The first known whistleblower, the American Daniel Ellsberg, died at the age of 92, the Reuters agency announced.
Ellsberg is called the "father" of whistleblowing by the American media.
Ellsberg, a U.S. military analyst's opinion on the Vietnam War led to the leak of the classified "Pentagon Papers," revealing the U.S. government's deception about the war and launching a major battle for press freedom.
Long before Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks revealed government secrets in the name of transparency, Ellsberg let Americans know that their government was capable of deceiving and even lying to them. In later years, Ellsberg would become an advocate for whistleblowers and leakers, and his leak of the "Pentagon Papers" was featured in the 2017 film "The Post."
Ellsberg went undercover in the media in 1971 in hopes of hastening the end of the Vietnam War. This made him the target of a smear campaign by the Nixon White House, Reuters reminds. Henry Kissinger, who was the president's national security adviser at the time, called him "the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs."
When he went to Saigon for the State Department in the mid-1960s, Ellsberg had an impressive resume. He earned three degrees from Harvard, served in the Marine Corps and worked at the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation, an influential policy think tank.
He was a dedicated Cold War warrior and Vietnam hawk at the time. But Ellsberg said in his 2003 book, "Secrets: A Vietnam Memoir and the Pentagon Papers," that he was only a week into a two-year tour of duty in Saigon when he realized the United States was in a war it would not win.
Meanwhile, at the behest of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Pentagon officials were secretly compiling a 7.000-page report covering US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. When it was completed in 1969, two of the 15 published copies went to the RAND Corporation, where Ellsberg worked again.
With his new perspective on the war, Ellsberg began attending peace rallies. He said he was inspired to copy the "Pentagon Papers" after hearing an anti-war protester say he was looking forward to going to prison for resisting the draft.
Ellsberg began sneaking the secret study out of the RAND office and copying it at night on a rented photocopier—using his 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter as assistants. He took the documents with him when he moved to Boston for a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ended up sitting on them for a year and a half before passing the pages on to The New York Times.
On June 13, 1971, the Times published its first installment of the "Pentagon Papers," and President Richard Nixon's administration quickly asked a judge to halt further publication. Nixon's assertion of executive power and invocation of the Espionage Act set off a press freedom struggle over the extreme censorship of the previous restriction.
Ellsberg's next move was to give the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post and dozens of other newspapers. In New York Times v. USA, the Supreme Court ruled less than three weeks after its initial publication that the press had the right to publish the newspaper, and the Times continued to do so.
The study said that US officials concluded that the war was probably unwinnable and that President John F. Kennedy approved plans for a coup to overthrow the South Vietnamese leader. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, is also reported to be planning to expand the war, including bombing North Vietnam, despite saying during the 1964 campaign that he would not. The newspaper also revealed secret US bombing in Cambodia and Laos and that the death toll was higher than reported.
The Times never said who provided the papers, but the FBI quickly figured it out. Ellsberg surrendered in Boston after two weeks in hiding.
"I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in withholding this information from the American public," Ellsberg said at the time.
He would say he was sorry for not submitting the papers sooner.
Although the Pentagon Papers did not cover Nixon's handling of Vietnam, the White House's "plumbing" unit, which would later carry out the Watergate break-in that led to Nixon's downfall, was ordered to stop further leaks and discredit Ellsberg.
Two and a half months after the initial publication, two men later to be prominent in Watergate - Mr. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt - broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to look for incriminating evidence.
Ellsberg and his RAND colleague were eventually charged with espionage, theft, and conspiracy. But at their trial in 1973, the case was dismissed on the grounds of government misconduct when the burglary was discovered.
In his later years, Ellsberg, who was born on April 7, 1931, in Chicago, became a writer and lecturer campaigning for government transparency and against nuclear proliferation.
He said Snowden, who worked at the National Security Agency and gave reporters thousands of classified documents about government intelligence gathering before fleeing the country, had done nothing wrong. He also said he considers soldier Chelsea Manning a hero for handing over a trove of government files to WikiLeaks.
His books include 2017's "Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" and 2002's "Secrets: A Vietnam Memoir and the Pentagon Papers."
Bonus video:
