Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  An hour or so into our talk, an aide opened the door to Assad’s office, but Assad waved him away before he said a word. A few moments later a ranking officer again opened the door, and Assad said he would be available soon. We talked another half an hour or so—Assad is fluent in English—and when I left, there was a huge array of senior government officials waiting outside the office. I did not learn for another hour that, as Assad and I continued to chat, Hariri had been assassinated by a bomb that killed twenty-one others near the Lebanese parliament building. Assad was an obvious suspect because of the public dispute with Hariri that immediately preceded the murder. I was convinced that there was no way Assad knew that Hariri was going to be killed, given his openness with me about the Hariri offer and why it was a nonstarter. I also knew that there was much I did not know, and it was possible that the timing of our interview, which had been scheduled weeks earlier, was deliberate. In other words, I might have been used to create an alibi for an assassination ordered by the Syrian president. I thought that was extremely unlikely, but despite some pressure from The New Yorker, I decided not to write about the interview. It was a tough call, and to my surprise the fact that I did not write about our meeting did not prevent me from having further interviews with Assad. He never raised the issue, and the Hariri assassination remains unsolved to this day.

  My contact with the reclusive Nasrallah revolved around the American war in Iraq. The sheik was known to be close to the Shiite leadership in Iran, who were bitterly anti-American, and I had been urged in mid-2003 by August Hanning, the longtime head of Germany’s federal intelligence service, the BND (for Bundesnachrich­tendienst), to meet with him. Hanning told me during an interview at his home in Berlin that he had worked with Nasrallah and Ariel Sharon, Israel’s hard-line prime minister, on a series of prisoner exchanges stemming from the chronic state of war between Hezbollah and Israel. I was stunned to learn of such contacts: Hezbollah was known to consider Israel an existential enemy and an illegal state, and Israel saw Hezbollah as a terrorist organization operating on its border. Of course the round, plump sheik was professional and affable when we first met, and I was flooded with tea and cookies and what seemed to be straight talk about Israel and the war. Nasrallah had an ironic sense of humor and constantly toyed with prayer beads as we talked, through an interpreter. I asked him at the outset what he would do if Palestinian authorities entered into a permanent peace agreement with Israel. His answer surprised me. “If there is a deal, let it happen,” he said. “I would not say anything. I would say nothing. At the end of the road no one can go to war on behalf of the Palestinians, even if one is not in agreement with what the Palestinians agreed on.”*4

  I interviewed the sheik three or four times over the next few years, and he was steadfast in his belief that there was no way America would win the war in Iraq. He also assured me that the Iraqi opposition would win control of the Iraqi parliament in the 2005 election there—all sides abused the process—two weeks before the disputed election results were made public. Predicting an election victory was one thing, but Nasrallah’s prediction came within one-tenth of a point of the winning margin. I concluded there was much we Americans did not know about fixing elections. I also came away from my meetings with Assad and Nasrallah convinced that American presidents, driven by fear of criticism and worry about the unknown, were making a huge mistake in not dealing with both men.

  Remnick was far more skeptical than I was of the integrity of Assad and Nasrallah, but he did not hesitate to publish the gist of my interviews. It was a vote of confidence in my judgment, and it made it easier for me to respect his. There was one story, after my Abu Ghraib series, that I wanted him to publish but he did not. I had been told in early 2005 by a senior CIA official of his distress at hearing a respected former CIA station chief brag to his colleagues over a drink about how he got a major high-value target in the War on Terror to talk. The target was an Indonesian-born terrorist, known to the U.S. intelligence community as Hambali, whose arrest in the late summer of 2003 had been publicly trumpeted by the Bush administration as a major success in the American War on Terror. Hambali’s real name was Riduan Isamuddin, and he was said to be the al-Qaeda point man for research into biological warfare. CBS News and the Chicago Tribune, citing intelligence sources, eventually reported that when captured, he had been in the process of “implementing plans” for the spread of a biological weapon, perhaps anthrax.

  The former station chief, who had been promoted to a key Agency position in Washington, explained that he had broken Hambali by placing a sackful of fire ants over his head. Within minutes, he said, “the whimpering and simpering” Hambali turned into “a vegetable.” The distressed CIA official, in his account to me, said he had checked the most secret Agency files on Hambali and found no evidence for the allegations about biological warfare. He then reported the fire ant story to the Agency’s top management. In response, he was insultingly ordered to take a lie detector test. He resigned immediately and said nothing about what he knew until a year later, when he sought me out. He could understand George W. Bush’s political need to show success in the floundering War on Terror by exaggerating the importance of Hambali, but he could not understand why his peers and the top management had not been troubled, as he was, by the claimed use of fire ants in interrogation. (It was a torture that had been practiced by Apache, Comanche, and other Indian tribes in their nineteenth-century war with the U.S. Army for control of the West.)

  It was an appalling story about a man who knew no limit. Remnick was as horrified as I was about the extent of American torture in the Iraqi war, but, as he told me, given the importance of the station chief, he was troubled by the fact that the main source did not want to be named, and more so by the fact that many of the station chief’s peers had claimed, as I wrote, that the station chief was known as a chronic liar. I was convinced that the station chief’s pals were rallying around him with a collective lie, and I later learned that was so from one of them, but I did not know it when David decided the story was too risky. This was not Abu Ghraib, where there was an abundance of on-the-record evidence, including photographs of Iraqi prisoners being subjected to sexual humiliation and General Taguba’s internal report on the prison. David’s concern was not solely about the magazine but about me—the reporter who had unraveled the Abu Ghraib mess. The fire ant story, which had been edited and put into galleys, did not run.

  There was a later codicil. I had kept the CIA’s office of public affairs aware of what I was planning to write, and learned that the Justice Department had chosen to declassify a 2002 legal memorandum on torture as we were editing the story. The memorandum authorized the use of insects during interrogation, as long as the prisoner was known to be afraid of insects and was informed “that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain.” The suggested insect was a caterpillar. Even that sleight of hand, alas, obviously meant to diminish my story, was not enough to justify publication. David was still right. There was a reason, I thought, God made editors.

  One constant theme of my reporting dealt with the free rein that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had given the Joint Special Operations Commands in Iraq and elsewhere. I ran into a wave of anger when, during a Q and A with former vice president Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who had served on the Church Committee when in the Senate, I was quoted complaining about what I called an “executive assassination ring” that was in place during much of the Iraqi war. I usually tried to let what I publish speak for me on provocative issues such as assassination—most Americans chose to remain innocent about such a reality—but there was, as I explained to an appropriately annoyed Remnick, a special circumstance in this case. My talk with Mondale had been scheduled months in advance as part of a foreign policy series at the University of Minnesota, where Mondale taught. I arrived in Minneapolis midmorning for the evening event, just as snow began to fall. By early evening, Minneapolis had been clobbered by sno
w and was at a standstill, but the show went on—before fewer than a hundred of the many hundreds who subscribed to the series. Mondale had become radicalized about the U.S. intelligence community by the seamy stuff he learned on the Church Committee, and he urged all in the audience to gather close to the stage as we chatted. The former vice president was very outspoken and angry about the abuses that I had been writing about. It was in that spirit I mentioned the existence of an American assassination ring. I knew more than I could say, which turned out to be a good thing. Ten months after 9/11 I had obtained a package of classified internal documents that were responses from various Pentagon offices to an astonishing question that had been poised by Donald Rumsfeld: How could America organize itself more efficiently for what he called “Manhunts”—the assassination of enemies? One special operations group responded by urging that the American military end its requirement for “actionable intelligence”—that is, evidence that the victim was the right target—and be “willing to take greater risks.” America’s military, said the special ops group, “must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered…This denies us the ability and tactical surprise so necessary for manhunts, snatches, and retribution raids.” Knowing of such thinking helped shape my reporting, but at the time I did not publish the documents I had, in fear of exposing the source. Sure enough, someone in the audience was recording my remarks on a cell phone and wrote a blog item about them on the internet. Not a big deal, I initially thought—Mondale had agreed with my choice of words—but the blog went viral, and there was an immediate outcry about my allegation of a murder ring, which was comical given the extensive and consistent reporting I had done on that issue in The New Yorker.

  By 2005, the brilliant Amy Davidson had been my editor for more than a year, and she responded to the criticism with a long essay, “Close Read,” for The New Yorker’s internet page. In the piece she summarized much of what I had written about murder in the War on Terror. Even I, who had done the reporting and writing, was amazed by the amount of specific detail that had been published.

  Davidson reviewed the many articles in the magazine I had written between late 2001 and 2008 in which I told how cold-blooded murder had become standard practice in the combat zone. The first, published within weeks of 9/11, quoted what I called a “C.I.A. man” as espousing the need to consider tactics that “defy the American rule of law….We need to do this—knock them down one by one.” In late 2002, I exposed the targeted assassination of an al-Qaeda leader whose demise had been approved by President Bush, although such killings had been expressly barred by President Ford in the wake of the Church hearings of 1975. I ended the article by quoting an experienced Pentagon consultant: “We’ve created a culture in the Special Forces—twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds who need adult leadership. They’re assuming you’ve got legal authority, and they’ll do it”—eagerly eliminate any target assigned to them. Eventually, the intelligence will be bad, he said, and innocent people will be killed. “And then they’ll get hung.” In late 2003, I depicted assassination as a standard tactic in Iraq, as what seemed to be a quick U.S. victory over the insurgents, many of them former members of the disbanded Iraqi army, had become far less likely. I quoted a former intelligence official as saying that when American Special Forces target an insurgent for death, “it’s technically not assassination—it’s normal combat operations.” In a third article on Abu Ghraib in 2004, depicting assassination as part of the backdrop of the prison scandal, I quoted an official as saying, “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’ ” (I also revealed in that article the existence of what became known as “black sites,” undeclared American torture prisons in Europe and Asia that were operating in stringent secrecy, with no congressional funding or knowledge.) By early 2005, with the Iraqi war going badly and violence on the rise, I revealed a high-level order that “specifically authorized the military ‘to find and finish’ terrorist targets….It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets….[T]he order further quoted an official as asking, pointedly, “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” He added, “And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.”

  As the Bush administration finished its eight years in office, I quoted “a recently retired high-level C.I.A. official” who told of bitter disagreements between the White House and the Agency over the issue of targeted assassination. “The problem is what constituted approval,” the former CIA man said. “My people fought about this all the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just tell me to kill Joe Smith. If I was the Vice-President or the President, I’d say, ‘This guy Smith is a bad guy and it’s in the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.’ They don’t say that. Instead, George”—George Tenet, the director of the CIA until mid-2004—“goes to the White House and is told, ‘You guys are professionals. You know how important it is. We know you’ll get the intelligence.’ George would come back and say to us: ‘Do what you gotta do.’ ”

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  BEING AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER became far more complicated after Israel’s disastrous war with Hezbollah in 2006. The war had gone badly for Israel, I wrote, despite significant advance support and intelligence from the Bush administration, very little of which was known to the public. Bush and Cheney had hoped that the Israeli attack on Lebanon, with its targeting of Hezbollah’s underground missile and command-and-control complexes, would serve as a model for a preemptive U.S. attack on what was believed to be Iran’s underground nuclear installations. The disappointing Israeli attack was far more costly than the mainstream American press reported. My article quoted Richard Armitage, an experienced navy veteran who had served as deputy undersecretary of state in Bush’s first term, as saying, “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Force—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million. The only thing that the bombing [of Lebanon] has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”

  A year later Israeli warplanes flew into Syrian airspace to attack and destroy what the Israeli government claimed was a nuclear reactor under construction. There was no official acknowledgment of the attack, although newspapers there were flooded with leaks insisting that the reactor was nearing completion—ready to start up—when struck. Israel also made no effort to produce photographic or other evidence that the target indeed was a reactor, as it had done after its successful bombing in 1981 of an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction at Osirik, twelve miles southeast of Baghdad.

  I flew to Damascus a few weeks after the bombing in 2007 and interviewed President Bashar Assad, foreign minister Walid Muallam, and a senior Syrian intelligence official. I was told that Syria did not have the funds or expertise to invest in a nuclear weapons program and, if it had, a reactor would not have been located in the desert to the northwest, near a major archaeological dig and close to the borders of Turkey and Iraq, two hostile regimes, with the prevailing winds blowing toward Damascus. I also was told, with no proof offered, that the structure bombed by Israel was to be used for upgrading low-range rockets and missiles.

  I had met often with Assad by late 2007 and found that his factual assertions, including off-the-record statements about the sharing of intelligence with the CIA, invariably checked out. Assad told me he was stunned when Bush’s response to his intelligence help in the aftermath of 9/11 was to include Syria as an ally in the President’s famed “axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Despite that, Assad continued to hold out hope, he said, for a better relationship with Washington.

  Before flying to Syria, I had learned from my sources in Washington that there was a dispute inside the America
n intelligence community over the validity of the Israeli target. Some thought the intent of the Israeli mission had nothing to do with the alleged reactor, but was meant to reestablish Israel’s military credibility in the wake of its disappointing war against Hezbollah the year before. I also showed that many of the specific assertions in support of the Israeli claim, such as the freight ship allegedly used to bring nuclear materials to Syria, were not correct. (In the decade since the attack America and Israel have made repeated allegations about the existence of a chemical warfare capability in Syria, but have said nothing further about a Syrian nuclear weapons program.)

  I was not surprised when my skeptical article, replete with specific points of conflict, led to no further reporting on the issue. But there was a new element in the media’s indifference to a complicated contrary account. The Israeli version of the attack and its endorsement by the Bush administration had been accepted without question by the American cable news networks, whose around-the-clock unquestioning news coverage was more and more becoming a dominant point of view. There were many reasons to be skeptical of the Israeli and American certitude. Israel was a nation that was still denying the existence of a nuclear arsenal that all knew exists, and the Bush administration’s credibility had been eviscerated after its prewar insistence that there were WMDs in Iraq. I had also researched the cargo ship that, so Israel later insisted, had delivered nuclear supplies to Syria and reported that the vessel could not have done what Israel claimed it had. I watched over the next years as the American media, overwhelmed by twenty-four-hour news, would increasingly rely in a crisis on the immediate claims of a White House and a politically compliant intelligence community. Skepticism, the instinct that drives much investigative reporting, would diminish even more after Barack Obama, full of hope and promise, took office in early 2009.