Perle Threatens Lawsuit Over Hersh Article In New Yorker
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 14, 2003; Page C01
Seymour Hersh has a knack for arousing strong reactions in the people he investigates.
Richard Perle, his latest target, has gone nuclear in recent days, likening the New Yorker reporter to a "terrorist."
Why the incendiary language? "He ignites bombs and I don't think he cares whether the victims are innocent civilians," the former assistant defense secretary declares.
New Yorker Editor David Remnick calls Perle's attack "disgusting."
Hersh says that Perle, a businessman who is also chairman of President Bush's Defense Policy Board, hasn't cited a single inaccuracy in this week's New Yorker piece. "It's not about me and Richard. It's about what Richard did," Hersh says.
What Perle did, according to the magazine, is to have lunched in January with controversial Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi and a Saudi industrialist. The industrialist, Harb Saleh Zuhair, was interested in investing in a venture capital firm, Trireme Partners, of which Perle is a managing partner.
Nothing ever came of the lunch in Marseilles; no investment was made. But the Hersh piece suggests that Perle, a longtime critic of the Saudi regime, was inappropriately mixing business and politics.
Khashoggi, a former arms broker who says he lost $10 million as a middleman between the White House and Iran in the 1980s arms-for-hostages deal, told Hersh: "It was normal for us to see Perle. We in the Middle East are accustomed to politicians who use their offices for whatever business they want."
The piece contains this extraordinary quote from Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States: "There were elements of the appearance of blackmail -- 'If we get in business, he'll back off on Saudi Arabia' -- as I have been informed by participants in the meeting."
"Just preposterous," Perle says, adding that "my views are completely unchanged about the appalling record of the Saudis in making money available to extremist groups. . . . That accusation is so monstrous -- that my view is for sale -- and there is not a shred of anything to support that."
This is, at bottom, a clash between two old Washington warriors who have tangled over the years. Perle, 61, is a tenacious infighter who so strongly opposed arms control with the Soviets when he worked in the Reagan administration that he was dubbed the Prince of Darkness. From his office in suburban Maryland, he wields considerable clout as a hawkish adviser on Iraq, in part through his chairmanship of the Pentagon advisory board, a blue-chip assortment of former officials.
Hersh, 65, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, is a bulldog journalist and former New York Times reporter who takes on powerful people and thorny subjects. He drew criticism for initially accepting a bogus batch of Kennedy papers while researching his 1997 book "The Dark Side of Camelot," but has scored repeatedly with stories about U.S. intelligence and military matters.
Three years ago, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, then the White House drug czar, denounced a piece that Hersh was writing about his role in alleged brutality during the Persian Gulf War, sparking a war of words even before the article was published.
Perle, a frequent talk show guest, has been one of the leading voices demanding the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Because Trireme, which was founded in 2001, specializes in homeland security and defense, Hersh writes that Perle "has set up a company that may gain from a war."
Perle calls the piece "inaccurate" but doesn't dispute that the lunch took place. He says he will likely sue Hersh in Britain, where libel cases face a lesser burden of proof.
Perle says he has a four-page letter -- he won't say whether it's from Khashoggi or Zuhair -- complaining of "egregious misquotes and flagrant errors derived from my interview with Mr. Hersh," along with "reckless, grotesque renditions and innuendos."
Remnick says he believes the letter is from Khashoggi and that "those quotes were all gone over carefully with Khashoggi." He says that when Perle called him Wednesday, he replied that there was nothing for the New Yorker to retract.
Perle launched his counterattack Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition," declaring that Hersh is "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist."
"He should know better," Remnick says. "The only loose talk I know of where this entire story is concerned is coming from Mr. Perle. That story was deeply and well reported and thoroughly checked, with Mr. Perle's cooperation."
In Perle's telling -- which also appears in the Hersh article -- he was invited to meet with Zuhair, who had recently been in Baghdad and was said to have information about Hussein being willing to step down. "I went there as a private citizen to hear what this man had to say," Perle says. "There was never any business discussed."
Salon columnist Joe Conason says Perle "arguably should be required to resign" from the Defense Policy Board "because of his grossly intemperate public attack on Hersh." But former Bush speechwriter David Frum writes in National Review Online: "Would such an investment have been improper if it had been discussed? Despite Hersh's heavy breathing, the article has to concede that the answer is once more no: Richard Perle is a private citizen, who serves the U.S. government without pay, and is entitled to earn a living so long as he avoids conflicts of interest -- of which Hersh could show none."
Hersh says he has "immense respect" for Perle for being willing to talk to the press. But, he says, "if Richard Perle having a private lunch in Marseilles with Adnan Khashoggi about a business deal -- or about politics -- isn't a story, I've been in the wrong business for 40 years. It's a story, period. That's what I do for a living. I write stories."
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