Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  I spent most of my time between the summer of 1973 and the fall of 1974 on three more issues that had Kissinger’s markings on them—the secret bombing of Cambodia, the activities of the White House Plumbers, and the CIA’s clandestine war against the Allende government in Chile. I helped make the issues public, found new material that made headlines, and put malfeasant cabinet officials in jeopardy—helping to make Nixon’s presidency unsustainable. I never got to Kissinger in any legal or moral sense, but I did get his attention.

  In July 1973, I began a series of stories about an illegal and astonishing—absolutely the right words—fake bookkeeping system that was authorized somewhere in the upper reaches of the Nixon administration to hide fourteen months’ worth of secret B-52 bombing in Cambodia. The bombings, aimed at disrupting the flow of arms to Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam, ended in May 1970, when the Nixon administration invaded Cambodia and officially recognized the neutral regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The long-running bombing attacks had been disclosed earlier by the press, but not the fact that their existence was hidden by a double-entry bookkeeping system that permitted only a very few in the military and the White House to know that the bombs were not falling inside the borders of South Vietnam, as falsely reported in all of the Pentagon’s classified records, but in Cambodia.

  The existence of the cooked books was made known in a letter sent by a just-retired air force major named Hal M. Knight to Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, an antiwar Democrat who was on the Senate Armed Services Committee, then still dealing with remnants of the Lavelle affair. Hughes and I had become friends during the Lavelle matter—the man could put away a dozen pork chops over lunch—and he forwarded the letter to me. Knight’s disclosure went right onto the front page for Sunday, July 15. In an interview, Knight, who had served in the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, told me he had begun to falsify B-52 bombing records shortly after arriving in South Vietnam in February 1970. The former major quickly got to the crucial issue: The Strategic Air Command’s main function, along with dropping bombs from B-52s in the war, was to carry nuclear weapons and stay on constant airborne patrol on the edges of Russia and China. The B-52 pilots were only a verified presidential command from raining nuclear hell on Russia and beginning World War III. “We were all SAC,” Knight told me. “If somebody [in the Nixon White House] could have punched the right number into the right spot, they could have had us bombing China, if they so chose, instead of Cambodia.” The integrity of America’s nuclear deterrent was being put at risk by someone at the top of the Nixon administration, then immersed in a losing war, who was ordering pilots of the Strategic Air Command to lie.

  I called Kissinger two days later, shortly after noon on July 17, and according to a transcript put together by his office, I began by saying my call “is in the nature of here we go again.” On background, I told him what I knew about Hal Knight’s recollection. I was hoping, naively perhaps, for a serious discussion, given Kissinger’s expertise on arms control and related issues, and what I got was a series of lies. “What I read in your story was total news to me….I don’t know anything about the goddamned reporting system,” he said. “So I wouldn’t even know how to give an order to falsify it if I wanted to….If my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you how the reporting is done.” Kissinger urged me to talk to Al Haig about the issue and promised he would tell him to get in touch with me. He added, almost plaintively, “You know there are a lot of people who have tried to do the right thing, even the moral thing and the right thing, and it’s getting awfully tough when everything—when constantly every action has to be interpreted four years after an event.” Among the very few Kissinger telephone transcripts I obtained years later was one depicting a Kissinger-to-Haig call four hours later that dealt with his talk with me. Kissinger asked, “Did we ever tell them [the Strategic Air Command] how they should do their report?” Haig: “Hell no.” Kissinger: “That is what I said.” Haig: “Why should we even talk about that? Why should we even tell Seymour Hersh anything?” Kissinger: “Well, you can take that attitude but I can’t. I knew about the operation.” I did not need a transcript at the time to know that Kissinger had been lying to me.

  The Senate hearings, which were authorized by chairman John Stennis, began the morning of my talk with Kissinger and produced a quick confirmation of the falsified bombing reporting from James R. Schlesinger, the new secretary of defense, who had just replaced Elliot Richardson. The fun began as Kissinger, Laird, and other officials, including retired army general Earle Wheeler, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, initially deplored the fake bookkeeping system and insisted they had no knowledge of it. Amid all this, I revealed that Secretary of State William Rogers had told Congress three years earlier in a secret hearing that Cambodia was one Southeast Asian nation “where our hands are clean and our hearts are pure.”

  The truth finally dribbled out in early August, when the Senate committee released a highly classified memorandum showing that Laird and Wheeler knew about and authorized the phony bookkeeping. Those top officials then began ratting out those responsible in the White House. Laird told me that orders for the falsification came from Kissinger’s National Security Council, and Wheeler, recanting his earlier testimony, told the Senate committee that Nixon had personally ordered that the raids be held “with the greatest secrecy.” It took another decade, when I was at work on a book about Kissinger, before I learned that the secret bookkeeping system had been organized, with the help of an air force colonel, by Al Haig, Kissinger’s most trusted confidant on the NSC staff, with Kissinger’s complete knowledge.

  In a summary of the matter for the Times that summer, I could not resist the obvious opening sentence, “It always begins with a letter”—a reference to Ron Ridenhour’s tip-off about My Lai. It took only a few days of Senate hearings before the denials fell away as the risk of tampering with the Strategic Air Command’s sense of mission became clear. Nixon’s authorization of the military cheating and lying to shield the B-52 bombing of Cambodia became the fourth item of impeachment promulgated by the House Judiciary Committee against Nixon in July 1974, a month before he left office, but it was not adopted.

  There was more evidence late in the year of the extreme chaos and lack of respect for the law inside the Nixon administration, and this time Kissinger was both the cause of the disarray and its main victim. Much of Kissinger’s diplomacy was done in secrecy out of sight of the media, a fact that for some mysterious reason seemed to titillate many in the Washington press corps. Only those few aides who had an immediate need to know were being kept up to date as Kissinger conducted the secret peace talks in Paris and also secretly set the stage for Nixon’s triumphant visit in 1972 to Beijing. Admiral Tom Moorer, a southern hawk who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been cut out of the loop, as were other military officers and civilian officials who should have been consulted for their take on such issues as a visit to China, and the end to the impasse between Washington and Beijing.

  Kissinger and Haig also eschewed the civilian professionals who usually served as note takers and stenographers on secret trips, and turned to the military, who were seen as less likely to leak. The two national security leaders thought they had found the perfect fit in a navy yeoman named Charles E. Radford, a sometime submariner and top-notch stenographer who was assigned to Kissinger’s office in late 1970 and was still at it by the end of 1971. Radford accompanied Kissinger to secret talks in early 1971 in Islamabad with the Pakistani president, Yahya Khan, who was a close ally of China’s. The arrangements for Nixon’s Beijing visit in early 1972 were made formal via the good services of President Khan. There was a very dark side to the secrecy: Khan was also a murderous despot whose army slaughtered anywhere from 500,000 to 3 million of his own people in suppressing a secessionist revolt in late March 1971 in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The world recoiled over Khan’s brutality
, but Nixon and Kissinger remained mute for reasons not understood by the State Department bureaucracy and the rest of the world at the time, to protect their lifeline to the Chinese leadership. Kissinger would devote nearly eighty pages in his memoirs to an unconvincing rationalization for his inaction in the face of Khan’s brutality. Radford, of course, knew the secret; he had the full confidence of Kissinger, who had no idea that the yeoman was making a copy of his notes and papers prepared for the President and relaying them, through a senior admiral on duty in the White House, to Admiral Moorer.

  Some of the inside information about what became known as the White House’s “tilt” toward Pakistan began showing up in December 1971 in the daily columns of Jack Anderson, the longtime Washington muckraker. The leaking of such embarrassing top secret data led to an internal security inquiry headed by David Young, Egil Krogh’s sidekick on the Plumbers team, that quickly found its way to Radford. Anderson was a Mormon and so was Radford, who acknowledged under questioning that he had a church-based friendship with Anderson; there seemed little doubt that Radford, immersed in the spying, was putting in some overtime work for the columnist, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his many news-breaking columns.

  There were obvious questions for Kissinger in all of this, because the secretive Young, who held degrees from Oxford University and Cornell Law School, worked for more than two years with Kissinger’s NSC staff before joining John Ehrlichman’s domestic council and, ultimately, the Plumbers. There was yet another inquiry into the scandal by a John Stennis–led Senate committee, and Radford and all of his superiors in the military initially denied what was obvious—that there was a concerted military spying ring, with as many as five senior officers involved, along with Radford, that had been triggered by Kissinger’s secrecy. The sordid mess was buried until January 1974, when I learned that the White House had informed the Senate Watergate Committee of what it wrongly believed to be a blackmail threat by W. Donald Stewart, then the inspector general of the Defense Department’s Investigative Service. Stewart, a former FBI agent, had applied earlier to be head of the bureau, and there were some in the rattled administration who feared he was seeking to trade his information about the military spying for a high-level job. (Stewart laughed off the allegations, which were dismissed, in a subsequent interview with me; I later learned that he had futilely gone to Secretary of Defense McNamara in 1967, a year before My Lai, with evidence that things were getting out of hand in the Vietnam War.)

  I was joined in the chase by the hardworking Bob Woodward, who was also on top of the story. He and I had begun playing tennis together as Watergate moved from scandal to impeachment, and that led to a few late-night pizzas over which we decided that we would stay in touch and share, as much as possible, what we were learning.*2 The thought was that it would be much more efficient if we would no longer chase the same story—I once found a “Kilroy was here” note from Bob outside the office of someone I’d hoped to interview—but do separate stories and push our editors to run the gist of each other’s work. The agreement freed both of us to work on our own stories and no longer be responsible for trying to “match”—a hated word in our profession—each other’s exclusive report. Of course there was no sharing of a truly vital story, but those were dwindling as the Watergate saga entered its third year. Bob eventually told his editors about our arrangement; he also insisted, tongue in cheek, that I never paid for the indoor tennis court time (not so). The time had been booked for the season by Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher, a Georgetown socialite who, in private, could be as foulmouthed as Ben Bradlee—and me. She, like Woodward, could ignore the fierce Post versus Times competition when a need arose, and at the height of my Watergate run she summoned me to her top-floor office to help draft a speech on investigative reporting, bitching all the while about the fact that Bradlee would never give the paper’s biggest advertisers a break when they got in trouble. It was impossible not to admire her directness.

  The military spying scandal led to an obvious question, as I wrote: Why didn’t the President, with his oft-stated concerns about the need for national security, insist on a real investigation? The paper trail, as disgorged by Radford in interviews with me, led directly to Admiral Moorer and others, but no prosecutions took place and all stayed in their jobs. I wrote about that aspect, of course, but could not say what I really thought, since I wasn’t being paid by the Times to convey my unsubstantiated thoughts. They, in fact, were very dark: I was convinced the White House would cover up any scandal in fear that the really important ones, whatever they were, would be uncovered. I was focusing once again on Kissinger, in part because of Kissinger’s triggering role in the mess with his secrecy, but also because I was convinced that the very quiet David Young had filled him in all the while, along with details, perhaps, of other Plumbers operations still unknown.

  I thought so because Kissinger had been emphatic in his denials about any such knowledge during his Senate confirmation hearing four months earlier on his nomination to be secretary of state. “I have no knowledge of any such activities that David Young may have engaged in,” he told the Foreign Relations Committee. “I did not know of the existence of the plumbers group by that or any other name. Nor did I know that David Young was concerned with internal security.”

  It was a lie he had to tell, for Young and Krogh were responsible for the hiring of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy for the Plumbers team, and both, as said earlier, were involved in the illegal break-in into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst in Los Angeles in mid-1971, as well as the break-in at the Watergate. Young cooperated with the prosecution in the Plumbers trial and spent no time in jail. He left America to return to Oxford, got his doctorate, and kept his mouth shut, as Kissinger, so I thought, had to know he would. Kissinger, questioned further three days later by the Foreign Relations Committee about his knowledge of the Plumbers, repeated his denials and added a new element: “I was not aware even of the location of his [Young’s] office or duties, nor did I have any contact with him.”

  Ten days after my first story about the military spying scandal, Kissinger dropped his pretense about his ties to Young and acknowledged, in a news briefing at the State Department, that in late 1971 he had listened to a tape recording Young had made with a junior admiral who had been involved in the funneling of documents from his office to the Pentagon. The admission directly contradicted his testimony during his confirmation hearings and, as Kissinger surely knew, would do him little good with the many people in the government and media who viewed him as a serial liar. He did his best to muddle the issue, initially stating that it was John Ehrlichman who “let me see, or rather listen to, the interrogation.” He later conceded, under questioning by the press, that the interrogation had been conducted by David Young. Kissinger could not stop himself, however, and sought to convince the journalists that “one could not suppose that David Young was conducting an investigation” because he was doing the interview, and not the young admiral. He “assumed,” he said, that Young had simply been asked by Ehrlichman to do the interview. “I reaffirm here every word that I have said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee [in his confirmation hearings] and I assert that they were fully consistent with the allegations of the unnamed sources that have been made.”

  It had come to this with Kissinger—just another day and another briefing and more misrepresentations. I was still in touch with John Stennis, and he made it clear that the Radford mess was an investigation that would go nowhere, in terms of punishing wrongdoers. It was another story, he said, like the phony bookkeeping that hid the Cambodian bombing, that could destroy the Pentagon. Woodward and I continued to write about the scandal, but the public seemed to have had its fill of the White House shenanigans. Nixon’s constant wrongdoing and Kissinger’s way with words were pretty established by then, and the pro-military Senate Armed Services Committee held a few pro forma hearings and let the matter drop. In a later interview, Ra
dford told me something that he had not told the committee or publicly said earlier—that he moved no fewer than five thousand secret documents from Kissinger’s office to the Pentagon during his thirteen months in the White House.

  By early 1974, Les Gelb, who constantly saw humor in the White House madness, was telling stories to all who would listen about my interviewing antics on the telephone. The one I liked the most, whether true or not, involved a time during the crisis over the Plumbers when I was desperate to reach Charles Colson, the Nixon aide who was deeply involved in much of the wrongdoing that went on. He’d been indicted on some matter, and everyone in the press corps was looking for the guy. As Les tells it, I had Colson’s private home phone number, but no one was picking up. So I spent hours dialing again and again every few moments, allegedly reading a transcript of a congressional hearing while doing so. Finally, Mrs. Colson answered and said that Colson was not available. “He’s still in Washington?” I said, and then added, “Well, Mrs. Colson, if I were your husband, I’d have put on a mustache and flown to South America.” She laughed and I then went on and on about how much I admired Colson for not running away. She said she would have him call me back, and he did.