HISTORY

Pentagon Papers Co-Conspirator Comes Forward

Meet “Mr. Boston,” Gar Alperovitz, now 81.

A Massachusetts man who helped Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post and elude the FBI for nearly a month in 1971 has come forward. According to The New Yorker, Gar Alperovitz, now 81 years old, was known as “Mr. Boston” to journalists when he acted as an intermediary between Ellsberg and the media, and even advised Ellsberg on how to proceed with releasing the Rand Corp. documents that revealed the Pentagon’s deception of American public on the Vietnam War. Part of what Ellsberg dubbed his “Lavender Hill Mob,” Alperovitz met Ellsberg at a dinner party and subsequently “mapped out a strategy” with him on leaking the papers to the press. Alperovitz put together elaborate handoffs of hundreds of documents to different newspapers in the three-week rush to publish. He told The New Yorker that President Trump’s “outrageous and destabilizing” talk regarding North Korea compelled him to come forward now and “to suggest to people that it’s time to take action.”