Seymour “Sy” Myron Hersh, born on April 8th 1937, is a prominent investigative journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize and writer based in Washington DC. He regularly contributes to The New Yorker magazine, focusing on security and military issues.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois to Lithuanian Jewish parents who had moved to the United States from Poland and Lithuania. His parents managed a dry-cleaning shop in Austin, Chicago. He is a history graduate of the University of Chicago.

His first work to gain international acclaim—made when he was but a freelancer in 1969—was his coverage of the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up. He first got a tip regarding the Vietnam War atrocity from The Village Voice’s Geoffrey Cowan about an Army office being put on trial for the killing of Vietnamese civilians. His subsequent report, which was sold to the Dispatch News Service, was featured in 33 newspapers.

He eventually became a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970.

Later, he worked for The New York Times, where he had acted as a reporter from 1972-1975 and in 1979. He was also involved in the investigation of the CIA’s Project Jennifer, an endeavor to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.

His coverage on the United States military’s exploitation of Abu Ghraib prison detainees, also one of his seminal works, gained extensive attention from the media industry.