Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  My domestic spying story, important as it was, had at least one unintended and unfortunate consequence: It brought Richard Cheney into the world of national security. I learned that decades later by reading Cheney, a very informative 2007 biography of the then vice president that was written by Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard. Hayes wrote that the White House aide “had not previously worked on intelligence issues. As Cheney’s notes at the time anticipated, the [Hersh] article would have long-term implications for the future of American intelligence and for the relationship between the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government.” Cheney’s initial take was to protect the CIA from Congress—and then go after me.

  I had no idea at the time who Cheney was or that I was on his to-do list. I had my own problems. Since few, if any, in the Washington press corps seemed to be interested in adding to my domestic spying account, I did not take my family on a New Year’s holiday. I instead pounded out story after story over the next month with the goal—never stated, of course—of ensuring that Alan Cranston and his colleagues in the Senate would agree to set up a special investigating committee to look into CIA abuses. I felt I owned the story, as I had with the My Lai disclosures, and accepted the pressure and responsibility of continuing to elaborate on a story that I had written, one that was under attack by my peers.

  Amid all this, I felt I was double-crossed by the top editors of the Times. On January 16, 1975, Abe Rosenthal, Clifton Daniel, Scotty Reston, and a few others, including Tom Wicker, were invited to join President Ford for a lunch at the White House. I was not invited or included, nor was I told of the lunch. The issue of whether the meeting would be on or off the record had not been discussed beforehand. Ford, hoping to head off a Senate inquiry, had announced the appointment of a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate and report on the alleged CIA abuses. The group was dominated by conservatives. Rosenthal, in a memorandum I found years later, explained that as the editor responsible for my stories he had felt obligated to ask the President why he had selected “such an obviously loaded commission.” Ford responded that he needed to appoint those who could be trusted to keep those secrets that had to remain secret. “Like what?” asked Rosenthal. “Like assassinations,” the President said. He added, “That’s off the record.”

  It stayed that way, although Wicker came away from the lunch convinced, as he wrote in his 1978 memoir, On Press, it was “intolerable that the American government should sponsor such criminal and indefensible acts as political assassinations, and I saw no reason why the New York Times should protect Ford against his own disclosures of such acts. If the people had a right to know anything, surely they had a right to know murder was being done in their name.” The story was sure to come out eventually, he told Rosenthal and the others. “It couldn’t hold. Why not give the information to Hersh—he wouldn’t have to be told where the lead came from…and let him take it from there?” Ford had asked that his comment be off the record, but he had done so after the fact. Wicker’s question—“did we have a right to keep that secret to ourselves?”—was left hanging.

  I shared Tom’s concern about morality, but there was a more practical argument to be made. If Rosenthal and his colleagues had brought me into the discussion, I would have pointed out that Ford had surrounded himself with staff aides and operators such as Dick Helms, Bill Colby, and Henry Kissinger who had spent their careers telling lies and keeping secrets from higher-ups. If I had been turned loose on the assassination story, the odds were high that the intelligence community officials—fellow moralists, one could say—who had helped me get the domestic spying story would keep on talking and tell me about operations that had been hidden from presidents and the Justice Department. In the long run, therefore, my reporting could have done Gerald Ford a lot of good by getting the truth out early in the inquiry and preventing the White House from being sandbagged by the CIA, as it had been with regard to domestic spying.

  It’s also possible that Ford knew what he was doing by talking about assassinations. Declassified memorandums of secret White House conversations made public decades later showed that the President and his key advisers were obsessed with the political implications of my story and knew that the Kennedy administration had been deeply involved in attempts to murder Castro. There was a risk of collateral damage in going after Kennedy, however. In one meeting, on January 4, 1975, Kissinger told President Ford, “What is happening is worse than in the days of McCarthy. You will end up with a CIA that does only reporting, and not operations….Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.” At this point, the declassification memorandum noted only that Kissinger “described some of the other stories.” Kissinger, always anxious about his public persona, also told Ford, “The Chilean things—that is not in any report. That is sort of blackmail on me….This will get very rough and you need people around who know the Presidency, and the national interest. What Colby has done [in talking to me] is a disgrace.”

  The private attitude of the White House toward full disclosure made a mockery, as Wicker understood, of the high-minded response of the Times’s senior leadership to the President’s belated request that his comment about assassination be kept off the record. (Wicker closed his memoir with a plea for an end to self-censorship.)

  Rosenthal phoned me a day or so after the lunch and urged me to keep on reporting on the domestic operations story, but also to think more about “foreign intelligence matters.” I had no idea what he was talking about and told him so. There was a moment of silence. Then he said, “Never mind,” and hung up. It was not like Abe, but I figured everyone was entitled to a senior moment. A few days later Wicker again pulled up a chair next to my desk and filled me in on Ford’s mention of assassination, and the later conversation among the newspaper’s big shots at which it was agreed that I would not be told about it. I made some calls and learned, for the first time, that Fidel Castro had been high on the CIA’s hit list, but I could not write that without overriding the decision that Abe and the others had made in respecting Ford’s request for secrecy.

  Talk about unrequited love. The guys running my newspaper who for years had showered me with praise and raises had a higher loyalty to a president who had just appointed a weak-kneed investigating commission than to someone who had pulled them out of the Watergate swamp. Sure, I understood there were more charitable ways of looking at the dilemma of Abe and his colleagues, but I was distraught at being—there is no other word for it—censored. There was no way I could pursue and write the important assassination story for the Times, but it had to be made public. So I did what Wicker had done: He had leaked to me, and I would leak to a neighbor and family friend, Daniel Schorr, of CBS News. I told Dan about the lunch with Ford and what little I had learned about the efforts against Castro. I understood he had his own contacts, and CBS was a hell of a good place to break the news that the CIA had been involved in political assassination. Dan got the story and it was a winner.

  I finally was able to move off the CIA beat when the Times hired from Newsweek Nicholas Horrock, a serious professional, to handle the ongoing investigations. I felt that the halcyon days in the newsroom were over. With Nixon gone, the pendulum had swung back to a place where a president’s argument that national security trumps the people’s right to know was once again carrying weight with editors and publishers.

  I spent my last few months in Washington taking long overdue vacation time and joining my wife in looking for schools for our two children and a place to live in New York while also giving the intelligence community a few farewell licks. I was trying that winter and spring to finish the trifecta I had told Max Frankel about—Chile, CIA spying, and the attempt to recover a submerged Russian submarine. In the fall of 1973, Colby, then the new CIA director, had called me to ask if we could me
et. Of course we could, and he came to the Times bureau soon after to ask me if I would forget all about that submarine. I had asked Bob Phelps to join the meeting and did not hesitate to engage in some low-level extortion in front of him. Colby always thought I knew more than I did and I told him I would do what he wished, but I needed something on Watergate and the CIA in return. Colby did not hesitate and told me that Lucien Nedzi’s House intelligence subcommittee had stumbled a year earlier into some vital Watergate data that was overlooked. I had a lead on a good story.

  Flash forward to February 1975, when the Los Angeles Times revealed the existence of the CIA’s submarine recovery program and the fact that—as I did not know—the Agency had contracted with a firm owned by the mysterious Howard Hughes to build a multimillion-dollar rescue ship that was thought to be capable of bringing the Russian submarine to the surface. Watergate was over, but I had forgotten about the submarine story. I was enraged at myself for so doing and frantically renewed my reporting. I was no longer covering the domestic spying scandal and it felt great to be working again, and I soon accumulated enough information to fill a page full of type. There was much more than the initial Los Angeles Times story had reported—such as the fact that a recovered portion of the submarine included the bodies of Russian sailors. I also learned that Colby had begun going around to Washington news bureau chiefs and urging them, with total success, not to report on the story and let the operation proceed. He was bragging to editors and reporters that I and the Times had gone along earlier with such a request, without mentioning—there was no reason for him to do so—the trade we had made. I further learned that Colby, to my horror, had convinced Abe Rosenthal to lay off the story, which he did without consulting me. Abe surely had to know I was at work on it. Why else had Colby gone to see him? I wrote a testy note to Clifton Daniel, asking him to forward it to Rosenthal, bitching about the decision, and telling Abe that I knew about their betrayal on the assassination issue a month earlier. I was pretty mouthy in that March 4, 1975, memo: “Lest I seem cavalier about secrets, the fact is that I know almost every major on-going reconnaissance operation…and have for years. I’m not going around shooting off my mouth about it”—except to my editors, obviously—“but when one of the programs seems risky and overpriced and there’s a legitimate news peg, it doesn’t make sense not to tell the American people about it.” I was such a purist.

  I had stopped working on the story after learning of Abe’s acquiescence in the Colby ban and ignored Clifton’s insistence that I update the work I had done on the submarine story and get it ready for publication in case someone decided to ignore the embargo. Clifton renewed his request. I said no way; if the Times wanted to play ball with the CIA, it was their business and not mine. Daniel didn’t bat an eye. He telephoned my wife at home that night or one soon after and told her that I was being a baby, and would she tell me to grow up. She did and I spent a day or two finishing a long version of the story that was quickly edited and readied for publication.

  A few weeks later Jack Anderson broke the embargo on one of his nightly news broadcasts and reported many more details of the submarine retrieval project; he also revealed Colby’s success in persuading dozens of newspaper editors and publishers to suppress the story. He had called me before going on the air to ask if it was true, as he had heard, that I had a much more comprehensive story ready to go and had been censored. I said yes, because I liked Jack. I was also agog at his ability to obtain important documents; he and Les Gelb were the best I’d seen in being able to raid the federal bureaucracy. I had a lot of dealings with Jack while researching a book on Henry Kissinger years later and learned, firsthand, that he had an up-to-date lending library of top secret White House documents that was dazzling.

  I told Daniel that Anderson was going to break the submarine story that night; his show was broadcast at 9:00 p.m., too late for the first edition. Jack, as anticipated, did break the embargo, and I was asked to update our story to include that fact and have it ready for the second edition, whose deadline was a few hours off. There was more petulance from me. I called Rosenthal and argued that Jack Anderson was not a force and the Times was—I had been told my second-edition story would be given a triple-deck headline across five columns at the top of the front page—and wouldn’t Bill Colby’s argument about national security still be valid? The august New York Times was taken far more seriously by Russia than Jack Anderson, was it not? Why run the story? Abe ignored my whining and said, simply, “Shut the fuck up and get the story ready.”

  I wasn’t helped in my self-pity by the late David Halberstam, whose brilliant reporting for the Times from Vietnam in the early 1960s had changed the perception of the war for many Americans. David somehow figured out that I was having a problem or two at the Times and began writing me fan letters that were so wonderfully rancid about the paper that I dared not share them with anyone outside Gelb. The most zestful, and generous, was one written in 1974: “My own instinct tells me that it is probably a difficult time for you and that the pallid clerks who control your destiny…are probably an immense pain in the ass, but I do hope you keep in mind the importance of what you are doing. You are, my friend, a national treasure. Bless you.” David had left the Times in a huff in 1969, for reasons not clear to me, to begin his successful career as a biographer and historian.

  The Times redeemed itself in my eyes a few months later by publishing an article of mine full of secrets that were sure to make trouble amid the ongoing Senate hearings into CIA spying. The article told how the U.S. Navy had been spying inside the territorial waters of the Soviet Union for at least fifteen years. The mission’s initial goal was to tap into Soviet underground communication lines as well as to monitor the travels of the Soviet submarine fleet, but over the years the intelligence gathered was far more easily obtained by other means—primarily electronic intercepts—and the inherent risks of the illegal mission were considered by many too high to justify their continuance. I was warned by a federal agent before leaving Washington that summer to watch my step; the Ford White House had gone bonkers over the story and wanted to prosecute me. I wasn’t worried, because, so I thought, I knew much more about the spying program and how it began and the many things that had gone wrong and been covered up. Going after me would bring a lot of dirt to light.

  Enter Cheney. After the publication of the story he fought hard to get me punished, not only for my perceived transgression, but also to prevent reports of other possible intelligence wrongdoing from being revealed during the Senate intelligence hearings chaired by Frank Church, a liberal Democrat from Idaho. A stash of Cheney memorandums and other notes were declassified in 2000, twenty-five years after their origin, and they showed that Cheney, beginning on May 29, four days after publication of my article, had been in the forefront of those wanting to shut me up. One of his memorandums proposed five courses of action, including doing nothing, obtaining a search warrant to go after any classified papers I might have at my home, and the convening of a grand jury to obtain my immediate indictment. In the end, the Ford administration chose the first option, but I had made an enemy for life.* The few times over the next decades when I was introduced to Cheney—including one instance by Donald Rumsfeld—Cheney ignored my proffered handshake and walked past me without a glance.

  It took guts for Abe to run the submarine story and a later one in July—perhaps the last one I wrote from Washington—that reported that the navy’s special fleet of spy submarines had the wherewithal in case of a collision or a similar troublesome incident to falsify official logs to avoid alerting higher-ups of the error. The story, like many others I wrote in my four years in the Washington bureau, attracted little attention from my colleagues.

  By late August, I was ready to leave Washington for New York City, which was then in financial meltdown. I had enjoyed reporting on the military and intelligence world, and now I was eager to see how I measured up when it came to the world of Wall Street an
d high finance.

  The one worry I had about the New York bureau was being in much closer contact with the editors there, including Abe. I was coming as a lone wolf and being provided with a private office, a rarity that separated me from the other reporters on the paper, but I did not want to be pampered or given special treatment. I wanted to be part of the Times’s team that was reporting on a New York that was unable to collect enough taxes to keep the city going and was in dire need of a huge bailout from the federal government. What had gone wrong and why was a great story. Robert Caro’s fascinating book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker, had been published the year before, and it convinced me that there were stories to be had in the city. I also remembered that Harrison Salisbury had returned to New York in the 1950s after winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Russia for the paper, and it was decided, so legend has it, to take him down a peg by assigning him to cover the city’s sanitation department. He turned the assignment into a prizewinning three-part series delving into the city’s inability to keep its streets clean despite spending millions more than any other American city on garbage collection. New York was there for the taking.

  My first day on the job told me it was going to be an idiosyncratic ride. There were family issues: I was to report for work after Labor Day 1975, but the city’s teachers were on strike and we had yet to find a suitable caretaker for our children. My wife’s classes at NYU had been under way for a week, and so I took the little ones with me to the paper. It was a kick for them to ride the subway, and the three of us arrived at the Times’s lobby at nine o’clock in the morning, just as Abe did. “What’s this?” he asked of his new man from Washington. I explained the situation and told him the children would take care of themselves while I took a day or so to get organized. That’s fine, he said, with a perfunctory nod to the kids. A few hours later, I was storing files in my office, which was located beyond the sports department in the huge third-floor newsroom. My five-year-old daughter was drawing in a corner, and my seven-year-old son was playing kickball with a couple of sportswriters who were seven years old at heart. I heard a noise at the door. I look up and it’s an unsmiling Abe. “Seymour,” he asked, “what do you think would have happened if, on that fateful day two thousand years ago, Mrs. Moses had told her husband that he had to stay home and take care of the kids? Do you think the waters would have parted?” I gave him a look and realized he was not kidding. All I could say was “I dunno, Abe.” With that, he left. Well, I thought, the guy certainly wore his heart on his sleeve. We found a caretaker within days, and I was able to report such to Abe in a note at week’s end. (I did not add that the waters would be able to be parted, once again.)