Morton H. Halperin (born June 13, 1938) is an American expert on foreign policy and civil liberties. He served in the Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton administrations and in a number of roles with think tanks and universities such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard University. He is currently Senior Advisor for the Open Society Institute which was founded by George Soros.

Halperin served in the Department of Defense under President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and was dovish on the Vietnam War, calling for a halt to bombing Vietnam. When Richard Nixon became president in 1969, Henry Kissinger, his new National Security Advisor announced Halperin would join the staff of the National Security Council. The appointment of Halperin, a colleague of Kissinger's at Harvard University in the 1960s, was immediately criticized by General Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; and Senator Barry Goldwater.

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Kissinger soon lost faith in Halperin. A front page story in The New York Times on May 9, 1969, stated the United States had been bombing Cambodia, a neutral country. Kissinger immediately called Hoover to find out who might have leaked this information to the press. Hoover suggested Halperin and Kissinger agreed that was likely. That very day, the FBI began taping Halperin's phones at Kissinger's direction. (Kissinger says nothing of this in his memoirs and mentions Halperin in passing about four times.) Halperin left the NSC in September 1969 after only nine months, but the taping continued until February 1971. Halperin was also placed on Nixon's Enemies List.

He was a friend of Daniel Ellsberg. When Ellsberg was investigated in connection with the Pentagon Papers, suspicion fell on Halperin, who some Nixon aides believed had kept classified documents when he left government service. John Dean claimed that Jack Caulfield had told him of a plan to fire-bomb the Brookings Institution, Halperin's employer, to destroy Halperin's files.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Halperin