Why Seymour Hersh's Trading With The Enemy Still Matters
Seymour Hersh is still the guy journalists point to when they need someone to actually get information from people who didn't want to talk. Trading with the Enemy is one of his more controversial books, and honestly, reading it makes you understand why he gets hate from certain circles. The book came out in 2004 and covers what Hersh claimed was a secret US backchannel operation with Iran during the early years of the George W. Bush administration. That alone would have been explosive. What made it more explosive was the way he built the narrative.
Seymour Hersh Trading With The Enemy
The core of the book argues that senior Bush administration officials secretly pursued diplomatic contact with Iran while simultaneously labeling it part of the "Axis of Evil." Hersh's sources describe a situation where people in the intelligence community were running parallel operations that contradicted public policy, and when Hersh reported on it, the government response was pretty much exactly what you'd expect — denial, threats, and a lot of noise about unreliable sources. Here's what most people miss when they read this book: Hersh isn't just reporting a story. He's documenting a pattern. The backchannel with Iran wasn't an isolated incident in his telling. It fit into a broader structure where certain players in Washington operated outside normal diplomatic channels and took credit for results while hiding the origins of those results from Congress and the public. That's the part that still feels relevant years later. I remember reading the section about the Iranian contact carefully because it reminded me of situations I'd encountered in other contexts. You know how certain operatives move through different channels — formal embassies, backroom intermediaries, private flights — and none of it shows up in any official record? Hersh describes exactly that mechanics in this book. The Iran operation ran through people like Scheherazade Goodarzi and later through Pakistani intermediaries, and the paper trail, if there ever was one, was carefully controlled.
One practical thing about reading Hersh like this: his sourcing is a mixed bag. Some parts are extremely well-verified. Other parts rest on a single anonymous source who Hersh himself admits he cannot corroborate independently. When I've worked with similar material, the workaround I found was to cross-reference the claims against whatever public documents existed around the same timeframe. For Trading with the Enemy, that meant looking at declassified documents, congressional testimony, and news reports from 2001 to 2004. Some of Hersh's claims held up under that kind of check. Others didn't. The book also covers the North Korea angle, which I found to be the weaker half of the work. Hersh makes some serious claims about US intelligence assessments of North Korea's nuclear program, but the evidence he provides is thinner there. I'd say skip ahead to the Iran sections if you're reading for the first time and come back to the North Korea material afterward. There's a reason this book still gets discussed in intelligence and journalism circles. It forced a conversation about something that wasn't really being had publicly at the time: how much of US foreign policy is actually driven by covert backchannels versus official channels. The answer, if you read Hersh and then look at what we learned from later document releases, is probably more than most people wanted to believe.
Get the Full Details
Download copies of the book circulate on various file-sharing sites, but you can also find it used through regular book retailers pretty easily. It's in print still, though it sometimes sells out and comes back. If you're researching this period of post-9/11 foreign policy, it's essential reading alongside Bob Woodward's Stated Intent and John R. MacArthur's Second Front. What Hersh does in this book that most journalists can't do is sit down with people who were actually inside these operations and let them describe the mechanics in detail. That's valuable even when you disagree with his conclusions or question some of his sourcing choices. The details about how these channels operated — the funding, the intermediaries, the compartmentalization — are the kind of things you won't find in a textbook.
