In June of 1971, Gar Alperovitz was a father of two who ran a small economic think thank focused on community-building. He had never considered himself much of a risk taker, though he had participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and rung doorbells with Martin Luther King Jr. in Boston. But what he decided to do that June could lead to federal prison. Alperovitz, 35 at the time, was helping handoff the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret Vietnam history, to journalists. Over a three week span of time, Alperovitz helped Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst at the RAND Corporation, elude an FBI manhunt and distribute the Pentagon Papers to 19 newspapers. Two years before, Ellsberg had smuggled the documents out of RAND’s Santa Monica office and copied them with the help of a colleague. Though he is the public face of the leak, Ellsberg was aided by about half-dozen volunteers whose identities have stayed secret for 46 years, despite the intense interest of the Nixon Administration, thousands of articles, books, documentaries, and plays, as well as the major film, The Post. The hidden group was so critical to the operation that Ellsberg gave them a code name, The Lavender Hill Mob, which is the name of a 1951 film about a group of amateur bank robbers. Alperovitz, now 81, agreed to be revealed for the first time through an interview with The New Yorker.
“We were trying to stop the war,” Alperovitz told The New Yorker. “I’m not heroic in this, but I just felt it important to act,” he said. “There were lots of people dying unnecessarily. There were lots of people who were taking risks to try to end the war, and I was one of them.”
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