The offer to take a critical look at Kissinger’s diplomatic record had been on the table for more than a year. It was a book that needed to be done, I knew, but the idea was especially attractive because it came at the right time and from James Silberman, who had been editor in chief of Random House when I did the My Lai books. Jim now had his own imprint, Summit Books, and an uncanny instinct for bestsellers.
In my letter of resignation, I did not tell Abe the real reason for my resignation—although he had to know I was discouraged by the paper’s lukewarm, at best, support for the Gulf and Western series—but cited the need for a critical study of Kissinger. I asked for a formal leave of absence, and Abe said no. I was not surprised; rumors of my leaving the newspaper had made the gossip columns in New York and had to be a sore point. Abe felt I not only never loved the newspaper but had used it, in his view, to get a book contract and move on, as had David Halberstam.
The irony is that over the next decade, until Abe’s retirement as executive editor in 1988, I wrote a dozen or so major freelance articles for the Times, bylined as if I were still on the staff. It was as if the words each of us spoke to the other had no meaning; we were ensnared by our love for good journalism. My first dispatches came in August 1979, just four months after my resignation. I had returned to Hanoi, now the capital of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, to conduct interviews for the Kissinger book about the secret peace talks in Paris with Nguyen Co Thach, who would become Vietnam’s foreign minister in 1980. After the interviews, I chose to stay in Vietnam to write about life in Saigon under communism. Like many of my newspaper colleagues, I was a Vietnam junkie, endlessly obsessed by the wrongheaded American war. I ended up writing half a dozen dispatches for the paper about postwar Saigon, crudely renamed Ho Chi Minh City, in an effort to give a glimpse of the many difficulties facing those who had been unable to flee the South after its collapse in 1975. One piece provided details about the burgeoning black market; another reported on a flourishing noncommunist newspaper in Saigon. I interviewed Red Cross and United Nations officials in Hanoi and Saigon and wrote a long piece about the plight of the more than two million Cambodians who were facing starvation. It was as if I had never left the staff.
My interview with Thach and others for the Kissinger book went well, but the highlight of my visit came at a lunch at the still-operating rooftop restaurant at the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, which was the hangout for many foreign correspondents during the war. I had arranged to meet there with one of the wartime leaders of the National Liberation Front. He was a nationalist, not a communist, as were many NLF leaders, but was now a ranking administrator in Ho Chi Minh City.
There were two remarkable moments. Our waiter, upon learning I was an American journalist, told me he had worked throughout the war serving my colleagues and as a special treat would dig out a still-frozen steak from the last days of the South, which fell in 1975. After weeks of Vietnamese food, as wonderful as it was, the four-year-old defrosted steak tasted great. The second moment came when my lunch partner, after getting my assurance that we were speaking privately, told me he had been stunned after Saigon fell to learn how many hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent by America on infrastructure projects—including roadways and water and sewer systems—to support the South Vietnamese army, and society at large, during the war. The Russians, he said, took over the American role as economic partner and consultants to the new government at the war’s end. One of the earliest Russian projects involved the construction of a processing plant in Ho Chi Minh City that was capable of converting powdered medicines, such as aspirin, into pills and packaging them for Russia’s trading partners in Eastern Europe. Russian ships began arriving in the city’s busy harbor filled with drugs in bulk and returned with packaged medicines. The new plant was a success, but the Russian government had not paid for the work, and after a year or two of such my lunch partner was assigned the mission of collecting the funds due. He was told by the authorities in Moscow, without a trace of irony, that the Russian government would be delighted to deduct the cost of the packaging from the Vietnamese debt to Russia for arms and other supplies it provided the North during the war. We shared a shrug—what could one say about the vagaries of both America and Russia?—and moved on.
I got important material on the peace talks while in Hanoi, much of it supported by back-and-forth internal memorandums that provided what the American press had not had during the war—a Vietnamese point of view. The beauty of my Kissinger project was that it did not matter whether Kissinger agreed to talk with me or not; he had given me what amounted to an extended, revelatory interview in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years, published in 1979. His book of more than fifteen hundred pages was intended, far more than most readers could perceive, to answer all of his critics. It was a gold mine of new information about all of the important (and unimportant) issues he faced, along with an astonishing amount of misrepresentation and outright lies. I spent nearly a year reading his version of events alongside the published information at the time; I also had the luxury of comparing Kissinger’s account with the published memoirs by other government insiders, including RN, Nixon’s far more honest—and thus revelatory—presidential history.
It was hard work, and I took time out to produce a two-part series for the Times magazine about the old boys’ network at the beck and call of two former CIA operatives who were supplying the renegade regime of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi with arms and explosives at huge profit. Edwin P. Wilson and Frank Terpil had convinced a third former CIA employee named Kevin Mulcahy that they were legitimate. Mulcahy eventually figured out the scam, which resulted in millions of dollars in profit to Wilson and Terpil, and eventually made his way to me with the story. The series won an unprecedented fifth Polk Award for me in 1981, a prize that was shared by two Times reporters, Philip Taubman and Jeff Gerth, my old pal, who also had written about the Wilson-Terpil scam. (Richard V. Allen, a former Kissinger aide who was then Reagan’s national security adviser, sent me a copy of the magazine on which the President had written a note asking Allen to look into the allegations therein.*1)
The contradictions in the Kissinger memoir were glaring, and I learned more about them in interviews over the next few years. Writing a nonfiction book involves the same principles I sought to use in my daily journalism: Read before you write, find people who know the truth, or a truth, and let the facts tell the story. There were some on Kissinger’s National Security Council staff who did not want to talk to me, but the vast majority did, many of them on the record.
I also benefited from the essential evil of the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy. My reporting in 1974 for the Times on Chile produced a series of anonymous letters to me from someone inside the CIA’s clandestine service who had firsthand information about the administration’s desire, from Nixon and Kissinger on down, to get rid of Allende. The letters were astonishing—full of highly classified inside cable traffic and policy concerns, and as such they tested, but did not alter, my determination to never publish information provided by people who did not identify themselves.
One of my quirks as a reporter, however, has been to keep track of the retirement of senior generals and admirals; those who did not get to the top invariably had a story to tell in explaining why. I also watched death notices, which proved surprisingly full of detail on the foreign postings of CIA operatives who passed away. A brief Washington Post obituary of a retired CIA officer named John C. Murray in 1979 intrigued me because it mentioned that Murray had served overseas in Latin America before his retirement. His widow’s name and address were listed. I found a phone number for her and kept a reminder to call on my to-do list (the one in my head). Six months later I called and struck pay dirt. Yes, his wife said, her husband was the one who had been writing to me in anger and frustration over the Agency’s criminal activities in Chile; and yes, her husband did have a box or two of documents that he kept in the basement; and yes, I could come and retrieve them; and yes, why not publish his name? He had been appalled at the Agency’s willingness to carry out the criminal orders of Nixon and Kissinger.*2
Kissinger’s instinct for deceit also helped. Roger Morris, one of Kissinger’s most trusted aides in his first years—he was a liaison for the most sensitive intelligence in the government—had much to say on the record about Kissinger and Africa as well as Kissinger’s interest in the pluses and minuses of the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in a crisis. The code word for the option was “Duck Hook,” and Morris had kept copies of his memos about it. Kissinger was perceived by some on his staff to take credit for the work done by others, and thus some aides smuggled home copies of their papers, highly classified or not, as a hedge against misrepresentation of their work. Others, such as Dick Allen, who left Kissinger’s staff early for an appointment at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, rewarded my constant visits and my willingness to chase down details by telling me, after a few years of contact, how he had been in the middle as Kissinger passed confidential political and national security information to both sides in the 1968 presidential race between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. The result was that either man, if elected, would have chosen him to be his national security adviser. I verified Allen’s account, and, as amplified, it became a much-publicized opening chapter of the Kissinger book.
Government memoirs are ghastly affairs, invariably self-serving and full of untruths, but one of the better ones was written by a retired admiral named Elmo Zumwalt, who served as chief of naval operations, the navy’s top job, from 1970 to 1974. In his memoir, On Watch, published in 1976, the admiral wrote critically of Nixon’s cynical willingness, as he explained privately to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to ignore the explicit wording of the late 1972 breakthrough peace agreement with Hanoi. “We will keep the agreement if it serves us,” Zumwalt quoted Nixon as saying. I remember admiring the memoir, but do not recall any conversation about it with the admiral, who passed away in 2000. What I do remember is getting a call in late 1982 from Zumwalt, then living and working in Milwaukee, and being invited to come for a visit over a weekend. I moved with alacrity, and we met in a suburb along Lake Michigan on a late Saturday afternoon. Zumwalt told me that he had some papers he wanted to share with me, and to do so, we needed to find a photo shop. We did, and I paid the manager for after-hours access to a copying machine. When all was quiet, I spent a good part of an hour copying one page after another on the primitive machine, with Zumwalt feeding pages to me and handling the collating. It felt great to have a four-star admiral as my wingman. It turned out that in mid-1972, with the quickening pace of the secret peace talks with Hanoi in Paris, Zumwalt wanted to know what was going on inside Kissinger’s NSC and found a novel way to do so: He planted a young navy officer on Al Haig’s personal staff, someone who was trusted to monitor and take notes on many of Haig’s personal calls, as directed. Haig was known to have his aides, invariably a junior military officer, listen to his calls on a third phone. What Haig did not know is that the young navy officer to whom he gave that assignment in 1972 was recording notes of the calls on a cassette and supplying them directly to Zumwalt, who had them transcribed. I used only a few lines from the tapes in the Kissinger book, in fear of tipping off Haig to the source, who had left the navy by then for a career in business.
The full extent of the vile, vindictive, and paranoid atmosphere as Kissinger sought a peace agreement with a stunningly unstable president was vividly apparent as I read through the transcripts. The main leverage Nixon and Kissinger had, or thought they had, in the floundering peace talks by the summer of 1972, with an election looming, was massive B-52 bombing. “Three more months,” Zumwalt was told in June, “and then pull the plug with an all-out bombing campaign or bug out.” A few months later, with no progress in Paris, Zumwalt was told that Nixon “is presently on a dovish track….The President said take anything that Hanoi will give. The President is afraid that the war will do him in. Kissinger is worried that his reputation will be dragged down.” Some weeks later, Zumwalt was told that Nixon, “whose mind is being poisoned by Haig on the subject, feels that Kissinger is screwing the negotiations up. Haig told the President that Kissinger would get yo-yoed by the North Vietnamese. Haig called Kissinger to relay this as the President’s judgment. Kissinger was furious.” Kissinger got his revenge later, when Haig was out of Washington, by going to the President and saying, “It was important to get Haig back in the Army because nobody was watching Abrams [army chief of staff General Creighton Abrams] from within the Army….Haig said, ‘Henry is trying to promote me out of the White House.’ ”
The internal madness continued after a peace agreement was reached with the North Vietnamese—and immediately violated by all sides, as was anticipated—and it went on after Kissinger became secretary of state, while continuing as Nixon’s national security adviser. As the Watergate scandal unfolded in 1973 and 1974, Zumwalt was told that Haig, then the army’s deputy chief of staff,
was in bed with Haldeman and Ehrlichman and was aware of the Plumbers operation….The President wants to say [regarding the wiretapping of aides and others]…that all Presidents did it. He wants to justify the motive, not the act….Kissinger keeps insisting that he was not involved in Watergate…that he didn’t know about the wiretaps….Kissinger asked if [David] Young [who with Egil Krogh ran the Plumbers team for Ehrlichman] was loyal to Kissinger….Kissinger wanted to bring David Young back to the NSC staff….Nobody gets to the President. Some of his old political advisors have tried to get in and he refuses to see them….There are five coups a day as various power centers try to take over.
It was very reassuring data to have as I was finishing my book on Kissinger in Nixon’s White House. As the memoirs of both made clear, I noted at the end of my book, “neither man ever came to grips with the basic vulnerability of their policy: They were operating in a democracy, guided by a constitution, and among a citizenry who held their leaders to a reasonable standard of morality and integrity….The dead and maimed in Vietnam and Cambodia—as in Chile, Bangladesh, Biafra, and the Middle East—seemed not to count as the President and his national security adviser battled the Soviet Union, their misconceptions, their political enemies, and each other.”
It took four years of constant reading, interviewing, and writing and rewriting, before the book, far too lengthy, was published in June 1983. Its title, The Price of Power, was suggested by the ever-loyal Halberstam. The reaction was predictable: Those in the media whose success and insights were derived, in part, from their closeness to Kissinger, hated the book; others admired it. Noam Chomsky, whom I knew only slightly and respected greatly, sent me a warm note saying, “It is really fabulous, apart from the feeling that one is crawling through a sewer. It sets a new standard for far-reaching and insightful analysis of the making of foreign policy, one that is going to be very hard to equal.” The ever-droll Russell Baker wrote a column in the Times titled “The Hissing of Hersh” that depicted another point of view:
Among the well-tailored group headed for Seymour Hersh’s house, I recognized Endicott. “Come join us,” he cried. “We’re all going to stand outside Seymour Hersh’s house and hiss.”
Well, he didn’t have to tell me what that was all about. I knew Hersh had just published a book of 698 pages….Personally, I hadn’t read it and didn’t see how I could for a while….
Still, I’d read in the papers that Hersh’s book wasn’t very flattering to Kissinger; and knowing that Endicott considers Kissinger the greatest diplomat since Talleyrand, I wasn’t surprised that he might dislike opinion to the contrary.
“But is it bad enough to justify hissing Hersh en masse in front of his own house?” I asked. “Worse,” said Endicott. “It is a pack of slimy lies.” “That’s terrible. What are the things Hersh lies slimily about?” “How should I know?” said Endicott. “I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet.”
Baker’s inspiration came from an interview I did the day after publication with Ted Koppel, the distinguished anchor of ABC-TV’s Nightline, a hugely popular late-night news program. Kissinger had been interviewed by Koppel the night before my appearance on a different issue, but Koppel raised the subject of my book, whose opening chapter about double-dealing was splashed all over newspapers that day. Kissinger’s response was ferocious, and undoubtedly sold thousands of copies of my book. “I haven’t read the book,” he said, adding, “What you read is a slimy lie.” But it was he who lied when asked if he knew me or my work, telling Koppel, “I don’t know him at all.”
Koppel’s introduction of me the next night set the tone for an ugly hour that managed to produce something unusual for me—sympathy.
Koppel: “Mr. Hersh’s book paints a savage portrait of a wildly ambitious and largely unprincipled man, charges which Kissinger has denounced as ‘slimy lies.’…Sy Hersh, what’s the point? What purpose is served by the book?”
I remembered thinking that this was going to be bad. Easy answer, though: “Oh, truth, for sure…simply to tell what happened in that first Nixon administration.”
Koppel: “Truth without having spoken to him?”
Hersh: “A reporter is often able to get truth without speaking to some of the people directly involved.”
Koppel: “You must forgive me. I guess everyone’s in the same boat on this one….No one has quite had the time yet to read the entire book….I get the impression that beyond a grudging first couple of paragraphs about the China opening and the SALT talks there isn’t a great deal of admiration left in the book.”
It went on like that for a few minutes, with Koppel continuing to suggest that my book was focused on a Kissinger who was “almost Rasputin-like in his ability to fool everybody, until Sy Hersh comes along and rips the mask from him.” It was impossible to say much about what I had learned about Kissinger’s real foreign policy since Koppel had no idea of what was in the book, nor did he know just how Rasputin-like all in that White House had been.
Enter two more guests on the hour-long show: Larry Eagleburger, who was Kissinger’s undersecretary in the State Department and one of those who warned Kissinger that he was my “ultimate target” for his role in overthrowing the Allende government in Chile, and Winston Lord, whom I knew slightly from a few poker games at Les Gelb’s home. Lord, one of Kissinger’s most trusted aides, had my respect as someone who remained totally loyal to Kissinger on a staff full of malcontents. I had wanted both men to talk to me, but they would not.
Eagleburger went first. At one point in 1974, while working for Kissinger, Larry had invited me to the State Department and said, sardonically, that “Heinrich” wanted me to see some top secret documents about the CIA operations in Chile in an effort to prove that a former CIA official who had been talking to me had supported the mission at a critical time. I of course skimmed through the sensitive papers and realized, as Larry perhaps had not, that they included a summary of an earlier secret meeting at which yet another heinous covert operation against the Allende government had been approved by Kissinger, and wrote a story the next day about it for the Times. I had been glad to make a mockery of yet another Kissinger gambit that demonstrated his essential contempt for the working press. Remembering all this, I was hard-pressed not to laugh when Larry said, “What we have here is a total ignorance, or attempt to avoid…the fact this was a massive intellectual effort and a great foreign policy….I suffer also from not having read the book.”
Lord tore into me personally. He acknowledged that he had not read the book but depicted me nonetheless as a know-nothing who ignored Kissinger’s achievements in China, on arms control, and in trying to end a war with honor. “Are we better off” with Kissinger serving as an anchor for the American people and the world during Watergate? he asked rhetorically. “I submit the answer is yes. That will be the verdict of history long after hatchet men have slunk back into their holes.” Lord had to know he was playing fast and loose by bringing up the 1972 Kissinger and Nixon breakthrough visit to China. The middleman in the secret negotiations was, as I said earlier, the murderous Yahya Khan, the president of Pakistan, and Nixon and Kissinger looked away as the Pakistani army slaughtered untold numbers of innocents. Lord was famed on the inside in those days for his ability to know which aide had been told which set of lies by Kissinger. I quoted a rare on-the-record interview in my book that Lord gave about the slaughter, in which he managed to claim that Kissinger’s refusal to crack down on Khan’s attacks in East Pakistan, despite waves of protest inside the United States, was aimed at China: “So it was not so much a ‘Thanks, Yahya, for helping us with China’ as a demonstration to China that we were a reliable country to deal with.”
At that point, I was sure that Koppel would defend me, if only to suggest that I did have enough standing as a journalist to merit spending an hour on his broadcast. He did not and I was left having to say, “I’m a little tired of talking about my book to people who haven’t read it….I certainly hope…when Mr. Eagleburger and Mr. Lord were in government, they didn’t conduct foreign policy on the basis of what they read in newspapers.”
I had been exposed to tough love from CIA operatives, Sidney Korshak, Charles Bluhdorn, and a variety of thugs in my career, but nothing would match the face-to-face hostility generated by Koppel and the others, with millions watching on television. I knew Koppel had been a longtime admirer of Kissinger’s, and was open in describing him, as he did in a 1989 interview, as “one of the two or three great secretaries of state of our century.” In 2005, after his retirement from ABC, Koppel went further and told a public television interviewer that Kissinger, after being appointed by Nixon to be secretary of state, asked him to become the State Department spokesman with the rank of assistant secretary of state. “It was a nice offer,” Koppel told a reporter for the PBS Frontline documentary series. “I struggled with it for about three or four weeks” before turning it down.
The book did what it was meant to do: expose some of the truth about Kissinger. There were bad reviews, but more good ones. The one I thought caught both the good and the tedious in the book was written by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a Times daily book reviewer, whom I did not know. What was most impressive about the book, he wrote, was
its exhaustive detail, its seeming objectivity and, most striking of all, its ultimate thesis. This is a book that doesn’t just gossip and tattle, but reconstructs four years of American foreign policy in far greater detail than Mr. Nixon did in his own official memoirs, and almost rivals the exhaustiveness of Mr. Kissinger’s two volumes….
This is a book that through its factual density avoids the typically hectoring tone of the investigative reporter or the ideologue with an ax to grind. Indeed, Mr. Hersh manages to sound like a historian, a morally objective one at that.
Lehmann-Haupt went on to explain the ultimate difficulty with the book. It was a hard read, he said, in essence. “So densely detailed that it must test the tolerance of anyone who has grown even slightly weary of reading about the Nixon Administration.” Besides, he added, the book ultimately “is depressing, especially to anyone grown weary with Watergate. Foreign policy and Henry Kissinger were supposed to be two of the redeeming features of the Nixon Administration. If Mr. Hersh is wrong, then there is still cause for comfort, but if his monumental study stands the test of future scrutiny, then we will no longer have even that solace.”
I SAW BOTH the good and the tedious one day early in the summer of 1983 when my family was invited to swim at a YMCA pool in suburban Maryland. As we got settled, I saw a young woman reading my book while sunbathing. Thirty minutes later she was fast asleep, with the opened book shielding her face from the sun.
With the book behind me, Les Gelb thought we should combine on a column. There was no question that we would be able to sign up many newspapers for the venture. Les, though, brilliant as he was at getting hard-core information, was a bit lazy at heart and would have been clever and seductive enough to get me to do most of the writing, or at least the first draft. My real concern was that it just wasn’t for me: I thrived on long projects and would have gone nuts writing two or three seven-hundred-word columns week after week. Les did fine without me and ended up with a column at the Times.*3
Meanwhile, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on inside the White House. The consequences of President Reagan’s inability to control, or desire to control, William J. Casey, the CIA director, were not being reported, and I knew there was some important work I could do for the Times, if the paper would have me. I had a talk with Abe about me, the Times, and his hurt feelings, and we both knew then it would be a mistake. He wrote me a long letter afterward saying, “It would have been awfully nice if you had stayed and built with us, but since that didn’t work, I think it’s best to leave it at that.” He was right—although, once again, that didn’t stop him from publishing some pretty important stories I wrote over the next few years. The pieces
helped keep Kissinger out of a White House job in 1984 by revealing that a commission on the future of Central America he headed had concluded, farcically, that the Soviet Union was threatening a “strategic coup of major proportions” in the region. No such coup took place, and the commission dissolved amid controversy about its main conclusion. A draft of the commission’s report had been leaked to me, and much of it was reprinted in the paper.
revealed highly classified evidence reporting that Iraq had used a nerve agent in its war with Iran—the United States supported Iraq at the time—and had been buying laboratory equipment for the production of the agent from a West German company. The intelligence, gathered from satellite coverage, had been presented three times within a week to President Reagan without any indication he had read it, forcing CIA officials to redline the most pressing issues in the President’s daily intelligence brief that they prepared, which he apparently was not reading. (I was told at the time, but did not verify, that the White House’s national security aides eventually found a way to engage the President—by having the daily CIA intelligence brief recorded on a videotape and screened on TV for him.)
detailed a successful Pakistani operation over nine months to smuggle nuclear triggers out of the United States for its burgeoning nuclear weapons program. The story, which included an interview with the Pakistani agent involved in the operation, was published a few days in advance of the airing of a PBS Frontline documentary on the Pakistani smuggling that I had worked on with Mark Obenhaus, a New York filmmaker.
told of the secret role of the U.S. intelligence community in providing the South African government with intelligence on the banned and exiled African National Congress (ANC), which was then immersed in an ultimately successful fight to end apartheid. The sharing of such intelligence, which led to the jailing of ANC leaders, was shut down by President Jimmy Carter. (I was unable to learn whether it had been reinstated under Reagan.)
The most troublesome article I did, as someone not on the staff of the newspaper, came in June 1986 and dealt with American signals intelligence showing that General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the dictator who ran Panama, had authorized the assassination of a popular political opponent. At the time, Noriega was actively involved in supplying the Reagan administration with what was said to be intelligence on the spread of communism in Central America. Noriega also permitted American military and intelligence units to operate with impunity, in secret, from bases in Panama, and the Americans, in return, looked the other way while the general dealt openly in drugs and arms. The story was published just as Noriega was giving a speech at Harvard University and created embarrassment for him, and for Harvard, along with a very disturbing telephone threat at home, directed not at me but at my family.
I also wrote three more detailed magazine articles in those years for The New York Times Magazine. One told of a secret army spy unit that had been corrupted by money and lack of supervision; another described the attempted assassination, by American F-111s flying out of England, of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and a third dealt with the Iran-contra scandal of 1987, which revolved around the White House’s secret agreement to sell arms to Iran in return for American hostages. That article, which relied on interviews with staff members of the separate House and Senate committees, as well as with some members, raised significant issues about the reluctance of the legislators, Democrats as well as Republicans, to delve deeply into the specific role of Reagan and Vice President Bush in the sordid affair that tarnished the last years of the administration.
The newspaper and magazine articles for the Times involved intensive interviewing and reporting and reminded me of the power and importance of long-form journalism. But my main projects in the decade after the Kissinger book revolved around writing two more books and doing a second Frontline documentary, in 1988, with Mark Obenhaus that depicted the many failures of intelligence and tactics during the problematic American invasion of Grenada in 1983. I also got dragged into another profession during that time by David Obst, who had drifted into the film world and helped produce Revenge of the Nerds in 1984. David nagged me relentlessly and finally persuaded me to take a few hours off on my next reporting trip to Los Angeles and join him in visiting with Martin Bregman, a successful producer whose most recent hit had been Dog Day Afternoon, starring a very young Al Pacino. I thought the movie was terrific and so off we went.
We were to discuss a possible movie based on a Kissinger-like character that David and I had spent perhaps half an hour discussing as we drove to what is known in Hollywood as a pitch meeting. After ten or so minutes of meandering chatter with Bregman, he stunned both of us by saying “Fine” and asking us to have our agents call. As I would learn, we were meeting amid a short-lived period of milk and honey when studios put up serious money on the basis of loose talk, without a script in hand.
It did not work out with Bregman, but David and I soon had a contract at Warner Bros., and I had something new to learn. We ended up writing five scripts over the next few years for a number of serious filmmakers, including Oliver Stone, Sarah Black, and Ned Tanen. My weeks of flying back and forth between Washington and Los Angeles had nothing to do with journalism, of course, and were best described by my wife as accomplishing three things: a chance to get to the West Coast and play tennis with my brother; take my mother to dinner; and never get embarrassed by having anything made. I did learn how to write a reasonably competent script, mostly through our association with the brilliant and very patient Tanen, a longtime studio executive who was involved in a series of hit movies that included The Deer Hunter, American Graffiti, and Top Gun. As Ned told us again and again, it’s all about character.
I wrote two more books after the Kissinger opus. “The Target Is Destroyed,” published in 1986, was an exegesis of the 1983 Russian shoot down of Korean passenger Flight 007, and The Samson Option was a 1991 history of America’s secret acquiescence in the Israeli decision to go nuclear. Both were edited by Bob Loomis of Random House.
They both had much to say that went beyond the facts. The 007 book dealt with the Reagan administration’s willingness to immediately conclude, without evidence, that Russia had shot down the airliner in full awareness that it was a passenger plane, when it inadvertently flew into Russian territory. It turned out to be pilot error, but America went into a White House–generated spasm of Cold War hysteria over the shoot down. With the help of Major General James Pfautz, the head of air force intelligence, I got deep into the air force’s first-rate reporting on the mistakes that were made. The remarkable Pfautz, who flew scores of missions in the Vietnam War, was a strong-minded officer who essentially forced the system to realize that the Russians had simply mistaken the Korean airliner that had gone off course for an American spy plane that was constantly flying off the Russian coast tracking radar and other signals. Pfautz grew to trust me because, in my reporting on the shoot down, I had uncovered some facts that he requested that I not publish, and I did what he asked. In turn, he helped me find a number of people inside the American intelligence community who knew the truth and shared it with me. My book ended with this sentence: “A tragic and brutal Soviet mistake—never acknowledged by Moscow—was escalated into a tinder-box issue on the basis of misunderstood and distorted intelligence, while the NSA, which knew better, chose not to tell others in the government what they didn’t want to hear.” The book’s greatest sales were in Japan, whose citizens learned from my book that the National Security Agency (NSA) had a signals monitoring site, known to only a few in the Japanese hierarchy, on one of the country’s northernmost islands.
The journalist Thomas Powers, in closing his review of the book for the Times, got the message:
Mr. Hersh has no quarrel with the collection of intelligence, has clearly been impressed with the seriousness and ability of the people who gather and analyze it, and has made no effort to compromise their work. But he has gone a long way toward exposing the most closely held of all intelligence secrets—the fact that the ultimate consumers of intelligence, the officials at the top of the pyramid of government, are political in their instincts before they are anything else, and sometimes use it for entirely personal political ends. They are accustomed to getting away with it. Mr. Hersh has caught them at it, and they don’t like it.
It was not surprising that an experienced national security reporter got the point of the book, but I was even more pleased when I was asked by an intelligence analyst at one of the most important, and secret, NSA collection stations in Japan if I would donate a few autographed copies of “The Target Is Destroyed” for the annual fund-raising book fair for the base’s charitable programs. I also was told it was a must-read there, and at other NSA installations in the Far East.
My book on the Israeli bomb, and what America knew about it, benefited from the surprising victory of Menachem Begin’s Likud Party in the 1977 national elections in Israel. The defeat of Labor, which had merged in 1968 with the center-left Mapai Party, meant that moderate liberals would not dominate Israeli politics for the first time in twenty-nine years. The result was something that could only happen in Israel: Some of those out of office began to talk about the unknowable—how Israel got its bomb, and how America chose to do nothing about it. I could not name those former members of the Labor Party who talked to me here in America and elsewhere about the early days of the bomb, just as I could not identify those CIA officers who were appalled by what they knew of America’s secret support for the Israeli research.
I also walked into an inside account of how Robert Maxwell, the prominent British publisher of the bestselling tabloids Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, worked through Nicholas Davies, his editor for foreign affairs, and the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, to ensnare and capture Mordechai Vanunu, a onetime worker in the Israeli nuclear bomb program whom Israel was seeking to put on trial on charges of treason and espionage. Vanunu, a Jew who converted to Christianity, had gone public in a competing British newspaper with extensive details about the Israeli bomb program—the exposé created an international sensation—and then disappeared. Maxwell, who was Jewish, was not a spy for Israel but someone who supported the country and was willing to do what he could for it. I had cited Davies as a sometime arms dealer and a key figure in the seizure of Vanunu. The allegation led to a tabloid frenzy of accusation and denial, with a banner headline in the Daily Mirror screaming “FORGERY” in huge type about one of the documents I had, and its main competitor responding with an equally bold headline, “YOU LIAR,” when my document proved to be real.
The dispute generated even more headlines a few weeks after the Mirror Group sued me for libel when Maxwell was found dead—mysteriously dead—later in 1991 on his yacht in the waters off the Canary Islands. The Mirror Group’s suit against me was dismissed in 1995, and a libel suit I had filed, at the urging of Michael Nussbaum, my attorney, was settled the next year when the newspaper issued a very abject apology to me and also paid me substantial damages that under the terms of the settlement I was not allowed to specify. The Washington Post, writing about the settlement, noted that the Mirror Group acknowledged that the allegations against me and Faber & Faber, my British publisher, “were completely without foundation and ought never to have been made.” The Mirror Group statement added that I was “an author of excellent reputation and of the highest integrity who would never write anything which he did not believe to be true and that he was in this instance fully justified in writing what he did.” The next sentence in the Post left me very puzzled: “The paper’s lawyers seemed to be saying yesterday Hersh was right.” I would guess so.
There were high hopes in the American market for the book, whose disclosures about the extent of the Israeli nuclear arsenal became a lead story in the Times just as the book was officially published in the fall of 1991. It soon became clear, however, that the book was far from a celebration of Israeli might, but a critical look at America’s role, from the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower forward, in avoiding a confrontation with Israel over its secret nuclear weapons work. An early flurry of hot sales on New York’s West Side, the home to many Jews, quickly diminished as the book’s message became known. It was a message that very few, Jewish or not, wanted to hear. I had been inundated in the days after publication by invitations from synagogues and various Jewish groups, and it was disappointing, but no great shock, when all but one canceled. The one venue that did not, a synagogue in suburban Cleveland, became a scene of chaos when many in the audience tried to shout me down as I foolishly described how one president after another looked away as Israel began producing warheads. My point was not that Israel should not have a bomb but that the sub-rosa American support for it was known throughout the Middle East and made a mockery of American efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and other nations with undeclared nuclear ambitions. The protests from the congregation grew stronger as I kept on talking, and eventually I was forced, only partly in jest, to ask the presiding rabbi if I could have a two-minute head start at the end of my talk to get to my rental car in the parking lot.
The reviews of the book, not surprisingly, were favorable or not depending on the reviewer’s personal feelings about Israel and its relationship with its Arab neighbors. Those who supported Israel invariably cited my reliance on anonymous sources for refusing to believe the book’s major revelations; they did so while ignoring the fact that day after day the Times and other mainstream media were citing unnamed officials and others on stories involving foreign policy. The book also gave me an insight into the disarray of the Arab world. The Samson Option was published a few days before the convening of the October 1991 Madrid Conference, an innovative effort sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union aimed at renewing the Israel-Palestine peace talks. Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon also were to be involved in the process, with the approval of President George H. W. Bush. The book’s arrival provided an immediate opportunity for those Arab nations who wanted to discuss the military and diplomatic implications of the Israeli nuclear arsenal, the proverbial elephant in the room when it came to any peace negotiations; Israel had a nuclear arsenal, and no one else in the region did. Thus I received numerous calls and messages from the Arab world asking me to visit and give a talk. My answer to all was that I would be delighted to speak about my book anywhere in the Middle East, but I did not have time to give the same talk in five or six different nations. I proposed instead that the nations that wanted to hear what I had to say work out a combined venue at which I could speak. It did not happen, despite the interest of many in the Middle East, and I did not make the trip. The lesson I learned was that there will be peace in the world between white and black, Russia and America, rich and poor, before there will be a settlement of the Arab-Israeli issue.
Both of the books “earned out,” a publishing industry phrase for selling enough copies to offset the advance given, but appeared only briefly on bestseller lists. There were many foreign sales, reviews galore, and scores of newspaper and TV interviews with me, but hardback sales in the United States for neither book approached the number reached by The Price of Power.
I wondered whether it was time to forget about books, movies, and documentary television and return once again to daily journalism. I had been asked a few years earlier to rejoin the Times Washington bureau by Craig Whitney, the bureau chief, but I said no. Max Frankel, who had replaced Abe as executive editor in 1986, was more chary about allowing outsiders to break stories on the front pages of the newspaper, which was appropriate. (I was told that Rosenthal had explained my continued presence in the newspaper by saying that there was no need for him to buy the cow when he could get its milk through a fence. I hope he said that, or something like that, because the arrangement had worked for both of us.) So the daily Times was not available to me. The Sunday magazine was, however, and I was chafing to do a story on the failed Senate investigation into the Iran-contra scandal. I was immersed in the Korean shoot-down book when the story unfolded, and thought the daily press had failed to do what had been done in Watergate—focus on the role of President Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. It was impossible to believe that Bush, as a former CIA director working for a muddled president, was not a key player in the mess. Bush and Reagan both escaped with their reputations intact and so, I believed, had the Senate investigators. I spent months on assignment for the magazine in 1990 and 1991 trying to figure out what had gone wrong. One finding was that there was no real stomach among the involved senators for going after Reagan.
The Senate investigation had been a flop, so I wrote: “More than three years of investigation and criminal proceedings have put no one in jail. Nor has the disclosure of Iran-Contra, the illicit selling of guns for profit by a renegade group in the White House, led to any constitutional or legal reforms.” Ronald Reagan, the avuncular and weak-minded “Gipper,” had been given a pass.
*1The series also led me to a huge embarrassment. After the series was published, I was contacted by yet another alleged CIA operative who told me he had specific information about nuclear materials that had been smuggled by Wilson and Terpil into Libya. By then I was back at work on the Kissinger book, and I decided, with the operative’s permission, to pass his information to Dick Allen, who had been very helpful to me on my book before joining the administration. I told him the story and the operative’s name. He said he would check him out and get back to me. He did so and a meeting was arranged in the Situation Room of the White House. I was invited by Allen to attend the meeting but had mixed emotions, to put it mildly, about doing so. One part of me said it was none of my business; on the other hand, I had never seen the top secret Situation Room while often writing about it. So I joined the meeting. It was agreed my presence would be off the record—another mistake. At one point, a senior official at the meeting told my operative that he understood there was nothing that he had not done for country. The idiot I brought to the meeting said yes and added that there were many times that he had done the utmost. It was clear to all that the two were talking about sanctioned assassinations. I was appalled and angered by the exchange and by the fact that it took place in front of me. I was now a participant and not a reporter. Things were said that I could not, and did not, write about. I walked a block or two toward my office with the operative and expressed my anger at participating. He, with a sly smile, asked if I wanted a transcript of the session. It turned out that somehow he had managed to smuggle a small tape recorder past the Situation Room security by burying it high up between his legs. I got the hell away from him as fast as I could and called Allen to tell him that he may have been betrayed. Allen said not to worry, and we maintained a friendship that continues today. I never heard from the operative again, nor did the context of the meeting ever become public. I also have no idea whether the operative’s information was valid and, if so, was acted on. Off the record was anathema to me after that, and I learned once again not to allow myself to become a participant in a government function.
*2A few years later, with the publication of an excerpt on Chile from my soon-to-be-published Kissinger book, I received a letter from Murray’s daughter, Marea, then living in Massachusetts, thanking me for my work and adding, “Finally, I know what my father’s role was in this ‘CIA business’—at least with regard to Chile—and I am proud.”
*3Ben Bradlee called me amid my scheming with Gelb and invited me to lunch at an upscale French restaurant in downtown Washington. He told me that Bob Woodward, then in charge of the ten-man Post investigative team, was going on leave to write a book and would I consider taking over for him? I would be free to write, too. I said nothing to anyone about the offer, as Bradlee had urged, and had a pleasant meeting about the job, and about money, with Katharine Graham. Bob learned within days that I was to be his replacement—secrecy does not exist when it comes to newspaper gossip—and offered to stay on and help me get adjusted to the job. I liked and respected Bob—he is one of the very few reporters I’ve shared a source or two with—but I was a loner at heart and always had been, whether in my father’s store or at the Times. I had surprised myself by working well with Jeff Gerth, but collaboration, even with those as talented as Bob Woodward or Les Gelb, wasn’t for me and I told Ben that. He understood, and our Sunday morning tennis games went on for many more years with no more discussion about my coming to work at the Post.