a serious mental disorder in the sense of being psychotic and out of contact with reality. There are suggestions, however, that some of his longstanding personality needs were intensified by psychological pressures of the mid-life period and that this may have contributed significantly to his recent actions. An extremely intelligent and talented individual, Subject apparently early made his brilliance evident. It seems likely that there were substantial pressures to succeed and that Subject early had instilled in him expectations of success, that he absorbed the impression that he was special and destined for greatness. And indeed, he did attain considerable academic success and seemed slated for a brilliant career. There has been a notable zealous intensity about the Subject throughout his career. Apparently finding it difficult to tolerate ambiguity and ambivalence, he was either strongly for something or strongly against it. There were suggestions of problems in achieving full success, for although his ideas glittered, he had trouble committing himself in writing. He had a knack for drawing attention to himself and at early ages attained positions of considerable distinction, usually attaching himself as a " bright young man " to an older and experienced man of considerable stature who was attracted by his brilliance and flair. But one can only sustain the role of " bright young man " so long. Most men between the ages of 35 and 45 go through a period of re-evaluation. . . . For the individual who is particularly driven towards the height of success and prominence this mid-life period may be a particularly difficult time. The evidence reviewed suggests that this was so for Ellsberg, a man whose career had taken off like a rocket, but who found himself at mid-life not nearly having achieved the prominence and success he expected and desired. Thus it may well have been an intensi . ed need to achieve signi . cance that impelled him to release the Pentagon Papers. There is no suggestion that Subject saw anything treasonous in his act. Rather, he seemed to be responding to what he deemed a higher order of patriotism. . . . Ellsberg ’s reactions since emerging from seclusion have been instructive. Initially there was jubilation, an apparent enjoyment of the limelight. This was succeeded by a transient period wherein there was a sense of quiet satisfaction, of acceptance of his new-found stature, as if his personally significant action had accomplished what he sought to achieve. But then, embittered that Congress and the press had not wholeheartedly supported him, he turned against them. This is not surprising, for there would seem to be an insatiable quality to Ellsberg ’s strong needs for success andrecognition.
The profile was pretty much on the mark. But the Plumbers found it unhelpful. It " was a very poor psychological profile," Liddy remembers. Only hours after receiving it, Krogh and Young reported to John Ehrlichman," We have received the CIA preliminary psychological study . . . which I must say I am disappointed in and consider very super . cial. We will meet tomorrow with the head psychiatrist, Dr. Bernard Malloy, to impress upon him the detail and depth that we expect. We will also make available to him here some of the other information we have received from the FBI on Ellsberg." Young told Malloy the next day that the profile was " too general to be useful " (prompting Malloy and his colleagues to respond, effectively," Garbage in, garbage out. Give us better material," as Liddy remembers it." Don ’t complain to us about the quality of the psychological profile when you don ’t give us much").
Hunt and Liddy believed Fielding ’s files on Ellsberg might provide grist for an improved profile." That was the second reason that pushed us towards going in and getting the doctor ’s office files," Liddy told me." One, we could get that information [on Ellsberg ’s capabilities, intentions, and collaborators ]. Second, anything else that was in there we were going to give to the CIA. . . . They had said, ‘Give us better information, we ’ll give you a better profile.’ Which made sense to us. . . . ‘We ’re going to be in there anyway for our own purposes, and the CIA wants this, and they can give us . . . a real profile on this guy.’" It was, in fact, upon receipt of the CIA’s first profile of Ellsberg and "in this connection" that Krogh and Young recommended to Ehrlichman that they undertake a covert operation to examine Fielding ’s files on Ellsberg.
But another motivation for obtaining Fielding ’s files was to collect dirt on Ellsberg. Hunt, who approached the Plumbers ’investigation of Ellsberg from "the psychological warfare point of view," proposed the mission to White House Counsel Charles Colson as part of a " skeletal operations plan " for determining "how to destroy his public imand credibility." Fielding ’s files might contain evidence of Ellsberg ’s psychological problems, drug use, and deviant sexual practices, Hunt believed. "They expected to find evidence to corroborate what Hunt had been saying about Ellsberg’s mental unbalance: that he was a drug user; he shot at peasants in Vietnam from a helicopter; he had a ménage à trois with two women," Ehrlichman would say years later. "The catalog went on and on." The evidence would be leaked. The Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski later concluded that the primary purpose of the break-in was "to obtain derogatory information about Ellsberg in order to release that information publicly and thereby destroy Ellsberg’s public image." Jaworski erroneously rejected the conspiracy investigation motive.