EPILOGUE

The rough draft of this manuscript was completed in haste about a month after Hersh's book appeared. But, as is true of the Kennedys and of the assassination, something is always added. These are what in newspapers are, despite how long ago what they relate to happened, are referred to as "breaking stories."

Nothing more is needed to leave it beyond question that for whatever purpose, from whatever cause or inspiration, Hersh is an inveterate, determined, non-stop liar. The record of that, while far from complete in the foregoing, is an irrefutable record.

Hersh claimed what he referred to as the "absolute" right to write history his way. His way was the way of lies, of prejudice, of hatred and the venom of hatred, and of deliberate dishonesty.

He was determined to ruin the reputations of all Kennedys for all time and to destroy the love and respect of most people for the martyred President and for his administration. For this Hersh found nothing too evil, too dishonest, too prejudiced, too false, too disgraceful to use, and as we have seen, he did use — depends on — what no self-respecting writer would consider using or depending on.

In his attack on the Kennedy administration Hersh was particulary harsh relating to Cuba, Cubans and the CIA's Bay of Pigs disaster. He went for the phony line of some anti-Castro Cubans and the CIA had been resorting to for three decades, that the reason that invasion failed was Kennedy's refusal to allow an additional air strike. While that in itself is less fully truthful and could use amplification and explanation, it here is not necessary for our purposes because of the nature of the actual new information that was made available after this manuscript was written, after, really I had written another book-length manuscript in addition to other work and other writing. To a degree this new information is summarized by the headline in The New York Times of February 22, 1998, on the story by its Tim Weiner, a story that begins on the first page and is continued onto two addition pages. That headline is:

C.I.A. Bares Own Bungling

In '61 Report on Bay of Pigs

The story is followed by a boxed direct quotation of the CIA's own record that the Times reported.

First we let the story speak for itself, as it does forcefully, straightforwardly and persuasively, and the reader can decide whether or not, in addition to all else, it makes an even bigger liar, a man of greater intended evil, a writer even more determined to rewrite our tragic history dishonestly:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 — One of the most secret documents of the cold war is out: the Central Intelligence Agency's brutally honest inquest into the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, which laid blame for the disastrous invasion of Cuba squarely on the agency's own institutional arrogance, ignorance and incompetence.

The 150-page document also cautioned those who would use the C.I.A. to overthrow enemies, saying that job belongs to the Pentagon and its broad arsenal of military forces around the globe.

The report painted a picture of an agency shot through with deadly self- deception, one whose worse secret operations were "ludicrous or tragic or both." In mounting the Cuban operation, almost none of the C.I.A. officers were, able to speak Spanish, yet those same officers heaped contempt on their Cuban "puppets" hand-picked to replace Fidel Castro, the report said.

The Bay of Pigs invasion, carried out in April 1961, was organized by the C.I.A. and was intended to lead to the overthrow of Mr. Castro, whose Communist Government just 90 miles from the Florida coast was seen as a beachhead for Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere.

While the basic facts of the commando raid on Cuba are known, the report, titled "the Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation," is an untapped well of cold, hard facts. A leading, historian of the operation, Peter Wyden, write wistfully in his book "Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story" (Simon & Schuster, 1979) that the report was "probably buried forever."

This week, after 36 years of secrecy during which all but one copy of the report was destroyed, a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group, has unearthed the sole surviving volume, which was locked in the safe of the Director of Central Intelligence. The report, written by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, after a six-month investigation, is a record of bungling by the best and the brightest and makes for chilling reading.

The C.I.A.'s leaders believed that it was President John F. Kennedy's failure to approve an attack on Cuba's air force to coincide with the landing of commandos that caused the deaths of nearly 1,500 raiders. And in their rebuttals to the report by Mr. Kirkpatrick, they wrote that his depiction of "unmitigated and almost willful bumbling and disaster" — in the words of Gen. Charles P. Cabell, then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence — was motivated by personal malice. Mr. Kirkpatrick had wanted to be the agency's spymaster, but his career advancement stalled when he contracted polio in the early 1950's.

The report said the operation, whose planning began in April 1960, started as a classic covert action "in which the hand of the United States would not appear." The plan called for a group of exiled Cuban leaders, supported by a C.I.A. cadre, to build political momentum slowly toward toppling Mr. Castro, who had taken power 16 months earlier.

Very quickly, "this operation took on a life of its own," the report said. "The agency was going forward without knowing precisely what it was doing."

The C.I.A.'s officers "became so wrapped up in the operation as such that they lost sight of ultimate goals." Their budget multiplied from $4.4 million to $46 million. Within a year, they created an unruly, ill-trained, crudely supported invasion force whose cover was blown, and whose existence had been broadly hinted at in newspaper reports before the operation took place. "Plausible denial" — the ability of the United States to lie convincingly about its role in the invasion — became "a pathetic illusion," the report said.

With crisscrossing lines of communication and control among bases and camps in Miami, Key West, New Orleans, Nicaragua and Guatemala, all under sporadic command from headquarters, the C.I.A created a "complex and bizarre organizational situation" that was doomed to fail.

The officers chosen to staff the huge operation were in many instances incapable; "very few spoke Spanish or had Latin-American background knowledge," the report said.

Even today, C.I.A. officials say that this lack of foreign languages and experience remains one of the biggest problems at the agency.

Agency employees treated the Cubans training to overthrow Mr. Castro "like dirt." The abuse left the hungry, barefoot, disillusioned trainees "wondering what kind of Cuban future they were fighting for."

The Revolutionary Council, the C.I.A.-created alternative to Mr. Castro, became the agency's "puppets." as described in the report. "Isolated in a Miami safe house, 'voluntarily' but under strong persuasion the Revolutionary Council members awaited the outcome of a military operation which they had not planned and knew little about while agency-written bulletins were issued to the world in their name."

If the C.I.A. could not work with Cubans, Mr. Kirkpatrick warned prophetically, "how can the agency possibly succeed with the natives of Black Africa or Southeast Asia?"

President Kennedy had been in office just three months when the invasion took place. The report argued that he might not have fully grasped the details of the raid, because the C.I.A. did fully explain them. "Detailed policy authorization for some specific actions was either never fully clarified or only resolved at the 11th hour," it said. "Even the central decision as to whether to employ the strike force was still somewhat in doubt up to the very moment of embarkation."

The C.I.A. convinced itself and the White House that the invasion would magically create in Cuba "an organized resistance that did not exist," composed of 30,000 Cubans who would "make their way through the Castro army and wade the swamps to rally to liberators." This was self-deception, the report said, adding dryly, "We are unaware of any planning by the agency or by the U.S. Government for this success."

On April 15, 1961, C.I.A. pilots knocked out part of Castro's air force, and were set to finish the job. At the last minute, on April 16, President Kennedy called off the air strikes, but the message did not reach the 1,511 commandos headed for the Bay of Pigs. Three days of fighting destroyed the invading force. A brigade commander sent his final messages: "We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help," and: "In water. Out of ammo. Enemy closing in. Help must arrive in next hour."

It never came. Over the next few days two American teams and a crew of Cuban frogmen plucked 26 survivors off the beaches and reefs.

After the inquiry completed its work, the agency clearly viewed the report as poison: "In unfriendly hands, it can become a weapon unjustifiably to attack the entire mission, organization, and functions of the agency," warned General Cabell, the Deputy Director at the time. Nevertheless, the C.I.A. agreed to release the report as part of a slow process of making public parts of its past.

Read with hindsight, the accumulated weight of the details in Mr. Kirkpatrick's report makes a case that "the fundamental cause of the disaster" was the C.I.A.'s incompetence, not President Kennedy's failure to follow through with the air raids in support of the commandos. The agency failed the President by failing to tell him "that success had become dubious and to recommend that the operation be therefore canceled," it said.

The consequence of canceling was chagrin: "The world already knew all about the preparations, and the Government's and the agency's embarrassment would have been public," the report said. The cost of continuing was "failure, which brought even more embarrassment, carried death and misery to hundreds" and wounded American prestige. "The choice was between retreat without honor and a gamble between ignominious defeat and dubious victory," the report said.

"The agency chose to gamble at rapidly decreasing, odds," in an operation sabotaged by bad intelligence, incompetent staffing, illusionary planning, and self- deception. In the future, it concluded, when the White House wanted to engage in major covert operations "which may profoundly affect world events," it should call the Defense Department, not the C.I.A.

The report was released under tile Freedom of Information Act to the National Security Archive, which collects and publishes declassified Government documents. Peter Kornbluh, director of the archive's Cuba Documentation Project called the report "one of the most important examples of self-criticism ever written inside, the agency."

The Times headlined the direct quotations in the box, "'The C.I.A. on the C.I.A.: A Scathing View."

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 — Following are excerpts from "The Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation," a highly critical internal inquiry into the Central Intelligence Agency's Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The 151-page report, written in numbered sections, was one of the most secret documents of the cold war. It was released under the Freedom of Information Act to the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group that collects and publishes declassified Government reports.

31. The agency committed at least four extremely serious mistakes in planning:

a. Failure to subject the project, especially in its latter frenzied stages, to a cold and objective appraisal by the best operating talent available, particularly by those not involved in the operation, such as the Chief of Operations and the chiefs of the Senior Staffs. Had this been done, the two following mistakes (b and c, below) might have been avoided.

b. Failure to advise the President, at an appropriate time; that success had become dubious and to recommend that the operation be therefore canceled and that the problem of unseating Castro be restudied.

c. Failure to recognize that he project had become overt and that the military effort had become too large to be handled by the agency alone.

d. Failure to reduce successive project plans to formal papers and to leave copies of them with the President and his advisers and to request specific written approval and confirmation thereof.

32. Timely and objective scrutiny of the operation in the months before the invasion, including study of all available intelligence, would have demonstrated to agency officials that the clandestine paramilitary operations had almost totally failed, that there was no controlled and responsive underground movement ready to rally to the invasion force, and that Castro's ability both to fight back and to roll up the internal opposition must be very considerably upgraded.

33. It would also have raised the question of why the United States should contemplate pitting 1,500 soldiers, however well trained and armed, against an enemy vastly superior in number armament on a terrain which offered nothing but vague hope of significant local support. It might also have suggested that the agency's responsibility in the operation should be drastically revised and would certainly have revealed that there was no real plan for the post-invasion period, whether for success or failure. . . .

37. Cancellation would have been embarrassing. The brigade could not have been held any longer in a ready status, probably could not have been held at all. Its members would have spread their disappointment far and wide. Because of multiple security leaks in this huge operation, the world already knew about the preparations, and the Government's and the agency's embarrassment would have been public.

38. However, cancellation would have averted failure, which brought even more embarrassment, carried death and misery to hundreds, destroyed millions of dollars' worth of U.S. property, and seriously damaged U.S. prestige . . . .

40. It is beyond the scope of this report to suggest what U.S. action might have been taken to consolidate victory, but we can confidently assert that the agency had no intelligence evidence that Cubans in significant numbers could or would join the invaders or that there was any kind of an effective and cohesive resistance movement under anybody's control, let alone the agency's, that could have furnished internal leadership for an uprising in support of the invasion. The consequences of a successful lodgment, unless overtly supported by U.S. armed forces, were dubious. . . .

41. The choice was between retreat without honor and a gamble between ignominious defeat and dubius victory. The agency chose to gamble, at rapidly decreasing odds.

42. The project had lost its covert nature by November 1960. As it continued to grow, operational security became more and more diluted. For more than three months before the invasion the American press was reporting, often with some accuracy, on the recruiting and training of Cubans. Such massive preparations could only be laid to the U.S. The agency's name was freely linked with these activities. Plausible denial was a pathetic illusion.

Harsh as this self-condemnation appears to be, it is less critical that from what was known is justified. For example, it states in 31. b that "success had become dubious." It was never anything else!

It also was no secret, was well known, that, as is stated at 32., "there was no controlled and responsive underground movement ready to rally to the invading forces." Truth in the last half of this can be omitted and it remains a statement of fact, that there was no real underground movement there. More of this appears at 40.

If is also the fact that the military had approved this childishly amateurish scheme of the right-wing novelist nuts like Hunt, Kennedy did consult with and did get the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In this CIA inspector general's report, written long before there was a Freedom of Information Act and when the CIA expected perpetual secrecy on its own account of the slop in which it lives, apologies to Reno of Newsday, there is of course, on a hundred and fifty pages much more than the Times could use in a news story, long as this one is. Without study of the report itself we can't be aware of its content and can't be aware of what appears to be missing in the Times story is in the report itself.

It does appear, however, that when it was apparent there was little chance for success in the invasion and when for all the people involved and the vast fortune the CIA lavished on this project there was "no planning" for the "success" of the project, that the CIA was not figuring on that "success" and therefore did not plan for it.

What may very well have been its intention, and this is indicated by Eisenhower's expressed hope for it quoted above, was holding the beachhead long enough to use it as the excuse for recognizing the government in exile that Ike was so anxious to recognize.

(Weiner has an error in his history that probably came from haste in which he had to familiarize himself with so much and then decide on what to include in his story. Where he gives the number of deaths among the invaders as "nearly 1500," that in fact was the number of the invaders, of whom most by far survived and, as we saw above with the accurate figures, were made prisoner.)

Throughout this manuscript as written in haste, as soon as the Hersh book was available, his a favoritism of the CIA is explicit and stated often. There are inferences that he was serving CIA interests in his Goebbelsization of our history.

After I had finished the rough draft and turned to another manuscript, when I told my Wisconsin professor friend Dave Wrone what I had written it reminded him of what I had forgotten. I had written an analysis/commentary on Hersh's The Samson Option while I was reading it. I was writing while reading it, without reading all of it at first.

What had happened is that my local professor of history friend, Jerry McKnight, had loaned me The Samson Option and what I though and saw was addressed to him. (Jerry is head of the history department of Hood College, where all my records and manuscripts will be a public archive.)

There were obvious questions of Hersh's honesty in that book, as what I wrote five years ago about it, long before his commercialization of Hersh-it journalism was apparent as it now is.

I began this memorandum January 18, 1993 and finished it six days later. It is here presented without change, with typographical errors and nothing else corrected.

At the outset, before I'd read much of The Samson Option, I wrote Jerry that the book is "dishonest." I then explained why.

In the beginning the second part of this analysis/commentary I noted that rather than being a reporting job what Hersh wrote "is a political argument disguised as a reporting job." That should sound familiar to those who have read this.

What I wrote in January, 1993 about Hersh, about the many questions coming from reading The Samson Option, about all that he left out when he should not have if he intended an honest book, I concluded remembering his great career debt to the CIA, that Director Colby had selected him of all the many available reporters to give the exclusive story to when he wanted to use a reporter in "getting rid of [James Jesus] Angleton, [head of the CIA's counterintelligence] and that "the history of the book . . . does explain the unquestioned omissions of many, possibly most sources and the absence of citing direct quotations of controversial nature to any source. If this book does not have this (i.e., an intelligence) origin, it would have been impossible without intelligence agency help the signs of which permeate the book."

What I wrote about Hersh's writing in 1993 is certainly applicable to his mistitled book of late 1997.

In 1993 it was clear that Hersh was deeply indebted to the CIA. In 1997 it was clear that he was paying it back by writing the book he knew it wanted written defending it and repeating its endless lies as the solid truth.

With what we have seen of Hersh's sources in his current book what he said about one of his major sources for The Samson Option in 1997, but not at the time that book appeared, only years later, as Time stated it in its November 17, 1997 issue, is:

Hersh has had a second thoughts about some of his sources. For his book The Samson Option, about Israel's nuclear-weapons program, he depended on Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer with a penchant for intricate tales. But a story in the November Vanity Fair quotes Hersh as now saying that Ben-Menashe"lies like people breathe."

Anson did write that and a little more.

He reported that Random House had contracted with Hersh for the book that appeared as The Samson Option and that it was a flop. But in England Hersh made money on it after getting into a hassle with several British publishers to whom he referred as Israeli intelligence assets. They sued each other and after one died mysteriously the other settled out of court with Hersh for a hundred thousand British pounds.

The part to which Time alluded is:

In writing the book, Hersh had relied on Ari Ben-Menashe, a shadowy Israeli exile and arms dealer who specialized in spinning fantastic, unverifiable stories. When a writer for The New Republic pressed Hersh for an accounting, Hersh — who now says Ben-Menashe "lies like people breathe" — snapped, "You know what, kid? Come around next Tuesday and tie my shoelace."

From this it can fairly be taken that Hersh thought more of his shoelace than of his reputation as a writer, about his integrity, personal or professional.

He went from Ben-Menashe to his magnification of Ben-Menashe in Exner.

If his mistitled The Dark Side of Camelot, which is more about this dark side of Sy Hersh, does nothing else, it is consistent with the belief that Hersh cares more about his shoelace, about almost anything, than he does about his personal and professional reputations.

Here is what I wrote, in haste without first reading The Samson Option through, when it appeared, in January, 1993.

Dear Jerry,	1/18/93

I've read about a fifth of Hersh's The Samson Option. It is impressive and well-written, predictable for him. It is also dishonest, the reason I write you about it. I do not know whether you've read it and if you have not, whether you'll have the time to read it critically. I did not begin that way but the farther I got into it the more apparent it was to me that he intended a one- sided account of what I presume is true, that Israel has the bomb.

After reading this much of the book I realized that he has been without any explanation of why Israel believed it required the bomb, with a single, passing mention that can be taken that way. This was Ike's failure to respond to Ben-Gurion's request that Israel be included under the US nuclear shield.

Along with the absence of any presentation of Israeli justification of proceeding with the bomb is an absence of any presentation of what, militarily and politically, Israel faced, particularly when it was so much weaker than it now is.

He can be excused, if one stretched, for not have a chapter on this, but I do not excuse it and believe that both fairness and honesty required it. Otherwise the book is polished propaganda, not a full and dependable account.

Before Truman was elected, when I was still doing radio news at what became WGMS, I recall clearly that Egypt was importing all the Nazi scientists it could get for military projects. Of these I am clear in my recollection of missiles.

Iraq's hostility to Israel is well-known, even historic. Did not Israel have to regard itself as a potential target of Iraqi atomic or nuclear bombs?

Until Camp David, as he does not mention, the entire Muslim world was in a state of war with Israel. Those agreements led to Egypt's recognition of the State of Israel. It is the only Muslim country to recognize that state and the only one not to have persisted in a state of war with Israel. The others have as their continuing policy wiping the state of Israel out. Now these are things I not only did not read where they belong in such a book, up front, I also checked the index. Under PLO the index has three mentions only, none with any subject indicated. I just thought to check the index for Arafat. Not there!

Now this is not that large a book that a few pages could not have been added in fairness and in honesty if he had intended either.

So we have a book that is critical of Israel for developing the bomb that does not tell the reader why Israel decided to develop the bomb. Nor what the international attitude toward it is, as reflected at the UN. Nor why the enormous expenditure was invested in developing the bomb at the cost of so many urgent needs that could not be met and at the cost of fantastic indebtedness.

There can be legitimate disagreements over what has to be included in such a book and what might not be. My own view is that on such a subject all that within reason can be interpreted as relevant should be included.

One that I believe he could not have overlooked I realize others may regard differently, but it gets to the environment of Israel's belief it needed the bomb.

After all the wars the Arabs lost, when as the simple price for US recognition of the PLO it asked for only a statement that it recognized the right of the State of Israel to live in peace within secure borders, the PLO itself rejected this through its executive council but Arafat, under heavy pressure, pretended to. He did not. He could not have been more overtly evasive in refusing to face the issue in his statement — which still would not have been binding to the PLO. His actual statement the US administration grabbed and interpreted as recognizing Israel did not. He did not mention the State of Israel. He spoke only of the people of Israel. That is deliberately not recognizing the right of the State to live in peace, as the world pretended. And he soon blew that by refusing to condemn a PLO terrorist attack in which it got caught.

To most of the readers these facts and so many more like them will be unknown and thus from the approach Hersh has taken and from what I recall from reviews and commentaries they will be made to have anti-Israel feelings and attitudes or they will have these attitudes reinforced.

Israel did not take the Iraqi nuclear plant out until 6/81, long, long after it was clear that Iraq was aiming at the bomb and that in this much of the world had to have helped it, the world that sits in judgment of Israel on its bomb. Of course also the part of the world that pretended ignorance of what Iraq was up to while helping it do it.

It was not long before the world was deeply indebted to the Israelis for ending the bomb threat from Iraq. Which gives every indication of persisting in it at all and very considerable costs. Including at this very minute.

What do you think the situation, especially our situation, would have been if Saddam had that bomb to use in the Gulf War?

I've mentioned nothing about the other Muslim arms proliferation, all of which Israel has to consider is available for use against it — by states that persist in non-recognition and in a state of war. Nothing about the Muslim CBW capabilities, some rather well known. But these dangers to Israel deserve no mention in such a book? The other efforts against it, like trying to ruin Israel economically?

If the state were not Israel and if the Muslims did not monopolize the world's energy supplies I think there would be an entirely different reaction. Witness India and Pakistan, China and North Korea. And suspects, like South Africa. And the current situation in which for all practical purposes the Muslim world is silent about Iraq and what Saddam has been and is doing. Including in challenging the UN and not living up to the agreement to which he did agree to end the Gulf War. . . . Hersh did not begin with honest intentions and what he evolved is not honest. It is propaganda.

/s/

Harold

The farther I get into the book the more interested I become in what it reveals about Hersh and his objectives and the accumulating evidence that rather than a reporting job, at which he is superb, it is a political argument disguised as a reporting job.

Of interest because John McCone was CIA head at the time of the JFK assassination and its investigation is that Hersh begins his Chapter 6 with an account of McCone as a partisan and incomplete leaker. (Pages 71ff) Hoover caught him doing that with consummate irresponsibility over the fabrications of Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte — over which Ambassador Mann was well on his way to starting World War II when wheeled in.

In discussing the ultra Admiral Lewis Straus, AEC head, and portraying him as blindly pro-Israel, he reports that Strauss favored raising money beginning in 1933, to resettle endangered Jews in Africa. While correctly pointing this impinged on the rights of those living on the land to be bought for this purpose, Hersh does not note how it parallels an early Hitler scheme for ridding Europe of Jews.

Without recognition of how it can influence his argument that Straus was blinded by his Jewishness, Hersh says on 86 that he "privately was in favor of a nuclear-armed Israel" while saying two pages later that he "remained hostile to Zionism all of his life." Can it be that Straus was motivated to want Israel to have the nuclear weapons because Straus was so anti-Zionist?

Hersh notes on page 89 that in the CIA there was a fear of the loyalty of Jews so they were excluded from dealing with "Israeli issues within the CIA headquarters" and that for many years no Jews were assigned to Israel [inside the CIA]. He quotes a high-ranking CIA Jew as saying years later that "every fucking Jew in the CIA was in accounting or legal."

On 96 Hersh says, quoted in full, that JFK was told at a Hyannis gathering, "everybody knows the reputation of your father concerning Jews and Hitler." He has a footnote on that page saying that during the period in which he got his education JFK had "few close Jewish friends," which he says was not atypical for wealthy Irish Catholics, but he has no footnote saying what the "reputation" is that the father got "concerning Jews and Hitler."

On 97 he quotes reporter and JFK friend Charles Bartlett as quoting JFK saying that Jews had told him that in return for "paying" his "bills" they wanted control over his Middle East policy." Perhaps true, although nothing about it in his [Hersh's] spare notes. But if true is it unusual in any way — other than being attributed to Jews?

Hersh quotes Floyd Cutler, an American expert after a trip to Israel's Dimona nuclear operation as saying "They were terrified that they'd be bombed. I was asked by an Israeli to raise the question of an American nuclear umbrella."

If Hersh does not see any connection between the refusal to guarantee Israel against nuclear attack and its decision to achieve its own nuclear protection he is blind. The blindness extending to his index. This is the third such (unindexed) quotation to this point. (There are more, like on 178.) Hersh talks about Admiral Straus as pro-Israel while anti-Zionist and as in favor of a "nuclear-armed Israel" but Hersh never connects the two, the US refusal to provide nuclear protection and Israel's resulting quest for its own nuclear protection. Or against vastly larger enemy forces. Or CBW.

In seeming to argue against providing this nuclear protection, Hersh quotes Cutler as asking, "Would the United States initiate a nuclear war to protect any country in the Middle East, or India, or Pakistan, or Argentina?" He says that Cutler said, "we were all in a bind. We have to be careful in assigning blame. It may be a story but there is no right or wrong."

I don't know why Hersh included the no right or wrong part of the quote unless he feared a strong reaction from omitting it but it applies to him and he does blame in his writing.

Moreover, was the question of initiating a nuclear war to protect any country?

Is not a "shield" concept that the promise to retaliate will discourage another from initiating a nuclear war?

I am not a third of the way through the book and I wonder more and more what impelled Hersh to do this book rather than one of many other subjects available to him. I continue to wonder about his overt bias and his dishonesty in the book. About him.

For example, his lengthy footnote on 88 reporting that our planes regularly overflew and photographed Nazi extermination camps, his plural but he mentioned only Auschwitz by name. It has been photographed "30 times." Showing "four large complexes of gas chambers and crematoriums . . . Bodies were being buried in trenches or burned in large open pits. Some of the photos showed victims being marched to their deaths, while others showed prisoners being processed for slave labor." He does not say that this slave labor was performed at the IG Farben "synthetic oil and rubber complex" only five miles away. He does say that Auschwitz 12,000 were killed daily. An instead of explaining this disclosure, new to me, he seeks to justify its being ignored by saying that photo-interpreters were not available enough and informed enough to make this out. But there was no such need because before then the death camps and crematoria were well reported by eyewitnesses who were ignored by the Allies. With the knowledge that existed these pictures were confirmation of what had been reported and ignored. I think they also refute the claim to explain away not bombing the railroad track to prevent the influx of more to be exterminated: it is obvious that the slave labor was working at the plants engaged in essential Nazi war production. There was this additional reason for bombing at least the means of getting the slave labor there. Hersh also discloses that bombers flew over at least 30 times. So there was plenty of opportunity to at the time reduce Nazi was supplies and human fuel for the crematoria. It did not even require special flights — there were 30+.

This is the Hersh of My Lai? Or is it a Heine-like Jew, a Jew-hating Jew or one with some special ax of a different kind to grind? Is it only that he is anti-Israel?

Hersh begins his Chapter 9 reporting that when Kennedy could not get Ben-Gurion to say what he wanted him to say he decided "to help get Ben-Gurion . . . out of office." The first step was to invite a political rival, Golda Meir to a long visit at Palm Beach. (Page 117).

Hersh says that JFK "made an extraordinary private commitment to Israel's defense, "We are asking the cooperation of Israel . . . not unfriendly to Israel; but in order to help more effectively I think it is clear that in case of an invasion the United States would come to the support of Israel . . ." 117-8)

As Hersh fails to note, as a "private commitment" this had no meaning after JFK was out of office and need not have while he was President. Moreover, depending on the capabilities of any invading force(s), coming to Israel's aid after invasion had to be regarded by Israeli's as perhaps being too late. (Compare with 178, where he says what I say here.)

And, of course, Israel was invaded and it got no military forces from the US to help it and the wars demonstrated that help could always be too late.

It is not easy to believe that the US would go to war against the world's petroleum monopoly or would have then.

When Egypt, Syria and Iraq combined in the Arab Federation Ben-Gurion proposed that the US and USSR jointly and publicly declare the territorial integrity of every Middle Eastern state. JFK would not. When Ben-Gurion then wrote him, "my people have a right to exist . . . and this existence is in danger" JFK again refused to sign a security pact. This told Ben-Gurion's party to get rid of him, Hersh says.

In discussing LBJ's closer ties to Jews and stronger feelings and the reason for them — his trip to a crematoria — Hersh says what I do not recall knowing, that Erich Leinsdorf was about to be deported by the US when LBJ prevented that.

Hersh does not evaluate this "extraordinary private commitment" he says JFK gave Ben- Gurion. He does not note that when Israel was invaded the US did not get militarily involved, as JFK promised, and he has no observation about the US refusal to put any guarantees on paper and how Israel could interpret that and why the US didn't.

Yet without comment and without any notes this is part of Hersh's argument for Israel not developing the bomb for its own protection.

Is it not obvious that if JFK did not dare put his promise in writing there was little chance of his daring to implement it? Hersh has no observation on whether or not this could or should have made those Israelis determined to develop their bomb willing or unwilling to give the promise or of any real meaning in the promise for Israel for the future.

Chapter 10 is the title chapter, "The Samson Option." He writes it to give the impression this is how Israelis who wanted the bomb actually thought and spoke of that extremity but this is not true: "In its place, argued the nuclear advocates, would be the Samson option. Samson, according to the Bible . . . cried out, 'Let my soul die with the Philistines'."(page 137) He concludes this paragraph with a similar suggestion, "For Israel's nuclear advocates, the Samson Option became another way of saying, 'Never again'." Here he has a footnote to a Podheretz Commentary essay in which Podheretz offers the opinion that if there was a war in which Israel was hopelessly lost it would do as Samson did, not do a Masada of mass suicide. The closest thing to a source in his notes as "For a discussion of the Samson and Masada psychologies see "A Psycho-History of Zionism . . ." The number of books in his text and sources is considerable, so I wonder how he had the time for a book with this title, or whether he was attracted to it by its title.

While I indicated he at no point gives an explanation of why those Israelis who opted for the nuclear weapon did so and at no point makes an effort to state what the nuclear interest/ situation was in the Muslim world, from time to time a bit creeps in. For example at the beginning of this chapter he quotes a Dayan article published 4/63 or well before Israel had made any real progress on having a nuclear bomb, as "urging" the Israeli arms industry to keep pace with President Gamel Abdel Nassar's effort to build nuclear weapons." (page 129) He has not yet given his reader any real understanding of Nassar as a person or leader or of his policies. But without that, is it not enough that Nassar sought the bomb for Israel to feel that as a deterrent it also needed the bomb? No discussion of this by Hersh. No mention.

On 138 Hersh says that "A major complication in the debate (over whether to develop the bomb by Israel), seemingly, was the Arab and Israeli press which routinely published exaggerated accounts of each side's weapons of mass destruction. In Israel there were alarmist accounts of Chinese support for an Egyptian nuclear bomb. . ." Hersh has no single quotation or citation of any such stories in the Israeli press. But do not the subsequent wars reflect that the Arabs were very well supplied with advanced weaponry, especially planes and tanks? Was not the USSR stocking them all? And he wrote this after he knew that the Scuds had exploded over Israel in the Gulf War and after it was well known that China and other powers like North Korea were stocking Syria with missiles of longer range than the Scuds. And Saudi Arabia obtained from the US planes that could enable it to bomb Greece, that much of a load range.

It is not only Nassar about whom Hersh gives his reader not a word to this point, through chapter 10. He has nothing on any of them, the Saddams, whose name is not mentioned in the book once, or Asad, also not mentioned (Correction, there is a single mention of Saddam Hussein on page 317, his Epilogue, where he says that on the second day of the war Saddam launched 8 Scuds at Israel). Of King Hussein, on page 289, he says it was Ariel Sharon's hope to overthrow him and make Jordan a Palestinian state. No mention is made Gadafi under any spelling of which I know. Libya is not mentioned at all, not its tyrant or its CBW arms and plants. None of this and more if I searched, I'm sure, in a book supposedly examining the Israeli development and possession of nuclear weapons, and with the title yet of "The Samson Option" so clearly scribbled from what appears to be a work of amateur shrinkery published in 1975 by the prestigious house of Mason J. Charter, in New York!

His chapter 11, "Playing the Game," is on Angleton. It has remarkably few sources and none for some direct quotations. Some of it is new to me an I'd like to know the source! Including of direct quotations. What made wonder is that much as he knows about Angleton he has no source for his statement that it was Angleton who received the CIA intelligence on Israel. He was head of counterintelligence, not intelligence, and normally intelligence would be routed to that component.

In Chapter 12, "The Ambassador," he has brief mention of the Israeli attack on our spy ship the Liberty. He quotes a cable from our ambassador saying, "Urge strongly that we too avoid publicity. (As Israel had sought to do.) [Liberty's] proximity to the scene could feed Arab suspicions of U.S.-Israel collusion . . .(his omission) Israelis obviously shocked by error and tender sincere apologies." (Pages 166-8)

On page 167 he begins this short section saying that the Liberty, a naval intelligence ship, "had been monitoring Middle East communications traffic in international waters off the coast of Israel and had been identified as an American ship before the attack . . ." In the text Hersh has no explanation of the attack but in a footnote — on Clark Clifford! — it quotes him as not crediting Israel's claim of error. (Neither do I!) But having said that the ship flew an American flag and had been identified as American and then that the "error" explanation is not credible when he says nothing else it is a deliberate attack on Israel. He quotes the Ambassador as saying that Arabs could suspect collusion with Israel but says nothing at all about the ship monitoring Israeli communications when Israel was in a declared war in which it could be wiped out. (It was on the third day of that war.) The Israeli pilots had to assume their communications were being monitored and that it was a US ship or an Arab ship flying a US flag. The ship had no business being there on such a mission without arranging for the Israelis to know why it was there and persuading it that it was not spying on Israel's communications. Avoiding the incitation against Israel he published would have required but one sentence and the book had plenty of room for that.

I see no pint in continuing with long details or comments and I'll make fewer. But I cannot omit his justifying on 178 the US not to keep a President's promise: the US "failed to respond to Nassar's closing the straight of Tiran and blockade of Elat. Israeli foreign ministry documents show that Dwight Eisenhower had promised in writing after the Suez debacle of 1956 that the United States would use force, if necessary, to keep the straight open. Israel called on Johnson to keep that commitment after Nassar's blockade and felt betrayed upon learning that the State Department considered Eisenhower's commitment to have expired when Eisenhower left office in early 1961. Only a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate was binding on subsequent administrations . . ." Yet as noted earlier, Hersh had the exact opposite position re: a JFK promise.

This was, he says, a month before the Six-Day War — as he says — and he does not say that it did or could trigger that war, or whether what Egypt did was an act of war.

Without comment or explanation, he reports that the US "embargoed all arms deliveries to Israel for 135 days . . . while the Soviets continued to supply their allies, the Arabs.

This has no bearing on any Israeli effort to develop The Bomb? Or belief it had to?

He even lies, and it is a lie, in the very beginning of Chapter 15, to cover the perfidy of Albion. He refers to "the Jewish struggle after World War II against the British mandatory power in Palestine. The British authorities had angered David Ben-Gurion and his followers by insisting that the adhere to the strict limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine that were set in 1939, after three years of Arab revolts." In fact the British refused to permit the number of Jews within those "strict limitations" to enter Palestine. He melds time, treating before and after World War II as one period and in this makes no mention of the fact that those denied permission to emigrate from Europe within the quota were incinerated by Hitler and as of that era has what came after the war, "the outgunned members of the Hagannah, the Jewish underground, began the inevitable guerrilla war against British troops." (195) This is more reprehensible because in the period he omits, of the war, as with World war I, Palestine Jews fought valiantly with the British while most of the Arabs of the area were behind Hitler.

This is not sloppy writing. Hersh is not a sloppy writer. It is a deliberate deception and misrepresentation. Moreover, as he may say later, "the underground" did not consist only of the Hagannah.

In reading his account of the 1973 war in his "Nuclear Blackmail" chapter pages 225ff I was surprised to note that he avoided giving any meaningful account of the remarkable military performance of the surprised and unmobilized Israeli forces. I then remembered that he handled the 1967 war the same way. To me this is surprising for a number of reasons, including that it could be an argument that Israel did not need The Bomb. It would have taken only a few sentences to give his readers an idea of the remarkable military performance of the greatly outnumbered and under-equipped Israeli forces so that other than his argument for their not having the bomb the reader could learn more about the actualities of that area and that dispute. He does make passing reference one point to Israel crossing the Suez canal but he at no point indicates the number of prisoners they took, the planes, tanks, and even armies they destroyed or the casualties. Without the epilogue he added, in paperback format this book is only 315 pages so space was not a consideration. It seems as though in all respects save for making the bomb he intends to deprecate Israel and just about all things Israeli.

His account of the Nixon/Kissinger reaction to the nuclear blackmail by Israel Hersh alleges is new to me and is interesting. He says Israel said it would use the bomb, would have to, if its conventional arms lost in the earliest moments of the 1973 war were not replaced.

Not until the very end does Hersh offer any explanation of or reasons for Israel's making the enormous and very dangerous (for it) investment in having its own Bomb. On page 318, next to the last in his Epilogue, he refers to the Gulf War guarantees meaning "little; no Jews had been killed by poison gas since Treblinka and Auschwitz and Israel, after all, had built its bomb so it would never have to depend on the goodwill of others when the lives of Jews were being threatened."

The very last sentence in this epilogue bears on this: "The Samson Option is no longer the only nuclear option available to Israel."

In short, only after completing a very anti-Israel book which he was certain to get considerable international attention does he make a gesture at putting the entire book in context. He does not give his reader or reviewers any reason to believe that it was not all 100% madness and irresponsibility until after his mind-poison has had its effect.

Earlier I noted the inadequacy, an understatement, of his notes and citations of sources and to a large degree their total absence where they appear to be most necessary. This morning, my reading including his last two chapters, his Epilogue and the Afterword to the Vintage edition, I began to believe and I do believe that his book is really an operation of essentially United States intelligence, with some involvement of some in Israeli intelligence or opposition politics or both.

This would account for the absence of the urgently needed, in most cases, notes on the unnamed and unidentified sources for most of the content of this book.

In this morning's reading, in which I did not bother to check the inadequate notes, and in looking at them now see that for those chapters they take up less than a page, I came to believe that even if he had a massive research staff it does not seem possible for him to have located and read all the sources he does cite, many in text, not notes. And his brief (page 329) acknowledgments do not refer to any such research help.

Perhaps relevant, perhaps not, his last two chapters are on the Pollard case in the US and Vanunu's leaking of Israeli nuclear information in London, this is a very brief chapter. Much of the Pollard material has no direct connection, but I think I'd have included it, too. Among the to me remarkable omissions in his handling of that is any reference to the unusual severity of the sentence. This also is consistent with his serving US government interests in his book.

With Hersh here is a precedent. Colby selected him of all reporters to use in getting and getting rid of Angleton and his disclosures he believed necessary for the health of the CIA, for the disclosure of its "family jewels," as I recall the phrase. While this may not have happened, I believe it is the history of this book and it does explain the unquestioned omissions of many, possibly most sources and the absence of citing direct quotations of controversial nature to any source.

If this book did not have this origin, it would have been impossible without intelligence agency help the signs of which permeate this book.

/s/

H.

In his The Samson Option Hersh seems clearly to be still again indebted to the CIA, the CIA to which he was indebted for giving him an exclusive on its spectacular "family jewels" leaking and its getting rid of the fabled Angleton.

In his The Dark Side of Camelot Hersh is again indebted to the CIA, especially to its Halperns who fed him the lies he needed to have a sources for and the anti-Kennedy propaganda he required for his anti-Kennedy book.

It is clear that this book is a propaganda job in the interest of the CIA, if not in its interest only.

It is also clear that in this entire book there is not a word of criticism of the CIA — and in this epilogue we have some of the warranted criticism of it by its own inspector general that the CIA suppressed for more than three decades of its perpetration of those of its lies — there is not a relevant word that is not favorable to the CIA, regardless of fact, truth, the CIA's record and what says and proves means other than Hersh says that was publicly available to him.

Beginning not later than the Colby exclusive to Hersh of that "family jewels" sensation, through The Samson Option and in The Dark Side of Camelot it is without question that Hersh served CIA interests.

There can be a question about his relationship with the CIA but there is no question, he has served its interests as well as if he had been on its payroll.