From Vietnam to Abu Ghraib to Iran, Seymour Hersh has tirelessly dug for the truth. The veteran reporter talks to Denis Staunton, Washington Correspondent
After four decades as America's leading investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh says that he's become a "boy reporter" again, breaking hard news stories about the Bush administration's war plans and dissent within the intelligence and defence communities. The Pulitzer-prize winner, who broke the story of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam and exposed the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib in 2004, has written a succession of reports in the New Yorker magazine in recent months revealing contingency plans for an attack on Iran.
"Thirty two months I've been writing about this story, and when I began, they all thought I was wacky. No longer," he says as we meet for breakfast in Washington this week.
At 70, Hersh is fit and spare, dressed in an open-collar shirt and frayed trousers and carrying a battered briefcase. He has a reputation for being gruff and prickly, but when we meet, he is warm, patient and self-effacing. "You see how I'm dressed - nine to five is useless to me. My joke is I'm like a vampire. I do my work at night and weekends," he says. "I would see people very high up in the administration. But I've got to call them late at night. I had a 6.30am breakfast with somebody at a fancy hotel where nobody would see us for an hour. And it's nerve-wracking."
Earlier this month, Hersh reported that the Bush administration had shifted its target in Iran from an attack on suspected nuclear installations to striking the Iranian forces and weapons suppliers that the US claims are helping insurgents in Iraq.
"They were marketing an attack on Iran and they've got a problem. Almost everything they say is not going to be believed by a lot of people because of their track record. So they weren't able to sell the idea that the Iranians were a significant nuclear threat to the United States," he says. "So they just did what any good marketer does - they changed the product. And they've been doing it in front of us. It's not been subtle. For about three months now it's been a steady drumbeat of: 'The Iranians are killing our boys and the British boys. The Revolutionary Guards have to be put on the terrorist list,' etcetera."
US military commanders in Iraq claim Iran is supplying Shia insurgents with weapons, including the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are responsible for most US casualties. This month, the US Senate voted by a margin of three to one to declare Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist entity, a move that critics complained could enable the administration to attack Iran without consulting Congress.
President George Bush has consistently refused to rule out military action against Iran, although the administration claims that it wants to resolve its differences with Tehran through diplomacy.
"If it were to happen, it would be the biggest disaster of all time. And that's the reason why the odds are it won't, because there are just so many rational people," Hersh says about a possible attack.
"The problem is that you have somebody like Bush, who's a genuine revolutionary. He's a Trotsky, a believer in permanent revolution . . . and he's uneducable. You can't teach him anything. He doesn't learn anything. He still thinks democracy can work in Iraq. I take him at his word, by the way. I just believe him when he says this stuff. He didn't do what he did for Israel or oil. That's all secondary. It's for democracy and this wacko stuff, I mean really wacko stuff. It's very unsettling to me."
RESEARCHING HIS MOST recent story, Hersh spoke to senior officials in Berlin, Paris and London, as well as figures within the US administration, and he believes that Washington has briefed key European allies about a possible attack on Iran.
"We know that Cheney is very much there. The assumption is that Bush is there. We know less about Bush than Cheney," he says. "The plan of the administration would be: limited cross-border hits, hit Revolutionary Guards, maybe hit their barracks, hit some places in Tehran (that means you have to put some people on the ground to laser-guide the bombs), avoid collateral damage, which is actually very hard. What a blow to the pride of Tehran to do this! I mean the arguments against this are just immense and obvious but so what - they were also against Iraq. Tell the Europeans to encourage the Iranians not to respond: 'It's a short hit. You Iranians have been doing bad stuff inside so just take your medicine.' "
The son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, Hersh was born in Chicago in 1937 and started his career as a police reporter in his home town before moving to Washington in 1963 to report on the Pentagon for the Associated Press. After a brief stint as press secretary to anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, he returned to journalism in the late 1960s and soon shot to worldwide fame by breaking the biggest story of the Vietnam War.
On March 16th, 1968, about 100 US soldiers descended on My Lai, a village on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam, to search for Vietcong guerrillas. Instead, they found hundreds of women, children and old men, whom they killed systematically in their homes and in fields, sometimes raping the women first.
More than a year later, Hersh heard that William Calley, one of the platoon leaders, was about to be court-martialled for killing civilians. Hersh tracked Calley down to the Georgia military base where he was now stationed and the two men talked all night.
The story of My Lai shocked America and not only changed the perception of the Vietnam War but shattered the illusion of American innocence.
"Until My Lai, everybody thought: 'Oh my God, we don't fight the war like the Nips, the Japanese or the Krauts or the Nazis did. We're not like that. We fight differently.' Well of course it turns out that war is dehumanising across the board," Hersh says.
Hersh joined the New York Times in 1972 and in the years that followed he produced scoops on everything from Watergate and the CIA's domestic spying programme to US involvement in the 1973 coup in Chile and Israel's nuclear policy.
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2001, Hersh's reports in the New Yorker have focused on the "war on terror", US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and the administration's intentions towards Iran. But Hersh says that, despite the horror of Abu Ghraib, the revelation that US soldiers were torturing Iraqi prisoners didn't change the way Americans felt about Iraq in the way that My Lai transformed public opinion on Vietnam. The difference, he feels, was the level of fear in the US.
"After 9/11 there was total fear, just fear of the bad guys. Fear, payback and then you've got a leader who says we've got to get them out of their snakeholes, it's either them or us, for us or against us. So it didn't have the impact," he says.
His reports have won him enduring hostility from the top figures in the administration. "Seymour Hersh is a liar," Bush told Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, according to Bob Woodward's Bush at War.
Hersh has also antagonised journalists on leading US papers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, accusing them of failing in their duty in the run-up to the Iraq war and claiming that they are equally gullible in the face of the administration's spin on Iran.
"They're being spun like tops," he says. Hersh's critics point to his extensive use of unnamed sources, arguing that nobody really knows who he is talking to or how well-informed his sources are. In fact, New Yorker editor David Remnick knows the name of every one of Hersh's sources, all of whom are contacted by the magazine's factcheckers. "My guys have to talk to the New Yorker. They have to talk separately to the factcheckers. Some guys won't," says Hersh. He says he has sources at the highest level in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies as well as in foreign governments and intelligence services and he insists each of his assertions is backed by multiple sources.
HE IS SCATHING about the Bush administration, which he describes as the worst he has experienced - even worse than Nixon's - and claims that a handful of neoconservatives took over US policy after 9/11.
"It was like we were taken over by a cult - eight or nine wackos took over," he says. "And our democracy turns out to be much more fragile than we thought. The army went and fell over dead. I mean, they resisted but they fell over dead, nothing public. The Congress, which was then Republican, fell over dead. The bureaucracy, which leaks a lot, they were scared. The press fell over dead."
Hersh has reported on the use of torture at secret US prisons overseas and he maintains that torture and abuse remain widespread.
"We're going to be really ashamed of ourselves when this whole story about Guantanamo comes out. Guantanamo is a really depraved place. We're going to be really ashamed of ourselves," he says.
A critic of the Iraq war from the start, Hersh believes the US should withdraw its troops as soon as possible, arguing that the US presence has been the source of most of the violence. He is also concerned about the coarsening effect on American soldiers of fighting a war that has sinister echoes of Vietnam.
"Can you believe that after Vietnam we go back into another war in a society that we do not understand, against a force we do not see," he says. "And inevitably what that means is that you get into a situation like we did in Vietnam where you take it out on the people. And then you lose it. That's where we are now. I don't think there's any hope for us."
Most opinion polls and political pundits suggest that the next US president will be a Democrat, but Hersh is not so sure, pointing out that Bush could surprise the public by announcing a big troop cut next summer, in time to give the Republicans a boost. No matter who succeeds Bush in the White House, Hersh believes that Americans will pay the price for this administration's mistakes for many years to come.
"I would argue that Vietnam, where we lost 58,000 dead, was a tactical mistake," he says. "After the war, five years later, we're playing monopoly with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This, although the death rate is much less, about 6 or 7 per cent of what we had in Vietnam, this is a strategic war. We're in for a long, long, decades-long experience with these people and it's going to be horrible. It's going to be decades of tension about the US versus the Muslim world, unless we change overnight."
Seymour Hersh will give the 2007 Amnesty International Lecture next Wednesday at 7pm in the Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College Dublin. The booked-out event will be be videostreamed on www.rte.ie