Inventing the Facts

The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.

by Seymour M. Hersh.

Random House. 354 pp. $23.00.

Seymour Hersh has long been recognized as one of America’s top investigative journalists. He is the recipient, as the jacket of this book tells us, of “more than a dozen major journalism prizes,” including the Pulitzer Prize, and was responsible for breaking the story of the My Lai massacre. He has earned a reputation, at least among his colleagues in the news industry, for reporting courageously and accurately things that other reporters have been unable or unwilling to report.

Besides translating into big book advances and adulation of his work, the most important by-product of this reputation is that the media tend to accept Hersh’s findings without the same skepticism or competitive jealousy with which many reporters traditionally view the work of their colleagues. In other words, Hersh’s reputation has given him a license to publish virtually anything he wants without the same scrutiny that applies to other members of the media.

No book in recent years better demonstrates the dangers of having such a reputation than Hersh’s The Samson Option. It purports to offer the inside story of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the activities of its intelligence service, the Mossad. Yet virtually none of the book’s newsworthy findings is accurate. In fact, many of Hersh’s claims are demonstrably false. Had this book been written by any other journalist, it would have never seen the light of day. As it is, simple fact-checking and verification of sources should have stopped its publication.

At the outset, it should be said that Israel’s nuclear program is a perfectly legitimate area for journalistic scrutiny. That Israel managed clandestinely to acquire a nuclear option by the early 1970’s with American connivance or acquiescence is a story as compelling as any other covert program meriting investigative focus. The problem with The Samson Option, however, is that Hersh approached Israel’s nuclear program and Israeli policies in general with a severe ideological bias that rendered him, at best, susceptible to disinformation and, at worst, receptive to anything negative about Israel regardless of its veracity.

Hersh is obsessively antagonistic to all of Israel’s policies—not just its nuclear program but its entire political posture—and he makes disparaging, and factually incorrect, statements about Israel’s role in the 1967 war, its war against Palestinian terrorists, its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and its intelligence-gathering. Throughout the book Hersh repeats old canards—for example, that black African countries cut off ties to Israel as a result of their opposition to Israel’s retention of territories after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when even African leaders openly admit that their termination of relations with Israel was due to the extraordinary power of the new OPEC oil cartel.

On the primary question of Israel’s development of a nuclear capability, Hersh is not only opposed but is angry that the U.S. turned a blind eye to it. He seems to believe that the “Samson Option”—the acquisition by Israel of a nuclear mutual-assured-destruction capability—was only a manifestation of innate Israeli aggression, megalomania, and belligerence when in truth it was driven by Israeli military insecurity and fears of Arab quantitative superiority.

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To put this book together, Hersh cannibalized the available literature on the subject, then stitched in his own interviews with anonymous sources, most of whom, it is transparently clear, had no substantive connection to Israel’s nuclear program or to U.S. oversight of it. One of the sources who agreed to be quoted on the record was an Israeli named Ari Ben-Menashe. Ben-Menashe has become ubiquitous: in addition to being behind the major allegations in Hersh’s book, he is also the primary source in Gary Sick’s October Surprise, which alleges that the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 secretly negotiated a deal with Iran to delay the release of American hostages until after the election.

It was from Ben-Menashe that Hersh picked up some of his most sensational charges: that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir personally transferred purloined American intelligence and satellite data to the Soviets; that the late media mogul Robert Maxwell worked with the Mossad and helped it capture Mordechai Vanunu, who had smuggled nuclear data out of Israel; and that Jonathan Pollard had actually been spying for Israel for much longer than was previously thought.

In establishing Ben-Menashe as a bona-fide source, Hersh writes that he “served for more than ten years in the External Relations Department of the Israeli Defense Force, one of the most sensitive offices in Israel’s intelligence community.” Hersh also writes that in 1987 Ben-Menashe went to “work directly for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as an adviser on intelligence issues.” This description is correct in one detail—Ben-Menashe did serve in the External Relations Department from 1977 through 1987. Everything else is palpably and demonstrably false. Ben-Menashe was a low-level translator, translating letters to and from foreign military attaches, mostly about mundane matters. He never worked for Shamir.

Had Hersh interviewed anyone in Israel—he never went to Israel, later claiming disingenuously that he would have been subject to Israeli censorship—or, for that matter, had he independently investigated any of the outlandish claims by Ben-Menashe, he would have found that his source was an abject fraud and impostor. Indeed, Ben-Menashe was denied a special security clearance because he was considered delusional. Thus he claimed that he was Israel’s top spy, that he had been a commander of the Entebbe raid in 1976, that he had planted the homing device in the Iraqi nuclear reactor right before the Israeli raid in 1981, that he had worked with Shamir on top-secret projects around the world, and that he had been with George Bush in Paris in October 1980 when Bush supposedly negotiated a secret deal with Iran.

But Hersh need not even have traveled to Israel to discover that Ben-Menashe was a pathological liar. When his book was still in manuscript, Hersh was warned by several journalists about Ben-Menashe’s credibility problems. The most forceful of these warnings came from the chief investigative reporter for the London Sunday Times “Insight” team, Peter Hounam. As the man who broke the first story on Israel’s nuclear reactor, based on the photos and information supplied by Vanunu, Hounam was particularly wellqualified to evaluate the authenticity of Ben-Menashe and his description of what is now referred to as the “Vanunu Affair.” But after interviewing Ben-Menashe, Hounam quickly concluded that he was an outright fabricator. In an effort to convince Hersh that he would be committing an egregious error to rely on Ben-Menashe, Hounam offered him an opportunity to go through his own personal files on the Vanunu Affair—a gesture not normally made in the world of investigative journalism. But Hersh turned down the offer, and made no changes in the manuscript.

New evidence revealing the methods used by Hersh was disclosed in the wake of Robert Maxwell’s death, which occurred just days after Hersh’s book was published in late October 1991. On November 12, Hersh issued a statement in London that he had just acquired new “documentation”—consisting of logs of telephone calls from a Geneva hotel to Israel—to support his allegations against Maxwell. According to Hersh, a “private detective” who had been hired by the Mossad had provided him with the material. Yet shortly after Hersh issued this statement, the London Sunday Times revealed that the “private detective” was none other than an infamous British hoaxer who specializes in deceiving British newspapers. The hoaxer admitted to the Times that he had “conned” Hersh’s publisher into believing that he worked with the Mossad, and had been paid for this story. The Times also established conclusively that no telephone logs from the Geneva hotel existed at all, rendering Hersh’s statement that he had acquired such “documentation” patently false.

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Even beyond the charges raised by Ben-Menashe, Hersh presents as fact things that are highly implausible. For example, he alleges that Israel targeted the Soviet Union for nuclear oblivion, which is nothing short of ludicrous. Even William Quandt, who served as a Middle East aide in the National Security Council under Jimmy Carter, writes: “I find it difficult to believe that Israel has developed a so-called ‘counterforce’ capability against the Soviets. It makes little sense militarily, in contrast to a ‘city-busting’ capability, which might make the Soviets think twice if they were considering threats to Israel.”

Equally absurd is Hersh’s statement (given without attribution) that an American KH-11 satellite “captured an Israeli nuclear-missile storage site” and that American government experts were able to “count ten items that were subsequently confirmed as nuclear warheads.” This means either that Israel deliberately left in the open ten nuclear warheads so that American and Soviet satellites could photograph them, or that the KH-11 satellite is so powerful that it can see through the roofs of buildings. The former notion is totally implausible and the latter is physically impossible.

To repeat, the Israeli nuclear-weapons program is fair game for investigative journalism. And there is no doubt that Israel’s intelligence services, and the government itself, like all other intelligence services and governments around the world, have engaged in skullduggery in the conduct of covert operations. Israel may in fact prove more journalistically interesting from this point of view than other countries because it probably relies to a greater degree on covert diplomacy and operations. But none of this translates into a license for well-known authors to publish outright inventions like The Samson Option.