CNN Transcript: Seymour Hersh Defends His Bin Laden Report

In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, noted New York Times investigative journalist Seymour Hersh defended the claims in his article that the Obama administration lied in its account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  Hersh told Cuomo "This is not a wager — this is a story that has to be dealt with by this government very seriously."

Here is a transcript of the interview, courtesy of CNN:

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Taking out Osama bin Laden.  Just a huge moment for the American War on Terror.  Question now is, was President Obama's account of the raid that killed bin Laden a lie?  That is the claim in a stunning new article by noted investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.  He joins us now to defend the reporting.  Mr. Hersh, thank you for joining us on NEW DAY.

SEYMOUR HERSH, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Okay.

CUOMO: The basic headline here is, Pakistan knew where he was, they were keeping him there, and one of their own turned him over, essentially, to the U.S. Why do you believe that story, especially leaning so heavily on just one anonymous source?

HERSH: Well, I don't think that's correct to say one anonymous source.  The story says clearly that I was able to vet and verify information with others in the community.  It's very tough for guys still inside to get quoted extensively.  There are other people who America uses an awful lot of retired CIA people, military people, in the War on Terror and there are other people who have retired with great information, so it's much easier to quote some of them than somebody on active duty.

But the story makes it clear I vetted most and verified. You know, I've been around a long time, long of tooth in this business, and I understand the consequences of saying what I'm saying.

CUOMO: But a lot of the detail that you have in the piece, some 10,000 words, does come from this unnamed source and that's why it's drawing some fire. But, you know, if you just get in the particulars of it, what is the main reason why this would be a lie?  Why would it be covered up if it was really just a cooperative agreement with Pakistan?  Where's the motive?

HERSH: Well, no, the motive is very simple.  The idea, of course, was that we did have a walk-in, that's what the CIA calls somebody who comes in and sort of, you can argue, betrays his company or his country for money.  He took most of the $25 million, at least 20 of it. That was the offer we had on the table for information leading to the whereabouts of bin Laden that had been going on.  We had that offer outstanding since 2002. So some guy walks in, he's basically involved in the protection of bin Laden on behalf of the Pakistani intelligence service and we start from there.

CUOMO: How do you think a guy walks into the Islamabad Embassy and you know how, and certainly this person would know, how closely watched it is by Pakistani authorities.  How would someone just walk in and give this kind of information?

HERSH: Well, I don't know the details of how he walked in.

CUOMO: It matters.

HERSH: Of course, it does, but it's not very -- I can tell you right now, he talked to the station chief, a man named Jonathan Bank, a very confident officer, and the CIA and the government did what you do in a case like this. You make sure you give this guy a polygraph test, a team came out from Washington to do so.  You know, I always worry about a walk-in.  A lot of them have a lot of reasons that aren't particularly reliable or very tasteful, so they worked him to the bone, and then we began to do the issue and we realized the president was asking a lot of very good questions, how do we know it's really bin Laden, et cetera.

And we realized we had to go and talk to the Pakistanis who were keeping him and the head of the Pakistani military, a guy named General Kayani and a guy named General Pasha, eventually agreed to cooperate us.  They didn't have much choice.  We could cut off our supply of arms and money under the table to the generals and we did so. We put a lot of pressure on them and they worked with us.  Of course, they worked with us.

The alternative is, you want to believe what I call a Lewis Carroll fairytale, that bin Laden, the most hunted man since 2002 in the world, decided the one safe place to live is in a compound 40 miles from the main capital of Pakistan.

CUOMO: That's the point of intrigue that's always been a point of skepticism, is that we all thought he was hiding in some honeycomb cave somewhere and it turns out that he was right down the street from the equivalent of their West Point. With that as a starting point --

HERSH: That's a pretty good starting point.

CUOMO: The idea though - Obviously, look, I don't mean to tell you the trade, you've been doing it at such a high level for such a long time, but the idea that we were working with them and then after, as soon as it comes out, the Pakistani government condemns us unconditionally for doing it. I mean, it just doesn't seem that they were owning their own narrative. 

Why wouldn't Pakistan come out and say we gave you this guy, we helped you? 

HERSH: Well, the idea was, the understanding was -- First of all, bin Laden's very popular inside Pakistan.  The majority of the unwashed of the people there, most of the public, really respected and liked bin Laden, especially for sticking it in the eye of America.  We're not very popular in Pakistan.  Things are a little better now, but for many years we were very, very low, low on the totem pole in terms of respect.

The idea was that we were going to go in -- you know, if you have to -- Think about this. A team of SEALs, and our SEALs are the best there is, there is no question - 24, 25 guys go into the middle of Pakistan, take out a guy with no air cover, no protection, no security, no trouble.  Are you kidding me?  What happened was, the deal was we weren't going to announce it. 

They were going to take him out.  They had to kill him, that was the agreement.  There was no question this was an assassination from the get-go, despite what the White House says.

They had to kill him, and they had to bring him out, the body out, then we were going to announce that the initial plan was, the plan that everybody agreed to, it would be announced seven to ten days later as the result that we did a drone hit in the Hindu Kush mountains that separate Pakistan and Afghanistan and my god, we took a look, there was a tall guy, and it turned out to be bin Laden, we did a DNA test, and the president was going to announce it a week later.  Everybody in Pakistan is protected.  The generals --

CUOMO: So what happened?

HERSH: What happened is the president decided that night to go public.

CUOMO: But look, then so he just double crosses the people who had handed him something, especially this president, who's bent over backwards to be nice to Pakistan?  On the SEALS side, you have that they were training for a raid that you say they didn't need to do.  Why were they training so hard?  You have it in Utah, but it was supposedly in Nevada.

Then you have the SEALs telling such a different account.  They would all have to be lying for what you're saying to be true, and we had our Peter Bergen, as you probably know, who went to the compound in Abbottabad before they destroyed it and he said the place was riddled with bullets and was, obviously, the scene of a firefight, not to mention that we lost a bird in this and the helicopter going down.  All of that would have to be untrue, other than the helicopter going down, for your account to be true.  Why put so much stock in it?

HERSH: Because I did an awful lot of work, I talked to a lot of Pakistanis, I quote by name, one of the things that made the story doable now, where before it wouldn't have been, was the fact that a former retired head of the Pakistani Intelligence Service, General Asad Durrani, basically said to me, look, you got the story.  We all know this is true.  We've all known this is true for a long time.  He's talking about the insiders.

CUOMO: But he didn't say that to Bergen.  When Bergen contact him, he said, look, I don't know the facts, but it is

plausible.  That's not exactly endorsement.

HERSH: That's not what he said in the magazine article.

CUOMO: We have a graphic.  Put up what we're saying that the reporting is there so we can have it.  "When I e-mailed Durrani," this is from Peter Bergen, obviously, "after the Hersh piece appeared, Durrani said there was no evidence of any kind that the ISI knew that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad but he could still 'make an assessment that this could be plausible'." That's exactly what I said it was. So that --

HERSH: That's not what he said in the article and that's not what he said in many, many exchanges by phone, by e-mail.  The sentences that appeared in the article are very definitive.  He understood there was a walk-in.  Of course, everybody knew that's what happened in the Pakistani side.  I also quoted somebody I could not name in the Pakistani who's very knowledgeable about Pakistan saying the same thing.

Look, I'm sorry it goes against the grain.  I've been doing this all my life.  All I can tell you is, I understand the consequences, I've been a reporter, as you know, for 50 years in this town.  Had a lot of good stories and a lot of stories --

CUOMO: But not everything turns out the way you think it's going to turn out also, even in your own career.  That's part of the vagaries of the business.  But something --

HERSH: I would argue that a lot of the stories I wrote were pretty much on mark.  I'm not going to -- nobody's perfect, of course. I mean, everybody's done bad stories.

CUOMO: But it's about which stories you decide to go out on a limb for and on this one --

HERSH: I'm not out on a limb, that's just your definition.  I'm sorry that Durrani was under pressure, maybe I had no idea what he said.  But it's very clear, we were back and forth in e-mails.

CUOMO: But if he doesn't say the same to Peter Bergen by Bergen's reporting, if Bergen sees that it was the scene of the firefight, if the SEALs say it happened that way, we know they were training - not where you said, but somewhere -- the Saudis putting this guy up in Pakistan when the Saudis hate him and revoked his citizenship.  Why would the Saudis be paying for the keep of Osama bin Laden?  you didn't find that hard to believe?

HERSH: Not if you think about the fact that the last thing the Saudis wanted the Pakistanis to do was to give us access to bin Laden because then bin Laden might tell us just who was financing him in those years in 2001, 2002, when he did the
damage he did.

CUOMO: The Pakistanis, as you know, have handed people over quietly before, like KSM.  Why wouldn't they have done it that way?  Why this elaborate rouse this way?

HERSH: It wasn't a rouse - I told you, it was an understanding it wouldn't be announced, it would be announced by the president seven to ten days later.  I'm waiting for the White House to deny the story.  They haven't done anything public yet.

CUOMO: There are no commenting it right now, but I don't think --

HERSH: Why not?

CUOMO: -- I think it's a safe bet that they don't buy it.  I think they don't want to give too much fuel to the fire.  I think they'd rather it just go away as something that should be dismissed.  Why aren't the Pakistanis owning it? Why aren't they coming out and saying, yes, Hersh has it right?

HERSH: Why?  Because if the two generals involved admitted publicly that they knew all about the invasion and the attack in advance, they would have a hard time being safe.  They'd need an awful lot of security.  The option for them, once the president made public, made that surprise announcement, believe me, to the Pakistanis, the option for them was to say, yes, you're right, we didn't know a thing about it and take the heat that way.

And, in fact, the Pakistani military, the military, is a very proud institution, it was a big blow to their whole image and the country.  It was a very unhappy time for the Pakistanis.

CUOMO: It would have to be -- but one of two things has to be true. Either they found him, as you suggest, and they took him and they were holding him for leverage and they didn't want anybody to know because they are so afraid because everybody loves bin Laden, or they would have immediately turned him over to the United States to show they actually were a good friend and I had interviewed Pervez Musharraf, the former president there, more than once about this, and there's no question a problem for them about what to do with bin Laden if they got him.

But they can't have it both ways that, you know, well we would turn him over if we got him, but we got him and we didn't turn him over because we were holding him as leverage, but then when we do decide for you to have him, you're going to stage it as a raid and make us look like we're idiots and we're on the wrong side of this war.  How does Pakistan win in this?

HERSH: Musharraf was out of office at this time.  Of course, you're not going to share it.  You're going to keep this a pretty tight secret.  Look --

CUOMO: They looked bad in this, is what I'm saying, Seymour.  They didn't come out --

HERSH: They look bad now.  No, they look bad now.

CUOMO: But even the way they planned it would have looked bad for them.

HERSH: What choice did they have?  What choice did they have when somebody on the inside walks into the American Embassy, and that's the only way I can describe it.  Of course, everybody in Pakistan knows who he is and, of course, even I do know who he is and where he is.  We're not talking about that.

What if somebody walks in and says, here's the story.  What can they do?  They are stuck.  And the best thing they could do is once we let them know that we knew that they had him there. They had him there at least since '06. They picked him up somewhere in the mountainside, wherever he was hiding.  I think somewhere actually inside the Pakistan borders in Waziristan and the Pakistani Intelligence Service picked him up, they put him in the compound, he'd been there four years, he was a prisoner there. What could they do? They were stuck either way.  They had to go along with us.  The best way you could do it would be to have the SEALs come in. And if you remember, the SEALs came in with no air cover, no, you know, if there was a big firefight --

CUOMO: But the administration released information that they knew where there were holes in the radar and that these ships that were used could get through without the radar picking them up and that's why they did the mission the way they did and practiced it for so long in Nevada, as opposed to Utah, where you suggest in the reporting.  Why doesn't that all smell right?

HERSH: If I'm wrong about Utah, that's just a mistake, because I know exactly where they were in Nevada.  Sometimes my geography gets lousy.  In any case, the bottom line was, you know, I can sit there and argue with you all week and all day
about it.  The story is a long story, there's a lot of information in it.  It's not just -- it is one source, one person who's quoted, but I make it very clear that others were involved.

I'll take it a step further. The information I have suggested, that the whole notion of being buried at sea is probably not correct.  The story was, it would have been a good, clean mission if we hadn't gone public that night and said we did it, instead of waiting the week as we were supposed to.  That was the game.

If you think about it that way, you realize it makes a lot more sense. The Pakistanis were confronted with the fact we knew something they didn't want us to know, they had no choice but to cooperate because we have a lot of economic leverage on them, the generals, I mean, we put a lot of money into Pakistan.

CUOMO: Right. I'm just saying that you've made a big wager here with a pedigree that extends many years.

HERSH: No, no, it's not a wager. Excuse me, excuse me. That's your definition.  This is not a wager.  This is a story that has to be dealt with by this government very seriously.

CUOMO: Understood.

HERSH: And it has to be dealt with others.

CUOMO: And we'll see how they deal with it going forward.  Again, just for the audience's benefit, this is something that Peter Bergen has also looked into very closely and he says what's true is not new and what's new is not true.

But Mr. Hersh, thank you very much for coming on to defend the reporting. Appreciate it here on NEW DAY.

HERSH: Bye-bye.