Why the American media shrugged off a story about spying at the United Nations
On Saturday evening March 1, Daniel Ellsberg was noodling around the Web and happened across a story from the British newspaper The Observer that caught his eye under the tantalizing headline, "Revealed: US Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War." The paper's Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy and Peter Beaumont had obtained a copy of a memo from a National Security Agency (NSA) official outlining U.S. plans to spy on certain United Nations Security Council members to get some insight into their thinking on Iraq and the coming Security Council vote.
Interesting, Ellsberg thought. "So I rushed out the next morning at 5 o'clock to get [The New York Times] to see how they were covering it," he told me. Naturally, he was disappointed. And remains so, because, as I write, the Times has yet to mention the story, which has received only scant coverage elsewhere in the American press.
Meanwhile, it's received far more coverage around the globe. And at the end of last week, the story took an ominous new turn. A British employee of the Government Communications Headquarters (Britain's NSA), a 28-year-old woman, was arrested on suspicion of leaking the memo. The Observer reports now that Tony Blair's government -- with his political future conceivably hanging on what happens at the United Nations in the coming days -- has commenced a search for more leakers and is seeking more arrests. Hence Ellsberg's interest.
"A Pentagon Papers case, essentially, is happening right now in Britain," he says, "around a memo whose revelation could dramatically affect the Security Council's vote. And by and large, Americans don't even know about it."
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