The journalist Thomas Powers, in closing his review of the book for the Times, got the message:
Mr. Hersh has no quarrel with the collection of intelligence, has clearly been impressed with the seriousness and ability of the people who gather and analyze it, and has made no effort to compromise their work. But he has gone a long way toward exposing the most closely held of all intelligence secrets—the fact that the ultimate consumers of intelligence, the officials at the top of the pyramid of government, are political in their instincts before they are anything else, and sometimes use it for entirely personal political ends. They are accustomed to getting away with it. Mr. Hersh has caught them at it, and they don’t like it.
It was not surprising that an experienced national security reporter got the point of the book, but I was even more pleased when I was asked by an intelligence analyst at one of the most important, and secret, NSA collection stations in Japan if I would donate a few autographed copies of “The Target Is Destroyed” for the annual fund-raising book fair for the base’s charitable programs. I also was told it was a must-read there, and at other NSA installations in the Far East.
My book on the Israeli bomb, and what America knew about it, benefited from the surprising victory of Menachem Begin’s Likud Party in the 1977 national elections in Israel. The defeat of Labor, which had merged in 1968 with the center-left Mapai Party, meant that moderate liberals would not dominate Israeli politics for the first time in twenty-nine years. The result was something that could only happen in Israel: Some of those out of office began to talk about the unknowable—how Israel got its bomb, and how America chose to do nothing about it. I could not name those former members of the Labor Party who talked to me here in America and elsewhere about the early days of the bomb, just as I could not identify those CIA officers who were appalled by what they knew of America’s secret support for the Israeli research.
I also walked into an inside account of how Robert Maxwell, the prominent British publisher of the bestselling tabloids Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, worked through Nicholas Davies, his editor for foreign affairs, and the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, to ensnare and capture Mordechai Vanunu, a onetime worker in the Israeli nuclear bomb program whom Israel was seeking to put on trial on charges of treason and espionage. Vanunu, a Jew who converted to Christianity, had gone public in a competing British newspaper with extensive details about the Israeli bomb program—the exposé created an international sensation—and then disappeared. Maxwell, who was Jewish, was not a spy for Israel but someone who supported the country and was willing to do what he could for it. I had cited Davies as a sometime arms dealer and a key figure in the seizure of Vanunu. The allegation led to a tabloid frenzy of accusation and denial, with a banner headline in the Daily Mirror screaming “FORGERY” in huge type about one of the documents I had, and its main competitor responding with an equally bold headline, “YOU LIAR,” when my document proved to be real.
The dispute generated even more headlines a few weeks after the Mirror Group sued me for libel when Maxwell was found dead—mysteriously dead—later in 1991 on his yacht in the waters off the Canary Islands. The Mirror Group’s suit against me was dismissed in 1995, and a libel suit I had filed, at the urging of Michael Nussbaum, my attorney, was settled the next year when the newspaper issued a very abject apology to me and also paid me substantial damages that under the terms of the settlement I was not allowed to specify. The Washington Post, writing about the settlement, noted that the Mirror Group acknowledged that the allegations against me and Faber & Faber, my British publisher, “were completely without foundation and ought never to have been made.” The Mirror Group statement added that I was “an author of excellent reputation and of the highest integrity who would never write anything which he did not believe to be true and that he was in this instance fully justified in writing what he did.” The next sentence in the Post left me very puzzled: “The paper’s lawyers seemed to be saying yesterday Hersh was right.” I would guess so.
There were high hopes in the American market for the book, whose disclosures about the extent of the Israeli nuclear arsenal became a lead story in the Times just as the book was officially published in the fall of 1991. It soon became clear, however, that the book was far from a celebration of Israeli might, but a critical look at America’s role, from the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower forward, in avoiding a confrontation with Israel over its secret nuclear weapons work. An early flurry of hot sales on New York’s West Side, the home to many Jews, quickly diminished as the book’s message became known. It was a message that very few, Jewish or not, wanted to hear. I had been inundated in the days after publication by invitations from synagogues and various Jewish groups, and it was disappointing, but no great shock, when all but one canceled. The one venue that did not, a synagogue in suburban Cleveland, became a scene of chaos when many in the audience tried to shout me down as I foolishly described how one president after another looked away as Israel began producing warheads. My point was not that Israel should not have a bomb but that the sub-rosa American support for it was known throughout the Middle East and made a mockery of American efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and other nations with undeclared nuclear ambitions. The protests from the congregation grew stronger as I kept on talking, and eventually I was forced, only partly in jest, to ask the presiding rabbi if I could have a two-minute head start at the end of my talk to get to my rental car in the parking lot.
The reviews of the book, not surprisingly, were favorable or not depending on the reviewer’s personal feelings about Israel and its relationship with its Arab neighbors. Those who supported Israel invariably cited my reliance on anonymous sources for refusing to believe the book’s major revelations; they did so while ignoring the fact that day after day the Times and other mainstream media were citing unnamed officials and others on stories involving foreign policy. The book also gave me an insight into the disarray of the Arab world. The Samson Option was published a few days before the convening of the October 1991 Madrid Conference, an innovative effort sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union aimed at renewing the Israel-Palestine peace talks. Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon also were to be involved in the process, with the approval of President George H. W. Bush. The book’s arrival provided an immediate opportunity for those Arab nations who wanted to discuss the military and diplomatic implications of the Israeli nuclear arsenal, the proverbial elephant in the room when it came to any peace negotiations; Israel had a nuclear arsenal, and no one else in the region did. Thus I received numerous calls and messages from the Arab world asking me to visit and give a talk. My answer to all was that I would be delighted to speak about my book anywhere in the Middle East, but I did not have time to give the same talk in five or six different nations. I proposed instead that the nations that wanted to hear what I had to say work out a combined venue at which I could speak. It did not happen, despite the interest of many in the Middle East, and I did not make the trip. The lesson I learned was that there will be peace in the world between white and black, Russia and America, rich and poor, before there will be a settlement of the Arab-Israeli issue.
Both of the books “earned out,” a publishing industry phrase for selling enough copies to offset the advance given, but appeared only briefly on bestseller lists. There were many foreign sales, reviews galore, and scores of newspaper and TV interviews with me, but hardback sales in the United States for neither book approached the number reached by The Price of Power.
I wondered whether it was time to forget about books, movies, and documentary television and return once again to daily journalism. I had been asked a few years earlier to rejoin the Times Washington bureau by Craig Whitney, the bureau chief, but I said no. Max Frankel, who had replaced Abe as executive editor in 1986, was more chary about allowing outsiders to break stories on the front pages of the newspaper, which was appropriate. (I was told that Rosenth
al had explained my continued presence in the newspaper by saying that there was no need for him to buy the cow when he could get its milk through a fence. I hope he said that, or something like that, because the arrangement had worked for both of us.) So the daily Times was not available to me. The Sunday magazine was, however, and I was chafing to do a story on the failed Senate investigation into the Iran-contra scandal. I was immersed in the Korean shoot-down book when the story unfolded, and thought the daily press had failed to do what had been done in Watergate—focus on the role of President Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. It was impossible to believe that Bush, as a former CIA director working for a muddled president, was not a key player in the mess. Bush and Reagan both escaped with their reputations intact and so, I believed, had the Senate investigators. I spent months on assignment for the magazine in 1990 and 1991 trying to figure out what had gone wrong. One finding was that there was no real stomach among the involved senators for going after Reagan.
The Senate investigation had been a flop, so I wrote: “More than three years of investigation and criminal proceedings have put no one in jail. Nor has the disclosure of Iran-Contra, the illicit selling of guns for profit by a renegade group in the White House, led to any constitutional or legal reforms.” Ronald Reagan, the avuncular and weak-minded “Gipper,” had been given a pass.
*1The series also led me to a huge embarrassment. After the series was published, I was contacted by yet another alleged CIA operative who told me he had specific information about nuclear materials that had been smuggled by Wilson and Terpil into Libya. By then I was back at work on the Kissinger book, and I decided, with the operative’s permission, to pass his information to Dick Allen, who had been very helpful to me on my book before joining the administration. I told him the story and the operative’s name. He said he would check him out and get back to me. He did so and a meeting was arranged in the Situation Room of the White House. I was invited by Allen to attend the meeting but had mixed emotions, to put it mildly, about doing so. One part of me said it was none of my business; on the other hand, I had never seen the top secret Situation Room while often writing about it. So I joined the meeting. It was agreed my presence would be off the record—another mistake. At one point, a senior official at the meeting told my operative that he understood there was nothing that he had not done for country. The idiot I brought to the meeting said yes and added that there were many times that he had done the utmost. It was clear to all that the two were talking about sanctioned assassinations. I was appalled and angered by the exchange and by the fact that it took place in front of me. I was now a participant and not a reporter. Things were said that I could not, and did not, write about. I walked a block or two toward my office with the operative and expressed my anger at participating. He, with a sly smile, asked if I wanted a transcript of the session. It turned out that somehow he had managed to smuggle a small tape recorder past the Situation Room security by burying it high up between his legs. I got the hell away from him as fast as I could and called Allen to tell him that he may have been betrayed. Allen said not to worry, and we maintained a friendship that continues today. I never heard from the operative again, nor did the context of the meeting ever become public. I also have no idea whether the operative’s information was valid and, if so, was acted on. Off the record was anathema to me after that, and I learned once again not to allow myself to become a participant in a government function.
*2A few years later, with the publication of an excerpt on Chile from my soon-to-be-published Kissinger book, I received a letter from Murray’s daughter, Marea, then living in Massachusetts, thanking me for my work and adding, “Finally, I know what my father’s role was in this ‘CIA business’—at least with regard to Chile—and I am proud.”
*3Ben Bradlee called me amid my scheming with Gelb and invited me to lunch at an upscale French restaurant in downtown Washington. He told me that Bob Woodward, then in charge of the ten-man Post investigative team, was going on leave to write a book and would I consider taking over for him? I would be free to write, too. I said nothing to anyone about the offer, as Bradlee had urged, and had a pleasant meeting about the job, and about money, with Katharine Graham. Bob learned within days that I was to be his replacement—secrecy does not exist when it comes to newspaper gossip—and offered to stay on and help me get adjusted to the job. I liked and respected Bob—he is one of the very few reporters I’ve shared a source or two with—but I was a loner at heart and always had been, whether in my father’s store or at the Times. I had surprised myself by working well with Jeff Gerth, but collaboration, even with those as talented as Bob Woodward or Les Gelb, wasn’t for me and I told Ben that. He understood, and our Sunday morning tennis games went on for many more years with no more discussion about my coming to work at the Post.
· EIGHTEEN ·
A New Yorker Reprise
I was delighted when Tina Brown, who was named editor of The New Yorker in 1992, called and urged me to write again for the magazine. I knew that Harry Evans, her husband, had been a great supporter of investigative reporting when he ran the London Sunday Times, and there was every reason to think that Tina, as everyone seemed to call her, would do the same.
Tina’s call came at a perfect time. I had struck out the year before after being given a dream assignment by Joe Lelyveld, Max Frankel’s deputy. Joe had my respect—he was a first-rate reporter—and he wanted me to return to the paper on special assignment and take a stab at solving the lingering mystery of President Jimmy Carter’s reelection defeat in 1980. The question was whether the Republicans had something to do with Iran’s decision to release fifty-two American prisoners within a few minutes of the 1981 inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. The Americans, most of them diplomats, had been seized inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, nine months after the violent overthrow of the U.S.-supported regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. There were widespread rumors that William J. Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager—and later his CIA director—had pulled off an October surprise by entreating the Iranian leadership to hold on to the prisoners until after the 1980 election, diminishing Carter’s reelection prospects.
I spent months, and a lot of Times money, traveling back and forth to Europe without getting close to a visa to Tehran, and a possible answer. The fact that America had supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with weapons and intelligence in its murderous eight-year war with Iran—it ended in 1988—did not help. I left the Times office in Washington after more than five months with three strikes against me: I had not broken the code, if there was one, of the October surprise; I had consistently forgotten the name of Maureen Dowd, its star columnist, whose office was next to mine; and the one substantial news story I wrote in those months for the paper, revealing that the Terex Corporation, an American company with a subdivision in Ireland, was manufacturing and selling trucks to Iraq that could easily be converted to Scud launchers, resulted in a lawsuit filed against me, though not the Times. There was much unpleasant back-and-forth before the Times legal office agreed to hire Michael Nussbaum to work with the excellent Washington firm that had been retained on the case. The suit, whose purpose I believed was to prevent me and others from writing more about the company’s operations in Ireland, was eventually settled, over my objection, with a statement by the Times saying it had no evidence that Terex had supplied military equipment to Iraq. My key source for the story, an American businessman with long-standing ties to the Middle East and to the CIA, was kept from testifying because the Justice Department, citing the danger to American national security, invoked the States Secret Privilege, an often-relied-upon precedent to avoid the disclosure of highly classified information. It would be another decade before the real story became known—that more than one hundred Western business entities had been selling arms and military goods to Iraq, including sanctioned items that could be used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Such dealings became an embarra
ssment to the companies and nations involved after the first Gulf War against Iraq began in the late summer of 1990.*1 Michael’s bill was minimal, but the newspaper’s legal department had not paid it when in late December 1991 some genius there contacted Michael and offered what he called an end-of-the-year settlement of something like sixty cents on the dollar. The busy Nussbaum, whose clients included Lloyd’s of London, ignored the cheesy offer. At his death two decades later, Michael still had made no effort to get paid.
Tina’s call meant I would once again be working with Pat Crow, who had edited my My Lai excerpts so brilliantly, and also have the advantage of working again with The New Yorker’s solid fact-checkers. Crow and I had shared a very odd experience a year or so before when the esteemed Robert Gottlieb was editing the magazine. I had picked up a lot of inside information about turmoil inside the Pentagon over the planning for America’s 1989 invasion of Panama that ousted Manuel Noriega but left hundreds dead and parts of Panama City, the capital, in ruins. I called Pat and the two of us met with Gottlieb, who was chatty and very informal—very un-Shawn-like. He told me how pleased he was that I was offering a story, heard me out carefully, and then said go for it. As Pat and I were walking out of his office, Gottlieb added these words: “Sy, I just want you to know that I don’t like controversy.”
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