In The Samson Option, on the rare occasions when he identifies a source (other than Ben Menashe), Hersh gets the story wrong. Hersh cites distinguished 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. I asked Ne'eman about this on February 8, 1992. Ne'eman said he had indeed spoken to Hersh and told him the United States -- not Israel -- went on nuclear alert twice during that war. According to Hersh, the famed U.S. airlift to Israel during the war was only undertaken because Israel blackmailed President Nixon, threatening to use its atomic arsenal if supplies were not sent immediately. Hersh does not even pretend to offer any evidence for this. Veteran foreign correspondent Russ Braley, who was friendly with Richard Nixon, wrote to the ex-President asking if there was any truth in what Hersh wrote. In a letter dated January 22, 1992 Nixon replied: "The story has no foundation whatever."

In dark suggestions more appropriate to the Liberty Lobby than an American Jewish journalist, Hersh implies sinister motivations by Jewish Americans in high places. For example, Hersh goes on for pages assailing Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the 1950s, as a closet practitioner of "dual loyalty." "The strongest evidence," according to Hersh, was that in 1966, Strauss recommended Ernst David Bergmann as a two month visiting fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. In fact 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. But Hersh has yet more "proof" of his dual loyalty charge. He reports that AEC official Myron Kratzer told him that after Strauss left the AEC, he "followed the tradition of fasting during Yom Kippur." In Hersh's Elders of Zion mentality, that clinches it.

It is worth noting that The Samson Option is unique among Hersh's oeuvre in treating the U.S. as innocent, deceived victim (of Israel and the nefarious Jewish lobby). The rest of his books and articles are permeated by the theme of America-the-enemy. It took Israel to purify America, however briefly.

Seymour Hersh is a product of the "Movement" of the 1960s, which saw America as the focus of world evil and Israel as the fusion of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. 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. 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. Typically, Hersh insisted that My Lai was not an isolated instance; the true villain, he wrote, was "the Army as an institution."

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." The Times hired him and he remained there from 1972-79. He wrote a series of stories in the Times 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). 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. The upshot of the "reforms" Congress enacted was to seriously compromise our intelligence capabilities, with the piper being paid on 9/11. The passage of the Patriot Act has finally begun to undo the mischief Hersh helped to wreak on our intelligence services.

In 1979, Hersh left the Times to write a hatchet job on Henry Kissinger. As it turned out the chief victim of The Price of Power, published in 1983, was not Kissinger but India's former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Hersh quoted anonymous 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. By 1989, when the suit went to a Chicago jury, Desai was 93 and too ill to come to the U.S.

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 testifed 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

Outpost               - 6 -               May 2003