85 Facts About Seymour Hersh

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh was born on April 8,1937 and is an American investigative journalist and political writer.

Seymour Hersh gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Seymour Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards.

Seymour Hersh is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2013, Seymour Hersh's reporting alleged that Syrian rebel forces, rather than the government, had attacked civilians with sarin gas at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War, and in 2015, he presented an alternative account of the US raid in Pakistan which killed Osama bin Laden, both times attracting controversy and criticism.

In 2023, Seymour Hersh alleged that the US and Norway had sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, again stirring controversy.

Seymour Hersh is known for his use of anonymous sources, for which his later stories in particular have been criticized.

Seymour Myron Hersh was born in Chicago on April 8,1937, to Isador and Dorothy Hersh, Yiddish-speaking Jews who had immigrated to the US in the 1920s from Lithuania and Poland, respectively.

Seymour Hersh graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1954, then attended the University of Illinois Chicago and later the University of Chicago, where he graduated with a history degree in 1958.

Seymour Hersh worked as a Xerox salesman before being admitted to the University of Chicago Law School in 1959, but was expelled during his first year due to poor grades.

Seymour Hersh moved to Pierre, South Dakota, in 1962 to work as a correspondent for United Press International, reporting on the state legislature and writing a series of articles on the Oglala Sioux.

In 1963, Seymour Hersh moved back to Chicago to work for the Associated Press, and in 1965 he was transferred to its Washington, DC, bureau to report on the Pentagon.

Seymour Hersh began to develop his investigative methods, often walking out of regimented press briefings at the Pentagon to interview high-ranking officers in their lunch halls.

In 1966, Seymour Hersh reported on the intensifying US involvement in the Vietnam War, writing series of articles on draft reform, the shortage of qualified pilots, and on the US bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam, revealed by New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury.

In 1967, Seymour Hersh became part of the AP's first special investigative unit.

Seymour Hersh wrote six articles in national magazines in 1967 in which he detailed the government's growing stockpiles of the weapons and its co-operation with universities and corporations, as well as the secret adoption of a first-use policy.

The event and Seymour Hersh's reporting led to public hearings and international pressure, contributing to the Nixon administration's decision to end the US biological weapons program in 1969.

In 1969, Seymour Hersh's freelance reporting exposed the My Lai massacre, the murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers in a village on March 16,1968.

On October 22,1969, Seymour Hersh received a tip from Geoffrey Cowan, a columnist for The Village Voice with a military source, about a soldier being held at Fort Benning in Georgia for a court-martial for allegedly killing 75 civilians in South Vietnam.

Seymour Hersh next found Calley's lawyer, George W Latimer, who met with him in Salt Lake City, Utah, and showed him a document which revealed Calley was charged with killing 109 people.

Seymour Hersh next approached the anti-war Dispatch News Service run by his friend David Obst, which sold the story to 35 national papers.

Seymour Hersh next interviewed Paul Meadlo, a soldier who admitted that he had killed dozens of civilians on the orders of Calley.

Seymour Hersh proceeded to visit 50 witnesses over the next three months, 35 of whom agreed to talk.

Seymour Hersh's reporting garnered him national fame, and encouraged the growing opposition to the war in the US However, he was attacked by some in the press and government, who questioned his work and motivations.

Seymour Hersh later wrote in a note to Robert Loomis, the editor of his 1970 book-length account of the massacre, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath:.

One of Seymour Hersh's sources leaked the testimony to him over the course of a year; it revealed that at least 347 civilians were killed, over twice as many as the Army had publicly conceded.

Together with Walter Rugaber, Seymour Hersh produced extensive reporting for the Times on the unfolding scandal; a key article by him published on January 14,1973, revealed that hush money payments were still being made to the burglars, which shifted the press's focus from the break-in itself to its cover-up.

On June 11,1972, an article by Hersh alleged that General John D Lavelle, who had recently been relieved as commander of the Air Force in Southeast Asia, was ousted because he had ordered repeated, unauthorized bombings of North Vietnam.

Seymour Hersh learned of Knight's letter after exposing a different scandal on May 17,1973, in which Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had authorized wiretaps of employees of the National Security Council after early bombings of Cambodia were exposed in the Times in May 1969.

Seymour Hersh interviewed Knight and detailed the cover-up of Menu in an article on July 15,1973, one day before the start of Knight's public testimony.

Seymour Hersh continued to investigate who had ordered the cover-up; in a rare telephone interview, Kissinger stated Nixon had "neither ordered nor was aware of any falsification".

In early 1974, Seymour Hersh planned to publish a story on "Project Jennifer", a covert CIA operation that partially recovered the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from the floor of the Pacific Ocean with a purpose-built vessel, the Glomar Explorer.

On September 8,1974, an article by Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA, with the approval of Kissinger, had spent $8 million to influence unions, political parties, and media in Chile in order to destabilize the government of socialist Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in the September 11,1973, coup d'etat that brought to power a military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet.

Seymour Hersh followed up the story over the next two months, with 27 articles in total.

On December 22,1974, Seymour Hersh exposed Operation CHAOS, a massive CIA program of domestic wiretapping and infiltration of anti-war groups during the Nixon administration, which was conducted in direct violation of the agency's charter.

Seymour Hersh reported that dossiers had been compiled on at least 10,000 American citizens, including congressmen; the government eventually conceded the figure was closer to 300,000.

Seymour Hersh wrote 34 more articles on the story over the next months; they prompted the formation of the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee, which investigated covert CIA operations and led to reforms of the agency.

Seymour Hersh thereafter decided to move away from reporting on the CIA.

On May 25,1975, Seymour Hersh revealed that the US Navy was using submarines to collect intelligence inside the three-mile protected coastal zone of the Soviet Union in a spy program codenamed "Holystone", which had continued for at least 15 years.

In 1976, Seymour Hersh moved with his family to New York, where his wife was to attend medical school.

Seymour Hersh began working on larger projects; the first was a four-part investigation produced with Jeff Gerth, initially appearing on June 27,1976, into the activities of Sidney Korshak, a lawyer and "fixer" for the Chicago Mafia, union leaders, and Hollywood.

The Times management was ambivalent about Seymour Hersh's new focus, and he left the job in 1979 to start writing a book on Henry Kissinger.

Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA had given the pair tacit approval to oversee the sale of American technology.

Seymour Hersh's 1983 book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, which involved four years of exhaustive work and more than 1,000 interviews, was a best-seller and won him the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

In 1974, Seymour Hersh had reported in the Times that Korry had known of the CIA's efforts to foment a coup.

Korry, who had reacted to the claim with furious denial, demanded a front-page retraction in exchange for documents Seymour Hersh wanted for his book.

Seymour Hersh worked on and narrated the 1985 PBS Frontline documentary "Buying the Bomb", which reported on a Pakistani businessman who had attempted to smuggle krytron devices which could be used as nuclear bomb triggers out of the US On June 12,1986, an article by Seymour Hersh in the Times revealed that US-backed dictator of Panama Manuel Noriega was a key figure in weapons and narcotics trafficking.

Seymour Hersh spent much of the decade writing two critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful books.

Seymour Hersh reported that the US Air Force knew almost immediately that the Soviets believed that they had shot down a military plane, and that the US misrepresented the situation to portray the Soviets as deliberate murderers of civilians.

Seymour Hersh wrote that Israel received aid from the US in the 1973 Yom Kippur War through "nuclear blackmail".

Shortly before publication, it emerged in the press that Seymour Hersh had removed claims at the last minute which were based on forged documents provided to him by fraudster Lex Cusack, including a fake hush money contract between Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.

In 1998, Seymour Hersh published Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government, about Gulf War syndrome.

Seymour Hersh estimated that 15 percent of returning American troops were afflicted with the chronic and multi-symptomatic disorder, and challenged the government claim that they were suffering from war fatigue, as opposed to the effects of a chemical or biological weapon.

Seymour Hersh suggested the smoke from the destruction of a weapon depot that stored nerve gas at Khamisiyah in Iraq, which more than 100,000 soldiers were exposed to, as a possible cause.

Seymour Hersh had received tips on the incident, which had been investigated and dismissed by the US Army, from other officers while investigating McCaffrey's role in the Colombian drug war.

Seymour Hersh performed six months of research for the article, and interviewed 300 people, including soldiers who had witnessed the killings; he alleged that McCaffrey had deceived his superiors and disregarded cease-fire orders.

President Bush told Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that Seymour Hersh was "a liar".

Seymour Hersh later reported on the government's flawed prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, on the US's aggressive assassination efforts against al-Qaeda members, and on business conflicts of interest held by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's advisory Defense Policy Board, which led to his resignation.

Seymour Hersh reported that the claim that Iraq had received nuclear materials from Niger was based on forged documents, that the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans had provided dubious intelligence to the White House on Iraq's weapons capacity, and that the Bush administration had pressured the intelligence community to violate its "stovepiping" rule, which allowed only vetted and confirmed information to rise up the chain of command.

In July 2005, an article by Seymour Hersh alleged that the US had covertly intervened in favor of Ayad Allawi in the January 2005 Iraqi parliamentary election, in an "off the books" campaign conducted by retired CIA officers and non-government personnel, and with funds "not necessarily" appropriated by Congress.

Seymour Hersh wrote several more pieces on this alleged plan in the next two years, including a July 2006 article on how senior commanders were challenging Bush's plan for a major bombing campaign, articles in November 2006 and March 2007 on the plan's re-focusing on targets in Iran aiding Iraqi militants, and an October 2007 article on planned "surgical" strikes on Iranian Quds Force training camps and supply depots.

Seymour Hersh later began writing a book on Cheney in 2011, which he spent four years on before dropping amid a crackdown on leaks, instead writing his 2018 memoir Reporter.

Seymour Hersh alleged in a May 2011 article titled "Iran And the Bomb" that the US lacked conclusive evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, citing a still-classified National Intelligence Estimate produced by the National Intelligence Council earlier that year.

The summary of the 2007 estimate, which had been released publicly, had found "with high confidence" that Iran had halted its weapons program in late 2003 after the invasion of Iraq; Seymour Hersh alleged that the 2011 estimate found that this program had been aimed at Iraq, not Israel or the US, and that no new evidence had changed the 2007 assessment, despite expanded covert surveillance.

In February 2008, an article by Seymour Hersh questioned the Israeli and American claims that a Syrian facility bombed by Israel in September 2007 was an under-construction nuclear reactor; a later report by the IAEA in 2011 found it was "very likely" that it was a secret reactor.

Seymour Hersh concluded that the Obama administration had a chance for diplomacy with Syria and perhaps Iran.

Seymour Hersh alleged that Turkey's National Intelligence Organization and Gendarmerie had proceeded to instruct al-Nusra on producing and deploying sarin, and that the planned US strike was averted after British intelligence found that samples of sarin from Ghouta did not match batches from Syria's arsenal.

In exchange for this support, aimed at defeating ISIS, Seymour Hersh alleged that the Joint Chiefs had required that Assad "restrain" Hezbollah from attacking Israel, restart negotiations with Israel over the Golan Heights, agree to accept Russian advisers, and hold elections after the war.

On June 25,2017, the German newspaper Die Welt published Seymour Hersh's article "Trump's Red Line", which had been rejected by the LRB.

Higgins again criticized Seymour Hersh's claims, writing for Bellingcat that they were inconsistent with Syrian and Russian descriptions of the target and satellite images of the impact sites, as well as findings of sarin and hexamine in samples retrieved by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Seymour Hersh stated that both the Obama administration and Pakistan had lied about the event, and that American media outlets were reluctant to challenge the administration, saying: "It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]".

Seymour Hersh later said that his sources told him that the official story was false days after the raid, but that The New Yorker had rejected his article pitches.

On May 10,2015, a 10,000-word article by Seymour Hersh detailing an alternative account of the raid, titled "The Killing of Osama bin Laden", was published in the London Review of Books.

Seymour Hersh's article stated that a drone strike was the raid's original cover story before one of the Black Hawk helicopters crashed and was demolished, which was impossible to hide.

Some details in Seymour Hersh's article were corroborated by Carlotta Gall of The New York Times, who reported that she had previously been told by a "high-level member" of the ISI that Pakistan had been hiding bin Laden and that an ISI brigadier had informed the CIA of his location; NBC News corroborated the claim of a retired ISI officer who had tipped off the CIA.

On February 8,2023, in a Substack article titled "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline", Seymour Hersh alleged that the September 26,2022, sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which carried natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea, was carried out by the US in a top-secret CIA operation ordered by President Joe Biden, with collaboration from Norway.

In Russia, Seymour Hersh's report was picked up by the state-owned media agencies RT and TASS.

Seymour Hersh wrote that ADS-B records did not show the alleged "seemingly routine flight" by a Norwegian P-8 Poseidon in the hours before the explosions, and questioned the claim that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had co-operated with US intelligence since the Vietnam War, as Stoltenberg was 16 years old in 1975.

Seymour Hersh replied that the open-source location data could have been manipulated by spoofing or disabling transponders.

Seymour Hersh further alleged that some military leaders viewed the US wars in the Middle East as a "crusade", in which they were protecting Christians from Muslims "[as] in the 13th century".

Seymour Hersh later said that he had relayed "gossip", and that he was fishing for information.

Seymour Hersh chose not to report on the alleged abuse because he considered it part of Nixon's private life, a decision which he later regretted.

Seymour Hersh's reporting is well-known for its use of anonymous sources, which his biographer Robert Miraldi described as his "trademark".

Seymour Hersh's reporting outside of The New Yorker has been criticized for allegedly being subjected to less editorial review and fact-checking.

Seymour Hersh stated that his 2013 article on the Ghouta chemical attack, published in the London Review of Books, had been rejected because "[Remnick] didn't feel it was strong enough".