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There are five major bases in the United States
for the production of chemical and biological weapons
and research into them.
Have there been any accidents?
You have the incident at Dugway.
On a Sunday, one Sunday,
some sheep farmers noticed that their sheep were dying.
By Monday, 6000 had died.
They've been testing nerve gas there since the '60s.
Something went wrong. An Air Force plane
had 40 gallons of nerve gas dyed red.
It blew over toward Salt Lake City.
What about your family?
Have they had any ill effects from this?
Well, I don't know whether it's from this or not.
We all had a stomach flu Saturday
and was vomiting quite a bit all night long.
Whether it's related or not, it kind of spooks you.
Medical, veterinarian
and other technical personnel of Dugway Proving Ground
are in the field investigating the cause of this problem.
At this time, it would be purely speculative
to attempt to fix a specific cause of death of the sheep.
I don't care what the Army says. I investigated it,
um, for a magazine article I did,
and it was nerve gas that killed the sheep.
And the Army wants to mess around, but it was nerve gas.
Everybody says that off the record
and nobody's willing to say, "Well, you know,
the Army's lying through its teeth."
All right.
Come on. Come on, just do it right.
It says,
"Hersh seems to know a great deal
about what they were investigating.
But it's okay, boss. He's not aware of the cover-up."
Pretty amazing. I didn't see this until about a year ago.
- All right. Showtime. - All right.
What do you want to do? You've been filming all of this, right?
We'd love to talk about sources.
Let's put it this way. You'd love to talk about sources
and I'd love not to talk about sources.
It isn't necessarily specific sources.
Types of people you get?
We already went through some of the people I get.
And I looked at the pads last night
and the names are all over them.
I never in my...
this is all supposed to be after death.
Sy, we're not exposing any of these people.
Some of these people may be alive, you understand?
And a lot of them hated my guts and still talked to me.
And why do you think they liked meeting with you?
I don't know. If you work in the secret world,
and there's some guy out there pounding away
and getting in there, you know, why not talk to me?
I don't know, I don't know. I don't...
You know, I don't psychoanalyze those who talk to me.
Just like I don't psychoanalyze myself, thank God.
Which you want me to do, I know. But I'm not going to.
Not gonna go there.
Let's see, I'm thinking of some people.
Here's somebody who worked for Kissinger.
And then here's...
Here's a CIA woman.
It's complicated to know who to trust.
You know, I barely trust you guys.
I've learned not to worry too much
about what others think.
Because I was always writing stories
that got certain people mad.
There's a history of America that's so hard to write.
There always is another level.
My job as a newspaper reporter
is to find out secrets and facts.
If that's what... if that's what the issue is.
And you publish them. Why do you publish them?
We publish them knowing we're violating the rules
and the laws, and we're breaking national security.
It's top-secret information... above top-secret...
because we think there's an outstanding reason.
We think there's a story here of officials with responsibility
not conducting their affairs correctly.
And that's the issue I'm trying to make.
And there shouldn't be any bar on the press, theoretically,
to publish anything we want,
because that happens to be the way
the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was set up.
When we get in a contest of any kind,
American people like to rise like this.
And they like for the opposition to go down like this.
Now that--
that's not the kind of war we're fighting in Vietnam.
I think we're moving more like this.
And I think they're moving more like this
instead of straight up and straight down.
We are making progress.
We are pleased with the results that we're getting.
We are inflicting greater losses than we're taking.
You know, the Pentagon is a strange place.
I mean, you get there and you get your cup of coffee
and you shoot the fat, you read the papers.
Around 10:30, they come and give you a little briefing.
You file a little something off that.
You know, these guys get paid an awful lot of money
for doing things like listening to the news conference
and waiting an hour till the transcript's typed up,
and then writing a 500-word story off it.
That's what they do all day for a living.
That's not very much.
I think what you have in America is not so much censorship,
but self-censorship by the press.
When I was at the Pentagon for the AP,
instead of going to lunch with my colleagues,
I would go find young officers.
You know, talk a little football,
get to know them.
I had been in the Army. I was in the Army reserves.
Eventually, Army guys would just start saying,
"Well, you know, it's murder incorporated there."
What? I said, "What do you mean?"
I, as President of this country,
will lay on the table
the schedule for the withdrawal of all of our...
There's a lot of brainwashing going around.
And, you know, a lot of people making decisions
about what people should hear or listen to.
And we are in a stage of open murder in Vietnam.
I was generally, um, feeling useless in a sense.
I had just a sense of unease
about where I was and where the war was.
There was this big story that seemed impossible.
There's something called the truth.
There was just this massive truth out there,
and there was just... I didn't see a way to get to it,
and I worried about it.
I mean, I thought about that stuff.
After a fight with the editor,
I quit the AP.
My wife Liz and I were married with a kid
and not much money.
I began to freelance a lot.
One day I get a call from a guy I didn't know
and I said, "What's up?" He said, "There's a terrible,
there's a terrible atrocity in Vietnam
that they're covering up."
It was murky.
He described it as a GI had gone nuts
and shot up a lot of people.
He didn't know much about it,
but the Army was in a panic about it.
I had no name. I knew nothing.
I went to the Pentagon a couple times,
and there was one colonel I liked a lot.
And I bump into the colonel, and now he's got a one star.
I stop him, and we said, "Hi, you know, gee,
we haven't seen each other in years."
I said, "What's with the knee?"
He said, "Oh, I caught a bullet."
I said, "Oh, my God, you shot yourself in the knee
to become a general and get a medal, right?"
He laughed and he said, "Go eff yourself."
We kept on walking.
So I said, "So what are you doing now?"
He said, "I'm working for the chief of staff."
"Westmoreland?" He said, "Yes."
And I said, "What do you know about some guy
shooting up a village?"
And he said, "Sy, let me tell you,
that guy, Calley, I hope he goes to hell."
Whatever you said.
Calley? I had a name.
Of course I was spelling it wrong.
But eventually, I found a clip from The New York Times,
and there was a little square
that a lieutenant named William L. Calley Jr.
was being held for manslaughter.
And Calley, Calley, right?
I found out he had a lawyer named Latimer.
I called him up and I said, "Hey, my name is Hersh."
And I said, "You know, I'm on a flight to the West Coast
that stops in Salt Lake.
Is it okay if I stop in your office and say hello?"
He said, "Sure, come on by."
You know, that wasn't the way it was.
I just wanted to be casual about it.
And I got to his office
and he pulled out a piece of paper.
There's a charge sheet.
Lieutenant Calley was charged with killing 109 people.
He had the paper in front of him, upside down.
I said to myself,
you're going to continue a conversation
and you're going to pretend to be taking notes,
and you're going to write almost letter by letter
as much as you can.
So I've got dynamite.
So I decided I had to go find Calley.
And I flew to Fort Benning.
I got this ratty suit, probably my wedding suit.
I'm wearing the same clothes for days.
I got there early in the morning.
I finally found him at midnight the same day by sheer luck.
They put Calley into the housing for colonels and generals.
It's the last place I was looking.
He was so different from what I wanted.
I wanted to see a monster.
And he starts telling me a series of lies about,
"It was a firefight, and there were a lot of enemy there.
Nobody knew who anybody was.
And all I was doing my job protecting my troops,
and yes, I'm sure civilians were killed,
but they were trying to kill us."
And he said, "My captain, Ernest Medina, he's like me.
He's going through an investigation.
He'll tell you."
He picks up the phone and he says,
"Captain, I'm here with a reporter from Washington.
And why don't you tell him
I was just following orders on all this?"
And Medina says, "I don't know what you're talking about,"
and slams the phone.
And Calley gives me this look like
maybe... maybe I'm the fall guy.
Sy had tried to sell it to a number of magazines.
Nobody would touch it.
Finally, he handed it to me and said,
"Don't fuck it up."
And I spend the next nine hours
cold calling every managing editor
of every newspaper in America
and pitching my little heart out.
Sy, last week you broke a story
about an Army lieutenant
who is accused of murdering 109 Vietnamese civilians.
Where did it first break into print?
The Chicago Sun-Times, 5:30 on the street,
at 6:30 Washington time.
That was your story, the Dispatch story.
Right. Right.
And then it was in the first edition
of about, as I said, about 30 papers.
I think it takes sort of a non-establishment approach.
I talked to LIFE who had said no, they weren't interested.
LOOK, they weren't interested.
And that's when David Obst took over, of Dispatch.
He assured me he could get this paper
in the front pages intact.
I'm not on anybody's fan club in the Pentagon these days.
They tried to keep it secret. I broke that game up.
The Pentagon's view of this
is that Calley is some sort of a madman.
My hunch is he's not a madman.
And it raises a very real question,
were there really orders to shoot everything in the village?
And if so, is this being done all the time?
We're with you, Calley!
There was more.
There had to be more,
and I couldn't figure out where to go.
The Army wasn't going to help me, that's for sure.
Oh, I didn't turn off my phone. I'm so sorry.
No, no, no. Okay.
Let me just say this. The only thing I called you about is,
I said the warning came too from Iran,
but it went through Saudi Arabia.
But I don't think that's important.
You said, "Presumably from Iran."
Well, it was from Iran, but it was through the Saudis.
But it's okay. It's fine. That's good enough.
We don't have to change it.
Goodbye, goodbye. Trying to say goodbye. Goodbye.
He said, "You don't want to give away too much."
So here's what happened.
We go back to my house on McComb Street
and Sy's reading The Washington Post
and he sees a small little story buried in there
about a kid named Ron Ridenhour
who claims that he had told the Army about the massacre.
Ridenhour, eight months earlier,
wrote a letter, he sent it to 30 members of Congress,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, all the generals,
and to the White House, to the President,
about what he knew was a dark deed.
So I went home to pack my bag.
Had to borrow money,
and took a plane to California to see him.
Specifically, they told me that they had seen
individuals, individual soldiers,
and some of the officers
going through the village,
and as they swept through the village,
if there were people standing by the side of the trail,
through the village or in the village,
that they just gunned them down, that they shot them,
they saw them, these people shot,
uh, with no provocation.
I felt that I had to take some action.
I had to do something.
I couldn't just rest with this knowledge
for the rest of my life. I couldn't.
I couldn't live with myself if I did.
Ridenhour gave me a company roster,
and he gave me the names of two people
who would talk to me.
One was a young man
who was a Mormon that lived in Utah.
His name was Michael Terry.
So I went up there, I found him, I went up that night.
His line was, it was "a Nazi-type thing".
The second person that Ridenhour had told me about
was Michael Bernhardt.
I met him at Fort Dix.
It would have been impossible to screw up that story.
All you had to do was get out of the way of the story.
You had notes from Terry. You had notes from Bernhardt.
Just let their voice be the story.
What were your orders?
Prior to the operation, the C.O.'s order was,
uh, to destroy the village and its inhabitants.
Did you think the people in the village were Viet Cong?
Uh, some of the people in the village,
you say people in the village,
some of the people in the village, uh,
weren't old enough to walk yet.
I don't see how they could be Viet Cong.
There was a great reaction of people
not wanting to believe it.
Being angry at us as being the messengers.
Nobody wanted to know
that the United States was the bad guy.
Recently, a few individuals involved in serious incidents
have been highlighted in the news.
Some would have these incidents
reflect on the Army as a whole.
They are, however, the actions of a pitiful few.
But the Army as an institution should never be put on trial.
I was trying to put together what happened.
What the hell happened? So that was my goal.
And I kept on. I kept on finding people.
I found a lot of people that talked to me an awful lot.
Say more. What do you mean? What happened?
How did it happen? Wha-- How-- The descent into madness.
You're getting me
to think about things I don't want to think about.
I was looking for this kid
who had his foot blown off, Paul Meadlo.
He lived in this corner of Indiana.
It was a farm. An old run-down farm.
And a very southern lady came out,
and I said, "I'm here to see Paul."
I said, "I'm a journalist.
And I wanted to talk about what happened in the Army."
And then she said this line
that will stay in my head the rest of my life.
She said, "I gave them--" in a bitter voice--
"I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer."
When he came back,
he was just a-stuttering and I said,
"Well, what makes you do that?"
And he said, "Mom, I have went through hell."
I go to see Paul.
Then I said, "So what happened?" And then he started just...
Killing, murder, killing, expiation.
And, uh, straight as you can make it.
Sy calls me, and he says,
"We've got the front-page story of the world."
So I cold-call CBS Evening News,
and then I did something that you're not supposed to do.
But I didn't know at the time you weren't.
I said, "We need money for it."
He says, "How much do you want?"
I had no idea. I blurted out, "$10,000."
There's a pause. He says, "Deal."
Mike Wallace is assigned to do the interview.
Mike talks to him for two minutes and says,
"Let's get him in a room right now."
And they start taping it.
How many people did you round up?
Well, there was about 40, 45 people
that we gathered in a,
in, like I say, uh, the center of the village.
What kind of people? Men, women, children?
Men, women, children.
- Babies? - Babies.
And, we all huddled them up, made them squat down.
And, uh...
Lieutenant Calley came over and said,
you know what to do with them, don't you?
And, I said, yes.
So I took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch 'em,
and, he left and came back about ten or fifteen minutes later,
and said, how come you ain't killed 'em yet?
And, I told him that,
I didn't think you wanted us to kill 'em.
I thought you wanted us to guard them.
He said, no, he wanted them dead.
So he stepped back about ten, fifteen feet,
and he started shooting them,
and he told me to start shooting them.
So I started shooting and fired about four clips into the group.
- Men, women and children. - Men, women and children.
- And babies. - And babies.
But how do you shoot babies?
I don't know, it's just one of them things.
Hell no, we won't go! Hell no, we won't go!
The Army photographer involved, Ron Haeberle,
he had two cameras.
For the Army, he ended up using the black-and-white camera.
But he never told anybody about
having another set of color film.
After my first story broke, he sold them.
It was all over the world once they published them.
How many people died from your family?
Four people.
When you came back from the market, what did you see?
I'm too young. I was afraid to look.
Are you the only survivor in your family?
Yes.
They came and burned down everything.
They beat some, captured some. They killed everyone in a frenzy.
Do you know the reason why?
I don't know. I don't know the reason.
They rounded everyone up. Even the monk was taken away and killed.
Can you guess how many people died?
- How many people were killed? - Yes, how many?
I don't know, but I saw death everywhere. I saw so many dead bodies.
My nephew, who had just learned to walk--
He was clinging to my head and crying, "Mommy, Mommy."
Then "bang," he got shot and died. I just lay there but I couldn't see it.
We've been sort of committed to a program
of almost at random murder, rape, etc.
I think everybody just looked the other way,
including the reporters,
who obviously must have heard about it. Some of them.
It's appalling.
Why the hell didn't this get out?
That, to me, is the great question.
Here is the killing of 400 or 500 people,
witnessed by perhaps a dozen helicopters
who were assigned that day for combat support.
The major general in charge of the Americal Division
was in the air that day.
The colonel in charge of the brigade was there.
The head of the task force was there.
Within a few days, 300 or 400 men, GIs, knew about it,
and yet nobody said anything.
Nobody reported it.
There's only two things, I think, to conclude from this.
One is, of course, that it was such a shockingly untoward event
that nobody could even begin to discuss it.
The other one, I think the more logical conclusion, is,
"Well, that's just another day in Vietnam."
The whole Army ran on body count.
You measure success by how many kills you have.
Westmoreland needed numbers.
And so how do you get the kind of body count you want?
You had to go into places like My Lai
and tell them that everybody there is a Viet Cong
and kill everybody.
They killed people three ways that day.
I'm talking, not everybody in the company participated,
- but a majority did. - You missed my point.
I just want to tell you what they did.
We're talking about, let's just focus on what happened.
They gathered people, perhaps 100 of them
in groups, little circles,
and then some men with automatic rifle fire, shot them.
You don't know that of your own knowledge.
As a reporter, I know that.
Do you know that of your own knowledge?
You know, if reporters had to use
everything of their own knowledge, they wouldn't get
much out of a presidential news conference either.
After my story came out, the Army did an investigation.
I was reading the testimony as it happened.
And the Army, of course, went totally crazy
trying to figure out how I got it.
It was supposed to be kept secret.
Would you again, taking the large aerial photo,
would you mark where, to the best of your knowledge,
you saw the ditch with the bodies in it.
Yes, sir.
I don't know if you want to hear this, sir.
Fine. We'd like to hear anything you have to say.
All right, so the first shot
hit a baby in the head,
and I turned around and got sick,
because that was the first time I ever...
Well, I killed a person before,
but not actually seen it, the damage what it did.
Would you tell us what happened
after this group was shot?
Well...
right at or in that time, there was several people
raping several women in this area.
There was three other guys on one girl,
all at one time.
A guy would grab one of the girls there,
and in one or two incidents
they shot the girls when they got done.
Each day was another 30 years of life on my shoulders.
That's how I felt.
It just got worse and worse and worse.
I spent two or three months finding kids,
and then I learned... It was just so horrible.
I learned more.
You know, a couple times I couldn't take it anymore.
They had testimony
showing that My Lai was not isolated.
There was a second massacre the same day.
The Army went to great lengths to describe My Lai Four
as an isolated incident.
Not only was it not isolated in terms of the war,
but it wasn't even isolated in terms of that day,
that morning, that area.
A mile and a half away, this is going on too.
There were 14 officers
that were clearly involved in covering it up.
And the charges the Army eventually filed on the 14
were dereliction of duty,
failure to obey lawful regulations,
and failure to duly report.
They were all either involved in murder,
planning murder or covering it up,
and they were charged with "failure to report."
And then Westmoreland finishes his four-year term,
and he's promoted,
even though everybody in the Army
and in the Joint Chiefs knows he was killing civilians.
Hi.
Of course I will protect you in every way.
I don't even know how to describe you. You tell me.
You can say
"a researcher who recently returned from Gaza".
When you describe the targeting of women
and you describe the targeting of children, who has statistics?
In terms of the systematic targeting of children
with quadcopters,
I, myself, have dozens of X-rays of children
with quadcopter bullets in their necks, in their heads,
provided to me by doctors.
These are kids.
A fucking nightmare.
And we're only in the first stage of it.
From my side, I don't have the privilege
of not believing that something can be done,
because I'm daily in touch with friends and loved ones.
Not believing means abandoning them.
- Are you going back? - That's the plan.
What people don't understand
is that this is setting a precedent.
Gaza has collapsed the past and the future.
This is the past and the future combined, collapsed.
My father never talked about much at all with us.
The communication was either nothing or rage.
But it's very typical Eastern European.
I didn't know the secrets 'til later.
My dad was a Jewish refugee.
Came to America not knowing much English.
He was a violinist in the old country.
Played beautiful violin.
He came from a small village called Šeduva.
In Lithuania, in those days, being Jewish was a marker.
Somehow, when he was about 16 or 17,
in 1920, 22,
he got from central Lithuania to Hamburg
and saved $12
to get on a ship in steerage to come to America.
Not knowing English, not knowing much at all.
Years later, when the Germans came,
they marched all the Jews out to the woods
and then executed them.
They were all wiped out.
And I-I never talked to him about it
because I never knew about it.
Never, not a word about the Holocaust.
It would have been a story I wanted to hear.
And your mom never told you?
My mom never talked about anything.
And if she did, she didn't tell the truth.
I knew that right away.
That's just the way it was. My mom liked to bake.
And sometimes if she couldn't bake,
she would buy the cookies and say she baked them as if--
as if we didn't know the difference.
You know what I mean?
So it was okay. She was my mother.
I have a twin brother who's a wave theory physicist.
My mother dressed us alike
until one day, when we were about 13,
we realized, "This is crazy."
I didn't have any in-family education.
And so I joined the Book of the Month club.
I lived on books. Books taught me how to think.
My father had a business. Laundry and dry cleaning.
On 45th Street and Indiana, the South Side.
And I liked it. I liked working there.
It was all-Black community, Black workers.
There was a guy named Sterling,
he was about in his early 20s.
He was pressing pants for $0.12, and he used to take me to games.
I saw all the great Negro league players,
Satchel Paige and others, as a kid.
He made it pretty plain to me
that you're going to be okay, kid, because, you know,
you got that color.
I don't have that color.
I'm going to be pressing pants the rest of my life.
So I got that.
I got that. It wasn't that explicit, but I got that.
I had two older sisters. They were also twins.
They couldn't wait to get the hell out of the house.
I was always living a little bit by my wits,
because from the age of 15 on, I was carrying the family.
I remember his coughing at night.
Three packs. I remember his coughing.
It went from lung cancer to brain cancer.
As he got sicker and sicker,
I could take him, I could bathe him,
I could do all that stuff.
I went from getting straight A's to nothing.
I didn't go to school.
His argument was, forget about college.
He needed me
to stay and run the store because I could do it.
And Alan, who was my brother, he just...
He wasn't going to cut it. He had to go to college.
But Seymour doesn't need college. He'll be okay.
That was the way he did it. Because I could run the store.
And I could, you know?
What skills did you have to run the store?
Talk. Pizazz. Like people.
One night, I was driving from the store after closing it.
And the way I knew he died
is I looked up and the light was dark.
I didn't even know he was on the deathbed.
I mean, it just was an unthinking family.
That I couldn't say goodbye?
There was a junior college.
The University of Illinois had a junior college,
and it was very cheap.
That was the big thing.
I always knew I was a good writer.
I didn't think it was that valuable.
I just didn't think that...
I couldn't see any reason that was so important to me
when I'm ringing up the cash register,
giving people clothes.
One of the first assignments was
to compare any British novel you want with an American novel.
And so I wrote this essay about it.
At the end of class one day, I'm in the back row,
eager to get out.
And he said, "Is Seymour Hersh here?"
"Oh, fuck," I thought. "What have I done?"
I walked up to the front, you know, head down.
And he said, "Are you Hersh?" I said, "Yeah." He said,
"What are you doing here?" And I knew what he meant.
"Well, my father died..."
He said to me, "So where's your store?"
"47th and Indiana on the South Side."
He said, "You've got your own schedule?
Well, meet me tomorrow at the admissions office."
I tear up thinking about it.
"At the University of Chicago."
And I go there, and they give me a test.
They said, "Wait, we can-- You don't need English 1."
I said, "Yeah, yeah, I need it, I need it all."
So I took it all.
And that was it. It changed my life.
You gotta understand. I get to Chicago,
and it's a different world.
I had a girlfriend, and she was from Washington,
and her father was in the government.
And she shocked me by saying... I must have been 19, 20...
She said, "Oh, my God.
My father thinks Eisenhower is such an asshole."
Somebody talked about a president that way?
"Your father said that to you, and he's working in the..."
She said, "Yeah, he's really, really a dumb asshole."
I said...
"Presidents can be dumb assholes?" You know.
I mean, you know, I was 19 or 20,
so I didn't understand the world.
Um... And I didn't think I was going to make it a better place.
I had no illusions.
Um... Um...
But I had a vague feeling that I had some moxie going.
One night at a bar,
a guy starts talking to me, and I said, "What do you do?"
He said, "Well, I'm a reporter. I've been at City News."
I said, "What do you mean, City News?" He said,
"Don't you know anything about it?" I said, "No."
It just was... It was like a miracle.
You know, I mean, it's just like a friggin' miracle
that I found my way to journalism.
When they did a story,
I would roll out 12 copies
and put them in a bin and put them, roll them up
and send them in the pneumatic tubes to all the papers.
That was my job.
Within a month,
I'm promoted to being a police reporter.
I fell in love being a reporter. I loved it.
Chicago was a mobbed-up city,
and the mob and the police had something in common, ok?
I did understand that.
The first thing you learn is "Do not fuck with the cops."
If they're robbing and stealing, that's not our business.
So I saw a tyranny up close, in a way.
And I understood it was a tyranny.
But it was also the most exciting thing I'd ever been in.
I'm writing something that's going to be sort of puerile
in terms of what the real story is,
but close enough.
Um, you know, but it's important
because the warning about Dimona is important.
You know, Dimona's not a target...
You were wrong, you said 30 miles
between the airfield and Dimona.
It was 28 miles. You're losing it, kid.
Goodbye, baby. Talk to you.
That was my Israeli friend who helped me on the bomb,
30 years ago.
Did you see it? I sent it to you, let's see.
I mean, I either sent it to you or I sent it to my dead mother.
Maybe she can read it.
I once came back from Hanoi,
I made a trip to Hanoi during the war.
She said, "Always going
where nobody wants you," you know.
"Always going where nobody wants you."
Let's see what I did with that thing.
I had a visa to go to Hanoi.
The Times called me up, said,
"We'd really like to publish anything you have from Vietnam."
That's how Abe Rosenthal hired me.
When I got to The Times,
Henry Kissinger wanted to see me right away.
He's really worried about the guy that did My Lai
being at The New York Times.
That was not a comfortable feeling for him,
because he always had his way.
He was Nixon's national security advisor,
and he spent a great deal of time with reporters.
He was really working the press, the media, very much.
I go see him in the White House.
And he said, "So, I'm interested in what your impression was
when you were in Hanoi in all those weeks."
I said, "Well, I can tell you
I saw no signs of a lack of morale."
Then I went on like that, 10, 15 minutes of badinage,
not about policy.
He said, "Hold on," and he called his aide on Vietnam.
And he said to him,
"This man knows more about what's going on in Vietnam
than the CIA."
And I thought to myself, "This can't be real."
I mean, am I supposed to be flattered by this bullshit?
I was just amazed.
But that's how it worked.
Kissinger would call up
and talk to The New York Times' bureau chief, Max Frankel.
And Bernie Gwertzman,
who was doing the main foreign policy article,
would write a story.
And it would reflect exactly what Kissinger said.
"American officials say talks reach a new impasse."
"Senior officials said today..." and it was just Kissinger.
I was knocked out by this.
The power the guy had in the paper.
And he sure as hell didn't like what I was doing.
Nixon: This fellow Hersh is a son of a bitch.
Nixon: He's probably a communist agent.
Kissinger: Exactly. Exactly.
Nixon: I just thought it was shocking The New York Times would run that.
Kissinger: Oh, it was a disgrace.
Nixon: What do you think?
Nixon: He was picking it, Henry, right out of whole cloth.
I was just getting my feet wet at The Times,
when somebody in the CIA
told me this most amazing story about a top-secret operation.
The Russians had lost a submarine
that may have a codebook.
The CIA made up a cover story
to recover the Russian submarine,
using a boat owned by Howard Hughes,
called the Glomar Explorer.
It was the craziest stupid operation in the world.
I had the story,
but the paper was convinced by the government
not to publish it, because of national security.
They didn't run it for two years.
I didn't quit, but I thought about it.
The biggest trouble I had was managing Sy
at a newspaper that hated to be beaten
but didn't really want to be first.
The Times was scared to death
of being first on a controversial story
that challenged the credibility of the government.
Over the weekend, five men were nabbed
in the Democratic National headquarters here in Washington,
seemingly preparing to tap or bug the place.
It happened on a weekend.
And The Times had missed the story
because all the guys on weekends,
they were, you know, at the beach somewhere,
you know, or at the club.
The Washington Post, meanwhile,
gets a police report of these guys,
and they send Woodward and Bernstein down to cover it.
I go to the courthouse,
and there's the arraignment.
The judge asks the lead burglar, James McCord,
"Where did you work?"
McCord goes-- "CIA."
And the judge says, "Speak up, speak up."
And he finally says, "CIA."
I am in the front row watching this,
and blurted out,
"Holy shit."
It was kind of portrayed in the media
as a bizarre, unexplained event,
and Carl and I didn't see it that way.
We still don't know nearly everything
that happened during the campaign
in terms of political espionage and sabotage.
Not just wiretapping, but other acts.
It was a story
that we were alone on for seven months.
Woodward and Bernstein had the story, and they owned it.
Rosenthal eventually, in the end of '72, came down
and he said, "We can't let The Washington Post
push us around like that."
I didn't want to do Watergate.
I didn't know anybody in the White House.
But I was sorta full of myself, you know?
And so I'm in the fringes,
I'm nibbling around, I'm getting some stuff from the committee.
And eventually,
I found one of the five people that broke in,
and he tells the story about the whole cover-up.
On January 14th, Sy Hersh's story
said the burglars were being paid for their silence.
That was a very important story,
because it was additional evidence of the cover-up.
This was a lifeline.
Not only that it was Sy Hersh of My Lai,
but it was The New York Times.
That's why I called him up and said,
"Thank you. It's lonely."
He said, "We had to get The Times into the story.
We just couldn't believe
you guys wouldn't get into the story.
We couldn't believe how dumb you were."
And he said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
And he meant that.
So I was able to keep the story going for The Times.
It was great competition
with Carl and Bob.
It was fun.
Mr. Mitchell, The New York Times quotes
government investigators this morning
as saying that you helped coordinate a plan
to cover up the Watergate after the incident.
I noticed The New York Times story this morning,
and it's about the same
as every other one I see in The New York Times.
I don't believe any of them.
Nixon: Goddamn it, this story in The Times, the one by Hersh--
He doesn't usually go with stuff that's wrong.
I mean the son of a bitch is a son of a bitch, but he's usually right, isn't he?
At this point,
I'm getting stuff that nobody else is getting.
There were people
in the White House staff talking to me.
I had some amazing people talking to me in Justice.
I was beginning to get a sense
of the great extent of covert dirt.
Kissinger was doing stuff all over the world, covertly.
He had control of covert operations up to a great extent.
It's called the 40 Committee. And Kissinger was the boss.
They would do anything to stay in power.
Any lie, any story. Bury anybody.
Allende, Allende!
Nixon hated the Allende government.
They were lefties. They were Communists.
They had nationalized copper mines
that were owned by people
who were big supporters of Nixon financially.
So, there was a lot of pressure on Kissinger
and the CIA
to make sure Allende didn't stay in office.
In '73, Allende was killed and the overthrow took place.
A fascist named Pinochet came in.
They arrested thousands of people,
and many of them were killed.
It was all connected.
The Nixon re-election committee,
the Nixon White House, the Nixon CIA.
It was all intertwined.
I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President
at that hour in this office.
People inside the CIA began to tell me more.
Sy, you're a reporter
who has come up with some scoops,
and yet who's also identified as very much of a critic.
And yet, you continue to get leaks.
Does that mean the system isn't as closed as you think it is?
Of course it isn't. No, of course not. Sure.
The thing I do is... I give service to leaks.
If they're a good leak, baby, I drop everything and go get it.
People, for a lot of reasons, they talk.
They talk to me.
People want to talk about stuff they did
that was wrong and stupid.
That's what I always thought.
I got to be very friendly with a source.
Bob Kiley was his name.
He's dead now, so I can talk about him.
Kiley was recruited by the CIA to spy on student activists.
He was increasingly disillusioned.
He left the CIA.
I called him.
He told me about CHAOS.
"What the hell is Operation CHAOS?"
He told me that, in the late '60s,
the government was under pressure
by the White House to find out
if the student movement was being run by communists.
And so, the CIA
began making contacts with student groups
and recruiting inside them.
Spying on American kids.
The guy running counterintelligence
was a man named James Angleton.
He was a mythical figure in the CIA.
I called him up, and I said, "I know about CHAOS."
He not only denied everything,
he offered me two stories if I wouldn't write that story.
I just knew it was right.
The New York Times reported today
that the Central Intelligence Agency
had consistently violated the terms of its charter
from the 1950s until the end of the Nixon administration.
That included spying on at least 10,000 Americans.
By law, the CIA
is supposed to gather only foreign intelligence.
Angleton was very angry at me, to put it mildly.
After several days of intense pressure,
James Angleton told reporters he has resigned
as chief of counterintelligence of the CIA.
Jim Angleton.
Why did you resign?
I think the time comes to all men
when they no longer serve their country.
Did you jump or were you pushed?
I wasn't pushed out a window.
As I was doing the story,
people were looking at me at the agency.
They had been watching me for a long time.
There was total panic,
because I knew about this secret document
called "The Jewels".
I heard "Family" later, but they called it "The Jewels".
The former CIA director
had put out the order to gather all of the wrongdoing.
He wanted everybody in the agency
who knew something that was against the Constitution
to put together a huge compilation.
Every criminal act that had violated American law.
Foreign assassinations, domestic spying, mind control...
There was a big book, 600-700 pages.
And I knew about it.
The CIA had operated in the shadows
for all of its existence.
Sy's reporting was the trigger
that set up the Rockefeller Commission.
And that, in turn, led to the Church Committee.
The hearing will please come to order.
And as a result,
the public got its fullest and ugliest portrayal
of a government agency that had operated in secrecy.
The whole truth and nothing but the truth...
so help you God. I do.
You just said, did you not,
that you knew in 1970,
and had known for a substantial period of time,
that the CIA was opening mail in New York City?
That is correct.
Certain individual rights have to be sacrificed
for the national security.
Operation CHAOS was the tip of the iceberg.
The Senate this morning meets in a rare secret session
to discuss its Intelligence Committee's report
on the CIA's involvement
in plots to kill foreign leaders.
The decade of murder plots spanned four administrations,
from the first attempt on Castro in 1960
under President Eisenhower,
to the death of a Chilean general in 1970
under President Nixon,
and some plots under the Kennedy and Johnson tenures.
There was no policy
uh, since... to assassinate
any foreign official or foreign leader.
There was no plot.
As far as I know,
the CIA was never responsible
for assassinating any foreign leaders.
Were there discussions about possible assassinations?
I don't know whether I've stopped beating my wife
or whether you've stopped beating your wife or--
talks of that--
but in government there are always discussions
of practically everything under the sun.
Of assassinations?
Of everything under the sun.
Well, you're not answering my question.
Well, I'm not trying to answer your question.
When Helms left, he burned a lot of files.
He literally burned them in his office.
I learned that from Kiley. He was Helms's assistant.
The covert operations people, the dirty tricks people,
they have their own histories that they don't share.
"The Jewels" that were finally released were redacted.
Obviously, there was much more.
We do know that the CIA, in the late '50s,
they were trying to make a Manchurian Candidate
using LSD.
They were going to reprogram somebody to be an assassin.
It was really crazy stuff.
And somebody from inside was troubled by it.
Frank Olson was ready to quit,
and he was seen as a traitor.
Frank Olson plunged to his death
from the tenth floor of the Hotel Statler in New York.
His family was told he'd committed suicide.
I have every reason to believe
that was an organized CIA hit.
In this segment of our program, The CIA Story.
The AP used to run an annual convention.
Every managing editor of the newspapers was there.
Thank you very much.
I am, in a way, a managing editor, too.
Around 6:00, I go down and have an editorial conference
with the various people that put out our publications.
The President's brief,
the publication we put out
for a broader group of Washingtonians.
With the credibility problems
that our people have had about government,
it is quite natural that they would expect to find
wrongdoing, cover-up,
and all the rest of those things in the intelligence business.
And therefore, there is great attention and excitement
when the veil of secrecy is lifted, even a little bit.
Now this, I think, is understandable,
but I do ask for some proportion in the way,
particularly you, ladies and gentlemen,
go at it in your job.
I think the story Mr. Colby's referring to, of course,
is the domestic spying story.
Get this, they get something like 650 pages
of evidence of domestic wrongdoing
or allegations of domestic wrongdoing,
which was sat on,
until that newspaper story came out.
And I think what's needed, frankly and honestly,
as an American citizen,
is a wipe out at the top.
You've got to get new people in.
And that's the way it is. That's the way I see it.
So long.
All right. Thanks.
The abrupt firing of Defense Secretary Schlesinger
and CIA Director Colby
sent shockwaves through the U.S. intelligence establishment.
President Ford has named George Bush
to succeed Colby as CIA Chief.
The one thing about Sy is
he's very complicated and unpredictable.
And so, depending upon the situation,
he could be quiet and tame,
or he could be bouncing off the wall.
There's really no one Sy Hersh M.O. other than
he takes notes in a way that are unintelligible.
I was in New York,
and I wanted to do something different.
I started writing about corporations.
It was just a totally different world,
and I knew nothing about it.
I heard about this fellow, Jeff Gerth.
He was a freelance writer
who was writing for an underground newspaper,
and he knew a lot.
So we became a team.
It was fun to do something with somebody else.
I'd been a loner so long.
Sy had some sort of appeal,
I'm not sure I could explain it all,
but, you know, a lot of people knew who he was
and it almost became enticing for people to want to...
"Oh, Sy Hersh is investigating this.
I want to talk to him."
Even if they knew
it was going to be some tough questions
and they might not come out looking too good.
The New York Times had never done
a major investigation of a corporation.
The editors were nervous.
That was the beginning of the end
with me at The New York Times
when I started to write about corporations.
There was just no question. It was just horrible.
Before that, I could say, "I'm doing this,"
and, "Go ahead. Godspeed, go get it."
But when it came to corporations,
"Why are you doing it? What? Why?"
So I had to write a bullshit note like this
to the national editor about why I wanted to do it.
I see what I wrote.
"Part of the Sy Hersh continuing saga
of how the world really works,
or in this case, more than you'll ever want to know
about Gulf and Western."
Gulf and Western was a high-flying conglomerate
that had started out as an industrial company
that had continued buying
all these no-name industrial companies
and had then moved into the movie business
and Simon and Schuster
and it moved up into sort of the Hollywood
celebrity status.
It was a new kind of corporation,
in which they had different parts
that had nothing to do with the core business.
And they have enormous latitude to play.
They can hide money, and they can hide profits.
I had gone to business school,
and I was the one who read the proxy statements
and the 10-Ks and a lot of the litigation.
We found fraud, corruption.
This was not going to be a friendly story,
and the newspaper didn't want to do it.
It said things about corporate America
that The New York Times, as part of corporate America,
you know, didn't like.
And then Gerth, for reasons known only to Gerth,
decided he'd read all the corporation filings
of The New York Times,
and he said, "Oh, my God,
Abe, your buddy Abe, had bought a new penthouse,"
and the board of directors had given him a loan
at one-half the prime rate, or something like that.
And I said, well, look, we got a problem here.
We're writing about favorable bank loans to a top executive,
and we've got a similar situation
with The New York Times.
So I lost it. I was so angry.
And I went screaming at Abe,
"Are you crazy? You took money from the board?
You're supposed to be independent of the board!"
And Abe then said, "My lawyer said it's okay."
And that's when I said, "That's what every crook
I've ever talked to in my life tells me!"
Sy has found a way
of trying to get people's attention,
and... ...screaming is certainly one way to do it.
It's not his only tool,
but he definitely has a short fuse sometimes.
I won't say he threatens people,
but he definitely ups the temperature.
Um, I mean, Gulf and Western would say he threatened them.
In conversations with one of their top executives,
Sy pissed him off.
And he wrote a very threatening letter to the newspaper.
The editors put us through absolute insanities
to get it in paper.
They tried everything they could.
They said, "We need an extra source for everything,"
at the last minute, after editing it.
They still didn't want to publish it.
You want to know why I quit?
Why I left? That's a major factor.
Let's put it this way.
There was no farewell party for me
when I left the paper.
Does it bother you when somebody...
Really, I mean, we're going to get calls this morning.
I guarantee you that people don't like you.
Does that bother you, or do you think that's part of the game?
I don't like it. I don't like... I weep and moan and all the...
I get some wonderfully nasty reviews.
Some are very funny.
Our first call's from Boise, Idaho this morning.
Good morning.
- You're on the air. - Morning, Brian. This is Bill.
Yeah, Bill.
I just wanted to make a comment.
I heard Mr. Hersh make a statement.
I just wanted him to know that it's guys like him
that I think should be shipped out.
When you say shipped out, what do you mean by that?
Well, I think Havana would be a good stop for the first stop.
But what do you object to the most?
Huh?
What do you object to the most in Mr. Hersh?
I guess we lost him. Well, he made his point.
- Havana. - Havana.
What do you say to people like that?
I'll tell you my attitude, sir. Again, with all due respect,
I have as much right to be here as you do, buddy.
I saw the limits of daily journalism. There is a limit.
You just can't do as much if you're publishing something
and it appears in print the next day.
There's something about a book,
where you're not blurting out things right away,
and you think longer and harder about it.
Every book I did got people mad.
Particularly the one about John F. Kennedy.
This book of yours has been described
as everything from evil to fictitious.
Why is it that historians and journalists
find your work so distasteful?
You know, the attacks are not just that you wrote
a shoddy piece of work,
but that you're in it for the bucks.
Well, I mean, look, I can just make some guesses.
You know, if you're a member of the press corps
who was around in '60 to '63,
what am I saying about your job?
How you did it? I'm saying something bad.
This is a book that, if I did it right,
was going to be a sure hit.
Are you up and running, Mark?
Yep.
You worked the Lawford house,
beach house?
- You saw Monroe there? - Yes.
And did you know that she and the President were together?
We had no access to the house,
so we didn't see what was happening in the house.
But the assumption was that
he was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe.
Okay, can we do off the record?
Sure. We can do what you want.
When I was helping Sy with the Kennedy book,
he came and said, "You'll never believe this."
And he had gotten a hold
of some long-lost letters of JFK and Marilyn Monroe.
This was gold.
They were in the collection of a man named Lex Cusack.
But as it turned out,
it was fool's gold, because Cusack was a forger.
And he had produced these letters.
Sy had been snookered.
He had maybe talked to too many people
about these papers that he'd found,
but he had not published them.
It was almost career destruction.
So how do you feel?
Like a dupe, idiot.
And secondly, horribly relieved,
because it meant you could, you know...
It cleared up a whole number
of impossible to reconcile issues for us.
Of course, they had to be verified,
and the fact that they weren't true
was just that's part of the process.
Lex Cusack went to jail for nine years.
In my position, I'd want to minimize it,
but I always thought
that the day I don't chase a story like that
is the day I'm dead.
I was a fact checker at The New Yorker when I met Sy.
I got to know him at a point
where I think he was a little vulnerable
and talking a lot about his process.
Sy was the subject of a story
about his JFK book.
It was a piece that was not uncritical.
It's been suggested that
you didn't really follow the facts where they led,
that you had a story and you wanted to fit the facts to them.
Did you have a story in your mind
before you started the book?
Totally different one, of course.
Sy, you stand to make a lot of money from this book.
It's a big book. There's an ABC special coming up.
Did the prospect of that big payday in any way...
pressure you to push some of the evidence
further than perhaps you should have?
- Is that what you would do? - Well...
Is it? I mean,
is that what you would do as a professional journalist?
I wonder if there's a temptation.
Would you have that temptation?
Why would I, if you don't think you would?
It's definitely a cautionary tale for journalism,
but also for Sy and his strengths
and his things that maybe are not necessarily strengths.
In case anybody cares, this is less and less fun.
I started writing for Substack.
There might be a lot of questions about, you know,
what's Hersh doing slumming, or whatever you want to call it.
But I'm perfect for them. I'm an outsider.
Who is behind the bombing
of the Nord Stream pipelines?
One of the great mysteries of the past year.
Sy Hersh cites an unnamed source
who says the sabotage was carried out by the U.S. Navy.
Hersh reports the Biden administration
began planning the act of sabotage
in December 2021,
two months before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
I'm sure you're aware
of the new report from Seymour Hersh,
"How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline."
- Did you read the piece? - I'm familiar with it.
Beyond getting his facts entirely wrong,
as he has before in very high-profile ways,
it is a fundamental misunderstanding to suggest
that our intelligence community is not subject to oversight.
The attack is... It's a single source.
Right. Which has been the criticism.
So what?
So what? It's a legitimate criticism, absolutely.
You know. Right?
- Say more. - Yeah. What do I, I mean, I...
I mean, it is a legitimate...
The only point I'm saying is that,
of course, there was, what am I going to do?
I can't write about who I know else
was brought in from the Army, the Air Force,
because I'm exposing them.
Even if there's nine sources,
sometimes it's much better just to make it one.
I'm sorry to tell you that.
Well, because you don't want to talk...
you don't want, "Sources in the State Department
and the CIA both agree..."
What if the source got it wrong?
And it's a single source? What do you do?
Then I've got 20 years of working with a guy
that I've been wrong on.
Time after time, I'm told things that turn out to be right.
Yes.
This is it, right? Or one of them.
There's, there's two or three of them.
Here's the problem with this stuff.
In one page, you got three people
that are absolutely private, confidential sources.
These are all people that
I would never mention their names.
I can't do it.
So I don't know what to tell you.
Putting their name out there would be murderous.
Look at this.
I don't know how this stuff slipped into your file,
but you got them.
This has gone way beyond I ever thought would happen.
And it's not good for me. It's not good for my people.
What the fuck is this doing in your hands? You know.
I'm looking at it, thinking this is... What is this?
Now, I'll go home, and I look at these things and,
this is an FBI guy, but most of them are CIA guys.
I think I have some sense of some of these people,
and I don't think we're in a position at any point
or we're intending at any point
to jeopardize any of these people.
Well, I'd like to quit. I'd like to quit.
Look, I made a contract with you.
I'm doing it. I've been very faithful. I'm very good.
Sy, hold on.
I probably shouldn't have started with you,
but you came to me 20 years ago,
and I said to you all, when I'm ready, I'll do it.
And then you asked me again, and I thought, why not do it?
But I'm ambivalent about it.
You guys, you know too much about what I'm doing.
You have too many people.
There's people there you don't even realize who they are,
some of them, but they're in it, and I don't...
I'm in a position now I'm not telling you stuff.
So I'd like to quit.
Maybe we should... Should we cut?
What? No, let's just quit it.
Just cut the cameras, please.
We're just going to cut cameras.
This isn't easy for you.
I was very happy not talking about myself.
Very happy.
And I'm doing it, and so...
There are some days I'm really irritated at myself,
but if you do something, you have to do it 100%.
There's no ambivalence.
Yeah, there's always ambivalence.
But forget about ambivalence.
You know, I gave you my notebooks.
And so, that's where we are.
Let's set the record straight.
I don't leave everything.
I've been married, you know, 60 years.
So let's get that clear. It's not that I leave everything.
Some things I stick to.
We have very few words
from you talking about Elizabeth.
It's complicated because she's a psychoanalyst.
She has a very strong commitment
to the confidentiality of her office.
So what can we say?
She's a very special person.
Let's just put it that way.
And she waited for me to grow up.
I think that's fair.
I was always a little bit in outer space.
I'm not a wacko. I have a family with children.
I couldn't have married better,
because there was somebody always there
to put things in focus.
I'm obviously a high-octane person.
And so, you know, I married the right person
who can calm me down
and keep me from going into total despair.
There were often times it was so sad.
I was writing such terrible stuff.
There were moments when I was doing the My Lai reporting.
I would hear about throwing up two-year-old kids
and catching them on bayonets.
And I had a two-year-old...
That's the first time I couldn't take it.
And so I call Liz up
and I said, "I don't know. I don't think I can take it."
And she said, "It has nothing to do
with your son or me or...
It has nothing to do with it."
"It's not about your children."
So that was helpful.
She would get me through
when I'm in a crying jag in a pay phone.
I despair a lot sometimes. And so, um...
I was very lucky to marry her.
I'll take The Times.
I leave The Post for her.
I've been writing about Syria because, obviously,
I was pretty shocked it fell so quickly.
I read this stuff now, and I say to myself,
I really misjudged him.
It's been so long, I haven't seen this article in years.
I wrote stories for the London Review.
There were reports that Assad nerve-gassed his own people.
I saw him two or three or four times,
and I didn't think he was capable
of doing what he did.
Period.
And let's call that wrong.
Let's call that very much wrong.
But is that an example of getting too close to power?
Of course. What else is it?
The human rights people were all over him.
I never thought he was Mother Teresa,
but I thought he was okay.
But if I have made a claim
in prior interviews to be perfect,
I would now withdraw it, that's all. I wasn't perfect.
It's now about five days
since the major ground forces entered Iraq.
It's almost four days and 30 minutes ago
that the air war began.
We're still, needless to say,
much closer to the beginning than the end.
I was very much against that war
because it made no sense.
But The New Yorker was more willing
to run stories, puff stories about it,
and more willing to run,
perfectly willing to run my tough stuff about it.
At some point, I became Sy's main editor
when he was writing for The New Yorker.
Right before the invasion of Iraq.
He just called up and just was full Sy raging at the heavens.
I think part of him wondered why
we didn't all collectively throw ourselves
in front of the machine and make it stop.
You know, he was like,
"This is the moral issue of our time."
And he just thought it was such a mistake.
He thought it was such a mistake.
This is the guy.
Sadiq's the guy that told me the story.
Sadiq was a two or three-star general
in the Iraqi Air Force.
He asked me, "Do you know about the prison in Abu Ghraib?"
He said, "They're arresting everybody
and sending them to Abu Ghraib."
People that had nothing to do with anything.
There were sexual assaults
and children were being assaulted.
Horrifying abuse.
Months later, I get a call
from a former Marine intelligence officer
named Roger Charles.
He had retired and was hired by 60 Minutes.
And so he came to me and said, "We got a problem."
He told me about Abu Ghraib, and I go, "Ah!"
CBS had photographs.
They had gotten photographs from somebody,
of showing torture,
but they couldn't get it on the air.
What's the government doing?
Well, the government's doing everything they could
to stop the story by going to the executive of CBS
and telling him, "You're not going to publish the story,
because it's going to hurt the American war."
I made some calls.
I learned that one of the GIs that had been accused,
the lawyer for him happened to be a lawyer
who represented a My Lai kid.
I went up to New Hampshire to see him,
and he said to me,
"You know, there was a report done."
I said, "What are you talking about?"
So then he gave me this.
I mean, you can see, this is the one he gave me.
The interview stopped here. I took the report,
I started reading it, and I said, "I'm out of here."
The author of the report
was a two-star general named Tony Taguba.
I couldn't believe the guts he had.
He was accusing higher ranking generals
of gross misconduct.
Initially started with a kid in the unit, named Darby.
He went to the Army Criminal Investigation Division
and gave them photographs.
There were thousands of them.
I was working late. Sy called,
and said something like, "I've just...
read the most devastating Army report."
The report had been bad enough,
but then I got photographs.
They were horrifying.
The CIA had beaten one prisoner to death.
I felt we had to tell 60 Minutes.
So I called up the producer.
I said, "If you don't do it Thursday,
on Sunday, we're going to run the report with pictures
and say, we're doing this story
because a major network called CBS
did not fulfill its obligations.
It's going to be the second paragraph."
Two weeks ago, we received an appeal
from the Defense Department
and eventually from the chairman
of the Military Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Richard Myers, to delay this broadcast,
given the danger and tension on the ground in Iraq.
We decided to honor that request
while pressing for the Defense Department
to add its perspective
to the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison.
This week, with the photos
beginning to circulate elsewhere,
and with other journalists about to publish
their versions of the story,
the Defense Department agreed to cooperate in our report.
So, they did it.
And, on Friday, my story came out.
It went on for about 18 days.
Was it the same thing every day?
Every day my schedule was 23 hours of torture, and one hour of rest.
And there were many kinds of torture.
Like these photos--
I remember being forced to stand like this.
With other people.
I remember being forced to stand like this.
They would try to interrogate me.
And one of the things they'd say... He threatened me...
If you don't talk, if you don't confess, we'll let the soldiers...
...rape you.
If I could follow up, Mr. Secretary,
Given the ramifications
of not only what is in this report,
the findings specifically,
but the pictures, the photographs
that you knew as of a couple weeks ago
were going to be broadcast.
Why did you not feel incumbent upon yourself at that time
to ask for the findings,
or just take a look at the pictures beforehand
so you could perhaps be prepared?
I think I did inquire about the pictures
and was told that we didn't have copies.
Is that not correct?
We didn't have them here.
I didn't have them.
Mr. Secretary,
a number of times from the podium,
you've said U.S. troops do not torture individuals.
Does this report undercut your notion
that the U.S. doesn't torture?
I'm not a lawyer.
My impression is that
what has been charged thus far is abuse,
which I believe technically is different from torture.
Just a minute.
I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said,
that torture has taken place,
and therefore I'm not going to address the torture word.
You're listening
to The Diane Rehm Show.
You're on the air.
First of all, I want to say,
especially to Mr. Hersh,
that in all of this sanctimonious self-righteousness
you're doing more to encourage
the insurgency and terrorist attacks on Americans.
Mr. Hersh is clearly partisan. Let's admit that.
This is propaganda,
whether or not it proves to be true or exaggerated,
and you will be culpable and responsible directly
for any backlash that results
by fanning the flames of this story.
Sy Hersh.
Oh, nobody likes the messenger, you know,
I just don't like American soldiers torturing people.
We saw what we saw. We wrote down what we heard.
I didn't know how to react, other than...
being angry.
And Rumsfeld accused me of leaking it.
I was indignant. I looked him in the face.
Then we started talking about the report.
You know, why did it happen? What did you do? Blah blah blah.
So, I kept repeating it, over time.
And then somebody asked, is this torture or is it abuse?
I said, well,
there's two distinctive values when it comes to interrogation.
Abuse is basically slapping
or not giving them food or whatever have you.
Torture's when you inflict grievous bodily harm.
So I give him an example.
You have a detainee that's being interrogated naked,
his clothes were taken away from him,
laying down on the floor
and a broom handle is being shoved up his rectum
and he's being kicked by two civilian interrogators.
Now that's torture.
It doesn't matter what I believe.
What matters is what you can find.
At some point in an interview with public radio,
I said, "Here's my phone number. Just give me a call."
Get in touch with me.
202 872-0703, just call.
Leave a number. I'll get in touch with you.
And sure enough, I got a call a couple hours later
from a woman that said, you better come talk to me.
We met at a Friday's.
You know, we talked for a little while
and then I said, "Well, I have my laptop here.
I can show you the pictures."
And we were in a booth in a relatively private area.
So I did open the laptop
and I shared some of the pictures with him.
I lent my former daughter-in-law my laptop
when she deployed to Iraq.
So upon her return,
she returned my laptop
and I noticed there were a lot of photographs on the laptop.
She wasn't involved,
but she was among many people
with whom these pictures were shared.
The pictures I remember most
were of a man being menaced by a dog.
The fear was so evident.
I just remember Sy saying to me,
"You know, this is really important stuff."
And "would you be willing to give me a copy of these?"
And I was reluctant, because I was afraid.
But I wanted the facts to be exposed.
I wanted the truth to be exposed.
What would have happened
if there hadn't been photographs?
If there hadn't been photographs?
No story.
I've sent you
just under three dozen images.
I have 10,000 images.
From north to south of Gaza.
I would love to ask you how you got these,
but I'm not going to.
So tell me what I'm seeing.
So these are Israeli soldiers,
occupation soldiers, in people's homes,
who are basically giving a set of instructions
to the unit.
They're very well aware of civilian spaces
before they bomb them.
But these images, I mean, literally, again,
their names are on the walls,
they are going to be used to piece together incidents
to understand who was where.
You have an image, for example, 3A.
- 3A. Let me go find it. - Where they...
Where they mark all of Gaza.
Which battalions that are entering
from these areas, from those areas,
this, plus a record of massacres.
We can basically trace it back
to the unit that committed the war crimes.
People are already starting to prosecute them,
which is why the Army is freaking out.
Okay. And now this is all, this is all background.
I'm not allowed to write any of this.
For now no,
but you'll be the person I'll come to when we're ready.
This afternoon,
William Calley stood to attention
as Colonel Clifford Ford read the verdict.
The jury has found him guilty
on three counts of premeditated murder,
one count of assault with intent to murder.
Free Calley now, free Calley now.
And while the rally for Calley was in progress,
hundreds of telegrams
were pouring into the Western Union office.
Most all of them protesting the conviction of Calley
and promising their support.
It's called "The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley".
My name is William Calley
I'm a soldier of this land
I'm trying to do my duty
And to gain the upper hand
But they've made me out A villain
They have stamped me With a brand
As we go marching on
The day the verdict of guilty came in on Calley,
radio stations started calling us for extra copies then.
You shipped 16 5" last night,
and you can give me how many today?
I'm just another soldier
From the shores of USA
Forgotten on a battlefield
10,000 miles away
While life goes on as usual
From New York to Santa Fe
As we go marching on
In the late afternoon,
the President ordered Calley released from jail.
He ended up serving only three or four months in prison.
And then he was done.
We are a culture of enormous violence.
It's just so brutal.
There's a level you just can't get to.
So why do you keep doing the work?
You can't have a country that does that.
That's why I've been sort of on the warpath ever since.
You can't just have a country that does it
and looks the other way.
If there's any mantra to what I do, that's it.