Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  My work brought me into contact with usually reclusive John C. Stennis, the conservative Democratic senator from Mississippi who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. I didn’t know Stennis but sensed that he would be appalled by the cheating that was going on, and keep his concerns to himself, just as I had correctly guessed years earlier that L. Mendel Rivers, the conservative chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, would be troubled by the massacre at My Lai. I was told Stennis was an early bird who got to his office by 7:00 a.m., so I called at that time one weekday and he answered the phone. He had been following my stories, and he and I began a series of early morning telephone conversations that went on for years. He would talk to me, he said at the beginning, about the Lavelle matter and my splurge of stories about it if we kept what was said between ourselves. It was reassuring to know that Stennis was deeply troubled by the command-and-control issues involved, especially because, as he said to me one morning, we were in a war that he thought had to be won. He said he was going to authorize hearings on the case and wanted me to know that if I kept going on the issue, as he knew I would, my Times stories could—I cannot forget these words—“destroy the Pentagon.” I suspected then that he knew that Lavelle had been given authority to conduct the bombings. It was a bit hard to fathom, given his reputation as defender of everything military, but Stennis repeatedly encouraged me to write the truth as I knew it.

  The Lavelle story lingered through the end of the year. The Senate held a series of public hearings in the fall, and Lavelle finally acknowledged, during his testimony, that he had received higher authority. All above him in the immediate chain of command—the air force chief of staff, the army general in charge of the war effort, and Mel Laird, the secretary of defense—denied in subsequent testimony that they had any knowledge of Lavelle’s actions.

  Decades later, the real story emerged in the White House tape recordings and it was ugly. In February 1972, Nixon had ordered his generals, through Kissinger, to expand the air war by bombing North Vietnamese anti-aircraft missile sites at will. By then, as Nixon and Kissinger knew, Lavelle had been attacking those sites, without a formal order, for months. On June 14, 1972, two days after publication of my first article on the issue, Nixon was upset about the leak of the illegal bombing and about Lavelle’s firing. “I just don’t want him to be made a goat,” he told Kissinger. Twelve days later, with the first stories about the Senate hearings, Nixon again expressed guilt about Lavelle and told Kissinger, “I just do not feel right about pushing him into this thing and then he takes a bad rap.” Kissinger urged him to stay out of it, and Nixon agreed to do so, saying, “I want to keep it away if I can, but I do not want to hurt an innocent man”—it was as if he had no power to intervene. Lavelle was drummed into an early, and unfair, retirement.

  I was never in touch with Jack Lavelle again—he passed away in 1979—but his wife and two of his children did occasionally write to me, including a son who told me that he was one of the two boys who had waited an hour in the family car as his dad and I talked at the golf course. In late October 1972, when it was clear that there would be no absolution for his father, the oldest boy, Jack Lavelle Jr., wrote me a note that I will keep forever. “It is amazing how things can be distorted in the free press,” he said. “I guess that implies freedom from accuracy and license to accuse from the hip if you’re aiming below the belt. Gen. Lavelle didn’t ask for mercy, just honesty. You were fair and honest…didn’t moralize or make implications. On behalf of my family and myself, I thank you…for your impartial hard work.” One letter like that in a decade is all a reporter can ask for.

  My initial splash of Lavelle stories ended in late June, just as the first Watergate story broke in The Washington Post. By then, I had been moved into the bureau’s foreign policy cluster and was sitting across from Bernard Gwertzman, the very competent point man for stories involving Henry Kissinger and his National Security Council (NSC). There was a near-daily ritual involving Bernie that stunned me. On far too many afternoons around 5:00, Max Frankel’s secretary would approach Bernie and tell him that Max was at that moment on the phone with “Henry” and the call would soon be switched to him. Sure enough, in a few moments Bernie would avidly begin scratching notes as he listened to Kissinger—he listened far more than he talked—and the result was a foreign policy story that invariably led the paper the next morning, with quotes from an unnamed senior government official. After a week or two of observing the process, I asked the always affable and straightforward Bernie if he ever checked what Henry was telling him with Bill Rogers, the secretary of state, or Mel Laird at the Pentagon. “Oh no,” he said. “If I did that, Henry wouldn’t speak to us.”

  Frankel was paying little attention to me, but I worked closely with Bob Phelps, the deputy bureau chief and a wonderful editor whom I came to trust totally. I continued to focus on everything that was wrong with the war, and Frankel seemed to have no issues with that. I wrote a few front-page stories that summer about the CIA’s alleged role in running drugs as part of its covert operations in Southeast Asia, as reported in a new book by Alfred McCoy, then a graduate student at Yale University. An academic publishing a book is one thing, but for the Times to give wide exposure to his findings was unexpected and traumatic for the CIA. As a result, I received a visit from a senior officer in the Directorate of Operations—the Agency’s so-called dirty tricks bureau—who could not quite understand why I published such stories given that the Agency had denied it all. It did not help, I guess, that I had quoted a former CIA officer with years of experience in Vietnam as saying that McCoy’s work was “10 per cent tendentious and 90 per cent of the most valuable contribution I can think of.” It was clear that from the CIA’s point of view I was running amok.*

  In early July, I wrote an article that led the paper about the Pentagon’s previously unknown cloud-seeding program in Southeast Asia whose goal was to create storms that would hinder, so the military hoped, enemy troop movement and suppress anti-aircraft fire. It turned out, as I wrote later, that Secretary of Defense McNamara had in 1967 ordered an end to such efforts, whose long-term impact on the environment was not at all understood. The Pentagon, however, continued to seed clouds until late 1971. There was another summertime series of articles dealing with allegations that the United States was targeting dikes in North Vietnam. In fact it was the anti-aircraft sites built on top of the dikes that were the targets. In late July there were more front-page stories based on testimony from war veterans who told of knowingly targeting North Vietnamese and Vietcong hospitals. I wrote a long piece for The New York Times Magazine about the exploits of a former air force captain who had spent eighteen months working out of a secret office in Laos on the clandestine bombing campaign there. The magazine, like the daily paper, was totally supportive of me. The headline of the story was “How We Ran the Secret Air War in Laos.” By the end of the summer I had become the point man for those in the military and, more important, for those inside the CIA who were troubled by what they knew.

  I was making Rosenthal happy—and more than a little anxious about my personal politics. At one point in the fall, while visiting the Washington bureau, he snuck up behind me, ruffled my hair, and said, “How’s my little commie?” He then added, “And what do you have for me today?” It was his way of telling me he knew I was keeping my personal politics out of my reporting. There was always residual anxiety about those of us on the paper who were open about their dislike of the war. At one point in the mid-1970s, with Saigon on the verge of falling to the North, I was going to lunch in New York with Gloria Emerson, Tony Lewis, and Richard Eder, a brilliant colleague who shared our feelings, and we bumped into Abe and Arthur Gelb, the city editor, who was Abe’s close friend. “Ah, the cell is meeting,” Gelb said. My hatred of the Vietnam War stemmed not from an ideology but from what I had learned in reading and reporting on it—on-the-job training, in a sense.

  I stayed busy and kept the hell
away from the Watergate story. I knew nothing about the Nixon White House or the presidential aides who worked there. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post whiz kids—neither one was thirty years old in 1972, and I was all of thirty-five—were onto an issue that I felt could doom the Nixon presidency. The Times Washington bureau, though, was doing little on the story. Frankel and his senior editors seemed unperturbed as the Post kept on banging away. Gwertzman told me more than once that summer that Frankel and other higher-ups in the bureau had been assured by Kissinger that the Post was making a huge mistake in pushing the stories by the two young reporters. There was nothing to it, and the Post would be embarrassed.

  The tension between the Washington bureau and the home office in New York had been the stuff of gossipy magazine and newspaper reports for nearly a decade, but I did not understand the depth of those feelings until 1980, when Harrison Salisbury, who spent more than twenty-five years at the Times, wrote Without Fear or Favor, a book on the paper’s history that he described as uncompromising. By the end of the day on Saturday, June 17, 1972—the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington took place early that morning—the Post, Salisbury wrote, had eight reporters assigned to the story. At the Washington bureau of the Times,

  no alarm bells rang….Not many members of the forty-man Washington bureau worked on Saturdays. It was an assignment everyone tried to avoid. They wanted to be away for the weekend, to their houses in the West Virginia hills, the Blue Ridge of Virginia, the eastern Maryland shore, or by mid-June in Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket where half the staff spent the summer….Nothing was more un-chic than to stay in grubby Nixonian Washington over a weekend at any time from June 15 to September 15. Nobody worth knowing possibly could be in town.

  Salisbury was exaggerating, of course. Frankel had brought a bunch of first-rate young reporters onto his staff—among them, Walter Rugaber, John Crewdson, and Christopher Lydon—who were chasing the Watergate story, but the Post had the inside track and was holding it dear. Salisbury’s mean-spirited words were imprecise, but the gist of what he wrote was not. Abe Rosenthal was enraged and embarrassed by the success of his main competitor, and changes were coming. I knew nothing of this.

  * * *

  —

  THAT FALL, after a family vacation that included a visit with Erik Erikson and his son Kai, then teaching at Yale, my merry way with the Times got more complicated. I was continuing to report on the Senate hearings on the unauthorized bombing issue, watching sadly as one senior general after another dissembled in a successful effort to put the full onus for the unauthorized bombing on the disgraced Jack Lavelle. By then I had become friendly with Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers fame, and he, as one of Kissinger’s early advisers, told me that the Pentagon, at Nixon and Kissinger’s insistence, had systematically bombed Cambodia in secret for more than a year in an effort to deny the Vietcong a sanctuary. I talked to former Kissinger aides who knew the story—the illegal bombing would later become an item of impeachment for Nixon—but none of them would go on the record. I was aware that someone had to be quoted by name to enable the Times to publish a story of such import within two months of an election that Nixon was heavily favored to win.

  I was invited to a dinner hosted by one of Eugene McCarthy’s Irish Catholic cronies from the 1968 campaign, a retired senior operative for the CIA. I had made contact earlier with a number of former and present CIA officers with a story or two to tell; the fact that I was able to publish the critical stories I had in the Times obviously was a factor in their coming to me. I asked my host at one point during the dinner—there were a few other old hands from the Agency there—about the CIA’s highly secret plans to use a salvage ship owned by Howard Hughes to recover a Soviet submarine, with three nuclear warheads aboard, from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. I used the then current code word for the operation and the table froze. My host responded that he hoped I would not write the story until the mission was completed.

  Washington certainly worked in strange ways, but the dinner table confirmation enabled me to go back to those former agents, who shared a lot of disturbing information with me, with renewed confidence in their status as insiders; an inevitable fear for any reporter who is critical of his government’s policies is being fed a false story that would be professionally catastrophic. I resolved early that I would never publish information from someone on the inside without verifying it elsewhere, even if a second source insisted I had to pretend that he did not exist. Abe Rosenthal made a point, after I was hired and began writing inside stories for the Times, to speak privately to me and ask for the names of all of the sources involved, including those not cited in any way by me. I had no hesitancy in telling all to him. In some cases, the unnamed source was a senior official in the White House or even in the CIA. One source led to another, and I learned of three major issues that were creating controversy inside the Agency, led by Richard Helms, the urbane old-timer who meshed brilliantly with the Washington establishment. One involved the recovery of the downed Soviet submarine, an operation whose budget was estimated at $750 million at a time the federal government was cutting back milk subsidies for public school lunches; the second dealt with the CIA’s frantic efforts to undermine the government of Salvador Allende of Chile, a socialist who was unafraid to speak out against American foreign policy; and the third was total dynamite—the existence of Operation Chaos, a secret project authorized in 1967 to collect intelligence inside the United States on anti–Vietnam War protesters and other suspected dissidents. Such activity was in direct violation of the CIA’s charter, which explicitly forbade the Agency to operate inside the United States.

  The stories would take time, lots of it. I understood that going that deep into the Agency was a hell of a lot more complicated than writing about the unfair cashiering of a general. I had relied on Bob Phelps to keep Frankel aware of what I was doing, but the CIA was a formidable target, and I wrote a long memorandum to Frankel about the three stories, explaining what I knew, what I needed to know, and something about my sources. I did not remember that Frankel had published a series of articles in early 1972 about the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, obviously with a great deal of help from Kissinger, one of which told how Nixon had successfully resisted pressure from the CIA to be more aggressive in opposition to Allende. Even if I had recalled the stories, I would have sent the memo; Frankel was far too bright and competent not to realize that stories evolve.

  A month went by with no answer. I kept busy in the interim. I had gotten to know and respect Mrs. Cora Weiss, a leading New York City activist against the war who, through her contacts with the North Vietnamese, had become a funnel for mail to and from the American prisoners of war in Hanoi. She filled a natural void, since the U.S. government refused to acknowledge the North and thus was unable to handle mail for the prisoners. In September, Cora flew to Hanoi to accept in her care three American prisoners who had been released by the North. She was accompanied by Mrs. Minnie Lee Gartley, whose son, navy lieutenant Mark L. Gartley, was one of those released. The flight from Hanoi stopped in Moscow, and from there the five of them flew on a commercial flight to New York, via Copenhagen. I was invited by Cora to join the group in Copenhagen. The Times allowed me to do so, and I was able to spend useful time with the former prisoners and also witness a very tense standoff at John F. Kennedy Airport after the regular passengers had departed. The three men were to go directly to a nearby military hospital for evaluation, and a team of Pentagon officials, on edge because the prisoners had been freed by Cora Weiss, and not by the U.S. government, boarded the plane to begin the process. Mrs. Gartley stunned all by insisting on taking her son home for a few days before he was to report to the hospital. A senior Pentagon official angrily told her that the lieutenant, prisoner or not, was still a navy officer and was obligated to go where he was ordered. At that, Mrs. Gartley burst into tears
, and said, “I haven’t cried since the day you called me and said my son was shot down.” As I watched and took notes, another senior Pentagon official whispered to me, speaking of the Pentagon’s insistence that Gartley could not go home with his mother, “I told them not to do it.” I of course began my story for the next morning’s Times with Mrs. Gartley’s tears.

  A few days later, I wrote a far more significant dispatch, based on information I learned in talking to the pilots en route from Copenhagen, about the high standard of discipline that was being maintained among the prisoners in Hanoi, including an internally adopted code of conduct. I coordinated closely with the Pentagon in preparing the article, as any journalist would—hundreds of Americans were still in captivity—and many of the ingenious ways the prisoners found for communicating with one another remained a secret.

  My first six months at the Times had been exciting and I was proud of the work I did, but I understood I was still on the fringes of even more significant stories. An air force general bombing unauthorized targets and a mother crying for her prisoner son made great reading, but there was, so I was learning, another level of Nixon and Kissinger wrongdoing in foreign policy. Woodward and Bernstein were continuing to make headlines in their relentless hunt for the Watergate truth, but I still wanted no part of a story those two owned. I knew nothing of the war between Washington and New York over Watergate coverage, but I was convinced that the three stories I had proffered to Frankel would be as important, if not more, than the continuing Watergate saga. There was a secret world in Washington, and I wanted to write about it.

  I finally got my answer from Frankel late in the fall. In a one-paragraph memo to “sh” from “mf,” I was told that my story ideas were interesting and should be written in a single dispatch that described the lengths the national security establishment had gone to to protect American interests and monitor Soviet gains in technology. Be sure to run it by “Henry [Kissinger] and Dick [Helms],” Frankel wrote. I was crushed, and then horrified, and then realized that if I could not find a way to get what I knew into the newspaper, I would have to resign. Run it by Henry and Dick? They were the architects of the idiocy and criminality I was desperate to write about. I could not imagine how a senior editor, one as bright and supportive as Frankel had been, could not grasp the implications of what I was proposing. (I would be even more confounded by Max’s indifference when I learned later of the pressure he was under because of the bureau’s failings on the Watergate story. My stories offered the guy a chance to show New York, at a difficult time, what his bureau could do.)