Iran, Syria—and Seymour Hersh

When does a half-cooked notion, a conspiracy theory or a tissue of vaguely sourced and improbable claims become an item of journalistic "fact"? If you're a person of normal intelligence, the answer is: never. If, however, you're a faithful reader of the New Yorker, it happens roughly every time investigative reporter Seymour Hersh commits a word to print, presumably after having undergone the rigorous review of the magazine's world-famous fact-checking department.

So it was with some anticipation that I agreed last week to debate Mr. Hersh on CNN about his latest bequest to what the magazine likes to call its "Annals of National Security": Several thousand words in the June 6 edition on the subject of "Iran and the Bomb," along with the portentous subtitle, "How real is the nuclear threat?"

For readers who fail to grasp Mr. Hersh's point from the subtitle alone, his central contention is that there exists no "irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran"—which is surely right, since the word "irrefutable" allows for no ambiguity. As for his subtext, this too was clear: By taking an increasingly hard line on Iran, the Obama administration risked blundering into another Iraq-style intelligence fiasco.

Might this be true? Who knows: Mr. Hersh loves to affect the air of a journalist who has been brought into the loop of the most sensitive national security secrets. His expectation of readers is that they will take him at his word that the typically anonymous sources for his most explosive claims—often concerning highly specific descriptions of CIA operations in enemy nations—are credible and sober government officials (or former officials) who would never compromise vital secrets to our enemies. Yet these same insiders, Mr. Hersh would have readers believe, would gladly see those secrets disclosed in the pages of the New Yorker.

To get a better sense of Mr. Hersh's record, I turned from the Iran article to some of his earlier work. In January 2005 he wrote that Donald Rumsfeld would play the starring role in President Bush's second term. In fact, Condoleezza Rice did. In April 2006 he suggested that President Bush had all but made up his mind to bomb Iran before it started enriching a single kilo of uranium. All Mr. Bush did was pursue sanctions at the U.N. and support European efforts to engage Tehran diplomatically.

In March 2007, Mr. Hersh reported that the U.S. had provided "clandestine support" to the Lebanese government, which in turn had aided a Sunni terrorist group called Fatah al-Islam. Shortly thereafter the Lebanese government went to war against Fatah al-Islam. In February 2008, Mr. Hersh claimed that the mysterious Syrian facility Israel bombed the previous September "apparently had little to do with . . . nuclear reactors." Last month, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Yukiya Amano wrote that "the Agency concludes that the destroyed building was very likely a nuclear reactor." In April 2009, he returned to Syria to write a hopeful piece about the prospects of a U.S.-Syria rapprochement, strongly hinting that Damascus could gradually be peeled away from Tehran. The evidence of the past two months suggests otherwise.

More recently, Mr. Hersh gave a speech in Qatar alleging that Gen. Stanley McChrystal was a member of a religious order known as the Knights of Malta, and that senior U.S. officers seek to "change mosques into cathedrals." The retired general denies the allegation categorically.

How, then, does this bear on Mr. Hersh's current reporting about Iran? The article makes much of a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that found that in 2003 Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program. And he hints that an as-yet unreleased 2011 NIE says much the same thing.

Yet what's mainly remarkable about Mr. Hersh's reporting is that it makes no mention of what the IAEA itself says about Iran's most recent nuclear progress. "As previously reported by the Director General," goes the May 24 report, "there are indications that certain of these [undisclosed nuclear related] activities may have continued beyond 2004."

Among those activities: "producing uranium metal . . . and its manufacture into components relevant to a nuclear device"; "testing of explosive components suitable for the initiation of high explosives in a converging spherical geometry"; "experiments involving the explosive compression of uranium deuteride to produce a short burst of neutrons"; "missile re-entry vehicle redesign activities for a new payload assessed as being nuclear in nature."

It is in the nature of the journalistic enterprise that most of what we think we know is subject to amendment and revision. In this sense, Mr. Hersh is no different from his peers. But it is also the invariable mark of a crackpot to believe that truth, by its very nature, must be hidden; and that the simplest explanation is always suspect. Through this device, Mr. Hersh has led generations of readers—and policy makers, too—to believe fantasies while missing dangers that stand in plain sight.

As for that TV appearance, Mr. Hersh, according to a CNN producer, backed out at the last minute on grounds that he would not debate me. Should he change his mind, I'm ready any time he is.

Source: WSJ.com