Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  I kept busy during the two-month newspaper strike that shut down every paper in New York in late 1978 by writing a few Talk of the Town pieces for Mr. Shawn. Nonetheless, I still saw myself as a newspaperman and still relished the power of the Times. Washington would still be fertile ground, I thought. But the city had changed: The Vietnam War was over and so was Watergate. No one in the CIA had been prosecuted for the crimes that had been committed against the American people and the Constitution. Richard Helms, who had flatly lied to Congress about CIA activities in Chile, was hailed as a hero and a patriot upon being allowed to plead nolo contendere in 1978 to a misdemeanor charge of not being completely truthful in his testimony about CIA activities to Congress. He received a two-year suspended sentence, paid a two-thousand-dollar fine, and was greeted by a cheering crowd when he left the courthouse. The New Yorker journalist Richard Harris, in a report about the Helms case, saw the absurdity of the concept of nolo contendere: “The government accused Helms of committing crimes but declined to specify what they were or to prove them, and Helms refused to admit any guilt but allowed a judgment of guilt to be recorded against him.” I was still suffering disillusionment over the Gulf and Western process, and Harris’s shrewd analysis of the import of the Helms plea did not help.

  It got worse for me when the Times editorially praised the plea, as did far too many in the press, noting, “Helms was caught between his duty to obey the law and his duty to protect the secrets….And so the government was caught—between the need to enforce the laws against lying and the continuing need to keep secrets.” In other words, every CIA officer who took the oath of secrecy was now exempt from testifying truthfully to Congress. The intelligence community had survived a yearlong media blitz and the Church Committee inquiry and was once again where it thrived—in the gray area between right and wrong, legal and illegal, honor and dishonor. It was a gray area, I thought, that was shared by many American corporations.

  The Washington bureau did not work out for me. Clarity came a few months after my return to the bureau when John Finney, a marvelous old-time reporter there who had been promoted to editor, showed me a confidential back-channel message that had been sent to him by one of the editors on the biz/millennium desk warning about my bias against American corporations. Finney was appalled at the utter stupidity of the note and the insult to me therein. I resigned immediately, without saying why, and took a long-standing offer to write a book about Henry Kissinger. I would never work regularly for a newspaper again.

  *Cheney’s hard-line suggestions were immediately shot down by Edward Levi, the former University of Chicago Law School dean who was then the attorney general. Levi explained to Cheney that the legal actions he sought would force the government to “have to admit—and indeed prove—that the undersea communications intelligence operations both existed and was classified. This would put the official stamp of truth on the article.” Levi ended his memorandum by stating that “the most promising course of action” would be to talk to publishers about the dangers of printing material detrimental to national security. He was as direct with Cheney as he had been with floundering me in 1959 when I stopped doing any work in the final quarter of my first year in law school. He asked me then, very simply, whether I wanted to be in law school. I said no, without hesitation.

  · SEVENTEEN ·

  Kissinger, Again, and Beyond

  The offer to take a critical look at Kissinger’s diplomatic record had been on the table for more than a year. It was a book that needed to be done, I knew, but the idea was especially attractive because it came at the right time and from James Silberman, who had been editor in chief of Random House when I did the My Lai books. Jim now had his own imprint, Summit Books, and an uncanny instinct for bestsellers.

  In my letter of resignation, I did not tell Abe the real reason for my resignation—although he had to know I was discouraged by the paper’s lukewarm, at best, support for the Gulf and Western series—but cited the need for a critical study of Kissinger. I asked for a formal leave of absence, and Abe said no. I was not surprised; rumors of my leaving the newspaper had made the gossip columns in New York and had to be a sore point. Abe felt I not only never loved the newspaper but had used it, in his view, to get a book contract and move on, as had David Halberstam.

  The irony is that over the next decade, until Abe’s retirement as executive editor in 1988, I wrote a dozen or so major freelance articles for the Times, bylined as if I were still on the staff. It was as if the words each of us spoke to the other had no meaning; we were ensnared by our love for good journalism. My first dispatches came in August 1979, just four months after my resignation. I had returned to Hanoi, now the capital of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, to conduct interviews for the Kissinger book about the secret peace talks in Paris with Nguyen Co Thach, who would become Vietnam’s foreign minister in 1980. After the interviews, I chose to stay in Vietnam to write about life in Saigon under communism. Like many of my newspaper colleagues, I was a Vietnam junkie, endlessly obsessed by the wrongheaded American war. I ended up writing half a dozen dispatches for the paper about postwar Saigon, crudely renamed Ho Chi Minh City, in an effort to give a glimpse of the many difficulties facing those who had been unable to flee the South after its collapse in 1975. One piece provided details about the burgeoning black market; another reported on a flourishing noncommunist newspaper in Saigon. I interviewed Red Cross and United Nations officials in Hanoi and Saigon and wrote a long piece about the plight of the more than two million Cambodians who were facing starvation. It was as if I had never left the staff.

  My interview with Thach and others for the Kissinger book went well, but the highlight of my visit came at a lunch at the still-operating rooftop restaurant at the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, which was the hangout for many foreign correspondents during the war. I had arranged to meet there with one of the wartime leaders of the National Liberation Front. He was a nationalist, not a communist, as were many NLF leaders, but was now a ranking administrator in Ho Chi Minh City.

  There were two remarkable moments. Our waiter, upon learning I was an American journalist, told me he had worked throughout the war serving my colleagues and as a special treat would dig out a still-frozen steak from the last days of the South, which fell in 1975. After weeks of Vietnamese food, as wonderful as it was, the four-year-old defrosted steak tasted great. The second moment came when my lunch partner, after getting my assurance that we were speaking privately, told me he had been stunned after Saigon fell to learn how many hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent by America on infrastructure projects—including roadways and water and sewer systems—to support the South Vietnamese army, and society at large, during the war. The Russians, he said, took over the American role as economic partner and consultants to the new government at the war’s end. One of the earliest Russian projects involved the construction of a processing plant in Ho Chi Minh City that was capable of converting powdered medicines, such as aspirin, into pills and packaging them for Russia’s trading partners in Eastern Europe. Russian ships began arriving in the city’s busy harbor filled with drugs in bulk and returned with packaged medicines. The new plant was a success, but the Russian government had not paid for the work, and after a year or two of such my lunch partner was assigned the mission of collecting the funds due. He was told by the authorities in Moscow, without a trace of irony, that the Russian government would be delighted to deduct the cost of the packaging from the Vietnamese debt to Russia for arms and other supplies it provided the North during the war. We shared a shrug—what could one say about the vagaries of both America and Russia?—and moved on.

  I got important material on the peace talks while in Hanoi, much of it supported by back-and-forth internal memorandums that provided what the American press had not had during the war—a Vietnamese point of view. The beauty of my Kissinger project was that it did not matter whether Kissinger agreed to talk with me or not; he had giv
en me what amounted to an extended, revelatory interview in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years, published in 1979. His book of more than fifteen hundred pages was intended, far more than most readers could perceive, to answer all of his critics. It was a gold mine of new information about all of the important (and unimportant) issues he faced, along with an astonishing amount of misrepresentation and outright lies. I spent nearly a year reading his version of events alongside the published information at the time; I also had the luxury of comparing Kissinger’s account with the published memoirs by other government insiders, including RN, Nixon’s far more honest—and thus revelatory—presidential history.

  It was hard work, and I took time out to produce a two-part series for the Times magazine about the old boys’ network at the beck and call of two former CIA operatives who were supplying the renegade regime of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi with arms and explosives at huge profit. Edwin P. Wilson and Frank Terpil had convinced a third former CIA employee named Kevin Mulcahy that they were legitimate. Mulcahy eventually figured out the scam, which resulted in millions of dollars in profit to Wilson and Terpil, and eventually made his way to me with the story. The series won an unprecedented fifth Polk Award for me in 1981, a prize that was shared by two Times reporters, Philip Taubman and Jeff Gerth, my old pal, who also had written about the Wilson-Terpil scam. (Richard V. Allen, a former Kissinger aide who was then Reagan’s national security adviser, sent me a copy of the magazine on which the President had written a note asking Allen to look into the allegations therein.*1)

  The contradictions in the Kissinger memoir were glaring, and I learned more about them in interviews over the next few years. Writing a nonfiction book involves the same principles I sought to use in my daily journalism: Read before you write, find people who know the truth, or a truth, and let the facts tell the story. There were some on Kissinger’s National Security Council staff who did not want to talk to me, but the vast majority did, many of them on the record.

  I also benefited from the essential evil of the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy. My reporting in 1974 for the Times on Chile produced a series of anonymous letters to me from someone inside the CIA’s clandestine service who had firsthand information about the administration’s desire, from Nixon and Kissinger on down, to get rid of Allende. The letters were astonishing—full of highly classified inside cable traffic and policy concerns, and as such they tested, but did not alter, my determination to never publish information provided by people who did not identify themselves.

  One of my quirks as a reporter, however, has been to keep track of the retirement of senior generals and admirals; those who did not get to the top invariably had a story to tell in explaining why. I also watched death notices, which proved surprisingly full of detail on the foreign postings of CIA operatives who passed away. A brief Washington Post obituary of a retired CIA officer named John C. Murray in 1979 intrigued me because it mentioned that Murray had served overseas in Latin America before his retirement. His widow’s name and address were listed. I found a phone number for her and kept a reminder to call on my to-do list (the one in my head). Six months later I called and struck pay dirt. Yes, his wife said, her husband was the one who had been writing to me in anger and frustration over the Agency’s criminal activities in Chile; and yes, her husband did have a box or two of documents that he kept in the basement; and yes, I could come and retrieve them; and yes, why not publish his name? He had been appalled at the Agency’s willingness to carry out the criminal orders of Nixon and Kissinger.*2

  Kissinger’s instinct for deceit also helped. Roger Morris, one of Kissinger’s most trusted aides in his first years—he was a liaison for the most sensitive intelligence in the government—had much to say on the record about Kissinger and Africa as well as Kissinger’s interest in the pluses and minuses of the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in a crisis. The code word for the option was “Duck Hook,” and Morris had kept copies of his memos about it. Kissinger was perceived by some on his staff to take credit for the work done by others, and thus some aides smuggled home copies of their papers, highly classified or not, as a hedge against misrepresentation of their work. Others, such as Dick Allen, who left Kissinger’s staff early for an appointment at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, rewarded my constant visits and my willingness to chase down details by telling me, after a few years of contact, how he had been in the middle as Kissinger passed confidential political and national security information to both sides in the 1968 presidential race between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. The result was that either man, if elected, would have chosen him to be his national security adviser. I verified Allen’s account, and, as amplified, it became a much-publicized opening chapter of the Kissinger book.

  Government memoirs are ghastly affairs, invariably self-serving and full of untruths, but one of the better ones was written by a retired admiral named Elmo Zumwalt, who served as chief of naval operations, the navy’s top job, from 1970 to 1974. In his memoir, On Watch, published in 1976, the admiral wrote critically of Nixon’s cynical willingness, as he explained privately to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to ignore the explicit wording of the late 1972 breakthrough peace agreement with Hanoi. “We will keep the agreement if it serves us,” Zumwalt quoted Nixon as saying. I remember admiring the memoir, but do not recall any conversation about it with the admiral, who passed away in 2000. What I do remember is getting a call in late 1982 from Zumwalt, then living and working in Milwaukee, and being invited to come for a visit over a weekend. I moved with alacrity, and we met in a suburb along Lake Michigan on a late Saturday afternoon. Zumwalt told me that he had some papers he wanted to share with me, and to do so, we needed to find a photo shop. We did, and I paid the manager for after-hours access to a copying machine. When all was quiet, I spent a good part of an hour copying one page after another on the primitive machine, with Zumwalt feeding pages to me and handling the collating. It felt great to have a four-star admiral as my wingman. It turned out that in mid-1972, with the quickening pace of the secret peace talks with Hanoi in Paris, Zumwalt wanted to know what was going on inside Kissinger’s NSC and found a novel way to do so: He planted a young navy officer on Al Haig’s personal staff, someone who was trusted to monitor and take notes on many of Haig’s personal calls, as directed. Haig was known to have his aides, invariably a junior military officer, listen to his calls on a third phone. What Haig did not know is that the young navy officer to whom he gave that assignment in 1972 was recording notes of the calls on a cassette and supplying them directly to Zumwalt, who had them transcribed. I used only a few lines from the tapes in the Kissinger book, in fear of tipping off Haig to the source, who had left the navy by then for a career in business.

  The full extent of the vile, vindictive, and paranoid atmosphere as Kissinger sought a peace agreement with a stunningly unstable president was vividly apparent as I read through the transcripts. The main leverage Nixon and Kissinger had, or thought they had, in the floundering peace talks by the summer of 1972, with an election looming, was massive B-52 bombing. “Three more months,” Zumwalt was told in June, “and then pull the plug with an all-out bombing campaign or bug out.” A few months later, with no progress in Paris, Zumwalt was told that Nixon “is presently on a dovish track….The President said take anything that Hanoi will give. The President is afraid that the war will do him in. Kissinger is worried that his reputation will be dragged down.” Some weeks later, Zumwalt was told that Nixon, “whose mind is being poisoned by Haig on the subject, feels that Kissinger is screwing the negotiations up. Haig told the President that Kissinger would get yo-yoed by the North Vietnamese. Haig called Kissinger to relay this as the President’s judgment. Kissinger was furious.” Kissinger got his revenge later, when Haig was out of Washington, by going to the President and saying, “It was important to get Haig back in the Army because nobody was watching Abrams [army chief of staff General Creighton Abrams] from within the Army….Haig said, �
��Henry is trying to promote me out of the White House.’ ”

  The internal madness continued after a peace agreement was reached with the North Vietnamese—and immediately violated by all sides, as was anticipated—and it went on after Kissinger became secretary of state, while continuing as Nixon’s national security adviser. As the Watergate scandal unfolded in 1973 and 1974, Zumwalt was told that Haig, then the army’s deputy chief of staff,

  was in bed with Haldeman and Ehrlichman and was aware of the Plumbers operation….The President wants to say [regarding the wiretapping of aides and others]…that all Presidents did it. He wants to justify the motive, not the act….Kissinger keeps insisting that he was not involved in Watergate…that he didn’t know about the wiretaps….Kissinger asked if [David] Young [who with Egil Krogh ran the Plumbers team for Ehrlichman] was loyal to Kissinger….Kissinger wanted to bring David Young back to the NSC staff….Nobody gets to the President. Some of his old political advisors have tried to get in and he refuses to see them….There are five coups a day as various power centers try to take over.

  It was very reassuring data to have as I was finishing my book on Kissinger in Nixon’s White House. As the memoirs of both made clear, I noted at the end of my book, “neither man ever came to grips with the basic vulnerability of their policy: They were operating in a democracy, guided by a constitution, and among a citizenry who held their leaders to a reasonable standard of morality and integrity….The dead and maimed in Vietnam and Cambodia—as in Chile, Bangladesh, Biafra, and the Middle East—seemed not to count as the President and his national security adviser battled the Soviet Union, their misconceptions, their political enemies, and each other.”