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Russo Helped Leak Pentagon Papers

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The Associated Press

Published: August 11, 2008

SUFFOLK, Va. - Anthony J. Russo, a researcher who helped leak the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers to the media and prompted wider public questioning of the war, has died, police said.

Russo, 71, died in his native Suffolk on Wednesday, police records technician Susan Hart said Sunday. The cause of death was not immediately made public.

The case that became known as the Pentagon Papers helped put the Vietnam War on trial.

It began when Daniel Ellsberg, a top military analyst disillusioned with American policy, decided to release a top-secret, 47-volume Defense Department study of the U.S. role in Indochina over three decades. Russo helped him reproduce and distribute copies of the study.

Ellsberg offered the study to several members of Congress and government officials before deciding to leak it to newspapers.

The government initially tried to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers, first in The New York Times and then in The Washington Post, prompting a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision barring prior restraint of free expression.

Ellsberg and Russo were subsequently charged with espionage, theft and conspiracy for the leak. As co-defendants, they went on trial in Los Angeles, where the papers had been copied.

But in 1973, a federal judge dismissed the case, ruling that the government was guilty of misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg's Beverly Hills psychiatrist that was denounced as having been orchestrated by White House officials seeking to discredit him.

Ellsberg met Russo in Saigon in 1965 and they were both troubled by what they saw during their research.

Ellsberg went on to become an anti-war icon. Russo, retired as a researcher for Los Angeles County, devoted himself to anti-nuclear issues and led Persian Gulf War protests.

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