Sitting in front of a red velvet curtain, a spotlight trained on his black leather chair, Seymour Hersh is looking tired and a little uncomfortable. The 68-year-old celebrity journalist has just flown in from Washington to be interviewed as part of this year’s Brighton Festival. The audience in the Dome Concert Hall has clearly come expecting a gruff, bedraggled investigative reporter with his sleeves rolled up, a cross between Carl Bernstein and Columbo. But the man they’re faced with - his grey hair neatly parted, rimless glasses and dark suit - looks more like a middle-ranking businessman who has done rather well for himself.
Seymour Hersh is one of the living legends of American journalism. Last spring, 35 years after he exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam (and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts), he produced a series of New Yorker articles that uncovered the scandalous treatment of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Hersh’s interviewer, the BBC Radio broadcaster Nick Clarke, asks how he gets his stories. He is, Hersh explains rather wearily, “long in the tooth”: he has good contacts because he has been around for a long time, and “people with a black view of what is going on approach me”. He found out about the goings-on in Abu Ghraib from an “Iraqi general friend”; Hersh stayed for three days in a Damascus hotel squeezing the story out of him. He never recommends that his contacts go public with their stories, because they would be crucified by the rightwing news media. “I would never tell anyone to speak up,” he says. “They would be pilloried.”
Hersh speaks almost timidly, occasionally leaning forward to hold his glass of water between his hands. For the most part, he looks strangely inanimate. But the audience is rapt. Behind me, two elderly ladies - who had been discussing the finer points of bridging loans and inheritance tax for fully 15 minutes before the event began - are now in awe, perfectly still.
Iraq, Hersh says, is in a monstrous mess. There is an Iranian-style democracy developing in southern Iraq, which is rapidly alienating Sunni Arabs in the north. But what about the free elections, asks Clarke? Hersh says he was not impressed. The Iraqi people voted along sectarian lines, and so the political situation hardly changed. Still, “journalists are very good at identifying problems,” he concedes, “but not much good at solutions.”
What’s happening in the US government is disquieting, he says. George W. Bush doesn’t read The New York Times or The Guardian, Hersh believes, and doesn’t much care what they write. “[The papers] could rattle LBJ, Clinton, even George’s father.” But after September 11, the mood in the White House was “you’re either with us or against us.” Hersh cannot decide whether Congress is “supine or prone”, and explodes into a quiet rage: “The war crimes committed by this president are incredible. Where were the federal bureaucracy, the military?” (The answer is that some of them were quietly talking to Hersh.)
Someone raises their hand to wonder whether Hersh thinks Bush is a zealot or a pragmatist. For Hersh the answer is easy. He finds himself almost nostalgic for the days of Henry Kissinger, and American foreign policy as realpolitik. If Kissinger had gone to war, he says, everyone would have assumed that it was a deal tied into oil futures. Bush says what he believes - whereas Kissinger, Hersh spits, “lies like other people breathe”. The audience, previously a little cowed, rallies, giving him his first laugh and some modest applause.
An anti-war campaigner rises to ask whether Israel or the US might act to demolish Iranian nuclear capabilities. Hersh becomes suddenly animated, and responds with a quick-fire analysis. “Many,” he says, “feel that something has to be done to neutralise Iran. But we’d need bunker bombs and commando units to suppress its anti-aircraft fire.” Now he is on a roll, and thinking aloud. “You’re looking at about 400 sites, which is beyond the capability of the Israelis. If you invade on the ground, you will lose.” Hersh boasts excellent contacts within the military intelligence services - that is how he gets so many scoops - and you begin to realise why. The generals and the spooks trust him and talk to him because he is capable of thinking just like them. He shares much of their enthusiasm for the logistical tasks on the ground and, in a different world, might have been a general himself.
His lone sortie into Iran over, Hersh retreats back into pessimism. If Islamic militants planted three bombs in three American shopping malls, he says, the US domestic situation “could move in drastic ways”. The only thing that will stop Bush, he says, is the military situation, “boots on the ground”. And he apologises for the bleakness of his analysis. “This is such a downer,” he says. “I’m not secretly selling uppers at the back, you know.” The passing quip might be as dry as dust, but it gets Hersh one last, respectful, laugh from Brighton.
