In a war in which the media are being kept at many arms’ lengths, the one indispensable journalist is proving to be Seymour Hersh, who is spending the productive twilight of his long career at the New Yorker.

It was through Hersh’s reporting that we learned the US military had a chance to take out Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and — incredibly — backed off on the advice of a Pentagon lawyer. This week, Hersh reports that the October 20 Delta Force raid on Omar’s compound came under much heavier fire than Defense Department spokespersons have admitted. According to Hersh, several of those who participated in the raid called it a "total goat fuck" — which, we are told, is "military slang meaning that everything that could go wrong did go wrong."

Hersh’s success in breaking news about a war that American officials would like to keep news-free is both unsurprising and surprising. Unsurprising because Hersh is one of the finest reporters of his generation, winning a Pulitzer for exposing the My Lai massacre and writing an influential critical biography of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power (Summit Books, 1983). Surprising because, until recently, he appeared to have lost his touch. By the time his poorly received Kennedy book, The Dark Side of Camelot (Little, Brown, 1997), came out, he seemed irrelevant. Last year, Hersh made a comeback, writing an exhaustively researched, 25,000-word exposé for the New Yorker charging that retired Army general Barry McCaffrey may have committed "war crimes" during the Gulf War (see "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, May 19, 2000). But that story was almost entirely ignored.

Hersh’s technique is old-fashioned, as befits someone who has been reporting since the 1960s: he burrows inside and talks to people, most of them on background. You rarely see an attributed quote in one of his pieces, which is understandable — his sources’ careers would be ruined if their identities were known — but which also makes it easy for the Pentagon to respond by smearing him.

On Monday evening, Hersh appeared on CNN to refute charges by Pentagon officials that his account of the October 20 raid was less than credible, and, specifically, that Delta Force had not come under heavy fire. "Delta Force doesn’t deal with reporters very often," Hersh told host Judy Woodruff. "The reason I learned about it is, they were upset about what happened. This isn’t the way you run Delta Force. You can’t have this kind of big-scale operation. And so, they’re throwing a message over the fence, to the leadership, really, through me, through you by putting me on the air, through the New Yorker by publishing it. It doesn’t matter what they say publicly as long as they fix it in private. They’ve got to fix it."

Thus does Hersh offer a lesson in the value of a free press during wartime that the Pentagon — not to mention his colleagues in the media — ought to ponder.

Hersh’s post–September 11 articles on the war against terrorism are available at the New Yorker’s Web site: www.newyorker.com.

Issue Date: November 8 - 15, 2001

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