The late vice president’s lies and abuses of the Constitution spurred those close to him to tell the truth

SEYMOUR HERSH

NOV 05, 2025

∙ PAID

I was up late the other night here in Washington reading a new book on the horrors of prison life at Guantánamo Bay, one of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s contributions to life after 9/11. I woke up yesterday morning to find that Cheney, the most significant vice president in recent American history, had finally passed on. I reported critically on Cheney for years for the New Yorker with the help of people on the inside who thought there were better ways to respond to the 9/11 attacks than to offer up a different set of horrors.

At the minimum, Cheney was a co-equal to Bush and is widely understood to be perhaps the most effective vice president in history. Historians will make that call in the future. At this point I can relay my perceptions as someone who had some insight into the inner workings of his office, though I never met or talked with the man. We did bump into each other a decade or more after 9/11, but Cheney pointedly ignored my held out hand and walked past me. He was known to have a failing heart but after a new treatment he stayed alive a decade longer than expected, while continuing to hunt and fish in Wyoming. He would tell friends that his new electronically pumping heart was working fine, except that whenever he walked into the kitchen it turned on the coffee maker.

I knew early on after 9/11 that a senior operative, a bright veteran agent who knew the Middle East well—it was understood that this was information for my guidance on White House workings, but not to publish at the time—that the feared Taliban, then headed by Mullah Omar, had passed the word to the White House via the CIA that they did not consider Osama bin Laden, the head of Al Qaeda, to be an untouchable guest after 9/11. America thus was free to seek revenge on him and forgo a planned operation against the Taliban as well as bin Laden, who would soon be impossible to locate. Bush and Chenery ignored the offer, and the war was on. Bin Laden would not be found and assassinated until nearly a decade later, when a Navy Seal Team was authorized to kill him on sight by President Barack Obama, whose use of targeted assassinations of suspected terrorists abroad has never been fully explored by the media.

My journalism during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s got me to the New Yorker and then to the New York Times and then back to the New Yorker whose editor on 9/11, David Remnick, told me after the second airliner struck the World Trade Center that I was going to spend the next years of my career reporting on what would become the American war on terror.

It was clear from the get-go that Cheney was going to be the point man on that war, and I did all that a reporter for a weekly magazine can do to work my way slowly inside. Over the years of the war on terror I did find ways of getting information out of the vice president’s office from those whose loyalty to the Constitution and a sense of political and military proportionality—and the truth—outweighed all else.

With his early appearances on Sunday morning talk shows and his frank talk about the need to go to what he called “the dark side,” Cheney expanded CIA, NSA, and military intelligence operations here and abroad that shredded Constitutional limitations. Congress and the press and the public rolled over and endorsed the violations in ways that continue to have impact today. That was not my beat, as Remnick and others at the New Yorker saw it. My quest was to find out what Cheney was doing. What eventually got me inside was not my initial stories about American military foul-ups, but the repeated lying about them by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who stars, in a way he would not appreciate, in the recent documentary about my career, Cover-Up, by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus), National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Army General Tommy Franks, who was in charge of US Central Command running coalition military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The most highly classified data in the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq involved the constantly expanding authority for US special forces and covert troops in the field to assassinate suspect targets at will. Cheney and Rumsfeld were directly involved in such illegal actions, as I repeatedly reported in the New Yorker. The stress in the intelligence community about what was legal or not got to the point in 2007 that a recently retired senior CIA official who served as the rules were becoming more and more relaxed, told me: “The problem is what constituted approval. My people fought about this all the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just tell me to kill Joe Smith.

“If I was the vice president or the president, I’d say, ‘This guy Smith is a bad guy, and it’s in the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.’ They don’t say that. Instead George [Tenet]”—the director of the CIA from before 9/11 until mid-2004—“goes to the White House and is told, ‘You guys are professionals. You know how important it is. We know you’ll get the intelligence.’ George would come back and say to us, ‘Do what you gotta do.’”

The administration’s repeated lying about information I was publishing in the magazine led to calls to me at my listed home phone number from some inside who knew the truth. Those with integrity who love their country and support the American military often turn out to be the same ones who cannot stand official lying. I asked one person inside, now long retired, earlier today about Cheney and got this response: “He was smarter and more pragmatic than any president he served. He quietly shaped foreign policy behind the scenes and left few footprints. Outspoken only when defending decisions of his boss.” He then gave me a warning about this story: “ Impossible to capture him in a catch phrase.”

My closest call with Cheney as a tactician came during the mid-1970s, as I later learned from documents on file at the Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While he was working as a senior aid to Ford, Cheney learned I was writing an article for the Times about a secret operation to recover a Russian submarine that sank in the Pacific Ocean. There was a big drive within the White House to shut me up, and in a memorandum to Attorney General Edward Levi, Cheney urged him to have the FBI obtain a warrant to enter my home and recover whatever classified documents I possessed and convene a grand jury to obtain an immediate indictment. Levi rebuffed the request.

There was no similar effort to shut me up after 9/11 when I was constantly reporting on the plans and goals of Bush and Cheney in the war on terror. I wrote my stories, won some prizes, and waited out the global counterterrorism campaign. My inside reporting on the activities of the Cheney vice presidential office won me a friendship of the ambassadors to Washington from France, Germany, and England who, at Cheney’s insistence, were no longer welcome in his office for insider briefings as was customary during earlier administrations. I was open with what I knew, giving the ambassadors a chance to write memoranda to their governments’ foreign offices using information I had before I published it in the New Yorker. We met regularly to trade information and, in one crucial instance, I was allowed to review some decrypted diplomatic reporting in an embassy code room. The unusual access was a byproduct of Cheney’s distrust of Europeans and his refusal to meet with or brief America’s longtime allies.

One of my informed sources had reason—simply because of his wide experience and his proven track record—to be especially close to Cheney, who often sought his advice. This most interesting person had recoiled early on after 9/11 at some of the impulsive and countereffective American operations pushed by Cheney—such as turning from a failed war in Afghanistan to what would be a disastrous one in Iraq—and he occasionally shared his concerns with me.

In 2010, a year after Bush and Cheney left office, I accepted a contract from Sonny Mehta and Jonathan Segal of Knopf to write a book on the Cheney years. I delivered a draft of the first five chapters to my source inside to make sure his hand would not show. A few weeks later we met and he told me that Cheney, who many thought did not have long to live because of his failing heart, would realize who had been talking to me throughout the post-9/11 years.

It was very bad news to hear, and a week or two later I told my source that I had informed the publishers that I could not finish the book and would repay a great deal of money I had already spent and forfeit other sums never to be paid.

“I thought you would do this,” my source said. He then added, “And when Cheney dies, then I will tell you the real story.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5793850&forum_id=2Firm#49404012)