AMY GOODMAN: Thirty years ago today on the morning of June 17th, 1972, Washington police answered a call at the Watergate office complex and found five men burglarizing the office of the Democratic National Committee. The burglars had been hired by staff members of CREEP. That’s the Committee to Reelect the President. That was President Richard Nixon. That day was the beginning of the Watergate scandal. Two years later, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace.

Today, on the anniversary of Watergate, we’re going to talk with one of the great whistleblowers in U.S. history, Daniel Ellsberg. The same people who raided the DNC offices burglarized the offices of Dan Ellsberg’s psychiatrist a year earlier.

Ellsberg worked as an analyst for the Pentagon. He went public with the classified documents known as the Pentagon Papers during that time. The Pentagon Papers were a 7,000-page study of America’s 30-year involvement in Indochina that led to the Vietnam War. The Pentagon-commissioned report revealed a massive government cover-up.

After The New York Times published the classified documents on June 13, 1971, the Nixon Justice Department responded quickly and furiously. Just after the third installment was published, the Justice Department secured a restraining order preventing further installments from being printed. Within two weeks, the Supreme Court ruled the government had not shown compelling evidence to justify blocking publication.

Ellsberg was charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy for leaking the papers, but the charges against him were eventually dropped by a federal judge, who wrote that a pattern of, quote, “gross government misconduct” was so appalling that the administration’s retaliatory actions “offend the sense of justice.” Daniel Ellsberg joins us on the line right now.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Glad to be here. Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. So, can you reflect back on this day in 1972? Your psychiatrist’s offices had already been burglarized by these same men. But talk about what was known 30 years ago today.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, I didn’t know, when Watergate occurred, that these same people had been involved in breaking into the office of my former psychoanalyst. That did not come out until John Dean revealed it to his prosecutors on April 13th, 1973, a year later, during my trial.

And Nixon sat on that information for over two weeks. It should have gone right to my judge for revelation to me that this had happened, but Nixon ordered that it not be referred because he knew that that was what he’d been fearing for a couple of years now, that the word would get out somehow that men, on orders from the Oval Office, from him directly, through a chain of command, had led to a domestic crime. And he knew the American people would be much more upset about the constitutional aspects of a president, sworn to uphold the law, ordering a domestic crime than they would about his bombing a neutral country, let’s say, like Cambodia, or invading a country like Laos, that they’d get much more upset about that and that it had the seeds of impeachment for him.

In fact, in the White House tapes, the word “impeachment” — I’ve been reading them, some that have just come out recently. I think the word “impeachment” first comes up in those tapes out of the mouth of Nixon in connection with a talk with acting Attorney General Kleindienst, in connection with his desire that this information not go to the judge. And when he’s finally facing the fact that the word about this break-in will go to the judge after two weeks, he considers, “Well, what are they going to do? Impeach me? Then they’ll get — then they’ll get Agnew! How is that? Hahaha!” You know? But Agnew was his impeachment insurance. I’ve heard this on the tape, by the way. My imitation needs work. But Agnew was his impeachment insurance. He thought no one would impeachment him if they’d get Agnew. But then when Agnew had to plead guilty to extortion, essentially, to bribery, and he lost Agnew, he was a little more exposed.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you, though, talk about this day in history 30 years ago, June 17th? Can you talk about how it came to be known by the American public about the break-in of the Watergate complex, and who — who the men were that were involved?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah, I wasn’t following that at the time it came out. Especially in The Washington Post, it was being followed. I was on trial, actually, in Los Angeles for revealing the Pentagon Papers, or for copying the Pentagon Papers, along with Tony Russo, my co-defendant. And so I had my own problems at this point. And this third-rate burglary, as the White House called it, didn’t attract much attention for me.

My trial was suspended just after a jury had been picked, just around that time, because it was revealed that my lawyers had been overheard — or, a lawyer had been overheard on a wiretap of a foreign embassy. And since my main lawyer, Leonard Boudin, was the American counsel for both Cuba and Chile, he was a prime candidate for being overheard by the government.

So, it turned out later, by the way, on the tapes, that Nixon had said several times he didn’t want my trial to go on before the election. And then Kissinger added to that — which it didn’t, because of the suspension. And then Kissinger adds to that on the tape that I’ve just gotten that it shouldn’t go on until they’ve settled Vietnam, as they felt they had done in January of '73. And my trial didn't go on after that. Kissinger said — and this is quite pertinent, really, to why they went into the psychoanalyst’s office — Kissinger was saying to Nixon, “I know this man well. I think he would have other documents, that he would reveal something about war crimes. War crimes. That’s the way he would do it.” And he said, “We shouldn’t try until the war is settled.” And then Kissinger says — this tape has never come out, by the way; I just got it from a research assistant in Washington who copied it for me.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you get a hold of it, and who made the tape?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: It’s at the National Archives. And previously, they didn’t allow you to retape these things. You had to take notes on them. But now they allow you to copy it. So I have the tape of Kissinger saying that “I know he would have other documents to reveal. And if we try him, he may reveal documents that — Ellsberg — that I would not otherwise have revealed. He’ll save them for the trial.” He said, “But if we do it after the war is settled, after the Paris Accords later,” he says, “then no one will care about war crimes.” He says, “And I know he’ll do it because he is a despicable bastard” — if I can say that on your program. It’s a quote of the national security assistant. But the — so, all this was going on during this time, and I wasn’t paying too much attention to Watergate.

It turns out later that the heart of the problem of Watergate for Nixon was not the break-in to the Democratic headquarters. Crime as that was, they had covered their tracks enough so that the trail of that has never led up to the Oval Office. It led up to John Mitchell, who had left being attorney general — my attorney general, who indicted me — to being head of CREEP, Campaign to Reelect the President. As I heard you saying that, it’s hard to believe that they really allowed that acronym to occur, but they did, C-R-E-E-P. Then, the trail led up to Mitchell, and Mitchell never talked. It also led to Haldeman in the White House, and Haldeman never talked. So they never, to this day, 30 years later, have been able to prove that Nixon himself knew of the break-in beforehand or had any involvement in it. Almost surely he did, but no one had who knew that has ever said so.

The trail that led to Nixon directly started with two men who were caught in connection with the Watergate — Hunt and Liddy, whose names were in the pockets of the burglars in the Watergate. A couple of those burglars had also worked for Hunt and Liddy in the clear-cut domestic crime of burglarizing my psychoanalyst’s office nine months earlier. Also, the same people with Hunt and Liddy, and this time another guy who had been in my analyst’s office, de Diego, Eugenio Martínez and Bernard Barker, all Bay of Pigs veterans, all assets for the CIA, had been involved in an effort to incapacitate me, Daniel Ellsberg, totally. Those were the words the prosecutor relayed to me on the steps of the Capitol on May 3rd, '72 — in other words, just about six weeks or so before they were caught in the Watergate. In other words, this order, too, had come straight from the Oval Office via Charles Colson, the counsel to the president. So, here were two crimes that Hunt and Liddy could point prosecutors toward directly involving in Nixon. And for that reason, Nixon's first effort, when Watergate occurred, was to keep Hunt and Liddy from being indicted. They hadn’t been found in the Watergate; they were directing it from the Howard Johnson hotel across the street.

AMY GOODMAN: This was Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who is now the well-known radio commentator.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah, if you have to define CREEP, then I guess we have to define Liddy, who’s the well-known radio commentator now, but then an ex-FBI man.

AMY GOODMAN: Right. Didn’t he call for the killing of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms agents, talking about where they could be shot?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I don’t remember that. He was an interesting guy in his way, a fan of Hitler, actually, or, as one of the White House people said, “He’s a Nazi, but he’s our Nazi.” And in that spirit, he had the ethos all right, because he he offered actually to stand on a street corner himself and have a drive-by shooting take care of them as a witness, which the White House at that point they figured they were in deep enough, so they didn’t take him up on that. But for that reason, Nixon felt he could be relied on to observe the Mafia code of omertà here, of silence, and wasn’t worried about Liddy.

But he was worried about Hunt, who had worked for the CIA and didn’t have — I don’t know, the movie suggests they have the same code, but Hunt had not learned that, apparently, in agent school and was prepared to talk. And so they had to keep him quiet, not about the Watergate, because, as I say, they had nothing to tell about Nixon from the Watergate. Nixon would only lose his friends on that, like Mitchell or perhaps Haldeman. But he himself was at risk from Hunt because of the Fielding — the Dr. Fielding break-in nine months earlier, and because of this order to incapacitate me on the steps of the Capitol as I was giving a speech just weeks earlier. So he had to be kept quiet.

Nixon suggested then that the CI — to Haldeman and Dean, that the CI — and Ehrlichman, I’m sorry, not Dean — that the CIA tell FBI to lay off pursuing the investigation further than the men who had actually been caught in the Watergate. In other words, he wanted them to cut it off below Hunt and Liddy. And the CIA did that, and the FBI did lay off for a couple of weeks. And then they felt they had to get back on it.

So, this brought Hunt into the picture, because his name was found in the pockets of, I believe, Barker or Martínez or somebody in the Watergate. So, the FBI came to them, and they got indicted. At this point, Hunt was now in a position to be squeezed by the prosecutor to cop a plea by revealing other crimes. He didn’t do that, because he was essentially paid off. And at least that was the intention of the president, clearly, to do that, and it did keep him quiet. Then, after he was convicted for the Watergate break-in, the prosecutor was bound to bring him before the grand jury again, which he did, give him immunity for other crimes and order him to answer the question of what other crimes he knew of.

At this point, when Hunt faced that, was the “cancer on the presidency” discussion between John Dean and Richard Nixon, as taped, in the Oval Office, where Dean informed him that this — they were demanding more money, it might go as much as a million dollars. “A million dollars? You could get that. I know where you could get that,” says Nixon, rather fatally. And no problem. Dean urges him in this tape, this conversation, not to continue this, because more and more people will be involved in a new crime. That’s obstruction of justice and perjury. More and more people will know of it. That’s the cancer metaphor. And eventually someone will break, a warning or not that Dean himself might tell the story, which is what he did do later.

AMY GOODMAN: Now the whole question, 30 years later, is who was Deep Throat, the source for the Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein series of articles in The Washington Post that really unraveled, revealed the whole Watergate scandal? Do you have thoughts on this, as it doesn’t look like Dean is revealing it?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, what strikes me particularly, and I haven’t seen anyone comment on this, is how unwilling anyone is to be identified as Deep Throat after 30 years. After all, this man deserves a, I would say, Pulitzer Prize. At least he deserves the commendation of a grateful nation, and perhaps some high office. But he really did a great service in telling the truth and enabling us to penetrate a web of lies and crimes in the administration. No one has even coyly suggested, “Well, I might be,” or “If you say so,” or anything like that. The real Deep Throat clearly does not want to be known.

And that raises the question of — I think it tells us, actually, why there are so few Deep Throats compared to the number we need. It’s not that Watergate is the only crime waiting to be revealed and which the public needs to know. They occur daily, weekly, I would say, certainly a number of times a year. My guess is that this person, 30 years later, feels that he has friends to lose — probably not, after 30 years, a job to lose, though that probably was true for many years. But he’ll lose all of his friends, judging by my own experience. All my friends had clearances, and they couldn’t afford to know me at all as soon as I did reveal the truth here. I’d become dangerous to know. And in this case, I think Deep Throat feels, 30 years later — and he couldn’t have been, probably wasn’t too young then — that he still has a lot to lose if he tells the truth.

And that’s why I think we can guess, for example, that, as far as I know, there’s not one — hmm, I won’t pursue the metaphor. There’s not one whistleblower among the 46,000 Catholic priests, of whom an enormous number must have known this pattern of crime of child rape that was going on, interminably, and as far as I know, I haven’t seen that one of them came public, with or without documents, to let us know that. There was too much to lose. It went against their identity, their associations. Why did no one at Enron speak to the public? The one memo that we learned about later was written to the president, wasn’t presented to the public. I want to give Coleen Rowley credit in the FBI for sending her letter revealing this — what isn’t quite clear, but revealing things that she thought were disastrous mistakes.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg, we just have 30 seconds.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: OK, go ahead. Well, the reason they went into my psychoanalyst’s office, I will tell you, we now know, was to — fear that I had further documents and that I would reveal them, that I no longer was afraid of losing all this, documents on his Vietnam policy. And since his Vietnam policy, Nixon’s Vietnam policy, was still secret, still had a ways to go — we hadn’t bombed Hanoi yet — he wanted to keep me quiet by finding information he could blackmail me with, and thereby began a chain of domestic crime that did, in effect, bring him down and make it possible to end the Vietnam War.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg, and why you were going to your psychiatrist, very interesting in light of the fact that you are known as the man who published those thousands of pages of the Pentagon Papers?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, it was easier for me to publish documents to the public that other people had written. I was an insider. I was suited to the role of insider because I had a problem, it turned out, kind of a publisher’s block, not a writer’s block, because I wrote for a living. But I wrote to insiders. And the idea of publishing to a general audience was something that I had difficulty doing. And that was — I’m able to reveal this now, which I didn’t tell my editor at Viking Penguin until this morning, if she should be listening, is that — because it would have panicked her that I had a problem that needed working on, which was making a deadline to get something out in terms of publication. And since that is now done, as of this week — my book is coming out in October — I can now tell her that — I would have worried earlier — that with the help of my family, I made all these deadlines, and the book is coming out in October.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, congratulations. We may not know who Deep Throat is, but now we know why you were at the psychiatrist.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Right. Now you know who the author of Secrets is, right.

AMY GOODMAN: And I guess Nixon knew that, as well, given that the Nixon administration had authorized and been involved with, had done the break-in of your psychiatrist’s office, as well.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, he clearly diagnosed me as being capable of putting out secrets that ought not to be told, since I had just done that with The New York Times, and I was on trial. So, clearly the threat of trial was not enough to keep me quiet. And what he needed was either to blackmail me with information he could get from my psychoanalyst, which wouldn’t have worked, but it was a nice try, or to incapacitate me totally, which he tried to do in May.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Ellsberg, I want to thank you for being with us, former Pentagon official who exposed the Pentagon Papers 30 years ago. His forthcoming book is called Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, published by Viking Press this coming October.

You’re listening to Democracy Now! When we come back, why people are marching in Bolivia and June Jordan, the great poet and activist who died this weekend. Finally, we’ll look at the case of a woman who was killed by her ex-husband, domestic terrorism. Stay with us.