Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  There is a story behind my contact with Richardson that I have not told, until now. After his reelection in 1972, Nixon nominated a White House aide named Egil Krogh to be undersecretary of transportation. It was a big leap for a thirty-three-year-old aide who lacked any experience in transportation issues; he was known only as someone who had worked on drug abuse and internal security issues for John Ehrlichman. I had paid no attention to Krogh or his appointment until I got a call from Michael Pertschuk, a quick-witted Democrat who was chief counsel of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Pertschuk told me he and a colleague were monitoring Krogh’s confirmation before the committee and found something off about it. There was something wrong with the guy, Pertschuk said. I do not recall the exact words, but the message was that this seemingly upstanding White House nominee was very troubled. One did not ignore such a hint from Pertschuk, who would go on to serve with distinction as head of the Federal Trade Commission in the Carter administration, so I made an appointment to visit Krogh before the full Senate had scheduled a vote on his confirmation. He was still at work in the White House, and my pretext was the international drug issue; Krogh and a colleague, a former aide to Kissinger named David Young, had traveled to Southeast Asia in late 1972 to ask questions, and we talked about that. I asked a bunch of leading questions but came away thinking that there was no hidden agenda in Bud, as he was known; he seemed to be earnest but unhappy.

  Then, one day in the spring of 1973, Krogh telephoned me at the Times. He had a problem and wondered if I would meet him at the office of a lawyer named William Treadwell in downtown Washington. Treadwell turned out to be a prominent member of the Christian Science Church in the Washington area, and Krogh, as a committed member of the faith, had turned to Treadwell for guidance. Krogh explained that he had a crisis of conscience because he had not told me the truth when we met earlier and, after consultation with Treadwell, it had been determined that he could absolve himself by doing so now. So, on a bright sunny day in late April, or early May, I was stunned by what he told me—that he and David Young had been members of a secret internal security group in the White House, known formally, as I learned later, as the Special Investigations Unit, and informally as the Plumbers, that in 1971 recruited G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative, to assemble a trusted team to do whatever was needed—provided there would be no link to the White House—to find out what else Daniel Ellsberg knew that could be damaging to Nixon’s reelection. What the Hunt-Liddy team did, of course, was break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst in Los Angeles. The two men later orchestrated the famed Watergate break-in in June 1972. Krogh told me that he was also going to confess all to federal prosecutors and asked that I not write about our conversation until he had done so. With that understanding, I agreed to treat his absolution as a private matter between him and me, as the person he wronged, in front of a representative of his church. His goal was to free himself from his burden that, as Pertschuk saw, was tormenting him. After my hour or two with him and Treadwell, I knew that the emerging Watergate scandal was going to get much darker, as did Bud Krogh. He subsequently did agree to cooperate with federal prosecutors and spent four and a half months in jail after being given a two- to four-year sentence for his role in the Los Angeles break-in.*3

  I honored my agreement with Krogh, but I did privately relay much of what I learned to an aide to Richardson soon after Nixon appointed him attorney general in May 1973. Richardson had been given the job by Nixon, so I assumed, with the understanding that he would protect the President and Kissinger from the hell that was coming their way. I have no idea whether the information I relayed was useful, but Richardson and I talked many times, always on background, during the next year or two.

  He understood early, as I did, that Watergate was going to get much uglier.

  *1Kovach, after his retirement from the Times in 1989, spent twelve years as curator at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

  *2I was completely immersed in my work that spring and was persuaded—forced might be more apt—to join my wife one evening at a party at the nearby home of the Reverend Paul Moore, the Episcopal bishop of Washington. Moore, along with the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, had led the church to its unconditional support for civil rights and unyielding opposition to the Vietnam War. I noticed a huge crowd of teenagers outside the Moore home but thought little of it. Once inside I was eventually approached by a pleasant Brit and his Japanese girlfriend who knew I worked for the Times and they told me of the guy’s problem in obtaining a green card and permanent residence in the United States because of his opposition to the war and a previous conviction in England for smoking hashish. I had a teenage niece named Laura whose best friend was one of the Moore daughters, and I could not help noticing as the three of us talked that Laura’s pal was hopping up and down and making gestures to me and signs about…what? Of course, it turned out the Brit was John Lennon and his friend was Yoko Ono. How was I to know? Neither had anything to do with Watergate. Lennon called or came to see me the next day at the Times offices, and the paper eventually wrote stories about what was clearly a Nixon administration vendetta against him because of his Vietnam War stance. A few years after Lennon’s untimely death in 1980, Yoko Ono gave me and my wife a breakfast and tour of the apartment she had shared with Lennon in New York. It was filled with dozens of framed drawings by the Beatle, all suggesting the world had yet to see the best of him.

  *3I left a series of messages for Krogh with one of his good friends when I decided to write about our extraordinary meeting and relayed the essence of what I would say. He did not respond. I sent a similar summary to Bill Treadwell, who is retired and resides in North Fort Myers, Florida, and he responded with his recollection of our meeting. He told me that it was Krogh’s idea to meet with me and correct the record. “I did not want him to talk to you, or anybody from the press,” Treadwell wrote me in August 2017. “Bud insisted you were a ‘straight shooter,’ knew you from your work, and felt he could trust you. I finally agreed so long as it was in my law office and only the three of us….Bud decided the time had come to completely ‘come clean,’ cooperate with the prosecutors…and tell honestly all that he knew and had done himself.” I later called Pertschuk to check his recollections, and he said then what he had not before—that Krogh had spoken of the existence of the plumbers in his initial talks with the committee.

  · FOURTEEN ·

  Me and Henry

  One of my most memorable stories that spring came on Thursday, May 17, 1973, and it created turmoil inside Kissinger’s National Security Council office as well as inside the Times Washington bureau. I reported, without naming sources, that Kissinger had personally provided the FBI with the names of a number of his closest NSC aides and of newsmen to be wiretapped. Among them was Helmut Sonnenfeldt, perhaps Kissinger’s closest friend on his staff, who had just been nominated to be undersecretary of the Treasury Department. All hell broke loose.

  A few days earlier William Ruckelshaus, an honorable guy who was the acting FBI director, had revealed that thirteen government officials and four newsmen had been wiretapped at various times from 1969 until 1971. The story set off the usual mad scramble to learn who had ordered the FBI to do what, and it quickly became known that a number of Kissinger’s closest aides on the National Security Council had been overheard on the tape. Kissinger acknowledged that he had seen summaries of some of the conversations but insisted that he had not asked that the taps be installed and had not approved any of them in advance. Until this point, Kissinger, beloved by the media because he was always accessible, had managed to escape much of the obloquy being directed at the President and his senior aides, although Nixon’s machinations, including the yet to be determined authorization of the break-in on the Democratic headquarters, were linked to his preelection anxiety over his and Kissinger’s continuing endorsement of th
e Vietnam War.

  I was far from a Kissinger advocate at the time. My suspicions about his role in setting up John Lavelle as a fall guy had grown as I reported on that unresolved saga the year before. I had met with Henry only once, shortly after I returned from my trip to Hanoi in late March 1972. We talked for half an hour or so at his invitation in his White House office; John Negroponte, an aide who worked on Vietnam issues as well as the Paris peace talks, sat in. Kissinger was more than pleasant—I was, after all, going to be at the Times to do investigative reporting, and he was having his way with the Washington bureau—and there was nothing special about our chat. He asked about morale in Hanoi, and I told him what he already had to know: that I had seen no evidence that the American B-52 bombings and other attacks had diminished the intensity of popular support. It was a boilerplate comment, but at that point Kissinger turned to Negroponte and exclaimed that this young reporter had told him more about what was going on inside the North than all of the secret CIA reports he’d seen. It was malarkey and I remember wondering how Kissinger had managed to get away with such fulsome flattery with the White House press corps. I thought the reporters assigned to that beat were at the top of the game and could not be as easy to please as was the Pentagon press corps in my days there. I was wrong and Kissinger was right.

  It was only after the Ruckelshaus admission on Monday, May 14, that I got involved in the wiretapping saga, and how I did it was hardly a brilliant feat of investigative reporting. I was called shortly after the Ruckelshaus disclosure by William C. Sullivan, a longtime FBI official who had been pushed out of the bureau by the despotic J. Edgar Hoover in the fall of 1971. At the time, Sullivan, whom I had met years earlier, was in charge of all of the bureau’s investigative activities, including wiretaps. Bill, who died in a hunting accident in 1977, invited me to a late lunch at a restaurant very near the FBI headquarters downtown. I innocently took it to be purely a social occasion, because I knew the restaurant would be full at lunch, as it always was, with senior FBI officials. We did the usual chitchat, with me more than a little anxious to get back to my Watergate madness, and at the end of lunch Bill asked me to let him leave first. There will be a little something for you on my chair, he said. Sure enough, he’d been sitting on a manila envelope that I grabbed, trying hard to be very cool. I opened it as soon as I got back to the office and found seventeen formal White House wiretap requests for the FBI, sixteen of them signed by Henry Kissinger. They included newsmen with whom he chatted frequently, and many of his close NSC aides, as well as the senior aides to Mel Laird, the secretary of defense, and Bill Rogers, the hapless secretary of state. Kissinger was wiretapping friend and foe—especially his foes—in the bureaucracy.

  Sullivan’s portfolio also included documents indicating that the wiretaps had been put in place on the home telephones of those targeted. The papers listed the names of the FBI technicians who had done the work. I found a few of them at home that Monday night, and they confirmed, with some asperity, that yes, they had done the deed. I told the national desk Tuesday morning what I had, called the White House press office, told someone there what I was planning to write, and left word for Kissinger to call me. A few hours later the trouble began. Scotty Reston, who had an office in the far reaches of the bureau, padded up to my desk in slippers and asked if it were indeed so that I was going to target Kissinger in my next story. His message was very direct: Do you understand that if you do this story, Henry will resign? I had not had much to do with the estimable Scotty, though I knew he had been more than a little irritated earlier when one of my stories was based on traditionally secret grand jury testimony. Scotty’s position was very direct: The New York Times does not violate the sanctity of grand juries. He was right, up to a point. The paper had hesitated a few weeks earlier to run a good Watergate story I proffered because it came from someone linked to a grand jury. A few days later Carl and Bob published the same story, clearly with the same source, all over The Washington Post’s front page. My discarded story was flung into the Times’s second edition, and it was clear to me that any important Watergate story, if it checked out, was going to be published on page 1. The old rules were gone.*1

  I did not worry about Kissinger’s rights; his immorality and deceit, and power, made him fair game, so I thought. In the midst of the Watergate onslaught, however, The Times of London accused the Times and the Post of interfering with the judicial system by publishing “vast quantities of prejudicial matter” that would lead to “lynch law” in the trials of those accused. I had discussed the issue in an exchange of memos with the retired Lester Markel, a famed Times editor who had invented the Sunday magazine, which had boosted my confidence as a freelancer by publishing every story I suggested. Markel also was the man behind the Sunday “News of the Week in Review” section, for which I constantly wrote; it gave me a venue for analyzing the stories I was reporting, asking questions that I could not in the news sections. Markel retired from the newspaper in 1968 but maintained a strong interest in the day-to-day reporting, and he was worried about trial by newspapers and wanted to meet with me and ask whether, in my drive to match Woodward and Bernstein, eagerness had not eclipsed scruples. I thought he was right when it came to grand jury issues, but also understood that going after a president, as the grand jury was doing, was an extraordinary event that also happened to be highly competitive. I begged off a meeting by saying I was too exhausted to be “other than discursive on any subject, let alone the propriety of blasting away at (perhaps) innocent people every day without due process. In particular,” I added in a memo, “I do not wish to participate in my beheading.” I was aware that Rosenthal and his deputies were letting me run now, when they needed me, but I did not like being seen as a hit man.

  I spoke to Kissinger by telephone about the wiretaps before filing my story. He insisted that all of our conversations had to be off the record, or he would have nothing to do with me, so I of course agreed, only to learn decades later from an academic who filed a Freedom of Information request that Kissinger was provided with verbatim typed transcripts of our very infrequent talks within hours. He insisted then, according to the transcript, that his motives in authorizing the wiretaps “were honorable.” The wiretaps “had to be conducted in the interests of the country. It turned out to be a protection for innocent people [in] the way it was handled.” Needless to say, those who were wiretapped did not see it that way. One aide, Morton Halperin, had a special reason to take offense at Kissinger’s decision to put him on the list. He had been one of Kissinger’s most trusted associates in early 1969 and had drafted many of the more important NSC decision papers for Kissinger. Halperin sued over the wiretapping and did not drop his case until he got a public apology two decades later from Kissinger. He also got a copy of the FBI transcripts of the wiretap and learned in late 1969 that Ina, his then-wife, had been overheard complaining that she thought the house telephone was wiretapped. The FBI wiretap log showed that after her complaint about a beeping on the telephone, the agent monitoring her phone wrote, “There isn’t any beeping on the line. Ina has a complex her phone is being tapped.”

  I was not above flattery, of course, in my telephone chat with Kissinger, but he outdid me when it came to posturing. I began our chat, not knowing he was recording it, by saying, “Hi, Dr. Kissinger. I know we’re driving you half-crazy. All of your friends are telling us if we don’t stop, you’re going to leave and you’re a national asset and I think we all agree. I know Scotty certainly does.” Kissinger responded, “It’s a little disconcerting for me to have to spend all my time answering phone calls.” Me: “Well, let me tell you the more bad news I have….Everybody is leaking everything, as you know.” We talked about those who were wiretapped, and I said, “Well, it’s not going to be a nice story.” I added at a later point, innocently enough, I guess, because I do think I meant it, “The only spirit is truth, as you know, Dr. Kissinger, and I assume that’s the one we all work on.” Kissinger’s ans
wer was ingenious, if sheer pap: “Look, at this point the only thing that needs to concern us all, whatever our different views may be, is to presume some integrity and dignity for this country….And to get us back to some things that we can be proud of….And that’s what, you know, in my own way that’s what I’m trying to do here.” I was doing a lot of double-talking for sure, but he, with his practiced cant, far outdid me.

  Kissinger knew that few, if any, would believe his motives for the wiretapping of his aides and others were altruistic, including me, and so he sicced General Alexander Haig, his sometimes loyal deputy, on me. Haig called me a few times during the afternoon to inquire whether the story directly linking his boss to the wiretaps was going to be published the next morning. Yes, I said. There was an astonishing final call at deadline, around 7:00 p.m. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Seymour?” In all of our previous conversations, I’d been Sy. I again said yes. “Let me ask you one question then,” Haig said. “Do you honestly believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in such police-state tactics as wiretapping his own aides? If there is any doubt, you owe it to yourself, your beliefs, and your nation to give us one day to prove that your story is wrong.” I remember staring at my phone in astonishment. The story ran and Kissinger did not resign.

  Kissinger was named secretary of state by Nixon that September while continuing to serve as national security adviser. It was an unprecedented bit of double-dipping that moved Kissinger close to absolute control of the foreign policy process. It also signaled Nixon’s conviction that Kissinger’s popularity with the press was Nixon’s greatest asset in his fight to stay in office. The saga of Kissinger and the wiretaps dragged on for another year or so, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee commenced hearings, and Kissinger, as he had done with the Lavelle matter, escaped any sanction after insisting that he would resign unless the hearings erased what he called a stain on his “public honor.” The most dramatic threat came in June 1974 during a trip to the Middle East by President Nixon, one seen by many as a futile last hurrah in an effort to avoid impeachment. My colleague John Crewdson, who had continued, with Walter Rugaber, to expertly cover the Watergate inquiries, had alerted the White House to the fact that the Times was going to publish an internal FBI memorandum directly linking Kissinger to the placing of wiretaps whose purpose was uncovering those on his NSC staff who were leaking information. Kissinger summoned newsmen to a news conference in Salzburg, Austria, on the eve of the Nixon trip, to make a preemptive strike. It was the same old, same old: “I do not believe it is possible to conduct the foreign policy of the United States under these circumstances when the character and credibility of the secretary of state is at issue. And if it is not cleared up, I will resign.” My view was that staying in office was the best defense Kissinger would have to ward off a prosecution for perjury—the man lied the way most people breathed—and worse.