I was at home on the morning of September 11, 2001, sharing the same fears and anxieties as most Americans, after the first tower was struck. The call came, as I sensed it would, even before the second tower was hit. I don’t remember David’s exact words, but the message was simple: “You are now permanently assigned to the biggest story of your career.” He was not talking about New York City’s response to the attacks—the next issue of the magazine would be devoted to that—but he was relying on me to try to answer the classic questions editors pose in such times: who, what, and why?
I had an anxious flashback to that moment in late 1972 at the Times when Abe Rosenthal insisted that I stop reporting on what I knew well, the Vietnam War, and delve into Watergate. Abe had the same confidence in me as did David, but this assignment was far more challenging. Watergate was an in-house Washington story, and I knew I had a chance to get to some of the players. The New York attack seemed far more challenging: I had never explicitly covered Islamic terrorism, nor had I traveled to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his headquarters. On the other hand, I had written about Pakistan for The New Yorker and understood that the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, for Inter-Services Intelligence, had a profound, if murky, role inside Afghanistan.
I also knew that 9/11 was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime story that would require my developing new sources in Washington and the Middle East. I had done it many times before, so I wasn’t surprised to be told that some inside The New York Times, among them Tom Friedman, were suggesting that I be immediately rehired. I did get a telephone message from a senior editor at the paper who obviously was ambivalent about once again dealing with me. I did not return the call and heard no more. It did not matter, because I was Remnick’s man.
I began my new assignment by reading as much as I could absorb about the region in a few weeks as well as talking to those I knew inside the U.S. State Department and intelligence community who had served in South Asia; my goal was to get a basic understanding about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and international terrorism. I tracked down the few scholars in America who understood the ways of the Taliban, whose members were Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. It was unnerving to learn that revenge in Pashtun culture did not call for an immediate response, but could come months, and even years, after a violent act against a family member. I was convinced that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would respond violently in Afghanistan not only against bin Laden but also against his hosts, the Taliban, without having any idea of the long-term consequences of their decision.
My reporting on Jonathan Pollard and on the 1998 raid on the pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum led me to a number of senior FBI officials, and I risked an early morning call at home to one of them a few days after 9/11. I had always tried to be as open and straightforward with senior intelligence officials as possible, and the good ones—there are many good ones who deserved my respect—usually responded in kind. Things were hectic, of course, the official said, but one thing seemed clear to him and his colleagues: The nineteen suicide bombers, whether controlled by bin Laden or not, were not the leading edge, as many initially feared, of what would be a wave of terror inside America. They were the equivalent, he said, of a pickup basketball team that made it to the Final Four or a weekend soccer team that got to the World Cup. The American intelligence community might never be able to learn the whole story of the attack, he said, but he was convinced that the terrorists had been aided by the chronic lack of cooperation among the various intelligence services.
I set up meetings with some of those in and out of the CIA who had helped me on stories going back to the Vietnam War; former agents have always been able to gather amazing information from their onetime colleagues. I was eventually invited to join a group of operatives at a post-9/11 lunch at a Chinese restaurant in suburban Virginia. The discord was stunning as complaint after complaint was made about the Agency’s increasingly timid and rigid bureaucracy, the lack of freedom to maneuver, and budget restrictions. In their view, the CIA’s failure to detect the plot in advance was not the fault of the guys in the clandestine service but rather of the Agency’s vacillating leadership. The talk eventually turned to the CIA’s long-standing belief that its agents were superior to the others in the intelligence community. With that, I turned to an old friend, who had been a station chief in the Middle East and knew far more about terrorism than I did, and asked why, even after 9/11, there was so much contempt for the FBI. His answer stunned me. “Don’t you get it, Sy? The FBI catches bank robbers. We rob banks.” My friend went on: “And the NSA? Do you really expect me to talk to dweebs with protractors in their pockets who are always looking down at their brown shoes?” I was both shocked and bemused by his cynicism and could not help but laugh at his mention of NSA brown shoes.
I left the lunch convinced that total sharing of intelligence was never going to happen—even after 9/11. The nineteen suicide bombers had succeeded perhaps because of a culture war inside the intelligence community.
The New Yorker was eager for any story relevant to 9/11, and my immediate goal was to publish a detailed story on what had gone wrong—why America had missed the nineteen hijackers who, as we were learning day by day, had been far from discreet as they prepared for the 9/11 attack. I was hunting for any inside information and intelligence assessments I could get my hands on: My thought was to find a way to let those on the inside know I could be trusted to verify and accurately describe even the most highly classified information and not leave a trail that could point to sources. A similar process had worked for me at the AP and the Times, because insiders with differing points of view about the Vietnam War or CIA activities saw me as a conduit to have their say without any risk. So, in the first few months after 9/11, I was able to write about NSA intercepts that showed bitter infighting among the royal family in Saudi Arabia over money;*1 provided new intelligence about Pakistan’s emerging nuclear arsenal and its continual breach with India; and told of American fears about Iran and the possible decision of the Shiite leadership there to go nuclear, in part as a counter to the Pakistani threat. My reportage did not deal directly with 9/11, but it delineated other risks that America was facing in the region. My pieces in those early post-9/11 days were checked to death; Remnick made sure the most obsessive of the obsessive New Yorker fact-checkers were on the case.
Bush and Cheney, as expected, went to war in Afghanistan in early October. In a piece a few weeks later I revealed that twelve members of the army’s secretive Delta Force had been injured, some seriously, as a result of a stupid decision by General Tommy Franks, the American commander in charge of the war. The special ops soldiers, moving at night and sleeping in foxholes during the day, were assigned to capture or kill a major Taliban leader and were nearing his well-protected home when Franks ordered Army Rangers and helicopters to provide backup. The show of force tipped off the Taliban that a raid was imminent, and the Delta Force soldiers were discovered and ambushed. It was, as one member of the Joint Special Operations Command told me, “a total goat fuck.” The easy-to-understand story made headlines, and the fact that many of the army’s best had been injured, some seriously, was predictably denied and denounced on the Sunday morning news shows by General Franks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. That afternoon I was called at home by a four-star officer who offered to provide me with a highly classified satellite photo showing the boot and part of a severed leg of one of those wounded. I said no to his offer but assured him that I and many of my colleagues knew what a disaster General Franks was proving to be when it came to special operations. I was contacted later by a second official with direct ties to the Special Forces Command who was offended by the Bush administration’s constant public lying. I stayed in touch, off and on, with those two men over the next fifteen years.
I was troubled still by the failure of the major media to follow up on my stories, often dealing with the misuse of intelligence, as the American War on Terror intensified. After one such piece was published, James Risen, one of the best investigative reporters in the Washington bureau of the Times, telephoned me at home one night to compliment me on the piece and say that he and a few other reporters had been summoned to the office to try to match it. They found no one in the Bush administration willing or knowledgeable enough to help them do so, Risen said, with a laugh, and everyone had been told to go home. There would be no mention of the New Yorker story in the paper the next morning. “We couldn’t match it,” Risen added, “and so we’re going to ignore it.” I could not understand such thinking. During Watergate, Bob Woodward and I, aware that the story transcended competitiveness, had happily fed off each other’s work, as well as the reporting of the Los Angeles Times and others, and did our best to add to what had been published.
Ironically, the Times, while seemingly continuing to ignore my reporting, saw fit late in 2001 to publish a complimentary feature piece about what was described as the renewal of a rivalry between me and Woodward that began during Watergate. “Some of the most startling and controversial information to emerge from the crisis has appeared under their bylines,” the newspaper wrote, adding that three decades “after they battled each other in the unraveling of the Watergate scandal…they are at it again.” Woodward was depicted as “polished, smooth, punctilious.” I was “scruffy, scrappy, stubborn, loud….His charm is his lack of it.” Lack of charm and being scruffy, it seems, were the key to success in Washington—lots of reading, lots of interviewing, a few gutsy sources, not as much.
By early 2002, I was getting information from inside the White House and inside one of the major military commands, and protecting the sources of my information became more complex as Cheney’s authority grew. As usual, I was learning things I could not write at the time, lest the source, no matter how well disguised, become known to some on the inside. I knew, for example, that a decision had been made in late 2001—driven by neoconservative Republicans in and out of the government—to pull many special operations troops from Afghanistan, and from the hunt for bin Laden, in order to begin building up toward an all-out invasion of Iraq. The argument for doing so was that Saddam Hussein posed a more immediate threat because he had the capability to make the bomb. That was total nonsense. I knew from my earlier reporting on UNSCOM, the United Nations team whose mission had been to root out any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the 1991 American bombing in the First Gulf War had demolished the Iraqi nuclear weapons infrastructure, which had not been rebuilt. For the next fifteen months—until America began the Second Gulf War in March 2003—I wrote again and again about the distortion of intelligence and official lying about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq that paved the way for the war.
I began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States—with ease. It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The intellectual leaders of the group—Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle—had not hidden their ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but depicted themselves in public with a great calmness and a self-assurance that masked their radicalism. I had spent many hours after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that, luckily for me, helped me understand what was coming. (Perle and I had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke off relations in 2003 over an article I did for The New Yorker linking him, a fervent supporter of Israel, to a series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia. Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue me and characterizing me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue.)
Meanwhile, Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he did all he could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a great deal from the inside about his primacy in the White House, but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of betraying my sources. It was a burden I felt keenly. It was far more difficult after 9/11 to communicate with my contacts on the inside who had access to many of the secrets and were not afraid to talk about those operations, planned or ongoing—and only those operations—that were contrary to American values, or what was left of them. I came to understand that Cheney’s goal was to run his most important military and intelligence operations with as little congressional knowledge, and interference, as possible. It was fascinating and important to learn what I did about Cheney’s constant accumulation of power and authority as vice president, but it was impossible to even begin to verify the information without running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a good idea from whom I was getting the information.
I was learning in detail about what amounted to a massively cynical and perhaps unconstitutional enterprise emanating out of the White House, but could tell no one about it. Maybe there would be a book in another decade, I thought. In the short run, however, what I had been told, and what I believed, darkened my view of the Bush/Cheney White House and convinced me that, as in Watergate, the worst was yet to come.
There was some tension between Remnick and me in the months before the invasion of Iraq. David saw the threatened American invasion as providing the Bush administration with a chance, as he wrote in the magazine at the time, to press “the case for peace and political reform in the Middle East.” I thought he was kidding himself; the prospects for future peace or political reform in Iraq, given the extreme politics of those running the war, were nil. I’m sure David also disagreed with my skepticism about the possibility of any weapons of mass destruction remaining in the Iraqi arsenal. To his credit, David did not stop me from writing what my inside sources were telling me—that the Bush administration was simply making up such intelligence—but David did insist that I note in each story that there remained a possibility that Saddam did indeed have weapons of mass destruction.
The war went badly, as those I knew on the inside were convinced it would—given the American lack of understanding about the power structure in Iraq—and within months the quick and easy American victory became a contested occupation, with resistance growing daily. The American response was more violence, including an escalation in assassination, imprisonment, and torture. I was told again and again in those early days by involved officials who insisted on not being named that there was a widespread understanding that those who died in interrogation were not to be buried—lest the bodies be disinterred later—but had to be destroyed by acid and other means. It would be years, given the possibility that Cheney would begin a witch hunt for my sources, before I felt comfortable writing as much in print.
Over the years, the extent of Cheney’s contempt for congressional oversight also became known to a few senior Democratic members of the House Appropriations Committee, among them David Obey of Wisconsin, the committee chairman, and John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime member who, as a former marine, was close to the Pentagon’s military leadership. Obey and Murtha were members of a special four-man intelligence subcommittee—the other two members were Republicans who usually did Cheney’s bidding—that was to be briefed on all CIA covert operations. The two Democrats did not get along, and they rarely talked. I decided to share what I had been learning about Cheney’s off-the-books operations with Murtha and realized that he knew much more than I did about them and was equally alarmed. My talks with Murtha became known to Obey, and I thought it important to relay to him some of the inside information that Murtha was telling me. It also led the very taciturn Obey to develop trust in me. At a later point, Obey told me, he had gone to see Cheney and David Addington, the vice president’s counsel, and told them they were violating the Constitution by conducting their off-the-books operations without any congressional authorization and funding. The answer was, in essence, that President Bush had the authority to do whatever he deemed necessary in wartime. The specific message he got from the two men, Obey told me, was “If you don’t like what we’re doing, go into federal court and sue us.”
It was confidential information I could not share with anyone and could not put into the magazine because it would suggest, whether accurate or not, where I had been getting some of the information I published on covert CIA operations. (Murtha passed away in 2010, and Obey retired in 2011 after more than forty years in Congress.)
A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin “with the assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this…is that the war will start making the U.S. the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones, as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination.” Victory in Iraq would lead to an ultimatum to Damascus, the “defanging” of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America’s enemies must understand that “they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their annihilation.” I and the foreign general agreed that America’s neocons were a menace to civilization.
Donald Rumsfeld also was infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to permit America’s Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from its territory, and the division, with its twenty-five thousand men and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq until mid-April, when the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that Rumsfeld had asked the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, which had responsibility for monitoring Europe, including Syria and Lebanon, to begin drawing up an operational plan for an invasion of Syria. A young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career. The plan was seen by those I knew as especially bizarre because Bashar Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to 9/11 by sharing with the CIA hundreds of his country’s most sensitive intelligence files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the planning for 9/11 was carried out. (I had written about Assad’s action in The New Yorker in July 2003.) Rumsfeld eventually came to his senses and backed down, I was told, but not before demanding that all military planning for Syria and Lebanon be transferred to America’s Central Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and led by the more accommodating Tommy Franks.*2
I knew nothing of Rumsfeld’s retreat when I hurriedly flew to Damascus and arranged an interview with Mustafa Tlass, Syria’s defense minister, who had been on the job for nearly three decades. Tlass invited me to dinner at his spacious home and afterward walked me down to his basement to show me—bizarrely—his collection of pornography, much of it focused on Gina Lollobrigida, a voluptuous Italian actress. Then it was time for a serious talk. I told Tlass, whose English was fluent, that there was a possibility, as he surely knew, that Rumsfeld would order the Fourth Division, then encamped close to the Iraq-Syria border, to drive across the desert to Damascus. What would you do? I asked. He shrugged. I asked if Syria would unleash its chemical warfare arsenal against the Americans. “Those things?” he asked with obvious contempt. “If we used them, America would incinerate us [by responding with nuclear weapons] and they would be within their right to do so.” Tlass added that Syria’s chemical arsenal had been the brainchild of Hafez Assad, Bashar’s father, who had died in 2000 and who had envisioned them as a deterrent against the growing Israeli nuclear arsenal. They were useless as a deterrent, expensive, and hard to maintain, Tlass said. Okay, I said, if you did not have a deterrent, what would you do? “Let them come to Damascus,” Tlass said, “and we will see what happens.” He was talking about protracted guerrilla war. I returned to Washington and told my American military friends about the different approach to war of a Middle Eastern defense minister whose nation had been in a state of perpetual struggle for decades.
I wrote a bit about my evening with Tlass for The New Yorker but did not mention the courageous young general. A public account of what took place might cost the general his career, and I knew that keeping an officer with his integrity on the job was more important than a few lines in an article.
The one story that broke through, in terms of widespread media coverage, was my reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison and the sexual abuse there of young male prisoners. I had been tracking America’s increasingly violent behavior in what had become a war of occupation in which al-Qaeda, with the support of many disaffected former Iraqi military officers, was creating chaos with hit-and-run ambushes. The brutality of American military prisons was far from a secret in the spring of 2004, when the first of three articles I wrote about Abu Ghraib was published; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had put out devastating reports on prisons in Iraq that received little attention. I had learned all I needed to know about Abu Ghraib the previous Christmas when I spent three days in a hotel in Damascus with a former Iraqi air force major general.
The Iraqi army had been banned, as had the Baath Party, and most of the Iraqi generals who did not flee the country or join the resistance had been interrogated by the American command and, in some cases, jailed; others were recruited to work with U.S.-supported militias in the fight against the growing insurgency. The air force general had escaped that fate and was quietly minding his business in the first months after the American invasion, making a meager living selling vegetables and fruits from his garden. He was fluent in English and had been assigned while on active duty in the 1990s to monitor the operations of the UNSCOM team. He became trusted and respected by the UN inspectors for his integrity. When Baghdad fell, he reached out to former UN members, including Scott Ritter, a former marine major who had led many inspections of suspected WMD sites in the 1990s. Ritter, who created controversy after 9/11 by publicly insisting that Iraq had no nuclear weapons, introduced me to the general via Gmail—the internet was up and running in the first months after the American invasion—and we agreed to meet in Damascus, when it was safe for him to make the drive by taxi.
The general had sad tales, mostly secondhand, of the horrors of the American occupation, beginning with the American GIs who went on house raids and repeatedly stole money—many Iraqis kept their savings in hundred-dollar bills—and other valuables. He told of U.S. sergeants who made arrests and demanded cash to free those arrested, and senior American officers who were demanding kickbacks on the many contracts being awarded to local and foreign contractors. In his telling, Iraqi interpreters working for American combat units were constantly abusing prisoners and constantly extorting money from fellow citizens by threatening to tell Americans they were collaborating with the enemy. His most distressing comments, in terms of direct knowledge, were about the American-run prisons and the incessant torture and occasional murder that took place there. The worst was Abu Ghraib, he said, where women prisoners were spied on and assaulted by American and Iraqi guards to the point where they would write to their fathers and brothers and beg them to come kill them in jail because they had been dishonored by American and Iraqi prison guards.
Much of what he told me was impossible to confirm without being in Iraq and, in some cases, hard to credit. But the words about Abu Ghraib were reflected in those pretty much ignored reports by the various human rights groups; his account also smelled right. A few months later I learned that photos depicting some astonishing sexual abuse of male prisoners were floating around, and some were in the possession of 60 Minutes, the CBS news show. I also learned that a few GIs who were assigned there as prison guards were being prosecuted. The photos were said to show naked young male prisoners being forced to masturbate as female prison guards watched. The American military and the CIA had become desperate for reliable inside intelligence about future plans, and one scheme, so I had been told, was to grant early release to a few carefully vetted young male prisoners with the understanding that they, in return, would join the resistance and become informants on future attack planning. I wondered if the idea of converting some male prisoners into intelligence assets had somehow morphed into the sexual depravation shown in the photos. Those prisoners who had refused to become spies for the U.S. military might think differently if the military had photos of their masturbation in front of women. Nothing would be more shameful to a male in the Middle East. While researching the Abu Ghraib story, I was told, but could not confirm, that sexual extortion had been tried by the Israelis in an effort to get Palestinian prisoners to agree to join Hamas and similar radical groups and to spy on them.
I eventually got the names of a few American prison guards who were in trouble, learned who their lawyers were, and went to work. I soon had copies of the photographs, including some not in the possession of 60 Minutes, but I had managed to obtain something far more important—an internal report of the criminal goings-on at the prison that had been written by an army major general named Antonio Taguba. The detailed report was as incendiary as the photos. I learned that the senior executives at CBS were extremely skittish about broadcasting the photos, after being urged by the Bush administration not to do so. I convinced a skeptical Remnick that there was no need for our magazine to scoop 60 Minutes on its own story; an airing of the photos by the network would provide millions of dollars of free publicity for The New Yorker once we published the Taguba report. I sensed it would be easy to resolve the executive anxiety at CBS. I telephoned Mary Mapes, the CBS producer on the story, at her home in Texas and told her I had both the photos they had and a report they did not have and if CBS did not run the photos the next week—60 Minutes aired Sundays and Thursdays in those days—I would have no choice but to write about the network’s continuing censorship in The New Yorker. I knew Mapes hated the extensive censorship at CBS. The photos aired Thursday, and, to my amusement, Dan Rather, the anchor for the show, who I knew had also been fighting to get the story on the air, began his report by stating that CBS was showing the photos only after learning other media—he did not say The New Yorker—had the story. It wasn’t hard to guess that he had been ordered to make such an asinine excuse for an important news story.
It worked out beautifully. There was no way the mainstream media could ignore the report Taguba had written. Of course my old newspaper tried to avoid having to quote and give credit to another publication; Jeff Gerth was told to give me a call when The New Yorker came out and ask if I would give a copy of the report to the Times. We both laughed at the silliness of the request.
The New Yorker story was major news, and I was flooded with interview requests, and did many—it was good for the magazine and good for me—but I knew there was more to do.*3 The contempt GIs had for prisoners, and the notion that they could do what they wished, stemmed from the top. I said as much in one national radio interview and added, totally spur of the moment, that if anyone listening knew more about the prison they could call me, and quickly rattled off my office telephone number. I had no idea why I went so far, and feared that I would be flooded with callers trying to sell me magazine subscriptions and the like. I instead got a call from the mother of one of the soldiers, a young woman, who had been involved in the abuse. I returned the call and went immediately to see her. She had telephoned me out of desperation. Her young, vibrant daughter, in the army reserve, had been assigned to a military police unit at Abu Ghraib and returned from the war zone totally changed. She was depressed and disconsolate; newly married before going overseas, she left her husband, moved away from the family, and took a night job. No one could figure what was going on. The mother read the Abu Ghraib story in a local newspaper and confronted her daughter with the story. The daughter took a look and slammed the door. At that point, the mother remembered she had given her daughter a portable computer before she deployed to Iraq; the goal was to make it easier for the two of them to stay in touch. The computer had been left at home. The mother decided after reading about Abu Ghraib to take the computer to her office as a backup computer and, before doing so, began to delete files. She opened a file marked Iraq and was flooded with dozens of digital photographs of naked prisoners. One stood out: a terrified young Iraqi standing in terror in front of a prison cell with both hands protecting his privates as two snarling Belgian shepherd dogs strain at their leashes a foot away. She heard my interview soon after and called me. She was hesitant at first about releasing the photos for use in The New Yorker, but in the end she agreed, and also agreed to get permission from her troubled daughter to do so. There was something else she wanted to tell me as I was about to leave. Every weekend after she returned from Iraq, her beautiful daughter would go to a tattoo parlor and darken her body with large black tattoos that eventually covered all that could be seen. It was as if, the mother said, she wanted to change her skin.
The Abu Ghraib exposé and my other work led to a book contract, and Amy Davidson, my editor at the magazine, was hired to weave new material I had and the stories I had done into Chain of Command, which was published in late 2004. It probably sold as many copies overseas as it did in America, which may not have been what the publisher had hoped for, but I sure liked the reviews. One, written by Michiko Kakutani, a daily reviewer for the Times, went straight to my heart: “And much of his post-9/11 reporting—which frequently provoked controversy and criticism when it first appeared—had since come to be accepted as conventional wisdom.” I was pretty sure I would continue for the next few decades to provoke controversy and criticism, and it felt good to begin doing so with a clean slate, at least in her view. I always paid more attention to peer reviews, rather than sniping that invariably came from academics, and Jonathan Mirsky, a former editor for the London Times, complained, very nicely, in a review for The Spectator, “This is the only book I have reviewed that is impossible to summarize. It covers…much of which appeared in over 20 New Yorker stories….All of this becomes a titanic—devastating is not a strong enough adjective—case against Washington and, by extension, London.”
It would be wonderful to say that my reporting on Abu Ghraib changed the course of the war and ended torture, but of course nothing like that happened, just as the My Lai story had not ended the Vietnam War or its brutality. I stayed with the growing American-made mess in Iraq, the Middle East, and South Asia over the next few years, writing about
a critically important change in American policy in the War on Terror, in which the Bush administration decided it would work with extremist Sunni groups in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East in an effort to add to the pressure on Shiite-dominated Iran, Hezbollah, and Alawite Syria. The March 2007 article, titled “The Redirection,” was heavily reprinted for years;
Dick Cheney’s repeated but unfulfilled desire to attack Iran, which, as I insisted, to much incredulity from my colleagues in the media, was repeatedly found by the U.S. intelligence community not to have an ongoing nuclear weapons program;
Pakistan’s burgeoning nuclear weapons programs, which had Washington terrified to the extent that there were secret plans to take out its entire nuclear weapons complex in a crisis;
Cheney and Bush’s secret intelligence and arms support for the failed 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah that was, as I wrote, a strategic setback for Israel, and one that diminished its ability to deter a future Arab attack;
the September 2007 Israeli bombing attack on what it claimed was a nuclear reactor in Syria, and why the site might not have been what Israel said it was;
similar American covert intelligence and arms support for the Israeli war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in late 2008, just as Bush and Cheney were leaving office. That war ended on January 19, 2009, after President-elect Obama privately warned Israel that if it was still under way at his inauguration the next day, he would publicly call for its end.
My reporting after 9/11 necessarily involved many trips to the Middle East and interviews with prominent leaders relatively unknown to most Americans, including President Bashar Assad of Syria and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia invariably depicted in the U.S. media as the A-team of terrorist organizations.
My first interview with the tall, gangly Assad took place in 2003 in his downtown office in Damascus. He had been president for three years and clearly was uncertain about dealing with an American reporter. I asked my first question, and he responded by asking me, shyly, if it was all right if he gave me a detailed answer. I told him he was the president and it was his call, and then asked why he had raised the issue. He explained that he had been interviewed sometime earlier by Lally Weymouth, the journalist daughter of Katharine Graham, and she told him his answers were much too long. Because I was the first American journalist he had met with since, he wondered if there was some rule about the length of answers. I later asked Weymouth, who wrote often on foreign affairs for The Washington Post, about Assad’s comment, and she vigorously denied telling the president, essentially, to shut up.
Assad had not supported the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq, as his father had done during the Bush family’s far more successful first invasion in 1991, but the secular Syrian leader assured me that he supported America’s war against al-Qaeda. He reminded me that he had issued a statement in support of America after 9/11, and further said he had supplied thousands of intelligence files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg to the American intelligence community, as well as operational details about a future al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.
Once back in Washington, I confirmed that Assad’s intelligence had been invaluable; I also learned that some in Washington were convinced the 9/11 attack had been planned in Hamburg. I further learned—Assad had not given me this detail—the planned attack on the Fifth Fleet called for a glider loaded with explosives to crash into a headquarters building at the base. It also turned out that a tip about Bahrain had come from an invaluable source inside al-Qaeda who was cooperating with Syrian intelligence. The CIA, which had been unable to develop any similar sources, began pressuring Assad, through the U.S. embassy in Damascus, to tell all there was to know about the source. Assad resisted for months but finally relented after being guaranteed that the CIA would make no effort to contact the source. Assad told me in a later interview that he was stunned to learn that the CIA had done precisely what it promised not to do—made a clumsy effort to recruit the source who responded by immediately breaking off all contact with Syrian intelligence. Assad urged me not to write about the double cross because, he explained, he hoped the Bush administration would come to realize that Syria, as a secular nation, could be an asset in the War on Terror.
One rarely discussed issue among journalists has to do with access; we of course tend to like those senior officials and leaders, such as Assad, who grant us interviews and speak openly with us. But access inevitably provokes ethical dilemmas. I met again with Assad in Damascus at eleven o’clock in the morning on February 14, 2005, and the immediate topic had to do with a dispute he was known to have had with Rafic Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon. Syria then played a dominant role in Lebanon and controlled many aspects of its politics and military. Hariri, like all Lebanese prime ministers at the time, toed the line and followed Syria’s demands, but Damascus was buzzing with gossip about the meeting. I began my talk with a much more comfortable and confident Assad by asking what was up with Hariri. The issue was money, Assad said. Syria was going into the cell phone business, an extremely high-profit activity, and everyone wanted in, including members of his family. Hariri’s proposal was especially onerous, because he was insisting on controlling 70 percent of the profit. Even his greedy in-laws, Assad said, were offering a larger slice of the take. The issue had been resolved, he said, and Hariri had returned to Beirut. Corruption was of course endemic in the region. We moved on to the important geopolitical issues of the day.
An hour or so into our talk, an aide opened the door to Assad’s office, but Assad waved him away before he said a word. A few moments later a ranking officer again opened the door, and Assad said he would be available soon. We talked another half an hour or so—Assad is fluent in English—and when I left, there was a huge array of senior government officials waiting outside the office. I did not learn for another hour that, as Assad and I continued to chat, Hariri had been assassinated by a bomb that killed twenty-one others near the Lebanese parliament building. Assad was an obvious suspect because of the public dispute with Hariri that immediately preceded the murder. I was convinced that there was no way Assad knew that Hariri was going to be killed, given his openness with me about the Hariri offer and why it was a nonstarter. I also knew that there was much I did not know, and it was possible that the timing of our interview, which had been scheduled weeks earlier, was deliberate. In other words, I might have been used to create an alibi for an assassination ordered by the Syrian president. I thought that was extremely unlikely, but despite some pressure from The New Yorker, I decided not to write about the interview. It was a tough call, and to my surprise the fact that I did not write about our meeting did not prevent me from having further interviews with Assad. He never raised the issue, and the Hariri assassination remains unsolved to this day.
My contact with the reclusive Nasrallah revolved around the American war in Iraq. The sheik was known to be close to the Shiite leadership in Iran, who were bitterly anti-American, and I had been urged in mid-2003 by August Hanning, the longtime head of Germany’s federal intelligence service, the BND (for Bundesnachrichtendienst), to meet with him. Hanning told me during an interview at his home in Berlin that he had worked with Nasrallah and Ariel Sharon, Israel’s hard-line prime minister, on a series of prisoner exchanges stemming from the chronic state of war between Hezbollah and Israel. I was stunned to learn of such contacts: Hezbollah was known to consider Israel an existential enemy and an illegal state, and Israel saw Hezbollah as a terrorist organization operating on its border. Of course the round, plump sheik was professional and affable when we first met, and I was flooded with tea and cookies and what seemed to be straight talk about Israel and the war. Nasrallah had an ironic sense of humor and constantly toyed with prayer beads as we talked, through an interpreter. I asked him at the outset what he would do if Palestinian authorities entered into a permanent peace agreement with Israel. His answer surprised me. “If there is a deal, let it happen,” he said. “I would not say anything. I would say nothing. At the end of the road no one can go to war on behalf of the Palestinians, even if one is not in agreement with what the Palestinians agreed on.”*4
I interviewed the sheik three or four times over the next few years, and he was steadfast in his belief that there was no way America would win the war in Iraq. He also assured me that the Iraqi opposition would win control of the Iraqi parliament in the 2005 election there—all sides abused the process—two weeks before the disputed election results were made public. Predicting an election victory was one thing, but Nasrallah’s prediction came within one-tenth of a point of the winning margin. I concluded there was much we Americans did not know about fixing elections. I also came away from my meetings with Assad and Nasrallah convinced that American presidents, driven by fear of criticism and worry about the unknown, were making a huge mistake in not dealing with both men.
Remnick was far more skeptical than I was of the integrity of Assad and Nasrallah, but he did not hesitate to publish the gist of my interviews. It was a vote of confidence in my judgment, and it made it easier for me to respect his. There was one story, after my Abu Ghraib series, that I wanted him to publish but he did not. I had been told in early 2005 by a senior CIA official of his distress at hearing a respected former CIA station chief brag to his colleagues over a drink about how he got a major high-value target in the War on Terror to talk. The target was an Indonesian-born terrorist, known to the U.S. intelligence community as Hambali, whose arrest in the late summer of 2003 had been publicly trumpeted by the Bush administration as a major success in the American War on Terror. Hambali’s real name was Riduan Isamuddin, and he was said to be the al-Qaeda point man for research into biological warfare. CBS News and the Chicago Tribune, citing intelligence sources, eventually reported that when captured, he had been in the process of “implementing plans” for the spread of a biological weapon, perhaps anthrax.
The former station chief, who had been promoted to a key Agency position in Washington, explained that he had broken Hambali by placing a sackful of fire ants over his head. Within minutes, he said, “the whimpering and simpering” Hambali turned into “a vegetable.” The distressed CIA official, in his account to me, said he had checked the most secret Agency files on Hambali and found no evidence for the allegations about biological warfare. He then reported the fire ant story to the Agency’s top management. In response, he was insultingly ordered to take a lie detector test. He resigned immediately and said nothing about what he knew until a year later, when he sought me out. He could understand George W. Bush’s political need to show success in the floundering War on Terror by exaggerating the importance of Hambali, but he could not understand why his peers and the top management had not been troubled, as he was, by the claimed use of fire ants in interrogation. (It was a torture that had been practiced by Apache, Comanche, and other Indian tribes in their nineteenth-century war with the U.S. Army for control of the West.)
It was an appalling story about a man who knew no limit. Remnick was as horrified as I was about the extent of American torture in the Iraqi war, but, as he told me, given the importance of the station chief, he was troubled by the fact that the main source did not want to be named, and more so by the fact that many of the station chief’s peers had claimed, as I wrote, that the station chief was known as a chronic liar. I was convinced that the station chief’s pals were rallying around him with a collective lie, and I later learned that was so from one of them, but I did not know it when David decided the story was too risky. This was not Abu Ghraib, where there was an abundance of on-the-record evidence, including photographs of Iraqi prisoners being subjected to sexual humiliation and General Taguba’s internal report on the prison. David’s concern was not solely about the magazine but about me—the reporter who had unraveled the Abu Ghraib mess. The fire ant story, which had been edited and put into galleys, did not run.
There was a later codicil. I had kept the CIA’s office of public affairs aware of what I was planning to write, and learned that the Justice Department had chosen to declassify a 2002 legal memorandum on torture as we were editing the story. The memorandum authorized the use of insects during interrogation, as long as the prisoner was known to be afraid of insects and was informed “that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain.” The suggested insect was a caterpillar. Even that sleight of hand, alas, obviously meant to diminish my story, was not enough to justify publication. David was still right. There was a reason, I thought, God made editors.
One constant theme of my reporting dealt with the free rein that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had given the Joint Special Operations Commands in Iraq and elsewhere. I ran into a wave of anger when, during a Q and A with former vice president Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who had served on the Church Committee when in the Senate, I was quoted complaining about what I called an “executive assassination ring” that was in place during much of the Iraqi war. I usually tried to let what I publish speak for me on provocative issues such as assassination—most Americans chose to remain innocent about such a reality—but there was, as I explained to an appropriately annoyed Remnick, a special circumstance in this case. My talk with Mondale had been scheduled months in advance as part of a foreign policy series at the University of Minnesota, where Mondale taught. I arrived in Minneapolis midmorning for the evening event, just as snow began to fall. By early evening, Minneapolis had been clobbered by snow and was at a standstill, but the show went on—before fewer than a hundred of the many hundreds who subscribed to the series. Mondale had become radicalized about the U.S. intelligence community by the seamy stuff he learned on the Church Committee, and he urged all in the audience to gather close to the stage as we chatted. The former vice president was very outspoken and angry about the abuses that I had been writing about. It was in that spirit I mentioned the existence of an American assassination ring. I knew more than I could say, which turned out to be a good thing. Ten months after 9/11 I had obtained a package of classified internal documents that were responses from various Pentagon offices to an astonishing question that had been poised by Donald Rumsfeld: How could America organize itself more efficiently for what he called “Manhunts”—the assassination of enemies? One special operations group responded by urging that the American military end its requirement for “actionable intelligence”—that is, evidence that the victim was the right target—and be “willing to take greater risks.” America’s military, said the special ops group, “must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered…This denies us the ability and tactical surprise so necessary for manhunts, snatches, and retribution raids.” Knowing of such thinking helped shape my reporting, but at the time I did not publish the documents I had, in fear of exposing the source. Sure enough, someone in the audience was recording my remarks on a cell phone and wrote a blog item about them on the internet. Not a big deal, I initially thought—Mondale had agreed with my choice of words—but the blog went viral, and there was an immediate outcry about my allegation of a murder ring, which was comical given the extensive and consistent reporting I had done on that issue in The New Yorker.
By 2005, the brilliant Amy Davidson had been my editor for more than a year, and she responded to the criticism with a long essay, “Close Read,” for The New Yorker’s internet page. In the piece she summarized much of what I had written about murder in the War on Terror. Even I, who had done the reporting and writing, was amazed by the amount of specific detail that had been published.
Davidson reviewed the many articles in the magazine I had written between late 2001 and 2008 in which I told how cold-blooded murder had become standard practice in the combat zone. The first, published within weeks of 9/11, quoted what I called a “C.I.A. man” as espousing the need to consider tactics that “defy the American rule of law….We need to do this—knock them down one by one.” In late 2002, I exposed the targeted assassination of an al-Qaeda leader whose demise had been approved by President Bush, although such killings had been expressly barred by President Ford in the wake of the Church hearings of 1975. I ended the article by quoting an experienced Pentagon consultant: “We’ve created a culture in the Special Forces—twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds who need adult leadership. They’re assuming you’ve got legal authority, and they’ll do it”—eagerly eliminate any target assigned to them. Eventually, the intelligence will be bad, he said, and innocent people will be killed. “And then they’ll get hung.” In late 2003, I depicted assassination as a standard tactic in Iraq, as what seemed to be a quick U.S. victory over the insurgents, many of them former members of the disbanded Iraqi army, had become far less likely. I quoted a former intelligence official as saying that when American Special Forces target an insurgent for death, “it’s technically not assassination—it’s normal combat operations.” In a third article on Abu Ghraib in 2004, depicting assassination as part of the backdrop of the prison scandal, I quoted an official as saying, “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’ ” (I also revealed in that article the existence of what became known as “black sites,” undeclared American torture prisons in Europe and Asia that were operating in stringent secrecy, with no congressional funding or knowledge.) By early 2005, with the Iraqi war going badly and violence on the rise, I revealed a high-level order that “specifically authorized the military ‘to find and finish’ terrorist targets….It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets….[T]he order further quoted an official as asking, pointedly, “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” He added, “And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.”
As the Bush administration finished its eight years in office, I quoted “a recently retired high-level C.I.A. official” who told of bitter disagreements between the White House and the Agency over the issue of targeted assassination. “The problem is what constituted approval,” the former CIA man said. “My people fought about this all the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just tell me to kill Joe Smith. If I was the Vice-President or the President, I’d say, ‘This guy Smith is a bad guy and it’s in the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.’ They don’t say that. Instead, George”—George Tenet, the director of the CIA until mid-2004—“goes to the White House and is told, ‘You guys are professionals. You know how important it is. We know you’ll get the intelligence.’ George would come back and say to us: ‘Do what you gotta do.’ ”
BEING AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER became far more complicated after Israel’s disastrous war with Hezbollah in 2006. The war had gone badly for Israel, I wrote, despite significant advance support and intelligence from the Bush administration, very little of which was known to the public. Bush and Cheney had hoped that the Israeli attack on Lebanon, with its targeting of Hezbollah’s underground missile and command-and-control complexes, would serve as a model for a preemptive U.S. attack on what was believed to be Iran’s underground nuclear installations. The disappointing Israeli attack was far more costly than the mainstream American press reported. My article quoted Richard Armitage, an experienced navy veteran who had served as deputy undersecretary of state in Bush’s first term, as saying, “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Force—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million. The only thing that the bombing [of Lebanon] has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”
A year later Israeli warplanes flew into Syrian airspace to attack and destroy what the Israeli government claimed was a nuclear reactor under construction. There was no official acknowledgment of the attack, although newspapers there were flooded with leaks insisting that the reactor was nearing completion—ready to start up—when struck. Israel also made no effort to produce photographic or other evidence that the target indeed was a reactor, as it had done after its successful bombing in 1981 of an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction at Osirik, twelve miles southeast of Baghdad.
I flew to Damascus a few weeks after the bombing in 2007 and interviewed President Bashar Assad, foreign minister Walid Muallam, and a senior Syrian intelligence official. I was told that Syria did not have the funds or expertise to invest in a nuclear weapons program and, if it had, a reactor would not have been located in the desert to the northwest, near a major archaeological dig and close to the borders of Turkey and Iraq, two hostile regimes, with the prevailing winds blowing toward Damascus. I also was told, with no proof offered, that the structure bombed by Israel was to be used for upgrading low-range rockets and missiles.
I had met often with Assad by late 2007 and found that his factual assertions, including off-the-record statements about the sharing of intelligence with the CIA, invariably checked out. Assad told me he was stunned when Bush’s response to his intelligence help in the aftermath of 9/11 was to include Syria as an ally in the President’s famed “axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Despite that, Assad continued to hold out hope, he said, for a better relationship with Washington.
Before flying to Syria, I had learned from my sources in Washington that there was a dispute inside the American intelligence community over the validity of the Israeli target. Some thought the intent of the Israeli mission had nothing to do with the alleged reactor, but was meant to reestablish Israel’s military credibility in the wake of its disappointing war against Hezbollah the year before. I also showed that many of the specific assertions in support of the Israeli claim, such as the freight ship allegedly used to bring nuclear materials to Syria, were not correct. (In the decade since the attack America and Israel have made repeated allegations about the existence of a chemical warfare capability in Syria, but have said nothing further about a Syrian nuclear weapons program.)
I was not surprised when my skeptical article, replete with specific points of conflict, led to no further reporting on the issue. But there was a new element in the media’s indifference to a complicated contrary account. The Israeli version of the attack and its endorsement by the Bush administration had been accepted without question by the American cable news networks, whose around-the-clock unquestioning news coverage was more and more becoming a dominant point of view. There were many reasons to be skeptical of the Israeli and American certitude. Israel was a nation that was still denying the existence of a nuclear arsenal that all knew exists, and the Bush administration’s credibility had been eviscerated after its prewar insistence that there were WMDs in Iraq. I had also researched the cargo ship that, so Israel later insisted, had delivered nuclear supplies to Syria and reported that the vessel could not have done what Israel claimed it had. I watched over the next years as the American media, overwhelmed by twenty-four-hour news, would increasingly rely in a crisis on the immediate claims of a White House and a politically compliant intelligence community. Skepticism, the instinct that drives much investigative reporting, would diminish even more after Barack Obama, full of hope and promise, took office in early 2009.
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 problematical. 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 presidency; 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.
O’Connor’s office at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue was spare, but the Archbishop was a delight. We traded stories on background about Spellman, and at one point he gestured toward one of the steel filing cabinets in his office and said that when he’d first arrived in New York one of the cabinet drawers was sealed. “Well,” O’Conner told me with a laugh, “the first thing I did was call in a workman and get it opened. Inside was a wrapped package, also sealed, with a rope around it and a note saying, ‘Not to be opened by anyone. Cardinal Spellman.’ So I opened it. Hersh, it was fascinating. Full of letters.” He laughed again as I practically leaped off my chair in anticipation, and then he told me that the papers would never be seen: “I had them sent to the Vatican archives.”
He asked about reporting, and I asked about running a huge enterprise like the Catholic Church in New York. His secretary interrupted after forty-five minutes and again after an hour. He ignored her until she opened the door to the office and made it clear he was being rude. I got up to leave, and O’Connor walked me outside. It was a sunny, warm, early spring day, and as we approached the front door he threw an arm around me, pulled me close, and said, “My son, God has put you on earth for a reason, and that is to do the kind of work you do, no matter how much it upsets others. It is your calling.”
Of course he knew what I had done at My Lai, and he was telling me that he was okay with it. I walked down Fifth Avenue blinking away tears, thinking that a belief as powerful as his was a profound and wonderful gift. The cardinal was diagnosed with brain cancer a few years later and passed away in 2000, but we exchanged letters on and off until then. I saved his.
Another special moment came in 2004 after I had a chat about the White House’s War on Terror over lunch in Berlin with Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister. Fischer had studied Marxism as a radical student leader in the late 1960s and the 1970s and led many violent street protests, but later emerged as a leader of Germany’s Green Party as it moved to the center of German politics. He was brilliant, full of himself, and willing to be extremely caustic about America and its politics as long as we were chatting—make that gossiping—on background. We agreed it would be okay if there was something I wanted to use in The New Yorker and did not cite him by name. We talked about the Bush administration’s ambitions in the Middle East, and Fischer described Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld’s influential and very conservative deputy secretary of defense, as a “Trotskyite”—one who believes in permanent revolution. In a subsequent piece for The New Yorker, I quoted a senior foreign diplomat in Europe as depicting Wolfowitz as a Trotskyite. Fischer was called by a fact-checker and read the phrase, a routine check. He then insisted that I immediately call him in Berlin. I did and assured him there was no way the quote could be linked to him: It did not cite him by name, did not mention Germany, and did not say the phrase came from a foreign minister. “But I’m the only diplomat in Europe who would understand what a Trotskyite is,” he said. When I stopped laughing, I assured him we would take out the line.
It’s a wonderful business, this profession of mine. I’ve spent most of my career writing stories that challenge the official narrative, and have been rewarded mightily and suffered only slightly for it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
*1The NSA material I obtained depicted enormous hypocrisy among the royal family, with widespread sexual partying and much talk about financial corruption and arguments about which prince would get which percentage of bribery proceeds from the state’s many billion-dollar purchases of arms. The mainstream media ignored the story, although I named names, but financier George Soros did not. He invited me to dinner at his apartment in New York to talk more about Saudi Arabia. When I declined, he offered to pay a huge contribution to a public interest group whose director, Morton Abramowitz, was a retired diplomat, if I changed my mind. In his career, Mort had directed the State Department’s office of intelligence and also served as the U.S. ambassador to Thailand and Turkey. He was a longtime friend of mine, and I felt I had no choice but to go. Much of the talk dealt with future oil prices, about which I cared not a bit.
*2Rumsfeld was charming and likable and became a hero of sorts to the Pentagon press corps, and to much of America, in the early days of the war. He was having fun at press briefings with his laughing denials of my early, and negative, stories about the conduct of the war while privately sending messages to his staff, some of which I obtained, raising questions about the honesty of General Franks. Robert Gallucci, who had a long career as a government arms control expert before becoming director of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told me of a Pentagon meeting with Rumsfeld at the time of a Middle East crisis in 1983. The meeting was attended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior State Department officials; Gallucci was there as a deputy to his boss at State. Rumsfeld, then serving as a special envoy, outlined a diplomatic approach he thought would resolve the problem, if it was backed up by a display of American military might. He asked for comment and none was forthcoming. Gallucci finally asked Rumsfeld why he thought his approach would work, since the same concept had not worked in an earlier, similar crisis. Rumsfeld stared at him and said, loudly, “Out.” Gallucci was stunned and looked at his boss, who looked away. Rumsfeld again said, “Out.” Gallucci got up and walked to the door. As he did, Rumsfeld added, “I will not tolerate anyone who is not a team player.”
*3I had been unable to find General Taguba before writing the first Abu Ghraib dispatch, and I did not track him down for two years. Taguba told me then that Rumsfeld seemed convinced that he had leaked his report to me. The general said he was summoned to a meeting with the defense secretary a week after the report became public and was greeted with sarcasm and scorn. “Here…comes…that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report,” Rumsfeld said, mockingly, in front of the senior generals of the army. His fast-rising career was cut short after that meeting, Taguba said, and he was eventually forced to retire with no further promotion. He and I have talked many times since about war crimes and torture—we still share lunch every few months—and his honesty is breathtaking. He told me, with much bitterness, of a limousine ride he shared in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib with an anxious General John Abizaid, then commanding the floundering war in Iraq. Abizaid rolled up the glass separating the two of them from the driver and warned Taguba that he was going too far and too deep in his inquiry. “You and your report will be investigated.” “I’d been in the army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time I thought I was in the Mafia,” Taguba said.
*4There was a moment, in one of my last interviews with Nasrallah, that stuck with me. The sheik was beloved by his English translator, a Hezbollah cadre who was always ecstatic to see me because it meant he would spend what he called “quality time” with the sheik. During the interview, which took place a few months after Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, Nasrallah told me of the financial support for rebuilding—Israeli bombing had turned Shiite areas of Beirut into a wasteland—that flowed from Iran and Qatar. Nasrallah then cited a figure of something like twelve million dollars in daily aid from Iran. At that point, the interpreter began a strident conversation with the sheik. Back and forth they went in Arabic. I finally interrupted to ask what in hell was going on. It turned out that the interpreter thought that Nasrallah had not been fully forthcoming in discussing the funds supplied by Iran, and without a hint of rancor Nasrallah gave me a shrug and a smile and then substantially upped the amount given. The interview came a few weeks after President Bush had ordered a high-level State Department official fired for daring to correct him during a national security meeting.
*5David Obey would not have been surprised by Obama’s waffling. I stayed in touch with the former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee after his retirement in 2011, and he told me of a leadership meeting with the President in early 2009, a few months after Obama took office, dealing with the war in Afghanistan, which was continuing to go badly. The issue was whether the President should authorize a significant increase in the American military presence there. Obey and Vice President Biden were the only two to voice any skepticism. Obey recalled warning Obama that if he authorized the troop surge, he would have “to face the fact that it would crowd out large portions of your domestic program—except perhaps health care.” Obey remained after the meeting to have a private word with the President and asked him whether he had listened to the broadcasts of Lyndon Johnson’s telephone conversations about the wisdom of expanding the Vietnam War, which had been made public in 2003, creating a sensation in Washington. Obama said he had. Did the President recall listening to Johnson’s conversation with Richard Russell, the conservative chairman of the Armed Services Committee, in which both men acknowledged that adding more American troops there would not help the war effort and could lead to a disastrous war with China? Obama again said yes. Obey then asked, “Who’s your George Ball?” Ball, a senior State Department official in the Kennedy administration, repeatedly argued against escalating the American presence in Vietnam; it was a stand that hurt his reputation among the men around Kennedy. “Either the President chose not to answer, or he didn’t have one,” Obey told me. “But I didn’t hear anyone tell the President that he ought to put the brakes on in Afghanistan.” Obama authorized the deployment of thirty thousand more American troops to the war over the next six months.