The Passion of Seymour Hersh

...They cannot work hard...

...He somehow neglects to mention that Allende's plurality was 36 percent, only one percentage point ahead of his conservative opponent-a small detail but interesting...

...Meyer's picture is large and comprehensive, and includes a description of Chile's Socialist Party, which (a widely misunderstood fact) was nothing like the Social Democratic parties of Western Europe...

...It tells you a good deal about Hersh's book to note that, while references to the CIA are numerous as the stars in the heavens, there is not a single mention in the entire book of the DGI-Cuba's highly effective intelligence service- or the KGB...

...Richard Grenier THE PASSION OF SEYMOUR HERSH, Burned by the ardors of ideology...

...He says that Hersh is a "consistent liar," that he is guilty of "deliberate, sustained malice and dishonesty," and that he has "dealt journalism a blow quite analogous to the one Mr...

...Former Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry writes that Hersh offered to rehabilitate him in a front-page story in the New York Times if Korry would help him "get" Kissinger...

...Pre-Allende Chile, according to Hersh, is a devil's playground of greedy "American multinational corporations" with their relentless "profit taking...

...So be it...

...the evidence is conclusive that Allende's final downfall was strictly a Chilean affair in which the Agency played no part...

...In his very next sentence, Meyer affirms: From that time forward no:further attempt was made by Nixon to involve the Agency in any effort to encourage a military coup...

...Hersh knows this, since it was all in the daily newspapers, once upon a time, yet he omits it...

...Citizens of the People's Republic of Vietnam are uniformly truthful...

...The preceding month there had been an emergency international conference on Boat People...

...In interviews, nearly everybody involved, including the false-flaggers [deep-cover agents], has denied knowledge of any such pluming...

...a charge that Kissinger and aide Lawrence Eagleburger mocked Richard Nixon for kneeling and praying on the eve of his resignation (which General Brent Scowcroft, who says he was the only other person present when Kissinger and Eagle-burger allegedly did the mocking, has angrily denied in print...

...Hersh obviously -cannot bear the fact that whereas Richard Nixon was driven from office in disgrace, Henry Kissinger's general repute is still high...

...In office, Allende welcomed an influx of Cuban intelligence officers, one of whom married his daughter...

...He conducted vast extra-legal expropriations and requisitions, attempted to silence the opposition press and radio...

...Hersh has written a 699-page book of surpassing tediousness...

...According to the Church Committee, this all-out effort ran into the stone-wall of Chile's constitutionality, the military refusing to cooperate...

...What are their biases...

...So sane and wise on page 184, so lunatic or deceitful on page 187 that his well-wisher must pass over his words in silence...

...That some of the principal personages of Hersh's book should deny his allegations flatly is not particularly surprising-although many readers would take their word at least as readily as that of Hersh...

...Of course, Hersh is a human being, and like the rest of us, he has human desires...

...A benign, democratic Allende on his way to achieving a Chilean paradise if it had not been for the evil machinations of Henry Kissinger...

...Has Hersh twisted their statements...

...Hersh uses other sources for his book, of course...

...This, of course,- is just a matter of judgment, but Hersh finds Meyer's judgment wise and sound: How odd it is then, when three pages later Meyer writes that after Nixon's last-minute effort against an Allende victory "the President returned to a much more rational course in his dealings with the consequences of an Allende regime," that Hersh should find his judgment so atrocious that he chooses to ignore the statement, preferring to portray Nixon as going from wickedness to wickedness...

...military sources to the effect that such a plan was given consideration at a low echelon, but offers no evidence whatever that the coup was approved by either Kissinger or Richard Nixon...

...Allende's totalitarian sympathies, furthermore, were evident long before he came to power...

...Ho Chi Minh City, Hersh grants, as opposed to Hanoi, "is not a happy place...

...Perhaps American journalists as well...

...But you don't stop Seymour Hersh that easily...

...During his 1970 election campaign, although Allende promised to preserve democratic pluralism (of which promise, more later), the candidate declared: "Cuba in the Caribbean and a Socialist Chile in the Southern Cone will make the Revolution in Latin America...

...One is astonished to find Hersh-so permeated with the conviction of "lying on a wholesale scale" in the U.S...

...So, on Chile, what does this book leave us with...

...Former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai has called "a sheer mad story" the accusation that he was once a paid agent of the CIA-a charge attributed to one of Hersh's superbly unidentified sources...

...They include (with all the coherence that the following list conveys): a charge of extensive Kissinger double-dealing between the Nixon and Humphrey camps during the early stages of the Vietnam Peace Talks (this on the basis of a 36-hour Kissinger visit to Paris in September 1968...

...So be it, also...

...Hersh does not tell us, lastly, that the arati-Allende tally in the first round of this famous Chilean election was 64 percent, almost two-thirds- split, admittedly, between conservatives and centrists, but with conservatives dominant...

...Do the sources exist...

...If you want malice, you've got malice," Hersh admitted to Scott H. Lang of Arnold and Porter...

...But Richard Nixon, unwilling to rely on the long-term strength of Chilean constitutional democracy to withstand the threat of a six-year Allende presidency, ordered an all-out effort to block Allende's election, if necessary by military coup d'e"tat...

...But where there's a will-there's a way...

...He does not tell us that the CIA turned down funds from ITT because the corporation wished the Agency to channel them to Chile's conservatives, whereas, the Agency had a hands-off policy, refusing to choose between Allende's two opponents...

...Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry...

...A picture of Richard Nixon and his ravenous capitalist exploiters copied out of a hoary Marxist primer...

...Perhaps he is not so clever...

...We are dealing here with the Hersh School of Adversary Historiography, a monument, I would suggest, to the historical period-and to the press-which spewed him forth...

...and "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley!'' The truth must out...

...And, as with Chile, so with the rest of the book...

...The Freedom of Information Act has a quaint side effect...

...According to the Chilean constitution, if a presidential candidate did not win an absolute majority in the first round of the election, the run-off between the two top candidates was decided by a joint session of both houses of Chile's Congress some two months later...

...Hersh's treatment of the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee is similarly selective...

...In the last chapter of his book, Hersh issues the grandiose, bombastic pronouncement that Kissinger, like Richard Nixon, "remained blind to the human costs of [his] actions, the dead and maimed in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile...

...Full speed ahead...

...But Kissinger's opposition to Allende, writes Hersh, was of a completely different order: it was ideological (as well it might have been...

...On September 4,1970, Hersh tells us, Salvador Allende Gossens "won" the Chilean presidential election...

...In a later interview, when she asked him if, following the elections of 1970, under his presidency, there would ever be elections again in Chile, .he was even more forthright...

...Given the shortness of the time available, and the strong constitutional tradition of the Chilean military, Meyer writes that he did not consider a military coup,feasible, and placing his faith in Chile's constitutional democracy, he considered Nixon's decision "aberrational and hysterical...

...Simon and Schuster has prepared a six-page summary of the book's principal "revelations"-which, prorated, might be worth 17 cents if placed on sale separately...

...Apparently there is no wholesale lying in the government of Vietnam...

...Now if i words mean anything, this meant that-if Allende had his way-before his term in office was over all this fine democratic pluralism was going to go and Chile would have a new "regime" and a new "system," a "oneparty state," and would have embarked on a journey to a land from which no voyager has ever returned: monolithic Marxism-Leninism, which the ancients once called Communism...

...The present writer, be it understood, has neves confused Kissinger with Little Red Riding Hood...

...But Hersh seems to trust his Hanoi sources completely, since he uses them to reconstruct the "real" story of what went on at the Paris Peace Talks in his new book on Henry Kissinger...

...In his lust to report everything he could possibly scrounge that would reflect discredit on Kissinger, Hersh does not seem to have grasped the rather elementary fact that at Def Con 1, with the U.S...

...Heavily influenced by Leninist ideology from its inception in 1933, when Allende joined it as a young Trotskyite, "it was consistently a Marxist revolutionary party committed to the destruction of the bourgeois order," writes Meyer...

...The interests served by Hersh are far more dubious...

...American government officials lie wholesale...

...a charge that Kissinger ordered a secret 29-day alert at Def Con 1 in October 1969 (which from my own military experience I would deem quite impossible...

...Hersh produces a small collection of sources, all but one of them unidentified, who "heard talk," "figured" because of such-and-so that something must be afoot (the one named source), '<confirmed" that contingency plan's to assassinate Allende existed...

...And it is even more delightful when this real name has written a book, and one can read the full testimony, oneself, and not just the few words Hersh has tweezered out of it...

...He does not tell us that Allende received the full support of Chile's Communist Party, or that the Soviet Union and Cuba were secretly subsidizing his campaign (indeed how could he, since for Hersh the KGB and the DGI seem not to exist...

...But far more damaging to Hersh's case is disavowal by his own sources, such as Ambassador Korry, or the extremely numerous cases where his scatter-shot accusations or labored constructs do not square with rudimentary common sense...

...It doubtless contains some true statements, some false statements, and- according to some of Hersh's own sources-some shameless lies...

...When the report has something negative to say he embraces it fervently...

...Hersh considers Kissinger's statement that an Allende victory would end democracy in Chile so hypocritical that he comes back to it again eight pages later, this time calling it "ludicrous" in view, partly, of Allende's "graceful acceptance of defeat in the 1958 and 1964 elections.'' One would think a six-year-old could explain to Hersh that it is one thing to accept defeat "gracefully" when one is the beaten challenger, opposed by the police, military, and the constitutional order of the state, and quite another to surrender power gracefully when one already controls the police and military, the constitutional order having perhaps been subverted...

...Like William Shawcross before him- whom, in his egocentric way, Hersh barely acknowledges-he attempts to link Kissinger to the 1970 overthrow of Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia...

...Nor would he vote to confirm Little Red Riding Hood as Secretary of State...

...It will take a while...

...When evidence, testimonial or circumstantial, does not support Hersh's objective it goes straight into the ashcan...

...Clever as Seymour Hersh is said to be, he has never learned this...

...But it is Hersh's seeming un-familiarity with Re'gis Debray's Conversations with Allende, an elementary work tool for any student of the Allende period, that is most piquant...

...There are no trips to Stalinist Moscow or Castro's Havana...

...Writes'Hersh: Sloman [a pseudonym] insists that me Chileans were always told not to get involved in bloodshed: "Our answer to them was no-by no means...

...Their agonies had been shown on the world's television screens...

...armed forces at full war alert, all military leaves are canceled immediately-a fact which would be quite impossible to keep secret for 29 days...

...To which Koppel replied smartly, "It's kind of tough, isn't it...

...In pre-Allende Chile, in Hersh's version, there are no Marxist revolutionaries dedicated to overthrowing the bourgeois order...

...There is no Tricontinental Conference, no KGB or DGI...

...It contained, moreover, a radical faction which was far to the left of the Communists and favored extreme revolutionary violence as the only means to achieve power...

...His major source for events in Chile is former U.S...

...A Henry Kissinger so diabolical that he claimed he had fears for Chilean democracy while secretly fearing just the opposite: that social democracy would bloom in Chile...

...Poor Cord Meyer...

...From;such an examination as this, Kissinger'emerges unscathed...

...But he follows this with the confident assertion that Kissinger's "real fear, of course, was precisely the opposite: that Allende would work within the democratic process...

...This conflicts with my own experience in many long hours of conversation with North Vietnamese delegates during the Vietnam Peace Talks, where it seemed to me they lied even as other men, if not more so...

...To Georgie Anne Geyer, now a columnist of the United Press Syndicate, who asked Allende if he intended to set up a one-party state, he answered: "Not right away...

...Hersh cites a frequently quoted remark made by Kissinger as Chile's 1970 election approached: "I have yet to meet somebody who firmly believes that if Allende wins there is likely to be another free election in Chile...

...And this was not the only time he made such remarks...

...But Korry says the material was, first, "extorted" from him, and second, twisted beyond recognition...

...He bravely announces: No document will ever be found, nor will there be an eyewitness, to describe the CIA plans or White House, directions to murder Salvador Allende...

...Human beings naturally also have their ideological preferences...

...At no point, writes Meyer, was majority control within Chile's Socialist ranks exercised by genuine Social Democrats who believed in gradual reform within a multiparty system...

...But most fascinating of all are Hersh's unidentified sources, for whose testimony we are asked to take his unsupported word...

...A heart-rending plea ("itt the eyeshot-many critics") for the abolition of the CIA's authority to conduct covert operations, leaving the United States unilaterally disarmed in its struggle against-why, in its struggle against nobody, since in Hersh's cosmology the DGI,KGB, and other.such organizations are obviously mythical...

...Once Castro took power, Chile's "Socialists" sent many young militants to Cuba for indoctrination, and Allende led the Chilean delegation to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana...

...He finds a former South Vietnamese Army doctor who positively enjoyed his thirty months in a "re-education camp" (read: Gulag), describing the manual labor he did there as sheer "pleasure...

...Fronvmy days in the British press I remember Lord Beaverbrook's advice to reporters: if you want to destroy a man you must remember to accord him some praise in the process to give yourself the appearance of objectivity...

...Hersh is also an assiduous employer of innuendo...

...Apparently this is because, judging from Hersh's account, everyone in Vietnam-even when speaking through a government interpreter- always tells the truth...

...But, strangely, Hersh investigates none of this...

...I'd really love to get that son-of-a-bitch," he said of Kissinger in 1973, according to Harrison Salisbury...

...This would seem to imply that Hersh is some sort of revolutionary, working to bring about some new form of society, the shape of which we can only guess...

...Swimming as one does through seas of unnamed sources in Hersh's book, it is positively delightful-and for a crucial opinion-to come across a real name like Cord Meyer...

...He portrays some occupants of New Economic Zones (called "concentration camps" by Father Drinan) as ''reasonably content," warning that the foreigner's concern with being propagandized in a country like Vietnam is "sometimes . . .misplaced...

...Once in office, Allende justified the worst fears of his adversaries...

...He was an active member of many Communist-front, organizations and was serving as Vice-President of the World Peace Council when he visited Stalinist Russia in 1954 during the premiership of Georgi Malenkov, now an Orwellian "nonperson" (no longer listed in the Soviet Encyclopedial...

...So it is with breathless interest that one reads the series of dispatches that Hersh wrote for the New York Times from (or immediately upon returning from) Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in August 1979...

...Not only are government documents released to inquiring reporters, but letters from reporters requesting such documents are also released, which Hersh did not realize, and his letters of request-written before he had begun his investigation-reveal an anterior, intensely hostile view of Kissinger, plus a prior intention of showing "that lying on a wholesale scale went on in the White House...

...But perhaps, if one is sufficiently dedicated in his pursuit of truth, it is "Damn the torpedoes...

...But he holds Kissinger to be a man of extraordinary gifts, and feels that, though he made mistakes, he did so in what he thought to be the interests of the Republic...

...His authority for this is a National Security Council aide- unnamed, naturally...

...There doesn't even seem to be retail lying...

...a charge that Kissinger drove India into the arms of the Soviet Union (the Soviet-Indian Friendship Treaty had actually been in the works for two years...

...In August 1973, three weeks before the Pinochet coup, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies passed by a vote of 81 to 47 a resolution declaring: "The present [Allende] government, from the beginning, has attempted to seize total power, [and to install] a totalitarian order absolutely opposed to the system of representative democracy prescribed by the constitution...

...Its evils were denounced, in the Times, even by Father Robert Drinan and Elizabeth Holzman...

...Kissinger has called the charge of double-dealing during the Vietnam Peace Talks "a slimy lie," adding that what he had read of the book "is untrue, is distorted, or used totally interested witnesses, many of whom were dismissed after a year of serving on my staff...

...But it is as a seeker after truth that we must judge Seymour Hersh...

...Some of the people with whom I spoke' . . . I mean, you know . . . Give me a break...

...But he mentions no cause for this other than the war or the United States, noticing no intrinsic faults in the regime...

...Even such a publication as the Village Voice-with separate pictures of Hersh and Kissinger side by side on the front page-headlined its "splash" article on the book: WHOM DO YOU TRUST...

...To sort these out is almost impossible...

...He finds in Hanoi a "happy" people, "serene and optimistic" leaders...

...Koppel said to Hersh: "Some of the people with whom I spoke-and here too I'm afraid they want to remain unidentified-said that they received letters from you saying, in effect, 'Give me the dirt on Henry.'"' Embarrassed, Hersh answered: "What am I supposed to say...

...As happens again and again in his book, Hersh does not, in short, make his case...

...In fact, the record shows that from the time of Allende's election, the Agency was specifically enjoined from any action that might be construed as supporting coup plotting, and these orders were carried out...

...had won an absolute majority last time out...

...But surely Re'gis Debray, a Westerner but an ideological kinsman of Hersh, can be trusted to tell the truth...

...He uncritically quotes the Acting Foreign Minister as saying the fleeing refugees "have guilty consciences . . . they were used to the easy life under American aid...

...He uses Richard Allen, who was dismissed by Kissinger and notoriously bears him little love...

...And all this moralizing from a journalist whose, principal sources on Chile, Edward Korry, has called him such a consistent liar that he has disgraced his entire profession...

...Embassy or the CIA station in Santiago...

...Nixon dealt the presidency with Watergate...

...One can judge the strength of this faction from the fact that its leader, Carlos Altamirano, was elected the Socialist Party's Secretary General after Allende's ascension to the presidency...

...All this material was reported routinely in the press, some of it from the findings of the Church Committee, but is not mentioned by Hersh, presumably because it conflicts with his Marxoid view of American policy as the servile instrument of ravenous capitalist exploiters...

...David Halberstam writes of Hersh that, "pleasure of pleasures," "nothing would have pleased him more" than laying General Lavelle's "unauthorized" bombing of North Vietnam at Kissinger's door...

...Hersh, who was Eugene McCarthy's press secretary during the "Children's Crusade" of 1968, complained to Ralph de Toledano that Senator McCarthy was no better than a puppet of the Establishment and that he had no understanding or sympathy for the "revolution...

...Now the truths that Hersh has shown such fierce diligence in revealing-the My Lai massacre, the "secret bombing" of Cambodia, domestic spying by the CIA-have without exception been to the discredit of the government, or armed forces, or intelligence services of the United States...

...Not, apparently, when what he has to say conflicts with Hersh's thesis...

...At the time of Hersh's visit to Vietnam, the world press-including his own newspaper-was filled with stories of the Vietnamese "Boat People," the Vietnam "Gulag," and a regime revealing itself to be far more repressive than that of the former South Vietnam...

...Hersh says the Vietnamese people are already acquiring "Western values," and assures us on his own authority that aid from the USSR "would never turn Vietnam into a Soviet satellite...

...Now the CIA's Cord Meyer-whose judgment Hersh must respect since he quotes him deferentially at a key point-has given us an excellent, succinct picture of pre-Allende Chile in his remarkable recent memoir, Facing Reality, the very same work from which Hersh quotes...

...It's tough to respond to unidentified sources...

...This does not stop him from hinting darkly (still with no proof) that "at least some senior officials in the American government were actively encouraging the overthrow of Sihanouk...

...To Regis, who addressed him throughout as "Comrade President," Allende confessed that all his campaign promises to preserve democratic pluralism were merely a "tactical necessity...

...Desai has brought a $5 million libel suit against Hersh and secured a temporary injunction against distribution of the book in India...

...He screamed abuse at me . . . taunted me, threatening to inflict damage if I did not help him to 'get' Kissinger," says Korry...

...Bangladesh, Biafra, and yea, the Middle East...

...Hersh feels it was highly deceitful of Richard Nixon and Kissinger to use alleged intelligence from Desai because of Desai's "well-known hostility" to Indira Gandhi- an attitude not without irony since Hersh makes lavish use of just such hostile informants himself...

...Here Hersh turns deferentially to Cord Meyer...

...This is as close as Hersh ever gets to making his case...

...There is compelling evidence," Hersh writes, "that Nixon's tough stance against Allende in 1970 was principally shaped by his concern for the future of the American corporations...

...At the time," said Allende, "the impor- . tant thing was to take control of the government...

...He quotes some U.S...

...and a charge that Kissinger allowed himself to be outmaneuvered by the Soviet Union during SALT I (Hersh, incongruously, attacking now from the right...

...When the Chilean officers finally moved to overthrow Allende in September 1973, they did so on their own initiative and for their own reasons and,without consultation or coordination with either the U.S...

...The Chilean tradition, which in hindsight seems stunningly imprudent, was to elect in a gentlemanly manner the winner of the plurality in the first round...

...Here Hersh walked straight into an ambush set for him by Ted Koppel on ABC's "Nightline...

...For, bizarre as it is to recount, Hersh's Allende and Chile have virtually nothing in common with the Allende and Chile described by Cord Meyer...

...By the time his six-year presidential term was over, Allende said, "You must understand . . . everything will have changed . . . there will be a change of regime and of system...

...The Committee found no evidence-in the words of the report-that "assassination was ever proposed as a method of carrying out the Presidential order to prevent Allende from assuming office...

...In Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, Hersh finds an "independent," "non-Communist" newspaper...

...a charge that the CIA acted in Chile, not in the interests of national security, but to protect big business (disavowed by a major source, Edward Korry...

...He respectfully quotes the Acting Foreign Minister as saying, "There is no gap in Vietnam between the life of the people and the life of the officials...

...He uses John Mitchell, who has qualified various statements attributed to him as "grossly exaggerated," "gross falsifications," and, on a key point, "a goddamn lie...

...But when it exonerates the CIA he is instantly filled with dark suspicion...

...It supported neither, directing its efforts in a general way solely against what it felt was a Communist-dominated coalition...

...government-sitting at the feet of Nguyen Co Thach, then Vietnam's Acting Foreign Minister, repeating his words without the faintest hint of skepticism...

...I'll give you malice...

...General Scowcroft, for example, explained, "I don't think we've ever been to Def Con 1, which means imminent attack...

...Why clutter a good narrative...

...The book's two chapters on Chile (of especial relevance now that Kissinger has been appointed to head the new bipartisan Presidential Commission on Communist Penetration of Latin America) can serve as an example of Hersh's method...

...It is totally unreliable, and inspired by such an ungovernable hatred that-Hersh's remarks in interviews to the contrary -there is not a single favorable sentence in it about Kissinger...

...Hersh gives figures but he is tricky...

...Hersh's prose is leaden, the text is informed by no sense of foreign policy,, it has all the soaring quality of a lawyer's brief, and I would not find it unreasonable to demand $200 an hour to read it...

...He does not tell us that Allende's vote had dropped sharply from the total he received in the previous election six years before, or that his plurality in the three-cornered election was due to the rightward displacement of the electorate, weakening the centrist Christian Democrats, who...

...Yet, he said, "There is no way you can stop a Chilean from doing anything...

...At least that's what he tells us when he presents The Price of Power,* his new book on Henry Kissinger...

...Hersh's book-proves not a single word of this...

...Since Hersh is such a demon investigator, one would also think he might have investigated his way to the shelves of any public library, where he would have found The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende by Regis Debray, the world's premier Guevara groupie and France's gift to lyrical Latin American Revolutionism...