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Seymour M. Hershs memoirReporteris out this week, and its the story of an epic career in journalism.
And all of that is decades before the revelations of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Ive heard many of the stories he recounts in his memoir before.
This was an effective strategy to intimidate a young editor, which I was then.
Hershs reports on national security require the utmost clarity and an impersonal reportorial voice.
The exchange below has been condensed and edited.
[Recorder turned on in the middle of conversation.]
Yes, its worrying.
Even the Korean War, we now know that China started the war without talking to Russia.
We thought it was all Russia.
The wrongness of us.
So how do you deal with a country that gets everything fucking wrong?
[Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo today issued an edict today to the North Koreans.
Basically it was a Cold War edict.
Were going to give you the stiffest requirements.
You have to cut off everything, do everything we say.
And their answer was: Who do you think you are?
But how did we get so wrong?
How did we get so wrong on everything?
I cant figure that out.
Can you figure that out?
Im a literary critic.
What did literature do to help?
What did Styron do?
What did Mailer do?
I spend my life putting dead rats full of lice on peoples desks.
And it does pay off.
George Saunders just wrote a lovely note to my agent, saying Im a unbelievably wonderful read.
Hes my true hero.
What a read, he said, I can show it to you.
[He shows me the email.]
I gave a talk with him once, but hes the nicest man, you know.
I wrote back, George could write himself out of a Mengele experimental ward.
[The phone rings.]
This is money, I gotta take it.
[He takes it.
]I get these calls all the time from strange people.
Thats life in the fast track.
The CIA knew two years before.
They were watching me two years before.
This is where it comes from.
They have a whole section on me.
I barely knew myself at this time that I was doing it.
So every conversation I had with [CIA Director William] Colby was wired.
Every one, in his office, at home at night, was wired.
And every conversation I had with the Justice Department was wired.
It was the 70s and were not even at war.
What can I tell you?
And so I tell Abe Rosenthal I got this story.
He doesnt know a frigging thing about it.
He said, What, were spying on Americans?
And I said, No, its a real story.
He said, Well, write it.
I said, Its a big story.
He said, Just go write it.
So I go to the office, I go home.
Thats when I called his wife up.
What she said was a little more earthy than what I put in the book, but thats okay.
I mean, it did happen.
You called his wife or his girlfriend?
I called the wife first, who then told me about the girlfriend with some asperity.
As it turns out, he was a tomcat.
I guess I didnt know that he was a big buddy of Roy Cohns.
I learned that much later.
Yeah, they used to go to parties together.
I had no idea.
None of my business.
So I spend three hours on it.
I saw Colby at 10 oclock and he cashed in on me.
He claims that he just diminished it.
He said, Well, they wanted 110 wiretaps and they only got 74.
And its a ticket to ride.
And [CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus] Angleton is going to be done with this story.
And Colby knows that he wants to get rid of him.
And in a way Colbys probably using me to get rid of Angleton.
I dont know if these people are still alive.
[They are all dead.]
In those days its hard to believe how naive we are.
So I called up this guy Ober on Saturday morning, or Friday afternoon.
Ober ran the program.
And I say to Ober, Angleton just dumped all over you and said you did everything.
He said, I dont know what youre talking about.
And so we have this conversation and the whole time hes talking to me, Angletons talking to me.
Three other guys, four other guys are talking to me.
They all dont say, of course youre not using my name.
Do you know what I mean?
Were on that level.They understood and I understand.
So I have, as I said in the article, I had seven sources.
I finished the story about 11 or 12.
Ive stayed up all night, Ive got 7,000 words.
Ive been thinking about the story for years and I thought it through …
I understood where I was going.
Its not like a novel where sometimes the characters take over.
What did you say?
I said its 100,000 people.
How do you describe it?
They never talked to the lawyer.
I never talked to Jimmy Goodale [former vice-president and general counsel of the New YorkTimes].
Abe never calls me and says, who are the sources?
Talk about an amazing thing for the New YorkTimesto lead a paper with that.
They added an extra page in the middle of the night.
Abe got mad at me because I didnt know the phone number I was calling from.
He got really mad at me, What do mean you dont know your fucking number?
I can remember all these things.
Anyway, I remember all of my conversations with you, all of our fights.
I can remember every fight we had and where they went.
I remember them too, Sy.
It was for you and me to resolve.
You may have been right about a few things.
Im not worried about it.
I mean, its a feat.
I dont think Ive ever done anything nearly that close in all my years.
What was the aftermath of the CIA story?
How long did it take over your life?
The CIA took over my life for a long time.
One of the problems was that afterwards, nobody followed it and so I had to keep going.
Once again, its the same thing I talk about with the Pentagon press corps.
I saw the Pentagon press corps smoking pipes.
That was too many for them to cope with it.
Five and they might have gone after five.
I had to pretend to do interviews on other stuff to throw them off the trail.
It was really hard.
[Pentagon Press Secretary] Arthur Sylvester and [Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara?
I knew him from the very beginning.
McNamara was a fucking psychotic liar.
Is there anyone like him now?
Whats going on today in terms of the U.S. and Russia, its pretty nasty now.
Journalism can be a lot more interesting than what were seeing.
I hate to see the way journalism is devalued.
The New YorkTimesdoes this, and the WashingtonPostdoes the same thing, only to a lesser degree.
The story is just, Trump clearly lied again when he said such and such.
But those arent front page stories, yet there are three of them on the front page.
Its really sort of dishonest.
Was it like that with Nixon or Johnson?
Not nearly as bad.
In fact, not nearly as bad with George W. Bush either.
And not nearly as bad, certainly not, with Obama.
So heres where we are at.
All the Mueller stuff, all the Russia stuff.
Its catnip for liberal outrage.
Do you think Trump is doing as much damage as Bush and Cheney?
I wrote a lot about Cheney inTheNew Yorker, but I wrote very little of what I know.
They always never fit.
Cheney would go off on the 1917 Balfour declaration.
He knows a lot and hes a reader, and he aint dumb and hes got a great memory.
They caused irreparable damage.
How did you get hired at the New YorkTimes?
The bureau wasnt doing it and it wasnt doing Vietnam.
As much as we had bad blood, he knew he needed me.
You had gotten a visa to go to Hanoi, right?
Somebody at theTimespicked up on myNew Yorkerarticles.
Theres this story where I hung up on Abe and told him to go fuck himself.
It was when I was conducting an interview on My Lai for CBS.
They mentioned, but although they bought our story, they didnt mention it.
They paid 100 bucks like everyone else for a story after not buying it for weeks.
Well, I got paid.
I dont know how much David made because he later made it a business.
I shared a big chunk of the $10,000 CBS paid.
I didnt handle any of the money.
I had to hire lawyers and stuff like that.
I got enough money to make a down payment on a house.
You know this business.
Theres no big payday.
Certainly not for book critics.
This is my Cheney book.
Remember I told you I dont put anything on the computer?
This is the book right here.
This one is the history behind the early decision to bomb the Taliban in October 2001.
We werent at war with the Taliban.
Why would you want to go war with the Taliban?
You know where they are.
You do know where they are.
Instead, we went to war with the Taliban.
And now its been 17 years.
Everythings wonderful in Kabul, right?
Youve seen the crap I get, right?
Youve seen the documents.
[Hersh rifles through documents on his desk.
He pulls up a 2002 memo from Donald Rumsfeld referring to an entity called Grey Fox.]
What the fuck is that?
Ever heard of Grey Fox?
What are we talking about?
I mean, whats going on in this secret world?
And whats secret titrant?
What the fuck does that mean?
That means something important.
And again, how about this one?
I mean, I get this shit.
Theres one thats just amazing.
[We looked at a one-line memo from Rumsfeld to Douglas Feith, which caused us both to laugh.
]I mean, what are you going to do with this stuff?
First of all, they would nail the guy that gave it to me, Im sure.
He said, Well, you, no, we dont have to do that.
Thats why weve got to get Special Forces in there.
Get rid of Grey Fox.
I found out what it was.
Its a fucking black unit.
The names changed a thousand times times.
None of these I ever used, not one word.
These guys are really serious about killing a lot of people.
[Shows another memo.]
They love the idea!
Man, we could go out and start killing fucking people!
Fuck all this dumb shit about the Geneva Convention.
They said the problem is we have a lot of detainees.
This is in late 2001.
They think its okay now.
In the end they decided to put them in Guantanamo.
What was the process of researching your memoir.
Was it all here in notes and documents and clips?
People are amazed that I remembered so much.
You know Ive got a good memory.
Ive told the stories a hundred times, so they were in my head.
But I had to do immense fact-checking.
Youve been thinking something was one way for decades.
Turns out it was something else.
What I did is I went back and I got almost everything I ever wrote.
The AP was great.
I didnt know I was gonna be a writer when I started out.
And also dont forget I drove a car with just the press sticker.
We could go anywhere.
You didnt fuck with them, just like you didnt fuck with it.
Chicago was great then and I just drove around.
I could do what I wanted, but there was a limit.
You couldnt get into it.
And so I was glad to get out of there.
So I went and got everything I ever did and read all the stories.
You read them all?
Theres one from 16 years ago I wrote about John Walker Lindh, who they tortured.
We all knew what they were doing.
They were torturing and killing.
Certainly that was the atmosphere.
It came from the top.
Its a big steel container and they took the top off it and placed it on the ground.
People wrote about it as if he deserves it.
The 19-year-old Taliban, he got 20 years.
Hes coming out in two years, and needless to say, hes a little bitter.
Hes got one year off, two years off.
So hes gonna serve 18-and-a-half years.
I wanted to go talk to him, but hes too bitter, man, and half-crazy anyway.
Is he still religious?
I know hes still angry at America.
He doesnt like America.
He wants to get out.
His mother and father are trying to talk to him.
They separated when he was a kid.
You know, 17-year-old kid and his parents divorced.
He didnt go do drugs.
He joined the Taliban.
It was just murderous.
There was a CIA guy, but he wasnt really.
So he of course said nothing.
So they roughed him up and dragged him and threw him in this thing.
In theNew YorkerI wrote a story describing some of the Geneva Convention violations.
But it was like I was banging in the wind.
You know what the R&R was?
I didnt write that either.
How do you rate the main antagonists of your career: McNamara, Kissinger, Cheney?
Cheney, hes the smartest and he caused the most damage.
No, Kissinger, for all of his being wrong, Kissinger really was dexterous.
Cheney didnt have any of that.
He was just plowing straight ahead, but he just, he was well read.
I mean, he spent years trying to reorganize the Middle East.
But you talk about antagonists, I thought you would name my colleagues!
Im so glad you didnt.
If you notice in the book I was very generous.
This isnt a payback book.
