Seymour Hersh

On November 12, 1969, Hersh reported the story of the Mỹ Lai massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US soldiers in March 1968.[13]

Documents declassified in 2017 show that Hersh was on the National Security Agency watchlist possibly because of hostility towards his journalism including his writings about the Mỹ Lai massacre.[14]

In early 1974, Hersh had planned to publish a story on "Project Jennifer" (later revealed to be named Project Azorian and Operation Matador), a covert CIA project to recover a sunken Soviet navy submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. CIA director William Colby discussed the operation with Hersh in 1974, but obtained his promise not to publish while the operation was active. Bill Kovach, The New York Times Washington, D.C. bureau chief at the time, said in 2005 that the government offered a convincing argument to delay publication in early 1974—exposure at that time, while the project was ongoing, "would have caused an international incident". The New York Times eventually published Hersh's account on March 19, 1975, after a story appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The story included a five-paragraph explanation of the delay in publication.[15][16]

In The Target Is Destroyed (1986), Hersh alleged that the shooting down of Korean Air Flight 007 in September 1983 by the Soviet Union was due to a combination of Soviet incompetence and United States intelligence operations intended to confuse Soviet responses.[17]

Later releases of government information confirmed that there was a PSYOPS campaign against the Soviet Union that had been in place from the first few months of the Reagan administration. This campaign included the largest US Pacific Fleet exercise ever held, in April to May 1983.

In The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (1991), Hersh wrote that Nicholas Davies, the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, had tipped off the Israeli embassy in London about Mordechai Vanunu. Vanunu had given information about Israel's nuclear weapons program first to The Sunday Times and later to the Sunday Mirror. At the time, the Sunday Mirror and its sibling newspaper, the Daily Mirror were owned by media magnate Robert Maxwell who was alleged to have had contacts with Israel's intelligence services. According to Hersh, Davies had worked for the Mossad. Vanunu was later lured by Mossad from London to Rome, kidnapped, returned to Israel, and sentenced to 18 years in jail.[18] Davies and Maxwell published an anti-Vanunu story that was claimed by critics to be part of a disinformation campaign on behalf of the Israeli government.[19]

Hersh repeated the allegations during a press conference held in London to publicize his book. No British newspaper would publish the allegations because of Maxwell's famed litigiousness. However, two British MPs raised the matter in the House of Commons, which meant that British newspapers were able to report what had been said without fear of being sued for libel. Maxwell called the claims "ludicrous, a total invention". He fired Davies shortly thereafter.[20]

Ari Ben-Menashe was Hersh's primary source for the claims that Davies was a paid Israeli agent and that Maxwell collaborated with Mossad.[21]

Hersh strongly criticized Bill Clinton's decision to destroy, on August 20, 1998, the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Al-Shifa, the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, accounted for half the country's domestically produced medicines.[22]

Hersh wrote a series of articles for The New Yorker magazine detailing military and security matters surrounding the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. In March 2002, he described the planning process for a new invasion of Iraq that he alleged had been on-going since the end of the First Gulf War, under the leadership of Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and other neo-conservatives. In a 2004 article, he alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld circumvented the normal intelligence analysis function of the CIA in their quest to make the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A 2003 article, "Lunch with the Chairman", led Richard Perle, a subject of the article, to call Hersh the "closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".[23]

In May 2004, Hersh published a series of articles which described the treatment of detainees by US military police at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq.[24][25] The articles included allegations that private military contractors contributed to prisoner mistreatment and that intelligence agencies such as the CIA ordered torture in order to break prisoners for interrogations. They also alleged that torture was a usual practice in other US-run prisons as well, e.g., in Bagram Theater Internment Facility and Guantanamo. In subsequent articles, Hersh wrote that the abuses were part of a secret interrogation program, known as "Copper Green". According to Hersh's sources, the program was expanded to Iraq with the direct approval of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both in an attempt to deal with the growing insurgency there and as part of "Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A."[26] Some of his material for these articles was based on the Army's own internal investigations.[27]

Scott Ritter, a former arms inspector, stated in an October 19, 2005 interview with Hersh that the US policy to remove Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power started with US president George H. W. Bush in August 1990. Ritter stated that, while disarmament was used as the justification for the imposition of sanctions on Iraq, the real reason was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. The CIA believed that containing Hussein through sanctions for six months would result in the collapse of his government. According to Hersh, this policy resulted in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.[28]

A March 7, 2007, article entitled, "The Redirection" described a recent shift in the George W. Bush administration's Iraq policy, the goal of which Hersh said was to "contain" Iran. Hersh asserted that "a by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."[29]

In January 2005, Hersh alleged that the US was conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. Hersh also wrote that Pakistan and the United States had struck a "Khan-for-Iran" deal in which Washington would look the other way at Pakistan's nuclear transgressions and not demand handing over of its infamous nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan, in return for Islamabad's cooperation in neutralizing Iran's nuclear plans. This was also denied by officials of the governments of the US and Pakistan.

In the April 17, 2006 issue of The New Yorker,[30] Hersh wrote that the Bush administration had plans for an air strike on Iran. Of particular note in his article was that a US nuclear first strike (possibly using the B61-11 bunker-buster nuclear weapon) was being considered to eliminate underground Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. In response, President Bush cited Hersh's reportage as "wild speculation".[31]

When, in October 2007, he was asked in a Democracy Now! interview about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's hawkish views on Iran, Hersh stated that Jewish donations were the main reason for these:

Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let's not kid about it. A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat. And I think it's as simple as that. When you're from New York and from New York City, you take the view of – right now, when you're running a campaign, you follow that line. And there's no other explanation for it, because she's smart enough to know the downside.[32]

During one journalism conference, Hersh claimed that after the Strait of Hormuz incident, members of the Bush administration met in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to consider methods of initiating a war with Iran. One idea considered was staging a false flag operation involving the use of Navy SEALs dressed as Iranian PT boaters who would engage in a firefight with US ships. According to Hersh this proposed provocation was rejected.[33]

In September 2013, during an interview with The Guardian, Hersh commented that the 2011 raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden was "one big lie, not one word of it is true". He said that the Obama administration lied systematically, and that American media outlets were reluctant to challenge the administration, saying "It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]".[34] Hersh later clarified that he didn't dispute Bin Laden's death in Pakistan, and rather meant that the lying began in the aftermath of bin Laden's death.[35]

On May 10, 2015, Hersh published the 10,000-word article "The Killing of Osama bin Laden" in the London Review of Books (LRB) on the fourth anniversary of the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden (Operation Neptune Spear). It immediately went viral, crashing the LRB website.[36]

Hersh's story drew harsh criticism from reporters, academics, media commentators and officials.[37][38][39] Politico's Jack Shafer described the story as "a messy omelet of a piece that offers little of substance for readers or journalists who may want to verify its many claims".[40][41] Peter Bergen disputed Hersh's contentions, saying they "defy common sense";[42] Hersh responded that Bergen simply "views himself as the trustee of all things Bin Laden".[43] A similar dismissal of Hersh's account came from former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell.[44] A former intelligence official who had direct knowledge of the operation speculated that the Pakistanis, who were furious that the operation took place without being detected by them, were behind the false story as a way to save face.[45]

Others criticized the press response. In an article for the Columbia Journalism Review, Trevor Timm wrote that "barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his [Hersh's] claims", and observed that Slate, for example, "ran five hit jobs on Hersh within 36 hours".[46]

On May 12, the Pakistan-based journalist Amir Mir disclosed that the "walk-in" who had provided the CIA with the information about bin Laden's whereabouts was Brigadier Usman Khalid of ISI.[47][48]

On May 20, 2015, a former CIA officer and conspiracy theorist, Philip Giraldi, wrote in The American Conservative that he found Hersh's story credible.[49]

In 2018, Hersh told an interviewer, "I don't necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. We really don't have an ending to the story. I’ve known people in the [intelligence] community. We don't know anything empirical about who did what."[50]

On December 8, 2013, the London Review of Books published "Whose Sarin?", an article rejected by the New Yorker and Washington Post.[51][52][53] Hersh wrote that the Obama administration had used "cherry picked intelligence" to try to justify a military strike against Syria after the Ghouta chemical attack and had ignored evidence the Syrian rebels could also have obtained Sarin gas. The White House denied the allegations made in the article,[52][54] and a number of Syria and chemical weapons experts were critical of the article.[52][55]

On June 25, 2017, Welt am Sonntag published Hersh's article "Trump's Red Line".[56] This had been rejected by the London Review of Books.[57][58] He said there was a split between the U.S. intelligence community and president Donald Trump over the alleged 'sarin attack' at the rebel-held town of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib on April 4, 2017: "Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon".[56][59] Bellingcat accused Hersh of sloppy journalism: "Hersh based his case on a tiny number of anonymous sources, presented no other evidence to support his case, and ignored or dismissed evidence that countered the alternative narrative he was trying to build."[60] Journalist George Monbiot criticized Hersh for not giving the building coordinates to enable verification from satellite imagery and for relying on refuted analysis by Ted Postol.[61]

Hersh's 1997 book about John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, made a number of controversial assertions about the former president, including that:

• Though Jacqueline Bouvier officially was his first wife, his actual first marriage was to a woman named Durie Malcolm that was never legally terminated, and was hushed up by his father Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.
• He had been a semi-regular user of a prescribed pharmaceutical amphetamine-related drug, receiving injections from Dr. Max Jacobson.
• He had had a close working relationship with American Mafia boss Sam Giancana that supposedly included vote fraud in one or two crucial states in the 1960 presidential election.
• In 1958, when he was a member of the United States Senate, he had an extramarital affair with "an attractive aide in [his] Senate office," Pamela Turnure. This was three years before she became First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's press secretary. In 1958, Turnure's landlady Florence Kater took a photograph of the senator leaving Turnure's apartment in the middle of the night, a photograph that Kater tried repeatedly to bring to public attention to ruin the senator's presidential campaign.[63]
• "On May 14, 1960," says The Dark Side of Camelot, "just four days after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, [Florence Kater] approached him at a political rally at the University of Maryland carrying a placard with an enlarged snapshot of the early-morning scene outside Pamela Turnure's apartment. Kennedy ignored her, but a photograph of the encounter was published in the next afternoon's Washington Star, along with a brief story describing her as a heckler."[64]
• The reels of microfilm for The Washington Star that cover the month of May 1960 indicate that the newspaper, then known as The Evening Star of Washington, D.C. and The Sunday Star, never published an article about Florence Kater, nor did the article about Kennedy's campaign appearance at the University of Maryland mention a heckler.

For many of these allegations, Hersh relied only on hearsay collected decades after the event. In a Los Angeles Times review, Edward Jay Epstein cast doubt on these and other assertions, writing, "this book turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy."[65] Responding to the book, historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called Hersh "the most gullible investigative reporter I've ever encountered".[66]

A month before the publication of The Dark Side of Camelot, newspapers, including USA Today, reported Hersh had announced the removal from the galleys at the last minute a segment about legal documents allegedly containing JFK's signature.[67] The documents supposedly signed by John F. Kennedy included a provision, in 1960, for a trust fund to be set up for the institutionalized mother of Marilyn Monroe.[68][69] A paralegal named Lawrence X. "Lex" Cusack had shared them with Hersh and encouraged the author to discuss them in the book.[68]

Shortly before Hersh's announcement that he had removed all references to Cusack's documents, federal investigators began probing Cusack's sale of the documents.[68] After The Dark Side of Camelot became a bestseller, Cusack was convicted by a federal jury in Manhattan on 13 counts of fraud and forging the documents, and was subsequently sentenced to 10 years and three months in prison.[70] In 1997, the Kennedy family also denied Cusack's claim that his late father had been an attorney who had represented JFK in 1960.[68]

There has been sustained criticism of Hersh's use of anonymous sources.[65][71][72][25] Critics, including Edward Jay Epstein and Amir Taheri, say he is over-reliant on them.[65][71][72] Taheri, for example, when reviewing Hersh's Chain of Command (2004), complained:

As soon as he has made an assertion he cites a 'source' to back it. In every case this is either an un-named former official or an unidentified secret document passed to Hersh in unknown circumstances. […] By my count Hersh has anonymous 'sources' inside 30 foreign governments and virtually every department of the U.S. government.[71]

In response to an article in The New Yorker in which Hersh alleged that the U.S. government was planning a strike on Iran, U.S. Defense Department spokesman Bryan G. Whitman said, "This reporter has a solid and well-earned reputation for making dramatic assertions based on thinly sourced, unverifiable anonymous sources."[73]

In his Bin Laden story, "Hersh relied at least 55 times on an anonymous retired senior intelligence official."[25] Slate magazine's James Kirchick wrote, "Readers are expected to believe that the story of the Bin Laden assassination is a giant ‘fairy tale’ on the word of a single, unnamed source... Hersh's problem is that he evinces no skepticism whatsoever toward what his crank sources tell him, which is ironic considering how cynical he is regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy."[25][74] Politico wrote in 2015 that Hersh's reporting had increasingly been called into question due to "his almost exclusive reliance on anonymous sources".[75]

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, maintains that he is aware of the identity of all of Hersh's unnamed sources, telling the Columbia Journalism Review that "I know every single source that is in his pieces. ... Every 'retired intelligence officer,' every general with reason to know, and all those phrases that one has to use, alas, by necessity, I say, 'Who is it? What's his interest?' We talk it through."[76]

In an interview with New York magazine, Hersh made a distinction between the standards of strict factual accuracy for his print reporting and the leeway he allows himself in speeches, in which he may talk informally about stories still being worked on or blur information to protect his sources. "Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people. ... I can't fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say."[72]

Some of Hersh's speeches concerning the Iraq War have described violent incidents involving U.S. troops in Iraq. In July 2004, during the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal, he alleged that American troops sexually assaulted young boys:

Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has. They're in total terror it's going to come out.[72]

In a subsequent interview with New York magazine, Hersh regretted that "I actually didn't quite say what I wanted to say correctly. ... It wasn't that inaccurate, but it was misstated. The next thing I know, it was all over the blogs. And I just realized then, the power of—and so you have to try and be more careful."[72] In Chain of Command, he wrote that one of the witness statements he had read described the rape of a boy by a foreign contract interpreter at Abu Ghraib, during which a woman took pictures.[72]

In March 2007, Hersh asserted in a New Yorker piece that the United States and Saudi governments were funding the terrorist organization Fatah al-Islam through aid to Lebanese Sunni Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.[77] Following the publication of the story, journalist Emmanuel Sivan in Beirut wrote that Hersh put forth the allegation without any reliable sources.[78][79]

Hersh wrote in his 1983 book, The Price of Power, that former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai had been paid $20,000 a year by the CIA during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Desai called the allegation "a scandalous and malicious lie" and filed a $50 million libel suit against Hersh. By the time the case went to trial Desai, by then 93, was too ill to attend. CIA director Richard Helms and Henry Kissinger testified under oath that at no time did Desai act in any capacity for the CIA, paid or otherwise. A Chicago jury ruled in favor of Hersh, saying Desai did not provide sufficient evidence that Hersh had published the information with intent to do harm or with reckless disregard for the truth, either of which must be proven in a libel suit.[80][81]

In a January 2017 recorded telephone conversation about the 2016 death of former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, Hersh told former financial adviser Ed Butowsky that he had spoken to a Federal Bureau of Investigation source who confirmed the existence of information on Rich's laptop computer showing he had been in contact with WikiLeaks prior to his death. Although cautioned by Hersh that the information may not be true, Butowsky forwarded the secretly taped discussion to the Rich family setting off a flurry of activity in the media.[82] Hersh later said that he had heard "gossip"[83] and that he was fishing for information.[82]

In August 2018, Hersh said about the Skripal poisoning that "the story of novichok poisoning has not held up very well. He [ Sergei Skripal ] was most likely talking to British intelligence services about Russian organised crime". He said the contamination of other victims was “suggestive ... of organised crime elements rather than state-sponsored actions – though this files [sic] in the face of the UK government's position”.[50]

• Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal. New York: Bobbs-Merrill; London: MacGibbon & Kee. 1968. ISBN 0-586-03295-9.
• My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. Random House. 1970. ISBN 0-394-43737-3.
• Cover-Up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4. Random House. 1972. ISBN 0-394-47460-0.
• The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Simon & Schuster. 1983. ISBN 0-671-44760-2.
• The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It. Random House. 1986. ISBN 0-394-54261-4.
• The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House. 1991. ISBN 0-394-57006-5. Full text available.
  • Arabic translation available.
• The Dark Side of Camelot. Little, Brown & Company. 1997. ISBN 0-316-36067-8.
• Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government. New York: Ballantine Books. 1998. ISBN 0-345-42748-3.
• Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. HarperCollins. 2004. ISBN 0-060-19591-6.
• The Killing of Osama Bin Laden. Verso. 2016. ISBN 978-1-784-78436-2.
• Reporter: A Memoir (Autobiography). New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 2018 ISBN 978-0307263957 OCLC 1010776541

• "Foreword". Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein by Scott Ritter. Nation Books, 2005. ISBN 1-56025-852-7. Hardcover.

• Full list of published articles in The New Yorker
• Collected articles for the London Review of Books
• St. Louis Post Dispatch: The My Lai Massacre stories