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Forty Acres and an SUV

Like the discarded television that sits in my basement, America operates only in black and white. This color line remains because of three hundred years of de jure and de facto slavery. As the participants in "Making the Case for Racial Reparations" [November 2000] point out, slavery did not end with the Civil War. America (meaning the government and majority community) decided to live in denial and to ignore slavery and its echo.

But the slave is no less bound to the master than the master is bound to the slave. The majority community lives in fear of what equal access to success might mean to those inside and outside the Establishment. Until America can erase the color line, there will be friction among all who live here.

"Black reparations," as legal scholar Robert Westley has said, "should be considered a prerequisite to civil equality." But a paycheck, forty acres, and an SUV in and of themselves will not create civil equality.

Part of the goal in seeking reparations is to educate America and the rest of the world about what Forum participant Alexander Pires called "the most unacknowledged story in America's history." People must be made aware that black Americans, like the Jews and Japanese who continue to receive reparations for injustices perpetrated during World War II, suffer

Harper's Magazine welcomes reader response. Please address mail to Letters, Harper's Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, NY, 10012, or email us at letters@harpers.org. Short letters are more likely to be published, and all letters are subject to editing. Volume precludes individual acknowledgment.

from the nation's failure to acknowledge past injustices. In addition, reparations ought to include increased access to education for blacks, young and old. We need to implement institutions and programs that will allow black America to become economically independent.

Some people will argue: "I never owned a slave. I never oppressed anyone. Why should I have to pay?" But reparations are an investment for a better future. The livelihood of all Americans is dependent on an improved social condition, one in which civil equality exists.

Does America owe a debt to descendants of its slaves? The bricks and mortar of our nation's capital, whose very stones were laid by slaves, send a resounding yes. The real question is, When will America acknowledge the debt it owes and take action? Until we have adequately answered this question, the story of our nation will continue to unfold in black and white.

Johnnie Cochran
Los Angeles

The lawyers in the November Forum ignored several reasons why reparations should not be paid:

The slaves who survived the treacherous transatlantic journey generally fared far better than the mass of individuals left behind who were victims of brutal black slave owners in Africa.

Money for reparations would come from taxpayers who had nothing to do with slavery—whose own ancestors came to America long after slavery was abolished. Should these individuals be held accountable for the horrors suffered by the slaves in America?

4 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

No, I have confined myself to the identifiable crimes that can and should be placed on a proper bill of indictment, whether the actions taken were in line with general "policy" or not. These include, in this installment, the deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina and the personal suborning and planning of murder of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation—Chile—with which the United States was not at war. In a second installment we will see that this criminal habit of mind extends to Bangladesh, Cyprus, East Timor, and even to Washington, D.C.

Some of these allegations can be constructed only prima facie, since Mr. Kissinger—in what may also amount to a deliberate and premeditated obstruction of justice—has caused large tranches of evidence to be withheld or possibly destroyed. We now, however, enter upon the age when the defense of “sovereign immunity” for state crimes has been held to be void. As I demonstrate below, Kissinger has understood this decisive change even if many of his critics have not. The House of Lords’ ruling in London, on the international relevance of General Augusto Pinochet’s crimes, added to the splendid activism of the Spanish magistracy and the verdicts of the International Tribunal at The Hague, has destroyed the shield that immunized crimes committed under the justification of *raison d’état*. There is now no reason why a warrant for the tri-

MANY OF KISSINGER’S PARTNERS
IN POLITICS ARE NOW IN JAIL.
HIS OWN LONELY IMPUNITY IS RANK

al of Kissinger may not be issued in any one of a number of jurisdictions and no reason why he may not be compelled to answer it. Indeed, as I write, there are a number of jurisdictions where the law is at long last beginning to catch up with the evidence. And we have before us in any case the Nuremberg precedent, by which the United States solemnly undertook to be bound.

A failure to proceed will constitute a double or triple offense to justice. First, it will violate the essential and now uncontested principle that not even the most powerful are above the law. Second, it will suggest that prosecutions for war crimes and crimes against humanity are reserved for losers, or for minor despots in relatively negligible countries. This in turn will lead to the paltry politicization of what could have been a notable process and to the justifiable suspicion of double standards.

Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in politics, from Greece to Chile to Argentina to Indonesia, are now in jail or awaiting trial. His own

lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs—strong enough to detain only the weak and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.

REGARDING HENRY

On December 2, 1998, Michael Korda was being interviewed on camera in his office at Simon & Schuster. As one of the reigning magnates of New York publishing, he had edited and “produced” the work of authors as various as Tennessee Williams, Richard Nixon, Joan Crawford, and Joe Bonanno. On this particular day, he was talking about the life and thoughts of Cher, whose portrait adorned the wall behind him. And then the telephone rang and there was a message to call “Dr.” Henry Kissinger as soon as possible. A polymath like Korda knows—what with the exigencies of publishing in these vertiginous days—how to switch in an instant between Cher and high statecraft. The camera kept running, and recorded the following scene for a tape that I possess:

Asking his secretary to get the number (759-7919—the digits of Kissinger Associates), Korda quips dryly, to general laughter in the office, that it “should be 1-800-CAMBODIA . . . 1-800-BOMB-CAMBODIA.” After a pause of nicely calibrated duration (no senior editor likes to be put on hold while he’s receiving company, especially media company) it’s “Henry—Hi, how are you?... You’re getting all the publicity you could want in the *New York Times* but not the *kind* you want... I also think it’s very, very dubious for the administration to simply say yes, they’ll release these papers . . . no . . . no, absolutely . . . no . . . no well, hmmm, yeah. We did it until quite recently, frankly, and he did prevail . . . Well, I don’t think there’s any question about that, as uncomfortable as it may be . . . Henry, this is totally outrageous . . . yeah . . . also the jurisdiction. This is a Spanish judge appealing to an English court about a Chilean head of state. So it’s, it . . . Also, Spain has no rational jurisdiction over events in Chile anyway, so that makes absolutely no sense . . . Well, that’s probably true . . . If you would. I think that would be by far and away the best . . . Right, yeah, no, I think it’s exactly what you should do, and I don’t think it should be long, and I think it should end with your father’s letter. I think it’s a very important document . . . Yes, but I think the letter is wonderful, and central to the entire book. Can you let me read the Lebanon chapter over the weekend?” At this point the conversation ends, with some jocular observa-

34 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

HENRY KISSINGER,
1973

tions by Korda about his upcoming colonoscopy: "a totally repulsive procedure."

By means of the same tiny internal camera, or its forensic equivalent, one could deduce not a little about the world of Henry Kissinger from this microcosmic exchange. The first and most important is this: Sitting in his office at Kissinger Associates, with its tentacles of business and consultancy stretching from Belgrade to Beijing, and cushioned by innumerable other directorships and boards, he still shudders when he hears of the arrest of a dictator. Syncopated the conversation with Korda may be, but it's clear that the keyword is "jurisdiction." What had the *New York Times* been reporting that fine morning? On December 2, 1998, its front page carried the following report from Tim Weiner, the paper's national-security correspondent in Washington. Under the headline "U.S. Will Release Files on Crimes Under Pinochet," he wrote:

> Treading into a political and diplomatic confrontation it tried to avoid, the United States decided today to declassify some secret documents on the killings and torture committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile....

The decision to release such documents is the first sign that the United States will cooperate in the

case against General Pinochet. Clinton Administration officials said they believed the benefits of openness in human rights cases outweighed the risks to national security in this case. But the decision could open "a can of worms," in the words of a former Central Intelligence Agency official stationed in Chile, exposing the depth of the knowledge that the United States had about crimes charged against the Pinochet Government....

While some European government officials have supported bringing the former dictator to court, United States officials have stayed largely silent, reflecting skepticism about the Spanish court's power, doubts about international tribunals aimed at former foreign rulers, and worries over the implications for American leaders who might someday also be accused in foreign countries. [Italics added.]

President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, who served as his national security advisor and Secretary of State, supported a right-wing coup in Chile in the early 1970s, previously declassified documents show.

But many of the actions of the United States during the 1973 coup, and much of what American leaders and intelligence services did in liaison with the Pinochet Government after it seized power, remain under the seal of national security. The secret files on the Pinochet regime are held by the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council,

Photograph © Ellidge / Sipa Press

REPORT 35

the National Archives, the Presidential libraries of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, and other Government agencies. According to Justice Department records, these files contain a history of human rights abuses and international terrorism:

* In 1975 State Department diplomats in Chile protested the Pinochet regime's record of killing and torture, filing dissents to American foreign policy with their superiors in Washington.

* The C.I.A. has files on assassinations by the regime and the Chilean secret police. The intelligence agency also has records on Chile's attempts to establish an international right-wing covert-action squad.

THE SIGNING OF THE PARIS PEACE ACCORD, 1973

* The Ford Library contains many of Mr. Kissinger's secret files on Chile, which have never been made public. Through a secretary, Mr. Kissinger declined a request for an interview today.

One must credit Kissinger with grasping what so many other people did not: that if the Pinochet precedent became established, then he himself was in some danger. The United States believes that it alone pursues and indicts war criminals and "international terrorists"; nothing in its political or journalistic culture yet allows for the thought that it might be harboring and sheltering such a senior one. Yet the thought had very obliquely surfaced in Weiner's story, and Kissinger was a worried man when he called his editor that day to discuss the concluding volume of his memoirs (eventually published under the unbearably dull and self-regarding title *Years of Renewal*), which was still in progress.

"Harboring and sheltering," though, are understatements for the lavishness of Henry Kissinger's circumstances. His advice is sought, at $30,000 an appearance, by audiences of businessmen and academics and policymakers. His turgid newspaper column is syndicated by the *Los Angeles Times* and appears as far afield as the *Wash-

ington Post*. His first volume of memoirs was in part written, and also edited, by Harold Evans, who with Tina Brown is among the many hosts and hostesses who solicit Kissinger's company, or perhaps one should say society, for their New York soirees. At different times, he has been a consultant to ABC News and CBS; his most successful diplomacy, indeed, has probably been conducted with the media (and his single greatest achievement has been to get almost everybody to call him "Doctor"). Fawned on by Ted Koppel, sought out by corporations and despots with "image" problems or "failures of communication," and given respectful attention by presidential candidates and those whose task it is to "mold" their global vision, this man wants for little in the pathetic universe that the "self-esteem" industry exists to serve. Of whom else would Norman Podhoretz write, in a bended-knee encomium to the second volume of Kissinger's memoirs, *Years of Upheaval*:

> What we have here is writing of the very highest order. It is writing that is equally at ease in portraiture and abstract analysis; that can shape a narrative as skillfully as it can paint a scene; that can achieve marvels of compression while moving at an expansive and leisurely pace. It is writing that can shift without strain or falsity of tone from the *gravitas* befitting a book about great historical events to the humor and irony dictated by an unfailing sense of human proportion.

A critic who can suck like that, as was once dryly said by one of my moral tutors, need never dine alone. Nor need his subject. Except that, every now and then, the recipient (and donor) of so much sycophancy feels a tremor of anxiety. He leaves the well-furnished table and scurries to the bathroom. Is it perhaps another disclosure on a newly released Nixon tape? Some stray news from Indonesia portending the fall or imprisonment of another patron (and perhaps the escape of an awkward document or two)? The arrest or indictment of a torturer or assassin; the expiry of the statute of secrecy for some obscure cabinet papers in a faraway country? Any one of these can instantly spoil his day. As we see from the Korda tape, Kissinger cannot open the morning paper with the assurance of tranquillity. Because he knows what others can only suspect, or guess at. And he is a prisoner of the knowledge, as, to some extent, are we.

Notice the likable way in which Michael Korda demonstrates his broad-mindedness with the Cambodia jest. Everybody "knows," after all, that Kissinger inflicted terror and misery and mass death on that country, and great injury to the United States Constitution at the same time. (Everybody also "knows" that other vulnerable nations can lay claim to the same melancholy and hateful distinction as Cambodia, with incre-

36 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

Photograph © Bettmann / CORBIS

mental or "collateral" damage to American democracy keeping pace.) Yet the pudgy man standing in black tie at the *Vogue* party is not, surely, the man who ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics who got in his way. Oh, but he is. He's exactly the same man. And that may be among the most nauseating reflections of all. Kissinger is not invited and feted because of his exquisite manners or his mordant wit (his manners are in any case rather gross, and his wit consists of a quiver of borrowed and secondhand darts). No, he is sought after because his presence supplies a frisson, the authentic touch of raw and unapologetic power. There's a slight guilty nervousness on the edge of Korda's gag about the indescribable sufferings of Indochina. And I've noticed, time and again, standing at the back of the audience during Kissinger speeches, that laughter of the nervous, uneasy kind is the sort of laughter he likes to provoke. In exacting this tribute, he flaunts not the "aphrodisiac" of power (another of his plagiarized bons mots) but its pornography.

## DRESS REHEARSAL: THE SECRET OF '68

There exists, within the political class of Washington, D.C., an open secret that is too momentous and too awful to tell. Although it is well known to academic historians, senior reporters, former Cabinet members, and ex-diplomats, it has never been summarized all at one time in any one place. The reason for this is, on first viewing, paradoxical. The open secret is in the possession of both major political parties, and it directly implicates the past statecraft of at least three former presidents. Thus, its full disclosure would be in the interest of no particular faction. Its truth is therefore the guarantee of its obscurity; it lies like Poe's "purloined letter" across the very aisle that signifies bipartisanship.

Here is the secret in plain words. In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam. The means they chose were simple: they privately assured the South Vietnamese military rulers that an incoming Republican regime would offer them a better deal than would a Democratic one. In this way, they undercut both the talks themselves and the electoral strategy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The tactic "worked," in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, thereby destroying the peace initiative on which the Democrats had based their campaign. In another way, it did not "work," because four years later the Nixon Administration tried to conclude the war on the same terms that had been on offer in Paris. The reason for the dead silence that still surrounds the question is that in those intervening years some 20,000 Americans and an uncalculated number of Vietnamese,

Cam-

## THE PUDGY MAN AT THE VOGUE PARTY IS NOT, SURELY, THE MAN WHO DESTROYED CIVILIAN POPULATIONS

bodians, and Laotians lost their lives. Lost them, that is to say, even more pointlessly than had those slain up to that point. The impact of those four years on Indochinese society, and on American democracy, is beyond computation. The chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subsequent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger.

I can already hear the guardians of consensus, scraping their blunted quills to dismiss this as a "conspiracy theory." I happily accept the challenge. Let us take, first, the *Diaries* of that renowned conspirator (and theorist of conspiracy) H. R. Haldeman, published in May 1994. I choose to start with them for two reasons. First, because on the logical inference of "evidence against interest" it is improbable that Mr. Haldeman would supply evidence of his knowledge of a crime, unless he was (posthumously) telling the truth. Second, because it is possible to trace back each of his entries to its origin in other documented sources.

In January 1973, the Nixon-Kissinger Administration—for which Haldeman took the minutes—was heavily engaged on two fronts. In Paris again, Henry Kissinger was striving to negotiate "peace with honor" in Vietnam. In Washington, D.C., the web of evidence against the Watergate burglars and buggers was beginning to tighten. On January 8, 1973, Haldeman records:

> John Dean called to report on the Watergate trials, says that if we can prove in any way by hard evidence that our [campaign] plane was bugged in '68, he thinks that we could use that as a basis to say we're going to force Congress to go back and investigate '68 as well as '72, and thus turn them off.

Three days later, on January 11, 1973, Haldeman hears from Nixon ("the P," as the *Diaries* call him):

> On the Watergate question, he wanted me to talk to [Attorney General John] Mitchell and have him find out from [Deke] De Loach [of the FBI] if the guy who did the bugging on us in 1968 is still at the FBI, and then [FBI acting director Patrick] Gray should nail him with a lie detector and get it settled, which would give us the evidence we need. He also thinks I ought to move with George Christian [President

REPORT 37

Johnson's former press secretary, then working with Democrats for Nixon], get LBJ to use his influence to turn off the Hill investigation with Califano, Hubert, and so on. Later in the day, he decided that wasn't such a good idea, and told me not to do it, which I fortunately hadn't done.

On the same day, Haldeman reports Henry Kissinger calling excitedly from Paris, saying "he'll do the signing in Paris rather than Hanoi, which is the key thing." He speaks also of getting South Vietnam's President Thieu to "go along." On the following day:

The P also got back on the Watergate thing today, making the point that I should talk to Connally about the Johnson bugging process to get his judgment as to how to handle it. He wonders if we shouldn't just have Andreas go in and scare Hubert. The problem in going at LBJ is how he'd react, and we need to find out from [Deke] De Loach who did it, and then run a lie detector on him. I talked to Mitchell on the phone on this subject and he said De Loach had told him he was up to date on the thing because he had a call from Texas. A Star reporter was making an inquiry in the last week or so, and LBJ got very hot and called Deke and said to him that if the Nixon people are going to play with this, that he would release [deleted material—national security], saying that our side was asking that certain things be done. By our side, I assume he means the Nixon campaign organization. De Loach took this as a direct threat from Johnson. ... As he recalls it, bugging was requested on the planes, but was turned

THERE HAD TO BE AN INFORMANT INSIDE JOHNSON'S CAMP. THAT INFORMANT WAS HENRY KISSINGER

down, and all they did was check the phone calls, and put a tap on the Dragon Lady [Mrs. Anna Chennault].

This bureaucratic prose may be hard to read, but it needs no cipher to decode itself. Under intense pressure about the bugging of the Watergate building, Nixon instructed his chief of staff, Haldeman, and his FBI contact, Deke DeLoach, to unmask the bugging to which his own campaign had been subjected in 1968. He also sounded out former president Johnson, through former senior Democrats like Texas governor John Connally, to gauge what his reaction to the disclosure might be. The aim was to show that "everybody does it." (By another bipartisan paradox, in Washington the slogan "they all do it" is used as a slogan for the defense rather than, as one might hope, for the prosecution.)

However, a problem presents itself at once: how to reveal the 1968 bugging without at the same time revealing what that bugging had been

about. Hence the second thoughts ("wasn't such a good idea..."). In his excellent introduction to *The Haldeman Diaries*, Nixon's biographer Professor Stephen Ambrose characterizes the 1973 approach to Lyndon Johnson as "prospective blackmail," designed to exert backstairs pressure to close down a congressional inquiry. But he also suggests that Johnson, himself no pushover, had some blackmail ammunition of his own. As Professor Ambrose phrases it, the *Diaries* had been vetted by the National Security Council, and the bracketed deletion cited above is "the only place in the book where an example is given of a deletion by the NSC during the Carter Administration." "Eight days later Nixon was inaugurated for his second term," Ambrose relays. "Ten days later Johnson died of a heart attack. What Johnson had on Nixon I suppose we'll never know."

The professor's conclusion here is arguably too tentative. There is a well-understood principle known as "Mutual Assured Destruction," whereby both sides possess more than enough material with which to annihilate the other. The answer to the question of what the Johnson Administration "had" on Nixon is a relatively easy one. It was given in a book entitled *Counsel to the President*, published in 1991. Its author was Clark Clifford, the quintessential blue-chip Washington insider, who was assisted in the writing by Richard Holbrooke, the former assistant secretary of state and current ambassador to the United Nations. In 1968, Clark Clifford was secretary of defense and Richard Holbrooke was a member of the American negotiating team at the Vietnam peace talks in Paris.

From his seat in the Pentagon, Clifford had been able to read the intelligence transcripts that picked up and recorded what he terms a "secret personal channel" between President Thieu in Saigon and the Nixon campaign. The chief interlocutor at the American end was John Mitchell, then Nixon's campaign manager and subsequently attorney general (and subsequently Prisoner Number 24171-157 in the Maxwell Air Force Base prison camp). He was actively assisted by Madame Anna Chennault, known to all as the "Dragon Lady." A fierce veteran of the Taiwan lobby, and all-purpose right-wing intriguer, she was a social and political force in the Washington of her day and would rate her own biography.

Clifford describes a private meeting at which he, President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow were present. Hawkish to a man, they kept Vice President Humphrey out of the loop. But, hawkish as they were, they were appalled at the evidence of Nixon's treachery. They nonetheless decided not to go public with what they knew. Clifford says that this was because the disclosure would have ruined the Paris talks altogether. He could have

38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

added that it would have created a crisis of con-
fidence in American institutions. There are some
things that the voters can't be trusted to know.
And even though the bugging had been legal, it
might not have looked like fair play. (The Logan
Act flatly prohibits any American from conduct-
ing private diplomacy with a foreign power.)

In the event, Thieu pulled out of the ne-
gotiations anyway, ruining them just three
days before the election. Clifford is in no
doubt of the advice on which he did so:

The activities of the Nixon team went far be-
yond the bounds of justifiable political combat.
It constituted direct interference in the activ-
ities of the executive branch and the respon-
sibilities of the Chief Executive, the only people
with authority to negotiate on behalf of the
nation. The activities of the Nixon campaign
constituted a gross, even potentially illegal, in-
terference in the security affairs of the nation
by private individuals.

Perhaps aware of the slight feebleness of his
lawyerly prose, and perhaps a little ashamed
of keeping the secret for his memoirs rather
than sharing it with the electorate, Clifford
adds in a footnote:

It should be remembered that the public was
considerably more innocent in such matters
in the days before the Watergate hearings and
the 1975 Senate investigation of the CIA.

Perhaps the public was indeed more innocent,
if only because of the insider reticence of white-
shoe lawyers like Clifford, who thought there
were some things too profane to be made known.
He claims now that he was in favor either of con-
fronting Nixon privately with the information
and forcing him to desist, or else of making it
public. Perhaps this was indeed his view.

A more wised-up age of investigative re-
porting has brought us several updates
on this appalling episode. And so has
the very guarded memoir of Richard
Nixon himself. More than one "back channel"
was required for the Republican destabilization
of the Paris peace talks. There had to be secret
communications between Nixon and the South
Vietnamese, as we have seen. But there also had
to be an informant inside the incumbent admin-
istration's camp, a source of hints and tips and
early warnings of official intentions. That infor-
mant was Henry Kissinger. In his own account,
RN: *The Memoirs of Richard Nixon*, the disgraced
elder statesman tells us that, in mid-September
1968, he received private word of a planned bomb-
ing halt. In other words, the Johnson Adminis-
tration would, for the sake of the negotiations, con-
sider suspending its aerial bombardment of North

Vietnam. This most useful advance intelligence,
Nixon tells us, came "through a highly unusual
channel." It was more unusual even than he ac-
knowledged. Kissinger had until then been a de-
voted partisan of Nelson Rockefeller, the match-
lessly wealthy prince of liberal Republicanism.
His contempt for the person and the policies of

Richard Nixon was undisguised. Indeed, President
Johnson's Paris negotiators, led by Averell Har-
riman, considered Kissinger to be almost one of
themselves. He had made himself helpful, as Rock-
efeller's chief foreign-policy adviser, by supplying
French intermediaries with their own contacts in
Hanoi. "Henry was the only person outside of the
government we were authorized to discuss the
negotiations with," Richard Holbrooke told Wal-
ter Isaacson. "We trusted him. It is not stretching
the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a
secret source within the U.S. negotiating team."

So the likelihood of a bombing halt, wrote
Nixon, "came as no real surprise to me." He added:
"I told Haldeman that Mitchell should continue
as liaison with Kissinger and that we should hon-
or his desire to keep his role completely confi-
dential." It is impossible that Nixon was unaware
of his campaign manager's parallel role in col-
luding with a foreign power. Thus began what
was effectively a domestic covert operation, di-
rected simultaneously at thwarting the talks and
embarrassing the Hubert Humphrey campaign.

Later in the month, on September 26 to be
precise, and as recorded by Nixon in his memoirs,
"Kissinger called again. He said that he had just
returned from Paris, where he had picked up word
that something big was afoot regarding Vietnam.
He advised that if I had anything to say about
Vietnam during the following week, I should

FUNERAL, SOUTH
VIETNAM, 1972

Photograph © 1972 / Ian Berry / Magnum Photos, Inc.

REPORT 39

avoid any new ideas or proposals." On the same
day, Nixon declined a challenge from Humphrey
for a direct debate. On October 12, Kissinger once
again made contact, suggesting that a bombing
halt might be announced as soon as October 23.
*And so it might have been.* Except that for some rea-
son, every time the North Vietnamese side came
closer to agreement, the South Vietnamese in-
creased their own demands. We now know why
and how that was, and how the two halves of the

strategy were knit together. As far back as July,
Nixon had met quietly in New York with the
South Vietnamese ambassador, Bui Diem. The
contact had been arranged by Anna Chennault.
Bugging of the South Vietnamese offices in Wash-
ington, and surveillance of the "Dragon Lady,"
showed how the ratchet operated. An intercept-
ed cable from Diem to President Thieu on the
fateful day of October 23 had him saying: "Many
Republican friends have contacted me and en-

A NOTE ON THE "40 COMMITTEE"

In these pages, I've found it essential to allude frequently to the "40 Committee," the semi- clandestine body of which Henry Kissinger was the chairman between 1969 and 1976. One does not need to picture some giant, octopus- like organization at the center of a web of conspir- acy; however, it is important to know that there was a committee that maintained ultimate super- vision over United States covert actions overseas (and, possibly, at home) during this period.

The CIA was originally set up by President
Harry Truman at the beginning of the Cold War.
In the first Eisenhower Administration, it was
felt necessary to establish a monitoring or watch-
dog body to oversee covert operations. This pan-
el was known as the Special Group, and some-
times also referred to as the 54/12 Group, after
the number of the National Security Council di-
rective that set it up. By the time of President
Johnson it was called the 303 Committee, and
during the Nixon and Ford administrations it was
called the 40 Committee. Some believe that
these changes of name reflect the numbers of lat-
er NSC directives; others, the successive room
numbers in the handsome Old Executive Office
Building, now annexed to the neighboring
White House, in which it met. In fact, NSC
Memorandum 40 was named after the room in
which the committee met. No mystery there.

If any fantastic rumors shroud the work of the
committee, this may be the outcome of the ab-
surd cult of secrecy that at one point surrounded
it. At Senate hearings in 1973, Senator Stuart
Symington was questioning William Colby, then
director of central intelligence, about the origins
and evolution of the supervisory group:

SYMINGTON: Very well. What is the name of
the latest committee of this character?

COLBY: 40 Committee.

SYMINGTON: Who is the chairman?

COLBY: Well, again, I would prefer to go into
executive session on the description of the
40 Committee, Mr. Chairman.

SYMINGTON: As to who is the chairman, you

would prefer an executive session?

COLBY: The chairman—all right, Mr. Chairman—Dr. Kissinger is the chairman, as the assistant to the president for national security affairs.

Kissinger held this position ex officio, in other
words. His colleagues at the time were Air Force
General George Brown, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff; William P. Clements Jr., the
deputy secretary of defense; Joseph Sisco, the un-
dersecretary of state for political affairs, and the
director of central intelligence, William Colby.

With slight variations, those holding these
positions have been the permanent members of
the 40 Committee that, as President Ford
phrased it in a rare public reference by a presi-
dent to the group's existence, "reviews every
covert operation undertaken by our govern-
ment." An important variation was added by
President Nixon, who appointed his former cam-
paign manager and attorney general, John
Mitchell, to sit on the committee, the only at-
torney general to have done so. The founding
charter of the CIA prohibits it from taking any
part in domestic operations: in January 1975,
Attorney General Mitchell was convicted of nu-
merous counts of perjury, obstruction, and con-
spiracy to cover up the Watergate burglary,
which was carried out in part by former CIA op-
eratives. He became the first attorney general to
serve time in prison.

We have met Mr. Mitchell, in concert with
Mr. Kissinger, before. The usefulness of this note,
I hope and believe, is that it supplies a thread that
will be found throughout this narrative. Whenev-
er any major U.S. covert undertaking occurred,
between the years 1969 and 1976, Henry
Kissinger may be at least presumed to have had
direct knowledge of, and responsibility for, it. If
he claims that he did not, then he is claiming not
to have been doing a job to which he clung with
great bureaucratic tenacity. And whether or not
he cares to accept the responsibility, the account-
ability is inescapably his.

40 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

couraged us to stand firm. They were alarmed by press reports to the effect that you had already softened your position." The wiretapping instructions went to one Cartha DeLoach, known as "Deke" to his associates, who was J. Edgar Hoover's FBI liaison officer to the White House. We met him, you may recall, in H. R. Haldeman's *Diaries*.

In 1999 the author Anthony Summers was finally able to gain access to the closed FBI file of intercepts of the Nixon campaign, which he published in his 2000 book, *The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon*. He was also able to interview Anna Chennault. These two breakthroughs furnished him with what is vulgarly termed a "smoking gun" on the 1968 conspiracy. By the end of October 1968, John Mitchell had become so nervous about official surveillance that he ceased taking calls from Chennault. And President Johnson, in a conference call to the three candidates, Nixon, Humphrey, and Wallace (allegedly to brief them on the bombing halt), had strongly implied that he knew about the covert efforts to stymie his Vietnam diplomacy. This call created near-panic in Nixon's inner circle and caused Mitchell to telephone Chennault at the Sheraton Park Hotel. He then asked her to call him back on a more secure line. "Anna," he told her, "I'm speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It's very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position, and I hope you made that clear to them.... Do you think they really have decided not to go to Paris?"

The reproduced FBI original document shows what happened next. On November 2, 1968, the agent reported:

MRS. ANNA CHENNAULT CONTACTED VIETNAMESE AMBASSADOR, BUI DIEM, AND ADVISED HIM THAT SHE HAD RECEIVED A MESSAGE FROM HER BOSS (NOT FURTHER IDENTIFIED), WHICH HER BOSS WANTED HER TO GIVE PERSONALLY TO THE AMBASSADOR. SHE SAID THAT THE MESSAGE WAS THAT THE AMBASSADOR IS TO "HOLD ON, WE ARE GONNA WIN" AND THAT HER BOSS ALSO SAID "HOLD ON, HE UNDERSTANDS ALL OF IT." SHE REPEATED THAT THIS IS THE ONLY MESSAGE. "HE SAID PLEASE TELL YOUR BOSS TO HOLD ON." SHE ADVISED THAT HER BOSS HAD JUST CALLED FROM NEW MEXICO.

Nixon's running mate, Spiro Agnew, had been campaigning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that day, and subsequent intelligence analysis revealed that he and another member of his staff (the one principally concerned with Vietnam) had indeed been in touch with the Chennault camp.

The beauty of having Kissinger leaking from one side and Anna Chennault and John Mitchell conducting a private foreign policy on the other was this: It enabled Nixon to avoid being drawn into the argument over a bombing halt. And it further enabled him to suggest that it was the

Democrats who were playing politics with the issue. On October 25, in New York, he used his tried-and-tested tactic of circulating an innen- do while purporting to disown it. Of LBJ's Paris diplomacy he said, "I am also told that this spurt of activity is a cynical, last-minute attempt by President Johnson to salvage the candidacy of Mr. Humphrey. This I do not believe."

Kissinger himself showed a similar ability to play both ends against the middle. In the late summer of 1968, on Martha's Vineyard, he had offered Nelson Rockefeller's files on Nixon to Professor Samuel Huntington, a close adviser to Hubert Humphrey. But when Huntington's col- league and friend Zbigniew Brzezinski tried to get him to make good on the offer, Kissinger be- came shy. "I've hated Nixon for years," he told Brzezinski, but the time wasn't quite ripe for the handover. Indeed, it was a very close-run election, turning in the end on the difference of a few hundred thousand votes, and many hardened ob- servers believe that the final difference was made when Johnson ordered a bombing halt on Octo- ber 31 and the South Vietnamese made him look like a fool by boycotting the peace talks two days later. Had things gone the other way, of course, Kissinger was a near-certainty for a senior job in a Humphrey administration.

With slight differences of emphasis, the larg- er pieces of this story appear in Haldeman's work as cited and in Clifford's memoir. They are also partially rehearsed in President Johnson's auto- biography, *The Vantage Point*, and in a long re- flection on Indochina by William Bundy (one of the architects of the war) entitled rather trite- ly *The Tangled Web*. Senior members of the press corps, among them Jules Witcover in his histo- ry of 1968, Seymour Hersh in his study of Kissinger, and Walter Isaacson, editor of *Time* magazine, in his admiring but critical biography, have produced almost congruent accounts of the same abysmal episode. The only mention of it that is completely and utterly false, by any liter- ary or historical standard, appears in the memoirs of Henry Kissinger himself. He writes just this:

> Several Nixon emissaries—some self-appointed—telephoned me for counsel. I took the position that I would answer specific questions on foreign policy, but that I would not offer general advice or volunteer suggestions. This was the same response I made to inquiries from the Humphrey staff.

This contradicts even the self-serving memoir of the man who, having won the 1968 election by these underhanded means, made as his very first ap- pointment Henry Kissinger as national security adviser. One might not want to arbitrate a men- dacity competition between the two men, but when he made this choice Richard Nixon had only once, briefly and awkwardly, met Henry

REPORT 41

Kissinger in person. He clearly formed his estimate of the man's abilities from more persuasive experience than that. "One factor that had most convinced me of Kissinger's credibility," wrote Nixon later in his own delicious prose, "was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy."

That ghastly secret is now out. In the January 1969 issue of the Establishment house organ *Foreign Affairs*, published a few days after his appointment as Nixon's right-hand man, there appeared Henry Kissinger's own evaluation of the Vietnam negotiations. On every point of substance, he agreed with the line taken in Paris by the Johnson-Humphrey negotiators. One has to pause for an instant to comprehend the enormity of this. Kissinger had helped elect a man who had surreptitiously promised the South Vietnamese junta a better deal than they would get from the Democrats. The Saigon au-

thorities then acted, as Bundy ruefully confirms, as if they did indeed have a deal. This meant, in the words of a later Nixon slogan, "Four More Years." But four more years of an unwinnable and undeclared and murderous war, which was to spread before it burned out, and was to end on the same terms and conditions as had been on the table in the fall of 1968.

This was what it took to promote Henry Kissinger. To promote him from a mediocre and opportunistic academic to an international potentate. The signature qualities were there from the inaugural moment: the sycophancy and the duplicity; the power worship and the absence of scruple; the empty trading of old non-friends for new non-friends. And the distinctive effects were also present: the uncounted and expendable

corpses; the official and unofficial lying about the cost; the heavy and pompous pseudo-indignation when unwelcome questions were asked. Kissinger's global career started as it meant to go on. It debauched the American republic and American democracy, and it levied a hideous toll of casualties on weaker and more vulnerable societies.

## THE CRIME OF WAR, AND BOMBING FOR VOTES

Even while compelled to concentrate on brute realities, one must never lose sight of that element of the surreal that surrounds Henry Kissinger. Paying a visit to Vietnam in the middle 1960s, when many technocratic opportunists were still convinced that the war was worth fighting and could be won, the young Henry reserved judgment on the first point but developed considerable private doubts on the second. He had gone so far as to involve himself with an initiative that extended to direct personal contact with Hanoi. He became friendly with two Frenchmen who had a direct line to the Communist leadership in North Vietnam's capital. Raymond Aubrac, a French civil servant who was a friend of Ho Chi Minh, and Herbert Marcovich, a French microbiologist, began a series of trips to North Vietnam. On their return, they briefed Kissinger in Paris. He in his turn parlayed their information into high-level conversations in Washington, relaying the actual or potential negotiating positions of Pham Van Dong and other Communist statesmen to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. (In the result, the relentless bombing of the North made any "bridge-building" impracticable. In particular, the now forgotten American destruction of the Paul Doumer Bridge outraged the Vietnamese side.)

This weightless mid-position, which ultimately helped enable his double act in 1968, allowed Kissinger to ventriloquize Governor Rockefeller and to propose, by indirect means, a future détente with America's chief rivals. In his first major address as a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1968, Rockefeller spoke ringingly of how "in a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union, we can ultimately improve our relations with each—as we test the will for peace of both." [Italics added.]

This foreshadowing of a later Kissinger strategy might appear at first reading to illustrate prescience. But Governor Rockefeller had no more reason than Vice President Humphrey to suppose that his ambitious staffer would defect to the Nixon camp, risking and postponing this same détente in order later to take credit for a de-based simulacrum of it.

Morally speaking, Kissinger treated the concept

42 HARPÉR'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

Map by Mike Reagan

of superpower rapprochement in the same way as he treated the concept of a negotiated settlement in Vietnam: as something contingent on his own needs. There was a time to feign support of it and a time to denounce it as weak-minded and treacherous. And there was a time to take credit for it. Some of those who "followed orders" in Indochina may lay a claim to that notoriously weak defense. Some who even issued the orders may now tell us that they were acting sincerely at the time. But Kissinger cannot avail himself of this alibi. He always knew what he was doing, and he embarked upon a second round of protracted warfare having knowingly helped to destroy an alternative that he always understood was possible. This increases the gravity of the charge against him. It also prepares us for his improvised and retrospective defense against that charge: that his immense depredations eventually led to "peace." When he announced that "peace is at hand" in October 1972, he made a boastful and false claim that could have been made in 1968. And when he claimed credit for subsequent superpower contacts, he was announcing the result of a secret and corrupt diplomacy that had originally been proposed as an open and democratic one. In the meantime, he had illegally eavesdropped and shadowed American citizens and public servants whose misgivings about the war, and about unconstitutional authority, were mild compared with those of Messieurs Aubrac and Marcovich. In establishing what lawyers call the mens rea, we can say that in Kissinger's case he was fully aware of, and is entirely accountable for, his own actions.

Upon taking office at Richard Nixon's side in the winter of 1969, it was Kissinger's task to be *plus royaliste que le roi* in two respects. He had to confect a rationale of "credibility" for punitive action in an already devastated Vietnamese theater, and he had to second his principal's wish that he form part of a "wall" between the Nixon White House and the Department of State. The term "two track" was later to become commonplace. Kissinger's position on both tracks, of promiscuous violence abroad and flagrant illegality at home, was decided from the start. He does not seem to have lacked relish for either commitment; one hopes faintly that this was not the first twinge of the "aphrodisiac."

President Johnson's "bombing halt" had not lasted long by any standard, even if one remembers that its original conciliatory purpose had been sordidly undercut. Averell Harriman, who had been LBJ's chief negotiator in Paris, later testified to Congress that the North Vietnamese had withdrawn 90 percent of their forces from the northern two provinces of South Vietnam, in October and November 1968, in accordance with

the agreement of which the "halt" might have formed a part. In the new context, however, this withdrawal could be interpreted as a sign of weakness, or even as a "light at the end of the tunnel."

The historical record of the Indochina war is voluminous, and the resulting controversy no less so. This does not, however, prevent the following of a consistent thread. Once the war had been unnaturally and undemocratically prolonged, more exorbitant methods were required to fight it and more fantastic excuses had to be fabricated to justify it. Let us take four connected cases in which the civilian population was deliberately exposed to indiscriminate lethal force, in which the customary laws of war and neutrality were violated, and in which conscious lies had to be told in order to conceal these facts and others.

## WHAT CONVINCED NIXON OF HENRY'S CREDIBILITY: "THE LENGTH TO WHICH HE WENT TO PROTECT HIS SECRECY"

The first such case is an example of what Vietnam might have been spared had not the 1968 Paris peace talks been sabotaged. In December 1968, during the "transition" period between the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the United States military command turned to what General Creighton Abrams termed "total war" against the "infrastructure" of the Vietcong/National Liberation Front insurgency. The chief exhibit in this campaign was a six-month clearance of the province of Kien Hoa. The code name for the sweep was Operation "Speedy Express."

It might, in some realm of theory, be remotely conceivable that such tactics could be justified under the international laws and charters governing the sovereign rights of self-defense. But no nation capable of deploying the overwhelming and annihilating force described below would be likely to find itself on the defensive. And it would be least of all likely to find itself on the defensive on its own soil. So the Nixon-Kissinger Administration was not, except in one unusual sense, fighting for survival. The unusual sense in which its survival was at stake is set out, yet again, in the stark posthumous testimony of H. R. Haldeman. From his roost at Nixon's side he describes a Kissingerian moment on December 15, 1970:

> *Kissinger* came in and the discussion covered some of the general thinking about Vietnam and the P's big peace plan for next year, which K later told me he does not favor. He thinks that any pullout next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the '72 elections. He favors, instead, a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of '72 so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election.

REPORT 43

One could hardly wish for it to be more plain-
ly put than that. (And put, furthermore, by one
of Nixon's chief partisans with no wish to discredit
the re-election.) But in point of fact, Kissinger
himself admits to almost as much in his own first
volume of memoirs, *The White House Years*. The
context is a meeting with General de Gaulle, in
which the old warrior demanded to know by
what right the Nixon Administration subjected
Indochina to devastating bombardment. In his
own account, Kissinger replies that "a sudden
withdrawal might give us a credibility problem."
(When asked "where?" Kissinger hazily proposed
the Middle East.) It is important to bear in mind
that the future flatterer of Brezhnev and Mao
was in no real position to claim that he made
war in Indochina to thwart either. He certainly
did not dare try such a callow excuse on Charles

WE WERE NOT MEANT TO KNOW THAT
THE U.S. WAS IN VIETNAM AS EARLY
AS 1959 OR AS LATE AS 1975

de Gaulle. And indeed, the proponent of secret
deals with China was in no very strong position
to claim that he was combating Stalinism in gen-
eral. No, it all came down to "credibility" and to
the saving of face. It is known that 20,763 Amer-
ican, 109,230 South Vietnamese, and 496,260
North Vietnamese servicemen lost their lives in
Indochina between the day that Nixon and
Kissinger took office and the day in 1973 that
they withdrew American forces and accepted the
logic of 1968. Must the families of these victims
confront the fact that the chief "faces" at risk
were those of Nixon and Kissinger?

Thus the colloquially titled "Christmas bomb-
ing" of North Vietnam, continued after that elec-
tion had been won, must be counted as a war
crime by any standard. The bombing was not con-
ducted for anything that could be described as
"military reasons" but for twofold political ones.
The first of these was domestic: a show of strength
to extremists in Congress and a means of putting
the Democratic Party on the defensive. The sec-
ond was to persuade South Vietnamese leaders
such as President Thieu—whose intransigence
had been encouraged by Kissinger in the first
place—that their objections to American with-
d withdrawal were too nervous. This, again, was the
mortgage on the initial secret payment of 1968.

When the unpreventable collapse occurred in
Cambodia and Vietnam, in April and May 1975,
the cost was infinitely higher than it would have
been seven years previously. These locust years
ended as they had begun—with a display of brava-
do and deceit. On May 12, 1975, in the immedi-
ate aftermath of the Khmer Rouge seizure of pow-

er, Cambodian gunboats detained an American
merchant vessel named the *Mayaguez*. The ship
was stopped in international waters claimed by
Cambodia and then taken to the Cambodian is-
land of Koh Tang. In spite of reports that the
crew had been released, Kissinger pressed for an
immediate face-saving and "credibility"-enhanc-
ing strike. He persuaded President Gerald Ford, the
untried and undistinguished successor to his de-
posed former boss, to send in the Marines and
the Air Force. Out of a Marine force of 110, 18
were killed and 50 were wounded. Twenty-three
Air Force men died in a crash. The United States
used a 15,000-ton bomb on the island, the most
powerful nonnuclear device that it possessed. No-
body has the figures for Cambodian deaths. The
casualties were pointless, because the ship's com-
pany of the *Mayaguez* were nowhere on Koh Tang,
having been released some hours earlier. A sub-
sequent congressional inquiry found that Kissinger
could have known of this by listening to Cam-
bodian broadcasting or by paying attention to a
third-party government that had been negotiat-
ing a deal for the restitution of the crew and the
ship. It was not as if any Cambodians doubted, by
that month of 1975, the willingness of the U.S.
government to employ deadly force.

In Washington, D.C., there is a famous and
hallowed memorial to the American dead of the
Vietnam War. Known as the "Vietnam Veterans
Memorial," it bears a name that is slightly mis-
leading. I was present for the extremely affecting
moment of its dedication in 1982 and noticed
that the list of nearly 60,000 names is incised in
the wall not by alphabet but by date. The first
few names appear in 1959 and the last few in
1975. The more historically minded visitors can
sometimes be heard to say that they didn't know
the United States was engaged in Vietnam as ear-
ly or as late as that. Nor was the public supposed
to know. The first names are of the covert oper-
atives, sent in by Colonel Edward Lansdale with-
out congressional approval to support French colo-
nialism. The last names are of those thrown away
in the *Mayaguez* fiasco. It took Henry Kissinger to
ensure that a war of atrocity, which he had helped
to prolong, should end as furtively and ignomin-
iously as it had begun.

A SAMPLE OF CASES:
KISSINGER'S WAR CRIMES
IN INDOCHINA

Some statements are too blunt for everyday,
consensual discourse. In national "debate,"
it is the smoother pebbles that are cus-
tomarily gathered from the stream and used
as projectiles. They leave less of a scar, even when
they hit. Occasionally, however, a single hard-
edged remark will inflict a deep and jagged wound,

a gash so ugly that it must be cauterized at once. In January 1971 there was a considered statement from General Telford Taylor, who had been chief U.S. prosecuting counsel at the Nuremberg trials. Reviewing the legal and moral basis of those hearings, and also the Tokyo trials of Japanese war criminals and the Manila trial of Emperor Hirohito's chief militarist, General Yamashita Tomoyuki, Taylor said that if the standard of Nuremberg and Manila were applied evenly, and applied to the American statesmen and bureaucrats who designed the war in Vietnam, then "there would be a very strong possibility that they would come to the same end [Yamashita] did." It is not every day that a senior American soldier and jurist delivers the opinion that a large portion of his country's political class should probably be hooded and blindfolded and dropped through a trapdoor on the end of a rope.

In his book *Nuremberg and Vietnam*, General Taylor also anticipated one of the possible objections to this legal and moral conclusion. It might be argued for the defense, he said, that those arraigned did not really know what they were doing; in other words, that they had achieved the foulest results but from the highest and most innocent motives. The notion of Indochina as some *Heart of Darkness* "quagmire" of ignorant armies has been sedulously propagated, then and since, in order to make such a euphemism appear plausible. Taylor had no patience with such a view. American military and intelligence and economic and political teams had been in Vietnam, he wrote, for much too long to attribute anything they did "to lack of information." It might have been possible for soldiers and diplomats to pose as innocents until the middle of the 1960s, but after that time, and especially after the My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, when serving veterans reported major atrocities to their superior officers, nobody could reasonably claim to have been uninformed, and of those who could, the least believable would be those who—far from the confusion of battle—read and discussed and approved the panoptic reports of the war that were delivered to Washington.

General Taylor's book was being written while many of the most reprehensible events of the Indochina war were still taking place, or still to come. He was unaware of the intensity and extent of, for example, the bombing of Laos and Cambodia. Enough was known about the conduct of the war, however, and about the existing matrix of legal and criminal responsibility, for him to arrive at some indisputable conclusions. The

first of these concerned the particular obligation of the United States to be aware of, and to respect, the Nuremberg principles:

FORMER IMPERIAL CITY OF HUE, SOUTH VIETNAM, AFTER AMERICAN AIR FORCE BOMBING, 1968

Military courts and commissions have customarily rendered their judgments stark and unsupported by opinions giving the reasons for their decisions. The Nuremberg and Tokyo judgments, in contrast, were all based on extensive opinions detailing the evidence and analyzing the factual and legal issues, in the fashion of appellate tribunals generally. Needless to say they were not of uniform quality, and often reflected the logical shortcomings of compromise, the marks of which commonly mar the opinions of multi-member tribunals. But the process was professional in a way seldom achieved in military courts, and the records and judgments in these trials provided a much-needed foundation for a corpus of judge-made international penal law. The results of the trials commended themselves to the newly formed United Nations, and on Dec. 11, 1946, the General Assembly adopted a resolution affirming "the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal."

However history may ultimately assess the wisdom

Photograph © 1968 / Marc Riboud / Magnum Photos, Inc.

REPORT 45

or unwisdom of the war crimes trials, one thing is in-
disputable: At their conclusion, the United States
Government stood legally, politically and morally
committed to the principles enunciated in the char-
ters and judgments of the tribunals. The President
of the United States, on the recommendations of the
Departments of State, War and Justice, approved the
war crimes programs. Thirty or more American
judges, drawn from the appellate benches of the
states from Massachusetts to Oregon, and Min-
nesota to Georgia, conducted the later Nuremberg
trials and wrote the opinions. General Douglas
MacArthur, under authority of the Far Eastern Com-
mission, established the Tokyo tribunal and con-
firmed the sentences it imposed, and it was under his
authority as the highest American military officer in

judgment, the occasion for criminal conduct would
not have arisen. The Germans in occupied Europe
made gross errors of judgment which no doubt cre-
ated the conditions in which the slaughter of the in-
habitants of Klissura [a Greek village annihilated
during the Occupation] occurred, but that did not
make the killings any the less criminal.

Referring this question to the chain of com-
mand in the field, General Taylor noted further
that the senior officer corps had been

more or less constantly in Vietnam, and splendidly equipped with helicopters and other aircraft, which gave them a degree of mobility unprecedented in earlier wars, and consequently endowed them with every opportunity to keep the course of the fighting and its consequences under close and constant observation. Communications were generally rapid and efficient, so that the flow of information and orders was unimpeded.

These circumstances are in sharp contrast to
those that confronted General Yamashita in 1944
and 1945, with his troops reeling back in disarray be-
fore the oncoming American military powerhouse.
For failure to control his forces so as to prevent the
atrocities they committed, Brig. Gens. Egbert F.
Bullene and Morris Handwerk and Maj. Gens. James
A. Lester, Leo Donovan and Russel B. Reynolds
found him guilty of violating the laws of war and sen-
tenced him to death by hanging.

Nor did General Taylor omit the crucial link be-
tween the military command and its political su-
pervision; again a much closer and more imme-
diate relationship in the American-Vietnamese
instance than in the Japanese-Filipino one, as the
regular contact between, say, General Creighton
Abrams and Henry Kissinger makes clear:

How much the President and his close advisers in
the White House, Pentagon and Foggy Bottom
knew about the volume and cause of civilian casu-
alties in Vietnam, and the physical devastation of
the countryside, is speculative. Something was
known, for the late John McNaughton (then As-
sistant Secretary of Defense) returned from the
White House one day in 1967 with the message
that "We seem to be proceeding on the assump-
tion that the way to eradicate the Vietcong is to de-
roy all the village structures, defoliate all the jun-
gles, and then cover the entire surface of South
Vietnam with asphalt."

This was noticed (by Townsend Hoopes, a po-
litical antagonist of General Taylor's) before that
metaphor had been extended into two new coun-
tries, Laos and Cambodia, without a declaration
of war, a notification to Congress, or a warning
to civilians to evacuate. But Taylor anticipated
the Kissinger case in many ways when he recalled
the trial of the Japanese statesman Koki Hirota,

who served briefly as Prime Minister and for sever-
al years as Foreign Minister between 1933 and May,
1938, after which he held no office whatever. The

RICHARD NIXON AND  
HENRY KISSINGER  
WITH ALEXANDER  
HAIG AT CAMP DAVID,  
1972

the Far East that the Yamashita and other such pro-
ceedings were held. The United States delegation
to the United Nations presented the resolution by
which the General Assembly endorsed the Nurem-
berg principles.

Thus the integrity of the nation is staked on
those principles, and today the question is how they
apply to our conduct of the war in Vietnam, and
whether the United States Government is prepared
to face the consequences of their application.

Facing and cogitating these consequences him-
self, General Taylor took issue with another Unit-
ed States officer, Colonel William Corson, who
had written that

"[r]egardless of the outcome of . . . the My Lai courts-martial and other legal actions, the point remains that American judgment as to the effective prosecution of the war was faulty from beginning to end and that the atrocities, alleged or otherwise, are a result of a failure of judgment, not criminal behavior."

To this Taylor responded:

Colonel Corson overlooks, I fear, that negligent
homicide is generally a crime of bad judgment rather
than evil intent. Perhaps he is right in the strictly
causal sense that if there had been no failure of

46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

Photograph © AFP / CORBIS

so-called "rape of Nanking" by Japanese forces occurred during the winter of 1937-38, when Hirota was Foreign Minister. Upon receiving early reports of the atrocities, he demanded and received assurances from the War Ministry that they would be stopped. But they continued, and the Tokyo tribunal found Hirota guilty because he was "derelict in his duty in not insisting before the Cabinet that immediate action be taken to put an end to the atrocities," and "was content to rely on assurances which he knew were not being implemented." On this basis, coupled with his conviction on the aggressive war charge, Hirota was sentenced to be hanged.

Melvin Laird, as secretary of defense during the first Nixon Administration, was queasy enough about the early bombings of Cambodia, and dubious enough about the legality or prudence of the intervention, to send a memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking, "Are steps being taken, on a continuing basis, to minimize the risk of striking Cambodian people and structures? If so, what are the steps? Are we reasonably sure such steps are effective?" No evidence has surfaced that Henry Kissinger, as national security adviser or secretary of state, ever sought even such modest assurances. Indeed, there is much evidence of his deceiving Congress as to the true extent to which such assurances as were offered were deliberately false. Others involved—such as Robert McNamara; McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson; and William Colby—have since offered varieties of apology or contrition or at least explanation. Henry Kissinger, never. General Taylor described the practice of air strikes against hamlets suspected of "harboring" Vietnamese guerrillas as "flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention on Civilian Protection, which prohibits 'collective penalties,' and 'reprisals against protected persons,' and equally in violation of the Rules of Land Warfare." He was writing before this atrocious precedent had been extended to reprisal raids that treated two whole countries—Laos and Cambodia—as if they were disposable hamlets.

For Henry Kissinger, no great believer in the boastful claims of the war makers in the first place, a special degree of responsibility attaches. Not only did he have good reason to know that field commanders were exaggerating successes and claiming all dead bodies as enemy soldiers—a commonplace piece of knowledge after the spring of 1968—but he also knew that the issue of the war had been settled politically and diplomatically, for all intents and purposes, before he became national security adviser. Thus he had to know that every additional casualty, on either side, was not just a death but an avoidable death. With this knowledge, and with a strong sense of the domestic and personal political profit, he

urged the expansion of the war into two neutral countries—violating international law—while persisting in a breathtakingly high level of attrition in Vietnam itself.

From a huge menu of possible examples, I have chosen cases that involve Kissinger directly and in which I have myself been able to interview surviving witnesses. The first, as foreshadowed above, is Operation "Speedy Express":

My friend and colleague Kevin Buckley, then a much admired correspondent and Saigon bureau chief for *Newsweek*, became interested in the "pacification" campaign that bore this breezy code name. Designed in the closing days of the Johnson-Humphrey Administration, it was put into full effect in the first six months of 1969, when Henry Kissinger had assumed much authority over the conduct of the war. The objective was the American disciplining, on behalf of the Thieu government, of the turbulent Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa.

On January 22, 1968, Robert McNamara had told the Senate that "no regular North Vietnamese units" were deployed in the Delta, and no military intelligence documents have surfaced to

## KISSINGER HAD TO KNOW THAT EVERY CASUALTY IN INDOCHINA AFTER 1968 WAS AVOIDABLE

undermine his claim, so that the cleansing of the area cannot be understood as part of the general argument about resisting Hanoi's unsleeping will to conquest. The announced purpose of the Ninth Division's sweep, indeed, was to redeem many thousands of villagers from political control by the National Liberation Front (NLF), or "Vietcong" (VC). As Buckley found, and as his magazine, *Newsweek*, partially disclosed at the rather late date of June 19, 1972,

> All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians—perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official—were killed by U.S. firepower to "pacify" Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison....

The Ninth Division put all it had into the operation. Eight thousand infantrymen scoured the heavily populated countryside, but contact with the elusive enemy was rare. Thus, in its pursuit of pacification, the division relied heavily on its 50 artillery pieces, 50 helicopters (many armed with rockets and mini-guns) and the deadly support lent by the Air Force. There were 3,381 tactical air strikes by fighter bombers during "Speedy Express."...

"Death is our business and business is good," was the slogan painted on one helicopter unit's quarters

REPORT 47

during the operation. And so it was. Cumulative statistics for "Speedy Express" show that 10,899 "enemy" were killed. In the month of March alone, "over 3,000 enemy troops were killed... which is the largest monthly total for any American division in the Vietnam War," said the division's official magazine. When asked to account for the enormous body counts, a division senior officer explained that helicopter gun crews often caught unarmed "enemy" in open fields....

There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cong were well armed. Simple civilians were, of course, not armed. And the enormous discrepancy between the body count [11,000] and the number of captured weapons [748] is hard to ex-

those who opposed the war but by those who were conducting it. As one American official put it to Buckley,

"The actions of the Ninth Division in inflicting civilian casualties were worse [than My Lai]. The sum total of what the 9th did was overwhelming. In sum, the horror was worse than My Lai. But with the 9th, the civilian casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command's insistence on high body-counts.... The result was an inevitable outcome of the unit's command policy."

The earlier sweep that had mopped up My Lai—during Operation "Wheeler Wallawa"— had also at the time counted all corpses as those of enemy soldiers, including the civilian population of the village, who were casually included in the mind-bending overall total of 10,000.

Confronted with this evidence, Buckley and Shimkin abandoned a lazy and customary usage and replaced it, in a cable to *Newsweek* headquarters in New York, with a more telling and scrupulous one. The problem was not "indiscriminate use of firepower" but "charges of quite discriminating use—as a matter of policy in populated areas." Even the former allegation is a gross violation of the Geneva Convention; the second charge leads straight to the dock in Nuremberg or The Hague.

Since General Creighton Abrams publicly praised the Ninth Division for its work, and drew attention wherever and whenever he could to the tremendous success of Operation "Speedy Express," we can be sure that the political leadership in Washington was not unaware. Indeed, the degree of micromanagement revealed in Kissinger's memoirs quite forbids the idea that anything of importance took place without his knowledge or permission.

Of nothing is this more true than his own individual involvement in the bombing and invasion of neutral Cambodia and Laos. Obsessed with the idea that Vietnamese intransigence could be traced to allies or resources external to Vietnam itself, or could be overcome by tactics of mass destruction, Kissinger at one point contemplated using thermonuclear weapons to obliterate the pass through which ran the railway link from North Vietnam to China, and at another stage considered bombing the dikes that prevented North Vietnam's irrigation system from flooding the country. Neither of these measures (reported respectively in Tad Szulc's history of Nixon-era diplomacy, *The Illusion of Peace*, and by Kissinger's former aide Roger Morris) was taken, which removes some potential war crimes from our bill of indictment but which also gives an indication of the regnant mentality. There

## THE CHARGE OF KNOWINGLY KILLING CIVILIANS LEADS STRAIGHT TO THE DOCK AT NUREMBERG OR THE HAGUE

plain—except by the conclusion that many victims were unarmed innocent civilians....

The people who still live in pacified Kien Hoa all have vivid recollections of the devastation that American firepower brought to their lives in early 1969. Virtually every person to whom I spoke had suffered in some way. "There were 5,000 people in our village before 1969, but there were none in 1970," one village elder told me. "The Americans destroyed every house with artillery, air strikes, or by burning them down with cigarette lighters. About 100 people were killed by bombing, others were wounded and others became refugees. Many were children killed by concussion from the bombs which their small bodies could not withstand, even if they were hiding underground."

Other officials, including the village police chief, corroborated the man's testimony. I could not, of course, reach every village. But in each of the many places where I went, the testimony was the same: 100 killed here, 200 killed there.

Other notes by Buckley and his friend and collaborator Alex Shimkin (a worker for International Voluntary Services who was later killed in the war) discovered the same evidence in hospital statistics. In March 1969, the hospital at Ben Tre reported 343 patients injured by "friendly" fire and 25 by "the enemy," an astonishing statistic for a government facility to record in a guerrilla war in which suspected membership in the Vietcong could mean death. And Buckley's own citation for his magazine—of "perhaps as many as 5,000" deaths among civilians in this one sweep—is an almost deliberate understatement of what he was told by a United States official, who actually said that "at least 5,000" of the dead "were what we refer to as non-combatants"—a not too exacting distinction, as we have already seen, and as was by then well understood. [Italics mine.]

Well understood, that is to say, not just by

48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

remained Cambodia and Laos, which supposedly concealed or protected North Vietnamese supply lines.

As in the cases postulated by General Telford Taylor, there is the crime of aggressive war and then there is the question of war crimes. In the postwar period, or the period governed by the U.N. Charter and its related and incorporated conventions, the United States under Democratic and Republican administrations had denied even its closest allies the right to invade countries that allegedly gave shelter to their antagonists. Most famously, President Eisenhower exerted economic and diplomatic pressure at a high level to bring an end to the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel in October 1956. (The British thought Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser should not control "their" Suez Canal, the French believed Nasser to be the inspiration and source of their troubles in Algeria, and the Israelis claimed that he played the same role in fomenting their difficulties with the Palestinians. The United States maintained that even if these propaganda fantasies were true, they would not retrospectively legalize an invasion of Egypt.) During the Algerian war of independence, the United States had also repudiated France's claimed right to attack a town in neighboring Tunisia that succured Algerian guerrillas, and in 1964, at the United Nations, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had condemned the United Kingdom for attacking a town in Yemen that allegedly provided a rear guard for rebels operating in its then colony of Aden.

All this law and precedent was to be thrown to the winds when Nixon and Kissinger decided to aggrandize the notion of "hot pursuit" across the borders of Laos and Cambodia. As William Shawcross reported in his 1979 book, *Sideshow*, even before the actual territorial invasion of Cambodia, for example, and very soon after the accession of Nixon and Kissinger to power, a program of heavy bombardment of the country was prepared and executed in secret. One might with some revulsion call it a "menu" of bombardment, since the code names for the raids were "Breakfast," "Lunch," "Snack," "Dinner," and "Dessert." The raids were flown by B-52 bombers, which, it is important to note, fly at an altitude too high to be observed from the ground and carry immense tonnages of high explosive; they give no warning of approach and are incapable of accuracy or discrimination. Between March 1969 and May 1970, 3,630 such raids were flown across the Cambodian frontier. The bombing campaign began as it was to go on—with full knowledge of its effect on civilians and flagrant deceit by Mr. Kissinger in this precise respect.

To wit, a memorandum prepared by the Joint

Chiefs of Staff and sent to the Defense Department and the White House stated plainly that "some Cambodian casualties would be sustained in the operation" and that "the surprise effect of attack could tend to increase casualties." The target district for "Breakfast" (Base Area 353) was inhabited, explained the memo, by about 1,640 Cambodian civilians; "Lunch" (Base Area 609), by 198 of them; "Snack" (Base Area 351), by 383; "Dinner" (Base Area 352), by 770; and "Dessert" (Base Area 350), by about 120 Cambodian peasants. These oddly exact figures are enough in themselves to demonstrate that Kissinger must have been lying when he later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that areas of Cambodia selected for bombing were "unpopulated."

As a result of the expanded and intensified bombing campaigns, it has been officially estimated that as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos

and 600,000 in Cambodia lost their lives. (These are not the highest estimates.) Figures for refugees are several multiples of that. In addition, the widespread use of toxic chemical defoliants created a massive health crisis that naturally fell most heavily on children, nursing mothers, the aged, and the already infirm. That crisis persists to this day.

Although this appalling war, and its appalling consequences, can and should be taken as a moral and political crisis for American institutions, for at least five United States presidents, and for American society, there is little difficulty in identifying individual responsibility during this, its most atrocious and indiscriminate stage. Richard Nixon, as commander in chief, bears ultimate responsibility and only narrowly escaped a congressional move to include his crimes and deceptions in Indochina in the

TAKING COVER FROM HEAVY FIGHTING, 1966

Photograph © AP / Wide World Photos

REPORT 49

articles of impeachment, the promulgation of which eventually compelled his resignation. But his deputy and closest adviser, Henry Kissinger, was sometimes forced, and sometimes forced himself, into a position of virtual co-presidency where Indochina was concerned.

For example, in the preparations for the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, Kissinger was caught between the views of his staff—several of whom resigned in protest when the invasion began—and his need to please his president. His president listened more to his two criminal associates—John Mitchell and Bebe Rebozo—than he did to his secretaries of state and defense, William Rogers and Melvin Laird, both of whom were highly skeptical about widening the war. On one especially charming occasion, Nixon telephoned Kissinger, while drunk, to discuss the invasion

plans. He then put Bebe Rebozo on the line. "The President wants you to know if this doesn't work, Henry, it's your ass." "Ain't that right, Bebe?" slurred the commander in chief. (The conversation was monitored and transcribed by one of Kissinger's soon-to-resign staffers, William Watts.) It could be said that in this instance the national security adviser was under considerable pressure; nevertheless, he took the side of the pro-invasion faction and, according to the memoirs of General William

Westmoreland, actually lobbied for that invasion to go ahead.

A somewhat harder picture is presented by former chief of staff H. R. Haldeman in his *Diaries*. On December 22, 1970, he records:

> Henry came up with the need to meet with the P to-day with Al Haig and then tomorrow with Laird and Moorer because he has to use the P to force Laird and the military to go ahead with the P's plans, which they won't carry out without direct orders.

In his *White House Years*, Kissinger claims that he usurped the customary chain of command whereby commanders in the field receive, or believe that they receive, their orders from the president and then the secretary of defense. He boasts

that he, together with Haldeman, Alexander Haig, and Colonel Ray Sitton, evolved "both a military and a diplomatic schedule" for the secret bombing of Cambodia. On board Air Force One, which was on the tarmac at Brussels airport on February 24, 1969, he writes, "we worked out the guidelines for bombing of the enemy's sanctuaries." A few weeks later, Haldeman's *Diaries* for March 17 record:

> Historic day. K[issinger]'s "Operation Breakfast" finally came off at 2:00 PM our time.

> K[issinger] really excited, as was P[resident].

The next day's entry:

> K[issinger]'s "Operation Breakfast" a great success. He came beaming in with report, very productive.

It only got better. On April 22, 1970, Haldeman reports that Nixon, following Kissinger into a National Security Council meeting on Cambodia, "turned back to me with a big smile and said, 'K[issinger]'s really having fun today, he's playing Bismarck.'"

The above is an insult to the Iron Chancellor. When Kissinger was finally exposed in Congress and the press for conducting unauthorized bombings, he weakly pleaded that the raids were not all that secret, really, because Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia had known of them. He had to be reminded that a foreign princeling cannot give permission to an American bureaucrat to violate the United States Constitution. Nor, for that matter, can he give permission to an American bureaucrat to slaughter large numbers of his "own" civilians. It's difficult to imagine Bismarck cowering behind such a contemptible excuse. (Prince Sihanouk, it is worth remembering, later became an abject puppet of the Khmer Rouge.)

Colonel Sitton, the reigning expert on B-52 tactics at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began to notice that by late 1969 his own office was being regularly overruled in the matter of selecting targets. "Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids," said Sitton, "he was reading the raw intelligence" and fiddling with the mission patterns and bombing runs. In other departments of Washington insiderdom, it was also noticed that Kissinger was becoming a Stakhanovite committeeman. Aside from the crucial 40 Committee, which planned and oversaw all foreign covert actions, he chaired the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), which dealt with breaking crises; the Verification Panel, concerned with arms control; the Vietnam Special Studies Group, which oversaw the day-to-day conduct of the war; and the Defense Program Review Committee, which supervised the budget of the Defense Department.

It is therefore impossible for him to claim that he was unaware of the consequences of the bomb-

MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED CHILD OF AN AGENT ORANGE VICTIM, 1998

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

Photograph © 1998 / P. J. Griffiths / Magnum Photos, Inc.

ings of Cambodia and Laos; he knew more about them, and in more intimate detail, than any other individual. Nor was he imprisoned in a culture of obedience that gave him no alternative, or no rival arguments. Several senior members of his own staff, most notably Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, resigned over the invasion of Cambodia, and more than two hundred State Department employees signed a protest addressed to Secretary of State William Rogers. Indeed, both Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird were opposed to the secret bombing policy, as Kissinger himself records with some disgust in his memoirs. Congress also was opposed to an extension of the bombing (once it had agreed to become informed of it), but even after the Nixon-Kissinger Administration had undertaken on Capitol Hill not to intensify the raids, there was a 21 percent increase of the bombing of Cambodia in the months of July and August 1973. The Air Force maps of the targeted areas show them to be, or to have been, densely populated.

Colonel Sitton does recall, it must be admitted, that Kissinger requested the bombing avoid civilian casualties. His explicit motive in making this request was to avoid or forestall complaints from the government of Prince Sihanouk. But this does no more in itself than demonstrate that Kissinger was aware of the possibility of civilian deaths. If he knew enough to know of their likelihood, and was director of the policy that inflicted them, and neither enforced any actual precautions nor reprimanded any violators, then the case against him is legally and morally complete.

As early as the fall of 1970, an independent investigator named Fred Branfman, who spoke Lao and knew the country as a civilian volunteer, had gone to Bangkok and interviewed Jerome Brown, a former targeting officer for the United States Embassy in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. The man had retired from the Air Force because of his disillusionment at the futility of the bombing and his consternation at the damage done to civilians and society. The speed and height of the planes, he said, meant that targets were virtually indistinguishable from the air. Pilots often chose villages as targets, because they could be more readily identified than alleged Pathet Lao guerrillas hiding in the jungle. Branfman, whom I interviewed in San Francisco in the summer of 2000, went on to provide this and other information to Henry Kamm and Sydney Schanberg of the *New York Times*, to Ted Koppel of ABC, and to many others. Under pressure from the United States Embassy, the Laotian authorities had Branfman deforted back to the United States, which was probably, from their point of view, a mistake. He

was able to make a dramatic appearance on Capitol Hill on April 22, 1971, at a hearing held by Senator Edward Kennedy's subcommittee on refugees. His antagonist was the State Department's envoy, William Sullivan, a former ambassador to Laos. Branfman accused him in front of the cameras of helping to conceal evidence that Laotian society was being mutilated by ferocious aerial bombardment.

Partly as a consequence, Congressman Pete McCloskey of California paid a visit to Laos and

"THE PRESIDENT WANTS YOU TO KNOW IF THIS DOESN'T WORK, HENRY, IT'S YOUR ASS." —BEBE REBOZO

acquired a copy of an internal U.S. Embassy study of the bombing. He also prevailed on the U.S. Air Force to furnish him with aerial photographs of the dramatic damage. Ambassador Sullivan was so disturbed by these pictures, some of them taken in areas known to him, that his first reaction was to establish to his own satisfaction that the raids had occurred after he left his post in Vientiane. (He was later to learn that, for his pains, his own telephone was being tapped at Henry Kissinger's instigation, one of the many such violations of American law that were to eventuate in the Watergate tapping-and-burglary scandal, a scandal that Kissinger was furthermore to plead—in an astounding outburst of vanity, deceit, and self-deceit—as his own alibi for collusion in the 1974 Cyprus crisis.)

Having done what he could to bring the Lao-tian nightmare to the attention of those whose constitutional job it was to supervise such questions, Branfman went back to Thailand and from there to Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia. Having gained access to a pilot's radio, he tape-recorded the conversations between pilots on bombing missions over the Cambodian interior. On no occasion did they run any checks designed to reassure themselves and others that they were not bombing civilian targets. It had been definitely asserted, by named U.S. government spokesmen, that such checks were run. Branfman handed the tapes to Sydney Schanberg, whose *New York Times* report on them was printed just before the Senate met to prohibit further bliting of Cambodia (the very resolution that was flouted by Kissinger the following month).

From there Branfman went back to Thailand and traveled north to Nakhorn Phanom, the new headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Air Force. Here, a war room code-named Blue Chip served as the command and control center of the bombing campaign. Branfman was able to

REPORT 51

pose as a new recruit just up from Saigon and ultimately gained access to the war room itself. Consoles and maps and screens plotted the progress of the bombardment. In conversation with the "bombing officer" on duty, he asked if pilots ever made contact before dropping their enormous loads of ordnance. Oh, yes, he was assured, they did. Were they worried about hitting the innocent? Oh, no—merely concerned about the whereabouts of CIA "ground teams" infiltrated into the area. Branfman's report on this, which was carried by Jack Anderson's syndicated column, was uncontroverted by any official denial.

One reason that the American command in Southeast Asia finally ceased employing the crude and horrific tally of "body count" was that, as in the relatively small but specific case of Operation "Speedy Express" cited above, the figures began to look ominous when they were counted up. Sometimes, totals of "enemy" dead would turn out, when computed, to be suspiciously larger than the number of claimed "enemy" in the field. Yet the war would somehow drag on, with new quantitative goals being set and enforced. Thus, according to the Pentagon, the following are the casualty figures between the first Lyndon Johnson bombing

## KISSINGER OFFHANDEDLY DESCRIBED CHILE AS "A DAGGER POINTED AT THE HEART OF ANTARCTICA"

halt in March 1968 and February 26, 1972:
* Americans: 31,205
* South Vietnamese regulars: 86,101
* "Enemy": 475,609

The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Refugees estimated that in the same four-year period, rather more than 3 million civilians were killed, injured, or rendered homeless.

In the same four-year period, the United States dropped almost 4,500,000 tons of high explosive on Indochina. (The Pentagon's estimated total for the amount dropped in the entire Second World War is 2,044,000.) This total does not include massive sprayings of chemical defoliants and pesticides.

It is unclear how we count the murder or abduction of 35,708 Vietnamese civilians by the CIA's counterguerrilla "Phoenix program" during the first two and a half years of the Nixon-Kissinger Administration. There may be some "overlap." There is also some overlap with the actions of previous administrations in all cases. But the truly exorbitant death tolls all occurred on Henry Kissinger's watch; were known and un-

derstood by him; were concealed from Congress, the press, and the public by him; and were, when questioned, the subject of political and bureaucratic vendettas ordered by him. They were also partly the outcome of a secretive and illegal process in Washington, unknown even to most Cabinet members, of which Henry Kissinger stood to be, and became, a prime beneficiary.

On that closing point one may once again cite H. R. Haldeman, who had no further reason to lie and who had, by the time of his writing, paid for his crimes by serving a sentence in prison. Haldeman describes the moment in Florida when Kissinger was enraged by a *New York Times* story telling some part of the truth about Indochina:

> Henry telephoned J. Edgar Hoover in Washington from Key Biscayne on the May morning the *Times* story appeared.

According to Hoover's memo of the call, Henry said the story used "secret information which was extraordinarily damaging." Henry went on to tell Hoover that he "wondered whether I could make a major effort to find out where that came from...and to put whatever resources I need to find out who did this. I told him I would take care of this right away."

Henry was no fool, of course. He telephoned Hoover a few hours later to remind him that the investigation be handled discreetly "so no stories will get out." Hoover must have smiled, but said all right. And by five o'clock he was back on the telephone to Henry with the report that the *Times* reporter "may have gotten some of his information from the Southeast Asian desk of the Department of Defense's Public Affairs Office." More specifically, Hoover suggested the source could be a man named Mort Halperin (a Kissinger staffer) and another man who worked in the Systems Analysis Agency.... According to Hoover's memo, Kissinger "hoped I would follow it up as far as we can take it and they will destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no matter where he is."

The last line of that memo gives an accurate reflection of Henry's rage, as I remember it.

Nevertheless, Nixon was one hundred percent behind the wiretaps. And I was, too.

And so the program started, inspired by Henry's rage but ordered by Nixon, who soon broadened it even further to include newsmen. Eventually, seventeen people were wiretapped by the FBI including seven on Kissinger's NSC staff and three on the White House staff.

And thus, the birth of the "plumbers" and of the assault on American law and democracy that they inaugurated. Commenting on the lamen- table end of this process, Haldeman wrote that he still believed that ex-president Nixon (who was then still alive) should agree to the release of the remaining tapes. But:

> This time my view is apparently not shared by the man who was one reason for the original decision

52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

to start the taping process. Henry Kissinger is deter- mined to stop the tapes from reaching the public....

Nixon made the point that Kissinger was really the one who had the most to lose from the tapes be- coming public. Henry apparently felt that the tapes would expose a lot of things he had said that would be very disadvantageous to him publicly.

Nixon said that in making the deal for custody of his Presidential papers, which was originally an- nounced after his pardon but then was shot down by Congress, that it was Henry who called him and insisted on Nixon's right to destroy the tapes. That was, of course, the thing that destroyed the deal.

A society that has been "plumbed" has the right to demand that its plumbers be compelled to make some restitution by way of full disclosure. The litigation to put the Nixon tapes in the pub- lic trust is only partially complete; no truthful account of the Vietnam years will be available un- til Kissinger's part in what we already know has been made fully transparent.

Until that time, Kissinger's role in the viola-
tion of American law at the close of the Vietnam
War makes the perfect counterpart to the 1968
covert action that helped him to power in the first
place. The two parentheses enclose a series of
premeditated war crimes that still have power to
stun the imagination.

CHILE (PART I):
STATESMAN AS HITMAN

In a famous expression of his contempt for democracy, Kissinger once observed that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to “go Communist due to the ir- responsibility of its own people.” The country concerned was Chile, which at the time of this remark had a justified reputation as the most highly evolved pluralistic democracy in the Southern Hemisphere of the Americas. The plu-ralism translated, in the years of the Cold War, into an electorate that voted about one-third conservative, one-third socialist and Commu-nist, and one-third Christian Democratic and centrist. This had made it relatively easy to keep the Marxist element from having its turn in gov-ernment, and ever since 1962 the CIA had—as it had in Italy and other comparable nations—largely contented itself with funding the reli-able elements. In September 1970, however, the left's candidate actually gained a slight plurali-ty of 36.2 percent in the presidential elections. Divisions on the right, and the adherence of some smaller radical and Christian parties to the left, made it a moral certainty that the Chilean Congress would, after the traditional sixty-day in-terregnum, confirm Dr. Salvador Allende as the next president. But the very name of Allende was

anathema to the extreme right in Chile, to cer-
tain powerful corporations (notably ITT, Pepsi-
Cola, and the Chase Manhattan Bank) that did
business in Chile and the United States, and to
the CIA.

This loathing quickly communicated itself to President Nixon. He was personally beholden to Donald Kendall, the president of Pepsi-Cola, who had given him his first international account when, as a failed politician, he had joined a Wall Street law firm. A series of Washington meetings, within eleven days of Allende's electoral victory, essentially settled the fate of Chilean democracy. After discussions with Kendall, with

David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, and with CIA director Richard Helms, Kissinger went with Helms to the Oval Office. Helms's notes of the meeting show that Nixon wasted little breath in making his wishes known. Allende was not to assume office. "Not concerned risks involved. No involvement of embassy. $10,000,000 available, more if necessary. Full-time job—best men we have.... Make the economy scream. 48 hours for plan of action."

Declassified documents show that Kissinger—
who had previously neither known nor cared
about Chile, describing it offhandedly as “a dag-
ger pointed at the heart of Antarctica”—took se-
riously this chance to impress his boss. A group was
set up in Langley, Virginia, with the express pur-
pose of running a “two track” policy for Chile, one
the ostensible diplomatic one and the other—
unknown to the State Department or the U.S. am-
bassador to Chile, Edward Korry—a strategy of

Map by Mike Reagan

REPORT 53

destabilization, kidnapping, and assassination de-
signed to provoke a military coup.

There were long- and short-term obstacles to the incubation of such an intervention, especially in the brief interval available before Allende took his oath of office. The long-term obstacle was the tradition of military abstention from politics in Chile, a tradition that marked off the country from its neighbors. Such a military culture was not to be degraded overnight. The short-term obstacle lay in the person of one man: General René Schneider. As chief of the Chilean Army, he was adamantly opposed to any military meddling in the electoral process. Accordingly, it was decided at a meeting on September 18, 1970, that General Schneider had to go.

The plan, well documented by Seymour Hersh and others, was to have him kidnapped by extremist officers, in such a way as to make it appear that leftist and pro-Allende elements were behind the plot. The resulting confusion, it was hoped, would panic the Chilean Congress into denying Allende the presidency. A sum of $50,000 was offered around the Chilean capital, Santiago, for any officer or officers enterprising enough to take on

SALVADOR ALLENDE,
1971

this task. Richard Helms and his director of covert
operations, Thomas Karamessines, told Kissinger
that they were not optimistic. Military circles
were hesitant and divided, or else loyal to Gen-
eral Schneider and the Chilean constitution. As
Helms put it in a later account of the conversa-
tion: "We tried to make clear to Kissinger how
small the possibility of success was." Kissinger

firmly told Helms and Karamessines to press on
in any case.

Here one must pause for a recapitulation. An unelected official in the United States is meeting with others, without the knowledge or authorization of Congress, to plan the kidnapping of a constitutionally minded senior officer in a democratic country with which the United States is not at war and with which it maintains cordial diplomatic relations. The minutes of the meetings may have an official look to them (though they were hidden from the light of day for long enough), but what we are reviewing is a "hit," a piece of state-supported terrorism.

A
mbassador Edward Korry has testified that he told his embassy staff to have nothing to do with a group styling itself Patria y Libertad, a quasi-fascist group intent on defying the election results. He sent two cables to Washington warning his superiors to have nothing to do with them either. He was unaware that his own military attachés had been told to contact the group and to keep the fact from him. And when the outgoing president of Chile, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, announced that he was opposed to any American intervention and would vote to confirm the legally elected Allende, it was precisely to this gang that Kissinger turned. On September 15, 1970, Kissinger was told of an extremist right-wing officer named General Roberto Viaux, who had ties to Patria y Libertad and who was willing to accept the secret American commission to remove General Schneider from the chessboard. The term "kidnap" was still being employed at this point and is often employed still. Kissinger's "track two" group, however, authorized the supply of machine guns as well as tear-gas grenades to Viaux's associates and never seem to have asked what they would do with the general once they had kidnapped him.

Let the documents tell the story. A CIA cable to Kissinger's "track two" group from Santiago dated October 18, 1970, reads (with the names still blacked out for "security" purposes and cover identities written in by hand, in my square brackets, by the ever-thoughtful redaction service) as follows:

1. [Station cooptee] MET CLANDESTINELY EVENING 17 OCT WITH [two Chilean Armed Forces officers] WHO TOLD HIM THEIR PLANS WERE MOVING ALONG BETTER THAN HAD THOUGHT POSSIBLE. THEY ASKED THAT BY EVENING 18 OCT [cooptee] ARRANGE FURNISH THEM WITH EIGHT TO TEN TEAR GAS GRENADES. WITHIN 48 HOURS THEY NEED THREE 45 CALIBRE MACHINE GUNS ("GREASE GUNS") WITH 500 ROUNDS AMMO EACH. [One officer] COMMENTED HAS THREE MACHINE GUNS HIMSELF BUT CAN BE IDENTIFIED BY SERIAL NUMBERS AS HAVING BEEN ISSUED TO HIM THEREFORE UNABLE USE THEM.

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

Photograph by Raymond Depardon / Liaison Agency Inc.

2. [Officers] SAID THEY HAVE TO MOVE BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THEY NOW UNDER SUSPICION AND BEING WATCHED BY ALLENDE SUPPORTERS. [One officer] WAS LATE TO MEETING HAVING TAKEN EVASIVE ACTION TO SHAKE POSSIBLE SURVEILLANCE BY ONE OR TWO TAXI CABS WITH DUAL ANTENNAS WHICH HE BELIEVED BEING USED BY OPPOSITION AGAINST HIM.

3. [Cooptee] ASKED IF [officers] HAD AIR FORCE CONTACTS. THEY ANSWERED THEY DID NOT BUT WOULD WELCOME ONE. [Cooptee] SEPARATELY HAS SINCE TRIED CONTACT [a Chilean Air Force General] AND WILL KEEP TRYING UNTIL ESTABLISHED. WILL URGE [Air Force General] MEET WITH [other two officers] ASAP. [Cooptee] COMMENTED TO STATION THAT [Air Force General] HAS NOT TRIED CONTACT HIM SINCE REF A TALK.

4. [Cooptee] COMMENT: CANNOT TELL WHO IS LEADER OF THIS MOVEMENT BUT STRONGLY SUSPECTS IT IS ADMIRAL [Deleted]. IT WOULD APPEAR FROM [his contacts'] ACTIONS AND ALLEGED ALLENDE SUSPICIONS ABOUT THEM THAT UNLESS THEY ACT NOW THEY ARE LOST. TRYING GET MORE INFO FROM THE EVENING 18 OCT ABOUT SUPPORT THEY BELIEVE THEY HAVE.

5. STATION PLANS GIVE SIX TEAR GAS GRENADES (ARRIVING NOON 18 OCT BY SPECIAL COURIER) TO [cooptee] FOR DELIVERY TO [Armed Forces officer] INSTEAD OF HAVING [False Flag officer] DELIVER THEM TO VIAUX GROUP. OUR REASONING IS THAT [cooptee] DEALING WITH ACTIVE DUTY OFFICERS. ALSO [False Flag officer] LEAVING EVENING 18 OCT AND WILL NOT BE REPLACED BUT [cooptee] WILL STAY HERE. HENCE IMPORTANT THAT [cooptee] CREDIBILITY WITH [Armed Forces officers] BE STRENGTHENED BY PROMPT DELIVERY WHAT THEY REQUESTING. REQUEST HEADQUARTERS AGREEMENT BY 1500 HOURS LOCAL TIME 18 OCT ON DECISION DELIVERY OF TEAR GAS TO [cooptee] VICE [False Flag officer].

6. REQUEST PROMPT SHIPMENT THREE STERILE 45 CALIBRE MACHINE GUNS AND AMMO PER PARA 1 ABOVE, BY SPECIAL COURIER IF NECESSARY. PLEASE CONFIRM BY 2000 HOURS LOCAL TIME 18 OCT THAT THIS CAN BE DONE SO [cooptee] MAY INFORM [his contacts] ACCORDINGLY.

The reply, which is headed IMMEDIATE SANTIAGO (EYES ONLY [deleted]), is dated October 18 and reads as follows:

SUB-MACHINE GUNS AND AMMO BEING SENT BY REGULAR [deleted] COURIER LEAVING WASHINGTON 0700 HOURS 19 OCTOBER DUE ARRIVE SANTIAGO LATE EVENING 20 OCTOBER OR EARLY MORNING 21 OCTOBER. PREFERRED USE REGULAR [deleted] COURIER TO AVOID BRINGING UNDUE ATTENTION TO OP.

A companion message, also addressed to "SAN-TIAGO 562," went like this:

1. DEPENDING HOW [cooptee] CONVERSATION GOES EVENING 18 OCTOBER YOU MAY WISH SUBMIT INTEL REPORT [deleted] SO WE CAN DECIDE WHETHER SHOULD BE DISSEMED.

2. NEW SUBJECT: IF [cooptee] PLANS LEAD COUP, OR BE ACTIVELY AND PUBLICLY INVOLVED, WE PUZZLED WHY IT SHOULD BOTHER HIM IF MACHINE GUNS CAN

BE TRACED TO HIM. CAN WE DEVELOP RATIONALE ON WHY GUNS MUST BE STERILE? WILL CONTINUE MAKE EFFORT PROVIDE THEM BUT FIND OUR CREDULITY STRETCHED BY NAVY [officer] LEADING HIS TROOPS WITH STERILE GUNS? WHAT IS SPECIAL PURPOSE FOR THESE GUNS? WE WILL TRY SEND THEM WHETHER YOU CAN PROVIDE EXPLANATION OR NOT.

The full beauty of this cable traffic cannot be appreciated without a reading of an earlier message, dated October 16. (It must be borne in mind that the Chilean Congress was to meet to confirm Allende as president on the twenty-fourth of that month.)

1. [code name Trickturn] POLICY, OBJECTIVES AND ACTIONS WERE REVIEWED AT HIGH USG [United States Government] LEVEL AFTERNOON 15 OCTOBER. CON-

## WHAT WE ARE REVIEWING IS A "HIT," A PIECE OF STATE-SUPPORTED TERRORISM

CLUSIONS, WHICH ARE TO BE YOUR OPERATIONAL GUIDE, FOLLOW:

2. IT IS FIRM AND CONTINUING POLICY THAT ALLENDE BE OVERTHROWN BY A COUP. IT WOULD BE MUCH PREFERABLE TO HAVE THIS TRANSPARE PRIOR TO 24 OCTOBER BUT EFFORTS IN THIS REGARD WILL CONTINUE VIGOROUSLY BEYOND THIS DATE. WE ARE TO CONTINUE TO GENERATE MAXIMUM PRESSURE TOWARD THIS END UTILIZING EVERY APPROPRIATE RESOURCE. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT THESE ACTIONS BE IMPLEMENTED CLANDESTINELY AND SECURELY SO THAT THE USG AND AMERICAN HAND BE WELL HIDDEN. WHILE THIS IMPOSES ON US A HIGH DEGREE OF SELECTIVITY IN MAKING MILITARY CONTACTS AND DICTATES THAT THESE CONTACTS BE MADE IN THE MOST SECURE MANNER IT DEFINITELY DOES NOT PRECLUDE CONTACTS SUCH AS REPORTED IN SANTIAGO 544 WHICH WAS A MASTERFUL PIECE OF WORK. [Italics added.]

3. AFTER THE MOST CAREFUL CONSIDERATION IT WAS DETERMINED THAT A VIAUX COUP ATTEMPT CARRIED OUT BY HIM ALONE WITH THE FORCES NOW AT HIS DISPOSAL WOULD FAIL. THUS, IT WOULD BE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO OUR [track two] OBJECTIVES. IT WAS DECIDED THAT [CIA] GET A MESSAGE TO VIAUX WARNING HIM AGAINST PRECIPITATE ACTION. IN ESSENCE OUR MESSAGE IS TO STATE, "WE HAVE REVIEWED YOUR PLANS, AND BASED ON YOUR INFORMATION AND OURS, WE COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT YOUR PLANS FOR A COUP AT THIS TIME CANNOT SUCCEED. FAILING, THEY MAY REDUCE YOUR CAPABILITIES FOR THE FUTURE. PRESERVE YOUR ASSETS. WE WILL STAY IN TOUCH. THE TIME WILL COME WHEN YOU TOGETHER WITH ALL YOUR OTHER FRIENDS CAN DO SOMETHING. YOU WILL CONTINUE TO HAVE OUR SUPPORT." YOU ARE REQUESTED TO DELIVER THE MESSAGE TO VIAUX ESSENTIALLY AS NOTED ABOVE. OUR OBJECTIVES ARE AS FOLLOWS: (A) TO ADVISE HIM OF OUR OPINION AND DISCOURAGE HIM FROM ACTING ALONE; (B) CONTINUE TO ENCOURAGE HIM TO AMPLIFY

REPORT 55

HIS PLANNING; (C) ENCOURAGE HIM TO JOIN FORCES WITH OTHER COUP PLANNERS SO THAT THEY MAY ACT IN CONCERT EITHER BEFORE OR AFTER 24 OCTOBER. (N.B. SIX GAS MASKS AND SIX CS CANNISTERS [sic] ARE BEING CARRIED TO SANTIAGO BY SPECIAL [deleted] COURIER ETD WASHINGTON 1100 HOURS 16 OCTOBER.)

4. THERE IS GREAT AND CONTINUING INTEREST IN THE ACTIVITIES OF TIRADO, CANALES, VALENZUELA ET AL. AND WE WISH THEM MAXIMUM GOOD FORTUNE.

5. THE ABOVE IS YOUR OPERATING GUIDANCE. NO OTHER POLICY GUIDANCE YOU MAY RECEIVE FROM [indecipherable: State] OR ITS MAXIMUM EXPONENT IN SANTIAGO, ON HIS RETURN, ARE TO SWAY YOU FROM YOUR COURSE.

6. PLEASE REVIEW ALL YOUR PRESENT AND POSSIBLY NEW ACTIVITIES TO INCLUDE PROPAGANDA, BLACK OPERATIONS, SURFACING OF INTELLIGENCE OR DISINFORMATION, PERSONAL CONTACTS, OR ANYTHING

YOU MAY NOT SAY, WITH A CORPSE AT YOUR FEET, "I WAS ONLY TRYING TO KIDNAP HIM"

ELSE YOUR IMAGINATION CAN CONJURE WHICH WILL PERMIT YOU TO PRESS FORWARD OUR [deleted] OBJECTIVE IN A SECURE MANNER.

Finally, it is essential to read the White House "MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION," dated October 15, 1970, to which the above cable directly refers and of which it is a more honest summary. Present for the "HIGH USG LEVEL" meeting were, as noted in the heading, "Dr. Kissinger, Mr. Karamessines, Gen. Haig." The first paragraph of their deliberations has been entirely blacked out, with not so much as a scribble in the margin from the redaction service. (Given what has since been admitted, this sixteen-line deletion must be well worth reading.) Picking up at paragraph two, we find:

2. Then Mr. Karamessines provided a run-down on Viaux, the Canales meeting with Tirado, the latter's new position (after Porta was relieved of command "for health reasons") and, in some detail, the general situation in Chile from the coup possibility viewpoint.

3. A certain amount of information was available to us concerning Viaux's alleged support throughout the Chilean military. We had assessed Viaux's claims carefully, basing our analysis on good intelligence from a number of sources. Our conclusion was clear: Viaux did not have more than one chance in twenty—perhaps less—to launch a successful coup.

4. The unfortunate repercussions, in Chile and internationally, of an unsuccessful coup were discussed. Dr. Kissinger ticked off his list of these negative possibilities. His items were remarkably similar to the ones Mr. Karamessines had prepared.

5. It was decided by those present that the Agency

must get a message to Viaux warning him against any precipitate action. In essence our message was to state: "We have reviewed your plans, and based on your information and ours, we come to the conclusion that your plans for a coup at this time cannot succeed. Failing, they may reduce your capabilities for the future. Preserve your assets. We will stay in touch. The time will come when you with all your other friends can do something. You will continue to have our support."

6. After the decision to de-fuse the Viaux coup plot, at least temporarily, Dr. Kissinger instructed Mr. Karamessines to preserve Agency assets in Chile, working clandestinely and securely to maintain the capability for Agency operations against Allende in the future. [Italics added.]

7. Dr. Kissinger discussed his desire that the word of our encouragement to the Chilean military in recent weeks be kept as secret as possible. Mr. Karamessines stated emphatically that we had been doing everything possible in this connection, including the use of false flag officers, car meetings and every conceivable precaution. But we and others had done a great deal of talking recently with a number of persons. For example, Ambassador Korry's wide-ranging discussions with numerous people urging a coup "cannot be put back into the bottle." [Three lines of deletion follow.] (Dr. Kissinger requested that copy of the message be sent to him on 16 October.)

8. The meeting concluded on Dr. Kissinger's note that the Agency should continue keeping the pressure on every Allende weak spot in sight—now, after the 24th of October, after 5 November, and into the future until such time as new marching orders are given. Mr. Karamessines stated that the Agency would comply.

So "track two" contained two tracks of its own. "Track two/one" was the group of ultras led by General Roberto Viaux and his sidekick, Captain Arturo Marshal. These men had tried to bring off a coup in 1969 against the Christian Democrats; they had been cashiered and were disliked even by conservatives in the officer corps. "Track two/two" was a more ostensibly "respectable" faction headed by General Camilo Valenzuela, the chief of the garrison in the capital city, whose name occurs in the cables above and whose identity is concealed by some of the deletions. Several of the CIA operatives in Chile felt that Viaux was too much of a madman to be trusted. And Ambassador Korry's repeated admonitions also had their effect. As shown in the October 15 memo cited above, Kissinger and Karamessines developed last-minute second thoughts about Viaux, who as late as October 13 had been given $20,000 in cash from the CIA station and promised a life-insurance policy of $250,000. This offer was authorized directly from the White House. With only days to go, however, before Allende was inaugurated, and with Nixon repeating that "it was absolutely essential that the

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

election of Mr. Allende to the presidency he thwarted," the pressure on the Valenzuela group became intense. As a direct consequence, especially after the warm words of encouragement he had received, General Roberto Viaux felt himself under some obligation to deliver and to disprove those who had doubted him.

On the evening of October 19, 1970, the Valenzuela group, aided by some of Viaux's gang, and equipped with the tear-gas grenades delivered by the CIA, attempted to grab General Schneider as he left an official dinner. The attempt failed because Schneider left in a private car and not the expected official one. The failure produced an extremely significant cable from CIA headquarters in Washington to the local station, asking for urgent action because "HEADQUARTERS MUST RESPOND DURING MORNING 20 OCTOBER TO QUERIES FROM HIGH LEVELS." Payments of $50,000 each to Valenzuela and his chief associate were then authorized on condition that they make another attempt. On the evening of October 20 they did. But again there was only failure to report. On October 22 the "sterile" machine guns mentioned above were handed to Valenzuela's group for yet another try. Later that same day, General Roberto Viaux's gang finally murdered General René Schneider.

According to the later verdict of the Chilean military courts, this atrocity partook of elements of both tracks of "track two." In other words, Valenzuela was not himself on the scene, but the assassination squad, led by Viaux, contained men who had participated in the preceding two attempts. Viaux was convicted on charges of kidnapping and of conspiring to cause a coup. Valenzuela was convicted of the charge of conspiracy to cause a coup. So any subsequent attempt to distinguish the two plots from each other, except in point of degree, is an attempt to confect a distinction without a difference.

It scarcely matters whether Schneider was slain because of a kidnapping scheme that went awry (he was said by the assassins to have had the temerity to resist) or whether his assassination was the objective in the first place. The Chilean military police report, as it happens, describes a straightforward murder. Under the law of every law-bound country (including the United States), a crime committed in the pursuit of a kidnapping is thereby aggravated, not mitigated. You may not say, with a corpse at your feet, "I was only trying to kidnap him." At least, you may not say so if you hope to plead extenuating circumstances.

Yet a version of "extenuating circumstances" has become the paper-thin cover story with which Kissinger has since protected himself from the charge of being an accomplice, before and after

the fact, in kidnapping and murder. And this sorry euphemism has even found a refuge in the written record. The Senate intelligence committee, in its investigation of the matter, concluded that since the machine guns supplied to Valenzuela had not been actually employed in the killing, and since General Viaux had been officially discouraged by the CIA a few days before the murder, there was therefore "no evidence of a plan to kill Schneider or that United States officials specifically anticipated that Schneider would be shot during the abduction."

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Kissinger, takes at face value a memo from Kissinger to Nixon after his meeting on October 15 with Karamessines, in which he reports to the president about the Viaux plot, saying that he had "turned it off." He also takes at face value the claim that Viaux's successful hit was essentially unauthorized. These excuses and apologies are as logically feeble as they are morally contemptible. Henry Kissinger bears direct responsibility for the Schneider murder, as the following points demonstrate:

1) Bruce MacMaster, one of the "False Flag" agents mentioned in the cable traffic above, a career CIA man carrying a forged Colombian passport and claiming to represent American business interests in Chile, has told of his efforts to get "hush money" to jailed members of the Viaux group, after the assassination and before they could implicate the agency.

2) Colonel Paul M. Wimert, a military attaché in Santiago and chief CIA liaison with the Valenzuela faction, has testified that after the Schneider killing he hastily retrieved the two payments of $50,000 that had been paid to Valenzuela and his partner, and also the three "sterile" machine guns. He then drove rapidly to the Chilean seaside town of Vina del Mar and hurled the guns into the ocean. His accomplice in this action, CIA station chief Henry Hecksher, had assured Washington only days before that *either* Viaux or Valenzuela would be able to eliminate Schneider and thereby trigger a coup.

3) Look again at the White House/Kissinger memo of October 15 and at the doggedly literal way it is retransmitted to Chile. In no sense of the term does it "turn off" Viaux. If anything, it incites him—a well-known and boastful fanatic— to redouble his efforts. "Preserve your assets. We will stay in touch. The time will come when you with all your other friends can do something. You will continue to have our support." This is not exactly the language of standing him down. The remainder of the cable speaks plainly of the intention to "DISCOURAGE HIM FROM ACTING ALONE," to "CONTINUE TO ENCOURAGE HIM TO AMPLIFY HIS PLANNING," and to "ENCOURAGE HIM TO JOIN FORCES WITH OTHER COUP PLANNERS SO

REPORT 57

THAT THEY MAY ACT IN CONCERT EITHER BEFORE OR AFTER 24 OCTOBER." (Italics added.) The last three stipulations are an entirely accurate, not to say prescient, description of what Viaux actually did.

4) Consult again the cable received by Henry Hecksher on October 20, referring to anxious queries "from high levels" about the first of the failed attacks on Schneider. Thomas Karamessines, when questioned by the Senate intelligence committee about the same phrase in a similar cable sent to another CIA agent in Santiago, testified of his certainty that the term "high levels" referred directly to Kissinger. In all previous communications from Washington, as a glance above will show, that had indeed been the case. This on its own is enough to demolish Kissinger's claim to have "turned off" "track two" (and its interior tracks) on October 15.

5) Ambassador Edward Korry later made the obvious point that Kissinger was attempting to build a paper alibi in the event of a failure by the Viaux group: "His interest was not in Chile but in who was going to be blamed for what. He wanted me to be the one who took the heat. Henry didn't want to be associated with a failure, and he was setting up a record to blame the State Department. He brought me in to the President because he wanted me to say what I had to say about Viaux; he wanted me to be the soft man."

The concept of "deniability" was not as well understood in Washington in 1970 as it has since become. But it is clear that Henry Kissinger wanted two things simultaneously: He wanted the removal of General Schneider, by any means and employing any proxy. (No instruction from Washington to leave Schneider unharmed was ever given; deadly weapons were sent by diplomatic pouch, and men of violence were carefully selected to receive them.) And he wanted to be out of the picture in case such an attempt might fail, or be uncovered. These are the normal motives of anyone who solicits or suborns murder. Kissinger, however, needed the crime very slightly more than he needed, or was able to design, the deniability. Without waiting for his many hidden papers to be released or subpoenaed, we can say with safety that he is prima facie guilty of direct collusion in the murder of a constitutional officer in a democratic and peaceful country.

## A NOTE ON PART TWO

Two well-marked and separate but consistent styles may be noticed in Kissinger's successive, sanguinary encounters with Indochina and Chile: in the first instance, a megalo-style, replete with overblown operatic effects on his part and grand, terrifying consequences for others; in the second

instance, a micro-style, involving an obsessive, almost fussy manipulation of smaller forces. The two practices are actually quite congruent, and there is an obvious relation between the gross and comprehensive violence of the first case and the intimate and personal cruelty of the second.

In Indochina, the megalo-scale of mass murder also required much individual fawning, the tireless flattering of numerous secret committees, and the smiling betrayal of several associates. In Chile, the micro-scale of surreptitious assassination was paradoxically conceived with a certain grandeur, the objective being the destabilization of an entire government and, ultimately, the teaching of a sharp pedagogical lesson to a whole subcontinent.

In the March issue of *Harper's Magazine*, we shall again encounter these two contrasting but symmetrical tropes. In Chile, the destruction of an economy, a president, and a constitution is followed by the knowing extension of the "death squad" system across the Southern Americas. Vendetta, in other words—against Schneider and Allende—evolves into realpolitik. In Bangladesh, it is calmly decided that the lives of millions of Bengalis are expendable: they are the price of a glorifying photo-op in Beijing, the returning of a favor to a military dictator, and payment for an old personal resentment by Kissinger's boss. Since the victim cannot be forgiven, this grudge is later pursued to the threshold of assassination and beyond. In Cyprus, a fancied slight or two from an elected but inconvenient leader is enough to set the machinery of designated murder and wider geopolitical "destabilization" clanking again: out of a perceived affront to power evolves a bitter war and a continuing tragedy. In East Timor, an uncountable hill of corpses rises so that a covert and illegal handshake between Henry Kissinger and a bizarre despot may be honored. While in Washington, D.C., a lone reporter catches and offends the world's coldest eye and nearly loses both liberty and life as a consequence.

Finally—and as the most squalid illustration of the obscene connection between the vastly lethal and the merely paltry—we discover Henry Kissinger profiting explicitly as a private man from the crimes he committed as a public one. The stale image of the "revolving door" is inadequate to depict the great mill and grindstone of influence, as it generates misery and homicide in one corner and personal gain in another. Now that both corners can be illuminated, it has become both possible and necessary to sum up the legal case against this person, a case that unsurprisingly consists of gross violations of broad international laws and deliberate, cumulative, identifiable breaches of local and national ones.

This is, in both declensions—and in both senses—an American responsibility. ■

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2001

an Stephen J. Solarz of the
ok to investigate the matter
last year wrote to him: "With
ember 1974-January 1975
the State Department once
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A, even if the letter goes on
totified Rahman about the
if true, that "claim" is being
the man who was murdered
mission is stronger than the

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 permanent Select Committee
, "has the best chance of
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 was somehow lost along the
 inquiring committee, and
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with subpoena power could
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ted by recurring reliable
nacy of 1971 and the secret
sproving such a connection,
believe that everything is an

5

CHILE

IN A FAMOUS expression of his contempt for democracy, Kissinger once
observed that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to
"go Marxist" merely because "its people are irresponsible." The country
concerned was Chile, which at the time of this remark had a justified rep-
utation as the most highly evolved pluralistic democracy in the southern
hemisphere of the Americas. The pluralism translated, in the years of the
Cold War, into an electorate that voted about one-third conservative, one-
third socialist and communist, and one-third Christian Democratic and
centrist. This had made it relatively easy to keep the Marxist element from
having its turn in government, and ever since 1962 the CIA had – as it had
in Italy and other comparable nations – largely contented itself with fund-
ing the reliable elements. In September 1970, however, the Left's candidate
actually gained a slight plurality of 36.2 percent in the presidential elec-
tions. Divisions on the Right, and the adherence of some smaller radical
and Christian parties to the Left, made it a moral certainty that the Chilean
Congress would, after the traditional sixty-day interregnum, confirm Dr
Salvador Allende as the next president. But the very name of Allende was
anathema to the extreme Right in Chile, to certain powerful corporations
(notably ITT, Pepsi Cola and the Chase Manhattan Bank) which did busi-
ness in Chile and the United States, and to the CIA.

56

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

This loathing quickly communicated itself to President Nixon. He was personally beholden to Donald Kendall, the President of Pepsi Cola, who had given him his first corporate account when, as a young lawyer, he had joined John Mitchell's New York firm. A series of Washington meetings, held within eleven days of Allende's electoral victory, essentially settled the fate of Chilean democracy. After discussions with Kendall and with David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, and with CIA director Richard Helms, Kissinger went with Helms to the Oval Office. Helms's notes of the meeting show that Nixon wasted little breath in making his wishes known. Allende was not to assume office. "Not concerned risks involved. No involvement of embassy. $10,000,000 available, more if necessary. Full-time job - best men we have.... Make the economy scream. 48 hours for plan of action."

Declassified documents show that Kissinger – who had previously neither known nor cared about Chile, describing it offhandedly as “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica” – took seriously this chance to impress his boss. A group was set up in Langley, Virginia, with the express purpose of running a “two track” policy for Chile: one the ostensible diplomatic one and the other – unknown to the State Department or the US ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry – a strategy of destabilization, kidnap and assassination, designed to provoke a military coup.

There were long- and short-term obstacles to the incubation of such an intervention, especially in the brief interval available before Allende took his oath of office. The long-term obstacle was the tradition of military abstention from politics in Chile, a tradition which marked off the country from its neighbors. Such a military culture was not to be degraded overnight. The short-term obstacle lay in the person of one man – General René Schneider. As chief of the Chilean General Staff, he was adamantly opposed to any military meddling in the electoral process. Accordingly, it was decided at a meeting on 18 September 1970 that General Schneider had to go.

The plan was to have him kidnapped by extremist officers, in such a way as to make it appear that leftist and pro-Allende elements were behind the

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 57

Nixon. He was Pepsi Cola, who was a lawyer, he had been a meetings, held at the State House, and with David A. Radler, the State Senate majority whip. The two were the job – best men of action.”

In 1973, previously neutrally as “a dagger in the back,” Kissinger was able to impress President Richard M. Nixon with his proposal to send a diplomatic one US ambassador to Chile and assassinate all the Chilean government officials.

In 1974, Kissinger and General Schneider, in such a way, were behind the

plot. The resulting confusion, it was hoped, would panic the Chilean Congress into denying Allende the presidency. A sum of $50,000 was offered around the Chilean capital, Santiago, for any officer or officers entering enough to take on this task. Richard Helms and his director of covert operations, Thomas Karamessines, told Kissinger that they were not optimistic. Military circles were hesitant and divided, or else loyal to General Schneider and the Chilean constitution. As Helms put it in a later account of the conversation, “We tried to make clear to Kissinger how small the possibility of success was.” Kissinger firmly told Helms and Karamessines to press on in any case.

Here one must pause for a recapitulation. An unelected official in the United States is meeting with others, without the knowledge or authorization of Congress, to plan the kidnapping of a constitution-minded senior officer in a democratic country with which the United States is not at war, and with which it maintains cordial diplomatic relations. The minutes of the meetings may have an official look to them (though they were hidden from the light of day for long enough) but what we are reviewing is a “hit” – a piece of state-supported terrorism.

Ambassador Korry has testified that he told his embassy staff to have nothing to do with a group styling itself *Patria y Libertad* (Fatherland and Freedom), a quasi-fascist group intent on defying the election results. He sent three cables to Washington warning his superiors to have nothing to do with them either. He was unaware that his own military attachés had been told to contact the group and keep the fact from him. And when the outgoing president of Chile, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, announced that he was opposed to any US intervention and would vote to confirm the legally elected Allende, it was precisely to this gang that Kissinger turned. On 15 October 1970, Kissinger was told of an extremist right-wing officer named General Roberto Viaux, who had ties to *Patria y Libertad* and who was willing to accept the secret US commission to remove General Schneider from the chessboard. The term “kidnap” was still being employed at this point, and is often employed still. However, Kissinger's Track Two group authorized the

58

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

supply of machine guns as well as tear gas grenades to Viaux's associates, and never seems to have asked what they would do with the general once they had kidnapped him.

Let the documents tell the story. A CIA cable to Kissinger's Track Two group from Santiago dated 18 October 1970 reads (with the names still blacked out for "security" purposes and cover identities written in by hand – in my square brackets – by the ever-thoughtful redaction service):

1. [Station cooptee] met clandestinely evening 17 Oct with [two Chilean armed forces officers] who told him their plans were moving along better than had thought possible. They asked that by evening 18 Oct [cooptee] arrange furnish them with eight to ten tear gas grenades. Within 48 hours they need three 45 calibre machine guns ("grease guns") with 500 rounds ammo each. [One officer] commented has three machine guns himself but can be identified by serial numbers as having been issued to him therefore unable use them.

2. [Officers] said they have to move because they believe they now under suspicion and being watched by Allende supporters. [One officer] was late to meeting having taken evasive action to shake possible surveillance by one or two taxi cabs with dual antennas which he believed being used by opposition against him.

3. [Cooptee] asked if [officers] had Air Force contacts. They answered they did not but would welcome one. [Cooptee] separately has since tried contact [a Chilean Air Force General] and will keep trying until established. Will urge [Air Force General] meet with [other two officers] a.s.a.p. [Cooptee] commented to station that [Air Force General] has not tried contact him since ref a talk.

4. [Cooptee] comment: cannot tell who is leader of this movement but strongly suspects it is Admiral [Deleted]. It would appear from [his contact's] actions and alleged Allende suspicions about them that unless they act now they are lost. Trying get more info from them evening 18 Oct about support they believe they have.

5. Station plans give six tear gas grenades (arriving noon 18 Oct by special courier) to [cooptee] for delivery to [armed forces officers] instead of having [false flag officer] deliver them to Viaux group. Our reasoning is that

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 59

udes to Viaux's associates, and to the general once they

able to Kissinger's Track Two reads (with the names still unknown identities written in by thoughtful redaction service):

17 Oct with [two Chilean users] were moving along better evening 18 Oct [cooptee] grenades. Within 48 hours [use guns] with 500 rounds of the machine guns himself but been issued to him therefore

I believe they now under sus- [One officer] was late to be seen being used by opposition

s. They answered they not only has since tried contact [him] but [they] have not tried contact him

order of this movement but [he] appears from [his contact's] statement that unless they act now [before] evening 18 Oct about support

ing noon 18 Oct by special [his] officers] instead of having [up]. Our reasoning is that

[cooptee] dealing with active duty officers. Also [false flag officer] leaving evening 18 Oct and will not be replaced but [cooptee] will stay here. Hence important that [cooptee] credibility with [armed forces officers] be strengthened by prompt delivery what they requesting. Request headquarters agreement by 1500 hours local time 18 Oct on decision delivery of tear gas to [cooptee] vice [false flag officer].

6. Request prompt shipment three sterile 45 calibre machine guns and ammo per para 1 above, by special courier if necessary. Please confirm by 2000 hours local time 18 Oct that this can be done so [cooptee] may inform his contacts accordingly.

The reply, which is headed "IMMEDIATE SANTIAGO (EYES ONLY [DELETED])" is dated 18 October and reads:

Sub-machine guns and ammo being sent by regular [deleted] courier leaving Washington 0700 hours 19 October due arrive Santiago late evening 20 October or early morning 21 October. Preferred use regular [deleted] courier to avoid bringing undue attention to op.

A companion message, also addressed to "Santiago 562," went like this:

1. Depending how [cooptee] conversation goes evening 18 October you may wish submit Intel report [deleted] so we can decide whether should be disseminated.

2. New subject. If [cooptee] plans lead coup, or be actively and publicly involved, we puzzled why it should bother him if machine guns can be traced to him. Can we develop rationale on why guns must be sterile? Will continue make effort provide them but find our credulity stretched by Navy [officer] leading his troops with sterile guns? What is special purpose for these guns? We will try send them whether you can provide explanation or not.

The full beauty of this cable traffic cannot be appreciated without a reading of another message, dated 16 October. (It must be borne in mind that the Chilean Congress was to meet to confirm Allende as president on the 24th of that month.)

60

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

1. [Deleted/handwritten code name Trickturn] policy, objectives and actions were reviewed at high USG [United States Government] level afternoon 15 October. Conclusions, which are to be your operational guide, follow:

2. It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clan-destinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden. [italics added] While this imposes on us a high degree of selectivity in making military contacts and dictates that these contacts be made in the most secure manner it definitely does not preclude contacts such as reported in Santiago 544 which was a masterful piece of work.

3. After the most careful consideration it was determined that a Viaux coup attempt carried out by him alone with the forces now at his disposal would fail. Thus, it would be counterproductive to our [deleted; handwritten insert "Track Two"] objectives. It was decided that [deleted; handwritten insert "CIA"] get a message to Viaux warning him against precipitate action. In essence our message is to state, "We have reviewed your plans, and based on your information and ours, we come to the conclusion that your plans for a coup at this time cannot succeed. Failing, they may reduce your capabilities for the future. Preserve your assets. We will stay in touch. The time will come when you together with all your other friends can do something. You will continue to have our support." You are requested to deliver the message to Viaux essentially as noted above. Our objectives are as follows: (A) To advise him of our opinion and discourage him from acting alone; (B) Continue to encourage him to amplify his planning; (C) Encourage him to join forces with other coup planners so that they may act in concert either before or after 24 October. (N.B. Six gas masks and six CS cannisters [sic] are being carried to Santiago by special [deleted] courier ETD Washington 1100 hours 16 October.)

4. There is great and continuing interest in the activities of Tirado, Canales, Valenzuela et al and we wish them maximum good fortune.

5. The above is your operating guidance. No other policy guidance you may receive from [indecipherable: State?] or its maximum exponent in Santiago, on his return, are to sway you from your course.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 61

objectives and actions
ent] level afternoon 15
al guide, follow:
werthrown by a coup. It
ior to 24 October but
id this date. We are to
is end utilizing every
be implemented clan-
hand be well hidden.
level of selectivity in
 contacts be made in the
 contacts such as reported

ned that a Viaux coup
at his disposal would
; handwritten insert
; handwritten insert
precipitate action. In
plans, and based on
that your plans for a
duce your capabilities
touch: The time will
something. You
deliver the message
as follows: (A) To
m acting alone; (B)
Encourage him to
act in concert either
S cannisters [sic] are
Washington 1100

s of Tirado, Canales,
une.
y guidance you may
ponent in Santiago,

6. Please review all your present and possibly new activities to include propaganda, black operations, surfacing of intelligence or disinformation, personal contacts, or anything else your imagination can conjure which will permit you to press forward our [deleted] objective in a secure manner.

Finally, it is essential to read the White House "memorandum of conversation," dated 15 October 1970, to which the above cable directly refers and of which it is a more honest summary. Present for the "high USG level" meeting were, as noted in the heading: "Dr Kissinger, Mr Karamessines, Gen. Haig." The first paragraph of their deliberations has been entirely blacked out, with not so much as a scribble in the margin from the redaction service. (Given what has since been admitted, this twenty-line deletion must be well worth reading.) Picking up at paragraph two, we find the following:

2. Then Mr Karamessines provided a run-down on Viaux, the Canales meeting with Tirado, the latter's new position [after Porta was relieved of command "for health reasons"] and, in some detail, the general situation in Chile from the coup possibility viewpoint.

3. A certain amount of information was available to us concerning Viaux's alleged support throughout the Chilean military. We had assessed Viaux's claims carefully, basing our analysis on good intelligence from a number of sources. Our conclusion was clear: Viaux did not have more than one chance in twenty – perhaps less – to launch a successful coup.

4. The unfortunate repercussions, in Chile and internationally, of an unsuccessful coup were discussed. Dr Kissinger ticked off his list of these negative possibilities. His items were remarkably similar to the ones Mr Karamessines had prepared.

62

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

6. After the decision to de-fuse the Viaux coup plot, *at least temporarily*, Dr Kissinger instructed Mr Karamessines to preserve Agency assets in Chile, working clandestinely and securely to maintain the capability for Agency operations against Allende in the future.

7. Dr Kissinger discussed his desire that the word of our encouragement to the Chilean military in recent weeks be kept as secret as possible. Mr Karamessines stated emphatically that we had been doing everything possible in this connection, including the use of false flag officers, car meetings and every conceivable precaution. But we and others had done a great deal of talking recently with a number of persons. For example, Ambassador Korry's wideranging discussions with numerous people urging a coup "cannot be put back into the bottle." [Three lines of deletion follow.] [Dr Kissinger requested that copy of the message be sent to him on 16 October.]

8. The meeting concluded on Dr Kissinger's note that the Agency should continue keeping the pressure on every Allende weak spot in sight: - now, after the 24th of October, after 5 November, and into the future until such time as new marching orders are given. Mr Karamessines stated that the Agency would comply.

So Track Two contained two tracks of its own. Track Two/One was the group of ultras led by General Roberto Viaux and his sidekick Captain Arturo Marshal. These men had tried to bring off a coup in 1969 against the Christian Democrats; they had been cashiered and were disliked even by conservatives in the officer corps. "Track Two/Two" was a more ostensi-
bly "respectable" faction headed by General Camilo Valenzuela, the chief of the garrison in the capital city, whose name occurs in the cables above and whose identity is concealed by some of the deletions. Several of the CIA operatives in Chile felt that Viaux was too much of a mad-dog to be trusted. And Ambassador Korry's repeated admonitions also had their effect. As shown in the 15 October memo cited above, Kissinger and Karamessines developed last-minute second thoughts about Viaux, who as late as 13 October had been given $20,000 in cash from the CIA station and promised a life insurance policy of $250,000. This offer was authorized direct from the White House. However, with only days to go before Allende

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 63

lot, at least temporarily, Dr Allende Agency assets in Chile, the capability for Agency

1 of our encouragement to us as secret as possible. Mr Allende was doing everything possible to get flag officers, car meetings for his people urging a coup d'état of deletion follow.] [Dr Allende to him on 16 October.] I note that the Agency should not weak spot in sight – now, into the future until such time as we can amassinesses stated that the

n. Track Two/One was the plan and his sidekick Captain Off a coup in 1969 against Chile and were disliked even in Washington. "Two" was a more ostentatious name for the agency, the chief of staff in the cables above and below. Several of the CIA officers also had their ears cut off above, Kissinger and other high-level officials about Viaux, who as a former CIA station and his offer was authorized 7 days to go before Allende

was inaugurated, and with Nixon repeating that "it was absolutely essential that the election of Mr Allende to the Presidency be thwarted," the pressure on the Valenzuela group became intense. As a direct consequence, especially after the warm words of encouragement he had been given, General Roberto Viaux felt himself under some obligation to deliver also, and to disprove those who had doubted him.

On the evening of 19 October 1970, the Valenzuela group, aided by some of Viaux's gang, and equipped with the tear gas grenades delivered by the CIA, attempted to grab General Schneider as he left an official dinner. The attempt failed because he left in a private car and not the expected official vehicle. The failure produced an extremely significant cable from CIA headquarters in Washington to the local station, asking for urgent action because "Headquarters must respond during morning 20 October to queries from high levels." Payments of $50,000 each to General Viaux and his chief associate were then authorized on condition that they made another attempt. On the evening of 20 October, they did. But again there was only failure to report. On 22 October, the "sterile" machine guns above-mentioned were handed to Valenzuela's group for another try. Later that same day, General Roberto Viaux's gang finally murdered General René Schneider.

According to the later verdict of the Chilean military courts, this atrocity partook of elements of both tracks of Track Two. In other words, Valenzuela was not himself on the scene but the assassination squad, led by Viaux, contained men who had participated in the preceding two attempts. Viaux was convicted on charges of kidnapping and of conspiring to cause a coup. Valenzuela was convicted of the charge of conspiracy to cause a coup. So any subsequent attempt to distinguish the two plots from each other, except in point of degree, is an attempt to confect a distinction without a difference.

It scarcely matters whether Schneider was slain because of a kidnapping scheme that went awry (he was said, but only by the assassins, to have had the temerity to resist) or whether his assassination was the objective in the first place. The Chilean military police report, as it happens, describes a

64

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

straightforward murder. Under the law of every law-bound country (including the United States), a crime committed in the pursuit of a kidnaping is thereby aggravated, not mitigated. You may not say, with a corpse at your feet, "I was only trying to kidnap him." At least, you may not say so if you hope to plead extenuating circumstances.

Yet a version of "extenuating circumstances" has become the paper-
thin cover story with which Kissinger has since protected himself from
the charge of being an accomplice, before and after the fact, in kidnap and
murder. And this sorry cover story has even found a refuge in the written
record. The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its investigation of the
matter, concluded that since the machine guns supplied to Valenzuela had
not actually been employed in the killing, and since General Viaux had
been officially discouraged by the CIA a few days before the murder, there
was therefore "no evidence of a plan to kill Schneider or that United States
officials specifically anticipated that Schneider would be shot during the
abduction."

Walter Isaacson, one of Kissinger's biographers, takes at face value a
memo from Kissinger to Nixon after his meeting on 15 October with
Karamessines, in which he reports to the President that he had "turned off"
the Viaux plot. He also takes at face value the claim that Viaux's successful
hit was essentially unauthorized.

These excuses and apologies are as logically feeble as they are morally
contemptible. Henry Kissinger bears direct responsibility for the Schneider
murder, as the following points demonstrate.

1. Brian MacMaster, one of the "false flag" agents mentioned in the cable traffic above, a career CIA man carrying a forged Colombian passport and claiming to represent American business interests in Chile, has told of his efforts to get "hush money" to jailed members of the Viaux group, after the assassination and before they could implicate the Agency.

2. Colonel Paul M. Wimert, a military attaché in Santiago and chief

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 65

very law-bound country
ed in the pursuit of a kid-
You may not say, with a
him." At least, you may not
ances.

" has become the paper-
e protected himself from
ter the fact, in kidnap and
and a refuge in the written
its investigation of the
supplied to Valenzuela had
since General Viaux had
before the murder, there
ider or that United States
vould be shot during the

ers, takes at face value a
ing on 15 October with
that he had "turned off"
m that Viaux's successful

eeble as they are morally
nsibility for the Schneider

gents mentioned in the
ing a forged Colombian
usiness interests in Chile,
jailed members of the
ore they could implicate

né in Santiago and chief

CIA liaison with the Valenzuela faction, has testified that after the Schneider killing he hastily retrieved the two payments of $50,000 that had been paid to Valenzuela and his partner, and also the three "sterile" machine guns. He then drove rapidly to the Chilean seaside town of Vina del Mar and hurled the guns into the ocean. His accomplice in this action, CIA station chief Henry Hecksher, had assured Washington only days before that either Viaux or Valenzuela would be able to eliminate Schneider and thereby trigger a coup.

3. Look again at the White House/Kissinger memo of 15 October, and at the doggedly literal way it is retransmitted to Chile. In no sense of the term does it "turn off" Viaux. If anything, it incites him – a well-known and boastful fanatic – to redouble his efforts. "Preserve your assets. We will stay in touch. The time will come when you together with all your other friends can do something. You will continue to have our support." This is not exactly the language of standing him down. The remainder of the memo speaks plainly of the intention to "discourage him from acting *alone*," to "continue to *encourage* him to amplify his planning" and to "*encourage* him to join forces with other coup planners so that they may act in concert either before or after 24 October" (italics added). The last three stipulations are an entirely accurate, not to say prescient, description of what Viaux actually did.

4. Consult again the cable received by Henry Hecksher on 20 October, referring to anxious queries "from high levels" about the first of the failed attacks on Schneider. Thomas Karamessines, when questioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee about this cable, testified of his certainty that the words "high levels" referred directly to Kissinger. In all previous communications from Washington, as a glance above will show, that had indeed been the case. This on its own is enough to demolish Kissinger's claim to have "turned off" Track Two (and its interior tracks) on 15 October.

5. Ambassador Korry later made the obvious point that Kissinger was attempting to build a paper alibi in the event of a failure by the Viaux

66 THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

group. "His interest was not in Chile but in who was going to be blamed for what. He wanted me to be the one who took the heat. Henry didn't want to be associated with a failure and he was setting up a record to blame the State Department. He brought me in to the President because he wanted me to say what I had to say about Viaux; he wanted me to be the soft man."

The concept of "deniability" was not as well understood in Washington in 1970 as it has since become. But it is clear that Henry Kissinger wanted two things simultaneously. He wanted the removal of General Schneider, by any means and employing any proxy. (No instruction from Washington to leave Schneider unharmed was ever given; deadly weapons were sent by diplomatic pouch, and men of violence were carefully selected to receive them.) And he wanted to be out of the picture in case such an attempt might fail, or be uncovered. These are the normal motives of anyone who solicits or suborns murder. However, Kissinger needed the crime very slightly more than he needed, or was able to design, the deniability. Without waiting for his many hidden papers to be released or subpoenaed, we can say with safety that he is prima facie guilty of direct collusion in the murder of a democratic officer in a democratic and peaceful country.

There is no particular need to rehearse the continuing role of the Nixon-Kissinger administration in the later economic and political subversion and destabilization of the Allende government, and in the creation of favorable conditions for the military coup that occurred on 11 September 1973. Kissinger himself was perhaps no more and no less involved in this effort than any other high official in Nixon's national-security orbit. On 9 November 1970 he authored the National Security Council's "Decision Memorandum 93," reviewing policy towards Chile in the immediate wake of Allende's confirmation as President. Various routine measures of economic harassment were proposed (recall Nixon's instruction to "make the economy scream") with cutoffs in aid and investment.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 67

who was going to be blamed
for took the heat. Henry didn't
was setting up a record to
get in to the President because
of Viaux; he wanted me to be

understood in Washington in
Henry Kissinger wanted two
of General Schneider, by any
cction from Washington to
early weapons were sent by
carefully selected to receive
were in case such an attempt
nal motives of anyone who
ger needed the crime very
gain, the deniability. Without
d or subpoenaed, we can say
the collusion in the murder of
full country.

the continuing role of the
economic and political sub-
 environment, and in the creation
up that occurred on 11
aps no more and no less
ficial in Nixon's national-
ored the National Security
ing policy towards Chile in
President. Various routine
ed (recall Nixon's instruc-
offs in aid and investment.

More significantly, Kissinger advocated that “close relations” be maintained with military leaders in neighboring countries, in order to facilitate both the coordination of pressure against Chile and the incubation of opposition within the country. In outline, this prefigures the disclosures that have since been made about Operation Condor, a secret collusion between military dictatorships across the hemisphere, operated with United States knowledge and indulgence.

The actual overthrow of the Allende government in a bloody coup d'état took place while Kissinger was going through his own Senate confirmation process as Secretary of State. He falsely assured the Foreign Relations Committee that the United States government had played no part in the coup. From a thesaurus of hard information to the contrary, one might select Situation Report #2, from the Navy Section of the United States Military Group in Chile, and written by the US Naval Attaché, Patrick Ryan. Ryan describes his close relationship with the officers engaged in overthrowing the government, hails 11 September 1973 as "our D-Day" and observes with satisfaction that "Chile's coup deetat [sic] was close to perfect." Or one may peruse the declassified files on Project FUBELT - the code name under which the CIA, in frequent contact with Kissinger and the Forty Committee, conducted covert operations against the legal and elected government of Chile.

What is striking, and what points to a much more direct complicity in individual crimes against humanity, is the microcosmic detail in which Kissinger kept himself informed of Pinochet's atrocities.

On 16 November, Assistant Secretary of State Jack B. Kubisch delivered a detailed report on the Chilean junta's execution policy which, as he notes to the new secretary of state, "you requested by cable from Tokyo." The memo goes on to enlighten Kissinger in various ways about the first nineteen days of Pinochet's rule. Summary executions during that period, we are told, total 320. (This contrasts with the publicly announced total of 100, and is based on "an internal, confidential report prepared for the junta" to which US officials are evidently privy.) Looking on the bright side, "On

68

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

November 14, we announced our second CCC credit to Chile – $24 million for feed corn. Our longstanding commitment to sell two surplus destroyers to the Chilean navy has met a reasonably sympathetic response in Senate consultations. The Chileans, meanwhile, have sent us several new requests for controversial military equipment." Kubisch then raises the awkward question of two US citizens murdered by the junta – Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman – details of whose precise fate are still, more than a quarter-century later, being sought by their families. The reason for the length of the search may be inferred from a later comment by Mr Kubisch, dated 11 February 1974, in which he reports on a meeting with the junta's foreign minister, and notes that he raises the matter of the missing Americans "in the context of the need to be careful to keep relatively small issues in our relationship from making our cooperation more difficult."

To return, via this detour, to Operation Condor. This was a machinery of cross-border assassination, abduction, torture and intimidation, coordinated between the secret police forces of Pinochet's Chile, Stroessner's Paraguay, Videla's Argentina and other regional caudillos. This internationalization of the death-squad principle is now known to have been responsible, to name only the most salient victims, for the murder of the dissident general Carlos Prats of Chile (and his wife) in Buenos Aires, the murder of the Bolivian general Juan Jose Torres, and the maiming of a Chilean Christian Democrat senator, Bernardo Leighton, in Italy. A Condor team also detonated a car bomb in downtown Washington, DC, in September 1976, killing the former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his aide Ronni Moffitt. United States government complicity has been uncovered at every level of this network. It has been established, for example, that the FBI aided Pinochet in capturing Jorge Isaac Fuentes de Alarcon, who was detained and tortured in Paraguay, then turned over to the Chilean secret police, and "disappeared." Astonishingly, the surveillance of Latin US dissident refugees in the United States was promised to Condor figures by US intelligence.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 69

to Chile – $24 million two surplus destroy- pathetic response in the sent us several new bisch then raises the by the junta – Frank rise fate are still, more families. The reason for later comment by Mr orts on a meeting with the matter of the miss- ful to keep relatively our cooperation more

This was a machinery of intimidation, coordi- nator's Chile, Stroessner's illos. This internation- known to have been for the murder of the ) in Buenos Aires, the and the maiming of a con, in Italy. A Condor Washington, DC, in ign minister Orlando government complicity has been established, for George Isaac Fuentes de when turned over to the gly, the surveillance of promised to Condor fig-

These and other facts have been established by the work of "truth and reconciliation" commissions set up by post-dictatorship forces in the coun- tries of the southern hemisphere. Stroessner has been overthrown, Videla is in prison, Pinochet and his henchmen are being or have been brought to account in Chile. The United States has not so far found it convenient to establish a truth and reconciliation commission of its own, which means that it is less ready at present to face its historical responsibility than are the countries once derided as "banana republics."

All of the above-cited crimes, and many more besides, were committed on Kissinger's "watch" as secretary of state. And all of them were and are punishable, under local or international law, or both. It can hardly be argued, by himself or by his defenders, that he was indifferent to, or unaware of, the true situation. In 1999 a secret memorandum was declas- sified, giving excruciating details of a private conversation between Kissinger and Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, on 8 June 1976. The meeting took place the day before Kissinger was due to address the Organization of American States. The subject was human rights. Kissinger was at some pains to explain to Pinochet that the few *pro forma* remarks he was to make on that topic were by no means to be taken seriously. My friend Peter Kornbluh has performed the service of comparing the "Memcon" (Memorandum of Conversation) with the account of the meeting given by Kissinger himself in his third volume of apologia, *Years of Renewal*:

*The Memoir:* "A considerable amount of time in my dialogue with Pinochet was devoted to human rights, which were, in fact, the principal obstacle to close United States relations with Chile. I outlined the main points in my speech to the OAS which I would deliver the next day. Pinochet made no comment."

*The Memcon:* "I will treat human rights in general terms, and human rights in a world context. I will refer in two paragraphs to the report on Chile of the OAS Human Rights Commission. I will say that the human rights issue has impaired relations between the US and Chile. This is partly the result of Congressional actions. I will add that I hope you will shortly remove these

70 THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

obstacles. . . . I can do no less, without producing a reaction in the US which would lead to legislative restrictions. The speech is not aimed at Chile. I wanted to tell you about this. My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going Communist."

*The Memoir:* "As Secretary of State, I felt I had the responsibility to encourage the Chilean government in the direction of greater democracy through a policy of understanding Pinochet's concerns. . . . Pinochet reminded me that 'Russia supports their people 100 percent. We are behind you. You are the leader. But you have a punitive system for your friends.' I returned to my underlying theme that any major help from us would realistically depend on progress on human rights."

*The Memcon:* "There is merit in what you say. It is a curious time in the US. . . . It is unfortunate. We have been through Vietnam and Watergate. We have to wait until the [1976] elections. We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position."

In an unpleasant way, Pinochet twice mentioned the name of Orlando Letelier, the exiled Chilean opposition leader, accusing him of misleading the United States Congress. Kissinger's response, as can be seen, was to apologize for the Congress and (in a minor replay of his 1968 Paris tactic over Vietnam) to suggest that the dictator should hope for better days after the upcoming elections. Three months later, a car bomb in Washington killed Letelier; today still it remains the only such outrage ever committed in the nation's capital by agents of a foreign regime. (This notable incident is completely absent from Kissinger's memoirs.) The man responsible for arranging the crime, the Chilean secret policeman General Manuel Contreras, has since testified at trial that he took no action without specific and personal orders from Pinochet. He remains in prison, doubtless wondering why he trusted his superiors.

"I want to see our relations and friendship improve," Kissinger told Pinochet (but not the readers of his memoirs). "We want to help, not undermine you." In advising a murderer and despot, whose rule he had

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 71

a reaction in the US which
is not aimed at Chile. I
what you are a victim of all
greatest sin was that you
nist."

the responsibility to encour-
ge greater democracy through
... Pinochet reminded me
we are behind you. You are
our friends.' I returned to my
uld realistically depend on

It is a curious time in the
Vietnam and Watergate. We
amed the overthrow of the
not out to weaken your

ined the name of Orlando
accusing him of misleading
ouse, as can be seen, was to
play of his 1968 Paris tactic
old hope for better days after
a car bomb in Washington
uch outrage ever committed
time. (This notable incident
.) The man responsible for
liceman General Manuel
no action without specific
s in prison, doubtless won-

p improve,” Kissinger told
rs). “We want to help, not
despot, whose rule he had

helped impose, to disregard his upcoming remarks as a sop to Congress,
Kissinger insulted democracy in both countries. He also gave the greenest
of green lights to further cross-border and internal terrorism, of neither of
which he could have been unaware. (In his memoirs, he does mention
what he calls Pinochet's "counterterrorist intelligence agency.") Further col-
luding with Pinochet against the United States Congress, which was
considering the Kennedy amendment cutting off arms sales to human
rights violators, Kissinger obsequiously remarked:

> I don't know if you listen in on my phone, but if you do, you have just heard
> me issue instructions to Washington to [defeat the Kennedy amendment]. If
> we defeat it, we will deliver the F-5Es as we agreed to do.

The above passage is worth bearing in mind. It is a good key for decoding
the usual relationship between fact and falsehood in Kissinger's ill-crafted
memoir. (And it is a huge reproach to his editors at Simon and Schuster,
and Weidenfeld and Nicolson.) It should also act as an urgent prompting
to members of Congress, and to human rights organizations, to reopen the
incomplete inquiries and thwarted investigations into the multifarious
crimes of this period. Finally, and read in the light of the return to democ-
racy in Chile, and the decision of the Chilean courts to pursue truth and
justice, it repudiates Kissinger's patronizing insult concerning the "irre-
sponsibility" of a dignified and humane people, who have suffered very
much more than verbal insult at his hands.

6

AN AFTERWORD ON CHILE

A RULE OF thumb in Washington holds that any late disclosure by offi-
cialdom will contain material that is worse than even the cynics suspected.
One need not try and turn this maxim into an iron law. However, in
September 2000 the CIA disgorged the results of an internal inquiry on
Chile, which had been required of it by the Hinchey amendment to the
Intelligence Authorization Act for that fiscal year. And the most hardened
critics and investigators were reduced to amazement. (The document was
handed to me after I had completed the chapter above, and I let it stand so
as to preserve the actual order of disclosure.) I reproduce the chief headings
below, so as to preserve, also, the Agency's own prose:

*Support for Coup in 1970.* Under "Track II" of the strategy, CIA sought to instigate a coup to prevent Allende from taking office after he won a plurality in the 4 September election and before, as Constitutionally required because he did not win an absolute majority, the Chilean Congress reafirmed his victory. CIA was working with three different groups of plotters. All three groups made it clear that any coup would require the kidnapping of Army Commander René Schneider, who felt deeply that the Constitution required that the Army allow Allende to assume power. CIA agreed with that assessment. Although CIA provided weapons to one of the groups, we have found no information that the plotters' or CIA's intention was for the general

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 73

to be killed. Contact with one group of plotters was dropped early on
because of its extremist tendencies. CIA provided tear gas, submachine guns
and ammunition to the second group, mortally wounding him in the attack.
CIA had previously encouraged this group to launch a coup but withdrew
support four days before the attack because, in CIA's assessment, the group
could not carry it out successfully.

This repeats the old canard supposedly distinguishing a kidnap or abduc-
tion from a murder, and once again it raises the intriguing question: what
was the CIA going to do with the general once it had kidnapped him?
(Note, also, the studied passivity whereby the report "found no information
that the plotters' or CIA's intention was for the general to be killed." What
would satisfy this bizarre criterion?) But then we learn, of the supposedly
unruly gang that actually took its instructions seriously:

In November 1970 a member of the Viaux group who avoided capture recontacted the Agency and requested financial assistance on behalf of the group. Although the Agency had no obligation to the group because it acted on its own, in an effort to keep the prior contact secret, maintain the good will of the group, and for humanitarian reasons, $35,000 was passed.

"Humanitarian reasons." One has to admire the sheer inventiveness of this
explanation. At 1970 prices, the sum of $35,000 in Chile was a considerable
sum to pay. Not the sort of sum that a local station chief could have dis-
bursed on his own. One wants to know how the Forty Committee and its
vigilant chairman, Henry Kissinger, decided that the best way to dissociate
from a supposedly loose-cannon gang was to pay it a small fortune in cash
after it had committed a cold-blooded murder.

The same question arises in an even more acute form with another dis-
closure made by the Agency in the course of the same report. This is headed
"Relationship With Contreras." Manuel Contreras was the head of
Pinochet's secret military police, and in that capacity organized the death,
torture, and disappearance of innumerable Chileans as well as the use of
bombing and assassination techniques as far afield as Washington, DC.

HILE

ny late disclosure by offi-
even the cynics suspected.
an iron law. However, in
of an internal inquiry on
anchey amendment to the
ar. And the most hardened
ment. (The document was
above, and I let it stand so
produce the chief headings
rose:

e strategy, CIA sought to
price after he won a plural-
Constitutionally required
Chilean Congress reaf-
ferent groups of plotters.
require the kidnapping of
ply that the Constitution
ower. CIA agreed with that
one of the groups, we have
tention was for the general

74

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

The CIA admits early on in the document that it "had liaison relationships in Chile with the primary purpose of securing assistance in gathering intelligence on external targets. The CIA offered these service assistance in internal organization and training to combat subversion and terrorism abroad, not in combating internal opponents of the government."

Such flat prose, based on a distinction between the "external threat" and the more messy business of internal dictatorial discipline, invites the question – what external threat? Chile had no foreign enemy except Argentina, which disputed some sea lane rights in the Beagle Channel. (In consequence, Chile helped Mrs Thatcher in the Falklands war of 1982.) And in Argentina, as we know, the CIA was likewise engaged in helping the military regime to survive. No: while Chile had no external enemies to speak of, the Pinochet dictatorship had many, many external foes. They were the numerous Chileans forced to abandon their country. One of the jobs of Manuel Contreras was to hunt them down. As the report puts it:

> During a period between 1974 and 1977, CIA maintained contact with Manuel Contreras, who later became notorious for his human rights abuses. The US Government policy community approved CIA's contact with Contreras, given his position as chief of the primary intelligence organization in Chile, as necessary to accomplish the CIA's mission, in spite of concerns that this relationship might lay the CIA open to charges of aiding internal political repression.

After a few bits of back-and-forth about the distinction without a difference (between external and "internal" police tactics) the CIA report states candidly:

> By April 1975, intelligence reporting showed that Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta, but an interagency committee directed the CIA to continue its relationship with Contreras. The US Ambassador to Chile urged Deputy Director of Central Intelligence [General Vernon] Walters to receive Contreras in Washington in the interests of maintaining good relations with Pinochet. In August 1975, with interagency approval, this meeting took place.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 75

liaison relationships
in gathering intel-
ligence for the service assistance in
intervention and terrorism
government.”

The “external threat” and
online, invites the ques-
tion except Argentina,
Uruguay. (In conse-
-channel. In conse-
war of 1982.) And in
and in helping the mili-
taral enemies to speak of,
the foes. They were the
ary. One of the jobs of
report puts it:

contained contact with
human rights abuses.
CIA's contact with
intelligence organiza-
mission, in spite of
a to charges of aiding

action without a differ-
ent the CIA report states

ntreras was the princi-
ship in the Junta, but an
its relationship with
y Director of Central
eras in Washington in
Pinochet. In August 1975,

In May and June 1975, elements within the CIA recommended estab-
lishing a paid relationship with Contreras to obtain intelligence based on his
unique position and access to Pinochet. This proposal was overruled, citing
the US Government policy on clandestine relations with the head of an
intelligence service notorious for human rights abuses. However, given mis-
communications in the timing of this exchange, a one-time payment was
given to Contreras.

This does not require too much parsing. Some time after it had been con-
cluded, and by the CIA at that, that Manuel Contreras was the "principal
obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy," he is given American taxpay-
ers' money and received at a high level in Washington. The CIA's
memorandum is careful to state that, where doubts exist, they are stilled by
"the US Government policy community" and by "an interagency commit-
tee." It also tries to suggest, with unconscious humor, that the head of a
murderous foreign secret service was given a large bribe by mistake. One
wonders who was reprimanded for this blunder, and how it got past the
scrutiny of the Forty Committee.

The report also contradicts itself, stating at one point that Contreras's
activities overseas were opaque, and at another that:

Within a year after the coup, the CIA and other US Government agencies
were aware of bilateral cooperation among regional intelligence services to
track the activities of and, in at least a few cases, kill political opponents. This
was the precursor to Operation Condor, an intelligence-sharing arrange-
ment among Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay established in
1975.

So now we know: the internationalization of the death squad principle was
understood and approved by US intelligence and its political masters across
two administrations. The senior person concerned in both administra-
tions was Henry Kissinger. Whichever "interagency committee" is meant,
and whether it is the Forty Committee or the Interagency Committee on
Chile, the traces lead back to the same source.

76

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

On leaving the State Department, Kissinger made an extraordinary bar-gain whereby (having first hastily trucked them for safekeeping on the Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills, New York) he gifted his papers to the Library of Congress, on the sole condition that they remained under seal until after his demise. However, Kissinger's friend Manuel Contreras made a mistake when he killed a United States citizen, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, in the Washington car bomb which also murdered Orlando Letelier in 1976. By late 2000, the FBI had finally sought and received subpoena power to review the Library of Congress papers, a subpoena with which Kissinger dealt only through his attorneys. It was a start, but it was pathetic when compared to the efforts of truth and justice commissions in "Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay," the nations named above, which have now emerged from years of Kissinger-befriended dictatorship and sought a full accounting. We await the moment when the United States Congress will inaugurate a comparable process, and finally subpoena all the hidden documents that obscure the view of unpunished crimes committed in our names.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 31

On 22 January 1968, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had told the Senate that "no regular North Vietnamese units" were deployed in the Mekong Delta, and no military intelligence documents have surfaced to undermine his claim, so that the cleansing of the area cannot be understood as part of the general argument about resisting Hanoi's unsleeping will to conquest. The announced purpose of the Ninth Division's sweep, indeed, was to redeem many thousands of villagers from political control by the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC). As Buckley found, and as his magazine *Newsweek* partially disclosed at the rather late date of 19 June 1972:

> All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians – perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official – were killed by US firepower to "pacify" Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison....

"Death is our business and business is good," was the slogan painted on one helicopter unit's quarters during the operation. And so it was. Cumulative statistics for "Speedy Express" show that 10,899 "enemy" were killed. In the month of March alone, "over 3,000 enemy troops were killed... which is the largest monthly total for any American division in the Vietnam War," said the division's official magazine. When asked to account for the enormous body counts, a division senior officer explained that helicopter gun crews often caught unarmed "enemy" in open fields....

There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cong were well armed. Simple civilians were, of course, not armed. And the enormous discrepancy between the body count (11,000) and the number of captured weapons (748) is hard to explain – except by the conclusion that many victims were unarmed innocent civilians....

32

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

Other notes by Buckley and his friend and collaborator Alex Shimkin (a worker for International Voluntary Services who was later killed in the war) discovered the same telltale evidence in hospital statistics. In March 1969, the hospital at Ben Tre reported 343 patients injured by "friendly fire" and 25 by "the enemy," an astonishing statistic for a government facility to record in a guerrilla war where suspected membership of the Viet Cong could mean death. And Buckley's own citation for his magazine - of "perhaps as many as 5,000 deaths" among civilians in this one sweep - is an almost deliberate understatement of what he was told by a United States official, who actually said that "at least 5,000" of the dead "were what we refer to as noncombatants": a not-too-exacting distinction, as we have already seen, and as was by then well understood (italics mine).

Well understood, that is to say, not just by those who opposed the war but by those who were conducting it. As one United States official put it to Buckley:

> The actions of the Ninth Division in inflicting civilian casualties were worse [than My Lai]. The sum total of what the Ninth did was overwhelming. In sum, the horror was worse than My Lai. But with the Ninth, the civilian

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 33

casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command's insistence on high body-counts. ... The result was an inevitable outcome of the unit's command policy.

The earlier sweep which had mopped up My Lai – during Operation Wheeler Wallawa – had also at the time counted all corpses as those of enemy soldiers, including the civilian population of the village, who were casually included in the mind-bending overall total of 10,000.

Confronted with this evidence, Buckley and Shimkin abandoned a lazy and customary usage and replaced it, in a cable to *Newsweek* headquarters in New York, with a more telling and scrupulous one. The problem was not "indiscriminate use of firepower," but "charges of quite discriminating use – as a matter of policy in populated areas." Even the former is a gross violation of the Geneva Convention; the second charge leads straight to the dock in Nuremberg or The Hague.

Since General Creighton Abrams publicly praised the Ninth Division for its work, and drew attention wherever and whenever he could to the tremendous success of Operation Speedy Express, we can be sure that the political leadership in Washington was not unaware. Indeed, the degree of micro-management revealed in Kissinger's memoirs forbids the idea that anything of importance took place without his knowledge or permission.

Of nothing is this more true than his own individual involvement in the bombing and invasion of neutral Cambodia and Laos. Obsessed with the idea that Vietnamese intransigence could be traced to allies or resources external to Vietnam itself, or could be overcome by tactics of mass destruction, Kissinger at one point contemplated using thermonuclear weapons to obliterate the pass through which ran the railway link from North Vietnam to China, and at another stage considered bombing the dikes that prevented North Vietnam's irrigation system from flooding the country. Neither of these measures (reported respectively in Tad Szulc's history of Nixon-era diplomacy and by Kissinger's former aide Roger Morris) was

34 THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

taken, which removes some potential war crimes from our bill of indictment but which also gives an indication of the regnant mentality. There remained Cambodia and Laos, which supposedly concealed or protected North Vietnamese supply lines.

As in the cases postulated by General Telford Taylor, there is the crime of aggressive war and then there is the question of war crimes. (The Koki Hirota case cited above is of importance here.) In the period after the Second World War, or the period governed by the UN Charter and its related and incorporated Conventions, the United States under Democratic and Republican administrations had denied even its closest allies the right to invade countries that allegedly gave shelter to their antagonists. Most famously, President Eisenhower exerted economic and diplomatic pressure at a high level to bring an end to the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel in October 1956. (The British thought Nasser should not control "their" Suez Canal; the French believed Nasser to be the inspiration and source of their troubles in Algeria; and the Israelis claimed that he played the same role in fomenting their difficulties with the Palestinians. The United States maintained that even if these propaganda fantasies were true, they would not retrospectively legalize an invasion of Egypt.) During the Algerian war of independence, also, the United States had repudiated France's claimed right to attack a town in neighboring Tunisia that succoured Algerian guerrillas, and in 1964 Ambassador Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations had condemned the United Kingdom for attacking a town in Yemen that allegedly provided a rear guard for rebels operating in its then colony of Aden.

All this law and precedent was to be thrown to the winds when Nixon and Kissinger decided to aggrandize the notion of "hot pursuit" across the borders of Laos and Cambodia. Even before the actual territorial invasion of Cambodia, for example, and very soon after the accession of Nixon and Kissinger to power, a program of heavy bombardment of the country was prepared and executed in secret. One might with some revulsion call it a "menu" of bombardment, since the code names for the raids were

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 35

"Breakfast," Lunch," "Snack," "Dinner," and "Dessert." The raids were flown by B-52 bombers which, it is important to note at the outset, fly at an altitude too high to be observed from the ground and carry immense tonnages of high explosive: they give no warning of approach and are incapable of accuracy or discrimination because of both their altitude and the mass of their shells. Between 18 March 1969 and May 1970, 3,630 such raids were flown across the Cambodian frontier. The bombing campaign began as it was to go on – with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with flagrant deceit by Mr Kissinger in this precise respect.

For example, a memorandum prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and sent to the Defense Department and the White House said plainly that "some Cambodian casualties would be sustained in the operation" and "the surprise effect of attack could tend to increase casualties." The target district for Breakfast (Base Area 35) was inhabited, said the memo, by about 1,640 Cambodian civilians. Lunch (Base Area 609) was inhabited by 198 of them, Snack (Base Area 351) by 383, Dinner (Base Area 352) by 770, and Dessert (Base Area 350) by about 120 Cambodian peasants. These oddly exact figures are enough in themselves to demonstrate that Kissinger was lying when he later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that areas of Cambodia selected for bombing were "unpopulated."

As a result of the expanded and intensified bombing campaigns, it has been estimated that as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos, and 600,000 in Cambodia, lost their lives. (These are not the highest estimates.) Figures for refugees are several multiples of that. In addition, the widespread use of toxic chemical defoliants created a massive health crisis which naturally fell most heavily on children, nursing mothers, the aged and the already infirm, and which persists to this day.

Though this appalling war, and its appalling consequences, can and should be taken as a moral and political crisis for American institutions, for at least five United States presidents, and for American society, there is little difficulty in identifying individual responsibility during this, its most atrocious and indiscriminate stage. Richard Nixon as Commander in Chief

36

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

bears ultimate responsibility, and only narrowly escaped a congressional
move to include his crimes and deceptions in Indochina in the articles
of impeachment, the promulgation of which eventually compelled his
resignation. But his deputy and closest advisor, Henry Kissinger, was some-
times forced, and sometimes forced himself, into a position of virtual
co-presidency where Indochina was concerned.

For example, in the preparations for the invasion of Cambodia in 1970,
Kissinger was caught between the views of his staff – several of whom resigned
in protest when the invasion began – and his need to please his President. His
President listened more to his two criminal associates – John Mitchell and
Bebe Rebozo – than he did to his Secretaries of State and Defense, William
Rogers and Melvin Laird, both of whom were highly skeptical about widen-
ing the war. On one especially charming occasion, a drunken Nixon
telephoned Kissinger to discuss the invasion plans. He then put Bebe Rebozo
on the line. "The President wants you to know if this doesn't work, Henry, it's
your ass." "Ain't that right, Bebe?" slurred the Commander in Chief. (The
conversation was monitored and transcribed by one of Kissinger's soon-to-
resign staffers, William Watts.*) It could be said that in this instance the
National Security Advisor was under pressure; nevertheless he took the side of
the pro-invasion faction and, according to the memoirs of General William
Westmoreland, actually lobbied for that invasion to go ahead.

A somewhat harder picture is presented by former Chief of Staff H.R.
Haldeman in his *Diaries*. On 22 December 1970, he records:

> Henry came up with the need to meet with the P[resident] today with Al
> Haig and then tomorrow with Laird and Moorer because he has to use the
> P[resident] to force Laird and the military to go ahead with the P[resident]'s
> plans, which they won't carry out without direct orders. The plans in ques-
> tion, involved . . . attacking enemy forces in Laos.

* According to Woodward and Bernstein, Watts then had a word with General Alexander Haig, who told him: "You've just had an order from your Commander in Chief. You can't resign." "Fuck you, Al," said Watts. "I just did."

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 37

In his own memoirs, *White House Years*, Kissinger claims that he usurped the customary chain of command whereby commanders in the field receive, or believe that they receive, their orders from the President and then the Secretary of Defense. He boasts that he, together with Haldeman, Alexander Haig and Colonel Ray Sitton, evolved “both a military and a diplomatic schedule” for the secret bombing of Cambodia. On board Air Force One, which was on the tarmac at Brussels airport on 24 February 1969, he writes, “we worked out the guidelines for the bombing of the enemy’s sanctuaries.” Air Force Colonel Sitton, the reigning expert on B-52 tactics at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that the President was not at the meeting but had said that he would be discussing the subject with Kissinger. A few weeks later, Haldeman’s *Diaries* for 17 March record:

> Historic day. K[issinger]'s "Operation Breakfast" finally came off at 2.00 PM our time. K[issinger] really excited, as was P[resident].

The next day's entry reads:

> K[issinger]'s "Operation Breakfast" a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.

It only got better. On 22 April 1970, Haldeman reports that Nixon, following Kissinger into a National Security Council meeting on Cambodia, "turned back to me with a big smile and said 'K[issinger]'s really having fun today, he's playing Bismarck.'"

The above is an insult to the Iron Chancellor. When Kissinger was finally exposed in Congress and the press for conducting unauthorized bombings, he weakly pleaded that the raids were not all that secret, really, because Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia had known of them. He had to be reminded that a foreign princeling cannot give permission to an American bureaucrat to violate the United States Constitution. Nor, for the matter of that, can he give permission to an American bureaucrat to slaughter large numbers of his "own" civilians. It's difficult to imagine Bismarck cowering behind such a contemptible excuse. (Prince Sihanouk,

38 THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

Colonel Sitton began to notice that by late 1969 his own office was
being regularly overruled in the matter of selecting targets. "Not only was
Henry carefully screening the raids," said Sitton, "he was reading the raw
intelligence" and fiddling with the mission patterns and bombing runs. In
other departments of Washington insiderdom, it was also noticed that
Kissinger was becoming a Stakhanovite committeeman. Aside from the
crucial Forty Committee, which planned and oversaw all foreign covert
actions, he chaired the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), the
Verification Panel, which was concerned with arms control, the Vietnam
Special Studies Group, which oversaw the day-to-day conduct of the war,
and the Defense Program Review Committee, which supervised the budget
of the Defense Department.

It is therefore impossible for him to claim that he was unaware of the
consequences of the bombings of Cambodia and Laos; he knew more
about them, and in more intimate detail, than any other individual. Nor
was he imprisoned in a culture of obedience that gave him no alternative,
or no rival arguments. Several senior members of his own staff, most
notably Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, resigned over the invasion of
Cambodia, and more than two hundred State Department employees
signed a protest addressed to Secretary of State William Rogers. Indeed, as
has been noted, both Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird were
opposed to the B-52 bombing policy, as Kissinger himself records with
some disgust in his own memoirs. Congress was also opposed to an exten-
sion of the bombing (once it had agreed to become informed of it) but,
even after the Nixon-Kissinger administration had undertaken on Capitol
Hill not to intensify the raids, there was a 21 percent increase of the bomb-
ing of Cambodia in the months July-August 1973. The Air Force maps of
the targeted areas show them to be, or to have been, densely populated.

Colonel Sitton does recall, it must be admitted, that Kissinger requested
that bombing avoid civilian casualties. His explicit motive in making this

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 39

As early as the fall of 1970, an independent investigator named Fred Branfman, who spoke Lao and knew the country as a civilian volunteer, had gone to Bangkok and interviewed Jerome Brown, a former targeting officer for the United States embassy in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. The man had retired from the Air Force because of his disillusionment at the futility of the bombing and his consternation at the damage done to civilians and society. The speed and height of the planes, he said, meant that targets were virtually indistinguishable from the air. Pilots would often decide to drop bombs where craters already existed, and chose villages as targets because they could be more readily identified than alleged Pathet Lao guerrillas hiding in the jungle. Branfman, whom I interviewed in San Francisco in the summer of 2000, went on to provide this and other information to Henry Kamm and Sydney Schanberg of the *New York Times*, to Ted Koppel of ABC, and to many others. He also wrote up and published his findings in *Harper's* magazine, where they were not controverted by any authority. Under pressure from the US embassy, the Laotian authorities had Branfman deported back to the United States, which was probably, from their point of view, a mistake. He was able to make a dramatic appearance on Capitol Hill on 22 April 1971, at a hearing held by Senator Edward Kennedy's Senate Subcommittee on Refugees. His antagonist was the State Department's envoy William Sullivan, a former ambassador to Laos. Branfman accused him in front of the cameras of helping to conceal evidence that Laotian society was being mutilated by ferocious aerial bombardment.

Partly as a consequence, Congressman Pete McCloskey of California (a much-decorated veteran of the war in Korea) paid a visit to Laos and

40 THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

acquired a copy of an internal US embassy study of the bombing. He also prevailed on the US Air Force to furnish him with aerial photographs of the dramatic damage. Ambassador Sullivan was so disturbed by these pictures, some of them taken in areas known to him, that his first reaction was to establish to his own satisfaction that the raids had occurred after he left his post in Vientiane. (He was later to learn that, for his pains, his own telephone was being tapped at Henry Kissinger's instigation, one of the many such violations of American law that were to eventuate in the Watergate tapping-and-burglary scandal: a scandal that Kissinger was furthermore to plead - in an astounding outburst of vanity, deceit and self-deceit - as his own alibi for inattention in the Cyprus crisis.)

Having done what he could to bring the Laotian nightmare to the attention of those whose constitutional job it was to supervise such questions, Branfman went back to Thailand and from there to Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia. Having gained access to a pilot's radio, he tape-recorded the conversations between pilots on bombing missions over the Cambodian interior. On no occasion did they run any checks designed to reassure themselves and others that they were not bombing civilian targets. It had been definitely asserted, by named US government spokesmen, that such checks were run. Branfman handed the tapes to Sydney Schanberg, whose *New York Times* report on them was printed just before the Senate met to prohibit further blitzing of Cambodia (the very resolution that was flouted by Kissinger the following month).

From there Branfman went back to Thailand and travelled north to Nakhorn Phanom, the new headquarters of the US Seventh Air Force. Here, a war room code-named "Blue Chip" served as the command and control center of the bombing campaign. Branfman, who is tall and well-built, was able to pose as a new recruit just up from Saigon, and ultimately to gain access to the war room itself. Here, consoles and maps and screens plotted the progress of the bombardment. In conversation with the "bombing officer" on duty, he asked if pilots ever made contact before dropping their enormous loads of ordnance. Oh, yes, he was assured, they did. Worried

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 41

about hitting the innocent? Oh, no — merely concerned about the whereabouts of CIA “ground teams” infiltrated into the area. Branfman’s report on this, which was carried by Jack Anderson’s syndicated column and also in the *Washington Monthly*, was likewise uncontroverted by any official denial.

One reason that the United States command in Southeast Asia finally ceased employing the crude and horrific tally of “body count” was that, as in the relatively small but but specific case of Speedy Express cited above, the figures began to look ominous when they were counted up. Sometimes, totals of “enemy” dead would turn out, when computed, to be suspiciously larger than the number of claimed “enemy” in the field. Yet the war would somehow drag on, with new quantitative goals being set and enforced. Thus, according to the Pentagon, the following are the casualty figures between the first Lyndon Johnson bombing halt in March 1968 and the same date in 1972:

<table><tr><td>Americans</td><td>31,205</td></tr><tr><td>South Vietnamese regulars</td><td>86,101</td></tr><tr><td>“Enemy”</td><td>475,609</td></tr></table>

The US Senate Subcommittee on Refugees estimated that in the same four-year period rather more than three million civilians were killed, injured or rendered homeless. In the same four-year period, the United States dropped almost 4,500,000 tons of high explosive on Indochina. (The Pentagon's estimated total for the tonnage dropped in the entire Second World War is 2,044,000.) This total does not include massive sprayings of chemical defoliants and pesticides, the effects of which are still being registered by the region's ecology. Nor does it include the land-mines which detonate to this day.

It is unclear how we count the murder or abduction of 35,708 Vietnamese civilians by the CIA's counter-guerrilla “Phoenix program” during the first two and a half years of the Nixon-Kissinger administration. There may be some “overlap.” There is also some overlap with the actions

42 THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

of previous administrations in all cases. But the truly exorbitant death tolls all occurred on Henry Kissinger's watch, were known and understood by him, were concealed from Congress, the press and the public by him – at any rate to the best of his ability – and were, when questioned, the subject of political and bureaucratic vendettas ordered by him. They were also partly the outcome of a secretive and illegal process in Washington, unknown even to most cabinet members, of which Henry Kissinger stood to be, and became, a prime beneficiary.

On that closing point one may once again cite H.R. Haldeman, who had no further reason to lie and who had, by the time of his writing, paid for his crimes by serving a sentence in prison. Haldeman describes the moment in Florida when Kissinger was enraged by a *New York Times* story telling some part of the truth about Indochina:

> According to Hoover's memo of the call, Henry said the story used "secret information which was extraordinarily damaging." Henry went on to tell Hoover that he "wondered whether I could make a major effort to find out where that came from ... and to put whatever resources I need to find out who did this. I told him I would take care of this right away."

> Henry was no fool, of course. He telephoned Hoover a few hours later to remind him that the investigation be handled discreetly "so no stories will get out." Hoover must have smiled, but said all right. And by five o'clock he was back on the telephone to Henry with the report that the *Times* reporter "may have gotten some of his information from the Southeast Asian desk of the Department of Defense's Public Affairs Office." More specifically, Hoover suggested the source could be a man named Mort Halperin (a Kissinger staffer) and another man who worked in the Systems Analysis Agency. ... According to Hoover's memo, Kissinger hoped "I would follow it up as far as we can take it and they will destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no matter where he is."

> The last line of that memo gives an accurate reflection of Henry's rage, as I remember it.

> Nevertheless, Nixon was one hundred percent behind the wiretaps. And

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 43

And thus occurred the birth of the “plumbers” and of the assault on American law and democracy that they inaugurated. Commenting on the lamentable end of this process, Haldeman wrote that he still believed that ex-President Nixon (who was then still alive) should agree to the release of the remaining tapes. But:

> This time my view is apparently not shared by the man who was one reason for the original decision to start the taping process. Henry Kissinger is determined to stop the tapes from reaching the public....

> Nixon made the point that Kissinger was really the one who had the most to lose from the tapes becoming public. Henry apparently felt that the tapes would expose a lot of things he had said that would be very disadvantageous to him publicly.

> Nixon said that in making the deal for custody of his Presidential papers, which was originally announced after his pardon but then was shot down by Congress, it was Henry who called him and insisted on Nixon's right to destroy the tapes. That was, of course, the thing that destroyed the deal.

A society that has been “plumbed” has the right to demand that its plumbers be compelled to make some restitution by way of full disclosure. The litigation to put the Nixon tapes in the public trust is only partially complete; no truthful account of the Vietnam years will be complete until Kissinger's part in what we already know has been made fully transparent.

Until that time, Kissinger's role in the violation of American law at the close of the Vietnam war makes the perfect counterpart to the 1968 covert action that helped him to power in the first place. The two parentheses enclose a series of premeditated war crimes which still have power to stun the imagination.

44

4

BANGLADESH: ONE GENOCIDE, ONE COUP AND ONE ASSASSINATION

THE ANNALS OF American diplomacy contain many imperishable pages of humanism, which may, and should, be set against some of the squalid and dispiriting traffic recorded in these pages. One might cite the extraordinary 1915 despatches of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau from his post in Ottoman Turkey, in which he employed consular and intelligence reports to give a picture of the deliberate state massacre of the Armenian minority, the first genocide of the twentieth century. (The word "genocide" having not then been coined, Ambassador Morgenthau had recourse to the — in some ways more expressive — term "race murder.")

By 1971, the word "genocide" was all too easily understood. It surfaced in a cable of protest from the United States consulate in what was then East Pakistan — the Bengali "wing" of the Muslim state of Pakistan, known to its restive nationalist inhabitants by the name Bangladesh. The cable was written on 6 April 1971 and its senior signatory, the Consul General in Dacca, was named Archer Blood. But it might have become known as the Blood Telegram in any case. Also sent directly to Washington, it differed from Morgenthau's document in one respect. It was not so much reporting on genocide as denouncing the complicity of the United States government in genocide. Its main section read thus:

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 45

Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. 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[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya Khan a message defending democracy, condemning the arrest of a leader of a democratically-elected majority party, incidentally pro-West, and calling for an end to repressive measures and bloodshed. ... 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 civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

This was signed by twenty members of the United States diplomatic team in Bangladesh and, on its arrival at the State Department, by a further nine senior officers in the South Asia division. It was the most public and the most strongly worded démarche from State Department servants to the State Department that has ever been recorded.

The circumstances fully warranted the protest. In December 1970, the Pakistani military elite had permitted the first open elections for a decade. The vote was easily won by Sheik Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Bengali-based Awami League, who gained a large overall majority in the proposed National Assembly. (In the East alone, it won 167 out of 169 seats.) This, among other things, meant a challenge to the political and military and economic hegemony of the Western "wing." The National Assembly had been scheduled to meet on 3 March 1971. On 1 March, General Yahya Khan, head of the supposedly outgoing military regime, postponed its convening. This resulted in mass protests and nonviolent civil disobedience in the East.

On 25 March, the Pakistani army struck at the Bengali capital of Dacca. Having arrested and kidnapped Rahman, and taken him to West Pakistan,

46

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

it set about massacring his supporters. The foreign press had been pre-
emptively expelled from the city, but much of the direct evidence of what
then happened was provided via a radio transmitter operated by the United
States consulate. Archer Blood himself supplied an account of one episode
directly to the State Department and to Henry Kissinger's National Security
Council. Having readied the ambush, Pakistani regular soldiers set fire to
the women's dormitory at the university, and then mowed the occupants
down with machine guns as they sought to escape. (The guns, along with
all the other weaponry, had been furnished under United States military
assistance programs.)

Other reports, since amply vindicated, were supplied to the London *Times* and *Sunday Times* by the courageous reporter Anthony Mascarhenas, and flashed around a horrified world. Rape, murder, dismemberment and the state murder of children were employed as deliberate methods of repression and intimidation. At least ten thousand civilians were butchered in the first three days. The eventual civilian death toll has never been placed at less than half a million and has been put as high as three million. Since almost all Hindu citizens were at risk by definition from Pakistani military chauvinism (not that Pakistan's Muslim religionists were spared), a vast movement of millions of refugees – perhaps as many as ten million – began to cross the Indian frontier. To summarize, then: first, the direct negation of a democratic election; second, the unleashing of a genocidal policy; third, the creation of a very dangerous international crisis. Within a short time, Ambassador Kenneth Keating, the ranking United States diplomat in New Delhi, had added his voice to those of the dissenters. It was a time, he told Washington, when a principled stand against the authors of this aggression and atrocity would also make the best pragmatic sense. Keating, a former senator from New York, used a very suggestive phrase in his cable of 29 March 1971, calling on the administration to "promptly, publicly, and prominently deplore this brutality." It was "most important these actions be taken now," he warned, "prior to inevitable and imminent emergence of horrible truths."

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 47

Nixon and Kissinger acted quickly. That is to say, Archer Blood was immediately recalled from his post, and Ambassador Keating was described by the President to Kissinger, with some contempt, as having been "taken over by the Indians." In late April 1971, at the very height of the mass murder, Kissinger sent a message to General Yahya Khan, thanking him for his "delicacy and tact."

We now know of one reason why the general was so favored, at a time when he had made himself – and his patrons – responsible for the grossest war crimes and crimes against humanity. In April 1971, a United States ping-pong team had accepted a surprise invitation to compete in Beijing and by the end of that month, using the Pakistani ambassador as an intermediary, the Chinese authorities had forwarded a letter inviting Nixon to send an envoy. Thus there was one motive of realpolitik for the shame that Nixon and Kissinger were to visit on their own country for its complicity in the extermination of the Bengalis.

Those who like to plead realpolitik, however, might wish to consider some further circumstances. There already was, and had been for some time, a back channel between Washington and Beijing. It ran through Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania – not a much more decorative choice but not, at that stage, a positively criminal one. There was no reason to confine approaches, to a serious person like Chou En Lai, to the narrow channel afforded by a blood-soaked (and short-lived, as it turned out) despot like the "delicate and tactful" Yahya Khan. Either Chou En Lai wanted contact, in other words, or he did not. As Lawrence Lifschultz, the primary historian of this period, has put it:

> Winston Lord, Kissinger's deputy at the National Security Council, stressed to investigators the internal rationalisation developed within the upper echelons of the Administration. Lord told [the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] "We had to demonstrate to China we were a reliable government to deal with. We had to show China that we respect a mutual friend." How, after two decades of belligerent animosity with the People's Republic, mere support for Pakistan in its bloody civil war was supposed to

48

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

demonstrate to China that the US "was a reliable government to deal with" was a mystifying proposition which more cynical observers of the events, both in and outside the US government, consider to have been an excuse justifying the simple convenience of the Islamabad link – a link which Washington had no overriding desire to shift.

Second, the knowledge of this secret diplomacy and its accompanying privileges obviously freed the Pakistani general of such restraints as might have inhibited him. He told his closest associates, including his minister of information, G.W. Choudhury, that his private understanding with Washington and Beijing would protect him. Choudhury later wrote: "If Nixon and Kissinger had not given him that false hope, he'd have been more realistic." Thus, the collusion with him in the matter of China *increases* the direct complicity of Nixon and Kissinger in the massacres. (There is another consideration outside the scope of this book, which involves the question: why did Kissinger confine his China diplomacy to channels provided by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes? Why was an open diplomacy not just as easy, if not easier? The answer – which also lies outside the scope of this book – is apparently that surreptitiousness, while not essential in itself, was essential if Nixon and Kissinger were going to be able to take the credit for it.)

It cannot possibly be argued, in any case, that the saving of Kissinger's private correspondence with China was worth the deliberate sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Bengali civilians. And – which is worse still – later and fuller disclosures now allow us to doubt that this was indeed the whole motive. The Kissinger policy towards Bangladesh may well have been largely conducted for its own sake, as a means of gratifying his boss's animus against India and as a means of preventing the emergence of Bangladesh as a self-determining state in any case.

The diplomatic commonplace term "tilt" – signifying that mixture of signals and nuances and codes that describe a foreign policy preference that is often too embarrassing to be openly avowed – actually originates in this dire episode. On 6 March 1971, Kissinger summoned a meeting at the

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 49

National Security Council and – *in advance of* the crisis in East-West Pakistan relations that was by then palpable and predictable to those attending – insisted that no preemptive action be taken. Those present who suggested that a warning to General Yahya Khan be issued, essentially advising him to honor the election results, he strongly opposed. His subsequent policy was as noted above. After returning from China in July, he began to speak in almost Maoist phrases about a Soviet-Indian plot to dismember and even annex part of Pakistan, which would compel China to intervene on Pakistan's side. (In pursuit of this fantasy of confrontation, he annoyed Admiral Elmo Zumwalt by ordering him to despatch the aircraft carrier USS *Enterprise* from the coast of Vietnam to the Bay of Bengal, while giving it no stated mission.) But no analyst in the State Department or the CIA could be found to underwrite such a bizarre prediction and, at a meeting of the Senior Review Group, Kissinger lost his temper with this insubordination. "The President always says to tilt toward Pakistan, but every proposal I get is in the opposite direction. Sometimes I think I'm in a nuthouse." The Nixon White House was, as it happens, in the process of becoming exactly that, but his hearers only had time to notice that a new power-term had entered Washington's vernacular of crisis and conspiracy.

"The President always says to tilt toward Pakistan." That at least was true. Long before any conception of his "China diplomacy," indeed even during the years when he was inveighing against "Red China" and its sympathizers, Nixon detested the government of India and expressed warm sympathy for Pakistan. Many of his biographers and intimates, including Kissinger, have recorded the particular dislike he felt (more justifiably, perhaps) for the person of Indira Gandhi. He always referred to her as "that bitch" and on one occasion kept her waiting for an unprecedented forty-five minutes outside his White House door. However, the dislike originated with Nixon's loathing for her father Pandit Nehru, and with his more general loathing for Nehru's sponsorship – along with Makarios, Tito and Soekarno – of the Non-Aligned Movement. There can be no doubt that,

50

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

with or without an occluded "China card," General Yahya Khan would
have enjoyed a sympathetic hearing, and treatment, from this president, and
thus from this national security advisor.

This is also strongly suggested by Kissinger's subsequent conduct, as
Secretary of State, towards Bangladesh as a country and towards Sheik
Mujib, leader of the Awami League and later the father of Bangladeshi
independence, as a politician. Unremitting hostility and contempt were the
signature elements in both cases. Kissinger had received some very bad and
even mocking press for his handling of the Bangladesh crisis, and it had
somewhat spoiled his supposedly finest hour in China. He came to resent
the Bangladeshis and their leader, and even compared (this according to his
then aide Roger Morris) Mujib to Allende.

As soon as Kissinger became Secretary of State in 1973, he downgraded
all those who had signed the genocide protest in 1971. In the fall of the next
year, 1974, he inflicted a series of snubs on Mujib, then on his first visit to
the United States as head of state. In Washington Kissinger boycotted the
fifteen-minute meeting that Mujib was allowed by President Ford. He also
opposed Mujib's main request, which was for emergency United States
grain shipments, and some help with debt relief, in order to recuperate the
country so ravaged by Kissinger's friend and ally. To cite Roger Morris
again: "In Kissinger's view there was very much a distant hands-off attitude
toward them. Since they had the audacity to become independent of one of
my client states, they will damn well float on their own for a while." It was
at about this time that Kissinger was heard to pronounce Bangladesh "an
international basket case," a judgment which, to the extent that it was true,
was also self-fulfilling.

In November 1974, on a brief face-saving tour of the region, Kissinger
made an eight-hour stop in Bangladesh and gave a three-minute press
conference in which he refused to say why he had sent the USS *Enterprise*
into the Bay of Bengal three years before. Within a few weeks of his depar-
ture, we now know, a faction at the US embassy in Dacca began covertly
meeting with a group of Bangladeshi officers who were planning a coup

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 51

against Mujib. On 14 August 1975, Mujib and forty members of his family were murdered in a military takeover. His closest former political associates were bayoneted to death in their prison cells a few months after that.*

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was at that time conducting its sensational inquiries into CIA involvement with assassinations and subversion in the Third World. The "two track" concept, whereby an American ambassador like Ed Korry in Chile could find that his intelligence officers and military attachés were going behind his back and over his head, with secret authorizations from Washington, and running their own show, had not become a familiar one. However, exhaustive research by Lawrence Lifschultz of Yale University now strongly suggests that a "two track" scheme was implemented in Bangladesh as well.

The man installed as Bangladesh's president by the young officers who had slain Rahman was Khondakar Mustaque, generally identified as the leader of the right-wing element within the Awami League. He was at pains to say that the coup had come to him as a complete surprise, and that the young majors who had led it – Major Farooq, Major Rashid and four others, at the head of a detachment numbering just three hundred men – had "acted on their own." He added that he had never met the mutinous officers before. Such denials are of course customary, almost matters of etiquette. So are the ensuing statements from Washington, which invariably claim that this or that political upheaval has taken the world's largest and most powerful intelligence-gathering system completely off guard. That expected statement, too, was made in the aftermath of the assassination in Dacca.

The cover story (one might term it the coincidence version) leaks at every joint and comes apart at the most cursory inspection. Major Rashid was interviewed by Anthony Mascarhenas, the journalistic hero of the

* In December 2000 those responsible were convicted by a Bangladeshi court and (wrongly, in my opinion) sentenced to death. Some of the accused were unavailable for sentencing because they had taken refuge in the United States: a feat not achievable by the average Bengali immigrant.

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THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

Bangladesh war, on the anniversary of the coup. He confirmed that he had met Mustaque before the coup, and again on the days immediately preceding it. In fact, a senior Bangladeshi officer has dated meetings between Mustaque and the mutineers more than six months before Mujib's overthrow.

The United States ambassador in Dacca, Davis Eugene Booster, was aware that a coup was being discussed. He was also aware of the highly controversial congressional hearings in Washington, which had unveiled high-level official wrongdoing and ruined the career of many a careless foreign service officer. He ordered that all contact between his embassy and the mutinous officers be terminated. Thus his alarm and annoyance, on 14 August 1975, was great. The men who had seized power were the very ones with whom he had ordered a cessation of contact. Embassy sources have since confirmed to Lifschultz (a) that United States officials had been approached by, and had by no means discouraged, the officers who intended a coup and (b) that Ambassador Booster became convinced that his CIA station was operating a back channel without his knowledge. Such an operation would be meaningless, and also pointlessly risky, if it did not extend homeward to Washington where, as is now notorious, the threads of the Forty Committee and the National Security Council were very closely held in one fist.

Philip Cherry, the then head of the CIA station in Bangladesh, was interviewed by Lifschultz in September 1978. He was vague and evasive even about having held the job but did say, "There is one thing. There are politicians who frequently approach embassies, and perhaps have contacts there. They think they may have contacts." The shift from officer to politician is suggestive. And, of course, those who think they may have contacts may even act as if they do, unless they are otherwise advised.

Not only did Khondakar Mustaque *think* he had contacts with the United States government, including with Henry Kissinger himself, but he did indeed have such contacts, and had had since 1971. In 1973 in Washington, and in the aftermath of the unprecedented revolt of professional diplomats against the Kissinger policy in Bangladesh, the Carnegie

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 53

Endowment for International Peace (publisher of the magazine *Foreign Policy*) conducted a full-dress study of the “tilt” that had put the United States on the same side as those committing genocide. More than 150 senior officials from the State Department and the CIA agreed to be interviewed. The study was coordinated by Kissinger's former aide Roger Morris. The result of the nine-month inquiry was never made public, due to internal differences at Carnegie, but the material was made available to Lifschultz and it does establish one conclusion beyond doubt.

In 1971 Henry Kissinger had attempted the impossible by trying to divide the electorally victorious Awami League, and to dilute its demand for independence. In pursuit of this favor to General Yahya Khan, he had initiated a covert approach to Khondakar Mustaque, who led the tiny minority who were willing to compromise on the main principle. A recently unearthed "Memorandum for the Record" gives us details of a White House meeting between Nixon, Kissinger and others on 11 August 1971, at which Undersecretary of State John Irwin reported: "We have had reports in recent days of the possibility that some Awami League leaders in Calcutta want to negotiate with Yahya on the basis of giving up their claim for the independence of East Pakistan." This can only have been a reference to the Provisional Government of Bangladesh, set up in exile in Calcutta after the massacres, and could only have been an attempt to circumvent its leadership. The consequences of this clumsy approach were that Mustaque was exposed and placed under house arrest in October 1971, and that the American political officer who contacted him, George Griffin, was declared *persona non grata* when gazetted to the US embassy in New Delhi a decade later.

Those involved in the military preparations for the coup have told Lifschultz that they, too, had a "two track" policy. There were junior officers ready to mutiny and there was a senior officer – the future dictator General Zia – who was ready but more hesitant. Both factions say that they naturally checked with their United States contacts in advance, and were told that the overthrow of Mujib was "no problem." This is at least partially

54

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

confirmed by a signed letter from Congressman Stephen J. Solarz of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who undertook to investigate the matter for Lifschultz in 1980 and who on 3 June of that year wrote to him: "With respect to the Embassy meetings in the November 1974–January 1975 period with opponents of the Rahman regime, the State Department once again does not deny that the meetings took place." This would appear to be a rebuff to the evidence of Mr Cherry of the CIA, even if the letter goes on to say: "The Department does claim that it notified Rahman about the meetings, including the possibility of a coup." If true, that "claim" is being made for the first time, and in the name of the man who was murdered during the coup and cannot refute it. The admission is stronger than the claim in any case.

Congressman Solarz forwarded the questions about CIA involvement to the office of Congressman Les Aspin of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which committee, as he said, "has the best chance of obtaining access both to CIA cable traffic and to the relevant figures in the intelligence community." But the letter he sent was somehow lost along the way, and was never received by the relevant inquiring committee, and shortly afterwards the balance of power in Washington shifted from Carter to Reagan.

Only a reopened congressional inquiry with subpoena power could determine whether there was any direct connection, apart from the self-evident ones of consistent statecraft attested by recurring reliable testimony, between the secret genocidal diplomacy of 1971 and the secret destabilizing diplomacy of 1975. The task of disproving such a connection, meanwhile, would appear to rest on those who believe that everything is an accident.

## Chapter 4

### Background:

—Pakistan had severe problems turning into 1970, especially the flooding exacerbated by cyclones in East Pakistan. HK wrote Nixon: "By most accounts this is the greatest natural disaster in terms of destruction and danger to human life of the century and perhaps of recorded history." HK wrote this on Nov 27, 1970.

—Meanwhile, the political situation had heated up. The Awamis won a stunning victory in December 7, 1970 elections while Bhutto's party won in the west. This meant the need to reconcile the two in the creation of a new constitution and new parliament and government. Bhutto was a major player in this period in working against secession of East Pakistan. Up to the Pak army invasion of the East on March 25, 1971, both East (Mujib) and West (Bhutto) could not agree on a new government. In the interim, Yahya had cancelled the March 3 meeting of a new national assembly, then rescheduled it (a point which Hitchens missed entirely).

—HK was very proactive. He had commission two studies (NSSM 109 at the end of 1970) on US policies towards South Asia and an addendum - because of the unfolding crisis) - NSSM 118 in early 1971 ordering an immediate contingency study of options in the event of an East Pakistani move towards secession. In other words, the USG was already anticipating this.

—Crisis meetings on the Pak situation began as early as March 6, 1971 and were attended by numbers of people from State and from the NSC. The policy of the USG throughout 1971 was largely a collective one. HK was not running affairs by himself.

—Crisis meetings - the Senior Review Group (SRG) and Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG) plus the NSC meetings convened by Nixon continued throughout the year. HK's memoir, *White House Years*, chapter 21, details all of this.

—Even Secretary Rogers was annoyed by criticisms of US policy by Blood & company in Dacca, calling them "outrageous."

GENERAL COMMENT - CHAPTER 4

The author ignores HK's account as in chapter 21 of _White House Years_ or nearly 80 pages of material on the crisis. Many of the points which the author addresses are covered in these pages.

HK openly acknowledged in his writings that, except for Cambodia, no crisis yielded a greater difference in views between the White House and the departments than did the South Asian war. Thus, the author draws his material from those who disagreed with the policy (as in his reliance on the Carnegie Endowment study of the "tilt" policy of 1971 - which was never published because the members themselves could not agree), and the standard books critical of HK. Nor does he make clear - in taking aim at HK - that throughout the crisis, meetings were held on a regular basis such that the top level of government - Laird, Rogers, Sisco, Irwin, Helms, Johnson, etc - were all involved. This is clear from the meeting records and from meetings which Nixon himself had

## Chapter 4 - 2

with these officials.

For example, as the records of the period show, HK was proactive regarding South Asia. He had commissioned a major study (NSSM 109 at the end of 1970) on US policies towards South Asia (particularly after the major flooding in Pakistan at the time) and added another (NSSM 118 in early 1971) ordering an immediate contingency study of options in the event of an East Pakistani move towards secession. In short, HK was already anticipating this. Crisis meetings - the Senior Review Group (SRG), Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG) and National Security Council meetings with the President - began as early as March 6, 1971. By that time HK warned that Pakistan could not hold the East by force. By April 29, HK was writing Nixon that the likelihood was greater for East Pakistani autonomy and perhaps "eventual independence."

INSERT 48 - 1

REGARDING CHOUDHURY'S ACCOUNT AS
DESCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR, IT IS MISLEADING.
IT IS ALSO THE CASE THAT CHOUDHURY HAD THESE
RECOLLECTIONS IN HINDSIGHT.

REFERENCES TO NIXON'S COMMENTS
REFLECTED A MEETING HE HAD WITH YAHYA IN
OCTOBER 1970, WELL BEFORE THE CYCLONE AND
FOLLOW-ON CRISIS. EXPECTATIONS AT THE TIME
WERE THAT ELECTIONS WOULD BE HELD IN DECEMBER
1970 (THEY WERE) AND THERE WAS NO SPECIAL CRISIS.
BY LEAVING OUT THE TIMEFRAME, THE IMPRESSION IS
LEFT THAT NIXON AND HAK SOMEHOW GAVE "FALSE HOPE"
IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CRISIS.

EVEN SO, IT WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SURPRISING
IF THE PAKS THOUGHT THEY WOULD HAVE SUPPORT FROM
THE US IF ATTACKED BY INDIA. AMENDING A 1959
US-PAKISTANI BILATERAL AGREEMENT COVERING THIS
POINT, ASSURANCES WERE GIVEN BY PRESIDENTS KENNEDY
AND JOHNSON, INCLUDING A LETTER FROM PRESIDENT
KENNEDY TO AYUB KHAN ON JANUARY 26, 1962; AN
AIDE-MEMOIRE PRESENTED BY THE US AMBASSADOR ON
NOVEMBER 5, 1962; A PUBLIC STATEMENT BY THE STATE

## INSERT 48 - 1 cont'd

DEPARTMENT ON NOVEMBER 11, 1962; AND AN ORAL PROMISE BY PRESIDENT JOHNSON TO AYUB KHAN ON DECEMBER 15, 1965. THE PAKS FORMALLY INVOKED THE AGREEMENT ON DECEMBER 2 DURING THE WAR. WHEN HK ASKED HIS STATE COLLEAGUES IN THE WSAG MEETING ON DECEMBER 3 ABOUT PAST US UNDERSTANDINGS, STATE - WITH ITS PRO-INDIAN BIAS - WAS EVASIVE AND IN FACT DID NOT SEND HK COPIES OF THE KENNEDY AND JOHNSON PROMISES.

THE "COMPLICITY" ARGUMENT IS NOT VALID AS SUGGESTED BY MR. HITCHENS.

## INSERT 48 - 2

NIXON DROPPED BOTH PUBLIC AND PRIVATE HINTS ABOUT AN OPENING TO CHINA, TO A VARIETY OF PEOPLE AND COUNTRIES. ONE OPTION HE CONSIDERED WAS AN INTERVENTION BY SENATOR MANSFIELD. HE DISCUSSED CHINA WITH DE GAULLE. ON HIS WORLD TOUR IN 1969 HE TALKED OF CHINA IN NOT ONLY PAKISTAN AND ROMANIA BUT ALSO THAILAND AND INDONESIA.

IN THE END, AS A PRACTICAL MATTER, AN INTERMEDIARY HAD TO HAVE BOTH GOOD RELATIONS

## Insert 49 - 1

These comments pertain to the account of the March 6, 1971 meeting which evidently comes from South Asian State Department official Christopher Van Hollen. The latter provided his interpretation to Sy Hersh, author of the highly critical book on HK entitled *The Price of Power* and Van Hollen has repeated his theme in an article written many years later in the *Asian Survey*, April 1980, on "The Tilt" policy. It is all revisionist history and, Van Hollen, having been at the meeting, must know that what he has said cannot be true. This is all a matter of record since documents have been declassified. Precisely the opposite of what has been described took place.

The facts are as follows:

- It was not a meeting "at" the National Security Council but rather a meeting of the Senior Review Group (including all top level officials plus working level such as Van Hollen, although his name is not mentioned).

- HK chaired the meeting and listened to views. U Alexis Johnson opened and closed the meeting by defending the view that *the US do absolutely nothing*; rather, he urged that the US ask Britain to take the lead in dealing with Yahya. Christopher Van Hollen, a long time critic of HK, *specifically* urged that the US not take the lead in doing anything with regard to the Paks. Johnson pleaded: "It would be most unwise to do anything to prejudice our relations with Yahya." Dick Helms agreed absolutely.

- Contrary to the view in the Hitchens' book and also the line in the Hersh book, it was HK *alone* who suggested that the US should confront Yahya "that the use of force

## Insert 49 - 1 - cont'd

would be unwise." HK asked if we could go in "as a friend" and warn Yahya off. The group maligned the idea and HK was alone in his position. So any interpretation that it was HK that warned against a rebuke to Yahya is completely wrong and anyone who was at the meeting knows that for a fact.

--There was no use of the word "tilt" at the March 1971 meeting. That word was not used until the end of July 1971, so obviously Mr. Hitchens has not researched his work properly.

--There is a statement about Admiral Zumwalt being asked to dispatch the USS Enterprise without proper guidance. This is, once again, incorrect. Whatever Admiral Zumwalt wrote later, it was not the case at the time. He attended almost all of the SRGs and WSAGs through the duration of the crisis in 1971, and he was immensely helpful. For some reason, he was evidently not at the crucial meetings in early December 1971 and later complained that he was not consulted about a mission statement for the movement of the 7th fleet into the Bay of Bengal.

In fact, HK talked to Defense Secretary Laird on December 10 about the movement of the fleet, explaining its precise mission, and Laird was "staunch and supportive." (This is covered in *White House Years*, p. 905.) It was Nixon, who, on December 9, had specifically ordered the movement of the fleet. HK raised it at the December 10

## Insert 49 - 1 cont'd

WSAG and, absent Zumwalt, designated Admiral Moorer to insure that the President's plans were carried out. Moorer was in repeated touch with the NSC as the Defense Department carried out the President's plans to have the fleet - for purposes of both evacuation and show of force - move into the area. It was Nixon's decision entirely.

It is later alleged in this book that HK evaded a question about what the fleet was doing in the Bay of Bengal in 1971, during a visit he made to Bangladesh in November 1974 on a world tour. As the record shows, HK was never asked the question so it cannot be argued that he evaded an answer. The State Department transcript is a matter of public record.

--The reference to the Soviet/Indian plot should be seen in context. The author fails to mention the fact that a Soviet/Indian treaty was signed on August 9, 1971, disquieting many in the area.

44

4

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Havin-

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 45

Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. 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[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya Khan a message defending democracy, condemning the arrest of a leader of a democratically-elected majority party, incidentally pro-West, and calling for an end to repressive measures and bloodshed.... 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 civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

46 THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS 47