Veteran journalist claims US bombed Nord Stream gas pipelines: Who is Seymour Hersh

The claims by Hersh have been rejected by the White House, which called them “utterly false and complete fiction” on Wednesday (February 9).

This isn’t the first time that Hersh has come out with such an investigation. The Pulitzer Prize-winner journalist has previously reported for the New York Times and New Yorker magazine.

Who is Seymour Hersh?

Born in 1937, Hersh graduated from the University of Chicago with a history degree. Before becoming a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago in 1959, he went to the University of Chicago Law School but was soon expelled for poor grades.

Hersh went on to work for news outlets such as United Press International in South Dakota and Associated Press in the subsequent years but briefly left journalism to become a press secretary for the campaign of Democractic Party Senator Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 presidential election.

After the campaign, he returned to the profession as a freelancer and began covering the Vietnam War (1954–1975). On November 12, 1969, his investigation on the My Lai Massacre was published, in which he revealed that the US Army had murdered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians earlier in 1969. The report was published by 33 newspapers and helped Hersh win the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970.

Four years later, he joined The New York Times and reported on the Watergate scandal. He also wrote critically acclaimed books such as The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), which examined former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s influence on the country’s foreign policy during the Nixon presidency.

It was in this book that Hersh accused former Prime Minister Monarji Desai of taking “$20,000 a year from the CIA during the (Lyndon B) Johnson and (Richard) Nixon administrations in exchange for information on Indian foreign policy and domestic politics”, NYT reported. Desai later filed a $50 million libel suit against the journalist but he was acquitted.

In 1993, Hersh became a regular contributor to New Yorker and wrote a series of articles for the magazine after the US invaded Iraq in 2003. He extensively reported on the treatment of detainees by US military police at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. His investigations were later compiled in a book called Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, which was released in 2004.

His next big investigation came in 2015 when he alleged that President Barack Obama and the US officials had lied about the details of the 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda, was killed. Hersh claimed that Pakistan had kept bin Laden as a prisoner since 2006 and they knew about the raid before it happened. The Obama administration denied the allegations.

Apart from the Pulitzer Prize, Hersh is the recipient of numerous honours, including a National Magazine Award for Public Interest and five George Polk Awards, which are given for exceptional long-form investigative or enterprise journalism.

In a 2018 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, when the journalist was asked about being emotionally stable even after covering “really horrible things” over the years, he replied, “I don’t socialize with nobody — not with people in government, even my good sources. I have old friends. Most of them are not in government. I like tennis and sports. I had rotator cuff surgery recently, so I’m about a month away from getting back. I’ll go to the gym maybe today or tomorrow.”