the full testimony to him over the course of a year; it revealed that at least 347 civilians were killed, twice as many as the Army had conceded. The testimony formed the basis for two articles by Hersh in The New Yorker magazine, and his 1972 book on the investigation, Cover-Up. The New York Times In April 1972, Hersh was hired by The New York Times as an investigative journalist at the paper's Washington bureau. After the June 17 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington and the emergence of the Watergate scandal, the Times sought to catch up with the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post, who broke several stories in 1972 linking the break-in to the Nixon campaign. Together with Walter Rugaber, Hersh produced extensive reporting for the Times on the scandal; an important article by him published on January 14, 1973, revealed the $400 monthly "hush money" payments being made to the burglars, shifting the press's focus from the events before the break-in to its cover-up. During 1973, he wrote more than 40 articles on the scandal, most appearing on page one. John Dean, the president's counsel, later stated that while it had been the Post articles in 1972 that emboldened prosecutors, "the most devastating pieces that strike awfully close to home" were Hersh's in 1973 and 1974. Hersh contributed to the revelations around Operation Menu, the secret U.S. bombing of neutral Cambodia in 1969–1970. On June 11, 1972, an article by Hersh alleged that General John D. Lavelle, who had recently been relieved as commander of the Air Force in Southeast Asia, was ousted because he had ordered repeated, unauthorized bombings of North Vietnam. The ensuing "Lavelle affair" led to Senate Armed Services Committee hearings in September 1972. After reading Hersh's articles on the affair, Major Hal Knight, who had supervised radar crews in Vietnam, realized that the Senate "was unaware of what had taken place while I was out there", and in early 1973 wrote a letter to the committee that confessed his role in the cover-up of Operation Menu, in which he recorded fake bombing coordinates and burned his orders. Hersh learned of Knight's letter after exposing a different scandal on May 17, 1973, in which Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had authorized wiretaps of employees of the National Security Council after early bombings of