dramatizing as the book would have been. He and Nixon have, for years, circled warily and jealously around each other like sharks, each conscious that he could destroy the other but would be his own.

## Events out of place

THE STRUCTURE of the book needs to be noted. Given the length at which Kissinger wanted to write, two volumes were needed for mechanical reasons alone. But publishing only half the story at a time—this volume goes from January 1969 to January 1973—is another matter. Why did he do it?

One reason, clearly, was that he could not write the whole story in time for publication in fall 1979—in time for the presidential election campaign. Publishing in two installments presumably doubles (or at least increases) his royalties. It also doubles the attention. *Time* magazine and the *Sunday Times* (London) will serialize the book not once but twice; the reviewers will have to criticize and publicize the second volume as well as the first. Twice the hype. At the same time Kissinger will be able in Volume Two to assert that critics of Volume One had inadequate information on which to make reasonable judgments. This is of course exactly the same technique that he used in Volume One to deplore and dismiss criticism made before that volume was published.

An important effect of Kissinger's two-tier approach is the deliberate disruption of the real sequence of events. Bruce Page in the *New Statesman* best analyzed Kissinger's massacre of a true sense of time. Events are plucked out of their places in a constant, disorienting fashion. The references he makes in one section to other crucial events that formed the context of the story he is telling are often so minimal as to prevent the reader from having a real idea of what was actually going on at the time. And sometimes his description of the context is thoroughly misleading. The most obvious example of his destruction of the orderly sequence of events is with Vietnam. By any stretch of the imagination this was the most compelling problem facing the Nixon administration in January 1969. In

In deed, Kissinger says as much. Yet it is 225 pages and a full seven chapters before the reader reaches Vietnam in *White House Years*. An account with serious claims to representing the actual proportions of history would have had to place U.S. Vietnam policy in 1969 before a junket around Europe.

It is Watergate that Kissinger has ripped most untimely from its context in his memoirs. The abuses of power, which later became known as Watergate, and for which Nixon was later indicted, began early in 1969 and continued through every year after that. They were causally linked to the way in which Nixon and Kissinger conducted foreign policy. The secret bombing of Cambodia (itself a proposed article of impeachment, though unsuccessful), begun in March 1969, led to the first wiretaps—the first known domestic abuse of power of the Nixon administration. The uproar that greeted the 1970 invasion encouraged Nixon to authorize the Huston Plan (“evidence of a Gestapo mentality in the White House,” in Sam Ervin’s words) and greatly increased White House paranoia. Kent State was the beginning of Nixon’s “downhill road” to Watergate, according to H.R. Halderman.

Through 1970, 1971, and 1972 the isolation of the White House grew largely because of the obsessive secrecy with which Kissinger and Nixon chose to conduct affairs. Kissinger details to some extent the way in which Rogers and Laird were excluded from the making of policy; he does not care to ponder the conse-

“He and Nixon have, for years, circled warily and jealously around each other like sharks.”

SVIER

37

William
Shawcross
---
THROUGH
HISTORY
WITH
HENRY A.
KISSINGER

quences. The Plumbers, the White House spy
group, were employed in summer 1971, in
good part because of Kissinger's fury over
leaks to the press that he did not personally
control. Although one of Kissinger's personal
aides, David Young, was in charge of the
Plumbers along with Egil Krogh, Kissinger
has always claimed that he knew nothing of
the Plumbers' existence until it was publicly
revealed in 1973. This is hard to understand,
given Kissinger's precise concerns. It also
conflicts with the memory of Lord Cromer,
the British ambassador to Washington. In De-
cember 1971, Cromer and an embassy official
went to Kissinger to talk about the leaks to
Jack Anderson about the "tilt" to Pakistan.
"Don't worry," Kissinger told them, "we have
the Plumbers onto that." They did, too.*

Whatever the precise daily relationship be-
tween Kissinger and the Plumbers, Watergate
resulted from the distortions produced in
American society by Kissinger's and Nixon's
attempt to continue a war for which the United
States had no spirit. Kissinger cast America
in a role for which, at least at the beginning
of the Seventies, it was absolutely unsuited.
That role could not be played democratically;
abuses of power within the administration and
by the administration against the people were
inevitable. Kissinger ignored the reality of the
United States as well as that of Iran, Cambo-
dia, Chile, and other nations. He was every
bit as much responsible for Watergate as H.R.
Haldeman.

Let us take just two other examples of the
way in which Kissinger corrupts time se-
quences to tell different stories in different
chapters. Chapter Six (pp. 163-194) is en-
titled "First steps toward China"; in it Kis-
singer describes lovingly and at length the
succession of discreet moves the White House
made toward Peking in 1969. (The fact that
the initiative had come from the Chinese is
mentioned only fleetingly; Peking's eagerness
in the face of the Soviet threat is less impor-
tant than Kissinger's subtlety.) By the begin-
ning of 1970, relations had progressed as far
as a meeting between the U.S. ambassador
and the Chinese chargé in Warsaw. According
to Kissinger:

> This went extraordinarily well . . . proce-
> dural issues were amicably settled . . . both
> sides avoided polemics. . . . China and the
> United States were to engage in substan-
> tive talks again . . . painstakingly prepared
> over months by messages, first indirect but
> growing increasingly explicit, of a willing-

ness to bring about a fundamental change
in our relationship. . . . It was a moment
of extraordinary hope. . . .

Ten weeks (but over 300 pages) later, Kissinger is again discussing Peking. But now close contacts in Warsaw and moments of extraordinary hope are forgotten. Instead Peking has become "the most revolutionary capital in the world and with which moreover we had no means of communication whatsoever." What had happened, what disaster had befallen the new relationship? one might ask. Nothing at all; it is simply that in Chapter Seven it is necessary for Kissinger to deny his own success story in Chapter Six, because Prince Norodom Sihanouk has arrived in Peking after being overthrown by a coup in Cambodia, and Kissinger needs an excuse for Washington's failure to make any contact with him.

Or take Pakistan. On page 739 Kissinger is in Pakistan; it is July 1971. He is on his first, secret, and understandably exhilarating trip to Peking and about to take off in a plane provided by the president of Pakistan, Yayha Khan. Kissinger writes: "I was probably responsible for the last pleasant day Yayha had before he was overthrown as a result of the India-Pakistan war. . . . Yayha was enthralled by the cops-and-robbers atmosphere of the enterprise. He personally reviewed each detail of my clandestine departure." Reality is not allowed to intrude on this pleasant occasion.

It is not until page 853—114 pages later—that we reach the earlier date of April 1971. Kissinger acknowledges for the first time that Yayha Khan's army has embarked on the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Ben-galis in east Pakistan. It becomes clear that Yayha was still in the thick of this massacre when Kissinger visited in July. The effect of Kissinger's narrative is to spare the reader the pain of realizing that the man with whom he played "cops and robbers" so nicely was actually a mass murderer; and one, moreover, who was actually on the job when they were enjoying themselves together.

A short history of Iran

R
ATHER THAN touching lightly on many
different aspects of the book, I want
to look now in some detail only at
Kissinger's treatment of Iran and
then Cambodia. In my view, the policies
themselves, and Kissinger's account of them,
demonstrate well his inadequacies as both
statesman and historian.

Kissinger declared last fall that "the big-

* The context of Kissinger's relationship to the Plumbers is reportedly a major part of Seymour Hersh's forthcoming biography.

38

past foreign policy debacle in a generation was the collapse of the shah of Iran without any recognition or even understanding by the United States of what was involved." Leaving aside the hyperbole—and the obvious comparison with the Indochina "debacle" that it involved—it is clear that the shah's collapse was indeed a serious setback for the policy that successive U.S. administrations pursued in Iran. Indeed it ended that policy.

The story of Iran is a terrifying parable of our times. It is one in which all Western governments, not just the U.S. government, play unhappy parts. And not just governments, but corporations, institutions, newspapers, and individuals, also. "We"—in a broad sense—created the shah in our own image, we ignored the realities of Iran, we imposed upon it a regime fashioned to our liking, not that of the Iranians. We found that we could not control that regime, and in the end we could not save it either from itself or from its own people. The revenge was, and is, terrible. Certainly it was a debacle.

But readers who seek understanding of the debacle will not find it in Kissinger's memoirs any more than in Nixon's before him. Indeed, the way in which the two men treat Iran shows how terribly inadequate autobiographies can be as points of reference, let alone as accounts of history. In Nixon's memoirs there are just two references to Iran. On page 118 there is one sentence: "Nearby Iran, with its enormous oil reserves, was under the control of a left-leaning government that most observers feared would inevitably fall under Soviet domination." On page 133 Nixon has two paragraphs on Iran, in one of which he says, "I sensed an inner strength in [the shah] and I felt that in the years ahead he would be a strong leader." These observations both refer to the year 1953, when Vice-President Nixon was on a swing around the world. Iran in the Sixties and Seventies is not mentioned once in Nixon's memoirs. The reader could have no idea that Nixon ever gave the shah another thought after 1953, let alone that he built him into one of the most heavily armed policemen in the world.

Kissinger, in his memoirs, is a little more forthcoming on Iran, but not much. Iran gets just eight pages in his book, after the chapter on the 1972 Moscow summit. There are a few other references, all in passing. Given the importance of Iran in the Nixon-Kissinger design, which was supposed to give us a "generation of peace," this skimpy treatment can be explained only by a desire to conceal.

Nixon and Kissinger's policy toward Iran had its origins in the 1968 British decision to

withdraw from "east of Suez" by 1971. Early in 1969 Kissinger commissioned a National Security Study Memorandum on how the U.S. might deal with the vacuum that British withdrawal would leave in the Persian Gulf. In July 1969 Nixon enunciated on Guam the thoughts that were later to be enshrined as "the Nixon Doctrine." Their essence was that in the future America would not supply military manpower to its friends in Asia but would provide them the arms with which to defend themselves against Communism. The most notorious example of the Nixon Doctrine became Cambodia, which Nixon himself declared was "the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form." The human results of the Nixon Doctrine in Cambodia were atrocious. The application of the doctrine to Iran produced a strategic disaster.

In a sense, the Nixon Doctrine was Vietnamization on a grand international scale, and all the risks implicit in Vietnamization attended it. It ignored the effect that the introduction of massive American assistance might have on a client country, and it did not deal with what might happen if, after Washington had committed its prestige to a government, it nonetheless faltered and collapsed. Could and should Washington disengage itself from a government that lost the support of its people, or were they bound to sink together? Nixon and Kissinger do not seem even to have asked these questions when the Nixon Doctrine was first applied to either Iran or Cambodia. Still today they do not seem to have perceived the answers. That reflects above all a lack of political understanding and imagination that is in itself quite alarming.

The Nixon Doctrine applied to Iran was, basically, intended to build the shah into the guardian of the Persian Gulf. This was to be done by massive sale and transfers of arms. In the twenty-one years between 1950 and 1971, U.S. aggregate military sales to Iran had been $1.2 billion. As soon as Nixon took office, he and Kissinger encouraged an enormous increase; orders rose from $86 million in 1968 to $184 million in 1969. But the real bonanza began after Nixon and Kissinger's visit to Teheran in May 1972.

## Nixon and Kissinger visit the shah

THIS WAS AN extraordinary occasion. Nixon flew from Moscow, flushed with the success of a summit that had taken place despite his mining of the Haiphong harbor and renewed bombing of North Vietnam. He had, only a few weeks

"This skimpy treatment can be explained only by a desire to conceal."

39

William
Shawcross

before, visited China. Nixon was, apparently, in a mood close to euphoria. He literally embraced the shah in their private talks, frequently calling him "my protector" and "our protector." He encouraged him to be a tough ruler, at home and abroad, urging that he pay no attention to "our liberals' griping" about human rights. He urged the shah to take control of the Gulf and never to shut off oil as that "crazy man" Mossadegh had done.

The shah promised to do as he was asked on three conditions: that the CIA help him help the Kurds against Iraq; that the United States send him a large number of military technicians; and that, most important of all, he not only be armed but also be given carte blanche to buy the most sophisticated weapons in the American armory. Nixon and Kissinger agreed without reservation. Nixon offered the shah a U.S. naval presence in the Gulf.

The shah turned this down, saying he could defend the area himself. Together, he said, with Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and South Africa, he could control the Indian Ocean. He thanked Nixon for his advice on dissidents; he would put them in jail. He agreed with Nixon that the students must be stopped from being infected with "subversive" tendencies.

Nixon and Kissinger were evidently pleased with the visit. After their return to Washington, Kissinger implemented the promise to the shah. The CIA was ordered—over the protests of the station chief in Teheran, who feared disaster (correctly)—to start arming the Kurds. And in July Kissinger issued what must be one of the most remarkable memorandum ever written by a national security adviser. In the name of the president, he ordered the secretaries of defense and state to give the shah all the weapons he wanted. If the shah wanted F-14s, he should have them. If he wanted F-15s, he should have them. Even if they were still under development, even if U.S. forces themselves were not yet equipped with them. If he wanted laser-guided smart bombs, he should have them, too. If he wanted tanks, he should have them. If he wanted air-to-air missiles, ground-to-air missiles, air-to-ground missiles, they were to be sent. Destroyers, frigates, hovercraft, submarines—all were to go.

The generosity was in itself remarkable. But most extraordinary of all were Kissinger's instructions that the shah and the shah alone determine what he needed. He, and not the U.S. government, would decide what and how many American weapons were to be sent to Teheran.

According to George Ball, who reviewed the files for President Carter, Kissinger ordered "that the Iranian government should have the final word and that no American official should try to discourage any purchase." Kissinger's instructions were greeted with horror in the Pentagon, at least among the civilians in the Office of International Security Affairs (ISA), who are supposed to monitor and regulate U.S. arms sales in the national interest. They were, however, not subject to appeal, and over the next seven years $19.5 billion worth of arms were sold to the shah.

Kissinger's description of this policy in his book is less than complete. He merely says (p. 1264) that it was necessary to help arm the shah and that

> the specific decision facing Nixon was the Shah's wish for the F-14 and F-15 aircraft and associated equipment. There had been opposition: some Defense Department reluctance to part with advanced technology and State Department fears that the sale might be provocative. The Shah's alternative was to purchase the slightly less advanced French Mirage plane. Nixon overrode the objections and added a proviso that in the future Iranian requests should not be second-guessed. To call this an "open ended" commitment is hyperbole, considering the readiness and skill with which our bureaucracy is capable of emasculating directives it is reluctant to implement—a quality repeatedly demonstrated in the Nixon Administration (as during the India-Pakistan crisis) and soon compounded by the erosion of Nixon's authority as a result of Watergate.

Thus Kissinger dismisses and distorts a decision that led to one of the largest arms sale bonanzas in history. A decision, moreover, that was made without any policy review in Washington whatsoever, with no real or realistic consideration of its implications for either Iran or the United States.

## The OPEC connection

KISSINGER USES his two-volume technique to avoid any discussion of the corollary to the arming of the shah—the arming of the Kurds. He says, merely, "Nixon agreed also to encourage the Shah in supporting the autonomy of the Kurds in Iraq." After dismissing critics' "excited polemics" because they were ignorant of White House decisions, he says: "I shall explain these in a second volume. In 1972, in any case, this was all in the future." There then follows a short footnote on "the future":

42

"Suffice it here to mention..."

Kissinger does not mention much. Not that the decision to have the CIA run a $16 million program of arms to the Kurds was opposed by the U.S. ambassador in Teheran, as well as by the CIA station chief; not that the Forty Committee, the key oversight group for covert operations in Washington, was given no opportunity to discuss and approve the policy. Members were simply hand carried a one-paragraph synopsis of the project to sign after John Connally had been sent to Iran to assure the shah that the program was under way. Nor, of course, does Kissinger acknowledge that neither he nor the shah ever had any real intention of enabling the Kurds to win autonomy. They were to be used only to tie down Iraq troops for as long as that was the shah's pleasure. The Kurds themselves, unfortunately, did not understand this. Their leader, Musafa Barzani, frequently told CIA officials that he distrusted the shah but fully believed in the United States. If his cause succeeded, he was "ready to become the fifty-first state." His admiration for Kissinger was such that he sent him three rugs and, on his marriage, a gold and pearl necklace. In March 1976, the shah reached an accommodation with Iraq and abruptly cut off aid to the Kurds while Iraq launched an all-out offensive against them. Barzani sent frantic cables to the CIA station in Teheran, begging for help. The station passed them on to Washington, underlining its own concern about the situation. Barzani also wrote Kissinger:

> Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way with silence from everyone. We feel your excellency that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country's policy.

He begged Kissinger to try to end the Iraqi offensive and to try to get Iranian help to the Kurds. Despite further pleas from the station chief in Teheran on behalf of the Kurds, Kissinger did not reply. The Iraqi offensive destroyed Barzani's movement. Two hundred thousand refugees fled to Iran. They were not given much humanitarian assistance. The shah forcibly repatriated 40,000 of them; the United States accepted almost none. In 1975, Kissinger said of all this: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."

What does Kissinger now say? Only, in his footnote, that "the shah's decision in 1975 to settle the Kurdish problem with Iraq was based on the judgment, almost certainly correct, that the Kurds were about to be overwhelmed. ..."

KISSINGER REFUSES to acknowledge that the megalomania that he and Nixon encouraged in the shah by and after their May 1972 visit had anything to do with the shah's collapse. He attempts, naturally enough, to show that the shah was one of the most dedicated, progressive, and intelligent of rulers. One does not have to accept Edward Kennedy's assertion that he was one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants in history (he was not) to question this. Of the torture and imprisonment that became more and more characteristic of the shah's rule after Nixon's and Kissinger's encouragement in 1972, Kissinger says virtually nothing. Indeed, he had intended to say absolutely nothing. At the last minute, after the shah's fall, he added one sentence to the end of a long paragraph extolling the shah: "To be sure, there were also darker sides; high level corruption which blighted the noble aspirations and methods of repression unworthy of the enlightened goals" (p. 1259). The notion that the corruption and the repression had anything to do with the role that the United States had pressed upon the shah does not occur to Kissinger—not in print at least.

Kissinger writes that the shah "was for us that rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally" (p. 1261). If that is so, then Kissinger, evidently unwittingly, has put his finger on one of the causes of the shah's downfall. No leader can pledge his country to another unconditionally without suppressing his own country's national interests. What Kissinger is in fact saying is that those who claimed that the shah was an American puppet were absolutely correct. But is it true? In an important sense—that the shah was excited by dreams of defending the West—it was. In others it was not. In the matter of oil price rises—which, by most analyses, damaged U.S. and Western interests—the shah's friendship was far from unconditional. Kissinger obviously finds this a difficulty; his account, confined to a footnote (p. 1263), is painfully confused. It reads:

> He sought, of course, the best possible price for his oil, and was partly responsible for the severe OPEC price rise of 1973. But several things must be said: When he realized the damage done to the West by this action, he helped keep the price stable for the next five years. In fact, the real price of oil declined by 15 percent from 1973 to 1978. His motive for the original price rise was not political but economic; unlike some other countries, he wanted the maximum revenues for the development of his country. And he never sought to manipulate the oil price by restricting his pro-

"Kissinger says that the shah "was for us that rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally."

43

William
Shawcross
THROUGH
HISTORY
WITH
HENRY A.
KISSINGER

duction; he always kept his oil production at maximum capacity, thus permitting the law of supply and demand to operate in favor of stable prices.

The most interesting thing about this footnote is that it is almost all completely incorrect.

The shah did not always maximize his oil production, and he was, throughout the mid-Seventies, one of the leading hawks in OPEC, in no way a moderator. It is by no means clear that he realized, as Kissinger claims, that the price rises damaged the West. The Saudis, on the other hand, did appreciate that, and were constantly trying to restrain the shah and other members of the cartel. For example, when the OPEC oil ministers met in Teheran on December 22, 1973, the shah argued for a price of $14 a barrel. The shah had not joined the Arab boycott, but he was all for exploiting it to the full. The Saudi oil minister, Sheik Yamani, resisted this, partly on the grounds that it would damage the Western economy. He wanted only $7.50 a barrel. Under pressure Yamani agreed reluctantly to a compromise price of $11.65. Even this increase was too much for the West to absorb at once; Yamani had been right. From mid-1974 through 1975 the market slumped; there was an oil glut and production had to be cut back by 12 percent in 1975. At the same time, however, inflation in the West and Japan soared, in part as a result of the oil price rises; the prices OPEC members had to pay for American industrial products rose by 27 percent. At the next OPEC meeting, in Vienna in 1976, there was another fierce argument over the correct response. Once again the shah was among the most hawkish, the Saudis the least demanding. A compromise rise of 10 percent was agreed on.

The same dispute continued through 1976, as the West recovered from its recession and oil production increased again. At OPEC meetings in both Bali and Doha, the shah fought to push prices higher than the Saudis wished. The shah was not the only hawk in OPEC. Other countries with large populations—especially Algeria and Indonesia—were also keen on the highest prices. The point is simply that it is a lie for Kissinger to portray the shah as the friend of the West in the cartel.

Kissinger claims in his footnote that "the real price of oil *declined* by 15 percent from 1973 to 1978." This is apparently an attempt to downplay the significance of the oil price rises in the international economy. Even if this figure were true, which it is not, it hardly makes a persuasive case. OPEC raised the price by 400 percent after the Yom Kippur

war. In fact it was much higher than that, because the real price did not fall as Kissinger asserts.

## Oil for guns

THE CHARGE has now been aired—in the *Wall Street Journal* and on CBS's "Sixty Minutes"—that Kissinger actually colluded with the shah's rapacity in order that he be able the better to arm himself. James Akins, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, has said that before the December 1973 OPEC meeting, the Saudis tried in vain to get Washington's help in moderating the shah's demands. He says that through 1973, 1974, and 1975 this was a constant theme of the Saudis but that Washington would never listen. Other former administration officials, like Arthur Burns and William Simon, have added credence to Akins's charges.*

But whether or not Kissinger tacitly encouraged the shah's acquisitiveness, the oil price rises enabled the shah to expand his imperial dreams. What is extraordinary is that even though his purchasing power was so massively increased after 1973, there was no reconsideration of the policy to sell him whatever arms he wanted.

In July 1976, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own review, an extremely critical one. Kissinger immediately flew to Teheran. According to a report by the Washington correspondent of the *Times* of London, his "main purpose" was "to soothe the ruffled feelings of the shah" about the report. The shah gave a press conference in which he said: *(Continued on page 89)*

* When "Sixty Minutes" proposed to make a film documenting these charges, Kissinger reacted characteristically. He denigrated all his critics: Akins, whom he had fired, was out to get him; former Under Secretary of State George Ball was engaged in a personal vendetta; William Simon, former treasury secretary, was a political opponent; and so on. He refused at first to appear on the program, citing his contract with NBC. NBC's senior executives said they would not stop him appearing, so then he said that to do so would simply be committing suicide, and why should he? On Friday, April 25, two days before the program was due to be aired, he called CBS to say that he would appear after all. So the finished program was postponed, and the producers prepared to remake it to include Kissinger's rebuttals of the charges. On Monday, April 28, he called to say that he had changed his mind again. The postponement, in other words, had been for nothing. In the end the program was broadcast, without Kissinger, on May 4. He then put out a press statement which did little more than list his public criticisms of oil price increases from 1973 onward.

44

THROUGH HISTORY WITH HENRY L. KISSINGER

[10]

(Continued from page 44) "If you do not pursue a policy of standing by your friends who are spending their own money and are ready to spend their own blood, the alternative is nuclear annihilation or more Vietnams." Kissinger evidently agreed; he told the Senate on August 29 that the United States had now agreed to sell the shah to the Communists.

The massive militarization that the shah undertook did not itself cause hisown all. But it was part of the mega-terrania that separated him further from the realities of Iran; rather than try gently to curb those fantasies, Kissinger fed them.

The shah dislocated not just the economy but also the polity of the country, raising expectations that could never be met, encouraging huge migrations from the countryside to the towns—to disappointment. The "Great Civilization" was much vaunted; but it gave little. At the same time he came to believe more and more that "L'Etat, c'est moi." The meek opposition parties were dissolved, the secret police more and more vicious. In an interview with a Teheran paper to mark his fifty-seventh birthday on October 26, 1976, the shah reiterated that he would lead Iran "into the Great Civilization, by force if necessary. Those who do not want to work, we will take them by the tail and throw them out like mice."

There is no doubt that Carter's early insistence on human rights in 1977 pressured the shah to lift the lid of repression slightly. That this encouraged hundreds of thousands of people, millions even, to vent their frustrations, fears, grievances, and disappointments is clear. The mice began to turn. What does Kissinger make of this? His comments and analyses have been revealingly banal. "I accept the argument," he has said, "that all of us paid insufficient attention in Iran to the proposition that political construction should go side by side with economic construction. The failure was less of intelligence agencies than of a conceptual apparatus." Kissinger has also made it clear that the mice should then have been stamped on. Since the shah's fall he has constantly said that the United States should have intervened much more forcefully to encourage the shah to repress the revolution. Kissinger believes that the rage that the Iranian population has vented in the

last two years could have been suppressed by force. Perhaps it could have been—for a short time—but only by such amounts of force as, say, the Soviet Union is willing to apply.

Kissinger does not seem to see that as a problem.

## The Cambodian chapter

NOW CAMBODIA, another debacle for which he bears heavy though not exclusive responsibility. The parallels with Iran are obvious. In both countries local and regional realities were ignored. In both, Kissinger encouraged regimes that were unrepresentative to push their peoples in directions against their interests. The result, in both cases, was to separate those regimes farther and farther from their peoples and bring about their collapse. In both Iran and Cambodia, the application of the Nixon Doctrine was, to put it mildly, counterproductive. In both, American policy, Kissinger's policy, failed totally and produced reactions quite opposite to those he ostensibly sought. Those reactions have been terrible.

His treatments of the two policies in the memoirs also bear comparison. He is able to say so little about Iran because despite the importance of the subject, there has been almost no public investigation of his policy there. In the case of Cambodia he deals at length with issues already firmly in the public record and ignores those with which the public is less familiar but are actually more important.

In neither case does he give a full account. If he addresses issues inconvenient to his partial case, it is only because the inquiries of others have forced him to do so. This, perhaps, is not surprising (Why should an autobiography deal with uncomfortable matters?) but it bears constant repetition because of the reputation of completeness that Kissinger's book has won.

The destruction of Cambodia is one of the great man-made disasters of the twentieth century. During the Seventies, seven million people, mostly peasants, were plucked from peace and cast into an inferno of war and revolution. In the last decade perhaps two million people have died, and an entire society has been overturned. War continues there today and famine has threatened

the survivors. Much of what happened is still unbelievable, inexplicable. It will, one hopes, be examined and analyzed again and again, if only to diminish the chances of such a saga being repeated. In this process of establishing the historical record, Kissinger's book is of little help. His account of the Cambodian disaster is completely distorted—it has also been distorted not once but twice. The extent of the later distortions can be seen in the last-minute changes he made on his galleys. Here, I regret to say, a little personal history and explanation is needed.

In April 1979, I published a book called *Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia*. This book concentrated on the 1969-75 period of Cambodian history and laid much (not all) of the blame for Cambodia's destruction on careless policies carried out by Kissinger and Nixon. When *Sideshow* was published in April 1979, Kissinger was en route to Peking to join his wife, who had been modeling clothes for *Vogue* in China. In Peking he made a point of meeting, for the first time, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk had ruled Cambodia through the Fifties and Sixties and had kept the country largely out of Vietnam's war by a policy of inglorious but effective compromise. He was overthrown in a right-wing coup d'état in March 1970, and the White House immediately backed his usurper, General Lon Nol, and sustained him for the next five years despite his demonstrable incompetence.

Between 1970 and 1975 Cambodian society was torn apart and the Communist Khmer Rouge—led nominally by Sihanouk in Peking—grew from a tiny, insignificant group of some 4,000 with no hope of political influence into a callow army of about 70,000 that was able to take over the country. From 1975 to 1979 they ruled Cambodia with a ferocity that is still unbelievable, returning the country to "Year Zero" and murdering at least hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people. In January 1979, they were overthrown by an invasion from Vietnam. As the Vietnamese swept across Cambodia in the first week of 1979, the Chinese, the Khmer Rouge's only supporters, flew Sihanouk, whom the Khmer Rouge had kept under house arrest in Phnom Penh, to Peking. They sent him on to the United Nations to

89

protest the Vietnamese invasion. He did so, while also protesting Khmer Rouge domestic policies.

At that time I saw Sihanouk and asked him about the responsibility for what had happened over the last nine terrible years. He replied:

"There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia today, Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger. Lon Nol was nothing without them, and the Khmer Rouge were nothing without Lon Nol. Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger gave the Khmer Rouge involuntary aid because the people had to support the Communist patriots against Lon Nol. By expanding the war into Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger killed a lot of Americans and many other people—they spent enormous sums of money, $4 billion—and the results were the opposite of what they wanted. They demoralized America, they lost all of Indochina to the Communists and they created the Khmer Rouge."

Throughout the 1970-75 war, Kissinger failed to meet with Sihanouk, who lived in Peking. When he finally solicited a meeting in April 1979, Sihanouk, who is willing to make friends even of the bitterest enemies, invited him to lunch. Later last year, in Paris, Sihanouk gave me his account of the encounter. He seemed to find it amusing:

"Before lunch Kissinger said he wanted a special conversation with me. He began by saying he wanted to get things absolutely straight. That is to say, he had never been anti-Sihanouk, he had always been a Sihanouk supporter.... He insisted that the Americans had had nothing to do with the Lon Nol coup."

"I answered, 'But why, immediately after the coup, did you extend de jure recognition to Lon Nol? The United States government was the first in the world to do so. And after that President Nixon asked the U.S. Congress to give Lon Nol tremendous amounts of dollars to help his regime survive.'

"And Kissinger said, 'Yes, but we wanted you to return to power very quickly in Cambodia.'

"I answered, 'Why did you refrain from telling me about it? Not only that, but you wanted Lon Nol to resist to the end my return.'

"He said, 'No, No, No. You must believe' that we were favorable to your

returning to power and we did not like Lon Nol. We liked you!' (Sihanouk's emphasis).

"I said, 'Thank you very much.'

"And Kissinger said, 'I want you to believe it.' (Sihanouk's emphasis).

"I said, 'Excellency, let bygones be bygones.'

"He said, 'No, No, No, I want you to say that you believe me.'

"I said, 'I apologize; I cannot say I believe you.'"

With David Frost

KISSINGER'S BOOK was in galleys when Sideshow was published and when this conversation with Sihanouk took place. He incorporated some of the comments he elicited from Sihanouk—though not the exchange quoted above. He also made other substantial changes to the Cambodia section in an attempt to meet some of the charges made in Sideshow. Most authors make changes in their galleys. But some of Kissinger's changes shifted what he himself would call the "nuance" of his argument; others involved complete changes of fact.

Throughout last summer and early fall, Kissinger consistently and emphatically denied that he had made any such changes. When David Frost, to give but one of many examples, said in their celebrated NBC interview, "It's common knowledge that the Book-of-the-Month Club went berserk that you had to rewrite the Cambodian sections," Kissinger replied: "That just isn't true. . . . I added to the book itself one paragraph and I added one or two footnotes." The reality of the matter was established when, on October 31, 1979, the New York Times published a long article based on the galleys. It was headed "Kissinger revised his book more than he reported" and detailed some of the many changes that he made to the Cambodia section. Kissinger asserted that they were done in order to cut the length of the book. This too was untrue: The changes made the book longer.

Kissinger deals at length, if unpersuasively, with only two topics. First, the 1969-70 secret B-52 bombing of Vietnamese Communist sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia. Second, the spring 1970 overthrow of Sihanouk by Lon Nol and

the subsequent American invasion. After that, Cambodia disappears from the book for over 900 pages and two and a half years. The most destructive period of modern Cambodian history began in summer 1970. But Kissinger ignores it. He quite fails to mention that this new theater of war was staged by the White House and that he, personally, disregarding advice from the CIA, the State and even Defense Departments, constantly insisted that more and more Cambodians be conscripted to fight for what almost all American experts agreed was a hopeless and hopelessly destructive regime. Bearing in mind, therefore, that what Kissinger omits about the Cambodia story is much more important than what he includes, his Cambodia sections on the 1969-70 secret bombing and the 1970 invasion (together with the last-minute additions to them) need to be examined in detail if their full significance is to be clear.

AS THE AMERICAN war effort in South Vietnam increased in the late Sixties, the Communists built sanctuaries across the border in Cambodia. Sihanouk tolerated this infraction of his neutrality largely because he knew Cambodia could never survive an attempt to combat Vietnam. General Westmoreland frequently asked Lyndon Johnson to be allowed to attack the sanctuaries in force. Johnson, apparently anxious not to bring Cambodia directly into the war, refused and sanctioned hit-and-run attacks. In March 1969, Nixon and Kissinger acceded to a military request for B-52 strikes against one of the sanctuaries. Through the year the scale and frequency of these attacks grew. Between March 1969 and May 1970, over 3,600 raids were flown. The whole series was code-named Menu; specific sanctuaries attacked were called Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, et cetera. Neither Congress nor the public was informed of them.

Kissinger argues in his book the following points: He claims that the bombing had to be done secretly, because if it were public Sihanouk would have had to demand an end to it. He says, variously, that the sanctuaries were uninhabited or only lightly populated by Cambodians. He claims that the effect of the bombing was, if

90

anything to push the Vietnamese Communists back into South Vietnam rather than further into Cambodia. He asserts that the decision to bomb the sanctuaries was in response to an "unpro-unked" Communist offensive launched in South Vietnam in February 1969. He claims categorically that the North Vietnamese had violated the agreement under which the bombing of the North had been stopped in 1968 by President Johnson. Kissinger insists that protection of American lives was the principal U.S. concern. This contention would be reasonable if true. It is not true. The unprovoked Communist offensive began in February 1969, and fighting was fierce until the monsoon season ended it in May—this happened every year. Yet during that time the Menu campaign was, according to both Kissinger and Nixon, intermittent. There was one strike in March, one in April, and a few more in May. The strikes did not become regular until the fall of 1969. But by then the offensive had long since ended. If the bombing had been principally intended to save American lives, it would have been most intense from March to May.* It is, I suppose, not surprising that Kissinger does not mention Nixon's Madman Theory of War. This was explained by Nixon to H. R. Haldeman early in the administration: "I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war." One problem with establishing a reputation for madness is that it usually requires irrational actions or, at least, actions that more cautious men might forswear. The Menu bombing was in good part designed to practice the Madman Theory, to show that Nixon was prepared to take risks LBJ had forsworn. Kissinger acknowledges that the second Menu strike had nothing to do with Cambodia at all; Nixon ordered it in retaliation for the shooting down of a U.S. spy plane by North Korea. Nonetheless Kissinger insists that U.S. casualties were the principal concern.

Kissinger added at the last minute
claims that the sanctuaries bombed
were "all unpopulated" (p. 247) and
"affected no Cambodians" (p. 250).

This is simply not true. Indeed, the
Joint Chiefs themselves acknowledged
in a memorandum to Secretary Laird
in April 1969, that many of the bases
were inhabited: in Breakfast, there
were 1,640 peasants; in Lunch, 198
peasants; in Snack, 303 peasants; in
Dinner, 700 peasants; in Supper, 1,136
peasants; in Dessert, 120 peasants.
Nor is it true that no Cambodians
were killed and no complaints made
by Phnom Penh, as Kissinger claims.
In that same memo the Chiefs warned
that they thought it inevitable that
"some Cambodian casualties would be
sustained" in any attack on the sanc-
tuaries. In a memo of November 20,
1969, Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, chair-
man of the Joint Chiefs, acknowledged
to Melvin Laird that there had been a
recent complaint about a B-52 strike in
which eleven villagers had perhaps been
killed. Years later, on July 25, 1973,
the Pentagon told Congressman Mi-
chael Harrington: "We have no docu-
ments with which to provide useful
information on the totals of either ci-
vilian or military casualties in Cam-
bodia or Laos during this time frame."
The point is not that thousands of
peasants were killed by the Menu cam-

paign; no one knows how many died.
The point is simply that here again
Kissinger lies.

Rewritten history

JUST PRIOR to publication, Kissinger added a long section attempting to refute the notion, advanced in *Sideshow* and elsewhere, that the Menu bombing forced the Communists farther into Cambodia. In *Sideshow* I argued that this spread of the war helped increase right-wing dissatisfaction with Sihanouk and was one of the reasons for his overthrow in the right-wing coup in March 1970. Kissinger's addition begins:

> Nor is it true that the bombing drove the North Vietnamese out of the sanctuaries and thus spread the war deep into Cambodia. To the extent that North Vietnamese forces left the sanctuaries it was to move back into Vietnam, not deeper into Cambodia—until after Sihanouk was unexpectedly overthrown a year later.

This claim is absurd on several levels.
The idea of a "sanctuary" is not that

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* In fact U.S. casualties actually rose during the first half of 1969 in the Vietnamese province closest to many of the sanctuaries bombed, Tay Ninh. Kissinger does not mention this.

91

it be moved closer to the front line when attacked. There is much evidence that the Communists moved further into Cambodia through 1969 and early 1970. Sihanouk himself complained publicly about it. But there is no evidence at all that the sanctuaries were moved into Tay Ninh or other Vietnamese provinces that year. Nor does Kissinger cite any. When David Frost taxed Kissinger with this claim that the Communists leapt from the fire into the frying pan, Kissinger was visibly discomfited and admitted, "I have no evidence that they moved them in either direction, and I'm not saying that they moved them one way or the other." In other words, under pressure he agreed that an important part of the argument he made in his book was without foundation.

The book is also internally inconsistent on this matter. Kissinger's assertion conflicted with his own, largely correct, analysis of the causes of the coup against Sihanouk in March 1970:

> Cambodia's tragedy was that its internal stresses finally upset the delicate equilibrium that Sihanouk had struggled to maintain. . . .
> The precipitating issue was the communist sanctuaries from which the North Vietnamese had tormented our forces. These increasingly aroused the nationalist outrage of Cambodians. . . .

That is true. The sanctuaries were tolerable to most Cambodians through the late Sixties. In 1969 and 1970 they became intolerable to some because they became larger. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong usurped more of eastern Cambodia. Kissinger himself quotes statements from Sihanouk and from other Cambodian leaders to this effect. To maintain, as he does, that this movement out of the sanctuaries had nothing to do with the bombing of those sanctuaries (an operation that Kissinger says was extremely successful from the U.S. military view) is ridiculous. The point is not that Menu pushed the Communists hundreds of miles across Cambodia. It did not. But a few miles deeper into the country was enough to help upset what Kissinger calls its "delicate equilibrium."

The Menu campaign was destructive at home as well as abroad. It was unconstitutional—the president was secretly waging war in another country without the advice and consent of Con-

gress. Kissinger claims that on June 11, 1969, he and Nixon gave a "full briefing" to Senators Stennis and Russell on the matter. This is untrue. The bombing had not yet become regular and intense—there was no way the senators could have been fully briefed at all. Stennis himself has complained that he was never told the whole truth.

Kissinger does acknowledge that "we were wrong, I now believe, not to be more frank with Congressional leaders." But he claims that the minimal, informal briefings that took place were "at that time the accepted practice for briefing the Congress of classified military operations." (p. 253) This is not true. And Admiral Morer, later chairman of the Joint Chiefs, himself subsequently said in the *Washington Post* that the method by which the bombing was kept secret "was completely unique. It was occasioned by one thing and that was President Nixon's insistence on the utmost secrecy." Nixon and Kissinger's insistence led to the corruption of the military's own internal, top-secret reporting procedures. The true records of Menu missions were burned in special incinerators in South Vietnam. Radar officers were ordered to enter false statistics in the Pentagon's top-secret computer system. Thus, Menu was not just secret; according to the highest official records, it did not happen. When you consider that the B-52s are part of the Strategic Air Command, the nuclear strike force of the West, such corruption is alarming. Kissinger brushes it aside. The record shows without any doubt that Kissinger and Nixon were absolutely determined to deceive Congress, the press, and the American people on Menu—forever. That was why records were burned.

When Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970, he lied by claiming that hitherto the U.S. had "scrupulously respected" Cambodian neutrality and had not "moved against" the sanctuaries. On his galleys Kissinger made a last-minute acknowledgment of this: "And Nixon added a sentence that was as irrelevant to his central thesis as it was untrue, that we had heretofore not moved against the sanctuaries—overlooking the secret bombing." Kissinger does not acknowledge that he, too, told the same lie in a background briefing to the press that day. When David Frost asked Kissin-

ger about Nixon's lie, Kissinger said: "That statement should not have been made."

Frost: Why did he make it?

Kissinger: Because he was given to hyperbole.

Frost: Why did you make the same statement in your background briefing to the press on the same day?

Kissinger (looking very angry): Because, I suppose, to us this bombing of the sanctuaries had become so much part of the landscape that we did not really focus on that. But that was not a correct statement.

After the interview was taped, Kissinger moved heaven and earth to have NBC executives delete this exchange from the broadcast show. He called dozens of times from Europe, shouting that it be erased. But NBC was working under great public pressure because of Frost's resignation from and criticism of the project. The exchange was not erased.

Kissinger fails to acknowledge in the book that the lie was made not just once but over and over again. Nixon repeated it in his report to the nation on the invasion of June 30, 1970. This report was written by Kissinger. It was repeated again in the president's Foreign Policy Report to Congress on February 25, 1971; this report also was written by Kissinger. Countless other reports, briefings, and computer printouts sent to Congress through 1970, 1971, 1972, and early 1973 reiterated it. The story came out in summer, 1973, not because Kissinger or anyone else in the administration revealed it, but because an unknown radar operator who had been ordered to burn the original records finally described the operation to Senator Proxmire. But for him, there is no reason to suppose that Kissinger or any other administration official would have told any of the truth. Kissinger still tries not to do so.

## A welcome coup

PRINCE SIHANOUK was overthrown by his prime minister, Lon Nol, while he was enroute from Moscow to Peking, on March 18, 1970. Subsequently the North Vietnamese began to move farther into Cambodia; the South Vietnamese began to attack across the border. On April 30, the United States

92

and South Vietnamese invaded in force. From then on today, Cambodia has then engulfed in war and death. Writing on not the United States was directly involved in the coup—and I never personally found evidence that it was the record shows that it was welcomed by many in Washington. The Menu campaign had begun—as far as the military was concerned—as an attempt to destroy the Communist headquarters, COSVN; it had failed to do so, and the military was now pressing more forcefully for ground attacks across the border. The coup offered an unprecedented opportunity. Kissinger states:

> The record leaves no doubt that the North Vietnamese, also caught by surprise by the March coup, bear the heaviest responsibility for events in Cambodia. Their illegal and arrogant occupation of Cambodian territory tore apart the fragile neutrality of Sihanouk's neutralist country.

That the North Vietnamese bear heavy responsibility for the fate of Cambodia has never been in question. What is still debatable is just who was setting the pace of events in spring 1970. The record is by no means as clear as Kissinger claims. Indeed, his own contribution confuses more than it enlightens. Kissinger asserts that within days of the coup the situation was out of control. Sihanouk, he says, was "unreachable" in Peking (this point we have already dealt with) and had committed himself to his former enemies, the Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge. In fact the Chinese and the North Vietnamese both greeted the coup ambiguously: they did not embrace Sihanouk at once.

There is no doubt that the fighting in eastern Cambodia spread during March and April. Nor is there any doubt that the North Vietnamese moved westward. What is questionable is their motive. Did they move freely, bent on conquest, as Kissinger alleges, or were they pushed? Kissinger goes to considerable lengths to conceal that since February—before the coup—the South Vietnamese had been authorized by Washington to launch limited ground attacks on the sanctuaries, in an attempt to push the Communists farther away from the border (and deeper into Cambodia) than Menu had already done. On page 488 there is some

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93

THROUGH HISTORY WITH HENRY KISSINGER

serious rewriting to hide these operations. Originally Kissinger had acknowledged: "Since February the South Vietnamese had undertaken occasional shallow crossborder operations." On galleys he changed this to: "Since February the South Vietnamese had considered . . ." such operations. A different matter.

The extent to which these attacks began to drive the Vietnamese farther into Cambodia even before Sihanouk's overthrow is not known. But when Lon Nol seized power, the Communists tried to reach an accommodation with him. On March 20 the CIA reported that the Chinese ambassador to Phnom Penh had already indicated to Lon Nol that Sihanouk's overthrow would be acceptable so long as the sanctuaries could remain.

Perhaps most significant of all, a considered CIA National Intelligence Estimate, produced at the end of June 1970, noted: "Although Sihanouk was erratic, his policies allowed the Communists to operate under reasonably acceptable conditions as far as the war in South Vietnam was concerned. That the Communists were somewhat loath to give up this status quo is evidenced in their early, but unfruitful, efforts to attempt to strike some sort of deal with the new regime in Phnom Penh." Kissinger mentions none of these nor any other Communist efforts at accommodation in his book. It is his purpose to show that from the moment of the coup the North Vietnamese were intent on capturing Cambodia. Attempts at compromise do not fit into that design.

Why did Lon Nol first start and then abruptly break off negotiations with the Communists—from whose trade he had personally profited in the past? There seem to be two reasons. First, Lon Nol was given promises of American support if he ended the sanctuary system. And second, the North Vietnamese were all the time being pushed into the country, anyway—by South Vietnamese attacks.

Kissinger mentions that on April 3 the Communists attacked government positions in Svay Rieng province. He does not mention that on April 4 Abrams asked to send Special Forces teams into the country, nor that on April 5 two South Vietnamese battalions thrust ten miles deep into Cambodia. He says that on April 10 Cambodian troops were forced to evacuate

positions in the Parrot's Beak. He does not acknowledge another South Vietnamese operation begun on the same day. Nor that joint South Vietnamese-Cambodian military planning also began then. Kissinger produces long lists of specific Communist attacks to show Hanoi's aggressive intent. What is interesting is that many of these incidents have never been mentioned before, neither in Nixon's announcement of the invasion, nor anywhere else. This is not to say that they did not happen. But it does suggest that they were not considered significant until now. What Kissinger has done is to dredge the files for the slightest incident that he could exaggerate to support his current assertion that the Communists were intent in April 1970 on capturing all of Cambodia and would have done so but for the U.S. invasion. This exaggeration of events went on right until the book went to press. On page 472, for example, he had written that "on April 13 and 14 several Cambodian outposts in Takeo province south of Phnom Penh and near the South Vietnamese border were captured." This apparently did not sound serious enough; on rewriting, the outposts became "military positions," and the fact that they were near the border is deleted altogether.

Throughout, Kissinger has added last-minute assertions that the Communists were determined to overcome all Cambodia in April 1970. Thus on page 485 he has changed "April saw a wave of Communist attacks to ensure the free use of Cambodia for military purposes against South Vietnam and us" to "April saw a wave of Communist attacks to overthrow the existing governmental structure in Cambodia." These are two totally different things. The rewritten claims of imminent North Vietnamese hegemony over Cambodia are vital to Kissinger's case that the United States had no alternative to the actions it took there. But there is no evidence whatsoever to support them. His own analysts on the NSC—John Court, Larry Lynn, and Robert San-sone—were ordered in summer 1970 to try to prove that case on the basis of captured documents, radio intercepts, and all other evidence. They were un-able to do so.

The most detailed and authoritative survey of the U.S. case was published by the embassy in Saigon in January

1971. This was a long paper in the embassy's series, "Vietnam—Documents and Research Notes"; it was entitled, "The Viet Cong's March-April 1970 Plans for Expanding Control in Cambodia." This, too, made no mention whatsoever of any plan by Hanoi to take over the government of Phnom Penh. Nor did a similar, less sophisticated paper published by the Ministry of Information in Phnom Penh in 1971 entitled, "Documents of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Aggression Against Cambodia." Had any such evidence existed, it is certain that both of these documents would have included it.

To be fair to Kissinger, he does not produce any evidence himself. He merely asserts. These assertions have no basis in reality. What the Vietnamese Communists were trying to do in March-April 1970—after their attempt to work out a compromise with Lon Nol had failed—was to try to control large enough areas of eastern Cambodia to guarantee the security of their sanctuaries and supply routes. In the long term, certainly, they planned to build up an indigenous Communist army to battle Lon Nol. And in the long term, certainly they wanted Cambodia to be a part of an Indochina federation dominated by Hanoi. But that is not relevant to decisions made in 1970; then their principal concern was Vietnam, and any attempt to "conquer" and control Cambodia would have been a wasteful diversion of resources.

## Outflanking opponents

KISSINGER IS equally disingenuous in his description of the atmosphere and manner in which the invasion was planned in Washington, particularly in the White House. He disregards completely the fact that Nixon at the beginning of 1970 was anxiously seeking a way to demonstrate American "credibility" and that Cambodia provided an opportunity. In his own memoirs Nixon says in the Cambodian invasion section: "As 1970 began . . . I felt that we had to think about initiatives we could undertake to show the enemy that we were still serious about our commitment in Vietnam." Sihanouk's overthrow provided the opportunity for just such an "initiative."

94

Kissinger tries to downplay the chaotic emotional way in which the decision to invade was reached. He is not very successful because so much is already known the public record about Nixon's disbursed drinking state at the time. He also has difficulty in dismissing the charge that the secretaries of state and defense were cut out of the planning of the invasion because they were opposed to it. Here he has had the regime extra busy at work.

On page 597 Kissinger describes events on April 24. A decision to send the South Vietnamese into the sanctuaries had already been made; discussion over the use of American troops was continuing. Originally he had written: "All planning so far had been conducted without the participation of the secretaries of state and defense, who in fact devoted much of their energy to cutting back on even the South Vietnamese operation into the Parrot's Beak." In his revised version this admission has gone; instead he writes only: "Since the NSC meeting two days earlier the Secretaries of State and Defense had not been heard from."

In his attempt to show that no prior consideration had been given to an invasion, Kissinger has made perhaps the most fraudulent change of all on the galleys. On page 487 of the book there is a short paragraph that begins, "There had been no consideration of attacking the sanctuaries before April 21. The final decision was taken on April 28." This paragraph was added at the last minute; it bears reading twice.

At the same time Kissinger deleted from the galleys a memorandum that he wrote for Nixon's April 26 meeting with Laird, Rogers, Helms, and Wheeler. This memo, which would have appeared on page 499, reads:

> The purpose of today's meeting should be to consider the ramifications of authorizing the combined US-ARVN operation into Base Area 352-353. . . . Conceptually this operation would constitute a second punch when combined with the already approved ARVN operation into the Parrot's Beak scheduled for the early morning hours of April 28 Saigon time. The combined US-ARVN into Base Area 352-353 operation has been under preparation by MACV for

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95

several weeks but up until now Secretary Laird has not been aware of the likelihood of its being approved and opposition can be anticipated from him as well as from the Secretary of State. The Joint Staff and MACV, however, have been proceeding with the view towards early implementation of the plan in the event you decided in favor of it.

This is an extraordinary document, and one can see why Kissinger had to delete it. Not only does it flatly refute his last-minute claim that no invasion had been considered before April 21 and that it was only decided on April 28, it also demonstrates more clearly than anything else that the White House was making vast military plans without the knowledge of the secretary of defense. It is in effect a contradiction to the assertion that Kissinger added at the last moment on page 502 that "the decision was not made behind the backs of his senior advisers, as has been alleged—though later on others were. Nixon overruled his Cabinet members; he did not keep them in the dark."

SO MUCH for the causes and the planning of the invasion; what of the effects? Kissinger acknowledges that its successes were restricted by the domestic uproar (which Laird, unlike Kissinger, had predicted) that forced Nixon to limit the adventure to two months and eighteen miles. But he claims that "the main goals" were achieved. The invasion "made our withdrawal from Vietnam easier; it saved lives; even after the sanctuaries were partly reoccupied by the Communists they had been deprived of stockpiles for a sustained offensive" (p. 507). These claims are without foundation. To begin with the last, the Communists quickly rebuilt their stockpiles in the sanctuaries. In 1972, they launched huge attacks from them on Kontum in the central highlands and on An Loc in southwest Vietnam. The tactical advantage gained by the United States and South Vietnam was short-lived.

At home the political setback that the invasion represented was incalculable. It reawakened the antiwar movement in the streets and campuses, leading to Kent State; it encouraged

Congress to take a much more aggressive attitude toward Vietnamization.

What of casualties? Kissinger says, understandably, that "for Americans, of course, the key criterion was our casualties. . . ." He claims that after the invasion

the number of men killed in action dropped to below one hundred a week for the first time in four years. They continued to drop every month thereafter. For each month beginning with June, 1970, the casualty figure averaged less than half of that of the corresponding month of the previous year. By May, 1971, a year later, it had fallen to thirty-five a week; in May, 1972, ten a week. To be sure the withdrawal of American forces was a reason; but we had several hundred thousand Americans in Vietnam through 1971, and had Hanoi possessed the capability it could have inflicted substantially higher casualties than it did. That it did not do so was importantly due to the breathing space provided by the Cambodian operation (p. 508).

In fact this is, for Kissinger, rather a modest claim. And well it might be. For the invasion had little effect on U.S. casualties, beyond raising them for the period it lasted. Casualties dropped afterwards, but for other reasons.*

No one would argue that Nixon and Kissinger did not have a primary responsibility to protect their own

* Casualties were cyclical. Every year they were highest during the annual campaigning season, January-May, and fell through the summer and fall. June 1970, was no different.

Every year from 1968 onward, this overall pattern was repeated with lower peaks every year.

Over 50 percent of all American casualties occurred in the north of South Vietnam, near the DMZ, far from Cambodia and largely unaffected therefore by the bombing or invasion of the sanctuaries.

Over 76 percent of American deaths were incurred in combat, specifically in the U.S. maneuver battalions engaged in offensive action. U.S. deaths fell in direct relation to the withdrawal of maneuver battalions; from 1969—long before the invasion—these battalions were withdrawn faster than any other U.S. troops in Vietnam. By 1972, U.S. deaths were certainly way down—to only 300—because by then almost all Americans were safely ensconced in rear areas, protected by South Vietnamese troops.

troops. But what responsibility should they accept for the lives of their allies? In discussing casualties Kissinger does not mention those of the Cambodians or Vietnamese. In 1971 for instance, U.S. deaths were certainly down. But South Vietnamese deaths were the same, and Cambodian deaths had grown enormously. Overall, the number of young men dying in Indochina was almost identical to the year before. And over 1972-74, 98,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed. Obviously Kissinger could not be expected to weight Southeast Asian deaths as heavily as American ones. But some consideration of them was due. He seems to give none.

## All the world a stage

INA SECTION entitled "The Balance Sheet," Kissinger attempts to show that U.S. action actually saved Cambodia for five whole years from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge:

> Without our incursion the Communists would have taken over Cambodia years earlier. That the rule of these fanatical idealogies would have been more benign under those conditions is not very likely; when tyrants are so remote from their people, so committed to frightful experiments of social transformation, so doctrinaire, no normal criteria apply.

This is skillful but contemptible elision. By using the phrase "the Communists" Kissinger disregards the distinction between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese. He ignores that the indigenous Khmer Rouge could not have taken power in 1970; they were only about 4,000 strong and had no political base. By 1975 they had waxed on the war, seizing nationalism and numbered some 70,000 soldiers, capable (barely, and by using terror) of taking over the country. It may be that "no normal criteria" can be applied to the Khmer Rouge leaders. But Kissinger will not face the fact that in 1970 they could not have had power; in 1975 they won it after a five-year war that had destroyed Cambodian society.

Kissinger ignores also his own principal argument—that in April 1970, it was Hanoi's quest for hegemony that forced the U.S. invasion. If so, Hanoi would never have allowed leaders from

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the Cambodian Communist maquis to take control in 1970. Had they sought and won control of Cambodia at that point they would have installed their own leadership, and they did after they invaded in 1979. They had Cambodian Communists in Chiangai groomed since 1954 for just such an eventuality. (By 1979 the Khmer Rouge had killed all these 'Hanoi Khmer': Defectors from the Khmer Rouge had to be installed.) In a section (p. 517) added at the last minute Kissinger asserts:

> The bizarre argument has been made, with glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in history was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them. No one can accept this as an adequate explanation except apologists for the murderous Khmer Rouge rule. Sihanouk does not believe this; they were men he had kicked out of Cambodia in 1967 because they were a menace to his country. He told me in April, 1979, that the Khmer Rouge leaders were "always killers from the beginning."

The argument is not as bizarre as Kissinger misrepresents it. Whether or not the Khmer Rouge were always killers—and the evidence is that they became much more brutal as the war progressed—the point is that it was only after the five-year war that they were put into the position of being able to kill so many so indiscriminately. The five-year war did not resist them; it created the conditions, the only conditions, in which they could grow. Just as the Bolsheviks could come to power in Russia only after the destruction wrought by World War I, so the Khmer Rouge were brought to control Cambodia only by the 1970-75 war.

AND THAT'S almost all there is of Cambodia in Kissinger's book, apart from two pages of ritualistic regret, added at the last minute (pp. 518-520). *White House Years* covers 1969-1973, but there is no mention at all of Cambodia between pages 528 and 1,414, between June 1970 and a hastily rewritten paragraph on November 1972. The most destructive period of all, after the 1970 invasion when fighting and bombing spread across the country, is evidently

of no interest to Kissinger. He does not mention that he and Nixon sent Alexander Haig to Phnom Penh to decide how to run this new war in summer 1970. Nor does he discuss National Security Study Memorandum 99, in which tactics for the defense of Cambodia against the Communists were discussed in Washington in the fall of 1970. He ignores that it was he, against the advice of Laird and Rogers, who insisted that the United States implement the most ambitious and impractical of the proposals for the militarization of Cambodia. There is no reference here to National Security Decision Memorandum 89, "Cambodian Strategy," in which he gave this instruction.

Kissinger does not reveal his reasons for increasing the size of the U.S. military team in Phnom Penh again in summer 1971. He does not say anything about the terrible battle of Chenla 11 in November 1971 when Lon Nol's pathetic, bloated, overextended new army was decisively routed by the Vietnamese. He never mentions the problems of leadership and corruption that the military expansion imposed by the United States caused in Cambodia. He avoids that State and CIA officials in the U.S. embassy became more and more despairing as the war progressed, that they constantly warned Washington of Lon Nol's incompetence and corruption, and that these warnings were ignored.

The flood of peasants off the land, fleeing the bombing and the fighting and then the growing cruelty of the growing Khmer Rouge is not relevant to Kissinger. He has no interest in the collapse of Cambodian society through 1970, 1971, and 1972. None of these things, none of these terrible steps toward the calvary of the Cambodian people is mentioned once by Kissinger.

AFTER the second world war, the international military tribunal defined as a war crime "wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity." In the case of Cambodia, there are many groups against whom a prima facie charge could be made on those grounds, including Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge leaders. But Kissinger is also among them. This book shows that he has no defense. *White House Years*

proves forcefully and more conclusively than any of his critics could ever do that for Kissinger Cambodia was indeed a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations.

Iran and Cambodia are only two in a list of Kissinger failures that is far longer than that of his successes. His most obvious successes were SALT I and the attempt to deal rationally with the U.S.S.R. and the acceptance of the initiative from Peking—albeit in conditions of secrecy that were not only unnecessary but were themselves destructive—if only for the people of Bangladesh. Cyprus, Southern Africa, Chile, Argentina, even the Middle East—where his achievement is commonly thought considerable—all suffered from either his neglect at crucial times (because he was busy elsewhere and refused to allow others to deal with important issues) or his hard geo-political views. People all over the world are still suffering the consequences of Kissinger's policies. So is the United States.

Kissinger still has an adoring coterie of journalists, but at the end of last year, an ABC Harris poll showed that a majority of Americans believe that Kissinger lied about Cambodia and should not be secretary of state again. More and more of the promises he made have turned out to be unfounded. Nothing in his book or in his recent statements shows that he has learned from his failures. Returned to office, he would produce another Cambodia, another Chile.

Kissinger's obsession with signaling American resolve was such that to some Pentagon officials he was known as "the signalman." One does not have to question the assumption that the U.S.S.R. is an aggressive power, hostile to the West, to see that Kissinger's notion is both terrifying and very stupid. It is the Madman Theory of War applied to peace, or at least to "peaceful coexistence." It conjures up the picture of Kissinger attempting to manipulate or coerce country after country, crisis after crisis, into some carefully devised pattern of world order that has paid no real attention to local conditions or even the local outcome, but which is designed rather to impress a few old men in the Kremlin. All the world was a stage for Kissinger, but the audience was very small.

HARPER'S/NOVEMBER 1980

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