Tony Russo (whistleblower)

Anthony J. Russo Jr. (14 October 1936 – 6 August 2008) was an American researcher who assisted Daniel Ellsberg, his friend and former colleague at the RAND Corporation, in copying the Pentagon Papers.

He began working at the RAND Corporation as a researcher in late 1964 and was determined to go to South Vietnam to resolve his personal curiosity about the role of the Vietcong (VC) and the US opposition to them.

[2]: 355 By early 1966, Russo increasingly sympathised with the VC, who he felt had greater legitimacy than the corrupt South Vietnamese government.

Russo and his colleague, Doug Scott, wrote to RAND management complaining of deficiencies in Gouré's leadership, data analysis and the project design; the letter was ignored.

[2]: 166  Russo would later claim that Gouré instituted an informal censorship policy to remove details of torture or mistreatment of VC prisoners and civilians by South Vietnamese forces from RAND reports.

[1][4] On 11 May 1973, federal court judge William M. Byrne Jr. dismissed the case before it reached a jury, after the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist had been burglarized and the FBI had lost records of what may have been illegally taped telephone conversations.