THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 1980

[LC]

# ‘60 Minutes’ vs. Henry Kissinger

By THOMAS J. BRAY

Journalism is evanescant. Today's newspaper is tomorrow's fish-wrappler. TV journalism is even more fleeting: People talk, pictures glide by, facts-or what seem to be facts-dissipate into the atmosphere. The viewer is left clutching some impressions.

Thus it was difficult at first glance to know what to make of the flare-up last month between CBS's "60 Minutes," which is now TV's top-rated show, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

"60 Minutes," as you may recall, aired a 20-minute segment, "The Kissinger-Shah Connection," in which Mr. Kissinger was accused of having acquiesced in theSUPRISING of oil prices in 1973-74 so that the shah of Iran could scrape together enough money to buy American weapons and act as a U.S. proxy in the Persian Gulf. Mr. Kissinger refused to appear on the program, calling it a "hatchet job."

There was a bit of buzzing about whether Mr. Kissinger had or had not agreed to appear on the program, but the ruckus quickly died away. Most media observers don't have much of an interest in tomorrow's programs; there's always tomorrow's docudrama to be reviewed. But after looking into the matter of "The Kissinger-Shah Connection" a little, and reading the written transcript of the program a few times, one wonders if occasional backward looks might be a useful device for judging TV's fleeting images and educating ourselves about the medium's possibilities-and limitations.

## Some Disturbing Questions

Mr. Kissinger can take care of himself, of course. But a look back at "The Kissinger-Shah Connection" raises some disturbing questions about TV's penchant for reducing complicated subjects to neat little conspiracy theories, and the temptation to overlook points of view that can't be packed into interesting visual displays.

"The centerpiece of many "60 Minutes" programs is an expose in which corporate or political malefactors are cornered and then skewered for their transgressions. Often the "60 Minutes" team will literally burst into their target's office, demanding to know how he (or she) could possibly do such a thing. As often as not, the hapless defendant cringes from the camera, stutters out a few irrelevant excuses or declines to talk at all.

Aha, millions of Americans think to themselves, sure they got their man that time. Look at the guilt on his face.

It's a sort of ritual blood-letting, a journ alistic Grand-Guignol, in which we know the outcome in advance but cannot tear ourselves away from the spectacle of the execution. Besides, where else can you get the dandy drama in 15 or 20 minutes? Whole two-hour movies are built on less.

The technique may work pretty well where the prey is small potatoes and the transgression pretty straightforward. But it has its limits, as "The Kissinger-Shah Connection" shows.

The correspondent on this segment was Dan Rather, the $8 million heir to Walter Cronkite. Right off, he gave us reason to feel a little quasey. "Speculation persists that there is" a Kissinger-Shah connection. Kissinger has been "mentioned prominently in connection with" the shah's New York hospital trip. "Whatever the truth of these allegations, they are as of this date unproven." But "there is little doubt that during the time he was Secretary of State Kissinger gave the rule of the Peacock to Thronereferential treatment." "People inTHRONE position to know pointed us toward a link between Henry Kissinger, the shah of Iran and the price you are paying now for gasoline."

"Speculation"? "Whatever the truth"?

"Little doubt"? "Pointed us toward"? "A link"? Shucks, folks, nobody here but us objective reporters.

But on the bill of particulars. This gets a little tricky. There seemed to be two main charges. One, that some sort of deal was struck whereby the shah agreed to act as policeman in the Gulf if we wouldn't raise a fuss about higher oil prices. The other, that the world could have avoided higher oil prices by more simple expedient of having Henry Kissinger lean a little harder on His Royal MegalomanSHIP when OPEC took its fateful step in late 1973.

CBS News President Bill Leonard now denies, in a seven page letter to Mr. Kis-

> A look back at 'The Kissinger-Shah Connection' raises some disturbing questions about TV's penchant for reducing complicated subjects to neat little conspiracy theories....

singer which CBS made available to this newspaper, that the first charge was ever made. The program never said there was any collusion. Mr. Leonard asserts, only that the shah and the U.S. shared a "commonality of interests."

Now there's a phrase worthy of a diplomat, if not an objective reporter, much less a fair-minded observer. True, Mr. Rather never used the word collusion. Just the words "link" and "connection."

But about the second charge, that Mr. Kissinger's failure to jawbone the shah is responsible for "the price you are now paying for gasoline"?

Four witnesses appeared on the program. First was George Ball, a former Democratic Under Secretary of State and longtime Kissinger critic, who explained that the Nixon administration decided to make the shah its man in the Gulf after the withdrawal of British forces from that region. In a letter to CBS after the program was aired, Mr. Ball pointed out that he hadn't said anything about oil prices and had no information about a "link" between the connection and oil prices.

Next was James Akins, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1973 to 1975. In late 1973, he reported, Saudi leaders had begged him to urge the State Department to restrain its friend, the shah, from raising oil prices by a drastic amount. Mr. Akins said he cabled the plea to Washington, but that was ignored. Former Treasury Secretary William Simon, a friend of Mr. Akins, then was asked by Mr. Rather what he thought about the "theory," so far suggested by nobody but Mr. Rather, "that Mr. Kissinger knew full well what he was doing, that he wanted the Iranians and the shah to have the weapons, in order to get the weapons they had to have the money, and the way they got the money was to raise the oil prices."

Mr. Simon responded: "Well, there could have been some truth to that."

And lastly, presumably for effect, there appeared Mansour Farhang, Iran's present ambassador to the UN, who railed about "the close relationship" between Mr. Kissinger and the shah but had nothing to add about the oil angle. He even specifically disavowed the notion of a conspiracy. One hopes, for Mr. Farhang's sake, that the mullahs back in Iran weren't tuned in.

So that was it. Four witnesses. Two had nothing to say about the "link" between Kissinger, the shah and gasoline prices. A third, Mr. Akins, was fired as ambassador

by Mr. Kissinger in 1975 and has made little secret since of his animosity for his former boss-hardly an unbiased observer. Moreover, Mr. Akins either didn't know, because of his remote location, or failed to mention that Mr. Kissinger and the Nixon administration did indeed urge the shah to hold down prices.

And Mr. Simon, though he feels that a harder line should have been taken with the shah about oil pricing, says his remarks on "60 Minutes" were taken out of context and that he had no direct knowledge of any deal, tacit or otherwise, between Mr. Kissinger and the shah. "All the time I worked with Henry, it was to get oil prices down," Mr. Simon now says. "We just disagreed over tactics."

Now all of this might be chalked off to "60 Minutes" having pressed its case a little too hard, hardly the worst sin a news organization can commit. But several other points need to be made which suggest more grievous faults.

For one thing, "60 Minutes" and Mr. Rather failed to stand back and ask themselves a basic question: Does all this make sense in the first place? Would oil prices have come down if the Nixon administration had been tougher with the shah?

## Temporary at Best

At best, the relief would have been temporary. Iran has all along been a hawk on oil prices, under its liberator, the Ayatollah, as well as under the shah. Witness Iran's recent effort to get the price up to $35 a barrel. Price hawkishness fits Iran's economic conditions. Its reserves are relatively small compared to Saudi Arabia's. Iran therefore wants to make hay while it can. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has huge reserves. It doesn't want to do anything to scare consumers into inventing new sources of energy or encouraging exploration for other sources of oil. Hence Saudi Arabia takes a more "moderate" pricing line.

But in reality the price conferences held periodically by OPEC have little to do with the price we pay for gasoline. The key to OPEC is Saudi Arabia's willingness to keep production down. It cut back production two million barrels daily in late 1973, making oil scarred and driving up the price. Supply and demand, not OPEC's or the shah's blandishments, led to the quadrupling of prices in late 1973. The U.S. was vulnerable because price controls had held down supply and propped up demand in this country. Nothing Mr. Kissinger could have done would have changed that.

In Ambassador Akins, the Sidulis evidently found a credulous conduit for attempting to hang the rap for oil prices on the Iranians. It was a poorly understood and highly successful ploy that continues to this day, thanks in part to newsmen who fall to prove beneath the surface and who find a convenient villain in the shah.

Lastly, all of this and more was laid out for "60 minutes" in a 4½-page memo from Mr. Kissinger three days before the program was finally aired. In a 93-word postscript on the program, Mr. Rather did note that Mr. Kissinger found the story "malignous, ridiculous and untrue," and pointed out that there were personal and political differences between him and the four men who appeared. But not a word was spoken about the substance of the Kissinger objection.

One can understand the frustration of "60 Minutes" and Mr. Rather at failing to get a superstar like Kissinger on their show. But did failure of the accused to testify on camera absolute "60 Minutes" of the burden of giving fair play to opposing viewpoints? History, even instant history, deserves better.

Mr. Bray is associate editor of the Journal's editorial page.

June 21, 1980

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righteous a leader, we are in danger. Let one come by his compassion, though, from his own need of it from others, so that his righteousness is signified not in his person but in his *issues*—that is what we can hope to be able to trust.

This year is surely a national political emergency—Ronald Reagan has at least an even chance to win, and this, I think, puts the whole human race at seriously increased risk of nuclear war. At a time when we may be seeing the breakup of the two-party system, Kennedy now is finally reduced to hoping for some kind of upheaval of feeling against Carter's-renomination—because of steepening recession, perhaps, or because polls show him to be unelectable. But whatever happens and whatever else has to be said later about 1980, let it at least be remembered that despite withering abuse and orchestrated pressure, the last of the three Kennedy brothers came on in and fought the good fight and fought it well. ☐

STORY OF A COUP

# Kissinger's Bangladesh Sideshow

LAWRENCE LIFSCHULTZ and KAI BIRD

The peripheral nations always pay the heaviest toll. The tragic course of Cambodia's history after Henry Kissinger's extension of the war in Southeast Asia is only one instance of this principle. Kissinger's conduct of American foreign policy was marked by repeated lesser-known interventions, both covert and military, in the affairs of numerous countries.

There were many sideshows, and one of them was in Bangladesh. Kissinger's role with respect to that hardly

noticed country, which was born out of the bloody civil war of 1970-71, raises additional disturbing questions about the cynical assumptions that influenced our foreign policy during the Kissinger years. One result of Kissinger's "tilt" policy toward Pakistan's military regime during that civil war was to help prolong a conflict that ultimately claimed nearly a million casualties and created more than eight million refugees. And yet, in large measure because Asian rather than American blood was spilled, the record of Kissinger's covert maneuvering in Bangladesh has remained obscure.

Ever since columnist Jack Anderson obtained transcripts of National Security Council meetings concerning the 1971 Bangladesh crisis, we have known that Kissinger viewed the tilt to Pakistan as a necessary ingredient of his China policy; and, of course, in retrospect, his opening to China was a key to his bureaucratic staying power in the Nixon Administration. Now, new documentary evidence, extensive interviews with State Department and Central Intelligence Agency officials and access to some 150 interviews conducted in connection with an aborted study sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace make it possible to reconstruct the covert facet of the tilt policy. To Kissinger, Bangladesh was an irritant threatening to upset more important global realignments already in motion, and so he set about by secret diplomacy to break up the Bangladesh Awami League, which was in the forefront of that country's struggle for independence.

What is particularly startling, however, about this new information, is that a coup d'état four years later (on August 15, 1975) which overthrew the social democratic Government of Sheik Mujibur Rahman was organized by the same right-wing clique that carried out repeated secret contacts with

Lawrence Lifschultz was South Asia Correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Manchester Guardian. Kai Bird is Associate Editor of The Nation. They are authors of Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution (Zed Press, London; distributed by Lawrence Hill, U.S.A.).

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Kissinger in the 1971 period. The involvement of elements within the American Government—specifically including Kissinger—with this group opens up the question of American links to those who carried out the 1975 coup, which resulted in the killing of President Mujibur Rahman and forty members of his family.

It will be recalled that in December 1970, after a decade of military dictatorship, Pakistan held the first free and democratic elections in its history. The East Pakistan-based Awami League won an absolute majority in the proposed National Assembly and, in line with agreed democratic procedures, the leader of the league, Mujibur Rahman, would have become Prime Minister of all of Pakistan. On March 1, 1971, the country's provisional military junta, under Gen. Yahya Khan, arbitrarily postponed the convening of the National Assembly scheduled for March 3, triggering mass civil disobedience in East Pakistan. On March 25, in the worst bloodshed ever seen in a single night in South Asia, the Pakistani Army cracked down on Mujibur Rahman's democratic movement, driving Pakistan into a civil war that resulted in the creation of a new nation, Bangladesh, out of the ashes of the former East Pakistan.

Within the American State Department these events created a severe and open rift. Despite mass killings in Dacca carried out with American-supplied weapons, Kissinger and his national security aide for South Asia, Harold Saunders, supported the Pakistani junta and maintained a tilt policy, which resulted in a bitter disagreement in the foreign service. Twenty U.S. consular officials, led by Archer Blood, the consul general in Dacca, cabled from East Pakistan their collective dissent:

> Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak dominated government. ... Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the U.S.S.R. sent President Yahya a message defending democracy, condemning the arrest of a leader of a democratically elected majority party. ... But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional public servants, express our dissent.

This passionate indictment against massacre was ignored by Kissinger. During the spring of 1971 the overriding priority

of U.S. policy in South Asia was Kissinger's plan for a dramatic shift in Sino-American relations. On July 9, in the midst of Pakistan's civil war, he would travel secretly in a Pakistani aircraft from Islamabad to Peking. Kissinger's own political prospects within the Nixon Administration were hinged on this venture. All other questions took a subordinate position.

Inside the Administration, Nixon's two closest advisers on domestic policy, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, despised Kissinger and sought his removal from Nixon's inner circle in a second term. China policy thus became Kissinger's key to continued bureaucratic power and the stepping-stone for his rise to the post of Secretary of State in 1973. Global realignments were in motion and the Bengal "problem" appeared as a threatening and annoying sidelight. At the time of the massacre in Dacca, Pakistan's Gen. Yahya Khan was Kissinger's crucial intermediary in the first delicate steps of Nixon's reach for the Forbidden City and Tien An Men. Kissinger was adamant that these negotiations should not be disturbed at any cost and no alternative channel was pursued. A tilt to Pakistan became a necessary ingredient to Kissinger's China policy. The Bengalis were a complete sideshow.

It was in this context that Kissinger then launched his own effort to undermine and subvert the Bangladesh independence movement. For years, there have been rumors of secret contacts and negotiations carried out by the Americans in 1971. Now, according to documents contained in an unpublished study commissioned by the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a leading American foreign policy research institution, the existence of these links has been definitively established.*

The Carnegie papers reveal a bureaucratic drama that would have been merely petty were it not for its tragic consequences. As the officials involved recalled the meetings and conferences in the upper reaches of American diplomacy during the height of the crisis, the great issues of the time—genocide in Bengal, superpower rivalry, American policy toward dictatorship and democracy in Pakistan—all seemed to have been reduced to the level of Nixon's personal hatred of Indira Gandhi and Kissinger's obsession with the China negotiations.

The Carnegie documents make it unequivocally clear that secret contacts took place in 1971 in Calcutta between American diplomats and a faction of the Bangladesh Provisional Government led by Khondaker Mustaque Ahmed, a conservative Moslem leader of the right-wing faction of the Awami League and the Acting Foreign Minister in the Government-in-exile's shadow Cabinet. Kissinger's hope was to split the nationalist movement and arrive at a settlement short of independence. The American contacts were made

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*In 1973 the Carnegie Endowment commissioned a study of the conduct of U.S. policy during the 1971 Bangladesh crisis to examine the process whereby the U.S. tilt toward Pakistan virtually countenanced genocide. Due to internal dissension at Carnegie, the study was never completed, although more than 150 senior officials—from the State Department to the C.I.A.—had been interviewed in detail. From sources within the Endowment, all interviews and raw information gathered in the course of the study were made available to the authors. The documents ran into thousands of pages.

June 21, 1980

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with the Mustaque faction of the Awami League in Calcutta and were highly sensitive since they bypassed the Prime Minister of the provisional Government, Tajuddin Ahmed, who had the support of virtually the entire Bengali leadership in an unyielding demand for complete independence. Within the Provisional Government the solitary exception to this position was Mustaque.

Henry Kissinger, then working with the same Pakistan military junta that was helping him with his China negotiations, began an exercise aimed at dividing the exiled Awami League by splitting the Bengali leadership and supporting the faction that would be prepared to compromise with Pakistan and not demand full independence. However, Mustaque's clandestine contacts with the Americans were discovered in October 1971, and he was placed under house arrest in Calcutta by his angered colleagues in the Awami League, who considered his secret negotiations an act of treason.

Following the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, Mustaque was quietly pardoned by Mujib and given a minor position in the post-independence Government. He was to have little influence in the Mujib Government, whose policies over the next few years were dominated by the social democratic wing of the Awami League. The discovery of his secret indiscretions with the Americans had not only set back his political career, it had also assured the ascendancy of the pseudo-socialist and anti-American faction of the Awami League. Mustaque, who openly favored laissez-faire capitalism, seemed to have been relegated to permanent political oblivion. Yet, four years later, it was Mustaque, and his protégés from the days of the secret Calcutta connection, who emerged as the political leadership of the putsch that killed Mujib.

Just after midnight on August 14, 1975, in Bangladesh's capital city of Dacca, the Bengal Lancers and the Bangladesh Armoured Corps trundled out of the main military cantonment. They lined up in formation on the runway of an abandoned half-built airport at the edge of the city. From atop a tank, the commanding officer of the column, Maj. Farooq Rahman, who was one of the six young army officers leading the military operation, told his troops in a fire-eating speech that on that very night they would overthrow the regime of Mujibur Rahman. Within three hours Mujib was dead. The political figure installed by the officers was Khondakar Mustaque Ahmed.

At the time, the world press reported the motives for the coup as a combination of personal grudges against Mujib and his associates, held by certain of the officers, and a general mood of frustration at the widespread corruption that had come to characterize Mujib's regime.

The evidence suggests, however, that far from being a relatively spontaneous military putsch by a handful of disgruntled army officers, the coup had an identifiable political leadership. Knowledgeable Bengali and foreign diplomatic sources now claim that Mustaque and his political associates had been involved for more than a year in plans designed to bring about the overthrow of Mujib. Moreover, according to information obtained in our inter-

Tefft, Stanton K., Ph.D., Editor

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views of senior U.S. officials at the American Embassy in
Dacca, it appears that the United States had prior knowl-
edge of the coup that killed Mujib, and that American Em-
bassy personnel had held discussions with individuals in-
volved in the plan more than six months prior to his death.

One highly placed U.S. Embassy diplomat told us that officials at the American Embassy were approached by people intending to overthrow the Government of Mujibur Rahman. This embassy source says that a series of meetings took place with embassy personnel between November 1974 and January 1975. These discussions were held to determine the attitude of the U.S. Government toward a coup.

The contacts occurred while the Church and Pike intelli-
gence committees were holding hearings in Washington on
C.I.A. assassinations of foreign leaders, and the American
press was openly speculating that senior American intelli-
gence officials might face imprisonment for illegal clandes-
tine actions in Chile, and elsewhere.

In this atmosphere, according to a senior official at the U.S. Embassy in Dacca, a decision was reached in January 1975: "We came to an understanding in the embassy that we would disengage from those people." Although a decision was made at a high level in the embassy that there would be no further contact with the anti-Mujib group, what happened subsequently is a matter of controversy among U.S. officials interviewed.

Those who knew of the earlier meetings deny personal knowledge of what happened after early 1975. Others allege that while contact was broken off at the level of diplomatic and foreign service officials, who wished to remain "clean," liaison was taken over and carried on through the American C.I.A. station chief, Philip Cherry, and other station agents.

When interviewed, Cherry categorically denied this allega-
tion to us. "The Bangladeshis were doing it to themselves,"
said Cherry. "It's a great canard to think any coup takes
place because of an [outside] Government involvement.
Almost always coups take place because of the people them-
selves. . . . There are politicians who frequently approach
embassies and perhaps have contacts there. They think they
may have contacts. But that's a far cry from any of these
embassies [being] involved in assisting them in involvement
in a coup."

After Mustaque's coup, Bangladesh took a sharp turn to the right: at home, industries were denationalized and the left-wing parties which had constituted the main public opposition to the Mujib Government faced new repression. Externally, the country's foreign policy became avowedly pro-American, anti-Indian and pro-Pakistani. In the immediate post-coup period, Mustaque appointed to leading positions in the bureaucracy and national intelligence organizations people who had been prominent among the Bengali "Vichy" of 1971—the minute portion of the Bengali population who had actually collaborated with the Pakistani Army following Pakistan's crackdown in Dacca in March 1971.

The majority of the state security personnel, who received dramatic promotions from Mustaque immediately after Mujib's death, were not only identified with the Bengali Vichy but also had been trained prior to Bangladesh's independence by the American Office of Public Safety program at its Washington-based International Police Academy (I.P.A) and the International Police Services School, the latter of which, according to Congressional investigations, had been used exclusively for C.I.A. training of foreign police officials and recruitment of American intelligence "assets."

Most prominent of these was A.B.S. Safdar, who, in the midst of the 1971 civil war, returned from police training at the I.P.A. in Washington to join forces with the Pakistani Army. Immediately after the 1975 coup, Mustaque appointed Safdar director general of National Security Intelligence. Senior civilian sources within the Bangladesh Government, together with informants in the Bangladesh Army, allege that Safdar was intimately linked to the operation against Mujib. Safdar is also alleged to have acted as a principal liaison to C.I.A. Station Chief Cherry. When interviewed, Cherry initially denied ever having met Safdar. Subsequently, he did admit having encountered him socially at a Dacca sports club, but denied that Safdar had ever communicated any information to the U.S. Embassy regarding coup plans.

Two other prominent personalities to emerge at Mustaque's side immediately after the coup were Mahbub Alam Chashi, once a prominent diplomat, and Taheruddin Thakur, a former journalist who had been Mujib's Information Secretary. Both men had served as Mustaque's principal staff men during the 1971 Calcutta days. Each had been allegedly involved in Mustaque's secret Calcutta talks and Kissinger's ploy to divide the Bangladesh independence movement.

The American official who actually held face-to-face meetings with Mustaque's emissaries in Calcutta in 1971 was George Griffin, a Foreign Service political officer stationed at the time in the Calcutta Consulate. Griffin is reported to have had a direct channel to Saunders and Kissinger in the White House, bypassing Ambassador Kenneth Keating and other State Department dissidents, who were opponents of Kissinger's pro-Pakistan tilt.

At one stage in the 1971 negotiations, Kissinger apparently cut out all intermediaries and dealt directly with the Mustaque faction. As a senior official in the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau told the Carnegie Endowment researchers, "He [Kissinger] had been talking to the representatives directly."

By the time Mujib was killed in August 1975, the 1971 South Asian decision makers at the National Security Council had all become top officials of the State Department. With the departure of William Rogers in 1973, tensions between the parallel and often rival structures of the National Security Council and State Department were defused through Kissinger's elevation to the position of Secretary of State. Saunders, who began his career in the C.I.A., was one of Kissinger's only staff men to move with him to the State Department, as director of the department's Intelli-

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gence and Research Bureau. (Saunders's C.I.A. background should have precluded his promotion to a regular State Department job. The State Department had never allowed any long-standing C.I.A. official to assume a top post in the department—until President Carter appointed Saunders Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asia in 1977.) Griffin, Kissinger's man on the spot in Calcutta, was brought back from South Asia to become Saunders's intelligence deputy for the region. As previously described, the year after the new team had settled into the State Department, the American diplomatic mission in Dacca was approached by anti-Mujib elements to ascertain the U.S. Government's attitude toward a possible change of regime in Bangladesh. That was in the autumn of 1974. This intelligence was forwarded to Kissinger, Saunders and Griffin in Washington.

When asked about their "prior knowledge" of the plan to overthrow Mujibur Rahman and their past relationship with the group that carried out the coup, both Kissinger and Saunders refused to comment. Although Kissinger's office asked for a detailed list of written questions, his brief return letter failed to give a single direct answer to any question. "I cannot deal with the extraordinary mixture of allegation and innuendos contained in your letter," wrote Kissinger, "except to say that in substance they are so far from the truth that I am impelled to question the motives of your informants." Saunders refused to answer our letters or phone calls.

Leading C.I.A. officials concerned with the subcontinent, such as Alan Wolfe, a senior C.I.A. South Asian analyst and a former Pakistan Station Chief, refused requests for interviews. Wolfe declined, saying any interview would be a "no-win situation." A direct request for official, authorized interviews with William Grimsley, a former C.I.A. Station Chief in New Delhi, Angus Theurmer, John Foster, Wolfe, Cherry and other knowledgeable Agency officials has been refused by Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence. Requests made two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act for C.I.A. cable traffic and memorandums concerning the August 1975 coup have not been acted on. Although State Department sources have informed us that hundreds of cables relating to the period exist, including detailed reports and memorandums, the department has declassified only thirty-six cables, half of which were heavily blacked out. What remained uncensored was information of the most banal or obvious sort.

Agency officials are hopeful that their intensive campaign in Congress to "unleash" the C.I.A. from any obligations under the Freedom of Information Act will succeed in preventing the disclosure of intelligence documents on Bangladesh and many other sensitive issues. Meanwhile, inside the State Department, officials such as Harold Saunders, still the Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asia, remain in positions of authority that allow them to block the release of any documents concerning their own roles in the Bangladesh events of 1971 and 1975.

What happened in Bangladesh in August 1975 was by no means as simple as it was made to appear in the press at the

time. It was clear that Mujib's regime was in deep trouble. The country had just suffered a famine that had killed an estimated 50,000 peasants, for which Government incompetence and corruption was blamed. Civil unrest and rural insurgency were growing problems. In the two years prior to the coup, it was the country's organized left-wing parties that had developed and mobilized public sentiment against Mujib's regime. Yet, when the critical moment of collapse came for Mujib, it was not from a leftist mass uprising —"The Revolution"—as had been long expected but from a narrowly based conspiracy of the right.

In the end, a cohesive right-wing political and intelligence faction that had risen to prominence in the Pakistani period and was swept aside by Mujib after independence in 1971, finally staged a coup in 1975, in alliance with a faction of Mujib's own party, and reinstated themselves in power. The challenge being developed by radical nationalist forces was pre-empted by the August 1975 events. The coup was an inside job by conservative elements within Mujib's own party, his own Cabinet and his own national intelligence service who viewed Mujib's leadership as no longer capable of holding out against a left-wing challenge to their interests.

Mujib's demise in Bangladesh marked, as did Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's "execution" four years later in Pakistan, the end of an entire era of illusions surrounding the prospects for social democracy in conditions of severe backwardness and underdevelopment. In both Bangladesh and Pakistan, military and bureaucratic dictatorships have reasserted themselves like an old and familiar cancer. The full extent to which the long arm of American power and the "national security" vision of Henry Kissinger assisted in the reversion to military dictatorship in Bangladesh is yet to be unearthed down to the last detail. Only the power of a Congressional subpoena will pry loose the documents that will conclusively settle the extent of American links to the group that carried out the 1975 coup. But today, one conclusion is clear beyond any doubt: the United States had a long history of important prior relationships with the political and intelligence leadership of the coup that killed Mujibur Rahman. ☐

## First Amendment

*(Continued From Front Cover)*
censors, challenge the status quo.

In other times, freedom of speech was a rallying cry for the victims of oppression. In rough chronological sequence, the great battles for free speech in this country during this century were fought by anarchists seeking the right to hold public assemblies, by feminists seeking the right to vote, by Wobblies seeking the right to organize, by birth-control advocates seeking the right to counsel family planning, by World War I pacifists seeking the right to speak against con-

Aryeh Neier, a member of The Nation's Editorial Board, is adjunct professor of law at New York University and a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

June 21, 1980

The Nation.

747

STORY OF A COUP

Lawrence Lifschultz was South Asia Correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Manchester Guardian. Kai Bird is Associate Editor of The Nation. They are authors of Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution (Zed Press, London, distributed by Lawrence Hill, U.S.A.).

1, 1980

748

The Nation.

June 21, 1980

> Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak dominated government. . . . Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the U.S.S.R. sent President Yahya a message defending democracy, condemning the arrest of a leader of a democratically elected majority party. . . . But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional public servants, express our dissent.

## THE NATION ON THE AIR

"Women in the Middle" Elizabeth Pochoda, Literary Editor of *The Nation*, with Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, author of *Off Center*, Anne Tabachnick, painter and guest lecturer at the New York Studio School; Sally Martino Fisher, National Congress of Neighborhood Women.

WRVR-FM 106.7

June 21, 1980

The Nation.

749

Teftt, Stanton K., Ph.D., Editor

## SECRECY

-Gary P. Marx, Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"This book provides a fascinating combination of theoretical and empirical articles... an indispensable work."

-E. Pendleton Banks, Ph.D.

1980 351 pp.

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Paper $ 9.95

## BIOETHICS QUARTERLY

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Order 680-3

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## HEALTH/PAC BULLETIN

ISSN 0017-9051

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Vol. 11, 1979-80

Order 654-5

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Order 646-3

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$28.00

DuBois, Paul M., Ph.D.

## THE HOSPICE WAY OF DEATH

Providing sensitive and sympathetic care for the terminally ill and their families is one of the most basic human services. In response to growing concern, this book examines new approaches to the understanding and treatment of the terminally ill and the subsequent development of hospices in the United States and Europe. Hospices are interdisciplinary programs providing specialized and intensive health and mental health services for the dying and their families.

1979 223 pp.

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72 FIFTH AVENUE,

NEW YORK, N.Y. 10011 (212)243-6000

750

The Nation.

June 21, 1980

views of senior U.S. officials at the American Embassy in Dacca, it appears that the United States had prior knowledge of the coup that killed Mujib, and that American Embassy personnel had held discussions with individuals involved in the plan more than six months prior to his death.

The contacts occurred while the Church and Pike intelligence committees were holding hearings in Washington on C.I.A. assassinations of foreign leaders, and the American press was openly speculating that senior American intelligence officials might face imprisonment for illegal clandestine actions in Chile and elsewhere.

When interviewed, Cherry categorically denied this allegation to us. "The Bangladeshis were doing it to themselves," said Cherry. "It's a great canard to think any coup takes place because of an [outside] Government involvement. Almost always coups take place because of the people themselves. ... There are politicians who frequently approach embassies and perhaps have contacts there. They think they may have contacts. But that's a far cry from any of these embassies [being] involved in assisting them in involvement in a coup."

Most prominent of these was A.B.S. Safdar, who, in the midst of the 1971 civil war, returned from police training at the I.P.A., in Washington to join forces with the Pakistani Army. Immediately after the 1975 coup, Mustaque appointed Safdar director general of National Security Intelligence. Senior civilian sources within the Bangladesh Government, together with informants in the Bangladesh Army, allege that Safdar was intimately linked to the operation against Mujib. Safdar is also alleged to have acted as a principal liaison to C.I.A. Station Chief Cherry. When interviewed, Cherry initially denied ever having met Safdar. Subsequently, he did admit having encountered him socially at a Dacca sports club, but denied that Safdar had ever communicated any information to the U.S. Embassy regarding coup plans.

June 21, 1980

The Nation.

751

## First Amendment

Kissinger falls
from platform,
injures head

AP

HENRY A. KISSINGER
...treated for head injury

New York (AP)—Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, was treated at New York Hospital several hours after he suffered head injuries when he fell off a platform at a St. Louis speaking engagement, officials said.

Mr. Kissinger was X-rayed and examined in the hospital's emergency room about 8 p.m. Saturday. He was released following treatment for head trauma, hospital officials said.

Hospital authorities refused to discuss details of his condition or the incident.

Mr. Kissinger was not available for comment.

The accident occurred at a St. Louis hotel, where Mr. Kissinger was waiting to address the Illinois Bankers Association. As he sat down, one leg of his chair slipped off the back of the stage and he fell backwards about 2 feet to the floor, through a blue curtain.

Members of the audience rushed to his aid and gave Mr. Kissinger a glass of water. Moments later he returned to the stage, seemingly unhurt.

When it came time to speak, Mr. Kissinger joked that he "had to do something to top" the previous speaker, Paul S. Nadler, a Rutgers University professor. Mr. Kissinger then delivered his speech, pausing afterward to talk to reporters.

He flew back to his home in New York and then went to the hospital.

# Kissinger Overstated Clearance On Memoirs, U.S. Official Says

By George Lardner Jr.

Washington Post Staff Writer

Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger "vastly overstated, at least by implication," the ex-
tent to which hitherto classified information had
been cleared for publication in his memoirs, accord-
ing to correspondence made public yesterday.

The assessment was made by an official of the Na-
tional Security Council in response to an inquiry by
the publishers of another book whose author was
successfully sued by the government for failing to
obtain proper clearance.

Kissinger, in the foreword of his book, "The White House Years," wrote that "treatment of classified materials in this book has been worked out with the office of the national security adviser, Dr. Zbigniew Brezezinski, to whom I express my appreciation."

On May 21, however, the staff secretary of the
NSC, Christine Dodson, wrote to the head of the
publishing firm Random House that Kissinger sub-
mitted only "a very small part of the manuscript"
for review, and this was "in the form of discon-
nected, brief excerpts."

After some "required changes" were specified,
she wrote, "Kissinger never submitted any further
materials for review. It is our judgment, therefore,

that the passage you quote from the book's fore-
word vastly overstates, at least by implication, the
degree of classification review to which the book
was subjected by Dr. Brzezinski's office.

The NSC letter was sent to Robert L. Bernstein,
president of Random House, which had published
"Decent Interyal," a book by former CIA officer
Frank Snepp critical of American policy in Viet-
nam.

In a far-reaching ruling in February, the Supreme
Court held that Snepp had breached his position of
trust with the CIA by falling to submit the book to
the agency for prepublication review.

The court majority also said that "even in the ab-
sence of an express agreement" such as the one
Snepp signed with the CIA, the government can im-
pose restrictions on the release of confidential infor-
mation, even when no government secrets are com-
promised.

Snepp has been ordered to relinquish his profits
from the book, which are currently estimated at
about $140,000.

Kissinger, who is expected to make about $5 mil-
lion from his book, could not be reached for com-
ment. "The White House Years" was published last
fall by Little, Brown & Co. Kissinger owns the
worldwide book and serialization rights.

08/01/96