Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  Obama came into the White House talking of changes domestically and, more important to me, in foreign policy. I had learned late in 2008 that Bashar Assad was engaged in serious talks with Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, over regaining Syria’s Golan Heights, whose western two-thirds had been seized and occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. At one point, in early December, I knew Olmert had flown to Ankara and held a five-hour discussion with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was often in telephone contact with Assad. Those secret talks blew apart when Olmert authorized the Israeli military attack on Gaza City a few weeks later.

  I spent the next six weeks talking to senior officials in the Middle East, Europe, and Washington about prospects for a renewed peace agreement in the Middle East—one that would end the impasse over the Golan Heights and bring Syria back into the mainstream. Assad told me he was eager to meet with Obama and engage with the West. The implicit understanding was that Syria’s supportive relationship with Iran and Hezbollah, as well as with Hamas, the political party that ruled in Gaza, would have to change. I was surprised to find that it was no easier to get senior officials of the incoming Obama administration to talk to me, although the President-elect and his men had no hesitation to deal with those reporters inclined to parrot what they were told. There was a lot of chatter about a new era in foreign policy, but it did not happen as the months rolled by and Obama agreed to a dramatic increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. It seemed clear to me that once in office Obama was unwilling to take the risks he needed to take to change America’s foreign policy.

  Despite his cautious start, the world was in a better place with Obama in office, and I was tired and in need of a change after nearly eight years of working against the Bush/Cheney combine. There was another consideration: As much as I liked and respected Remnick, I was troubled by what I saw as his closeness to Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and the fact that he was planning to write a biography of him. I had learned over the years never to trust the declared aspirations of any politician and was also enough of a prude to believe that editors should not make friends with a sitting president.

  It wasn’t fair to David, or to me, to have such doubts, and it was time to move on. I had a standing offer to do a book about the Cheney years, and through my agent I made an agreement with Sonny Mehta, the chairman and editor in chief of Knopf, to do so. Jonathan Segal would be the editor. David was gracious about it. Parting was easy; we’d had a great run together, and we agreed I would stay alert for a good story. As with Abe Rosenthal, it did not take long before I was back at work for the magazine. I wrote a very tough article late in 2009 dealing with America’s continuing effort to prevent a renewed India-Pakistan dispute from turning ugly, and nuclear. I had spent weeks in Pakistan and India reporting on the story and learned of some serious disconnects in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. There would be hell to pay, and a violent American response, if the Pakistani leadership began arming its nuclear weapons in a crisis.

  The story was checked with senior officials in the State Department and the White House who, as usual, had no comment for the record but privately took issue, to put it mildly, with much of what I wrote. The usual official denial had come from the Pentagon, too, but on the day before the magazine was going to press, David called me to say that a senior military officer had contacted him and urged that the article not be published as initially edited. One of my findings, if made public, could create dangerous rioting in front of the American embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, and at consulates scattered throughout the nation. Unless we were willing to make some significant changes, David was told, the State Department was going to ask that all U.S. foreign service dependents leave Pakistan immediately. This was pretty strong stuff for a story that earlier had drawn nothing but official denials. Of course I agreed to alter the story; any reporter would.

  I cite this incident because it had to be obvious to David that I had sources in Pakistan and inside Washington who were reliable on what was, and remains, a major security issue for the United States—what to do about the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Flash forward two years and President Obama’s dramatic announcement in the spring of 2011 that bin Laden had been killed while hiding out in a Pakistani village north of Islamabad. The killing was a huge boost for the President’s reelection chances, and the administration, as would any administration, played it to the utmost. I heard within days from inside Pakistan that there was a far more complicated reality, which involved the Obama administration working closely on bin Laden’s assassination with the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, which had kept bin Laden imprisoned for years. I took the information I had to an American source and doubled up on how much I learned. The administration had killed bin Laden, no question about that, but much of what the White House had been telling reporters after the fact was not true. I went to David with the information, and he surprised me by asking if I would work with another reporter on the story; he was a new hire who happened to be in Pakistan. It was a first, but I said sure. A few weeks went by; the other reporter was not coming up with much—I could not give him the name of my Pakistani sources—and David told me he did not think I had enough reliable data for a story. I had done more reporting than he knew and wrote him a long memo summarizing what I planned to research and write. I got an email back saying that he was worried about my reliance on “the same old tired source.” I was astonished; the tired source in question, as David and other editors and many fact-checkers at the magazine knew, had helped put The New Yorker’s reportage on the War on Terror in the forefront for the past decade.

  Okay, I thought, he doesn’t want the story now, but there were many stories he did not initially want that were published eventually. I went on a ten-day hiking vacation in Europe with my wife and, on the way back, sent David a long email from Frankfurt outlining what I had and what I was going to write. When I returned to Washington, David called and, after ominously telling me not to get upset, told me that a long inside report on the raid, from the point of view of the SEALs who did the mission, and the killing, was going to be published in the next edition of the magazine. He added that I was not to worry, that the story would not impinge in any way on what I was planning to write. He did not offer to send the piece to me in advance of publication, nor did I ask to see it. I learned from inside the magazine that John Brennan, then Obama’s counterintelligence adviser, and Denis McDonough, the deputy national security director, had spent much time on the telephone with the fact-checkers verifying the details in the piece.

  I was enraged—perhaps more hurt than angry—and I immediately wrote David a letter of resignation, saying that he did not need me to spell out why I was leaving. David telephoned me within minutes to urge me not to be so rash, saying again that he did not think I “had” the story and he was open to publishing it when I did. The underlying implication, so I thought, was that I owed him that much respect, given our years together. What the hell, I thought. We had done much together, and it had been a good ride. I also knew from experience that investigative reporters wear out their welcome; it had happened to me at the AP and at the Times. Editors get tired of difficult stories and difficult reporters. I did not resign but returned to my book on Cheney, and did not read the alleged inside story of the raid, as published, for a year.

  I put together the first section of the Cheney book, which was based on many hundreds of interviews with variously involved officials and former officials, none of them cited by name, and began running into serious source problems. Writing a magazine story here and there was one thing, but a book full of secrets that was based on interviews with players still involved inside the intelligence and military communities posed a high risk of legal action, especially because Obama was cracking down as no other recent president had done on leaks. It was also a fact that a book full of quotes from those who could not be named was more than a little problematic
al. And so I went back to the ineluctable bin Laden story. The story, as finally written, ran more than ten thousand words, and I sent it, as promised, to David. He responded quickly, and acknowledged that there was much that was compelling in the story, but told me that without having someone on the record, it would not hold up. I am convinced he believed what he said when he said it, but I could not help but recall the dozens of articles I had written for the magazine that were devoid of even one on-the-record source.

  The fact we had captured bin Laden with the support of the generals who ran Pakistani intelligence and then betrayed them was too important to be left unsaid. And so I published my bin Laden story many months later in the London Review of Books (LRB), after another intensive round of fact-checking by two former checkers from The New Yorker. The story got a good deal of attention, but I was not surprised by the refusal, or the inability, of the press to follow up on the vital aspect of my story—the double cross of Pakistan. The media focused, as I feared would happen, not on what I wrote but on why it wasn’t in The New Yorker. The possibility that two dozen navy SEALs could escape observation and get to bin Laden without some help from the Pakistani military and intelligence communities was nil, but the White House press corps bought the story. Twenty-four-hour cable news was devouring the news-reporting business, TV panelist by TV panelist.

  While continuing to work on the suddenly problematical Cheney book, I wrote three more long articles between 2013 and 2015 for the LRB, focused on the burgeoning civil war in Syria and the Obama administration’s continued support, in secret, for the jihadist opposition to the Bashar Assad government. I also raised serious questions about the Obama administration’s public certitude that a 2013 sarin attack near Damascus was the work of the Assad government. What the American public had not been told, I wrote, was that the U.S. intelligence community had determined earlier—I had a copy of the highly secret report—that the radical jihadist opposition in Syria also had access to the nerve agent. There were two suspects for the use of sarin, but the American public was told only of one. It was not Obama’s finest moment.*5

  In the last week of 2014, I did what I had resisted doing for more than four decades and made my first visit, en famille, to My Lai. After the war, I had been asked many times by the Vietnamese government to do so, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I had traveled to Hanoi two times after the massacre and had rebuffed efforts then to get me to make a visit. The reason I usually cited was the notion that I had earned enough fame and profit from the massacre, but there was a darker reason: There were things that were done at that village that I did not write about and do not want to remember. But after forty-five years, amid a complete lack of interest in my return by the Communist government in power, I gave in to constant entreaties by my wife, children, dog, cat, gerbil, and pet mouse and returned, as a New Yorker title for the subsequently published piece put it, to “The Scene of the Crime.” My political disagreements with Remnick paled against the knowledge that he is a superb editor who would make sure I did not get too mawkish or self-serving in writing about the visit.

  There is an excellent museum on the site of the slaughter and its director, Pham Thanh Cong, now in his fifties, was a survivor of the massacre. He was eager to meet me, and I was just as eager to finally meet a survivor. He was full of stock phrases when first addressing our group, which included my family and a few close friends, explaining the Vietnamese were “a welcoming people” and “We forgive, but we do not forget.” After a tour, he and I sat on a bench and I told him a few things I knew and had not written about the massacre and asked him to describe exactly what he remembered from the time when he was eleven years old. When the shooting started, he said, his mother and four siblings had huddled in terror inside a bunker in their thatch-roof home. A group of GIs ordered them out—perhaps they were looking for military-age men—and then pushed them back inside. A hand grenade was thrown and Cong passed out. When he awoke, he was surrounded by corpses. I knew there was more, much more, and, ignoring his comment about passing out, I asked him what he had seen the soldiers do to his mother and his teenage sister. His suddenly hardened face told me I had gone too far. He did acknowledge, however, that he welcomed those Americans who participated in the attack and made the pilgrimage to the museum, but he had no interest in easing the pain of those few who claimed little memory of the event and expressed no remorse for what they had done. I do not know why I needed to make him drop his mask, if only for a few moments, but I was glad he did. There can be no forgiveness, in my view, for what took place at My Lai.

  It eventually became clear that I had to give up the Cheney project, at least in the short term. The draft of the book contained much secret information, and I could not justify risking the careers of those who had helped me since 9/11 and earlier. It was time to write this memoir.

  While doing so, I took time to challenge the widespread perception that Bashar Assad had used a nerve agent two months earlier against his own people in a contested province in opposition-held Syria. The article, which was taken by many to be an ad hoc defense of the hated Assad and the Russians who supported him, and not the truth as I found it, worried Mary-Kay Wilmers, the wonderful editor of the LRB, to the point where she delayed publication until I could produce a particular fact—one that was irrelevant, in my view, as well as far too secret to get. I decided not to wait and took my information to Welt am Sonntag, the popular Sunday edition of Die Welt, the German newspaper run by the sure-footed Stefan Aust, who had edited Der Spiegel for years, and was always receptive to my work. Aust sent a colleague to Washington to do some critical fact-checking and also had a team of editors go over the story line by line, as must be done, before publishing it in June 2017.

  In an early 2018 news conference at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary James Mattis, when asked about newly revived reports of nerve gas use in Syria by the Assad government, diverted from the previously stated American position that such had happened and said, “We do not have evidence of it.” Syria’s earlier use of nerve gas, he said, without saying when, gave “us a lot of reason to suspect them.” But, Mattis added, “I have not got the evidence, not specifically….Fighters on the ground have said that sarin has been used, so we are looking for evidence…credible or uncredible.” Mattis’s careful statement was significant and little noticed.

  I did not relish being the odd man out in terms of writing stories that conflicted with the accepted accounts, but it was a familiar experience. My initial reporting on My Lai, Watergate, Kissinger, Jack Kennedy, and the American murder of Osama bin Laden was challenged, sometimes very bitterly. I will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work.

  I grew up in a world where the incentive to learn came from within me, as did a sense of whom to trust and whom to believe. I was guided as a confused and uncertain eighteen-year-old by a professor who saw potential in me, as did Carroll Arimond at the Associated Press, William Shawn at The New Yorker, and Abe Rosenthal at The New York Times. They published what I wrote without censorship and reaffirmed my faith in trusting those in the military and intelligence world whose information, and friendship, I valued but whose names I could never utter. I found my way when it came to issues of life and death in war to those special people who had the integrity and intelligence to carefully distinguish between what they knew—from firsthand observation at the center—from what they believed. The trust went two ways: I often obtained documents I could not use for fear of inadvertently exposing the sources, and there were stories I dared not write for the same reason.

  I never did an interview without learning all I could about the person with whom I was meeting, and I did all I could to let those I was criticizing or putting in professional jeopardy know just what I was planning to publish about them.

  I will return to the Cheney book when the time is right, and when those who helped me learn what I did after 9/11 will not be in peril. Meanwhile, we have a Donald Trump pres
idency; allegations of Russian involvement in the 2016 election; a Middle East in its usual disarray, with the apparent end of ISIS. There will always be much to do, and some magical moments along the way.

  One came in the mid-1990s, as I was gathering material for my book on Jack Kennedy. I wrote to Cardinal John J. O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, and asked to meet with him about his most famous and controversial predecessor, Cardinal Francis Spellman, a good friend of Kennedy’s who served as archbishop from 1939 until his death in 1967. I got an appointment almost immediately.

  O’Connor was a major player in the world of New York. He was hostile to abortion, contraception, and homosexuality while being a fierce critic of unjust war, human trafficking, and those who opposed labor unions. He had served for years as a navy chaplain during the Korean War and repeatedly risked his life on the battlefield to give last rites to mortally wounded American soldiers. He ended his clerical career in the military as a rear admiral and chief of navy chaplains. I wondered if he knew of my reporting on My Lai and, if so, whether he would hold it against me.