Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  There was an element of luck in this. A few months earlier I had arranged a meeting at the CIA with Colby for Abe, and at his request I accompanied him. It was impossible for the two of us not to notice the hostility directed at me by the Colby assistant who ushered us into the elevator that brought us directly to Colby’s office. The guy never stopped glowering at me. Colby was cordial, as he always was, and the three of us sat around a large table over coffee. Abe told Colby he hated communism and everything it stands for, and was proud to be kicked out of Poland in the late 1950s for his reporting on the party. Colby responded with a big smile and said, “Oh, we know, Mr. Rosenthal, we know.” Abe went on to say that he also hated all forms of fascism and repression. So what he wanted to know, he now asked, was why his country supported the nail pullers and torturers who ran South Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines—and a few other places I do not recall. Colby, very calmly, responded by saying in essence that it was not the CIA’s place to make judgments about world leaders who were our allies. The CIA does what the President tells it to do, he said. Sometimes the Agency supported wonderful leaders who ruled by example, and other times it worked on the side of the nail pullers. The meeting was soon over, and Abe was quiet as we rode the elevator down, the dark-eyed Colby aide still glowering. When we began rolling down a parkway back to Washington in my car, Abe exploded. He was enraged by Colby’s refusal to differentiate between a democratic government and one run by a despot. I don’t recall all of Abe’s words as he fulminated, but I remember his final instructions to me: “You keep on writing—keep on—about those sons of bitches.”

  I loved the guy at that moment, but things had gotten very tense between Abe and me after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. I was continuing my freewheeling, above-the-fray ways in Washington, but I was now back in the bureau and the world of all my colleagues, not only Gelb. Any good reporter knows which of his colleagues are the real thing—people who work hard and care about being fair while also getting it right. Denny Walsh, who’d had a marvelous career writing for Life magazine, had been hired a few months or so after me. Denny was not a fast-talking, hotheaded operator like me; he was simply a wonderful reporter—careful, meticulous, and an expert on organized crime and political corruption. He was also unselfish. He went out of his way at one point early in the Watergate mess, when I knew little and was struggling, to put me in touch with an old friend of his, someone high up in the Nixon world. I was happy to have Denny as a colleague and friend. In the summer of 1974 a political corruption exposé he had spent many months researching and writing was suddenly killed by Rosenthal, with no explanation. None of us could figure out what had gone wrong, and I volunteered to help Denny sell the story to a major magazine. I made the initial call to an editor I knew there. Rosenthal falsely declared after the fact, upon learning of Denny’s intention to sell the story elsewhere, that he had not killed the piece but merely delayed publication. Denny was fired and Abe, who knew of my support for Denny, wrote me a long, soulful letter saying he did not hold me responsible in any way for “the whole unhappy thing” and inviting me to come visit him in New York to talk things over. I wisely did not respond, though I thought Abe had behaved despicably, as he was wont to do, because there was nothing I could say or do that would get Denny reinstated.

  A few months later, I gave a talk on investigative reporting at a conference sponsored by the American Press Institute, a nonprofit group that does media research. I talked honestly about the pressure I was under as a reporter designated by Rosenthal, as I saw it, to save The New York Times from itself, in terms of its initial failure to comprehend the importance of Watergate. I was asked by the editor of a major newspaper whether I agreed it was essential to get multiple sources for important investigative stories, and I remember my laughing response—something to the effect that at the height of the media frenzy over Watergate if I overheard something important from a guy standing next to me at a urinal, it would go right into the newspaper. I was obviously joking, but there was an element of truth in it; once I got going on a story, I was rarely questioned about the sourcing, although I always answered every question Rosenthal and other senior editors asked about sources. A few days after Thanksgiving 1974, Abe wrote me a very sorrowful note, saying that a fellow editor had relayed my comments at the conference and was astonished to hear a reporter be “so devastating in public about his own newspaper.” His goal in writing was to ask whether “this is indeed what you indeed said or think.” I had hurt his feelings and he deserved better, but I did not tell him that. Instead, I childishly wrote and asked him if he really wanted to know what I “think.”

  The underlying issue between us revolved around Abe’s profound love of everything about the Times and his need for me to be in love, too. He had repeatedly told me how much I enriched the paper and how he envisioned “years of mutuality” between the two of us. I thought the paper had been great to me and for me, and was ecstatic to be there, but there was much about its America-first coverage of foreign affairs I disagreed with, and Abe sensed it. I never responded to his requests to fly up to New York and talk about my future. At one point I had encouraged Brit Hume, who had done amazing work for Jack Anderson in the early 1970s, to come to the Times. Hume was politically conservative—he would have a long career as the evening news anchorman for Fox News—but he knew how to get a story, and that skill superseded politics in my view. Brit was skeptical, but I told Abe he had to see him and, sure enough, Brit did go for a one-on-one interview. There was no job offer. I asked Brit later what happened, and still nonplussed by the encounter, he told me that Abe at one point had said that those who worked for the paper had to learn to love it. “I told him,” Brit said, “Mr. Rosenthal, I don’t want to fuck your newspaper. I just want to work here.” That was it.

  This background makes what happened early on December 21, 1974, a Saturday morning, my favorite story about the most complicated editor I’ve ever worked for. I had returned to the Times office by late morning, having had my talk with Colby, and began writing. I had years of interviews to review and dozens of people to call for comment, or for more information, or to check quotes with the few who were to be cited by name in the story. I also placed a call to Sandy Berger, a key aide to Senator Edmund Muskie, then considered a major candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. Sandy, who later became Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, was a pro who understood the importance of the story. It was going to create a national debate. I asked if Muskie wanted to be the leader of a reform-the-CIA movement. Muskie said no.

  I wrote until early evening, dashed home for a meal, and returned to the near-empty bureau to keep on pounding out copy. Novelists talk about getting into a book and finding that the main characters develop their own voice and do the writing, and in a sense the storytelling, for the author. I felt the same way about the domestic spying story. I had outlined it, of course, but after a few thousand words the story was writing itself. By midnight, the night editor had left, and I was alone in the bureau, just me and a member or two of the building’s janitorial crew. The lights and heat were on; I don’t think they were ever turned off. It was not the first time I’d stayed into the early morning at the office, and I liked the quiet. I began filing takes; stories in those days were written on flimsy paper with four carbon copies and relayed, take by take, to the bureau news desk or, as in my overnight case, directly to New York for copyediting. Sometime well after midnight, a night editor named Evan Jenkins telephoned me to ask what in the hell I was doing. I had filed nearly five thousand words and was still sending copy. There was no room in the Sunday paper, Jenkins said. My story had been budgeted to run two thousand words. I urged him, to put it mildly, to reconsider. He said at the most he could find space for another five hundred words. It was my choice, he said: The story could run at that length or be held for the Monday paper; there was no other option.

  I went nuts. I didn’t know Abe soci
ally or in any personal way, but I had once met his wife, very briefly, and remembered her name was Ann. I also knew that in the bureau there was a list of editors’ home phone numbers. I found Abe’s private number, took a deep breath—it was past two in the morning—and called. The phone rang and rang. I did not hang up. Ann eventually answered. I apologized for calling, told her who I was, and said I needed to speak to Abe right away. Well, she said, with much bitterness, you’ve called the wrong person. Abe’s left me. You’ll have to call him at his girlfriend’s house. I’d staggered into a soap opera. I mumbled something and hung up. And then—I was not going to give up—I called again and asked Ann if she knew the name of the girlfriend. I got an earful, but she was an editor’s wife, and she came up with a name.

  I don’t remember whom I telephoned next, but I came up with an unlisted telephone number for Abe’s girlfriend. I called—it was close to three in the morning by this time—and the phone rang a few times and then cut off. I called again and Abe’s girlfriend picked up. I said, very quickly, I don’t care what the hell is going on there, but you’ve got to tell Abe Rosenthal that Sy Hersh is on the phone and needs to talk to him urgently. There was no response, but she did not hang up. Do it please, I said. A minute later Abe got on the telephone. He was very angry but I didn’t care. I interrupted his bitching to say that his fucking newspaper had its head up its ass and I had been told there was not enough space for the CIA story. How much do you need? he asked. I said at least seven or eight columns, seven thousand or more words. What’s your phone number? he asked. I said, What number? Numskull, he roared. The phone you’re using in the office. I gave the number to him and hung up. A few moments later Abe called and said I want you to know that tomorrow’s New York Times will have an extra page in every one of its 1.6 million copies. On one side will be a house ad and on the other side your cockamamie story. I muttered my thanks and he said, in response, “I am telling you right now that you are not to tell anyone, and I mean anyone, about what happened tonight. You got that?” With that, he hung up. And we never discussed it again.

  Of course I told a few of my Times colleagues about Abe’s remarkable response to my insane three o’clock in the morning call. I left out a few details, though.

  To this day I still cannot understand why Ed Muskie did not want to get involved in the domestic spying issue, because his Senate Democratic colleagues sure did. I began hearing from liberal senators within days of the December 22 story. It was clear that a major Senate inquiry was a must, but the issue for them was how to make sure that it would not be led by John Stennis, since he was the conservative head of the intelligence subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I could not say publicly that Stennis might be the best bet, because the other senators did not know of my many chats with him, which convinced me that he would always do the right thing. In early January, I was invited after the New Year’s congressional recess to brief a group of senators about my story and what else I knew. I had worked on other issues with five or six of them, most notably Harold Hughes of Iowa and William Proxmire of Wisconsin, but was more than a little chary of operating as a political insider. I talked it over with Clifton Daniel and Bob Phelps, whom I relied on in the bureau, and they said go. At the time I knew nothing about the CIA’s assassination attempts on Fidel Castro of Cuba and at least four other foreign leaders, which were among the as yet unknown revelations in the “family jewels,” but I had learned that there was at least one CIA-authorized request to take “Executive Action,” a phrase depicting assassination that the Agency used at the time in internal memorandums, against a domestic informer who had gone rogue. I went to a Sunday morning meeting, held in the Watergate apartment of Senator Alan Cranston of California, and talked off the record, so I thought, with a group of eight or so senators. I was asked at one point where else a no-holds-barred inquiry could lead, and I mentioned the possible murder of an insider in America. I also said my reporting on that element was very much a work in progress. In a floor speech the next morning, Cranston exhorted his fellow senators to vote for a full investigation and blithely claimed—to my shock and anger—that the inquiry could lead to a domestic CIA murder. That was it; being an insider was not in my DNA, and I never met privately with a group of senators after that and chose never to testify at a congressional hearing.

  I continued to report on the CIA domestic spying story for months after my initial piece was published, with growing unease: It was more than a little self-serving to write articles bolstering my initial story. But a scoop was a scoop; I was the first to report Jim Angleton’s firing, which was accompanied by the inevitable resignations of two of his senior deputies in the CIA’s counterintelligence office.* I was also getting leaks from inside the Ford White House and learned that Colby had acknowledged in a memo to the President over the New Year’s holiday that his Agency had maintained files on thousands of American citizens, but insisted that did not amount to a “massive” program of such spying, as I had written. In return, I raised an obvious question in an early January 1975 essay in a Times Week in Review piece: Given that the existence of the domestic spying program was known to a few members of Congress and in the government, and that all understood the potential criminality of the CIA’s activities, why did it take a newspaper story to provoke the firing of James Angleton, White House briefings on the wrongdoing, and a congressional hearing or two?

  I was, alas, initially mauled by some of my erstwhile newspaper colleagues on the national security beat, who had raised no objections when I was constantly breaking anti-Nixon stories a few years earlier. There seemingly was a love, or an admiration, for the CIA that I did not share. Not surprisingly, The Washington Post, the Times’s main competitor, was the most vocal, and snarky, noting early on that “most CIA activity can be fitted under the headline of ‘spying,’ and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called ‘domestic spying,’ it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in ‘violation’ of the agency’s Congressional charter or are ‘illegal.’ ” Larry Stern, my pal who covered intelligence for the Post, wrote that it was not the CIA that was keeping files on dissident or suspect Americans, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Time magazine began a profile on me, titled “Supersnoop,” with a plaudit: My prior writings on My Lai, Kissinger’s wiretapping, and the secret bombing of Cambodia, among others, “read like a historic road map to a generation.” But not the CIA revelations: “There is a strong likelihood that Hersh’s CIA story is considerably exaggerated and that the Times overplayed it.” I won many prizes for the spying story but not the Pulitzer, and it was explained to me by someone on the jury that Ben Bradlee, a fellow juror, successfully argued against the prize for me, stating that the CIA disclosures were, in some order, “overwritten, overplayed, and under-reported.”

  I was aware that I was not, to put it mildly, everyone’s cup of tea. The always witty Gloria Emerson once told a reporter, in her inimitable style, “There’s nothing silky about Sy,” adding that I bitched about one of her stories at our first meeting in 1972 in Paris. “No hoping that you’ll like him—Oh, forget it.” The irony of all of this is that I was saved by the honesty of Bill Colby, who would eventually publicly admit that his Agency had done what I had written, even to the extent of maintaining files on a hundred thousand American citizens.

  My psychiatric social worker wife, Elizabeth, had decided to become a psychoanalyst and was persuaded by others, among whom was Erik Erikson, the most prominent lay analyst, that going to medical school was the best way to get there. After a year or two of premed studies, she had been accepted at New York University’s medical school, and the Hersh family was planning to move to New York in the fall. I spent my last few months in Washington making trouble about other issues for the CIA and the navy, and I made a new enemy in so doing—Richard Cheney, the deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s chief of staff. Cheney’s powerful intellect and ultraconservative views
made him, even in early 1975, a powerhouse inside the White House.

  *Angleton blamed me for much of his troubles, including his firing. He had telephoned me at home early on Sunday morning, December 22, after he read my domestic spying story, to ask, “Do you know what you have done? You’ve blown my cover. My wife, in thirty-one years of marriage, was never aware of my activity until your story. And now she’s left me.” I was stunned, and initially felt guilty. But I also remembered hearing of an awards ceremony at the CIA at which Cicely, Angleton’s wife, was present. I called a longtime CIA operative—someone I knew from my days working for Eugene McCarthy—and relayed the gist of Angleton’s call. My pal laughed and said, “I can tell you that Cicely did leave him, but not because of you. She left him about three years ago to go live out in Arizona.” Three years later I began working on a long profile of Angleton for The New York Times Magazine and called him; it was our first talk since his firing. “He refused to grant me a formal interview,” I wrote at the opening of the magazine piece—code language indicating that we did talk, but on background. He did allow me to say, though, “You just go ahead and do what you want to do. The damage is pretty much irreversible.” He also insisted, so I wrote, that the damage to American national security that I had done by my domestic spying revelations, and his dismissal, was far more extensive than I could possibly realize. I found Angleton impossible to fathom; he was obviously brilliant but also childish, paranoid, and petty. The magazine’s cover said it all, I thought: It featured an enlarged close-up of Angleton’s face, buried in a deep shadow, with a black background. The photograph was slightly out of focus.

  · SIXTEEN ·

  Off to New York