Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  My book, The Dark Side of Camelot, when published, was an immediate bestseller—but for all the wrong reasons. The new material I dug up about Jack Kennedy’s advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion and his political use of that information caused nary a stir; the initial news stories focused on the fake documents that were not in the book and the Secret Service sex stuff. After the furor died down, I did an interview with The Atlantic magazine in which I finally found something good to say about the falsified Kennedy documents: “In a funny way I’m glad the…papers scandal happened. Given the pretty much universally hostile reception to my book, thank God I had those papers, because otherwise I would have been accused of falsifying everything….I’ve been criticized for a lot of things I’ve written—My Lai, CIA stuff—but this is the first time I’ve been criticized for what I thought….The bottom line is that I didn’t publish them. I don’t understand what’s so bad about chasing a story, finding out it’s not real, and saying so.”

  There were a few journalists who got it. In a lead piece for the Times’s Sunday Book Review, Tom Powers criticized me for what he called my “far-too-long romance” with the forgeries, and then went on to note that since the fakery did not get into the book, “a lot of other stuff did, and the question on the table is what to make of it.” He added,

  The first thing to be said about “The Dark Side of Camelot” is that it is a reporter’s book, not a historian’s. What’s in it is mainly Hersh’s. Again and again we are told that so-and-so “said in an interview for this book” or “told me” thus-and-such or that certain documents were “obtained for this book” and are here “published for the first time.” The first half-dozen times this seems boastful and aggrandizing, but we soon grow used to the litany, and it becomes clear that Hersh has done his legwork; he is not trying to smuggle things in from other books. He tells us what he’s found up front, making judgment easier for reviewers and blood enemies alike. The source notes at the back can be a little cumbersome, but compared with investigative reporters who provide no source notes whatever, Hersh is standing in the choir with Edward Gibbon.

  It was comforting to put the Kennedy book behind me and return, happily, to the sanity of The New Yorker. Pat Crow had retired, and Tina Brown had been replaced by David Remnick, a former Washington Post correspondent whom I did not know. Esther Newberg was a friend of David’s, and years earlier she had sent me advance galleys of Lenin’s Tomb, his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1993 book on the last days of the Soviet empire. It was nonfiction writing at its best, as I said in a jacket comment, and David’s appointment as editor seemed like a perfect fit. He was as welcoming to me as anyone could be, and off we went.

  My new editor was John Bennet, who, like all editors at the magazine at the time, saw his mission as understanding what the reporter was trying to say and helping him to say it. My first major article in the Remnick era was published in late 1998 and picked up where I had left off—challenging the public rationale for a Clinton administration Tomahawk missile attack in the Middle East. The White House’s target this time was an alleged pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, that the White House claimed had the capacity to manufacture chemical warfare agents as well as inexpensive generic medicines vitally needed by the local population. Clinton announced the bombing while on vacation in August 1998 in Martha’s Vineyard. His decision came three days after he had finished testifying before a federal grand jury about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky. He depicted the targeted plant as an “imminent threat” to American national security.

  Nearly all of the senior military and intelligence officials I knew had stayed on the job during the four years I wrestled with the Kennedy myth, and to a man they were troubled by Clinton’s decision to bomb. We use the word “sources” in the newspaper world to describe those who provide needed information, but it’s a totally inadequate word. I shared 6:00 a.m. breakfasts in diners and other offbeat places with my sources, and many lunches and dinners with them when they were on duty outside Washington. Some meetings took place overseas. These insiders quickly became more than sources; they were friends and stayed friends after they left government.

  As in the 1993 bombing attack on Baghdad, there were many questions about the intelligence linking the pharmaceutical plant, one of very few in Sudan, to the production of chemical warfare agents. There also were equally serious questions about how the Clinton White House prepared for the mission. Most significant, four members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been excluded from the attack planning until the last moment. Only army general Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had been involved in the operation from its inception, and I learned he had been instructed by Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, not to brief the chiefs on the mission, nor was he to involve the Defense Intelligence Agency in the planning. The operation was directed by Berger, and Berger was dealing back channel throughout the process with a lower-ranking admiral who, to the surprise of few in the Pentagon, was awarded at the end of the Clinton years with a promotion and a choice assignment as an overseas commander in chief.

  The process reeked, and many senior officers and officials in the military and intelligence community understood that the ambitious Berger, who was expected to be named Clinton’s chief of staff before the President’s second term came to an end, was doing in Khartoum exactly what the President wanted. It was a Wag the Dog scenario, and I ended my piece by quoting a former high-level State Department official as explaining that Clinton was preoccupied at the time by his personal and professional problems stemming from his sexual relationship with Lewinsky, which began when she was a White House intern. “Survival is his most important issue,” I quoted the former official as saying of the President. “It’s always on his mind. If Clinton was not in all this trouble, he wouldn’t have done it”—authorized the Tomahawk raid. “He’s too smart.” Berger refused to see me while I was reporting the story, despite many entreaties.

  Remnick did what every good editor would do as the story worked its way through the bureaucracy. He consulted with the fact-checkers—who did their work totally isolated from me—and, much to his credit, asked a lot of questions on the proofs. If he got heat from the White House after the story was published, he did not share it with me.

  I turned from Sudan to Israel and wrote a piece in early 1999 reflecting the negative view of the American intelligence community about Clinton’s likely decision to accede to Israeli demands that Jonathan Pollard be pardoned. Pollard was a Jewish navy intelligence official who had been caught spying for Israel in 1985 and subsequently given a life sentence. Clinton’s anticipated pardon triggered threats of wholesale high-level Pentagon and CIA resignations. The obvious question was, why such rancor from the men and women at the top of the intelligence food chain?

  Soon after I began asking questions, I was invited by a senior intelligence official to come have a chat at CIA headquarters. I had done interviews there before, but always at my insistence. (George Tenet was then the CIA director, but the invitation did not come from him.) When I arrived, I was taken into a small conference room on the seventh floor, where Tenet had his office, by an official I knew only by reputation; we had never talked, not for my want of trying. I was asked how I liked my coffee and told to take a seat. My host returned with coffee and a bound volume, handed both to me, said the equivalent of “Have fun,” and walked out.

  The volume included material that had been given under seal to the federal judge during Pollard’s trial. It was a summary of many of the documents that Pollard was known to have illegally obtained from various classified libraries in Washington and delivered—that is, presumably delivered—to his Israeli handlers. It was stunning to me, because the documents made clear that much of Pollard’s thievery dealt with how America spied on its greatest adversary—the Soviet Union. Spying on America seemed to be little more than an afterthought, or footnote,
to the assignments given Pollard by his Israeli handler. As I wrote, the thrust of the documents I was reading did not deal primarily with the product of American intelligence—assessments and estimates—but instead focused on how America learned what it did, the data known in the intelligence community as “sources and methods.” One series of papers obtained by Pollard revealed how a U.S. Navy signals attachment unit undercover in the Middle East tracked Russian nuclear submarines as they moved underwater into the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar. Another described the frequencies at which America picked up Russian signals. Another document depicted details about a ten-volume American manual known as RASIN, an acronym for radio-signal notation. The manual, which I had no idea existed, listed the physical parameters of every known signal of friend and foe. “It’s the bible,” I quoted one NSA veteran as explaining to me. “It tells how we collect signals anywhere in the world.”

  I knew the people to see in order to verify the gist of what I had been allowed to review, but I was very ambivalent about being in the unfamiliar position of carrying water for the American intelligence community. I, who had worked so hard in my career to learn the secrets, had been handed the secrets. The senior official who led me to the water never talked to me again, although I tried for years to get him to do so. I was able to verify the information that had been thrown at me, and I also took care, as I liked to believe those who gave me the material assumed I would, not to go too far in what I made public. I had been given an insight into the unique documents obtained by Pollard and passed on, in most cases, to the Israelis. Each page was lathered with markings depicting the extreme secrecy of the stuff I was reading.

  The files I saw also made clear that the men and women running American intelligence believed that the Israeli government was trading Pollard’s information to Moscow in exchange for the emigration of Soviet Jews with skills and expertise needed by Israel. That belief has never been confirmed, but it was spread throughout the top secret assessments I saw.

  I went back to writing stories I wanted to write and told of American attempts to interfere with, and covertly take over, a series of highly productive intelligence operations conducted in the late 1990s by the UN’s Special Commission for Iraq, known as UNSCOM. The UN team’s mission was to determine whether any weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or chemical, remained in Saddam’s arsenal. The contrary American goal was to pretend to share the UN’s interest in any information about Saddam’s weaponry while actually assembling data that would help facilitate the assassination of the Iraqi leader. The cover headline for the piece, approved by Remnick, was “Saddam’s Best Friend: How the C.I.A. Made It a Lot Easier for the Iraqi Leader to Rearm.” It felt good to be once again writing a story my government did not want known. I had the best job in the world. I was working for a wonderful magazine, with sophisticated and fearless editors with the highest of standards, and I was free to investigate whatever seemed worthy, with the support and approval of Remnick.

  I had been told repeatedly by those who worked for him of the aberrant behavior of Barry McCaffrey, a hard-charging and photogenic general who had led an army division in the 1991 Gulf War and retired from the military in 1996 after being named director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, a.k.a. the drug czar, by Bill Clinton. McCaffrey’s mercurial behavior continued in the White House. In late 1999, I shared an early morning coffee with a four-star general—who was itching to start his five-mile morning run—and talked about looking into McCaffrey’s conduct as a civilian official. My friend, who also served as a division commander in the 1991 war, told me that the real story had to do with McCaffrey’s decision to authorize and carry out a murderous surprise attack on a retreating Iraqi tank battalion after that war had ended—after the Iraqis had been assured of safe passage from the front near Kuwait back to Baghdad.

  It took months and hundreds of interviews, nearly all of them on the record, before I felt I had an unimpeachable story. I had transcripts of radio calls from one headquarters to another questioning the attack as it was ongoing, and I felt I had devastating comments from a dozen of McCaffrey’s fellow generals. Remnick, who was closely involved in the six-month inquiry, urged me to get as many critics of McCaffrey on the record as possible, which reflected a solid editorial instinct. I spent weeks negotiating watered-down on-the-record statements from McCaffrey’s peers and superiors in the army, and their criticisms, no matter how reserved, added to a smarmy portrait of a general determined to make his mark in the desert, just as one of McCaffrey’s heroes, German general Erwin Rommel, had done in North Africa in 1942.

  The twenty-four-thousand-word article, titled “Overwhelming Force,” was in the final stage of fact-checking when McCaffrey, who had consistently refused to talk to me and discouraged all of his peers he could from doing so, launched a preemptory attack. He issued a statement, through a lawyer, personally attacking me and complaining that I was conducting “defamatory” interviews out of “personal malice.” The tactic worked; many in the media wrote about his attacks, which came weeks before my article was published.

  My piece got plenty of attention, but did not provoke an official review of the incident. The 1991 victory over Saddam Hussein was seen as an end to the stigma of defeat that had haunted the American military since the end of the Vietnam War, and there was no official incentive to mar that picture. McCaffrey did not sue, despite his vitriolic complaints, and I was left with the impression that America did not care about the unnecessary killing of Iraqi prisoners or Iraqi soldiers heading home on a path fixed by an end-of-the-war peace agreement. It was a reminder of the Vietnam War’s MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it’s a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime. (I had learned a domestic version of that rule decades earlier while covering a fire that killed at least five in Chicago’s black ghetto for the City News Bureau.)

  My last story for Remnick before 9/11 dealt with a series of corrupt activities by Mobil Oil, an American giant, after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. Oil was to be had at ridiculously low prices per barrel in those chaotic days, as long as major bribes were given to those former Soviet officials, many of whom had been intelligence operatives, who were in the process of seizing billions of dollars in assets. The complicated story took months to edit and brought on threatened lawsuits by many of the most prominent law firms in New York, all of whom had been retained by Mobil and other involved entities. I remember one meeting at which the newly appointed general counsel for the magazine declared, plaintively, that he found it difficult to believe that a major corporation such as Mobil could operate as far outside the law as I was alleging. I, in despair about such comments, walked over to him, patted him on the cheek, and said, “You’re such a nice boy.” (The lawyer turned out to be a strong advocate for getting difficult-to-report stories into the magazine.) Remnick held firm, though his worry was eased by a number of modifications I made to the story, pursuant to legal advice. The complicated piece, published in July 2001, was a bitch to read, full of unfamiliar business transactions and many foreign names, but it attracted the attention of the federal government, which immediately opened an inquiry into the wrongdoing outlined in the piece.

  For all its difficulty, and its lack of pizzazz, the article, titled “The Price of Oil,” brought me to the attention of many oil traders and energy experts in Europe and the Middle East and made what I had to do after 9/11 much easier.

  *1My story turned out to be a mere hint of the reality, in ways the Times editors (and I) could not have known. In 2003, the Scottish Sunday Herald reported that Terex was one of seventeen U.K. companies named by Iraq in a 12,000-page dossier as having supplied the government of Saddam Hussein with nuclear, chemical, rocket, and conventional weapons for many years, ending in 1991. The list of those nations doing such business included firms from all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—Britain, France, Russia, America, and China—and the
Security Council, in obvious embarrassment, censored 8,000 pages of the dossier before its release. The deleted pages were later found to include details of the transactions of Western businesses that were aiding Iraq’s nuclear program prior to 1989.

  *2I had needed a new agent years before. Esther and I met for the first time in 1985 over breakfast in Washington. After saying hello, I started yakking about some gossip I’d heard, and she interrupted me to say, “That’s just bullshit.” She became my agent for life at that moment.

  *3The Kuwaiti government canceled its contract with Enron after my story appeared. Baker, who had refused to talk to me about the trip to Kuwait, ran into me on a flight from Washington to Houston a few months later. As he walked past me, he stopped, pointed a finger at me, and said, with much anger, “You didn’t lay a glove on me. Not one finger.” Years later, we sat side by side on a flight from Houston and had a pleasant chat. He was one of the few George W. Bush supporters who tried his best to mitigate the damage to America and the world that Bush and Dick Cheney had done after 9/11.