A lot of Trump’s speech — and an even greater share of the emotional energy, since he seemed bored reciting misleading economic numbers — was devoted to lamenting a wave of violent crime by immigrants. Was this racist? Yes, of course. But saying that doesn’t capture the full evil of what he was doing (and I use the term “evil” advisedly).
For he wasn’t exaggerating a problem, or placing the blame on the wrong people. He was inventing a problem that doesn’t exist, and using that imaginary problem to demonize brown people.
Racist dog-whistles are, of course, nothing new in American politics. Indeed, much of the rise of the modern, far-right GOP rested on the politics of racial division, with even “respectable” Republicans perfectly willing to exploit racial fear and hostility — most famously, Bush the elder’s Willie Horton ad.
But here’s the thing: back in the 70s and 80s there really was a crime wave, and a lot of it did involve blacks. That’s no excuse for racism, let alone the cynical political exploitation of that racism. But at least the panic was about something real.
This time, by contrast, there is no crime wave — there have been a few recent bobbles, but many of our big cities have seen both a surge in the foreign-born population and a dramatic, indeed almost unbelievable, decline in violent crime:
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FBI
Most notably of all, New York — once the emblem of the supposed collapse of law and order — is safer than it has ever been, despite being run by a mayor who, strange to say, has tried to rein in racist behavior by the police.
So Trump wants us to be scared of brown people based on nothing at all. That’s really ugly.
Correction: January 31, 2018
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the subject of a political advertisement. His nickname has historically been spelled Willie, not Willy.
AT THE SYRIAN BORDER, Golan Heights — Who knew that the future of warfare would present itself with such serene beauty — like one of those warm 19th-century David Roberts landscapes of the Middle East.
How so? I’m traveling along the Israeli border road at the intersection of Lebanon, Syria and Israel, and off in the distance there’s a freshly snow-capped Mount Hermon, begging for skiers. It’s framed by Lebanese and Syrian villages nestled into terraced hillsides, crowned by minarets and crosses. The only sound you hear is the occasional rifle burst from Lebanese hunters.
But this is no Roberts painting. It’s actually the second-most-dangerous spot on the planet — after the Korean Peninsula — and it’s the idyllic backdrop to what 21st-century warfare looks like.
Because hidden in these villages, hillsides and pine forests you can find a state — Israel — trying to navigate a battlefield with a rival state’s army (Syria), a rival regional superpower (Iran), a global superpower (Russia), super-empowered mercenaries and maniacs (Hezbollah and ISIS) and local tribes and sects (Druse and Christians).
I came to this crowded intersection because it could blow up at any moment. If the confrontations in Syria and Iraq between a broad global coalition and ISIS was the big story of 2017, the big story of 2018 will surely be the brewing confrontation between Israel and an Iranian/Hezbollah/Shiite coalition spanning the Syrian and Lebanese borders with Israel.
For the last two years 1,500 to 2,000 Iranian advisers operating out of Beirut and Damascus have been directing thousands of Lebanese pro-Iranian Shiite Hezbollah mercenaries, Syrian Army forces funded by Iran and some 10,000 pro-Iranian Shiite mercenaries from Afghanistan and Pakistan — to defeat Sunni Syrian rebels and ISIS in the Syrian civil war.
Personally, I am not anti-Iranian. I respect that Iran has legitimate security concerns in the Persian Gulf. But I have a couple questions: What the hell is Iran doing over here, helping to snuff out democracy in Lebanon and any hope for power-sharing in Syria, and now posing a direct threat to Israel? And how much is Russia, Iran’s partner in crushing the uprising in Syria — but also a country with good relations with Israel — going to use its advanced S-400 surface-to-air missiles, now covering Syria and Lebanon, to protect Iran and Hezbollah?
Both questions came to the fore this week. Listen to what Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, who just met Vladimir Putin for the seventh time in two years, said after they met on Monday: Israel will not allow Iran to entrench itself in Syria and turn Lebanon into a “factory for precision missiles. … I made clear to Putin that we will stop it if it doesn’t stop by itself.”
Yikes.
So far, the Israeli military command has played this 3-D chess game of 21st-century warfare extremely well — managing to stay out of Syria’s civil war while also surgically bombing attempts by Iran and Hezbollah to upgrade their missile capability against Israel. But Israeli officers will tell you that Hezbollah and Iran have played their side of the board very well, too. And they keep trying to inch forward.
So what’s Israel’s strategy to keep its conflict with Hezbollah and Iran on a low flame? First and foremost, it’s been to reinforce to Hezbollah and Iran, through many channels, that they can’t out-crazy Israel. That is, if Hezbollah and Iran think they can place rocket launchers in densely populated Lebanese and Syrian villages and towns — and expect that Israel will not take them out if it requires large collateral civilian casualties — they are as wrong today as they were in 2006.
Israeli military planners are more convinced than ever that the key reason Hezbollah has avoided major conflict with Israel since the big Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon in 2006 is that Israel’s Air Force — without mercy or restraint — pounded Lebanese infrastructure, Hezbollah offices and military targets in the southern suburbs of Beirut — not to kill civilians but not to be deterred by them, either, if they were nested amid Hezbollah weapons or headquarters.
Yes, it was ugly and brutal, say Israeli planners, but it worked. This is not Scandinavia. “The reality here starts where your imagination ends,” said one Israeli officer. Sometimes only crazy can stop crazy. And Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, definitely got the message. He declared after the 2006 war that he never would have set off that conflict had he known beforehand that Israel would inflict that much damage on his Shiite supporters and their property — “absolutely not,” he said.
Israeli military planners hope he remembers that, and that Iran does, too. They say that if Tehran thinks it can launch a proxy war against Israel from Lebanon and Syria — while the Iranian home front is untouched — it should think again. Israel has not purchased Dolphin-class submarines that can operate in the Persian Gulf, and armed them with cruise missiles, for deep-sea fishing.
But Iran is a determined and wily foe. It has been perfecting its ability to convert dumb surface-to-air missiles, with 1970s technology, into smart, precise surface-to-surface rockets, by reconfiguring them with GPS links, inertial navigation systems, dynamic wings and smart cards. Iran’s ally in Yemen, the Houthis, has used these types of rockets in recent months.
The Israelis told Putin that they would not allow Iran to build such rocket facilities in Lebanon or to transfer such precision missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon via any depots or factories in Syria, and that Russia should not interfere with Israeli operations against them. It’s not clear Putin made any promises.
This is no small matter. Today, if Hezbollah, with its less-precise area rockets, wanted to hit a specific Israeli military building or high-tech factory from Lebanon, it would probably have to launch 25 dumb missiles. By deploying the Iranian upgrades it would have to fire only one — with a very high probability of hitting the target within 30 meters, meaning it could inflict heavy damage on Israel’s infrastructure in a very short period of time.
War is not inevitable. For the last 12 years, Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have been engaging in what one Israeli officer called a “kinetic dialogue,” where both sides try to contain the conflict and not humiliate the other. When, on Jan. 18, 2015, Israel killed an Iranian general and several Hezbollah fighters in Syria, Hezbollah responded by firing a missile at an Israeli Army vehicle along the border, killing two Israeli soldiers. It was the biggest escalation since the 2006 war.
But Israel, after careful thought, chose not to retaliate for the retaliation. Iran and Hezbollah, having made their point, stopped, too. That’s the kinetic dialogue in operation. But how long can that be trusted to work?
Israel, Iran and Hezbollah are all stronger than they were in 2006. But they each also have more to lose by a new rocket war. Israel’s “Silicon Wadi” — its vast network of high-tech companies along its coastal plain — has become a giant growth engine. And Hezbollah and Iran have now assumed virtual control over the Lebanese and Syrian states. No one wants to lose its gains.
That should be a source of optimism. But, alas, there are just too many chances for miscalculation on this crowded 3-D chessboard to be sanguine that the next 12 years will be as quiet as the last 12.
As one Israeli military officer on the Syrian-Israel border remarked to me, “We want to keep the temporary status quo forever, because everything else looks worse.”
In 1971, Gar Alperovitz played a vital, clandestine role in making the Pentagon Papers public.
Photograph by Sharon Alperovitz
In June of 1971, Gar Alperovitz, a thirty-five-year-old historian, sped through suburban Boston, looking for an out-of-the-way pay phone to use to call a reporter. Alperovitz had never considered himself much of a risk-taker. The father of two ran a small economic think tank focussed on community-building. He had participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and rung doorbells with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Boston, as part of an antiwar campaign. But what he was doing on this day, propelled by his desire to end the conflict, could lead to federal prison.
He pulled his old Saab up to a phone booth on the outskirts of Harvard Square, and rang a hotel room nearby. When the reporter picked up, Alperovitz identified himself with the alias he had adopted: “It’s Mr. Boston.” Alperovitz told the journalist to open the door. Waiting in the hallway was a cardboard box, left minutes before by a runner working with Alperovitz. Inside were several hundred pages of the most sought-after documents in the United States—the top-secret Vietnam history known as the Pentagon Papers.
The handoff was one of about a dozen clandestine encounters with journalists that Alperovitz orchestrated over the course of a three-week period, when he and a small group of fellow antiwar activists helped Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst at the rand Corporation, elude an F.B.I. manhunt and distribute the Pentagon Papers to nineteen newspapers. Ellsberg, who had smuggled the documents out of rand’s Santa Monica office two years earlier and copied them with the help of a colleague, has long been the public face of the leak. But Ellsberg was aided by about a half-dozen volunteers whose identities have stayed secret for forty-six years, despite the intense interest of the Nixon Administration, thousands of articles, books, documentaries, plays, and now a major film, “The Post,” starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, about the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg told me that the hidden role of this group was so critical to the operation that he gave them a code name—The Lavender Hill Mob, the name of a 1951 film about a ragtag group of amateur bank robbers. He has referred obliquely to his co-conspirators over the years. But he held back from identifying them because some in the group still feared repercussions.
Now, Alperovitz, who is eighty-one, has agreed to be revealed for the first time. “I’m getting old,” Alperovitz told me, with a laugh. Several other members of the group told me that they still wished to remain anonymous, or declined interview requests. One former Harvard graduate student who also played a major role—she hid the papers in her apartment and organized hideouts for Ellsberg—considered coming forward in this piece, but she ultimately decided not to, after conferring with lawyers. As a green-card holder, she worried that her involvement could lead to her deportation by the Trump Administration. Still, she remains proud of her role. “Those were extraordinary days,” she told me. “It was about questioning the government and being against the government. I was very, very angry about what was happening in Vietnam.”
Alperovitz said that the renewed interest in the Pentagon Papers, brought on by “The Post,” pushed him to finally acknowledge his role, but he also alluded to the “very dangerous” climate under President Trump. A historian and political economist, whose writings have focussed on the dangers of nuclear war and economic inequality, Alperovitz said that Trump’s “outrageous and destabilizing” rhetoric on North Korea compelled him to tell his story and “to suggest to people that it’s time to take action.”
“We were trying to stop the war,” Alperovitz told me, in an interview in his home near Washington. “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.”
Ellsberg told me that Alperovitz, in particular, was “critical to the way this thing worked out,” organizing the broader distribution of the papers. Ellsberg had initially turned over the documents only to Neil Sheehan, a reporter at the Times, which published the first front-page article on the Pentagon Papers, on June 13, 1971. (The Nixon Administration quickly secured an injunction to halt the Times from continuing to publish the documents.) But it was Alperovitz who devised the strategy of distributing the papers to as many news organizations as possible, including the Washington Post, an approach that later proved to be crucial from both a legal and public-relations standpoint. And it was Alperovitz who came up with the elaborate techniques for slipping the documents to reporters while evading the authorities. “Gar took care of all the cloak-and-dagger stuff,” Ellsberg said.
The danger to the Lavender Hill Mob could hardly be underestimated. Alperovitz “would’ve been indicted in a heartbeat” if he had been identified, Ellsberg said. Senior officials in the Nixon White House had become obsessed with arresting and discrediting Ellsberg and any of his accomplices. They created a group of Nixon campaign operatives, who became known as “the plumbers,” to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, in what would be a precursor to the Watergate scandal. In a 2010 documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” Egil Krogh, one of the operatives, says that the Administration was obsessed with identifying who else was involved in the leak. “Did Daniel Ellsberg work alone? Was he working with some other people? Was he part of a conspiracy?” Krogh, who was imprisoned for his role in the Watergate break-in, says in the film. F.B.I. agents—and Nixon’s plumbers—tracked leads from Los Angeles to Paris. The perpetrators, it turned out, met less than a mile from Harvard Square, the epicenter of the liberal, Ivy League élitism that Nixon so detested.
Shortly after surrendering to federal authorities, in June, 1971, for his role in leaking the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg spoke to reporters.
Photograph by Bettmann / Getty
In early June of 1971, Ellsberg, who had left rand and was working as a senior research fellow at M.I.T., hosted a small dinner party at his home in Cambridge. Ellsberg, who was then forty, had never met Alperovitz but invited him after a colleague said that they shared an intense opposition to the war. The Harvard graduate student was there as well.
Alperovitz had worked in the U.S. government on foreign affairs from 1961 to 1966—first in Congress, then at the State Department—and it was there, as an insider, that his opposition to the war hardened. As a Senate aide, in 1964, Alperovitz worked unsuccessfully to stop what he still calls the “phony” Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which allowed President Lyndon B. Johnson to escalate America’s military involvement in Vietnam. More than anything, the congressional vote confirmed his view that the war was a fraud perpetrated on the American public.
At the dinner, Alperovitz and Ellsberg, a former Marine and Pentagon analyst, talked about Nixon, liberal activism, nuclear weapons, and, of course, Vietnam. The top-secret papers never came up. But, as the party wrapped up and Alperovitz walked to his car, the Harvard graduate student pulled him aside and made a cryptic comment about some sensitive material on Vietnam and “boxes and boxes of papers,” Alperovitz recalled.
A day or two later, the graduate student arranged to meet Alperovitz at a park, she told me in an interview. She explained to Alperovitz that Ellsberg had entrusted her with thousands of pages of the documents, and that she had stashed them in cupboards in the pantry of her small apartment. Ellsberg had given copies of the papers to a Times reporter several months earlier, but had not heard from him since. She and Ellsberg didn’t know when the newspaper might run the story, or if it even intended to do so, and were eager to distribute more of the papers to other news outlets. “I needed help to do this work,” the woman told me, and Alperovitz seemed like “exactly the right person.”
When she asked Alperovitz if he would help, he immediately agreed. Decades later, Alperovitz said that his eagerness, despite the obvious risks, still puzzles him. “I’m a very cautious person, but I didn’t blink—which I don’t understand,” he told me. “I’m surprised I didn’t just say, ‘Whoops, I’m busy tomorrow.’ It was out of character.”
In a subsequent meeting with Ellsberg, Alperovitz mapped out a strategy. Ellsberg, who had tried to leak the secret papers to members of Congress but had been rebuffed, wanted to get all seven thousand pages of the papers out at once, if not in the Timesthen in the Washington Post or somewhere else. “My nightmare was that the F.B.I. would catch me and capture all the papers first,” Ellsberg recalled. He even considered using the Harvard Crimson’s presses to print the documents himself. Alperovitz talked him out of it. “I said to Dan, ‘Look, this is seven thousand pages of material, you’ll get one story, maybe two,’ ” Alperovitz said. “If you really want to get this out to the public, you’ve got to break it up and keep the story going.”
To Ellsberg’s surprise, the Times ran its first story on the papers several days later. The Nixon Administration quickly secured an injunction to halt publication. By then, Alperovitz was already working the pay phones around Cambridge and Somerville to contact a reporter from the Post and get more coverage. Days later, with Alperovitz acting as an intermediary, Ellsberg met with a Post reporter in a local motel room and gave him the entire secret report. After the reporter left, Ellsberg and his wife, who were hiding out in the motel, saw on television that F.B.I. agents had descended on their home to question him. For the next two weeks, the Ellsbergs remained holed up, with the Harvard graduate student taking the lead in finding new places to stash them. “I moved them every few days,” she recalled. “I’d call friends and say, ‘I need your apartment for two days, and I just want you to go somewhere else. Just don’t ask me any questions.’ ” Each time the couple moved, she crammed boxes of the secret history into her small Volkswagen and moved them along with the Ellsbergs.
The one time that Ellsberg knew whose apartment he was using, he said, was during weekend that he spent in Cambridge with a friend, Jeffrey Race, a fellow Vietnam veteran. Race recalled watching a television news report with his fiancée about the F.B.I. searching for Ellsberg. “They can’t find him,” Race told me, “and we joked that, ‘Hey, he’s lying right here in his underwear on the floor taking a nap in front of the TV.’ ”
It was at Race’s apartment that Ellsberg had his closest brush with arrest. At Ellsberg’s request, from a pay phone outside of Race’s apartment, Alperovitz called a friend of Ellsberg’s in Los Angeles to arrange a way for him to speak with his children and let them know that he was all right. As Ellsberg watched from the window, Alperovitz hung up and walked away. Minutes later, police cars converged around the phone booth. Ellsberg guessed that the F.B.I. must have been tapping his Los Angeles friend’s phone, or perhaps the pay phone, in their effort to find him. “We ducked behind the window,” Ellsberg recalled. “I’m thinking, Oh my God!” He and his wife left that same night for a different hiding place.
Alperovitz asked the administrator of the Cambridge Institute, the think tank he ran, to vacate her apartment for the Ellsbergs for several days. “It was a very matter-of-fact thing,” the administrator, Nancy Lyons, who is now retired and living in Concord, Massachusetts, said in an interview. She immediately agreed—she saw it as an opportunity to be involved in something larger than herself. “I might have just been naïve, but I didn’t have any hesitation.” The one concern she had, she told me, was that she had waited a long time to get the rent-controlled apartment, and she didn’t want to lose it if someone found out. (No one did.)
Alperovitz’s primary task was devising how to distribute the papers to as many news organizations as possible. Ellsberg usually told Alperovitz which newspapers to contact—the Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Detroit Free Press, among them—but he left it to Alperovitz to figure out the logistics.
Alperovitz told me that he improvised the elaborate handoffs. “I invented this stuff as I went along,” he said. “I don’t know how.” Getting journalists interested in the papers, then the most sought after documents in the United States, was easy. He would call a newspaper’s city desk from a pay phone, identify himself as Mr. Boston—a code name that got a few references in “The Post”—and then offer to share some of the papers. “They were very happy to take them. Everyone wanted to be in on it,” he said.
The trickier part was handing off hundreds of pages of documents without being detected. Alperovitz and the Harvard graduate student recruited a handful of college students—all ardently opposed to the war—to help not only with mundane tasks, like getting the Ellsbergs’ groceries, but also to act as runners who delivered the papers.
During the frantic three weeks it took to distribute the documents, Alperovitz typically didn’t have time to even read all the papers before parcelling them out to reporters. He simply grabbed a few hundred pages, boxed them up, and sent the runners on their way. Alperovitz usually found out what was in each stack only when he read the news stories. The pace was so hectic that he and other participants have trouble remembering the exact sequence today. Alperovitz can’t remember, for instance, which reporter he called at the Cambridge hotel with instructions for finding the papers in the hallway. The former Harvard graduate student recalls a nighttime handoff of papers at an acquaintance’s home, but the details are hazy.
There were also furtive meetings at Boston’s Logan Airport, chosen by Alperovitz because it was a convenient place for out-of-town reporters to blend in. One student helping with the operation was dispatched to Logan to meet a Newsday reporter whom Alperovitz had summoned from Washington. Posing this time as Sam Adams, Alperovitz had the airport page the reporter over the public-address system; the student then handed the reporter a note with directions to find a green plastic shopping bag on a seat in the terminal. Inside were the last two chapters of the Pentagon Papers. The reporter, Martin Schram, recounted the “covert” and “borderline comical plan” in a story last month.
As Alperovitz dispatched members of the Lavender Hill Mob around the city, he never actually met any of the journalists himself—except for one: the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite. Alperovitz, posing again as Mr. Boston, called Cronkite to offer him a scoop—an on-camera interview with Ellsberg, who was still in hiding. Cronkite, like other journalists, seemed to believe he was talking to Ellsberg himself, Alperovitz said. He did not correct him.
Cronkite and his crew rushed to Boston. Alperovitz arranged for them to get a batch of the papers, and had a volunteer drive the anchorman to a nearby home in Cambridge, which an associate had lent for the day. The member of the Lavender Hill Mob “drove them around and around and back and forth to make sure they hadn’t been followed,” Alperovitz said. “If anyone smelled Cronkite, that would be trouble.” (The driver declined to be interviewed for this article.) With Alperovitz looking on, Ellsberg gave a dramatic interview that aired that night.
On June 28th, after a final burst of stories in newspapers from Long Island to Los Angeles, Ellsberg agreed to surrender to federal authorities in Boston. A mob of journalists and onlookers met him outside the federal courthouse. Alperovitz went, too, watching from a distance. He could not risk being seen with Ellsberg, but he wanted to be there to mark the end of the saga that had begun three weeks earlier, at the dinner in Cambridge. What struck him most about the scene, Alperovitz said, was the huge throng of supporters cheering on Ellsberg. “It was like we weren’t alone,” he told me.
Ellsberg never did any prison time. Two years later, a judge threw out the charges against him, ruling that the break-in by Nixon’s plumbers at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office had “incurably infected the prosecution.” For years, Ellsberg kept his distance from the people who helped him for fear of endangering them. He and Alperovitz saw each other occasionally at political or academic events, but they rarely spoke of those weeks in Cambridge, both men said. When Ellsberg was writing his 2002 memoir, “Secrets,” he went to Alperovitz and asked if he could name him in the book. Ellsberg said that he wanted to finally acknowledge the efforts of him and the others. Alperovitz declined. “I didn’t need credit or blame,” he said.
Last year, Ellsberg was doing a book-signing event when an older woman in line handed him a note asking him to dedicate her book “to The Lavender Hill Mob.” Ellsberg looked up and recognized one of the young students who had helped him. He hadn’t seen her in four decades. “After all these years, it was the most amazing thing,” he said.
Over the last forty years, a few reporters asked Alperovitz if he was involved, but he always denied it. The closest he came to being identified was a reference to an anonymous intermediary in some news reports recounting the leak. Today, he sees those weeks as a risk he had to take at a historic moment for his country. “I was someone who was trying, along with many people, to stop this killing. It was a moral issue of the first order,” he said. If Alperovitz regrets anything, it is only that the revelations in the papers didn’t force a quick end to America’s involvement in the war, as he had hoped. It would be another two years before most American military troops pulled out of Vietnam, and another four before the war came to an end—after the deaths, he noted, of “three million people, fifty-seven thousand Americans, for nothing.”
Video
The Other Pentagon Papers Whistle-Blower
A historian and political economist speaks publicly for the first time about his quiet but crucial role in helping Daniel Ellsberg leak the documents to journalists.
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