The Cult of Seymour Hersh The New Yorkers "hot" reporter turns out to be a balding canspirational anti-American retread
Isaac, Rael Jean
THE CULT OF SEYMOUR HERSH inevitably sounds self-serving. Hersh's most unforgivable exercise in character assassination was in his 1983 anti-Kissinger book The Price of Power. While the...
...There is no evidence for this and Hersh does not even pretend to offer any...
...But Hersh is unable to handle complicated material, unable to understand or analyze policy issues...
...He never seems to have heard of standards of evidence...
...Much later even Hersh would admit that Ben Menashe "lies like people breathe...
...Figments of his imagination...
...RAEL JEAN ISAAC Terrorism expert Steven Emerson, who described all this and more in a 1991 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, reports that Hersh was warned in advance about Ben Menashe but refused to listen...
...And that is the real question: Why has Hersh, who should long since have been banished to supermarket tabloids, instead attained what People magazine, in a fawning piece, called "a kind of mythic status as a journalist...
...The Air Force only has 21 and the large, heavily armed planes are not flown in groups...
...It turned out that Hersh was doubly conned...
...In the anti-establishment atmosphere of the period, Hersh's stories had a major impact, playing an important role in launching congressional investigations by both houses of Congress into the CIA...
...Gennadi Osipovich, the Soviet fighter pilot who shot down KAL 007, who reported he had been fortified with vodka before reciting, on orders, the wholly false account of what happened on Soviet state television¡ªthat the Boeing had been flying with its lights out and that it ignored warning tracer shots and a radio message before he destroyed it...
...This may explain Hersh's contempt for mere historical truth...
...He could not prove that no one in the CIA had told Hersh that he was on the payroll because the judge ruled that Hersh need not identify his sources and Desai's attorney was prevented from questioning anyone in the CIA's employ...
...The army was in the process of court-martialing Lt...
...Even Thomas Powers, a friendly reviewer in the New York Times, described The Dark Side of Camelot as a "file cabinet," holding up "in strict chronological order just about every report, claim, rumor or telltale clue" of everything the Kennedys and their friends would wish to keep secret...
...Hersh is a product of the "Movement" of the 1960s, which saw the American government as the focus of world evil...
...Kissinger testified on Desai's behalf, flatly contradicting Hersh's report in the book that he had been delighted to have someone of Desai's stature on the payroll and had playfully chastised CIA officials elsewhere for failing to recruit cabinet-level informers...
...Notice the absence of the word "fact" in this list of the file cabinet's contents...
...With his tenacity, lack of scruples, narrow vision, and white hats versus black hats view of the world, he might have been a successful police reporter¡ªparticularly in the earlier journalistic world of Chicago (Hersh's hometown) described by Ben Hecht, where letting the facts interfere with a sensational story was a mark against you...
...HO ARE HERSH'S SOURCES...
...Hersh is an ideological yellow journalist...
...The book's thesis was that the Soviet pilot had made an honest mistake, confusing the Boeing 747 with the RC-135, a U.S...
...The THE CULT OF SEYMOUR HERSH book claimed that Ted Kennedy paid off county chairmen in the West Virginia primary, among them Charles Peters, now founding editor of Washington Monthly...
...William Calley and investigating 36 others for their part in the shootings of civilians, and Hersh pursued the story, which Dispatch then distributed...
...Hersh was asked to explain a letter he had sent to Cusack claiming he had not only independently confirmed that Cusack's father had known Kennedy through an interview with Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln, but had also "independently confirmed some of the most interesting materials" in the papers...
...Izvestiya interviewed Lt...
...C OLUMNIST JOHN LOFTON QUOTES HERSH in a 1984 interview with the University of Chicago magazine: "I'm not interested in history because I'm trying to change things...
...Hersh had his start with Dispatch News Service, a Movement outfit founded in 1969 as an "alternative" news agency to disseminate anti-Vietnam war stories to the mainstream press...
...Hersh has a pattern of claiming to "corroborate" material that defies corroboration...
...Hersh recited these Russian claims sympathetically in his book...
...Hersh never even took the stand...
...81 Rael Jean Isaac's books include The Coercive Utopians, Israel Divided, and Madness in the Streets...
...Emerson writes that after Ben Menashe was publicly exposed, Hersh issued a six-page statement insisting he had "documentation" from "a private detective" confirming part of Ben Menashe's story...
...So even Hersh's claims that the Soviet officials believed their own version of events was untrue...
...Ne'eman said he had spoken to Hersh and told him the United States¡ªnot Israel¡ªwent on nuclear alert twice during that war...
...Disgruntled individuals with an axe to grind...
...In National Review, journalist John Miller observed that Hersh came up "with desperate rationalizations for skeptics who wondered why documents containing ZIP codes were dated before ZIP codes even existed...
...Among Ben Menashe's more sensational revelations, Hersh reports that Prime Minister Shamir personally authorized purloined U.S...
...After he began work on the book in 1984, Hersh received an official invitation to do his research in the Soviet Union and reports being taken aback when Deputy Foreign Minister George Kornienko told him his "assignment" was to find that KAL 007 was on a CIA spy mission...
...The theme of the book is that Israel, impelled by the megalomania of its leaders, built the Bomb, deceiving the United States (with the help of disloyal Jews) until the wicked deed was done...
...Ben Menashe had claimed a leading role in luring Vanunu back to Israel and Hounam offered to let Hersh go through his personal files on the Vanunu affair which showed that none of Ben Menashe's claims held up...
...Again, therewas the same pattern of refusing to credit the warning signs, however glaring...
...Amusingly, in one of his letters to Cusack, Hersh wrote, "We got along so well at that dinner Tuesday night because, I like to think, we are all what we seem to be...
...And indeed RAEL JEAN ISAAC Izvestiya also interviewed the divers who had found the black boxes...
...Unable or unwilling to sift out the wildest, most absurd allegations, he tosses them into the pot, as long as they contribute to his being able to say "the target is destroyed...
...The real issue is not Hersh but his standing among journalists...
...The upshot of the "reforms" Congress enacted was to seriously compromise our intelligence capabilities, setting up a firewall between the FBI and CIA, the piper being paid on 9/11...
...government claims...
...A source called Hersh with a tip on what became known as the My Lai massacre...
...N AN INTERVIEW with the Progressive I declared that "If the standard for being fired was being wrong on a story, I would have been fired long ago...
...He wrote a series of six articles in which he exhibited none of the critical zeal with which he chal lenged U.S...
...Hersh's lawyer announced that the outcome proved "that even a person as prominent as Morarji Desai cannot intimidate an American journalist entitled to his First Amendment protections...
...Veteran foreign correspondent Russ Braley wrote to Richard Nixon in retirement and asked if there was any truth in what Hersh wrote...
...In The Samson Option he says that "Ben Menashe's account might seem almost too startling to be believed, had it not been subsequently amplified by a second Israeli, who cannot be named...
...Hersh reported that the boat people were those who had cooperated with the Americans during the war and could not acclimatize...
...He also testified that to his knowledge Desai had no connection to the CIA and that former CIA director Richard Helms had told him he would be on "safe ground" in testifying that Desai was not a paid CIA informant...
...Who knows...
...THE CULT OF SEYMOUR HERSH inevitably sounds self-serving...
...Osipovich indignantly rejected the suggestion that he had mistaken the plane for an RC-135...
...B UT HERSH'S best-known romance with a con man came several years later, when he was working on a Kennedy book eventually published in 1997 as The Dark Side of Camelot...
...Rosenthal, then New York Times managing editor, called "the hottest piece of journalistic property in the United States...
...In his 1986 book The Target Is Destroyed, on the Soviet downing of Korean civilian airliner KAL 007, Hersh gets the entire story wrong...
...weapons systems...
...In a letter dated January 22, 1992, Nixon replied: "The story has no foundation whatever...
...How this squares with another of Ben Menashe's "disclosures," that Israel was using its stolen U.S...
...In The Samson Option Hersh writes that the famed U.S...
...Hersh identifies him as a former Israeli intelligence expert who served as adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir on intelligence affairs (both untrue...
...Hersh has won over a dozen major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, four George Polk awards, and this year's National Magazine Award...
...Also in The Samson Option Hersh repeatedly cites former Israeli Defense Forces major Seth Mintz as the source for the charge that Israel deliberately sank the USS Liberty during the 1967 war...
...The Dark Side of Camelot illustrates something else about Hersh's use of sources: reputable sources tend to be misquoted or selectively expurgated if they do not forward Hersh's personal agenda...
...Nonetheless Desai lost...
...To be sure, Hersh could not have been expected to obtain the true story in the Soviet Union of 1984...
...Hersh was not interested...
...Typically, Hersh insisted that My Lai was not an isolated instance: the true villain, he wrote, was "the Army as an institution...
...The "real story," said Hersh, was the "politically corrupt" use of intelligence by the U.S...
...The answer clearly lies in Hersh's long history of visceral anti-Americanism, which resonates with the journalistic elite...
...It is significant that Rosenthal would say that a number of Hersh's stories would not have been publishable under the standards he demanded of Times reporters a few years later...
...How could such dreadful stuff be so well rewarded...
...Hersh quoted anonymous intelligence officials "recalling" Desai had been paid $20,000 yearly as a CIA informer during the Johnson administration...
...the New Economic Zones were cultural and social success stories (they were actually concentration camps for political undesirables...
...I asked Ne'eman about this in 1992, not long after the book was published...
...He shows no interest in a crucial question: Did the Soviets find the plane's black boxes...
...In 1991 Izvestiya took advantage of its new freedom to revisit the fate of KAL 007, and its findings were widely available in the United States thanks to an article by John Barron in Reader's Digest...
...Barbara Comstock, in National Review Online, writes that Peters says Hersh interviewed him five times but simply ignored his claims that the payoffs did not happen...
...reconnaisance aircraft...
...While Hersh did not oblige his hosts, from the Soviet point of view, he did almost as well...
...Hersh's book The Samson Option (1991) rests squarely on the fantasies of one Ari Ben Menashe...
...On the contrary, Mintz says that the Israelis concluded the Liberty was an enemy ship masquerading as an American vessel after the U.S...
...Wanting to believe" is perhaps more accurate than "taken in"¡ªcon men provide the sensational material on which Hersh thrives...
...However, when Hersh does identify his sources they can be evaluated and he has a record of being taken in by con men...
...Instead Hersh provided what longtime Kennedy associate Theodore Sorensen described as "a pathetic collection of wild stories...
...Hersh assiduously wooed Cusack, who claimed to have found in the files of his late father, a prominent lawyer, papers that included a contract in which Marilyn Monroe promised to keep silent about her affair with Kennedy in return for $600,000 and documentation linking Kennedy directly to mobster Sam Giancana...
...the "reedu cation camps" were what they pur ported to be and not the brutal places they in fact were...
...Among fantasies too numerous to count (he was Israel's top spy, a commander of the Entebbe operation, planted a homing device in the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, declined an offer to become head of the Mossad), Ben Menashe claimed to have been with the first George Bush in Paris in October 1980 arranging for Iran to hold the hostages until after the presidential election¡ªthis on dates when Secret Service logs show Bush engaged in a large number of appearances in the United States...
...A few days later the Sunday Times revealed the "private detective" was actually Joe Flynn, a well-known British hoaxer, who admitted he had deceived Hersh for money (almost ?1,300 delivered by Hersh's British publisher...
...airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War was only undertaken because Israel blackmailed President Nixon, threatening to use its atomic arsenal if supplies were not sent immediately...
...In 1979, his last year at the Times, Hersh went to Vietnam, one of a few selected American journal ists the Communists permitted entry...
...Newsweek's John Barry, who looked into Ben Menashe's claims, declared on CNN, "If you were talking about the American civil war, he would tell you he was the guy who planned Lee's campaign...
...intelligence obtained through Jonathan Pollard to be "sanitized, retyped and turned over to Soviet intelligence officials" as part of Israel's ongoing exchange of intelligence with the Soviets on U.S...
...Hersh was also warned by Peter Hounam, the chief investigative reporter for the London Sunday Times' "Insight" team who had broken the story of the Vanunu affair, with documentation on Israel's Dimona reactor...
...My Lai turned Hersh overnight into what A.M...
...Are they rep utable people...
...Desai, 87 years old, reacted in outrage, calling it a "sheer mad story" and brought a libel suit seeking $50 million in damages...
...embassy, twice queried, denied there was any American ship in the area...
...What the case really showed was that as long as he did not need to reveal his sources, an irresponsible journalist could label any public figure a CIA agent with impunity...
...If Soviet officials had them, they would know the plane was not on a spy mission...
...In 1999 Hersh wound up on the stand as a prosecution witness and had to undergo a highly embarrassing three-hour grilling by Cusack's lawyer...
...Much of the time, given his massive use of unnamed individ uals, it is impossible to say...
...Cusack was exposed in time to spare Hersh the embarrassment of basing yet another book on the breathless recitation of a con man's revelations...
...officials had "rushed to judgment" because "strong hostility to communism had led them to misread the intelligence...
...Journalist John Miller challenged Hersh: "Would 16 of them lead a relatively small special-forces operation in Afghanistan...
...Tommy Franks said no one was wounded...
...Hersh claimed 16 AC-130 planes were used in the mission...
...While Hersh pulled down a huge contract with ABC for a Kennedy documentary based on the documents, it fell apart when ABC concluded they were phony...
...In fact, Ben Menashe is a notorious tale-spinner who currently, in a scenario beyond the imagination of the most far-out screenwriter, serves as chief witness in Robert Mugabe's farcical treason trial of the leader of the chief opposition party in Zimbabwe...
...Hersh fell for a stash of phony documents peddled by one Lawrence S. Cusack (who went to prison in 1999 for defrauding more than 100 investors of $7 million in a scheme to sell them...
...I am a con man," Flynn told the Times...
...But if he had not worn anti-American blinkers, he would surely have been more suspicious of Soviet claims...
...There is no worse indictment of the shoddy standards of American journalism and the political bias of its elite than the flood of honors its standard bearers have bestowed on Seymour Hersh...
...He wrote a series of stories attacking the CIA for covert actions abroad and for spying on domestic groups (the material, which had been assembled by the CIA itself and turned over to the congressional committee with oversight of the CIA, was leaked to Hersh by CIA head William Colby...
...But apart from the conspiratorial anti-Semitic tone of the book, it had nothing to offer that was not already well established¡ªexcept for the "revelations" of Ben Menashe...
...By the time the suit went to a Chicago jury in 1989, Desai was 93 and too ill to come to the U.S...
...Here is where I absolutely misstated things," an embarrassed Hersh testified...
...intelligence to target the Soviet Union which "was always Israel's primary nuclear target," is not explained...
...While the book was intended to be a hatchet job on Kissinger (who called Hersh's allegations about him "slimy lies"), the chief victim turned out to be India's former prime minister Morarji Desai...
...In The Samson Option Hersh cites Israeli scientist and government adviser Yuval Ne'eman as having told him that in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 Israel went on nuclear alert twice...
...Emerson himself warned him...
...In the November 12, 2001 New Yorker, Hersh described an October 20 raid on Taliban leader Mullah Omar's compound as "a near disaster," claiming 12 special forces were injured, three seriously...
...Undisturbed, Hersh said he might have "misheard...
...The Times hired him and he remained there from 1972 to 1979...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
