Simon & Schuster recalls book by ’60 Minutes’ Benghazi source

Publisher Simon & Schuster is dropping the book by Dylan Davies, the man who served as a primary source for a discredited “60 Minutes” report on last year’s attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Lybia.

In his statements to CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and in his recently published book, Davies claimed to give an eyewitness account of the terrorist attack that left a U.S. ambassador dead. But those versions contradicted an FBI incident report that showed he was not there the night of the incident.

The book titled “The Embassy House,” written by Davies under the pseudonym Sgt. Morgan Jones, was published late last month by Threshold Editions, a part of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp.

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“In light of information that has been brought to our attention since the initial publication of ‘The Embassy House,’ we have withdrawn from publication and sale all formats of this book, and are recommending that booksellers do the same,” Jennifer Robinson, spokeswoman for Threshold Editions, said Friday. “We also are notifying accounts that they may return the book to us.”

In the Oct. 27 “60 Minutes” story, Davies claimed he had confronted one of the attackers on the night of the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, and that he had seen the body of the ambassador, Christopher Stevens, in a hospital.

After the FBI report surfaced last week, CBS News defended Davies, but is now admitting that it made an error. The reporter on the “60 Minutes” story, Lara Logan, has said that she made “a mistake” by trusting Davies and putting him on the air.

“We take the vetting of sources and stories very seriously at ’60 Minutes’,” Logan said Friday on “CBS This Morning.” “But we were misled, and we were wrong.”

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ryan.faughnder@latimes.com