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Seymour Hersh - Book Web |
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Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937 Chicago) is an American Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, DC. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters.
His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.
Hersh received the 2004 George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting given annually by Long Island University to honor contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting. This was his fifth George Polk Award, the first one being a Special Award given to him in 1969.
In 2006 he reported on the US military's plans for Iran, which allegedly called for the use of nuclear weapons against that country.
Early years
Hersh was born in Chicago to Yiddish-speaking Jewish parents who emigrated to the U.S. from Lithuania and Poland and ran a dry-cleaning shop in a tough section of Chicago's South Side. After graduating from the University of Chicago, Hersh began his career in journalism as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in 1959. He later became a correspondent for United Press International in South Dakota. In 1963 he went on to become a Chicago and Washington correspondent for the Associated Press. During the 1968 presidential election, he served as press secretary for the campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Later that year, Hersh was hired as a reporter for the Washington Bureau of The New York Times, where he served from 1972 to 1975 and again in 1979. Hersh was also active in investigating the CIA's Project Jennifer.
His 1983 book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House won him the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography. In 1985, Hersh contributed to the PBS television documentary Buying the Bomb.
The My Lai Massacre
On November 12, 1969, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai Massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. soldiers in March 1968. The report prompted widespread condemnation around the world and reduced public support for the Vietnam War in the United States. The explosive news of the massacre fueled the outrage of the American peace movement, which demanded the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. It also led more potential draftees to file for conscientious objector status. Hersh wrote about the massacre and its cover-up in My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath and Cover-up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4.
Project Jennifer
In early 1974 Hersh had planned to publish a story on Project Jennifer. Bill Kovach, the New York Times Washington 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 Times eventually published its account in 1975, after a story appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and included a five-paragraph explanation of the many twists and turns in the path to publication. It is unclear what, if any, action was taken by the Soviet Union after learning of the story.
KAL 007
In his 1986 book The Target is Destroyed (Random House), Hersh alleged that the Soviet attack on Korean Air Flight 007 was due to a combination of Soviet incompetence and United State intelligence operations intended to confuse Soviet responses and to test the penetration of Soviet sea and air space. This stood in stark contrast to US President Ronald Reagan's statement that the Soviet attack was a purposeful attack on a civilian craft and "an act of barbarism, born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations."
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 not only the largest US Pacific Fleet exercise ever held in April to May 1983, which sailed the fleet in close (450 mile) proximity to a critical Soviet naval base, but also the renewed use of "ferret missions", a practice halted in 1970 where US planes would purposefully invade Soviet airspace to "ferret out" vulnerabilities and test response times. A CIA history of this period not only confirmed many of Hersh's allegations but also cited his book as historical reference.
Mordechai Vanunu and Robert Maxwell
In his 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Hersh wrote that Nicholas Davies, the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, had tipped off the Israeli embassy in London about whistle-blower 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 also 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. Davies and Maxwell published an anti-Vanunu story that was claimed to be part of a disinformation campaign on behalf of the Israeli government.
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," although perhaps coincidentally, he sacked Nick Davies shortly thereafter.
Attack on pharmaceutical factory in Sudan
On August 20, 1998, Hersh strongly criticized the aerial destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan—providing about half the medicines produced in Sudan—by United States aircraft during Bill Clinton's presidency.
Iraq
Hersh has written 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 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. Another 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."
A recent article, "The Redirection" (March 7, 2007), describes the recent shift in the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, the goal of which is to "contain" Iran. Hersh points out 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."
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. The articles included allegations that private 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 is a usual practice in other U.S. prisons as well, e.g. in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. In subsequent articles, Hersh claimed 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." Much of his material for these articles was based on the Army's own internal investigations.
Scott Ritter points out in his October 19th, 2005 interview with Seymour
Iran
In January 2005, Hersh alleged that the U.S. was conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. This was dismissed by both the US government and the Government of Iran. However, US government has not categorically denied that US troops have been on the ground in Iran. Hersh also claimed that Pakistan and USA have struck a "Khan-for-Iran" deal in which Washington will look the other way at Pakistan's nuclear transgressions and not demand handing over of its nuclear proliferator A Q Khan, in return for Islamabad's cooperation in neutralising 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, Hersh reported on the Bush Administration's purported plans for an air strike within Iran. Of particular note in his article is that an American nuclear first strike (possibly using the B61-11 bunker-buster nuclear weapon) is under consideration to eliminate underground Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. In response, President Bush cited Hersh's reportage as "wild speculation."
Lebanon
In August of 2006, in an article in The New Yorker, Hersh claimed that the White House gave the green light for Israel to plan and execute an attack on the mounting threat of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Supposedly, communication between the Israeli government and the US administration about this came as early as two months in advance of the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others by Hezbollah prior to the Israel/Lebanon conflict in July of 2006. The US administration has denied these claims. These claims were later proven, in part, true when Israeli PM Ehud Olmert admitted to the Winograd Commission that a military action was planned months prior if Hezbollah kidnapped any Israeli soldiers. On November 20th it is reported that Hersh purported in the New Yorker that a CIA analysis based on technical intelligence found no conclusive evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.
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