THE WASHINGTON POST, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1979

Joseph Kraft

Kissinger's Counterattack

"Sideshow," a recent book on Cambodia by the accomplished British journalist William Shawcross, provided Vietnam War critics with occasion for a new round of attacks on Henry Kissinger. Now Kissinger has struck back in a letter on the Shawcross book to The Economist.

As counterattack, the Kissinger letter is strong stuff. But from between the lines there emerges a line of questioning grounded not in the quaint conceits of liberal intellectuals about Southeast Asia, but in Kissinger's own concepts of legitimacy and world order.

The anti-Kissinger argument in the Shawcross book goes as follows: Kissinger was a major architect of the secret bombing of Cambodia, which the Nixon administration instituted in March 1969. That bombing drew North Vietnamese forces into the area.

Their entry into Cambodia set up the coup against the Cambodian ruler, Prince Sihanouk. Kissinger and Nixon used the ouster of Sihanouk as a pretext for the American invasion of Cambodia in April 1970. As a result, all-out war came to that peaceful country. There followed double devastation—first at the hands of a Communist regime under Pol Pot and most recently through a Vietnamese invasion.

In his letter, Kissinger pulls apart that supposedly inexorable chain of events. He cites Sihanouk, whom he saw in Peking in April, as witness that the bombing did not draw the North Vietnamese any deeper into Cambodia.

He shows that the fall of Sihanouk surprised and dismayed Washington, and came about largely because of local circumstances. He demonstrates that the invasion of 1970 was at least in part undertaken because the North Vietnamese had been using Cambodia as a base for attacks on Americans in South Vietnam. He persuades me that even after the invasion there were plenty of chances for events to turn out differently.

Along the way, Kissinger identifies the motive that caused so many of the war critics to use the Shawcross book for revived attacks at this late date. He claims—rightly, I think—that the critics have felt obliged to shift the base of the argument to Cambodia because they have been embarrassed by the recent behavior of the Vietnamese Communists.

But a good offense is not necessarily the best defense. The secret bombing of Cambodia can be fitted into a much different reconstruction of events.

The former secretary of state ac-

knowledges that the bombing of Cambodia was instituted in secrecy with a special system of false reporting. He thus implicitly admits an element of duplicity.

The purpose of the secrecy, Kissinger asserts, was to spare Sihanouk the humiliation of having to protest the bombing. When the Cambodian leader did not protest, and when the key senators raised no objections, the secret bombing was kept up.

To me, that practice suggests the belief that an element of cheating was okay as long as the traffic would bear it. It implies that the president, far from having an overwhelming responsibility for straightforward dealing, was entitled to do what he could get away with.

But where did that approach lead? Why, after all, did Nixon become involved in the "third-rate burglary" and cover-up that followed the Watergate break-in? Wasn't it really because he assumed he could get away with it?

More to the point with Kissinger is another line of questioning. What happened when the Watergate inquiry disclosed the cheating in Cambodia and in other matters? What did that do to the reputation of the president and his senior advisers in foreign policy? Didn't it weaken their credibility in the eyes of

Congress and the nation? Didn't it erode their legitimacy?

Didn't the Congress, in consequence, institute a series of special measures that effectively tied the hands of the Nixon administration? Didn't the country, as a whole, come to distrust any action taken in the name of national security? And by any institution charged with special responsibility for national security?

Wasn't one result the feeble American response when South Vietnam and Cambodia started to fall? Wasn't another result the inability of American leaders to respond effectively to the far more serious challenges that have developed in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf?

Isn't the lesson of all this that very high stakes are required to justify even a little duplicity in high office? Don't the stakes have to be far higher than the marginal advantage of bombing a marginal part of a marginal country in a marginal war? And shouldn't that point be felt with particular force by persons who set store by legitimacy as a binding feature of world order?

I leave the answers to the reader. For my own part, I am persuaded that, at worst, the questions involve matters of judgment, not, as some aver, of crime.

©1979, Field Enterprises, Inc.

THE WASHINGTON STAR, Thursday, September 27, 1979

# Kissinger Writes of Secret Trips

Special to The Washington Star

HONG KONG — The first trips by an American president to the capitals of the two Communist powers — the Soviet Union and China — involved anti-bugging devices, feigned stomachaches and dummy motorcades as part of the U.S. preparations, according to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Accounts of the visits to Peking in February 1972, and to Moscow three months later, are given in excerpts of Kissinger's memoir, *Kissinger: White House Years* (Little, Brown; $22.50), now appearing in the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper.

Kissinger traveled to both cities in advance of President Richard Nixon for preliminary discussions paving the way for the historic summit meetings with China's Mao Tse-tung and the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev.

His first trip to China, which was climaxed by the signing of the Shanghai Communique opening the way for eventual normalization of Sino-American relations, was conducted in deepest secrecy. It followed an exchange of confidential communications between Peking and Washington through an intermediary, President Yahya Khan of Pakistan.

To obscure his true purpose, which was to fly to Peking to work out arrangements for a possible Nixon visit, Kissinger first visited Saigon, Bangkok and New Delhi, then arrived in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, where he pleaded a severe stomachache.

Playing his prearranged role to the hilt, Yahya sympathized with Kissinger's faked discomfort and loudly invited his visitor to recuperate at a mountain retreat at Nathiagali. The ruse deceived even the Secret Service agents accompanying Kissinger. A dummy motorcade was dispatched to Nathiagali — without Kissinger — who was driven in the darkness hours to an airport for the flight to Peking.

There, Kissinger met for long hours with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, a leader who impressed Kissinger greatly for his self-command, grasp of world issues and courtliness. The two men talked exhaustively, the first session alone lasting nearly seven hours.

Near the end of the talks, Chou and Kissinger agreed that Nixon should visit Peking in early 1972. Two days after his arrival in Peking, Kissinger was back in Islamabad with only a few people aware of the fact that he had not been in the mountains of Pakistan nursing an ailing stomach.

Kissinger's Moscow trip to make arrangements for the Nixon-Brezhnev summit also was done in secret. In contrast with the visit to Peking, elaborate security precautions were taken, including the use of a tape that, when played at loud volume, filled the room with incoherent conversation.

This was intended to confuse the eavesdropping devices the Americans were certain were installed in their rooms. The secretaries taken along by the Kissinger party brought only manual typewriters for fear Soviet detection equipment would read the signals emitted by electric typewriters.

When Nixon eventually arrived in Moscow on May 22, 1972, he disclosed use of the anti-bugging tape machine, holding private conversations with Kissinger instead in his American-made limousine, the hope being that the bulletproof glass would deflect the beams of any Soviet listening equipment.

THE WASHINGTON STAR, Sunday, September 30, 1979

Kissinger Lauds Iran's Shah
As Modernizer, Close Ally

HONG KONG — The deposed shah of Iran was a progressive modernizer of his country who tragically failed to grasp the need for changes in Iran's political system that would accommodate the country's rapid social and economic changes.

This is the assessment of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in his "Memoirs, White House Years" (1979, Little, Brown and Co.), currently being excerpted in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post.

Kissinger suggests that the shah should be remembered as a modernizer and as a stalwart, unquestioning ally of the United States. Retrospective assessments of the shah that dwell on his authoritarianism and his U.S.-aided arms buildup overlook the accomplishments and the importance of the former Iranian leader.

Kissinger views the shah himself as almost forcing himself into the role of the distant and strong-willed

leader, even though he was at heart a warm and gentle man. As an authoritarian ruler, the shah was following a 25-century-old tradition of government in Iran. At the crossroads of the world's major cultural groups, the Iranian people are a meleange of ethnic groups long kept together by the unifying force of a shah or emperor.

As a modernizer, the shah pushed through a sweeping land reform, actively promoted literacy, increased the rights of women and, above all, pushed for economic development. It was partly the rapid pace of that development that brought him down.

The shah inadvertently engendered opposition among some of the beneficiaries of his modernization program, particularly students who were sent aboard on government scholarships and then joined radical groups.

See KISSINGER, A-10

Continued From A-1

Yet it was the conservative elements, who lost power and privilege as a result of the modernization process, who formed the backbone of the anti-shah movement, Kissinger observes. The Islamic mullahs and the large landowners had their interests threatened by the changes the shah was bringing about.

Kissinger devotes much of his treatment of the shah to a justification of the close military and diplomatic ties that several U.S. administrations, the Nixon administration in particular, developed with Iran.

The shah came to trust the United States to such an extent, Kissinger says, that his personal emotional problems during his last waning months of power may well have been caused in part by the shock of watching his trusted ally, the United States, vacillate in its support.

In the early 1970s, the shah proved an indispensable ally of the United States. At that time, thousands of Soviet troops were still based in Egypt, the Soviet Union was drawing closer to Iraq's rulers and Syria had invaded the moderate U.S. ally, Jordan. Britain, meanwhile, had just finished withdrawing its military forces from emirates in the Persian Gulf.

It was crucial for the West to maintain a balance of power in the region and guarantee that the radical Arab camp be contained. Yet the United States was utterly unable to directly establish its military presence in the area. U.S. forces were still stretched by the Vietnam war and U.S. public opinion then would never have tolerated a direct U.S. military commitment to the area.

Fortunately for the United States, Kissinger says, Iran moved into the breach. The shah was eager to develop Iran's military defense capacity and, given the critical situation in the area, the Nixon administration was more than willing to oblige. Kissinger suggests that a militarily strong, pro-Western Iran under the shah slowed the radicalization of the Arab countries and made it much easier for Anwar Sadat of Egypt to move his country out of

the Soviet sphere of influence and toward the West.

The former secretary of state says the shah's knowledge and understanding of regional and worldwide issues was among the best of any of the leaders he dealt with.

He said the shah's support of Western interests went well beyond his immediate region. The shah gave assistance to South Vietnam at the time of the 1973 peace agreement, aided Western Europe during the economic recession that followed the oil boycott and supported moderate forces in Africa.

The shah never used Iran's oil resources as a political weapon, Kissinger says, even though he naturally sought the highest possible prices in the world market.

The former secretary of state avoids any direct criticism of the Carter administration's lack of support for the shah. But he makes a strong plea that the United States refrain from condemning the shah in retrospect.

In discussing Nixon's first presidential trip to Europe in 1969, Kissinger tells of the absurd activities of the party's advance men. For the London stopover, John Ehrlichman tried to dictate the guest list for a dinner at 10 Downing St. This met with a rebuff from U.S. Ambassador David Bruce, who pointed out the ludicrousness of the White House trying to tell the British prime minister whom he would invite to his own house for dinner.

An overzealous advance man attempted to have pictures of former President John Kennedy taken off display at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to France, feeling they might make Nixon uneasy as he hosted a dinner for French President Charles de Gaulle. Only after special top-level permission was obtained was the ambassador, Sargent Shriver, allowed to keep on display the photographs of his brother-in-law.

The European trip delighted Nixon, who came from a small California town and was now landing at European capitals in Air Force One to be greeted by heads of state and honor guards drawn up at attention.