RAEL JEAN ISAAC ON SEYMOUR HERSH IN MIDSTREAM MAGAZINE 1992….SEE NOTE
Midstream, February/March 1992 Seymour Hersh’s Obsessions by Rael Jean Isaac
THIS WAS WRITTEN WHEN JAMES KIRCHICK WAS NINE YEARS OLD. THE READER IS ALSO DIRECTED TO :
“The Cult of Seymour Hersh (The American Spectator, July/August 2004) and “Investigating Seymour Hersh” (in Alexander and Bogdanor, eds. The Jewish Divide Over Israel, 2006), also published in Society,(Nov.-Dec. 2005).
SEYMOUR HERSH’S OBSESSIONS:
Had Seymour’s Hersh’s The Samson Option been written by a member of the antisemitic Liberty Lobby, it would come as no surprise. Its inacur-racies are matched only by its malevolence, its superficiality by its absurdities.
(Hersh’s chief source is Ari Ben Menashe, the notorious figure who, among other fantasies too numerous to count, claims to have been with George Bush in Paris in October 1980 arranging for Iran to hold the hostages until after the Presidential elections — this on dates when Secret Service logs show Bush engaged in a large number of appearances in the United States, one of them before the Zionist Organization of America.) Ben-Menashe’s “revelations” are the core of Hersh’s book.
The surprise is that the author is a Jew, a long-time star investigative journalist for the New York Times —although anyone who had followed Hersh’s career as a 1960s style advocacy journalist would have expected him to take up cudgels against Israel sooner or later. His books and articles are permeated by the theme of America-the-enemy; indeed, The Samson Option is his first book without that theme. Here the US is the innocent, deceived victim of Israel and the nefarious Jewish lobby. It took Israel to purify America.
Hersh’s thesis is that Israel, impelled by the megalomania of its leaders, built the Bomb, deceiving the United States until the wicked deed was done. Part of the deception, however, according to Hersh, was self-deception: American political leaders did not dare face up to what their intelligence agencies revealed for fear of the Jews. Jewish fund-raisers, says Hersh, warned political candidates in no uncertain terms that they were finished if they did not toe the line. American Presidents were resentful, but helpless in the face of what Hersh describes as the message of the Jewish lobby: “We’re ready to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.”
Any intelligence (or other) official who tried to alert his superiors to Israel’s secret development of a nuclear arsenal, Hersh alleges, was fired or (if lucky) demoted. And so bureaucrats soon got the message — keep quiet or your career will be ruined.
Although the reader would never guess it from The Samson Option, with its tone of awe-struck disclosure, there has been a series of books about Israel’s development of a nuclear capability. Much of what Hersh’s book offers that is new is false and perhaps libelous — Ari Ben Menashe’s fantasies served up as fact. Thus Hersh asserts that Prime Minister Shamir personally authorized purloined US 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 US weapons systems. (How this squares with another of Ben-Menashe’s sensational — and equally ridiculous —charges, that Israel was using its stolen US intelligence to target the Soviet Union, which, writes Hersh, “was always Israel’s primary nuclear target,” is not explained.) Ben Menashe is also the source for Hersh’s claim that Pollard began spying for Israel in 1981 (three years earlier than hitherto believed) and was only one of the (two? few? many?) Jewish spies within the US government.
It is ironic, given the emphasis the book places on alleged US self-deception concerning the Israeli bomb, that it is Hersh who deluded himself on the bona fides of Ari Ben Menashe; Newsweek, in November 1991, did an in-depth investigation of assorted Ben Menashe claims and found his credibility was zilch. And Newsweek only investigated Ben Menashe’s more plausible allegations. Writing in Commentary, journalist Steven Emerson notes that Ben Menashe had variously claimed he was Israel’s top spy, a commander of the Entebbe operation, and the one who planted a homing device in the Iraqi nuclear reactor before Israel’s 1981 raid. Little wonder that Israeli officials had deemed him “delusional.”
To be sure, all this came out after the publication of Hersh’s book. But Hersh was not merely guilty of failing to check on the credibility of a source making charges he himself calls “hard to believe.” Emerson reports that he refused to look at evidence urged upon him of Ben Menashe’s mendacity. Nor did the proffered evidence come from a suspicious source, i.e. for Hersh, one friendly to Israel. On the contrary, it came from the chief investigative reporter for the London Sunday Times’ “Insight” team Peter Hounam, who had broken the Vanunu story, complete with photographs, on Israel’s Dimona reactor. Hounam warned Hersh not to rely on Ben Menashe, making the highly unusual offer (for a journalist) of letting Hersh go through his personal files on the Vanunu affair. Hersh declined. Nor is the reason hard to fathom: without Ben Menashe’s “revelations,” Hersh would not have had a book. With them, he has a book, but only the tattered remains of a professional reputation.
Hersh, in short, is easy to fool because he wants to be fooled. Another illustration of this propensity followed the book’s publication. To Hersh’s embarrassment, a hoaxer who makes a specialty of fooling British newspapers made public how he had conned Hersh and his publisher into paying him for a phony story on supposed logs of telephone calls that supported Hersh’s claim that Robert Maxwell had worked closely with the Mossad. What is of special interest, Emerson points out, is that Hersh, before realizing he had been conned, said he had acquired the documentation, when he had no such thing.
Some of the book’s charges seem to be based on no sources (Hersh’s own fantasies?) or, in the rare case they are identified, on sources who never said what Hersh claims they did. Thus, he cites distinguished Israeli scientist and former cabinet minister Yuval Ne’eman as having said that in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel went on nuclear alert twice. This writer spoke to Ne’eman on 8 February 1992. Ne’eman said he had indeed spoken to Hersh and told him the United States went on nuclear alert twice during that war.
According to Hersh, the famed US airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War was only undertaken because Israel immorally blackmailed President Nixon, threatening to use its atomic arsenal if supplies were not sent immediately. There is no evidence for this, and Hersh does not even pretend to have any. Veteran foreign correspondent Russ Braley wrote to Richard Nixon asking if there was any truth in what Hersh wrote. In a letter dated 22 January 1992, Nixon replied: “The story has no foundation whatever.” Asked what he knew of Israel’s atomic program (Hersh claims that American presidents from Kennedy on knew that Israel was building weapons but did not dare do anything because of fear of the Jewish lobby), Nixon showed a sensible appreciation for Israel’s position: “I would say that I assumed they had weapons and that whether they had them or not, potential aggressors would be deterred then and now by the fear that they had them.”
What makes Hersh’s allegation that Israel engaged in nuclear blackmail more interesting than his other false claims is that, were it true, Hersh would have destroyed his thesis — that Israel was both immoral and foolish to create a nuclear capability. For were Hersh correct, the Israeli leaders who insisted on producing an Israeli bomb would, in this one incident, have proved they made the right decision. In the crunch, Israel’s atomic arsenal had shown its effectiveness. Without having to employ it, Israel’s leaders had been able to use its existence to save their country.
Why does this not occur to Hersh? The answer is that he never for a moment considers Israel’s point of view. Hersh has written a book about Israel’s development of a nuclear deterrent without ever asking himself why Israel might need or want it. Hersh does not have to bother his head about how Israel is to survive, since it is by no means clear to him that Israel deserves to survive. When he first talks about Israel as a “pariah” state (along with South Africa), he uses quotation marks. Later he drops the quotation marks.
Some of Hersh’s charges are not merely false, but sinister in their implications that Jews in high places are untrustworthy. For example, Hersh portrays Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, as a closet practitioner of dual loyalty, guilty of “ignoring his statutory responsibility” to tell his successor John McCone what he knew about the existence of Israel’s Dimona reactor. In fact, there was nothing to tell. Strauss left the AEC in 1958. Ne’eman points out that construction at Dimona did not begin until 1960 — in 1958, in his words, Dimona was no more than “a gleam in somebody’s eye.”
Although Hersh himself says that Strauss was a lifelong anti-Zionist, he goes on for pages about Strauss’ “dual loyalty.” Any other evidence? “The strongest evidence,” acccording to Hersh, for Strauss’ “sympathy for
the Israeli nuclear weapons program” was that in 1966 Strauss recommended Ernst David Bergmann as a two-month visiting fellow at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. But this reveals nothing. Bergmann. an outstanding scientist, was chairman of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, and he and Strauss would have come to know each other, as Hersh himself admits, at the conferences on peaceful use of the atom.
Does Hersh have any more “proof” of Strauss’ -dual loyalty?” Yes, says Hersh, AEC official Myron Kratzer found out after Strauss had left the AEC that he “followed the tradition of fasting during Yom Kippur.” In Hersh’s Elders of Zion mentality, that clinches it!
Hersh, who did not take the trouble to go to Israel in researching this book, treats every anti-Israel canard as gospel. He says that Israel deliberately sank the USS Liberty during the 1967 War. (Former Israeli Defense Forces major Seth Mintz, repeatedly cited as source for this charge, says, on the contrary, that the Israelis concluded the Liberty was an enemy ship masquerading as an American vessel after the US embassy, twice queried, denied there was any American ship in the area.) Hersh brings up Sabra and Shatila several times, with the implication that Israel conducted the massacre: no mention of the Phalangists, who were in fact responsible.
Hersh cannot be bothered to get the most readily available facts straight. Chronicling Begin’s evil background (Hersh has something insulting to say in introducing each Israeli leader — even, as in the case of General Rafael Eitan, if it is only that his socks smell!), Hersh describes the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel, and says the British responded a week later by hanging three suspected Irgun terrorists. In fact, the three Jews were hanged a year later for their role in the daring assault on the Acre fortress, which freed a large number of Irgun prisoners.
The Samson Option is a morality play without context. Hersh conveys no sense that Israel throughout its history has confronted Arab states seeking to destroy it. He never points out that Israel was not even permitted to buy conventional arms from the United States throughout the 1950s. At one point he quotes Robert McNamara as sympathetic to Israel’s plight: “I can understand why Israel wanted a nuclear bomb. There is a basic problem there. The existence of Israel has been a question mark in history, and that’s the essential issue.”
If Hersh conveys no sense of Israel’s dilemma, neither does he provide any context on nonproliferation. Israel was not the only country outside the great power club developing nuclear weapons. Given his theme that the US should have “done something” about Israel, Hersh presumably should have something to say about the US posture in relation, for example, to Iraq, Pakistan, and India. But Hersh is not interested. Indeed so obsessed is he with Israeli misdeeds, that he only refers to Iraq’s nuclear bomb program in order to condemn Israel. Recently, Defense Secretary Richard Cheney acknowledged US indebtedness to Israel for bombing Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. Incredibly, Hersh’s reaction to the Israeli deed which ensured Saddam Hussein would not have his finger on a nuclear trigger a decade later is to complain of Israel’s “abuse” of US photographic intelligence and the “misuse” of US F-16s in the raid.
What, in Hersh’s perspective, makes Israel so monstrous? Why is Hersh so hostile that he can only see Israel as malign without motive, an exploitative, manipulative evil force? To understand this, one must look at Hersh’s evolution as a journalist of the left-wing “Movement” of the 1960s. Under the influence of assorted Marxist and Trotskyite groupings, the Movement increasingly came to interpret Zionism as the product of Western racism, colonialism and imperialism. To attack Israel was to attack what was worst about the US.
From early in his career on, Hersh absorbed leftist orthodoxies. He was part of a group of young journalists whose perspectives were shaped by the Institute for Policy Studies, the radical left (and radically anti-Israel) think tank, founded in 1963, which served as ideological center of the Movement.’1 In the formulation of IPS’s cofounder and chief political philosopher Marcus Raskin, the United States was an imperialist country (“viewed as the world’s primary enemy by the poor and the young”) whose inhabitants were themselves colonized.
Hersh would develop close ties with IPS and his major stories frequently closely paralleled, and had the effect of furthering major IPS campaigns. It was IPS which indirectly propelled Hersh to stardom, for he first achieved fame freelancing for what Russ Braley in Bad News describes as an “IPS spinoff,” Dispatch News Service. Founded in 1969 as an “alternative” news agency to disseminate anti-Vietnam war stories to the mainstream press, Dispatch was funded by Philip Stern, chairman of the board of IPS. Richard Barnet, IPS’s codirector, was on its board of advisers. A source called Hersh with a tip on what became known as the My Lai massacre. The army was in the process of court-martialing Lt. William Calley and investigating 36 others for their part in the shootings of civilians, and Hersh pursued the story, which Dispatch then distributed.
Hersh received financial support for this work on the story, which would produce two books as well as a series of articles, from yet another outfit with strong IPS links, the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Like Dispatch New Service, this was funded by IPS board chairman Philip Stern as well as by the Rubin Foundation, which was the chief funder of IPS. (The Rubin Foundation’s president, Peter Weiss, followed Stern as chairman of the IPS board.) Hersh, with his IPS-style lenses on the world, insisted that My Lai was not an isolated instance of iniqitous behavior; the true villain, he wrote in Cover-up, was “the army as an institution, which, I believe, made in made so much of My Lai inevitable.”
My Lai turned Hersh overnight into what A.M. Rosenthal–then New York Times managing editor, called “the hottest piece of journalistic property in the United States.” And with what from the viewpoint of IPS was extremely happy timing, the My Lai story went on the front page of the New York Times just two days before Washington D.C.’s largest antiwar demonstration up to that time, in which IPS leaders took a major role. In 1972, North Vietnam would recognize the propaganda value of Hersh’s coverage to them by giving him a visa to enter, and report from that country.
From 1972 to 1979 Hersh worked for the New York Times. Not surprisingly, given the similarity of outlook between Hersh and IPS, several of his major exposes dovetailed with IPS campaigns. In September 1974, a week after the Center for National Security Studies, an IPS spinoff, conducted hearings attacking the CIA and covert operations, Hersh broke a major story on the front page of the Times on CIA covert actions against the Allende regime in Chile. In December Hersh followed up with a story on CIA spying, contrary to its charter, into domestic antiwar groups. (Although one would never have known this from reading Hersh, in this story. as in My Lai, he was describing incidents in which the government was cleaning up its own act. William Colby, then head of the CIA, had told Hersh of an internal CIA probe on misconduct within the organization.)
In the anti-establishment climate of the period, Hersh’s stories had a major impact, helping IPS to achieve its target — Congressional investigations by both houses of Congress into the CIA. The upshot was that for years the CIA was compromised. Eight Congressional committees had to be notified in advance of its conducting any covert operation, a guarantee of leaks.
Although the Times during this period was hardly a bastion of conservatism, Hersh stood out for his left-wing views: in Fit to Print, his book on the Times under A.M. Rosenthal’s leadership, Joseph Goulden reports that Rosenthal “constantly irritated Hersh by patting him affectionately on the shoulder and saying, ‘Well, well, how’s my little commie today?” It is also interesting, given Hersh’s lofty reputation, that Goulden quotes Rosenthal as saying that some of his articles would not have been publishable under the standards Rosenthal demanded of Times reporters a few years later.
In 1979 Hersh again visited Vietnam, one of the few (carefully selected) American journalists the Communists permitted entry. He wrote a series of six articles in the Times, in which he exhibited none of the investigative zeal with which he challenged US government claims. Hersh reported that the boat people were those who had cooperated with the Americans during the war and could not acclimatize; the New Economic Zones were cultural and social success stories (they were actually concentration camps for political undesirables); the “reeducation camps,” what they purported to be and not the dread, brutal places they in fact were.
In 1979 Hersh left the Times to work on an anti-Kissinger book, The Price of Power (published in 1983) There are hints of the themes that would dominate The Samson Option: according to Hersh, foreign service officers were forced into self-censorship, because those who reported critically on Israeli policy in State Department cables ran the risk of being labeled anti-Semitic. Kissinger himself is treated as part of the Israel lobby, a notion, international affairs expert Michael Ledeen observes wryly, “that has not previously occurred to anyone involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
Hersh makes plain that his purpose is to discredit the foreign policy of the Nixon administration, whose reputation had survived Watergate. The book opens by describing Kissinger’s two-faced efforts to ingratiate himself with presidential candidates of both parties, offering one the secrets of the other (Kissinger would call Hersh’s allegations “slimy lies.”) As in The Samson Option, there is no context, no attempt to assess the success or failure of the policies of the Nixon presidency, no attempt to consider what purposes were pursued under what constraints.
Very few sources are cited, and, in customary Hersh fashion, he makes no effort to assess their credibility. As it turned out, Hersh’s chief victim was not Kissinger but India’s former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Hersh quoted unnamed intelligence officials “recalling” Desai had been paid $20,000 yearly as a CIA informer during the Johnson administration. Desai, 87 years old, reacted in outrage, calling it a “sheer mad story,” and brought a libel suit seeking $50 million in damages.
Desai was 93 and too ill to come to the US by the time the suit went to a Chicago jury in 1989. 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. 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.
Nonetheless, Desai lost. 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. Furthermore, Desai’s attorney was prevented from questioning anyone in the CIA’s employ. Hersh never even took the stand. 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.” What the case really showed was that as long as he did not need to reveal his sources, a journalist could label any public figure a CIA agent with impunity.
Hersh followed The Price of Power with The Target is Destroyed (1986), on the Soviet destruction of Korean civilian airliner KAL 007. He turned for help to IPS. William Arkin headed IPS’s Arms Race and Nuclear Weapons Research Project, and was expert at extracting sensitive information from government sources and using it to embarrass the United States. Arkin’s team at IPS guided Hersh, as he gratefully acknowledges in his book, “in shaping my requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act.” Typically, the IPS team did so well that CIA director William Casey charged that “Hersh was perilously close to prosecution for revealing so much about important intelligence secrets.”
After he began work on the book, Hersh writes, he received an official invitation to come to the Soviet Union to investigate the story. He reports being taken aback when Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Kornienko told him his “assignment” was to find that KAL 007 was
on a CIA spy mission. It did not occur to Hersh that the Soviets might have looked upon a journalist who had been so helpful to their purposes as amenable to “following orders.”
Hersh did not oblige his hosts. He concluded what had been obvious to all but the most determined conspiracy buffs or pro-Soviet hacks from the start: KAL 007 had simply wandered off course. But from the Soviet point of view, he did almost as well. The thrust of the book was to criticize the United States for “Russia bashing.” The Soviets had made an honest mistake, confusing the Boeing 747 with the RG135, a US reconnaisance aircraft. US officials had “rushed to judgment” because “strong hostility to communism had led them to misread the intelligence and then, much more ominously, to look the other way when better information became available.” (The “better information” Hersh referred to was an alleged air force interpretation that the Soviet pilot had misidentified the plane.) The “real story,” said Hersh, was not the fate of the plane, but the “politically corrupt” use of intelligence by the US.
In 1991, Izvestiya took advantage of its new freedom to conduct some investigative journalism of its own. Izvestiya interviewed Lt. Col. Gennadi Osipovich, the Soviet fighter pilot who shot down KAL 007, who reported that he had been ordered to lie after the incident, to state on television that the Boeing had been flying with its lights out, and that it ignored warning tracer shots and a radio message before he destroyed it. (Hersh reports these Soviet claims sympathetically in his book.) In fact, the pilot told Izvestiya, he had seen its strobe lights flashing, fired no tracer shots and tried no radio warning. He indignantly rejected the suggestion that he had mistaken the plane for an RC-135, noting that he had made numerous flights to intercept RC-135s and recognized their markings and flight patterns.
It was thus not the US administration, but Hersh who had the story all wrong. To be sure, Hersh could not have been expected to obtain the true story in the Soviet Union of 1984. But if he had not worn anti-American ideological blinkers, he would surely have been more suspicious of Soviet claims and behavior.
Hersh shows no interest in a crucial question: Did the Soviets find the plane’s black boxes? If Soviet officials had them, they would know that the plane was not on a spy mission. And indeed, in 1990, Izvestiya interviewed the divers who had found the black boxes. So even Hersh’s claim that Soviet officials believed their own version of events was untrue.2
But The Target is Destroyed passage most revealing of Hersh’s moral universe has nothing to do with KAL 007. Criticizing Reagan for quoting a sentence from Solzhenitsyn (“Anyone who has once proclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose the lie as his principle”), Hersh says: “It was as if the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations had quoted Benedict Arnold as a moral authority and expert on the United States.” To Hersh there is no difference between the great Soviet dissident who courageously raised his voice against a totalitarian state and the Revolutionary War general, annoyed that he had been passed over for promotion, who betrayed his country.
Hersh’s work is pervaded by flawed moral judgments which are insistently pressed upon the reader. In The Samson Option, it is that Israel is “bad” to have pursued the nuclear option, and compounded its dereliction by “lying” about it to the United States. In The Price of Power, it is that Kissinger is a deceitful person pursuing ruthless policies. In The Target is Destroyed it is that (bad) American anti-Communism led to the US “lying” about the incident, misrepresenting an innocent, if tragic, Soviet mistake.
Setting aside the appropriateness of making “truth-telling” the touchstone of public policy, Hersh suffers from a curious double standard when it comes to applying his own principles. This is evident in The Samson Option in the very different approach he takes to Israel’s spying on the US as against the US’ spying on Israel. He writes that in 1963 the Kennedy administration informally agreed with Israel that neither country would spy on the other. But while Hersh devotes a chapter to excoriating Israel for the Pollard case, he repeatedly refers approvingly to the United States’ spying on Israel.
Hersh’s obsession with virtue in public life is also at odds with his own investigative techniques. In Bad News, Russ Braley describes Hersh’s pride in deceiving one of the authors of a book on Watergate. Hersh pretended he was in possession of a confidential outline of the book to make one of the authors talk: “I never had the outline. I bluffed him out of his pants. I pretended I had it all the time.” In Fit to Print, Joseph Goulden writes that A.M. Rosenthal, who found Hersh’s methods disturbing, recalled hearing Hersh telephoning someone for information: “He was practically blackmailing this guy. He was saying, ‘Either you tell me what I want to know or I’ll ….’ I put my hands over my ears and ran out of the room. I didn’t want to hear this sort of thing, I didn’t want any part of it. Let him get the story, but leave me out of it, how he got it.”
Victims of Hersh’s investigative methods have gone public. Edward Korry, former ambassador to Chile, claims that Hersh demanded a quid pro quo in the form of “dirt” on Kissinger in exchange for clearing his name of false charges Hersh had brought in the first place. When Hersh wrote a major “expose” of alleged criminal activities by Gulf and Western in the New York Times, G & W executive Martin Davis wrote to then Times managing editor Seymour Topping that Hersh “in the guise of seeking information about Gulf and Western and its executives, is spreading lies, although he bluntly asserts them as facts — lies of the most vicious kind, including flat statements that we have committed crimes.”
Hersh was indignant when the company took measures to protect itself, telling Goulden “G&W and that bastard Marty Davis played rough with me and Gerth [the other reporter involved] investigating us when we were working on the story, taping our conversations, the whole s[h]mear.” But although Hersh set in motion what he described as the most intensive SEC investigation of a company in history, it came to nothing. Understandably, the Times was not happy with the outcome. In Hersh’s interpretation, it was not his zealous advancing of charges that did not hold up that was the problem, but the Times‘ reluctance to confront big business. “The Times wasn’t nearly as happy when we went after business wrongdoing as when we were kicking around some slob in government.”
Hersh is an ideological yellow journalist. With his tenacity, lack of scruples in going after sources, narrow vision, and white hats versus black hats view of the world, he might, in an earlier era, have been a good police reporter. But he is unable to handle complicated material and unable to understand or analyze policy issues. He takes refuge in the simple-minded Movement notions (America-the-demon, Kissinger the two-faced, Israel the manipulator) which allow him to organize his warped books.
Hersh seems never to have heard of standards of evidence. He is able to get people to talk, but does not know what to do with what they say. Unable to sift out the wildest, most absurd allegations, he tosses them into the pot, as long as they contribute to his purpose by allowing him to say “the target is destroyed.” For the historical record, therefore, Hersh’s work is useless.
What is of real concern is less Hersh himself than his reputation among journalists. Hersh has won twenty major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970 (for reports on events in Vietnam written, as Braley points out, without his having been there) and the National Book Critics Circle Award. How could such dreadful stuff be so well rewarded? Alas, there is no worse indictment of the shoddy standards of American journalism, the visceral anti-Americanism of its elite, than the flood of awards its standard bearers have bestowed on Seymour Hersh.
A final note. Explaining why he called the book The Samson Option, Hersh writes that “Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured after a bloody fight.” What the Bible records, of course, is that Samson became helpless after Delilah deceived him into telling her that the secret of his strength lay in his long hair, and she summoned one of the Philistines to cut it off as he slept in her arms. Every school child knows that — but not Seymour Hersh.
•
1. See Rael Jean Isaac, ‘The Institute for Policy Studies: Empire on the Left,” Midstream, June/July 1980 and “The Fight Around the Institute for Policy Studies,” Midstream, February 1981.
2. The New York Times of 20 February 1992 resuscitated the airliner-was-a-spy-plane theory, giving lengthy coverage to the speculations of Robert Allardyce, a retired airline navigator, who has calculated that the most widely accepted explanation as to how the pilots flew so far off course — that they made a one digit mistake in keying flight coordinates into the navigation system — would not account for the flight path of KAL 007. From this, Allardyce flies to the conclusion that KAL 007 was a spy plane — this although, as the Times article points out, aviation officials disagree, and say a combination of innocent errors was almost certainly the cause of the course deviation. (Similar deviations happen often, fortunately without similar consequences.)
What is perhaps most astonishing about the Times piece is that its author, Robert Witkin, seems totally ignorant of the 70 part Izvestiya investigation. He treats Hersh’s book as the authoritative word on the subject to date, saying that Hersh had “established” that the Russians had “not known that their target was a civilian airliner but had mistaken it for a military reconnaissance plane.”
Midstream — February/March, 1992
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