The Player's

Henry Kissinger

 

 

The Case Against Henry Kissinger

THE 1968 ELECTION INDOCHINA * CHILE

It will become clear, and may as well 1 stated at the outset, that this is written by a political
opponent of Henry Kissinger. Nonetheless, I have found myself continually amazed at how
much hostile and discreditable material I have felt compelled to omit. I am concerned only
with those Kissingerian offenses that might or should form the basis of a legal prosecution:
for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary
or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture.

Thus, I might have mentioned Kissinger's recruitment and betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, who
were falsely encouraged by him to take up arms against Saddam Hussein in 1972-75, and
who were then abandoned to extermination on their hillsides when Saddam Hussein made a
diplomatic deal with the Shah of Iran, and who were deliberately lied to as well as
abandoned. The conclusions of the report by Congressman Otis Pike still make shocking
reading and reveal on Kissinger's part a callous indifference to human life and human
rights. But they fall into the category of depraved realpolitik and do not seem to have
violated any known law.

In the same way, Kissinger's orchestration of political and military and diplomatic cover for
apartheid in South Africa presents us with a morally repulsive record and includes the
appalling consequences of the destabilization of Angola. Again, though, one is looking at a
sordid period of Cold War and imperial history, and an exercise of irresponsible power,
rather than an episode of organized crime. Additionally, one must take into account the
institutional nature of this policy, which might in outline have been followed under any
administration, national security adviser, or secretary of state.

Similar reservations can be held about Kissinger's chairmanship of the Presidential
Commission on Central America in the early 1980s, which was staffed by Oliver North and
which whitewashed death-squad activity on the isthmus. Or about the political protection
provided by Kissinger, while in office, for the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran and its machinery of
torture and repression. The list, it is sobering to say, could be protracted very much further.
But it will not do to blame the whole exorbitant cruelty and cynicism of decades on one man.
(Occasionally one gets an intriguing glimpse, as when Kissinger urges President Ford not to
receive the inconvenient Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, all the while posing as Communism's most
daring and principled foe.)

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

Some of these allegations can be constructed only prima facie, since Mr. Kissinger-in what
may also amount to a deliberate and premeditated obstruction of justice-has caused large
tranches of evidence to be withheld or possibly destroyed. We now, however, enter upon
the age when the defense of "sovereign immunity" for state crimes has been held to be
void. As I demonstrate below, Kissinger has understood this decisive change even if many of
his critics have not. The House of Lords' ruling in London, on the international relevance of
General Augusto Pinochet's crimes, added to the splendid activism of the Spanish
magistracy and the verdicts of the International Tribunal at The Hague, has destroyed the
shield that immunized crimes committed under the justification of raison d'etat. There is
now no reason why a warrant for the trial of Kissinger may not be issued in any one of a
number of jurisdictions and no reason why he may not be compelled to answer it. Indeed, as
I write, there are a number of jurisdictions where the law is at long last beginning to catch
up with the evidence. And we have before us in any case the Nuremberg precedent, by
which the United States solemnly undertook to be bound.

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

Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in politics, from Greece to Chile to Argentina to
Indonesia, are now in jail or awaiting trial. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to
heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher
Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs-strong enough to detain only the
weak and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and
unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.

REGARDING HENRY

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

Asking his secretary to get the number (7597919-the digits of Kissinger Associates), Korda
quips dryly, to general laughter in the office, that it "should be 1-800-CAMBODIA . .
.1-800-BOMB-CAMBODIA." After a pause of nicely calibrated duration (no senior editor
likes to be put on hold while he's receiving company, especially media company) it's
"Henry-Hi, how are you? . . . You're getting all the publicity you could want in the New
York Times but not the kind you want... I also think it's very, very dubious for the
administration to simply say yes, they'll release these papers . . . no . . . no, absolutely . . . no
. . . no . . . well, hmmm, yeah. We did it until quite recently, frankly, and he did prevail . . .
Well, I don't think there's any question about that, as uncomfortable as it may be . . .
Henry, this is totally outrageous . . . yeah . . . also the jurisdiction. This is a Spanish judge
appealing to an English court about a Chilean head of state. So it's, it . . . Also, Spain has no
rational jurisdiction over events in Chile anyway, so that makes absolutely no sense . . .
Well, that's probably true . .. If you would. I think that would be by far and away the best. ..
Right, yeah, no, I think it's exactly what you should do, and I don't think it should be long,
and I think it should end with your father's letter. I think it's a very important document . . .
Yes, but I think the letter is wonderful, and central to the entire book. Can you let me read
the Lebanon chapter over the weekend?" At this point the conversation ends, with some
jocular observations by Korda about his upcoming colonoscopy: "a totally repulsive
procedure."

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

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

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

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

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

But many of the actions of the United States during the 1973 coup, and much of what
American leaders and intelligence services did in liaison with the Pinochet Government
after it seized power, remain under the seal of national security. The secret files on the
Pinochet regime are held by the C.l.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency the State
Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the National Archives, the
Presidential libraries of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, and other Government
agencies. According to Justice Department records, these files contain a history of human
rights abuses and international terrorism:

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

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

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

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

"Harboring and sheltering," though, are understatements for the lavishness of Henry
Kissinger's circumstances. His advice is sought, at $30,000 an appearance, by audiences of
businessmen and academics and policymakers. His turgid newspaper column is syndicated
by the Los Angeles Times and appears as far afield as the Washington Post. His first
volume of memoirs was in part written, and also edited, by Harold Evans, who with Tina
Brown is among the many hosts and hostesses who solicit Kissinger's company, or perhaps
one should say society, for their New York soirees. At different times, he has been a
consultant to ABC News and CBS; his most successful diplomacy, indeed, has probably been
conducted with the media (and his single greatest achievement has been to get almost
everybody to call him "Doctor"). Fawned on by Ted Koppel, sought out by corporations and
despots with "image" problems or "failures of communication," and given respectful
attention by presidential candidates and those whose task it is to "mold" their global vision,
this man wants for little in the pathetic universe that the "self-esteem" industry exists to
serve. Of whom else would Norman Podhoretz write, in a bended-knee encomium to the
second volume of Kissinger's memoirs, Years of Upheaval:

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

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

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

CHILE (PART II): DEATH IN THE SOUTH

On November 9, 1970, Henry Kissinger authored National Security Council Decision
Memorandum 93, which reviewed policy toward Chile in the immediate wake of Salvador
Allende's confirmation as president. Various routine measures of economic harassment
were proposed (as per Nixon's instruction to "make the economy scream"), with cutoffs in
aid and investment. More significantly, Kissinger advocated that "close relations" be
maintained with military leaders in neighboring countries, in order to facilitate both the
coordination of pressure against Chile and the incubation of opposition within the country.
In outline, this prefigures the disclosures that have since been made about Operation
"Condor," a secret collusion among military dictatorships across the hemisphere, operated
with the United States government's knowledge and indulgence.

The actual overthrow of the Allende government in a sanguinary coup d'etat took place on
September 11, 1973, while Kissinger was going through his own Senate confirmation
process as secretary of state. He falsely assured the Foreign Relations Committee that the
United States government had played no part in the coup. From a thesaurus of hard
information to the contrary, one might select Situation Report No. 2, from the Navy Section
of the United States Military Group in Chile and written by U.S. Naval Attaché Patrick J.
Ryan. Mr. Ryan describes his close relationship with the officers engaged in overthrowing
the government, hails September 11, 1973, as "our D-Day," and observes with satisfaction
that "Chile's coup de etat [sic] was close to perfect." Or one may peruse the declassified
files on "Project FUBELT"- the code name under which the CIA, in frequent contact with
Kissinger and the 40 Committee, conducted covert operations against the legal and elected
government of Chile.

What is striking, and what points to a much more direct complicity in individual crimes
against humanity, is the microscopic detail in which Kissinger kept himself informed, after
the coup, of Augusto Pinochet's atrocities. On November 16, Assistant Secretary of State
Jack B. Kubisch delivered a detailed report on the Chilean junta's execution policy, which,
as he notes to the new secretary, "you requested by cable from Tokyo." The memo goes on
to enlighten Kissinger in various ways about the first nineteen days of Pinochet's rule.
Summary executions during that period, we are told, totaled 320. (This contrasts with the
publicly announced total of 100 and is based on "an internal, confidential report prepared
for the junta" to which American officials are evidently privy.) Looking on the bright side,

On November 14, we announced our second CCC credit to Chile $24 million for feed corn.
Our long-standing commitment to sell two surplus destroyers to the Chilean navy has met a
reasonably sympathetic response in Senate consultations. The Chileans, meanwhile, have
sent us several new re' quests for controversial military equipment.

Kubisch then raises the awkward question of two American citizens murdered by the junta-
Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman-details of whose precise fate are still, more than a
quarter century later, being sought by their families. The reason for the length of the
search may be inferred from a telegram, dated February 11, 1974, which reports on a
meeting with the junta's foreign minister and notes that Kubisch raises the matter of the
missing Americans "IN THE CONTEXT OF THE NEED TO BE CAREFUL TO KEEP
RELATIVELY SMALL ISSUES IN OUR RELATIONSHIP FROM MAKING OUR
COOPERATION MORE DIFFICULT.'

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

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

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

The Memcon: I will treat human rights in general terms, and human rights in a world
context. I will refer in two paragraphs to the report on Chile of the OAS Human Rights
Commission. I will say that the human rights issue has impaired relations between the U.S.
and Chile. This is partly the result of Congressional actions. I will add that I hope you will
shortly remove these obstacles....I can do no less, without producing a reaction in the U.S.
which would lead to legislative restrictions. The speech is not aimed at Chile. I wanted to
tell you about this. My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the
world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going
Communist.

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

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

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

"I want to see our relations and friendship improve," Kissinger told Pinochet (but not the
readers of his memoirs). "We want to help, not undermine you." In advising a murderer and
despot, whose rule he had helped impose, to disregard his upcoming remarks as a sop to
Congress, Kissinger insulted democracy in both countries. He also gave the greenest of
green lights to further crossborder and internal terrorism, neither of which could have been
unknown to him. (In his memoirs, he does mention what he calls Pinochet's
"counter-terrorist intelligence agency.") Further colluding with Pinochet against the United
States Congress, which was considering cutting off arms sales to human-rights violators via
the Kennedy Amendment, Kissinger obsequiously remarked,

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

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

A rule of thumb in Washington holds that any late disclosure by officialdom will ,~ contain
material that is worse than even the cynics suspected. In September 2000, however, the
CIA disgorged the results of an internal inquiry on Chile, which had been required of it by
the Hinchey Amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act for that fiscal year. And the
most hardened critics and investigators were reduced to amazement:

"Support for Coup in 1970. Under "Track lI" of the strategy, CIA sought to instigate a
coup to prevent Allende from taking office after he won a plurality in the 4 September
election and before, as Constitutionally required because he did not win an absolute
majority, the Chilean Congress reaffirmed his victory. CIA was working with three
different groups of plotters. All three groups made it clear that any coup would require the
kidnapping of Army Commander Rene Schneider, who felt deeply that the Constitution
required that the Army allow Allende to assume power. CIA agreed with that assessment.
Although CIA provided weapons to one of the groups, we have found no information that
the plotters' or ClA's intention was for the general to be killed. Contact with one group of
plotters was dropped early an because of its extremist tendencies. CIA provided tear gas,
submachine-guns and ammunition to the second group, mortally wounding him in the attack.
CIA had previously encouraged this group to launch a coup but withdrew support four days
before the attack because, in ClA's assessment, the group could not carry it out
successfully."

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

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

"Humanitarian reasons." One has to admire the sheer inventiveness of this explanation. At
1970 prices, $35,000 was, in Chile, a considerable sum. Not likely the sort of sum that a
local station chief could have disbursed on his own. One wants to know how the 40
Committee and its vigilant chairman, Henry Kissinger, decided that the best way to
dissociate from a supposedly loose-cannon gang was to pay it a small fortune in cash after it
had committed a cold-blooded murder.

The same question arises in an even more acute form with another disclosure made by the
CIA in the course of the same report. This is headed "Relationship with Contreras."
Manuel Contreras was the head of Pinochet's secret military police, and in that capacity
organized the death, torture, and "disappearance" of innumerable Chileans as well as the
use of bombing and assassination techniques as far afield as Washington, D.C. The CIA
admits early on in the document that it

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

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

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

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

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

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

This does not require too much parsing. Some time after it had been concluded, and by the
CIA at that, that Manuel Contreras was the "principal obstacle to a reasonable human
rights policy," he is given American taxpayers' money and received at a high level in
Washington. The CIA's memorandum is careful to state that, where doubts exist, they are
stilled by the "U.S. Government policy community" and by "an interagency committee." It
also tries to suggest, with unconscious humor, that the head of a murderous foreign secret
service was given a large bribe by mistake. One wonders who was reprimanded for this
blunder, and how it got past the scrutiny of the 40 Committee.

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

"[w]ithin a year after the coup, the CIA and other U.S. Government agencies were aware
of bilateral cooperation among regional intelligence services to track the activities of and,
in at least a few cases, kill political opponents. This was the precursor to Operation Condor,
an intelligence-sharing arrangement among Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and
Uruguay established in 1975."

So now we know: The internationalization of the death-squad principle was understood and
approved by American intelligence and its political masters across two administrations. The
senior person concerned in both administrations was Henry Kissinger. Whichever
"interagency committee" is meant, and whether it is the 40 Committee or the interagency
committee on Chile, we are led back to the same source.

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

CYPRUS: A TURBULENT PRIEST

In the second volume of his trilogy of memoirs, Years of Upheaval, Henry Kissinger found
the subject of the 1974 Cyprus catastrophe so awkward that he decided to postpone
consideration of it:

"I must leave a full discussion of the Cyprus episode to another occasion, for it stretched
into the Ford Presidency and its legacy exists unresolved today."

This argued a certain nervousness on his part, if only because the subjects of Vietnam,
Cambodia, the Middle East, Angola, Chile, China, and the SALT negotiations all bear
legacies that are "unresolved today" and were unresolved then. (To say that these matters
"stretched into the Ford Presidency" is to say, in effect, nothing at all except that this
pallid interregnum did, historically speaking, occur.)

In most of his writing about himself (and, one presumes, in most of his presentations to his
clients) Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of
his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide,
naive and ill prepared and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him
something in self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, that he often adopts at precisely the
time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable and when knowledge or
foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.

Cyprus in 1974 is just such a case. Kissinger now argues, in the third volume of his memoirs,
Years of Renewal, that he was prevented and distracted, by Watergate and the
deliquescence of the Nixon presidency, from taking a timely or informed interest in the
crucial triangle of Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. This is a bizarre disclaimer: the phrase
"eastern flank of NATO" was then a geopolitical commonplace of the first importance, and
the proximity of Cyprus to the Middle East was a factor never absent from American
strategic thinking. There was no reason of domestic policy to prevent the region from
engaging his attention. Furthermore, the very implosion of Nixonian authority, cited as a
reason for Kissinger's own absence of mind, in fact bestowed extraordinary powers upon
him. To restate the obvious once more: When he became secretary of state in 1973, he took
care to retain his post as "special assistant to the president for national security affairs,"
or, as we now say, national security adviser. This made him the first and only secretary of
state to hold the chairmanship of the 40 Committee, which, of course, considered and
approved covert actions by the CIA. Meanwhile, as chairman of the National Security
Council, he held a position in which every important intelligence plan passed across his
desk. His former NSC aide, Roger Morris, was not exaggerating by much, if at all, when he
said that Kissinger's dual position, plus Nixon's eroded one, made him "no less than acting
chief of state for national security."

Kissinger gives one hostage to fortune in Years of Upheaval and another in Years of
Renewal. In the former volume he says, quite plainly: "I had always taken it for granted
that the next communal crisis in Cyprus would provoke Turkish intervention"-i.e., would at
least risk the prospect of a war within NATO between Greece and Turkey and would
certainly involve the partition of the island. That this was indeed common knowledge may
not be doubted by any person even lightly acquainted with Cypriot affairs. In the latter
volume, wherein Kissinger finally takes up the challenge implicitly refused in the first
volume, he repeatedly asks the reader why anyone (such as himself, so burdened with
Watergate) would have sought "a crisis in the eastern Mediterranean between two NATO
allies."

These two disingenuous statements need to be qualified in the light of a third one, which
appears on page 199 of Years of Renewal. Here, President Makarios of Cyprus is described
without adornment as "the proximate cause of most of Cyprus's tensions." Makarios was
the democratically elected leader of a virtually unarmed republic, which was at the time in
an association agreement with the European Economic Community, as well as a member of
the United Nations and of the Commonwealth. His rule was challenged, and the
independence of Cyprus threatened, by a military dictatorship in Athens and a highly
militarized government in Turkey, both of which sponsored right-wing gangster
organizations on the island, and both of which had plans to annex the greater or lesser part
of it. In spite of this, "intercommunal" violence had been on the decline in Cyprus
throughout the 1970s. Most killings were, in fact, "intramural": of Greek and Turkish
democrats or internationalists by their respective nationalist and authoritarian rivals.
Several attempts, by Greek and Greek Cypriot fanatics, had been made on the life of
President Makarios himself. To describe his person as the "proximate cause" of most of the
tensions is to make a wildly aberrant moral judgment.

This same aberrant judgment, however, supplies the key that unlocks the lie at the heart of
Kissinger's chapter. If the elected civilian authority (and spiritual leader of the Greek
Orthodox community) is the "proximate cause" of the tensions, then his removal from the
scene is self-evidently the cure for them. If one can demonstrate that there was such a
removal plan, and that Kissinger knew about it in advance, then it follows logically and
naturally that he was not ostensibly looking for a crisis-as he self-pityingly asks us to
disbelieve.