London Review of Books

Flyweight Belligerents

Michael Byers: À la carte multilateralism, 5 May 2005

“... bombs capable of penetrating up to six feet of concrete. In January, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that US special forces were already in Iran trying to pinpoint underground nuclear facilities and other potential targets. Earlier this year, US and Israeli forces spent a month testing the ability of Israeli air defences to shoot ...”

From The Blog

Double Flash

Norman Dombey, 26 May 2010

“... around that time during which he met the head of South Africa’s Atomic Energy Board. Seymour Hersh, in The Samson Option, quoted Israeli sources who confirmed that it was a joint Israeli-South Africa operation. Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, who was at the time commander of the Simonstown naval base, told the Johannesburg City Press that the double flash was ...”

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7Show More

“... were either out of the country and not available for interview or were deceased.’Seymour Hersh, who had already written a front-page story for the New York Times about the CIA’s illegal domestic surveillance programme, determined that the man who had fallen from the window was Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the CIA. ...”

Opportunities

David Gilmour, 1 June 1989

Prepared for the worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
by Christopher Hitchens.
Chatto, 357 pp., £15.95, April 1989, 0 7011 3459 3Show More

“... efforts and instigating lethal military adventures. Many years ago William Shawcross and Seymour Hersh revealed the extent of his hooliganism in Cambodia and elsewhere. More recently Patrick Seale showed in his biography of Asad that Kissinger almost single-handedly wrecked the chances of a Middle East settlement after 1973. And here Christopher Hitchens ...”

Operation Barbarella

Rick Perlstein: Hanoi Jane, 17 November 2005

Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon
by Mary Hershberger.
New Press, 228 pp., £13.99, September 2005, 1 56584 988 4Show More

“... left captivity. Melvin Laird, the defense secretary, told stories of unmitigated horror. Seymour Hersh uncovered a Pentagon letter to pow families reassuring them that this was only a stratagem: ‘We are certain that you will not become unduly concerned over the briefing if you keep in mind the purpose for which it was tailored.’ ...”

Text-Inspectors

Andrew O’Hagan: The Good Traitor, 25 September 2014

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State
by Glenn Greenwald.
Hamish Hamilton, 259 pp., £20, May 2014, 978 0 241 14669 9Show More

“... that of Woodward and Bernstein. Or of any member of the Sunday Times Insight team or of Seymour Hersh. ‘Beyond the rhetorical fallacy,’ Greenwald writes, a TV journalist had just given credence to the notion that other journalists could and should be prosecuted for doing journalism, an extraordinary assertion. Gregory’s question implied that every ...”

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2Show More

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7Show More

“... like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists for power (Schlesinger, Woodward) or its intimates ...”

Ethnic Cleansers

Stephen Smith, 8 October 1992

Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and its Aftermath
by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim.
Viking, 430 pp., £17.99, May 1992, 0 670 83233 2Show More

Tiger Balm: Travels in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia
by Lucretia Stewart.
Chatto, 261 pp., £10.99, June 1992, 0 7011 3892 0Show More

“... in covering it. Journalists wrote about My Lai all right, but with the exception of Seymour Hersh and a handful of others, they hardly pursued it. They attended the opening days of Calley’s court-martial in November 1970, but some of the most damning details revealed in the four-month hearing went unreported, because nobody could be bothered to sit it ...”

Why use a Novichok?

Tom Stevenson, 6 May 2021

Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents from Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia
by Dan Kaszeta.
Hurst, 408 pp., £25, July 2020, 978 1 78738 306 7Show More

“... would be repeated to justify increased American military intervention. Some, including Seymour Hersh in the LRB (19 December 2013), argued that Ghouta might have been a false flag operation conducted by rebel factions with Turkish support, but the weight of evidence suggests that the attack was carried out by the loyalist side. In 2017, sarin attacks on ...”

Nuclear Blindness

Brian Jones: The Case for Nuclear Proliferation, 22 June 2006

“... enrichment could be an exaggeration, designed to pre-empt the pre-emptive attack that Seymour Hersh has recently suggested the US is planning for. The ultracentrifuge cascades that are used for enrichment are complex structures, containing some very delicate mechanisms. They have the potential to self-destruct. It might take a cascade of 1000 centrifuges ...”

Bush’s Useful Idiots

Tony Judt: Whatever happened to American liberalism?, 21 September 2006

“... taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s ...”

How to Defect

Isabel Hilton: North Korea, 10 June 2010

Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea
by Barbara Demick.
Granta, 314 pp., £14.99, February 2010, 978 1 84708 014 1Show More

“... what Condoleezza Rice termed ‘anticipatory self-defence’. As one US official said to Seymour Hersh: ‘Don’t be distracted by all this talk of negotiations … they have a plan and they are going to get this guy after Iraq. He’s their version of Hitler.’ Such rhetoric may play well at home, but it did little for the citizens of North Korea. The ...”

Don’t do what Allende did

Greg Grandin: Allende, 19 July 2012

Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War
by Tanya Harmer.
North Carolina, 375 pp., £38.95, October 2011, 978 0 8078 3495 4Show More

“... in Latin America. All kinds of cataclysmic events rolled around, but Chile scared him.’ Seymour Hersh, drawing on a conversation with another NSC staffer, wrote that what Kissinger feared most about Allende was not his winning the presidency but that at the end of his term ‘the political process would work and he would be voted out of office in the next ...”

The Hagiography Factory

Thomas Meaney: Arthur Schlesinger Jr, 8 February 2018

Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian
by Richard Aldous.
Norton, 486 pp., £23.99, November 2017, 978 0 393 24470 0Show More

“... Aldous does not want to bore us with, say, the endless stand-off between Schlesinger and Seymour Hersh at the gates of Camelot. He continued to be flat-footed in his attacks on student movements, always prescribing bigger doses of liberalism for students in revolt against the cure. He became a critic of the Vietnam War as practised by his friend Henry ...”

Give or take a dead Scotsman

Liam McIlvanney: James Kelman’s witterings, 22 July 2004

You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free
by James Kelman.
Hamish Hamilton, 437 pp., £12.99, June 2004, 0 241 14233 4Show More

“... and the secret state’s holding centres, you don’t read James Kelman – you read Seymour Hersh. That its satire is paler than the reality it confronts is one reason You Have to Be Careful is an awkward book to place. Its calibration, its basic orientation towards its material, is not always clear. Time and again you taste its sentences for an irony ...”

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