THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:07 am

Chapter 8: EAST TIMOR

ANOTHER SMALL BUT significant territory has the distinction of being omitted -- entirely omitted -- from Henry Kissinger's memoirs. And since East Timor is left out of the third and final volume (Years of Renewal) it cannot hope, like Cyprus, for a hasty later emendation. It has, in short, been airbrushed. And it is reasonably easy to see why Kissinger hopes to avoid discussion of a country whose destiny he so much affected.

Let me state matters briefly. After the collapse of the Portuguese fascist regime in Lisbon in April 197 4, that country's colonial empire deliquesced with extraordinary speed. The metropolitan power retained control only in the enclave of Macau, on the coast of China, and later remitted this territory to Beijing under treaty in 2000. In Africa, after many vicissitudes, power was inherited by the socialist-leaning liberation movements which had, by their tactic of guerrilla warfare, brought about the Portuguese revolution in the first place and established warm relations with its first generation of activists.

In East Timor, situated in the Indonesian archipelago, the postcolonial vacuum was at first also filled by a leftist movement, known as FRETILIN or the Front for the Liberation of East Timor. The popular base of this movement extended from the Catholic Church to the Westernized and sometimes Leninized students who had brought back revolutionary opinions from the "motherland." FRETlLIN and its allies were able to form a government but were at once subjected to exorbitant pressure from their gigantic Indonesian neighbor, then led by the dictator (since deposed and disgraced by his own people) General Suharto. Portugal, which had and which retains legal responsibility, was too unstable and too distant to prevent the infiltration of Indonesian regular units into East Timor and the beginning of an obviously expansionist policy of attrition and subversion. This tactic was pursued by the generals in Jakarta for a few months, under the transparent pretext of "aiding" anti-FRETlLIN forces which were, in point of fact, deliberately inserted Indonesian ones. All pretense of this sort was abandoned on 7 December 1975, when the armed forces of Indonesia crossed the border of East Timor in strength, eventually proclaiming it {in an act no less lawless than Iraq's proclamation of Kuwait as "our nineteenth province") a full part of Indonesia proper.

Timorese resistance to this claim was so widespread, and the violence required to impose it was so ruthless and generalized, that the figure of 100,000 deaths in the first wave -perhaps one-sixth of the entire population -- is reckoned an understatement.

The date of the Indonesian invasion -7 December 1975 is of importance and also of significance. On that date, President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, concluded an official visit to Jakarta and flew to Hawaii. Since they had come fresh from a meeting with Indonesia's military junta, and since the United States was Indonesia's principal supplier of military hardware (and since Portugal, a NATO ally, broke diplomatic relations with Indonesia on the point), it seemed reasonable to inquire whether the two leaders had given the invaders any impression amounting to a "green light." Thus when Ford and Kissinger landed at Hawaii, reporters asked Mr. Ford for comment on the invasion of Timor. The President was evasive.

He smiled and said: "We'll talk about that later." But press secretary Ron Nessen later gave reporters a statement saying: "The United States is always concerned about the use of violence. The President hopes it can be resolved peacefully."


The literal incoherence of this official utterance -the idea of a peaceful resolution to a unilateral use of violence -may perhaps have possessed an inner coherence: the hope of a speedy victory for overwhelming force. Kissinger moved this suspicion a shade nearer to actualization in his own more candid comment, which was offered while he was still on Indonesian soil and "told newsmen in Jakarta that the United States would not recognize the FRETlLIN -- declared republic and that 'the United States understands Indonesia's position on the question."'

So gruesome were the subsequent reports of mass slaughter, rape, and deliberate use of starvation that such bluntness fell somewhat out of fashion. The killing of several Australian journalists who had witnessed Indonesia's atrocities, the devastation in the capital city of Dili, and the stubbornness of FRETILIN's hugely outgunned rural resistance made East Timor an embarrassment rather than an advertisement for Jakarta's new order. Kissinger generally attempted to avoid any discussion of his involvement in the extirpation of the Timorese -- an ongoing involvement, since he authorized back-door shipments of weapons to those doing the extirpating -- and was ably seconded in this by his ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later confided in his memoir A Dangerous Place that, in relative terms, the death toll in East Timor during the initial days of the invasion was "almost the toll of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War." Moynihan continued:

The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.


The terms "United States" and "Department of State" are here foully prostituted, by this supposed prose-master, since they are used as synonyms for Henry Kissinger.

Twenty years later, on 11 August 1995, Kissinger was confronted with direct questions on the subject. Publicizing and promoting his then-latest book Diplomacy, at an event sponsored by the Learning Exchange at the Park Central Hotel in New York, he perhaps (having omitted Timor from his book and from his talk) did not anticipate the first line of questioning that arose from the floor. Constancio Pinto, a former resistance leader in Timor who had been captured and tortured and had escaped to the United States, was first on his feet:

Pinto: I am Timorese. My name is Constancio Pinto. And I followed your speech today and it's really interesting. One thing that I know you didn't mention is this place invaded by Indonesia in 1975. It is in Southeast Asia. As a result of the invasion 200,000 people of the Timorese were killed. As far as I know Dr Kissinger was in Indonesia the day before the invasion of East Timor. The United States actually supported Indonesia in East Timor. So I would like to know what you were doing at that time.

Kissinger: What was I doing at that time? The whole time or just about Timor? First of all, I want to thank the gentleman for asking the question in a very polite way. The last time somebody from Timor came after me was at the Oxford Union and they practically tore the place apart before they asked the question.

What most people who deal with government don't understand is one of the most overwhelming experiences of being in high office. That there are always more problems than you can possibly address at any one period. And when you're in global policy and you're a global power, there are so many issues.

Now the Timor issue. First of all you have to understand what Timor, what Timor, what the issue of Timor is. Every island that was occupied by the Dutch in the colonial period was constituted as the Republic of Indonesia. In the middle of their archipelago was an island called Timor. Or is an island called Timor. Half of it was Indonesian and the other half of it was Portuguese. This was the situation.

Now I don't want to offend the gentleman who asked the question. We had so many problems to deal with. We had at that time, there was a war going on in Angola. We had just been driven out of Vietnam. We were conducting negotiations in the Middle East, and Lebanon had blown up. We were on a trip to China. Maybe regrettably we weren't even thinking about Timor. I'm telling you what the truth of the matter is. The reason we were in Indonesia was actually accidental. We had originally intended to go to China, we meaning President Ford and myself and some others. We had originally intended to go to China for five days. This was the period when Mao was very sick and there had been an upheaval in China. The so-called Gang of Four was becoming dominant and we had a terrible time agreeing with the Chinese, where to go, what to say. So we cut our trip to China short. We went for two days to China and then we went for a day and a half to the Philippines and a day and a half to Indonesia. That's how we got to Indonesia in the first place. So this was really at that time to tell the Chinese we were not dependent on them. So that's how we got to Indonesia.

Timor was never discussed with us when we were in Indonesia. At the airport as we were leaving, the Indonesians told us that they were going to occupy the Portuguese colony of Timor. To us that did not look like a very significant event because the Indians had occupied the Portuguese colony of Goa ten years earlier and to us it looked like another process of decolonization. Nobody had the foggiest idea of what would happen afterwards, and nobody asked our opinion, and I don't know what we could have said if someone had asked our opinion. It was literally told to us as we were leaving.

Now there's been a terrible human tragedy in Timor afterwards. The population of East Timor has resisted and I don't know whether the casualty figures are correct. I just don't know, but they're certainly significant and there's no question that it's a huge tragedy. All I'm telling you is what we knew in 1975. This was not a big thing on our radar screen. Nobody has ever heard again of Goa after the Indians occupied it. And to us, Timor, look at a map, it's a little speck of an island in a huge archipelago, half of which was Portuguese. We had no reason to say the Portuguese should stay there. And so when the Indonesians informed us, we neither said yes or no. We were literally at the airport. So that was our connection with it, but I grant the questioner the fact that it's been a great tragedy.

Allan Nairn: Mr Kissinger, my name is Allan Nairn. I'm a journalist in the United States. I'm one of the Americans who survived the massacre in East Timor on November 12, 1991, a massacre during which Indonesian troops armed with American M-16s gunned down at least 271 Timorese civilians in front of the Santa Cruz Catholic cemetery as they were gathered in the act of peaceful mourning and protest. Now you just said that in your meeting with Suharto on the afternoon of December 6, 1975, you did not discuss Timor, you did not discuss it until you came to the airport. Well, I have here the official State Department transcript of your and President Ford's conversation with General Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia. It was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. It has been edited under the Freedom of Information Act so the whole text isn't there. It's clear from the portion of the text that is here, that in fact you did discuss the impending invasion of Timor with Suharto, a fact which was confirmed to me by President Ford himself in an interview I had with him. President Ford told me that in fact you discussed the impending invasion of Timor with Suharto and that you gave the US ...

Kissinger: Who? I or he?

Nairn: That you and President Ford together gave US approval for the invasion of East Timor. There is another internal State Department memo which is printed in an extensive excerpt here which I'll give to anyone in your audience that's interested. This is a memo of a December 18, 1975, meeting held at the State Department. This was held right after your return from that trip and you were berating your staff for having put on paper a finding by the State Department legal advisor Mr. Leigh that the Indonesian invasion was illegal, that it not only violated international law, it violated a treaty with the US because US weapons were used and it's clear from this transcript which I invite anyone in the audience to peruse that you were angry at them first because you feared this memo would leak, and second because you were supporting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and you did not want it known that you were doing this contrary to the advice of your own people in the State Department. If one looks at the public actions, sixteen hours after you left that meeting with Suharto the Indonesian troops began parachuting over Dili, the capital of East Timor. They came ashore and began the massacres that culminated in a third of the Timorese population. You announced an immediate doubling of US military aid to Indonesia at the time, and in the meantime at the United Nations, the instruction given to Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as he wrote in his memoirs, was to, as he put it, see to it that the UN be highly ineffective in any actions it might undertake on East Timor ... [shouts from the audience]

Kissinger: Look, I think we all got the point now ...

Nairn: My question, Mr. Kissinger, my question, Dr. Kissinger, is twofold. First will you give a waiver under the Privacy Act to support full declassification of this memo so we can see exactly what you and President Ford said to Suharto? Secondly, would you support the convening of an international war crimes tribunal under UN supervision on the subject of East Timor and would you agree to abide by its verdict in regard to your own conduct?

Kissinger: I mean, uh, really, this sort of comment is one of the reasons why the conduct of foreign policy is becoming nearly impossible under these conditions. Here is a fellow who's got one obsession, he's got one problem, he collects a bunch of documents, you don't know what is in these documents ...

Nairn: I invite your audience to read them.

Kissinger: Well, read them. Uh, the fact is essentially as I described them [thumps podium]. Timor was not a significant American policy problem. If Suharto raised it, if Ford said something that sounded encouraging, it was not a significant American foreign policy problem. It seemed to us to be an anti-colonial problem in which the Indonesians were taking over Timor and we had absolutely no reason at that time to pay any huge attention to it.

Secondly you have to understand these things in the context of the period. Vietnam had just collapsed. Nobody yet knew what effect the domino theory would have. Indonesia was. ..is a country of a population of 160 million and the key, a key country in Southeast Asia. We were not looking for trouble with Indonesia and the reason I objected in the State Department to putting this thing on paper; it wasn't that it was put on paper. It was that it was circulated to embassies because it was guaranteed to leak out. It was guaranteed then to lead to some public confrontation and for better or worse our fundamental position on these human rights issues was always to try to see if we could discuss them first, quietly, before they turned into a public confrontation. This was our policy with respect to emigration from Russia, in which we turned out to be right, and this was the policy which we tried to pursue in respect to Indonesia and anybody can go and find some document and take out one sentence and try to prove something fundamental and now I think we've heard enough about Timor. Let's have some questions on some other subject. [applause from audience]

Amy Goodman: Dr. Kissinger, you said that the United States has won everything it wanted in the Cold War up to this point. I wanted to go back to the issue of Indonesia and before there's a booing in the audience, just to say as you talk about China and India, Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world. And so I wanted to ask the question in a current way about East Timor. And that is, given what has happened in the twenty years, the 200,000 people who have been killed, according to Amnesty, according to Asia Watch, even according to the Indonesian military. ... Do you see that as a success of the United States?

Kissinger: No, but I don't think it's an American policy. We cannot be, we're not responsible for everything that happens in every place in the world. [applause from audience]

Goodman: Except that 90 percent of the weapons used during the invasion were from the US and it continues to this day. So in that way we are intimately connected to Indonesia, unfortunately. Given that, I was wondering if you think it's a success and whether too, with you on the board of Freeport McMoRan, which has the largest gold-mining operation in the world in Indonesia, in Irian Jaya, are you putting pressure, since Freeport is such a major lobbyist in Congress on behalf of Indonesia, to change that policy and to support self-determination for the people of East Timor?

Kissinger: The, uh, the United States as a general proposition cannot fix every problem on the use of American weapons in purely civil conflicts. We should do our best to prevent this. As a private American corporation engaged in private business in an area far removed from Timor but in Indonesia, I do not believe it is their job to get itself involved in that issue because if they do, then no American private enterprise will be welcome there anymore.

Goodman: But they do every day, and lobby Congress.


It is interesting to notice, in that final answer, the final decomposition of Kissinger's normally efficient if robotic syntax. (For more material on his involvement with Freeport McMoRan, and his other holdings in a privatized military-political-commercial complex, see Chapter 10.) It's also fascinating to see, once again, the operations of his denial mechanism. If Kissinger and his patron Nixon were identified with anyone core belief, it was that the United States should never be, or even appear to be, a "pitiful, helpless giant." Kissinger's own writings and speeches are heavily larded with rhetoric about "credibility" and the need to impress friend and foe with the mettle of American resolve. Yet, in response to any inquiry that might implicate him in crime and fiasco, he rushes to humiliate his own country and its professional servants, suggesting that they know little, care less, are poorly informed and easily rattled by the pace of events. He also resorts to a demagogic isolationism. In "signaling" terms, this is as much as to claim that the United States is a pushover for any ambitious or irredentist banana republic.

This semi-conscious reversal of rhetoric also leads to renewed episodes of hysterical and improvised lying. (Recall his claim to the Chinese that it was the Soviet Union that had instigated the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.) The idea that Indonesia's annexation of Timor may be compared to India's occupation of Goa is too absurd to have been cited in any apologia before or since. What Kissinger seems to like about the comparison is the rapidity with which Goa was forgotten. What he overlooks is that it was forgotten because (1) it was not a bloodbath and (2) it completed the decolonization of India. The Timor bloodbath represented the cementing of colonization by Indonesia. And clearly, an Indonesian invasion that began a few hours after Kissinger had stepped off the tarmac at Jakarta airport must have been planned and readied several days before he arrived. Such plans would have been known by any embassy military attache worth the name, and certainly by any visiting secretary of state. We have the word of C. Philip Liechty, a former CIA operations officer in Indonesia, that:

Suharto was given the green light to do what he did. There was discussion in the Embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time. Without continued heavy US military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off.


Given that legal and international responsibility for East Timor rested with Portugal, a long-term NATO ally of the United States, the decision to disregard this, and at the admitted minimum to say nothing to the Indonesians about it, must have been deliberate. Given Kissinger's acute preoccupation with the fate of the Portuguese empire -- as we will see -- it may have been even more than that. It certainly cannot have been the result of inattention, or of the pressure of other distracting world events in (to take Kissinger's own cited instance) the other Portuguese colony of Angola.

The desire to appear to have been uninvolved may -- if we are charitable -- have arisen in part from the fact that even Indonesia's Foreign Minister, Adam Malik, conceded in public a death tnl1 of between 50,000 and 80,000 Timorese civilians in the first eighteen months of Indonesia's war of subjugation (in other words on Kissinger's watch) and inflicted with weapons that he bent American laws to furnish to the killers. Now that a form of democracy has returned to Indonesia, which in its first post-dictatorial act renounced the annexation and after a bloody last pogrom by its auxiliaries -- withdrew from the territory, we may be able to learn more exactly the extent of the genocide.

Kissinger's surreptitious conduct is made very plain by the State Department cable of December 1975, and the subsequent memorandum concerning it. In point of fact, the essential decisions about Portugal's ex-colonies had been made during the preceding July, when Kissinger had secured presidential permission for a covert program of military intervention, coordinated with the South Africans and General Mobutu, to impose a tribalist regime upon Angola. The following month, as a matter of record, he informed the Indonesian generals that he would not oppose their intervention in East Timor. The only bargaining in December involved a request that Indonesia delay the start of its own colonial adventure until after Air Force One, carrying Ford and Kissinger, had left Indonesian airspace.

This "deniable" pattern did not dispose of two matters of legality, both of them in the province of the State Department. The first was the violation of international law by Indonesia, in a case where jurisdiction clearly rested with a Portuguese and NATO government of which Kissinger (partly as a result of its support for "decolonization") did not approve. The second was the violation of American law, which stipulated that weapons supplied to Indonesia were to be employed only for self-defense. State Department officials, bound by law, were likewise bound to conclude that United States aid to the generals in Jakarta would have to be cut off. Their memo summarizing this case was the cause of the tremendous internal row that is minuted below, in a declassified State Department transcript:

SECRET/SENSITIVE MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION

Participants: The Secretary [Henry Kissinger] Deputy Secretary [Robert] Ingersoll Under Secretary [for Political Affairs Joseph] Sisco Under Secretary [ Carlyle] Maw Deputy Under Secretary [Lawrence] Eagleburger Assistant Secretary [Philip] Habib Monroe Leigh, Legal Advisor Jerry Bremer, Notetaker

Date: December 18, 1975 Subject: Department Policy

The Secretary [Kissinger]: I want to raise a little bit of hell about the Department's conduct in my absence. Until last week I thought we had a disciplined group; now we've gone to pieces completely. Take this cable on [East] Timor. You know my mind and attitude and anyone who knows my position as you do must know that I would not have approved it. The only consequence is to put yourself on record. It is a disgrace to treat the Secretary of State this way. ...

What possible explanation is there for it? I had told you to stop it quietly. What is your place doing, Phil, to let this happen? It is incomprehensible. It is wrong in substance and procedure. It is a disgrace. Were you here?

Habib: No.

Habib: Our assessment was that if it was going to be trouble, it would come up before your return. And I was told they decided it was desirable to go ahead with the cable.

[Kissinger]: Nonsense. I said do it for a few weeks and then open up again.

Habib: The cable will not leak.

[Kissinger] : Yes it will and it will go to Congress too and then we will have hearings on it.

Habib: I was away. I was told by cable that it had come up.

[Kissinger): That means that there are two cables! And that means twenty guys have seen it.

Habib: No, I got it back-channel it was just one paragraph double talk and cryptic so I knew what it was talking about. I was told that Leigh thought that there was a legal requirement to do it.

Leigh: No, I said it could be done administratively. It was not in our interest to do it on legal grounds.

Sisco: We were told that you had decided we had to stop.

[Kissinger]: Just a minute, just a minute. You all know my view on this. You must have an FSO-8 [Foreign Service Officer, Class Eight] who knows it well. It will have a devastating impact on Indonesia. There's this masochism in the extreme here. No one has complained that it was aggression.

Leigh: The Indonesians were violating an agreement with us.

[Kissinger]: The Israelis when they go into Lebanon -when was the last time we protested that?

Leigh: That's a different situation.

Maw: It is self-defense.

[Kissinger]: And we can't construe a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?

Leigh: Well ...

[Kissinger]: Then you're saying that arms can't be used for defense? Habib: No, they can be used for the defense of Indonesia.

[Kissinger]: Now take a look at this basic theme that is coming out on Angola. These SOBs are leaking all of this stuff to [New York Times reporter] Les Gelb.

Sisco: I can tell you who.

[Kissinger]: Who?

Sisco: [National Security Council member William] Hyland spoke to him.

[Kissinger]: Wait a minute -- Hyland said ...

Sisco: He said he briefed Gelb.

[Kissinger]: I want these people to know that our concern in Angola is not the economic wealth or a naval base. It has to do with the USSR operating 8,000 miles from home when all the surrounding states are asking for our help. This will affect the Europeans, the Soviets, and China.

On the Timor thing, that will leak in three months, and it will come out that Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law. How many people in L [the legal advisor's office] know about this? [italics added]

Leigh: Three.

Habib: There are at least two in my office.

[Kissinger]: Plus everybody in the meeting so you're talking about not less than 15 or 20. You have a responsibility to recognize that we are living in a revolutionary situation. Everything on paper will be used against me.

Habib: We do that and take account of that all the time.

[Kissinger]: Every day some SOB in the Department is carrying on about Angola but no one is defending Angola. Find me one quote in the Gelb article defending our policy in Angola.

Habib: I think the leaks and dissent are the burden you have to bear.

[Kissinger]: But the people in charge of this Department could have lacerated AF [Bureau for African Affairs].

Ingersoll: I was told it came from up the river.

Eagleburger: No way.

[Kissinger]: Don't be ridiculous. It's quoted there. Read Gelb. Was [Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs William] Schaufele called in and told to get his house under control? This is not minor league stuff. We are going to lose big. The President says to the Chinese that we're going to stand firm in Angola and two weeks later we get out. I go to a NATO meeting and meanwhile the Department leaks that we're worried about a naval base and says it's an exaggeration or aberration of Kissinger's. I don't care about the oil or the base but I do care about the African reaction when they see the Soviets pull it off and we don't do anything. If the Europeans then say to themselves if they can't hold Luanda, how can the}' defend Europe? The Chinese will say we're a country that was run out of Indochina for 50,000 men and is now being run out of Angola for less than $50m. Where were the meetings here yesterday. Were there any?

[Kissinger] : It cannot be that our agreement with Indonesia says that the arms are for internal purposes only. I think you will find that it says that they are legitimately used for self-defense.

There are two problems. The merits of the case which you had a duty to raise with me. The second is how to put these to me. But to put it into a cable 30 hours before I return, knowing how cables are handled in this building, guarantees that it will be a national disaster and that transcends whatever [Deputy Legal Advisor George] Aldrich has in his feverish mind.

I took care of it with the administrative thing by ordering Carlyle [Maw] not to make any new sales. How will the situation get better in six weeks?

Habib: They may get it cleaned up by then.

[Kissinger]: The Department is falling apart and has reached the point where it disobeys clear-cut orders.

Habib: We sent the cable because we thought it was needed and we thought it needed your attention. This was ten days ago.

[Kissinger]: Nonsense. When did I get the cable, Jerry?

Bremer: Not before the weekend. I think perhaps on Sunday.

[Kissinger] : You had to know what my view on this was. No one who has worked with me in the last two years could not know what my view would be on Timor. [italics added]

Habib: Well, let us look at it -talk to Leigh. There are still some legal requirements. I can't understand why it went out if it was not legally required.

[Kissinger]: Am I wrong in assuming that the Indonesians will go up in smoke if they hear about this?

Habib: Well, it's better than a cutoff. It could be done at a low level.

[Kissinger]: We have four weeks before Congress comes back. That's plenty of time.

Leigh: The way to handle the administrative cutoff would be that we are studying the situation.

[Kissinger]: And 36 hours was going to be a major problem?

Leigh: We had a meeting in Sisco's office and decided to send the message.

[Kissinger] : I know what the law is but how can it be in the US national interest for us to give up on Angola and kick the Indonesians in the teeth? Once it is on paper, there will be a lot of FSO-6s who can make themselves feel good who can write for the Open Forum Panel on the thing even though I will turn out to be right in the end.

Habib: The second problem on leaking of cables is different.

[Kissinger]: No it's an empirical fact.

Eagleburger: Phil, it's a fact. You can't say that any NODIS ["No Distribution": most restricted level of classification] cable will leak but you can't count on three to six months later someone asking for it [sic] in Congress. If it's part of the written record, it will be dragged out eventually.

[Kissinger]: You have an obligation to the national interest. I don't care if we sell equipment to Indonesia or not. I get nothing from it, I get no rakeoff. But you have an obligation to figure out how to serve your country. The Foreign Service is not to serve itself. The Service stands for service to the United States and not service to the Foreign Service.

Habib: I understand that that's what this cable would do.

[Kissinger] : The minute you put this into the system you cannot resolve it without a finding.

Leigh: There's only one question. What do we say to Congress if we're asked?

[Kissinger]: We cut it off while we are studying it. We intend to start again in January.


The delivery of heavy weapons for use against civilian objectives did indeed resume in January 1976, after a short interval in which Congress was misled as advertised. Nobody, it must be said, comes especially well out of this meeting; the Secretary's civil servants were anything but "pristine." Still it can be noted of Kissinger that, in complete contrast to his public statements, he:

1. Forebore from any mention of Goa.

2. Did not trouble to conceal his long-held views on the matter, berating his underlings for being so dense as not to know them.

3. Did not affect to be taken by surprise by events in East Timor.

4. Admitted that he was breaking the law.

5. Felt it necessary to deny that he could profit personally from the arms shipments, a denial for which nobody had asked him.


Evidently, there was a dialectic in Kissinger's mind between Angola and East Timor, both of them many miles from US or Russian borders but both seen as tests of his own dignity. (The "surrounding states" to which he alludes in the Angolan case were apartheid South Africa and General Mobutu's Zaire: the majority of African states, as a matter of record, opposed his intervention on the side of the tribalist and pro-South Africa militias in Angola. His favored regimes have long since collapsed in ignominy; the United States now recognizes the MPLA, with all its deformities, as the legitimate government of Angola. And of course, no European ever felt that the fate of the West hinged on Kissinger's gamble in Luanda.)

That Kissinger understood Portugal's continuing legal sovereignty in East Timor is shown by a NODIS memorandum of a Camp David meeting between himself, General Suharto and President Ford on the preceding 5 July 1975. Almost every line of the text has been deleted by official redaction, and much of the discussion is unilluminating except about the eagerness of the administration to supply naval, air and military equipment to the junta, but at one point, just before Kissinger makes his entrance, President Ford asks his guest, "Have the Portuguese set a date yet for allowing the Timor people to make their choice?" The entire answer is obliterated by deletion, but let it never be said that Kissinger's State Department did not know that Portugal was entitled, indeed mandated, to hold a free election for the Timorese. It is improbable that Suharto, in the excised answer, was assuring his hosts that such an open election would be won by candidates favoring annexation by Indonesia.

On 9 November 1979, Jack Anderson's column in the Washington Post published an interview on East Timor with ex-President Ford, and a number of classified US intelligence documents relating to the 1975 aggression. One of the latter papers describes how Indonesia's generals were pressing Suharto "to authorize direct military intervention," while another informs Messrs Ford and Kissinger that Suharto would raise the East Timor issue at their December 1975 meeting and would "try and elicit a sympathetic attitude." The relatively guileless Ford was happy to tell Anderson that the United States national interest "had to be on the side of Indonesia." He mayor may not have been aware that he was thereby giving the lie to everything ever said by Kissinger on the subject.
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Re: THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:08 am

Chapter 9: A " WET JOB " IN WASHINGTON?

AS WE HAVE more than once seen, Kissinger has a tendency to personalize his politics. His policies have led directly and deliberately to the deaths of anonymous hundreds of thousands, but have also involved the targeting of certain inconvenient individuals -General Schneider, Archbishop Makarios, Sheik Mujib. And, as we have also more than once glimpsed, Kissinger has an especial relish for the Washington vendetta and the localized revenge.

It seems possible that these two tendencies converge in a single case: a plan to kidnap and murder a man named Elias P. Demetracopoulos. Mr. Demetracopoulos is a distinguished Greek journalist with an unexampled record of opposition to the dictatorship that disfigured his homeland between 1967 and 1974. In the course of those years, he made his home in Washington, supporting himself as a consultant to a respected Wall Street firm. Innumerable senators, congressmen, Hill staffers, diplomats and reporters have testified to the extraordinary one-man campaign of lobbying and information he waged against the military gangsters who had usurped power in Athens. Since that same junta enjoyed the sympathy of powerful interests in Washington, Demetracopoulos was compelled to combat on two fronts, and made (as will shortly appear) some influential enemies.

After the collapse of the Greek dictatorship in 1974 -a collapse occasioned by the events I discuss in Chapter 7 on Cyprus above - Demetracopoulos gained access to the secret police files in Athens, and confirmed what he had long suspected. There had been more than one attempt made to kidnap and eliminate him. Files held by the KYP -- the Greek equivalent of the CIA -- revealed that the then dictator, George Papadopoulos, and his deputy security chief Michael Roufogalis several times contacted the Greek military mission in Washington with precisely this end in view. Stamped with the words "COSMIC: Eyes Only" -the highest security classification -this traffic involved a plethora of schemes. They had in common, it is of interest to note, a desire to see Demetracopoulos snatched from Washington and repatriated. An assassination in Washington might have been embarrassing; moreover there seems to have been a need to interrogate Demetracopoulos before despatching him. (The Greek junta was in 1970 expelled by the Council of Europe for its systematic use of torture against political opponents, and a series of public trials held in Athens after 1974 committed the torturers and their political masters to long terms of imprisonment. ) One proposal was to smuggle Demetracopoulos aboard a Greek civilian airliner, another was to put him on a Greek military plane, and still another was to get him aboard a submarine. (If it were not for the proven record of irrationality and mania among the leaders of the junta, one might be tempted to dismiss at least the third of these plans as a fantasy.) One sentence stands out from the COSMIC cables:

We can rely on the cooperation of the various agencies of the U.S. Government, but estimate the Congressional reaction to be fierce.


This was a sober estimate: the CIA and the NSC in particular were notoriously friendly to the junta, while Demetracopoulos enjoyed the benefit of many friendships among senators and members of the House.

Seeking to discover what kind of "cooperation" US agencies might have offered, Demetracopoulos in 1976 engaged an attorney -- William A. Dobrovir of the DC firm of Dobrovir, Oakes and Gebhardt -- and brought suit under the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act. He was able to obtain many hundreds of documents from the FBI, the CIA and the State Department, as well as the Department of Justice and the Pentagon. A number of these papers indicated that copies had been furnished to the National Security Council, then the domain of Henry Kissinger. But requests for documentation from this source were unavailing. As previously noted, Kissinger had on leaving office made a hostage of his own papers copying them, classifying them as "personal" and deeding them to the Library of Congress on condition that they be held privately. Thus, Demetracopoulos met with a stone wall when he used the law to try and prise anything from the NSC. In March 1977, however, the NSC finally responded to repeated legal initiatives by releasing the skeletal "computer indices" of the flies that had been kept on Demetracopoulos. Paging through these, his attention was not unnaturally caught by the following:

7024513 DOCUMENT= 5 OF 5 PAGE = 1 OF 1 KEYWORDS ACKNOWLEDGING SENS MOSS BURDICK GRAVEL RE MR. DEMETRACOPOULOS DEATH IN ATHENS PRISON DATE 701218


"Well it's not every day," said Demetracopoulos when I interviewed him, "that you read about your own death in a state document." His attorney was bound to agree, and wrote a series of letters to Kissinger asking for copies of the file to which the indices referred. For seven years -- I repeat, for seven years -- Kissinger declined to favor Demetracopoulos's lawyer with a reply. When he eventually did respond, it was only through his own lawyer, who wrote that:

Efforts were made to search the collection for copies of documents which meet the description provided. ... No such copies could be found.


"Efforts were made" is, of course, a piece of obfuscation that might describe the most perfunctory inquiry. We are therefore left with the question: Did Kissinger know of, or approve, or form a part of, that "cooperation of the various agencies of the U.S. Government" on which foreign despots had been counting for a design of kidnap, torture and execution?

To begin with an obvious question: Why should a figure of Kissinger's stature either know about, or care about, the existence of a lone dissident journalist? This question is easily answered: the record shows that Kissinger knew very well who Demetracopoulos was, and detested him into the bar gain. The two men had actually met in Athens in 1956, when Demetracopoulos had hosted a luncheon at the Grande Bretagne Hotel for the visiting professor. Over the next decade, Demetracopoulos had been prominent among those warning of, and resisting, a military intervention in Greek politics. The CIA generally favored such an intervention and maintained intimate connections with those who were planning it: in November 1963 the director of the CIA, John McCone, signed an internal message asking for "any substantive derogatory data which can be used to deny [Dematracopoulos] subsequent entry to the US." No such derogatory information was in fact available, so that when the coup came, Demetracopoulos was able to settle in Washington, DC, and begin his exile campaign.

He began it auspiciously enough, by supplying "derogatory data" about the Nixon and Agnew campaign of 1968. This campaign -already tainted badly enough by the betrayal of the Vietnam peace negotiations -was also receiving illegal donations from the $reek military dictatorship.

The money came from Michael Roufogalis at the KYP and was handed over, in cash, to John Mitchell by an ultra-conservative Greek-American businessman named Thomas Pappas. The sum involved was $549,000 -- a considerable amount by the standards of the day. Its receipt was doubly illegal: foreign governments are prohibited from making campaign donations (as are foreigners in general), and given that the KYP was in receipt of CIA subsidies there existed the further danger that American intelligence money was being recycled back into the American political process -- in direct violation of the CIA's own chatter. In 1968, Demetracopoulos took his findings to Larry O'Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who issued a call for an inquiry into the activities of Pappas and the warm relations existing between the Nixon-Agnew campaign and the Athens junta. A number of historians have since speculated as to whether it was evidence for this "Greek connection," with its immense potential for damage, that Nixon's and Mitchell's burglars were seeking when they entered O'Brien's Watergate office under the cover of night. Considerable weight is lent to this view by one salient fact: when the Nixon White House was seeking "hush money" for the burglars, it turned to Thomas Pappas to provide it.

Demetracopoulos's dangerous knowledge of the secret campaign donations, and his incessant lobbying on the Hill and in the press against Nixon's and Kissinger's client regime in Athens, drew unwelcome attention to him. He later sued both the FBI and the CIA -becoming the first person ever to do so successfully -- and received written admissions from both agencies that they possessed "no derogatory information" about him. In the course of these suits, he also secured an admission from then FBI director William Webster that he had been under "rather extensive" surveillance on and between the following dates: 9 November 1967 and 2 October 1969; 25 August 1971 and 14 March 1973; and 19 February and 24 October 1974.

Unaware of the precise extent of this surveillance, Demetracopoulos had nonetheless more than once found himself brushed by a heavy hand. On 7 September 1971 he was lunching at Washington's fashionable Jockey Club with Nixon's chief henchman, Murray Chotiner, who told him bluntly, "Layoff Pappas. You can be in trouble. You can be deported. It's not smart politics. You know Tom Pappas is a friend of the President." The next month, on 27 October 1971, Demetracopoulos was lunching with columnist Robert Novak at the Sans Souci and was threatened by Pappas himself, who came over from an adjacent table to tell him and Novak that he could make trouble for anyone who wanted him investigated. On the preceding 12 July, Demetracopoulos had testified before the European subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal of New York, about the influence of Thomas Pappas on US foreign policy and the Athens dictatorship (and vice versa). Before his oral testimony could be printed, a Justice Department agent appeared at the subcommittee's office and demanded a copy of the statement. Demetracopoulos had then, on 17 September, furnished a memorandum on Pappas's activities to the same subcommittee. His written deposition closed thus: "Finally, I have submitted separately to the subcommittee items of documentary evidence which I believe will be useful." This statement, wrote Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in their syndicated column, caused "extreme nervousness in the Nixon White House."

Later disclosures have accustomed us to the part-mafioso and part- banana-republic atmosphere in Washington during those years; it was still very shocking for Demetracopoulos to receive a letter from Ms Louise Gore. Ms Gore has since become more celebrated as the cousin of Vice President Albert Gore and the proprietress of the Fairfax Hotel in Washington, DC, where the boy politician grew up. She was then quite celebrated in her own right: as a Republican state Senator from Maryland, and as the woman who introduced Spiro Agnew to Richard Nixon. She was a close friend of Attorney General Mitchell, and had been appointed as Nixon's representative to UNESCO. Demetracopoulos lived, along with many congressmen and political types, as a tenant of an apartment in her hotel. He had also been a friend of hers since 1959. On 24 January 1972 she wrote to him:

Dear Elias --

I went to Perle's [Perle Mesta's] luncheon for Martha Mitchell yesterday and sat next to John. He is furious at you -- and your testimony against Pappas. He kept threatening to have you deported!!

At first I tried to ask him if he had any reason to think you could be deported and he didn't have any answer -- But then tried to counter by asking me what I knew about you and why we were friends.

It really got out of hand. It was all he'd talk about during lunch and everyone at the table was listening ...


Among those present at the table were George Bush, then ambassador to the United Nations, and numerous other diplomats. The Attorney General's lack of restraint and want of tact, on such an occasion and at the very table of legendary hostess Perle Mesta, were clearly symptomatic of a considerable irritation, even rage.

I have related this background in order to show that Demetracopoulos was under surveillance, that he possessed information highly damaging to an important Nixon-Kissinger client regime, and that his identity was well known to those in power, in both Washington and Athens. The United States ambassador in Athens at the time was Henry Tasca, a Nixon and Kissinger crony with a very lenient attitude to the dictatorship. (He later testified to a closed session of Congress that he, had known of the 1968 payments by the Greek secret police to the Nixon campaign.) In July 1971, shortly after Demetracopoulos testified before Congressman Rosenthal's subcommittee, Tasca had sent a four-page secret cable from Athens. It began:

For some time I have felt that Elias Demetracopoulos is head of a well-organized conspiracy which deserves serious investigation. We have seen how effective he has been in combatting our present policy in Greece. His aim is to damage our relations with Greece, loosen our NATO alliance and weaken the U.S. security position in the Eastern Mediterranean.


This was certainly taking Demetracopoulos seriously. So was the closing paragraph, which read as follows:

I am therefore bringing the matter to your personal attention in the hope that a way will be found to step up an investigation of Demetracopoulos to identify his sponsors, his sources of funds, his intentions, his methods of work and his fellow conspirators ... I bring this matter to your attention now, believing that as an alien resident in the United States it may be possible to submit him to the kind of searching and professional FBI investigation which would lift some of the mystery.


The cable was addressed, as is usual from an ambassador, to Secretary of State William Rogers. Yet it was also addressed -- highly unusually -- to Attorney General John Mitchell. But Mitchell, as we have seen, was the only attorney general ever to serve on Henry Kissinger's supervisory Forty Committee, which oversaw covert operations.

The State Department duly urged that "the Department of Justice do everything possible to see if we can make a Foreign Agent's case, or any kind of a case for that matter" against Demetracopoulos. Of course, as was later admitted, these investigations turned up nothing. The influence wielded by Demetracopoulos did not derive from any sinister source or nexus. But when he said that the Greek dictatorship had trampled its own society, used censorship and torture, threatened Cyprus, and bought itself political influence in Washington, he was uttering potent factual truths. Nixon himself confirmed the connection, between the junta and Pappas and Tasca and the two-way flow of dirty money, on a post. Watergate White House tape dated 23 May 1973. He is talking to his renowned confidential secretary, Rose Mary Woods:

Good old Tom Pappas, as you probably know or heard, if you haven't already heard, it is true, helped, at Mitchell's request, fund-raising for some of the defendants. ...He came up to see me on March 7, Pappas did. Pappas came to see me about the ambassador to Greece, that he wanted to -- he wanted to keep Henry Tasca there.


This same dictatorship had in June 1970 revoked Demetracopoulos's Greek citizenship, so he was a stateless person travelling only on a flimsy document giving him leave to re-enter the United States. This fact assumed its own importance in December 1970, when his blind father was dying of pneumonia, alone, in Athens. Demetracopoulos sought permission to return home under a safe-conduct or laissez-passer, and was able to enlist numerous congressional friends in the attempt. Among them were senators Frank E. Moss of Utah, Quentin N. Burdick of North Dakota, and Mike Gravel of Alaska, who signed a letter dated 11 December to the Greek government and to Ambassador Tasca. Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and William Fulbright of Arkansas also expressed a personal interest.

Neither the Athens regime nor Tasca replied directly, but on 20 December, four days after the old man had died without a visit from his only son, Senators Moss, Burdick, and Gravel received a telegram from the Greek embassy in Washington. This instructed them that Demetracopoulos should have applied in person to the embassy: an odd demand to make of a man whose passport and citizenship had just been cancelled by the dictatorship. Meanwhile, Demetracopoulos received a telephone call at his home, from Senator Kennedy in person, advising him not to accept any safe-conduct offer from Greece even if he was offered it. Had Demetracopoulos presented himself at the junta's embassy, he might well have been detained and kidnapped, in accordance with one of the plans we now know had been readied for his "disappearance." Of course, such a scheme would have been extremely difficult to carry out in the absence of some "cooperation" -- at least a blind eye -- from local US intelligence officials.

Declassified cable traffic between Ambassador Tasca in Athens and Kissinger's deputy Joseph Sisco at the State Department shows that Senator Kennedy's misgivings were amply justified. In a cable dated 14 December from Sisco to Tasca, the ambassador was told: "If GOG [Government of Greece] permits Demetracopoulos to enter, quite clearly we must avoid being put in a position of guaranteeing any assurances that he may have of being able to depart." Concurring with this extraordinary statement, Tasca added that there was a possibility of Senator Gravel attending the funeral of Demetracopoulos senior. Elias, wrote the ambassador, "undoubtedly hopes to exploit Senator's visit by providing some way of proving that conditions here are as repressive as he has been representing them to be. He could even try to arrange for some manifestation of violence, such as a small bomb."

The absurdity of this -- Demetracopoulos had no record whatever of the advocacy or practice of violence, as Tasca subconsciously recognized by making the hypothetical bomb a "small" one -- also has its sinister side. Suggested here is just the sort of alibi or provocation or pretext that the junta might need for a frame-up, or to cover up a "disappearance." The entire correspondence reeks of the unspoken priorities of both the embassy and the State Department, which reflect their contempt for elected United States senators, their dislike of dissent, and their need to gratify a group of Greek gangsters who are now rightly serving terms of life imprisonment.

Now look again at the computer index disgorged, after years of litigation, from Kissinger's NSC files. It bears the date of 18 December 1970 and appears to apprise Senators Moss, Burdick and Gravel that Demetracopoulos had met his end in an Athens prison. Was this a contingency plan? A cover story? As long as Dr Kissinger maintains his stubborn silence, and the control over his "private" state papers, it will be impossible to determine.

The same applies to the second attempt on Mr. Demetracopoulos of which we have knowledge. Having avoided the trap that seems to have been set for him in 1970, Demetracopoulos kept up his fusillade of leaks and disclosures, aimed at discrediting the Greek junta and embarrassing its American friends. He also became an important voice warning of the junta's designs on the independence of Cyprus and of US indifference to (or complicity in) that policy. In this capacity (discussed in detail in Chapter 7) he became a source of annoyance to Henry Kissinger. This can be established without difficulty. In a briefing paper presented to President Gerald Ford in October 1974, there are references to a "trace paper" about Demetracopoulos, to "the derogatory blind memo" about him, and to "the long Kissinger memo" on him. Once again, and despite repeated requests from lawyers, Kissinger has declined to answer any queries about the whereabouts of these papers, or shed any light on their contents. However, his National Security Council asked the FBI to amass any information that might discredit Demetracopoulos, and between 1972 and 1974, according to papers since declassified, the Bureau furnished Kissinger with slanderous and false material concerning, among other things, a romance which Demetracopoulos was allegedly conducting with a woman now dead, and a supposed relationship between him and Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the celebrated "Pentagon Papers," a man he has never met.

This might seem trivial, were it not for the memoirs of Constantine Panayotakos, the ambassador of the Greek junta to Washington, DC. Arriving to take up his post in February 1974, as the ambassador wrote in his later memoirs, entitled In the First Line of Defense:

I was informed about some plans to kidnap and transport Elias Demetracopoulos to Greece; plans which reminded me of KGB methods. ... On 29 Maya document was transmitted to me from Angelos Vlachos, Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry, giving the views of the United States ambassador Henry Tasca, which he agreed with, about the most efficient means of dealing with the conspiracies and the whole activity of Demetracopoulos. Tasca's views are included in a memorandum of conversation with the Foreign Minister Spyridon Tetenes of 27 May.

Finally, another brilliant idea of the most brilliant members of the Foreign Ministry in Athens, transmitted to me on 12 June, was for me to seek useful advice on the extermination of Elias Demetracopoulos from George Churchill, director of the Greek desk at the State Department, who was one of his most vitriolic enemies. [italics added]


(In Greek, the italicized word above is exoudeterosi. It is pretty strong. It is usually translated as "extermination," though "elimination" might be an alternative rendering. It is not a recipe for inconveniencing or hampering an individual, but for getting rid of him. ) Ambassador Panayotakos later wrote a detailed letter, which is in my possession, that he had direct knowledge of a plan to abduct Demetracopoulos from Washington. His testimony is corroborated by an affidavit which I also possess, signed under penalty of perjury by Charalambos Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos was at the time the Political Counsellor to the Greek embassy -the number three position -and was bidden to lunch at the nearby Jockey Club, in late May or early June of 1974, by Ambassador Panayotakos and the assistant military attache, Lieutenant Colonel Sotiris Yiounis. At the lunch, Yiounis broached the question of the kidnapping of Demetracopoulos, who was to be smuggled aboard a Greek NATO submarine at a harbor in Virginia.

Papadopoulos, who was Greek ambassador to Pakistan at the time he swore his affidavit, has since said that he was assured that Henry Kissinger was fully aware of the proposed operation, and "most probably willing to act as its umbrella." By that stage, the Greek junta had only a few weeks to live because of its crimes in Cyprus. Since the fall of the dictatorship, even more extensive evidence of the junta's assassination plans has been uncovered, if only at the Athenian end of the plot. But this was not a regime which ever acted without Washington's "understanding." Attempts to unearth more detail have also been made in Washington. In 1975 senators George McGovern and James Abourezk, seconded by Congressman Don Edwards of the House Intelligence Committee, asked Senator Frank Church to include the kidnap plot against Demetracopoulos in the investigative work of his famous committee on US intelligence. As first reported by the New York Times and then confirmed by Seymour Hersh, Kissinger intervened personally with Church, citing grave but unspecified matters of national security, to have this aspect of the investigation shut down.

Some of this may seem fantastic, but we do know that Kissinger was conducting a vendetta against Demetracopoulos (as was Ambassador Henry Tasca); we do know that Kissinger was involved in high-level collusion with the Greek junta and had advance knowledge of the plot to assassinate Archbishop Makarios; and we do know that he had used the US embassy in Chile to smuggle weapons for the contract killing of General Rene Schneider. The cover story in that case, too, was that the hired goons were "only" trying to kidnap him ...

We also know that two clients of Kissinger's Forty Committee, General Pinochet and Colonel Manuel Contreras, made use of the Chilean embassy in Washington to murder the dissident leader Orlando Letelier, not long after being received and flattered and in one case paid by Kissinger and his surrogates.

Thus the Demetracopoulos story, told here in full for the first time, makes a prima facie case that Henry Kissinger was at least aware of a plan to abduct and interrogate, and almost certainly kill, a civilian journalist in Washington, DC. In order to be cleared of the suspicion, and to explain the mysterious reference to Demetracopoulos's death in his own archives, Kissinger need only make those same archives at last accessible -- or else be subpoenaed to do so.
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Re: THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:11 am

Chapter 10: AFTERWORD: THE PROFIT MARGIN

IN HIS FURIOUS meeting at the State Department on 18 December 1975, shortly after his moment of complicity with the Indonesian generals over East Timor (see pages 101-6), Kissinger makes the following peculiar disavowal:

"I don't care if we sell equipment to Indonesia or not. I get nothing from it, I get no rakeoff."


One might have taken it for granted that a serving secretary of state had no direct interest in the sale of weapons to a foreign dictatorship; nobody at the meeting had suggested any such thing. How peculiar that Kissinger should deny an allegation that had not been made: answer a question that had not been asked.

It isn't possible to state with certainty when Kissinger began to profit personally from his association with the ruling circles in Indonesia, nor can it be definitely asserted that this profit was part of any "understanding" that originated in 1975. It's just that there is a perfect congruence between Kissinger's foreign policy counsel and his own business connections. One might call it a harmony of interests, rather than a conflict.

Six years after he left office, Kissinger set up a private consulting firm named Kissinger Associates, which exists to smooth and facilitate contact between multinational corporations and foreign governments. The client list is secret, and contracts with "the Associates" contain a clause prohibiting any mention of the arrangement, but corporate clients include or have included American Express, Shearson Lehmann, Arco, Daewoo of South Korea, H.J. Heinz, ITT Lockheed, Anheuser-Busch, the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Coca-Cola, Fiat, Revlon, Union Carbide, and the Midland Bank. Kissinger's initial fellow "associates" were General Brent Scow croft and Lawrence Eagleburger, both of whom had worked closely with him in the foreign policy and national security branches of government.

Numerous instances of a harmony between this firm and Kissinger's policy pronouncements can be cited. The best-known is probably that of the People's Republic of China. Kissinger assisted several American conglomerates, notably H.J. Heinz, to gain access to the Chinese market. As it was glowingly phrased by Anthony J.F. O'Reilly, CEO of Heinz:

Kissinger and his associates make a real contribution, and we think they are particularly helpful in countries with more centrally planned economies, where the principal players and the dynamics among the principal players are of critical importance. This is particularly true in China, where he is a popular figure and is viewed with particular respect. On China, basically, we were well on our way to establishing the baby food presence there before Henry got involved. But once we decided to move he had practical points to offer, such as on the relationship between Taiwan and Beijing. He was helpful in seeing that we did not take steps that would not have been helpful in Beijing. His relevance obviously varies from market to market, but he's probably at his best in helping with contacts in that shadowy world where that counts.


The Chinese term for this zone of shadowy transactions is guan-xi. In less judgmental American speech it would probably translate as "access," or influence-peddling. Selling baby food in China may seem innocuous enough, but when the Chinese regime turned its guns and tanks on its own children in Tienanmen Square in 1989, it had no more staunch defender than Henry Kissinger. Arguing very strongly against sanctions, he wrote that "China remains too important for America's national security to risk the relationship on the emotions of the moment." Taking the Deng Xiaoping view of the democratic turbulence, and even the view of those we now suppose to have pressed Deng from the Right, he added, "No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators." Of course, some governments would have found a way to meet with the leaders of those demonstrators. ... It is perhaps just as well that Kissinger's services were not retained by the Stalinist regimes of Romania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, which succumbed to just such public insolence later in the same year.

Nor was Kissinger's influence-peddling confined to Heinz's nutritious products. He assisted Atlantic Richfield/Arco to market oil deposits in China. He helped ITT (a corporation which had once helped him to over- throw the elected government of Chile) to hold a path-breaking board meeting in Beijing, and he performed similar services for David Rockefeller and the Chase Manhattan Bank, which held an international advisory committee meeting in the Chinese capital and met with Deng himself.

Six months before the massacre in Tienanmen Square, Kissinger set up a limited investment partnership named China Ventures, of which he personally was chairman, CEO and chief partner. Its brochure helpfully explained that China Ventures involved itself only with projects that "enjoy the unquestioned support of the People's Republic of China." The move proved premature: the climate for investment on the Chinese mainland soured after the repression that followed the Tienanmen Square massacres, and the limited sanctions approved by Congress. This no doubt contributed to Kissinger's irritation at the criticism of Deng. But while China Ventures lasted, it drew large commitments from American Express, Coca- Cola, Heinz and a large mining and extraction conglomerate named Freeport McMoRan, of which more in a moment.

Many of Kissinger's most extreme acts have been undertaken, at least ostensibly, in the name of anti-Communism. So it is amusing to find him exerting himself on behalf of a regime that can guarantee safe investment by virtue of a ban on trade unions, a slave-labor prison system, and a one-party ideology. Nor is China the sole example here. When Lawrence Eagleburger left the State Department in 1984, having been ambassador to Yugoslavia, he became simultaneously a partner of Kissinger Associates, a director of a wholly owned banking subsidiary of the Ljubljanska Banka, a bank then owned by the Belgrade regime, and the American representative of the Yugo minicar. Yugo duly became a client of Kissinger Associates, as did a Yugoslav construction concern named Enerjoprojeckt. The Yugo is of particular interest because it was produced by the large state-run conglomerate that also functioned as Yugoslavia's military-industrial and arms-manufacturing complex. This complex was later seized by Slobodan Milosevic, along with the other sinews of what had been the Yugoslav National Army, and used to prosecute wars of aggression against four neighboring republics. At all times during this protracted crisis, and somewhat out of step with many of his usually hawkish colleagues, Henry Kissinger urged a consistent policy of conciliation with the Milosevic regime. (Mr. Eagleburger in due course rejoined the State Department as Deputy Secretary and briefly became Secretary of State. So it goes.)

Another instance of the Kissingerian practice is the dual involvement of "the Associates" with Saddam Hussein. When Saddam was riding high in the late 1980s, and having his way with the departments of Commerce and Agriculture in Washington, and throwing money around like the proverbial drunken sailor (and using poison gas and chemical weapons on his Kurdish population without a murmur from Washington), the US-Iraq Business Forum provided a veritable slot-machine of contacts, contracts and opportunities. Kissinger's partner Alan Stoga, who had also been the economist attached to his Reagan-era Commission on Central America, featured noticeably on a Forum junket to Baghdad. At the same time, Kissinger's firm represented the shady Italian Banco Nazionale del Lavoro, which was later shown to have made illegal loans to the Hussein regime. As usual, everything was legal. It always is, when the upper middle class meets the lower Middle East.

In the same year -1989 Kissinger made his lucrative connection with Freeport McMoRan, a globalized firm based in New Orleans. Its business is the old-fashioned one of extracting oil, gas, and minerals. Its chairman, James Moffett, has probably earned the favorite titles bestowed by the business and financial pages, being beyond any doubt "flamboyant," "buccaneering," and a "venture capitalist."

In 1989, Freeport McMoRan paid Kissinger Associates a retainer of $200,000 and fees of $600,000, not to mention a promise of a 2 percent commission on future earnings. Freeport McMoRan also made Kissinger a member of its board of directors, at an annual salary of at least $30,000. In 1990, the two concerns went into business in Burma, the most grimly repressive state in all of South Asia. Freeport McMoRan would drill for oil and gas, according to the agreement, and Kissinger's other client, Daewoo ( which was then itself a venal corporate prop of an unscrupulous Korean regime), would build the plant. However, that year the Burmese generals, under their wonderful collective title of SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council), lost a popular election to the democratic opposition led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and decided to annul the result. This development -- producing yet more irritating calls for the isolation of the Burmese junta -- was unfavorable to the Kissinger Freeport-Daewoo triad, and the proposal lapsed.

But the following year, in March 1991, Kissinger was back in Indonesia with Moffett, closing a deal for a thirty-year license to continue exploiting a gigantic gold and copper mine. The mine is of prime importance for three reasons. First, it was operated as part of a joint venture with the Indonesian military government, and with that government's leader, the now-deposed General Suharto. Second, it is located on the island of Irian Jaya (in an area formerly known as West Irian): a part of the archipelago which in common with East Timor -- is only Indonesian by right of arbitrary conquest. Third, its operations commenced in 1973 -two years before Henry Kissinger visited Indonesia and helped unleash the Indonesian bloodbath in East Timor while unlocking a flow of weaponry to his future business partners.

This could mean no more than the "harmony of interest" I suggested above. No more, in other words, than a happy coincidence. What is not coincidental is the following:

• Freeport McMoRan's enormous Grasberg mine in Irian Jaya stands accused of creating an environmental and social catastrophe. In October 1995 the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a Federal body that exists to help us companies overseas, decided to cancel Freeport McMoRan's investment insurance for political risk -- the very element on which Kissinger had furnished soothing assurances in 1991. OPIC concluded that the Grasberg mine had "created and continues to pose unreasonable or major environmental, health or safety hazards with respect to the rivers that are being impacted by the tailings, the surrounding terrestrial ecosystem, and the local inhabitants."
• The "local inhabitants" who came last on that list are the Amungme people, whose protests at the environmental rape, and at working conditions in the mine, were met by Indonesian regular soldiers at the service of Freeport McMoRan, and under the orders of Suharto. In March 1996, large-scale rioting nearly closed the mine at a cost of four deaths and many injuries.

Freeport McMoRan mounted an intense lobbying campaign in Washington, with Kissinger's help, to get its OPIC insurance reinstated. The price was the creation of a trust fund of $100 million for the repair of the Grasberg site after it, and its surrounding ecology, had eventually been picked clean. All of this became moot with the overthrow of the Suharto dictatorship, the detention of Suharto himself, and the unmasking of an enormous nexus of "crony capitalism" involving him, his family, his military colleagues, and certain favored multinational corporations. This political revolution also restored, at incalculable human cost, the independence of East Timor. There was even a suggestion of a war crimes inquiry and a human rights tribunal, to settle some part of the account for the years of genocide and occupation. Once again, Henry Kissinger has had to scan the news with anxiety, and wonder whether even worse revelations are in store for him. It will be a national and international disgrace if the answer to this question is left to the pillaged and misgoverned people of Indonesia, rather than devolving onto a United States Congress that has for so long shirked its proper responsibility.
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Re: THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:12 am

Chapter 11: LAW AND JUSTICE

ALTHOUGH ONE COULD do no more than "deplore" a number of slaughtered children, there was in existence means of preventing one particular aspect of the principle of expediency from doing too much damage. Most international criminals were beyond the reach of man-made laws; Dimitrios happened to be within reach of one law. He had committed at least two murders and had therefore broken the law as surely as if he had been starving and had stolen a loaf of bread.

-- Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios


As Henry Kissinger now understands, there are increasingly noticeable rents and tears in the cloak of immunity that has shrouded him until now. Recent evolutions in national and international law have made his position an exposed and, indeed, a vulnerable one. For convenience, the distinct areas of law may be grouped under four main headings:

1. International Human Rights Law. This comprises the grand and sonorous covenants on the rights of the individual in relation to the state; it also protects the individual from other actors in the international community who might violate those rights. Following from the French Revolution's "Declaration of the Rights of Man;' international human-rights law holds that political associations are legitimate only insofar as they preserve the dignity and well-being of individuals, a view that challenges the realpolitik privilege given to the "national interest." The United States is directly associated with sponsoring many of these covenants and has ratified several others.

2. The Law of Armed Conflict. Somewhat protean and uneven, this represents the gradual emergence of a legal consensus on what is, and what is not, permissible during a state of war. It also comprises the various humanitarian agreements that determine the customary "law of war" and that attempt to reduce the oxymoronic element in this ancient debate.

3. International Criminal Law. This concerns any individual, including an agent of any state, who commits direct and grave atrocities against either his "own" citizens or those of another state; covered here are genocide, crimes against humanity, and other crimes of war. The Rome Statute, which also establishes an International Criminal Court for the trial of individuals, including governmental offenders, is the codified summa of this law as revised and updated since the Nuremberg precedent. It commands the signatures of most governments as well as, since 31 December 2000, that of the United States.

4. Domestic Law and the Law of Civil Remedies. Most governments have similar laws that govern crimes such as murder, kidnapping, and larceny, and many of them treat any offender from any country as the same. These laws in many cases permit a citizen of any country to seek redress in the courts of the offender's "host" country or country of citizenship. In United States law, one particularly relevant statute is the Alien Tort Claims Act.


The United States is the most generous in granting immunity to itself and partial immunity to its servants, and the most laggard in adhering to inter- national treaties (ratifying the Genocide Convention only in 1988 and signing the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights only in 1992). And the provisions of the Rome Statute, which would expose Kissinger to dire punishment if they had been law from as early as 1968, are not retroactive. The Nuremberg principles, however, were in that year announced by an international convention to have no statute of limitations. International customary law would allow any signatory country (again exempting the United States ) to bring suit against Kissinger for crimes against humanity in Indochina.

More importantly, United States federal courts have been found able to exercise jurisdiction over crimes such as assassination, kidnapping, and terrorism, even when these are supposedly protected by the doctrine of state or sovereign immunity. Of a number of landmark cases, the most salient one is the finding of the DC Circuit Court in 1980, concerning the car-bomb murder, by Pinochet's agents, of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. The court held that "(w)hatever policy options may exist for a foreign country;' the Pinochet regime "has no 'discretion' to perpetrate conduct designed to result in the assassination of an individual or individuals, action that is clearly contrary to the precepts of humanity as recognized in both national and international law." Reciprocally speaking, this would apply to an American official seeking to assassinate a Chilean. Assassination was illegal both as a private and a public act when Henry Kissinger was in power and when the attacks on General Schneider of Chile and President Makarios of Cyprus took place.

As the Hinchey report to Congress in 2000 now demonstrates that US government agents were knowingly party to acts of torture, murder, and "disappearance" by Pinochet's death squads, Chilean citizens will be able to bring suit in America under the Alien Tort Claims Act, which grants US federal courts "subject-matter jurisdiction" over a claim when a non-US citizen sues for a civil wrong committed in violation of a US treaty or other international law. Chilean relatives of the "disappeared" and of General Schneider have recently expressed an interest in doing so, and 1 am advised by several international lawyers that Henry Kissinger would indeed be liable under such proceedings.

The Alien Tort Claims Act would also permit victims in other countries, such as Bangladesh or Cambodia, to seek damages from Kissinger, on the model of the recent lawsuit held in New York against Li Peng, among the Chinese Communist officials most accountable for the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square.

A significant body of legal theory can be brought to bear on the application of "customary law" to the bombardment of civilians in Indochina. The Genocide Convention was not ratified by the United States until 1988. In 1951, however, it was declared by the International Court of Justice to be customary international law. The work of the International Law Commission is in full agreement with this view. There would be argument over whether the numberless victims were a "protected group" under existing law, and also as to whether their treatment was sufficiently indiscriminate, but such argument would place heavy burdens on the defense as well as the prosecution.*

An important recent development is the enforcement by third countries -- notably Spain -- of the international laws that bind all states. Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who initiated the successful prosecution of General Pinochet, has also secured the detention in Mexico of the Argentine torturer Ricardo Miguel Cavallo, who is now held in prison awaiting extradition. The parliament of Belgium has recently empowered Belgian courts to exercise jurisdiction over war crimes and breaches of the Geneva Convention committed anywhere in the world by a citizen of any country. This practice, which is on the increase, has at minimum the effect of limiting the ability of certain people to travel or to avoid extradition. The Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany have all recently employed the Geneva Conventions to prosecute war criminals for actions committed against non-nationals by non-nationals. The British House of Lords decision in the matter of Pinochet has also decisively negated the defense of "sovereign immunity" for acts committed by a government or by those following a government's orders. This has led in turn to Pinochet's prosecution in his own country.

There remains the question of American law. Kissinger himself admits (see page 105) that he knowingly broke the law in continuing to supply American weapons to Indonesia, which in turn used them to violate the neutrality of a neighboring territory and to perpetrate gross crimes against humanity. Kissinger also faces legal trouble over his part in the ethnic cleansing of the British colonial island of Diego Garcia in the early 1970s, when indigenous inhabitants were displaced to make room for a United States military base. Lawyers for the Chagos Islanders have already won a judgment in the British courts on this matter, which now moves to a hearing in the United States. The torts cited are "forced relocation, torture, and genocide."

In this altered climate, the United States faces an interesting dilemma. At any moment, one of its most famous citizens may be found liable for terrorist actions under the Alien Tort Claims Act, or may be subject to an international request for extradition, or may be arrested if he travels to a foreign country, or may be cited for crimes against humanity by a court in an allied nation. The non-adherence by the United States to certain treaties and its reluctance to extradite make it improbable that American authorities would cooperate with such actions, though this would gravely undermine the righteousness with which Washington addresses other nations on the subject of human rights. There is also the option of bringing Kissinger to justice in an American court with an American prosecutor. Again the contingency seems a fantastically remote one, but, again, the failure to do so would expose the country to a much more obvious charge of double standards than would have been apparent even two years ago.

The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame.

_______________

Notes:

* See especially Nicole Barrett: "Holding Individual Leaders Responsible for Violations of Customary International Law," Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Spring 2001.
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Re: THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:13 am

APPENDIX I: A FRAGRANT FRAGMENT

I AM TAKING the liberty of reproducing a correspondence, initially between Henry Kissinger and myself, which began in the New York Times Book Review in the fall of the year 2000. In a review (reprinted below) of The Arrogance of Power, the work by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan to which direct reference is made on page 13 of this book, 1 had essentially summarized and condensed the case against Nixon's and Kissinger's private and illicit diplomacy during the 1968 election; a case made much more fully in Chapter 1 here [see pages 8-15]. I also made reference to some other Nixon-era crimes and misdemeanors.

This drew a rather lengthy and -to put it no higher distinctly bizarre reply from Kissinger. Its full text is also appended, together with the responses that it occasioned in its turn. (I have no means of knowing why Kissinger recruited former General Brent Scow croft as his co-signer, unless it was for the reassurance of human company as well as the solidarity of a well-rewarded partner in the firm of Kissinger Associates.)

The correspondence makes three convenient points. It undermines pseudo-lofty attempts by Kissinger and his defenders to pretend that this book, or better say the arguments contained in it, are beneath their notice. They have already attempted to engage, in other words, and have with- drawn in disorder. Second, it shows the extraordinary mendacity, and reliance upon mendacity and upon non-credible but hysterical denial, that characterizes the Kissinger style. Third, it supplies another small window into the nauseating record of "rogue state" internal affairs.

Review by Christopher Hitchens The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan.


In one respect at least, the memoirs of Henry Kissinger agree with Sideshow, William Shawcross's report on the bombing of Cambodia. Both books confirm that Richard Nixon rather liked people to fear his own madness. In the fall of 1969, for example, he told Kissinger to warn the Soviet ambassador that the President was "out of control" on Indochina, and capable of anything. Kissinger claims that he regarded the assignment as "too dangerous" to carry out. But, as Anthony Summers now instructs us:

Three months earlier, however, Kissinger had sent that very same message by proxy when he instructed Len Garment, about to leave on a trip to Moscow, to give the Soviets "the impression that Nixon is somewhat 'crazy' -- immensely intelligent, well organized and experienced to be sure, but at moments of stress or personal challenge unpredictable and capable of the bloodiest brutality." Garment carried out the mission, telling a senior Brezhnev advisor that Nixon was "a dramatically disjointed personality... more than a little paranoid... when necessary, a cold-hearted butcher." The irony, the former aide reflected ruefully in 1997, was that everything he had told the Russians turned out to be "more or less true."


The great merit of The Arrogance of Power is that it takes much of what we already knew, or thought we knew (or darkly suspected), and refines and confirms and extends it. The inescapable conclusion, well bodyguarded by meticulous research and footnotes, is that in the Nixon era the United States was, in essence, a "rogue state." It had a ruthless, paranoid and unstable leader who did not hesitate to break the laws of his own country in order to violate the neutrality, menace the territorial integrity or destabilize the internal affairs of other nations. At the close of this man's reign, in an episode more typical of a banana republic or a "people's democracy;' his own secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, had to instruct the Joint Chiefs of Staff to disregard any military order originating in the White House.

Schlesinger had excellent grounds for circumspection. Not only had he learned that Nixon had asked the Joint Chiefs "whether in a crunch there was support to keep him in power," but he had also been told the following by Joseph Laitin, public affairs spokesman of the Office of Management and Budget. On his way to the West Wing in the spring of 1974, Laitin recalls:

I'd reached the basement, near the Situation Room. And just as I was about to ascend the stairway, a guy came running down the stairs two steps at a time. He had a frantic look on his face, wild-eyed, like a madman. And he bowled me over, so I kind of lost my balance. And before I could pick myself up, six athletic-looking young men leapt over me, pursuing him. I suddenly realized that they were Secret Service agents, that I'd been knocked over by the president of the United States.


Summers, a former BBC correspondent who has written biographies of Marilyn Monroe and J. Edgar Hoover, makes us almost spoiled for choice as we seek an explanation for this delirious interlude and others like it. Nixon might have been intoxicated; it took very little alcohol to make him belligerent, and he became even more thuggish and incoherent when he threw in a few sleeping pills as well. He might have been hypermedicated, and he may have helped himself to a very volatile anticonvulsant called Dilantin, given to him by a campaign donor rather than prescribed by a physician. He might have been in a depressive or psychotic state; for three decades and in great secrecy he consulted a psychotherapist named Dr Arnold A. Hutschnecker. He may even have believed the Jews were after him; on numberless occasions he used his dirtiest mouth to curse at Jewish plots and individuals.

The most arresting chapter gives us conclusive reason to believe that Nixon and his associates -- especially Attorney General John Mitchell and Vice President Spiro Agnew -consciously sabotaged the Vietnam peace negotiations in Paris in the fall of 1968. Elements of this story have surfaced before, in books by -- among others -- Clark Clifford and Richard Holbrooke, Seymour Hersh and William Bundy. But this is the most convincing account to have appeared so far, relying as it does on wiretaps released to Summers by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many senior Democrats knew this ghastly secret but kept it to themselves, if only because L.B.J. had lawfully -- if shamefacedly -- bugged Nixon and his co- conspirators, as well as the South Vietnamese embassy. (The FBI intercept cables are reproduced here.)

Using a series of extremist and shady intermediaries, the Nixon campaign covertly assured the South Vietnamese generals that if they boycotted President Lyndon B. Johnson's dearly bought conference ( which they ultimately did on the very eve of the election) they would get a more sympathetic administration. Irony is too feeble a word for what they actually got: a losing war, protracted for four years and concluded -with much additional humiliation -- on the same terms that Johnson and Hubert Humphrey had been offering in 1968. Summers has spoken to all the surviving participants, including the dramatic go-between figure of Anna Chennault, who now regards even herself as one of those betrayed by this foul deal. Almost half the names on that wall in Washington are inscribed with a date after Nixon and Kissinger took office. We still cringe from counting the number of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. Nixon's illegal and surreptitious conduct not only prolonged an awful war but also corrupted and subverted a crucial presidential election: the combination must make it the most wicked action in American history.

Summers speculates that fear of disclosure might supply the motive for the Watergate burglary, an element in the tainting of yet a second election. Again, though, he spoils us for choice. If Nixon's mobsters were not looking for Democratic opposition research on the 1968 treason, they were looking for evidence that the Democrats either knew about bribes to the president from Howard Hughes or, much more probably, that they knew about secret subventions paid to Nixon and Agnew by the Greek military dictatorship. Nice choices, you will agree; it has taken some effort to narrow them down to those tasteful three ( with a side bet on a prostitution racket that would have implicated both major parties).

For connoisseurs there is more detail -- about the shenanigans of Nixon's crony, Bebe Rebozo, in the Bahamas; about underhand dealing with the Mafia in Cuba; and about the slow public martyrdom of Mrs. Nixon, who, Summers says, may have been a victim of physical as well as mental cruelty. Too often for my taste, Summers employs the weasel word "reportedly," which ought to be banned. But he usually goes no farther than his evidence. And two serious and consistent themes assert themselves. Richard Nixon was able, time and again, to employ overseas entanglements to make end runs around American democracy. Short of money? shah, or the Greek junta, or some friendly but inconvenienced multinational, will provide the dough, redeemable in arms trades or rakeoffs or an imaginative new line on human rights. Stuck for an issue? Embrace the very despots -- Brezhnev or Mao -- whose demonization has fueled your career thus far. Polls narrowing? Sell your own country by conducting off- the-record two-track diplomacy with tinpot clients, as in 1968.

The second theme involves an attraction to violence that perhaps only Hutschnecker's posthumous notes will explain. Like many law-and-order types, Nixon had a relish for rough stuff and police provocation. He seems to have helped encourage the mayhem that both disfigured and transfigured his tour of Latin America as vice president in 1958. As president, he can be heard on tape agreeing to the employment of Teamster bullies to batter antiwar demonstrators ("Yeah. ...They've got guys who'll go in and knock their heads off"). This is the same duplicitous, gloating, insecure man who embellished his own mediocre war record in order to run for Congress, who adored obscene talk but was a poor hand with the fair sex, and who affected cloth-coat austerity while dabbling all his life in slush funds. A small man who claimed to be for the little guy, but was at the service of the fat cats. A pseudo-intellectual who hated and resented the real thing. Summers has completed the work of many predecessors, and made the task of his successors very difficult. In the process, he has done an enormous service by describing, to the citizens of a nation founded on law and right, the precise obscenity of that moment when the jutting jaw of a would-be Caesar collapses into the slobbering underlip of a weak and self-pitying king.

In Defense of Nixon

To the Editor:

We would like to raise some questions of fact about Christopher Hitchens's tendentious account of a tendentious book, Anthony Summers's "Arrogance of Power" (Oct. 8).

1. Neither of us was associated with Richard Nixon during the 1968 election campaign, but the allegations that he blocked a Johnson administration Vietnam peace initiative remain, in our view, allegations unsubstantiated by persuasive evidence. In any case, the record shows that the South Vietnamese foot-dragging (alleged to be at the behest of Nixon underlings) -even if the account were true -- could not have had the con- sequences that Summers claims. The expanded Paris peace talks began in early November, and any delay was therefore very brief; Nixon -- as president-elect and at the peak of his leverage -- encouraged President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to cooperate with the Johnson administration. Moreover, if the issue is political motivation, any discussion of this question has to begin with the indications from Soviet archives that Soviet leaders were led to believe that a main motive of rushing the bombing halt and peace talks was to get Hubert Humphrey elected.

2. It also needs to be borne in mind that the expanded Paris talks, once they began, were about procedure, not substance. Those talks immediately deadlocked, not on the substance of how to end the war but on whether the Vietcong guerrillas should have the same status at the table as the government of South Vietnam. No substantive proposal of any kind was put forward by the Johnson administration. It is therefore nonsense to assert that Nixon in 1972 achieved no better terms than what Lyndon Johnson was "offering" in 1968. (Hanoi rejected compromise terms until 1972.)

3. The reviewer plays the usual numbers game with American soldiers killed in action, claiming that nearly half occurred on Nixon's watch. One-third would be more nearly accurate. But that is not the essence of the misrepresentation. When Nixon came into office, America had already suffered 36,000 soldiers killed in action. Of the 20,000 killed in the Nixon period, 12,000 occurred in the first year before any new policy could take effect, 9,000 in the first six months -- clear legacies of the previous administration. When Nixon came in, American soldiers killed in action had run at an average rate of 1,500 per month for a year. At the end of his first term, they had been reduced to 50 per month. When Nixon entered office, American troops in Vietnam stood at 525,000 and were still increasing according to plans made in the Johnson administration. In 1972, they had been reduced to 25,000.

4. The Nixon administration concluded the first strategic arms control agreement and the first agreement banning biological weapons; opened relations with China; ended the decades-long crisis over Berlin; launched the Arab-Israeli peace process; and initiated the Helsinki negotiations, generally accepted as weakening the Soviets' control of their satellite empire and fostering German unification. Are these the actions of a "rogue" leader, as Hitchens calls Nixon?

5. Nixon was a strategist. He did want the notion to get around, as a strategic ploy, that if provoked by a foreign aggressor, he might respond disproportionately. But it is important here to separate the Nixon who some- times expressed extreme statements to his confidants for dramatic or rhetorical effect and the Nixon who never made a really serious international move without the most careful and cautious analysis. It is laughable to imagine Richard Nixon ordering a domestic coup. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger did apparently in Nixon's last days direct the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore orders from their commander in chief an unprecedented arrogation of authority. Whatever his motives, Schlesinger never came to either of us ( or anyone else, so far as we know) with his concerns and what to do about them.

6. As for the story by Joe Laitin ( a close associate of Schlesinger) that a frenetic Nixon came tearing down the stairs two at a time, pursued by six Secret Service agents, and literally knocked Laitin over -- no way. Nixon could not have gone down a set of stairs two at a time if his life depended on it.

HENRY A. KISSINGER New York BRENT Scow CROFT Washington [November 5, 2000]


Nixon Descending

To the Editor:

In reading Henry A. Kissinger and Brent SCOW croft's spirited defense of Richard Nixon (Letters, Nov. 5), I was surprised that they felt it necessary in making their case to say I had fabricated the details of my strange encounter with the president. I was there; they weren't.

However, they miss the point. Whether the president bowled me over or not is unimportant. I cannot swear that he was descending the stairs two at a time, three at a time or one at a time. All I can say is that the desperate look on his face as he was pursued by the Secret Service agents alarmed me and prompted my call to Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. Because I had direct access to Schlesinger, having worked with him for years, I was able to report the raw details of the incident immediately after it happened. As Kissinger and Scow croft well know, history cannot be tampered with, and suggesting I lied about my encounter with President Nixon can't change what actually took place.

JOE LAITIN Bethesda, Md. [November 19, 2000]


Nixoniana

To the Editor:

In his and Brent Scowcroft's letter (Nov. 5), former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger denied having been associated with Defense Secretary James Schlesinger in directing the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore orders from President Richard Nixon. As one who during 1973-75 served on one of the Battle Staff units, on permanent standby to brief the president and top commanders in the event of a nuclear crisis, I know otherwise. As I have testified in secret debriefings and in both open and closed sessions of House and Senate committees as far back as 1975, Kissinger signed or countersigned at least three such orders in the final year of the Nixon presidency. I have so testified under penalty of perjury several times.

After the first such order in 1973 signed by Kissinger, the Joint Chiefs demanded that any subsequent ones be countersigned by at least one other Nixon cabinet officer. A second such order, again an instruction not to obey the president until further notice, was signed by Kissinger and, to the best of my recollection, Elliot Richardson. At least one other was jointly signed by Kissinger and Defense Secretary Schlesinger. Such orders were always sent "Top Secret, Eyes Only, Limited Distribution;' bypassing other traffic. Sometimes they remained in effect for a week, most times only two to four days. The orders were issued at times of perceived Nixon mental instability, I repeatedly received them in my own hands, as did numerous others serving in sensitive nuclear control positions during that last horrific year of the Nixon presidency.

BARRY A. TOLL Painesville, Ohio [December 12, 2000]

To the Editor:

The letter by Henry Kissinger and Brent Scow croft, referring to our Nixon biography, "The Arrogance of Power;" was an inept barrage. They assert that allegations of Nixonian sabotage of the 1968 Johnson peace effort are "unsubstantiated by persuasive evidence;" then fail to counter any of our detailed analysis -- which includes the recently released record of F.B.I. surveillance conducted on the eve of the election that brought Nixon to power.

Kissinger and Scow croft cite Soviet archival sources, of all things, to insinuate that the Johnson peace initiative was just a political ploy "to get Hubert Humphrey elected." Any reading of the record of the pivotal White House meetings, available at the Johnson Library, dispels that notion. But even if that had been the case, it would not mitigate the offense indicated by the mass of information suggesting that Nixon did the unconscionable -- as an unelected political candidate he meddled in the government's conduct of highly sensitive peace negotiations.

Readers of our book will find that we account, page by page, for our sources -which included more than a thousand interviews. Had Kissinger granted us an interview, we would have faithfully reported his views on relevant matters. We made nine written requests over a two-year period, but he ducked and weaved and never came through.

ANTHONY SUMMERS ROBBYN SWAN Cappoquin, Ireland [December 12, 2000]


Unpublished

To the Editor:

I suppose it is a distinction of some sort to be attacked at such length by Henry Kissinger and (for some reason) his business partner General Brent Scow croft. It is certainly fascinating to see the evident nervousness with which they approach the allegations I made.

The record of Henry Kissinger's underhand involvement with the Nixon presidential campaign of 1968 is so extensively documented by now, including by Nixon himself, that one rubs the bleary eyes to read a denial of it. "Neither of us," write the two men, "was associated" with that campaign. Misery is said to love company; I have never bothered to inquire whether General Scow croft played any part in that unhappy episode but his own modesty -perhaps disappointment -only serves to put his co- author's credibility in starker contrast with the facts. Mr. Kissinger was hired as Nixon's principal advisor for national security as soon as the election was over, even though the two men had met only once. It was, moreover, Nixon's first appointment. Does Kissinger now deny that this was unconnected to the many surreptitious services performed by him, from Paris, for John Mitchell and for Nixon himself? If so, the flabbergasting denial of established facts would be interesting only insofar as it suggested something hitherto unguessed-at: the prickings of an uneasy conscience.

I make this perhaps unwarrantable suggestion because of a peculiar formulation later in the same paragraph, where Mr. Kissinger (I've done with Scow croft for now), says that:

the record shows that the South Vietnamese foot-dragging (alleged to be at the behest of Nixon underlings) -- even if the account were true -- could not have had the consequence that Summers claims. The expanded Paris peace talks began in early November, and any delay was therefore very brief; Nixon -- as president-elect and at the peak of his leverage -- encouraged President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to cooperate with the Johnson administration. (Italics added.)

This is a finely crafted paragraph and no mistake. But it is also very dishonestly argued. The South Vietnamese foot-dragging is not "alleged" but has been asserted and extensively documented. If the other emphasis of "alleged " is the intended one, then it was not at the "behest of underlings" -- the now-familiar "deniable" scheme whereby the chief is never told what his deputies do -- but at the direct instigation of Nixon himself. This has been solidly phrased by many Democratic and Republican high-level participants in these momentous events, and is not challenged, let alone rebutted, by Kissinger. "Early November" may sound suitably autumnal as a description of the seasonal setting of these same events, but it stretches to cover the date of the election itself and is thus designed to obscure what it purports to illuminate. What Kissinger means is that in the short interval when the actual "foot-dragging" took place, and as a thinkable consequence of that precise interval, one regime replaced another in the White House. That is, after all, the whole hypothesis (and the whole accusation) in the first place. Once President, Nixon did indeed appear to hew to the Johnson line -- which is another element in the case against him and his newly promoted "National Security Advisor;' who had no principled differences with that line to begin with.

The preceding and succeeding passages also betray unease. Kissinger does not say that there is no evidence for this grave allegation. He says that the evidence is not persuasive. Does he care to say what is unpersuasive about the evidence adduced by so many historians and participants, from the hawkish Bundy and Haldeman to the more skeptical Clark Clifford? Evidently he does not. Instead, there comes a breathtaking and highly suggestive change of subject:

If the issue is political motivation, any discussion of this question has to begin with the indications from Soviet archives that Soviet leaders were led to believe that a main motive of rushing the bombing halt and peace talks was to get Hubert Humphrey elected. (Italics in original.)

This clumsily constructed sentence deserves a close parsing. Apparently, political motivation is an allowable sub-text of the argument over the Paris negotiations after all, since if it can be alleged -- actually only suggested -- about the Democratic incumbents it can also surely be alleged about their Republican opponents. So one is grateful for Kissinger's perhaps inadvertent concession of common ground. However, if the Johnson-Humphrey regime sought to time the talks for their own electoral purposes (and this writer was not and is not in any position to approve of anything they undertook) then they did so in public view, and as the legally elected and constituted government of the United States. In that capacity, too, they would have been subject to the judgment of the voters as to their likely opportunism. Whereas Messrs Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell and Kissinger (only one of them so far unindicted for one abuse of power or another) would have been conducting a "diplomacy" with unaccredited interlocutors, illegal under the Logan Act, concealed not only from both the public and denominated negotiators of the country but also from its electorate! This indeed is part of the essential gravamen of the charge. To put the two notions on the same footing, and to lard them with vague and unsupported innuendoes about "Soviet" knowledge, is to take the same attitude to the United States Constitution that Kissinger was later to adopt towards the Chilean one.

It is obviously true to say, in a military-technocratic sense, that there is some extensive cross-over between the war as waged by Johnson and Humphrey and the war as "inherited" by Nixon and Kissinger. To that extent, some of the assertions of point (3) need not be disputed. ("One- third would be more nearly accurate." Good grief -so Kissinger has been counting them after all, while daring to accuse me of playing "the usual numbers game.") However, if the "legacy" transmitted from one administration to the next was indeed passed through a filter of illegal secret dealing with an undisclosed third power -- as has been authoritatively argued, and as the outgoing administration certainly believed -and if the effect of this was to enhance the level of violence rather than to diminish it, then the case for regarding Mr. Kissinger as a war criminal, careless only of American deaths, is complete on those terms alone.

Your readers might care to note that in seeking further to dilute the above implications, he says nothing to my original point about hugely increased Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian casualties during the years 1969-1975; a period when the war and its devastation was extended into large new tracts of formerly neutral and civilian territory. Such an omission cannot be accidental; it is the sort of "oversight" which results from a racist world-view and hopes -- I am sure in vain -- to concentrate the attention and sympathy of your audience only upon its "own" losses.

The remaining paragraphs of his letter are replete with boilerplate propaganda and pitiful falsehood, much of it ably disposed of by the later letters you have printed from Mr. Laitin and Mr. Toll. My forthcoming book The Trial of Henry Kissinger will, I hope, supply the refutation of the residual claims.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Washington, DC


[A P.S. for readers: I do not complain of not seeing my own letter in print; it was excessively lengthy and I had already had my say in the columns of the Book Review. I also delayed too long in sending it, in case Kissinger -. or even the hapless Scowcroft -- might choose to take on the annihilating replies they had received from Laitin and Toll. But answer came there none, so I allowed myself the satisfaction of finishing an argument Kissinger had started and then abandoned.]
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Re: THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:14 am

APPENDIX II: THE DEMETRACOPOULOS LETTER

DOBROVIR & GEBHARDT
SUITE 1105
1025 VERMONT AVENUE, N.W.
(202)347-8118
TELEX: 6503136357

WILLIAM A. DOBROVIR
JOSEPH D. GEBHARDT
ROBERT L. BAUM
ROBIN A. FRADKIN
NINA JOAN KIMBALL
COUNSEL: BETH L. DON
OF COUNSEL: ELIZABETH L. NEWMAN, PC

September 3, 1987

BY MESSENGER

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
c/o James E. Wesner, Esq.
Ginsberg, Feldman, Weil & Bress
Suite 700
1250 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

You will recall correspondence I sent to you, care of your attorney James Wesner, in 1980, concerning NSC documents referring to Elias P. Demetracopoulos. You never replied to those letters, in particular to the last, October 24, 1980, letter. From what you had told us through your attorney at that time, we were led to believe that neither you nor NSC possessed any of the described documents. Events since then require us to renew this matter with you.

1. Papers of Richard M. Nixon, released in May 1987, included John Dean files relating to Mr. Demetracopoulos, but no NSC files, as far as we know.

2. As you know (since we sent you copies), NSC released to us copies of computer indices showing that while you were National Security Advisor and Chairman of the 40 committee, the NSC did have copies of documents relating to Mr. Demetracopoulos. NSC informed us that the documents, if not in the Nixon papers (as they do not seem to be), were taken by you and presumably repose in your personal files, those files sent to the National Archives, or those files you have deposited in the Library of Congress but which are closed to the public until 2001.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
September 3, 1987
Page 2

3. One of the NSC computer indices shows a document, dated December 18, 1970, which refers to "Mr. Demetracopoulos death in Athens prison." That was about the time that the first attempts were made by the Greek dictatorship to kidnap Mr. Demetracopoulos, then living in this country, presumably to spirit him back to Greece to his "death in [an] Athens prison." This has recently been documented in sworn statements of knowledgeable Greek officials. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by the late Sen. Frank Church, began investigating the incident in connection with its study of intelligence activities relating to Greece: but, according to Committee sources, as reported by Seymour Hersh in his book The Price of Power, you urged the Committee to drop the investigation, and it did so.

4. Documents released by the CIA since 1980 refer to briefings for then President Ford in October 1974. The document refers to a "trace paper" about Mr. Demetracopoulos, a "derogatory blind memo" and "the long Kissinger memo on Elias [Demetracopoulos]," "left ...with General Skowcroft." Copies of pertinent documents are enclosed.

You should be aware that after a great deal of discussion, correspondence and congressional investigation, both the FBI and then Director William Webster and the CIA under the late Director William Casey, acknowledged that their years of investigation turned up not a shred of .derogatory. information about Mr. Demetracopoulos. A copy of a document is enclosed.

We cannot help but assume that you possess at least a copy of "the long Kissinger memo" on Mr. Demetracopoulos, and you may also possess copies of the "trace paper" and the "derogatory blind memo."

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
September 3, 1987
Page 3

We ask that, in order to complete the historical record you provide Mr. Demetracopoulos promptly with copies of the mentioned documents.

Sincerely yours,

William A. Dobrovir
Enclosures
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Re: THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:14 am

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When Harper's magazine was good enough to publish the two long essays that together became the core of this book, my friend and publisher Rick MacArthur sent an early copy round to ABC News in New York. Since we had criticized the deference of the American media quite as much as we had attacked the moral sloth of the overfed American "human rights" community, he thought it was only fair to give Nightline's producer the right of reply. After an interval, we got our answer. "Is there," said the top man at that top-rated Kissinger-showcasing show, "anything new here?"

Rick and I hugged ourselves with promised laughter at that. In Washington and New York and Los Angeles and every other cultural capital, the shallow demand for novelty is also an ally of a favorite spin-tactic of the powerful, which is to confront a serious allegation not by refusing to deny it but instead by trying to reclassify it as "old news:' And of course, the joke was therefore on the producer, who had come up with a stale and predictable and exhausted response. (We later asked him if there was anything fresh about his question. )

Had it been asked in good faith, of course, that same question would still require a straight answer. Here it is. The information in this book is not "new" to the people of East Timor and Cyprus and Bangladesh and Laos and Cambodia, whose societies were laid waste by a depraved statecraft. Nor is it "new" to the relatives of the tortured and disappeared and murdered in Chile. But it would be new to anyone who relied on ABC News for information. It is not new to the degraded statesmen who agree to appear on that network in return for being asked flattering questions. But some of it might come as news to the many decent Americans who saw their own laws and protections violated, and their own money spent in their name but without their leave, for atrocious purposes that could not be disclosed, by the Nixon-Kissinger gang. Oh yes, this is an old story all right. But I hope and intend to contribute to writing its ending.

As a matter of fact, there are a few disclosures in the book; some of the new material shocked even its author. But I'm not here to acknowledge my own work. Wherever possible, I give credit and attribution in the narrative itself. Some debts must still be mentioned.

Nobody in Washington who takes on the Kissinger matter can ever be clear of debt to Seymour Hersh, who first contrasted the man's reputation with his actions, and by this method alone, as well as by heroic excavations of the record, began the slow process which will one day catch up with the worthless, evasive cleverness of official evil. This is a battle for transparency and for historical truth, among other things, and if Hersh has any rival in that area it is Scott Armstrong, founder of the National Security Archive, which has been deputizing as Washington's equivalent of a Truth and Justice Commission until the real thing comes along. ("Then let us pray that come it may ..."')

During their long absence from the moral radar-screen of the West, the people of East Timor could have had no better and braver friends than Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn. The family of Orlando Letelier, and the families of so many other Chilean victims, could always count on Peter Kornbluh, Saul Landau and John Dinges, who in Washington have helped keep alive a case of crucial importance that will one day be vindicated. Lucy Komisar, Mark Hertsgaard, Fred Branfman, Kevin Buckley, Lawrence Lifschultz will, I know, all recognize themselves in my borrowings from their more original and more courageous work.

Sometimes a chat with an editor can be encouraging; sometimes not. I was in the middle part of my first explanatory sentence with Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine, when he broke in to say: "Done. Write it. High time. We'll do it." I didn't trust myself then to thank him, as I do now. So instead I got on with it, which I could not have done without the unusual Ben Metcalf at the Harper's office. Together with Sarah Vos and Jennifer Szalai, punctilious fact-checkers, we went over it again and again, marvelously nauseated at the renewed realization that it was all true.

The current state of international human-rights legislation inchoate. But, in an uneven yet seemingly discernible fashion, it is evolving to the point where people like Kissinger are no longer above the law. Welcome and unexpected developments have had a vertiginous effect: I hope that my closing section on this area is out of date by the time it is published. For their help in guiding me through the existing statutes and precedents, I am enormously obliged to Nicole Barrett of Columbia University, to Jamin Raskin and Michael Tigar at the Washington College of Law at American University, and to Geoffrey Robertson QC.

There are very few mirthful moments in these pages. Still, I remember so well the day in 1976 when Martin Amis, then my colleague at the New Statesman, told me that his literary pages would serialize Joseph Heller's Good as Gold. He showed me the proposed extract. Chapters 7 and 8 of that novel, in particular, are imperishable satire, and must be read and reread. (The relevant passage of sustained and obscene and well-reasoned abuse, which shames the publishing industry as well as the journalistic racket for its complicity with this deceitful and humorless toad, begins with the sentence: "Even that fat little fuck Henry Kissinger was writing a book!") I later became a friend of Joe Heller, whose death in 1999 was a calamity for so many of us, and my last acknowledgement is to the invigorating effect of his warm, broad-minded, hilarious, serious, and unquenchable indignation.

Christopher Hitchens
Washington, DC,
25 January 2001
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Re: THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, by Christopher Hitchens

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 4:15 am

INDEX

ABC News 148, 149
Nightline 148
Abourezk, James 119
Abrams, General Creighton 22,
28
civilian casualties 33
Agnew, Spiro T. 13, 113, 135, 144
Aldrich, George 104
Algeria 34
Allende, Dr Salvador
election alarms Nixon 55-6
overthrow 67
US plot against 56-66, 72-3
Ambler, Eric 127
Ambrose, Stephen 9
Amis, Martin 150
Anderson, Jack 40, 107
Anderson, Robert
denies Cyprus coup 85
Angola 103-4, 106-7
Armstrong, Scott 149
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret
World of Richard Nixon
(Summers and Swan) 13, 132,
133-7
Aspin, Les 54
Aubrac, Raymond 19, 21
Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw 124

Bangladesh 129
US manipulations 50-54
Barrett, Nicole 130n, 150
Blood, Archer 44-5, 46, 47
Bonanos, General Grigorios
The Truth 85
Booster, Davis Eugene 52
Boyatt, Thomas 81, 83
Branfman, Fred 39-40, 149
Bremer, Jeremy 101, 105
Brown, GeneralGeorge 17
Brown, Jerome 39
Brown, Tina 4
Brzezinksi, Zbigniew 14
Buckley, Kevin 30-33, 149
Bullene, General Egbert F. 28
Bundy, McGeorge 29-30, 143
Bundy, William 15, 135
The Tangled Web 14
Burdick, Quentin N. 115, 117
Burma 124
Bush Sr, George 113

CaIlaghan, James 87
Cambodia 7, 129
bombing of 30, 34-40
Khmer Rouge 23-4
Korda's jest 1, 5
Casey, William 147
Cavallo, Ricardo Miguel 130
Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA)
overseen by the Forty Committee
16-18
Chennault, Anna 8, 9
peace negotiations 12, 13-14, 135
Washington role 10
Cherry, Philip 52, 54
Chile
CIA and Contreras 72-6
international law 129, 130
overthrow of Allende 55-67
Pinochet's rule 67-71
China
and Cyprus 88
Kissinger's business in 121-3
and Pakistan 47-50
Chotiner, Murray 112
Chou En Lai
and Pakistan 47-50
Choudhury, G. W. 48
Christian, George 8
Church, Frank 119
Churchill, George 118
Clements Jr, William P. 17
Clifford, Clark 14, 135, 143
Counsel to the President 9-11
Colby, William 17, 29-30
ConnaIly, John 8
Constantopoulos, Savvas 85
Contreras, Colonel Manuel 70,
119
CIA relationship 73-4, 75-6
Corson, Colonel William 27
Counsel to the President (Clifford)
9-11
Cuba 78
Cyprus
overthrow of Makarios 77-84

Daewoo 124
A Dangerous Place (Moynihan) 92
De Loach, Cartha (Deke) 8, 12-13
Dean, John 7
Demetracopoulos, Elias P. 82, 86,
146-7
makes enemies 108-13
andPappas 111-13
unable to see father 115-16
vendetta against 114-19
Deng Xiaoping 88, 122
Diem, Bui 12
Dinges, John 149
Diplomacy (Kissinger) 93
Dobrovir, WilliamA.109-10,
146-7
Donovan, Major General Leo 28

Eagleburger, Lawrence 101-6
KissingerAssociates 121, 123
East Timor
Ford undermines Kissinger 107
Indonesian invasion 91-2
Kissinger questioned about 93-8
Kissinger's relations with Indonesia
98-101
post-colonial vaccum 90-91
State Department row 101-7
Eisenhower, Dwight D. 34
Ellsberg, Daniel 117
Evans, Harold 4
Evans, Rowland 113
Farooq, Major 51
Fawcett, J.E.S. 88
Ford, Gerald R. x
on the Forty Committee 17
Cambodia 24
East Timor 91-2, 94, 95, 96, 97,
107
meets Mujib 50
Forty Committee 16-18
oversees CIA 16-18
Freeport McMoRan 98, 122, 124
Frei, Eduardo 57
Fuentes de Alarcon, Jorge Isaac 68
Fulbright, William J. 82, 86, 115

Gandhi, lndira
Nixon's dislike for 49
Garz6n, Baltasar 130
Gaulle, Charles de
and Vietnam 22-3
Gelb, Les 103-4
Goa 94, 99
Goodman, Amy 97-8, 149
Gore, Louise 113
Gravel, Mike 115, 117
Gray, Patrick 8
Greece
and Cyprus 78-80, 80-84
and Demetracopoulos 111-19
rule of the generals 80, 86, 87 ,
108-9
Griffin, George 53

Habib, Philip 101-6
Haig, General Alexander 61
Cambodia 36, 37
Haldeman, H.R. 143
on Cambodia 36, 37
excitement over Cuban soccer 78-9
investigating 1968 campaign 7-9
on Kissinger's election concerns 22
on secrets of Kissinger 42-3
Handwerk, General Morris 28
Harper's magazine 150
Harriman, Averell 11, 21
Hecksher, Henry 65
Heinz (H.J.) Corporation 121
Heller, Joseph v, 150
Good as Gold v, 150
Helms, Richard
against Allende 56, 57
Hersh, Seymour 14, 119, 135, 149
Hertsgaard, Mark 149
Hirota, Koki 29, 34
Holbrooke, Richard
Vietnam peace negotiations 9,
11-12, 135
Hoover, I. Edgar 42
Horman, Charles 68
Humphrey, Hubert 6
peace negotiations 10, 13, 14, 135,
137, 141
Huntingdon, Samuel 14
Hutschnecker, Dr Arnold A. 134, 136
Hyland, William 103
In the First Line of Defense
(Panayotakos) 117-18
India
Goa 94, 99
Nixon's dislike of 49
Indonesia
Kissinger's business in 124-6
population and human rights
97-8
see also East Timor
Ingersoll, Robert 101-6
Ioannides, Dimitrios 80-81, 82, 83
Iraq
Kissinger's business in 123
Irwin, John 53
Isaacson, Walter 14
Viaux plot 64
Jackson, Henry 82
Johnson, Lyndon B.
blackmail 7-9
bombing halt 21, 41
peace negotiations 13, 135, 141,
143
The Vantage Point 14
Kamm, Henry 39
Karamessines, Thomas 57, 61-2, 65
Keating, Kenneth 46-7
Kenda1l, Donald 56
Kennedy, Edward 39, 115, 116
Khan, General Yahya 45-7, 49, 50, 53
Kissinger, Henry
Allende overthrow 61
approaches to China 48-50
author's response to 133-7 ,
141-5
Bangladesh 50-54
business dealings 120-26
Cambodia 24, 34-40, 133
civilian deaths in Indochina 28-30,
41-3
claims distraction by Watergate
78
committees 38
considers nuclear weapons 33
and Contreras 73, 75-6
on Cyprus 77, 79
defects to Nixon 15-16, 19-20
defends Nixon 137-9
and Demetracopoulos 110-19,
116-19
Diplomacy 93
East Timor secret conversation
101-7
election concerns 22-3
excitability 78-9
Indonesian visit 91-3, 98-101
interviewed about East Timor
93-8
on "irresponsible" democracy 55
need for "deniability" 65-7
no "rakeoff" from Indonesia 106,
120
offenses ix-xi
organizes Allende's coup 56-66
overthrow of Makarios 79-89
Pakistan 46-50
Paris peace negotiations 7-8,
11-16, 20
phone tapping 40
and Pinochet 69-71
position within international law
127-31
and Rockefeller 19, 20
targets individuals 108
Turkish invasion of Cyprus
86-9
two-track operations 21
The White House Years 22, 36-7
worried about Pinochet files 1-4
Years of Renewal 4, 69-70, 78, 79
Years of Upheaval 4, 77, 79
Kissinger Associates
clients and dealings 120-26
Komisar, Lucy 149
Koppel, Ted 4, 39
Korda, Michael 1-2, 5
Kornbluh, Peter 69, 149
Korry, Ed 51, 57, 62
on Kissinger's tactics 65-6
Kubisch, Jack B.
on Pinochet 67-8
Kurds vii
Laird, Melvin 29, 36
opposes bombing strategy 38
Laitin, Joe 134, 139, 145
Lake, Anthony 38
Landau, Saul 149
Lansdale, Colonel 24
Laos 7
bombing of 30, 34-6, 38
Lapham, Lewis 150
Leigh, Monroe 95, 101-6
Leighton, Bernardo 68
Lester, Major General James A. 28
Letelier, Orlando 68, 70, 76, 119, 129,
149
Li Peng 129
Liechty, C. Philip 99
Lifschultz, Lawrence 47, 51, 52, 53, 149
Lord, Winston 47
MacArthur, General Douglas 27
MacArthur, Rick 148
McCloskey, Peter 39
McCone, John 111
McGovern, George 119
MacMaster, Brian 64
McNally, Sir Tom 87
McNamara, Robert 29-30
civilian casualties in Vietnam 31
Makarios, Archbishop Mihai! 49, 119,
129
overthrow 79-89
received in Washington 86
The Truth 85
Malik, Adam 100
Marcovich, Herbert 19, 21
Marshal, General Arturo 62
Mascarhenas, Anthony 46, 51
Maw, Carlyle 101, 104
Mayaguez 23-4
Mesta, Perle 113-14
Metcalf, Ben 150
Milosevic, Slobodan 123
Mitchell, John 142
covert operations 114-15
onFortyCommittee 17-18
furious with Demetracopoulos
113-14
hands money to Pappas 111
and Kendall 56
Kissinger listens to 36
Paris peace negotiations 10, 13-14,
134-5
Mobutu, Sese Seko 107
Moffitt, Ronni Karpen 68, 76, 129
Morgan, Thomas 86
Morgenthau, Henry 44
Morris, Roger 33, 38
on Kissinger's power during
Watergate 78
on Mujib 50
study of Bangladesh policy 53
MOSS, Frank E. 115, 117
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 96
A Dangerous Place 92
Mujibur Rahman, Sheik 45-6
overthrow 50-54
Mustaque, Khondakar 51, 52, 53
Nairn, Allan 95, 149
Nasser, Gamal Abdel 34
National Security Archive 149
Naughton, James 28
Nehru, Jawaharlal 49
New Statesman, The 150
Nixon, Richard M.
alarmed by Allende's election 55-6
Allende overthrow 65
author's response to Kissinger's
defense 141-5
and Bengali massacres 46-7
Cambodia 34-40
defended by Kissinger and
Scow croft 137-9
dislike of India 49
and Greek junta 111-12
losses in Vietnam 23
and madness 133
and Pinochet 3
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
10
sabotages Paris peace negotiations
6-16
state of mind 134
wiretaps 42-3
North Korea 78
Novak, Robert 112, 113
Nurembergand Vietnam (Taylor)
25-30
O'Brien, Larry 111-12
O'Reilly, Anthony J.F. 121
Pakistan
Bengali massacres 44-8
Panayotakos, Constantine
In the First Line of Defense
117-18
Papadopoulos, Charalambos 118
Papadopoulos, George 109
Pappas, Thomas A. 85, 115
and Demetracopoulos 111-13
Pike, Otis ix
Pinochet, General Augusto 119
and CIA 74-6
first days of rule 67-8
international law 129, 130
and Kissinger 69-71
and Thatcher 74
US files on 2-4
Pinto, Constancio 93
Podhoretz, Norman
reviews Kissinger 4
Portugal
and East Timor 90, 99-100, 107
Prats, Carlos 68
Qiao Guanhua 88
Rashid, Major 51
Raskin, Jamin 150
Rebozo, Bebe 36, 136
Reynolds, Major General Russel B. 28
Richardson, Elliot 140
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(Nixon) 10
Robertson, Geoffrey 150
Rockefeller, David 56, 122
Rockefeller, Nelson
and Kissinger 11, 14, 19
Rogers, William 36, 114
opposes bombing strategy 38
Rosenthal, Benjamin 112, 114
Roufogalis, Michael 109, 111
Rowstow, Walt 10
Rusk, Dean 10
Ryan, Patrick 67
Saddam Hussein ix, 123
Sampson, Nicos 84-6
Schanberg, Sydney 39, 40
Schaufele, William 104
Schlesinger, James 134, 140
Schneider, General Rene 72, 119, 129
murder 63-6
US organizes death of 56-66
Scow croft, General Brent 121, 132, 147
author's response to 141, 142
defends Nixon 137-9
Shawcross, William
Sideshow 133
Shimkin, Alex 32, 33
Sihanouk, Prince 37, 38
Sisco, Joseph 17, 101-6, 116
Sit ton, Colonel Ray 37-8
Soekarno, Achmad 49
Solarz, Stephen J. 53-4
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander x
Stevenson, AdJai 34
Stoga, Alan 123
Stroessner, Alfredo 68, 69
Suharto, (Jeneral 91, 95, 107
overthrow 125
Sullivan, William 39-40
Summers, Anthony 142
The Arrogance of Power (with SW, 111)
13, 132-41
Swan, Robbyn
The Arrogance of Powcr ( with
Summers) 13, 132-41
Symington, Stuart 17
Szalai, Jennifer 150
Szulc, Tad 33
The Tangled Web (Bundy) 14
Tasca, Henry 83, 114
plot against Demetracopoulos
115-16, 118, 119
Taylor, General Telford 34
Nuremberg and Vietnam
25-30
Teruggi, Frank 68
Thatcher, Margaret 74
Thieu, Nguyen Van 12, 23, 137, 142
and Nixon 8, 9-10
Tigar, Michael 150
Tito (Josip Broz) 49
Toll, Barry A. 140, 145
Torres, Juan Jose 68
The Truth (Bonanos) 85
Turkey
and Cyprus 78-80, 81, 86-9
Valenzuela, General Camilo
Allende overthrow 62, 63-5
The Vantage Point (Johnson) 14
Viaux, General Roberto 73
Allende overthrow 57-8, 60-66
Videla, Jorge Rafael 68, 69
Vietnam
civilian deaths 28-33, 40-43
collapse of war 23-4
Johnson's bombing halt 21, 41
justifying the war 21
Kissinger's early visits to 19-21
Paris peace negotiations 6-16, 22-3
Paris peace talks 132-3
Vlachos, Angelos 118
Vos, Sarah 150
Wallace, George 13
Walters, General Vernon 74
Watts, William 36
Webster, William 112, 147
Weiner, Tim 2-4
Westmoreland, General William 36
The White House Years (Kissinger) 22
Wimert, Colonel Paul M. 64-5
Witcover, Jules 14
Woods, Rose Mary 115
Yamashita, General Tomoyuki 25, 28
Years of Renewal (Kissinger) 4, 69-70,
78, 79
Years of Upheaval (Kissinger) 4, 77, 79
Yiounis, Lt Colonel Sotiris 118
Yugoslavia
Kissinger's business in 123
Zia al-Haq, General Mohammad 53
Zumwalt, Admiral Elmo 49
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