Fourth Estate Sy Hersh, Lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors The Hersh piece can’t be refuted because there’s not enough solid material to refute.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

Knowing, perhaps, that his critics would denounce his revisionist take on the killing of Osama bin Laden as fantasy, Seymour M. Hersh sought to pre-empt such disparagement in the first paragraph of his piece published yesterday in the London Review of Books. The accepted version of the 2011 operation put forward by the White House, Hersh charged, “might have been written by Lewis Carroll.”

And with that intro, Hersh leads the reader into a Wonderland of his own, thinly sourced retelling of the raid on Bin Laden’s complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan. According to Hersh, who cites American sources, “bin Laden had been a prisoner of the [Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency] at the Abbottabad compound since 2006” and his ISI captors eased the way for the American SEAL team to skip into Pakistan on their helicopters, kill the al Qaeda leader, and then skip out.


It’s a messy omelet of a piece that offers little of substance for readers or journalists who may want to verify its many claims. The Hersh piece can’t be refuted because there’s not enough solid material to refute. Like the government officials who spun the original flawed Abbottabad stories, he simply wants the reader to trust him.

Hersh’s piece quarrels with almost every aspect of the official story, asserting that much of it is cover designed to protect the Pakistanis who sold bin Laden out to the United States for military aid. The official account that the U.S. located bin Laden by tracking his couriers? A “cover story” to mask the former Pakistani intelligence officer who walked in with information to collect the reward. The official account of a firefight at bin Laden’s compound. Also a cover story, according to an unnamed source who says the SEALs killed bin Laden “totally unopposed.” The disposal of bin Laden’s corpse into the ocean from the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson? No evidence it happened, states Hersh. What really happened, according to an unnamed retired official who spoke to Hersh, is that the SEALs claimed to have tossed some of bin Laden’s body parts “over the Hindu Kush mountains” on the flight back to their Jalalabad, Afghanistan, base. The treasure trove of intelligence reaped by the SEALs from the shot-up Abbottabad compound? The collection of bin Laden DNA evidence? Another cover story.

In his detailed critique of the piece, Vox’s Max Fisher accuses Hersh of “internal contradictions” and “troubling inconsistencies.” Why bother to build a duplicate of the Abbottabad residence in Nevada for SEAL training purposes when the Pakistanis were going to allow a cakewalk all the way to bin Laden’s doorstep? If the intelligence materials harvested by the SEALs were fake, then why did al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri endorse them as genuine? No supporting documents, Fisher kvetches, no proof, several anonymous sources, and one named Pakistani who ran ISI in the early 1990s, amounting to “worryingly little evidence for a story that accuses hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years,” Fisher writes.

That the accounts of bin Laden’s killing have changed over time cannot be denied—in fact the story started shifting in its opening hours, as the press argued over the most elemental facts (something I wrote at the time). The London Telegraph incorrectly had one U.S. helicopter crashing and burning after “apparently hit by fire from the ground.” The Wall Street Journal asserted, wrongly, that “One Pakistani helicopter involved in the raid crashed after it was hit by firing from militants.”

Which side was Pakistan on? ABC News reported that Pakistan intelligence said it was in on the joint operation while CBS News said Pakistan was clueless about the operation, finding out “when things started going boom at this villa.” Meanwhile, President Barack Obama addressed the teamwork issue obliquely, saying in a national address, “our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.”

Where was bin Laden shot and how many times? Much disagreement in the first reports. ABC News: “…in the head and then shot again to make sure he was dead.” The Atlantic: “…done in by a double tap—boom, boom—to the left side of his face.” The London Sun: “…in the head and chest.” Almost immediately after the raid, the government made substantial changes in its telling of the story. “Even I’m getting confused,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney when attempting to sort out fact from fancy.

These dueling accounts suggest that if U.S. government officials did attempt to orchestrate the hoax Hersh alleges, they were wildly incompetent in those efforts—unable to keep the press chasing a unified narrative, as I demonstrate above. Or, they were brilliant beyond the greatest Hollywood scenarist—spewing warring plotlines that completely fogged the true story from view until Hersh discovered it for the London Review of Books. What’s more likely is that a combination of U.S. spin, secrecy, diplomacy, politics and the usual confusion keep all the joints from dovetailing perfectly.

Hersh may very well be onto something—what did the Pakistanis know, when did they know it, and how much did they help? And that debate appears to be starting in earnest already, with NBC News quickly building off Hersh’s article. But Hersh’s potentially valid question on that subject is almost lost in the broad sweep of rolling back so many other stories and quibbling with effectively every known detail of one of the most thoroughly leaked secret operations in history.

By re-exploring the bin Laden operation, Hersh has thrust himself into the phenomenological territories that Cold War spymaster James Jesus Angleton called a “wilderness of mirrors.” In this clandestine world, truths are constructed, obliterated and bent to serve their masters. Adversaries who would deceive abound in this place, and without a reliable map, a compass, a sense of direction and maybe even a pedometer, even the most intrepid voyager (or journalist) can find himself lost. I’ll volunteer to join a search party for Hersh—somebody I’ve long admired—if only somebody can tell me precisely where he is.

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Angleton discovered the phrase “wilderness of mirrors” in T.S. Eliot’s poem “Gerontion.” Send a link to your favorite Eliot poem to [email protected] . For more poetry, subscribe to my email alerts , follow my Twitter feed, and sign up for my RSS feed.