Were the Pentagon Papers primarily CIA Whitewashing?

I am not sure about Ellsberg.  Was he one of the 20th century's greatest whistleblowers?  Or was he covering for the CIA?  Nowadays, I tend to believe the latter but am not sure.  Given that uncertainty, I'd have to start with a presumption of innocence for Ellsberg himself.  OTOH, I can freely shoot the message.

My first sense that something was amiss was attending a meeting featuring Ellsberg on video.  This was around the same time as the Snowden revelations and possibly had to do with them.  What struck me was that all the people whose ideologies I would describe as American Exceptionalist were the very biggest fans of Ellsworth.

I've never actually read the Pentagon Papers and perhaps I should at least skim it to be sure.  It disturbed me that AFAIK it said nothing about the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication.  That was only revealed later.

And then the way the Papers were published in the ultimate warmongering newspaper, The New York Times, has long given me pause.

Then subsequent to that I've discovered a large number of critics of Ellsberg with more solid evidence.  For example, Ronald Thomas West.  It still feels a bit fringy though.

According to these critics, what the Papers basically do is whitewash the CIA involvement in Vietnam, which was massive and central between 1954 and 1964 (and not that it stopped then).  The Papers shift the blame for the war to the White House and the Pentagon and whine that they were not listening to the CIA National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), which are the prominent feature of the Papers.  Meanwhile, the Papers don't say enough what the CIA itself was covertly doing, most often also in contradiction to the NIE

Curiously, the Pentagon Papers were released by Ellsberg right after the CIA was first getting intense scrutiny for it's ubiquitous global drug dealing.  So they also seem to be an effort to change the topic.  And Ellsberg has never confessed his own role in these drug dealing and other operations, which had been extensive.

Ellsberg was no lifelong peacenik.  In fact, he started as one of the very most hawkish, thinking that nukes would probably be the answer.  I suppose he could have changed in those regards however.