Like all good spy stories, it started out simply.

The Nieman Fellows--journalists spending a year taking courses at Harvard--were to have three guests this week: Daniel Ellsberg '52, the one-time Rand Corp. analyst who released the Pentagon Papers; William E. Colby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Victor Marchetti, co-author of "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence."

James C. Thomson Jr., curator of the Niemans, said he felt the viewpoints of the three would be likely to give the Niemans a balanced look at American intelligence operations.

The first obvious twist to this simple plot came late Monday night, when the New American Movement called for a picket line to greet Colby the next evening. About 150 people braved a steady drizzle Tuesday outside the Faculty Club, while Colby was reportedly running into some hostile questioning inside. He did not, however, say much that was startling.

But earlier in the day, the plot had begun to thicken. Ellsberg--who joined the picket lines that night--had decided his talk to the Niemans was serving to "legitimize" Colby's.

Ellsberg said he wanted his talk made public, and Thomson accordingly released to The Crimson a tape made for possible eventual publication in Nieman Reports, the fellowship's quarterly magazine.

Ellsberg's talk included an assertion that Colby said this September at a Washington conference on the CIA that there was "a political decision," with which he agreed, not to alert Chile's Popular Unity government to the imminence of the September 1973 military coup.

State Department officials who have acknowledged having advance reports of the coup have generally maintained that the reports were simply too common to be taken seriously.

Ellsberg also said the antiwar moratoriums of 1969 apparently "derailed" Nixon administration plans to mine Haiphong harbor that fall, two and a half years before the eventual mining occurred. And as in any spy story, Ellsberg cited some sources--a Washington Monthly article, Morton Halperin and John Paul Vann--while leaving others, such as National Security Council members, unnamed.