Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  Over the last decade, more and more government documents have been declassified revealing Kissinger’s involvement in and cover-up of human rights abuses in Latin America. He’s tried to defend himself. “Just to take a sentence out of a telephone conversation when you have 50 other conversations, it’s just not the way to analyze it,” he said, after a particularly unflattering recording of him plumping for Pinochet was released. “I’ve been telling people to read a month’s worth of conversations, so you know what else went on.”27 But now that more information is available, a month’s worth of conversations reads like one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest plays. Perhaps Macbeth, with its description of what today is called blowback: “We but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return.”

  There’s Kissinger’s support of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. In August 1975, Kissinger had received Chile’s foreign minister, Vice Admiral Patricio Carvajal, in Washington. By this point, Chilean security forces had killed or disappeared thousands, tortured even more, turning Santiago’s soccer stadium into a concentration camp. Kissinger had pushed back hard on Congress’s attempt to impose sanctions on the country for these violations. And so he opened his meeting with Carvajal with a joke, making fun of the fretting, by some of his staffers, over human rights: “The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there were not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.” The discussion then took a cryptic turn. Carvajal told Kissinger that Chile was having trouble with about two hundred people it had just released from prison. “They are creating problems,” the minister said, and he couldn’t find a country that would take them as exiles. Kissinger responded: “You will know what to do. We cannot go beyond what we have said. What other problem do we have to discuss?”

  The Pinochet regime did know what to do; torture, murder, and disappearances in Chile continued.

  There’s his support for the Argentine junta. Shortly after the coup, one of Kissinger’s aides advised him not to “rush out and embrace this new regime.” “We’ve got to expect a fair amount of repression,” the aide said, “probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long. I think they’re going to have to come down very hard not only on the terrorists but on the dissidents of trade unions and their parties.” Kissinger disagreed with the suggestion that he keep his distance. “Whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement,” he replied to his cautious aide, “because I do want to encourage them.” The next day, on March 27, 1976, the International Monetary Fund extended $127 million line of credit to the junta, with many millions more to come from both public and private loans.28

  There’s also Kissinger’s visit to Santiago, Chile, in early June 1976, to attend a session of the Organization of American States. There, he had a one-on-one with Pinochet and assured him that whatever mild criticism he might hear in his remarks to the OAS shouldn’t be taken seriously. Just a month later, Kissinger’s assistant secretary for Latin America, Harry Shlaudeman, urged Kissinger to help tone down the “rhetorical exaggerations of the ‘Third-World-War’ type.” Shlaudeman meant those conservative militants who thought they were on the front line of an international crusade against global Marxism. Chile was the worst of the lot. “Perhaps,” Shlaudeman said, offering understated advice, “we can convince them that a Third World War is undesirable.”

  But in his meeting with Pinochet, Kissinger stoked the fire: they commiserated about Vietnam and agreed that the Spanish Civil War was but the first battle in the current “world war.” The general, Kissinger said, is “a victim of all left-wing groups around the world” and that his “greatest sin” was that he “overthrew a government that was going Communist.” Kissinger told Pinochet that he would have to include a few words about human rights in his upcoming remarks to the General Assembly but that Pinochet could safely ignore them: “The speech is not aimed at Chile.”*

  In Santiago, Kissinger also met with Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, of the newly installed Argentine military junta. He gave Guzzetti the same advice he gave to Suharto a year earlier: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures.” As he did with Pinochet, Kissinger encouraged the idea that Argentina was a frontline state in a global war, telling the admiral that the United States “will do what we can to help it succeed.… We understand you must establish authority.” As in the earlier meeting with Pinochet’s foreign minister, the problem of displaced peoples came up; these included a number of exiles from the neighboring countries fleeing right-wing repression. Again Kissinger was cryptic: “I understand the problem.” They are creating “unrest,” Guzzetti said. “We wish you success,” Kissinger, himself a refugee, answered.

  At the end of the meeting, Kissinger and Guzzetti left the room for “a word alone,” according to the note taker. It was a brief four-minute conversation.29 What was said? Judging from the incriminatory comments Kissinger allowed to stay on the public record, we can assume he wasn’t urging Guzzetti to act with restraint.

  The next day, June 11, a death squad abducted and tortured twenty-four Chilean and Uruguayan refugees living in Argentina. There were many other operations that day, including the executions of Raúl Albert Ramat, a twenty-seven-year-old student activist at the Catholic University, in Buenos Aires, and fifty-nine-year-old Santiago Bruschtein, the last of seven members of his family to be either killed or disappeared. The junta was in no rush to get “back quickly to normal procedures.” The admirals and generals stayed in power for seven years and the murders and disappearances continued. Surviving military documents suggest that the dead or disappeared numbered 22,000 by July 1978.30

  Then there’s Kissinger’s involvement in the establishment of Operation Condor, an international death-squad consortium that carried out operations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. J. Patrice McSherry, one of the foremost researchers into Condor activities, argues that the available State Department documentation was actually designed to mislead. That may well be the case. Kissinger himself has noted that the sheer volume of foreign policy paperwork makes it impossible to determine “which documents were produced to provide an alibi and which genuinely guided decisions.” “Kissinger rarely put anything on the record in normal diplomatic channels if he could devise a more secretive back channel instead,” writes Walter Isaacson.31

  What does exist is damning. Condor was formally established on November 26, 1975, in Santiago, Chile (just after Castro decided to send combat troops to Angola) at a meeting attended by intelligence and military officers, as well as a few heads of state, representing nearly all of South America. It is clear that they had Washington’s help. The US ambassador to Paraguay confirmed that the different franchises of Condor kept “in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covers all of Latin America.” It was an “encrypted system within U.S. communications net” that allowed Condor countries (Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) to “maintain the confidentiality of their communication.” And it was after Kissinger’s visit to Santiago, and his conversations with Pinochet and Guzzetti, that Operation Condor got fully under way, including so-called phase III operations—the carrying out of executions outside of Latin America.

  The most famous of these took place on September 21, 1976, in Washington, DC’s Sheridan Circle, near Embassy Row, when a car bomb killed Orlando Letelier and his assistant, Ronni Moffitt. Letelier held a number of high-level positions in Allende’s government and after the coup had established himself in Washington, where he lobbied Congress to impose sanctions on Chile. In his meeting with Kissinger, Pinochet had complained twice about Letelier.

  Kissinger had been briefed repeatedly about Condor by the CIA and the State Department. He knew it was conducting operations in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. And he knew that it was targeting, as Assistant Secretary Shlaudeman to
ld him, “nonviolent” leftists and center leftists living abroad, like Letelier. “What we are trying to head off is a series of international murders,” Shlaudeman would subsequently write, just before Letelier’s killing.

  On August 23, Kissinger did approve a “stand down” cable, instructing his ambassadors to approach “the highest appropriate official” in their respective countries and tell that person that the “assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures … abroad … would create a most serious moral and political problem.” But then Kissinger reversed himself. On September 16, told by an aide that such an order might offend Pinochet, he rescinded his démarche. He was in Africa, in the middle of his goodwill tour to reverse the damage of his “tar baby” policy and the disastrous Angolan civil war, and he sent a note to Shlaudeman instructing that “no further action be taken on this matter.” Shlaudeman, in turn, told Kissinger’s ambassadors to “take no further action.”

  Five days later, Letelier and Moffitt were dead. Condor continued on.

  All told, the allies that Kissinger “encouraged” in Latin America murdered tens of thousands of civilians and tortured an equal number.* Among those abducted and brutalized by Kissinger’s proxies include the current presidents of Chile and Brazil and a former president of Uruguay. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was captured in 1970 and “spent three years behind bars, where interrogators repeatedly tortured her with electric shocks to her feet and ears, and forced her into the pau de arara, or parrot’s perch, in which victims are suspended upside down naked, from a stick, with bound wrists and ankles.”32 A recent Brazilian truth commission investigation found that over three hundred Brazilian soldiers were trained by the United States in the “theory and practice of torture.”33 Uruguay’s former president, José Mujica, was also tortured. Kidnapped in 1971, Mujica spent fourteen years in prison, including extended periods at the bottom of a well. The father of Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s president, was kidnapped and tortured, dying in Pinochet’s prison. President Bachelet and her mother were also captured and tortured but were eventually released, upon which they went into exile.34

  * * *

  The silent nod, the public gesture. A four-minute “word alone” with a key player in an international death-squad consortium, an impassioned speech on human rights. Secrecy and spectacle. Modern statecraft has long operated between these two poles, as diplomats have moved back and forth between the dark corner and the limelight. Do it quickly, Kissinger told his foreign allies. Do it theatrically, he told Ford: “Let’s look ferocious!”

  As Kissinger’s experience in Latin America and southern Africa suggests, the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate revival of the national security state came to depend, to a greater extent than it had in the past, on a dynamic coupling of secrecy and spectacle. On one level, the relationship of the overt to the covert is sequential. Kissinger wanted to go big after Vietnam, to take “tougher stands” someplace around the world over some issue. But he couldn’t. Checked by Castro and worried about a post-Vietnam public and Congress with no appetite for further war, he had to go dark and throw in with the men of Condor. On another level, though, secrecy and spectacle coexist simultaneously, feeding off each other. The death-squad disappearance regime put in place in Latin America during Kissinger’s tenure was a clandestine network of undisclosed prisons and torture rooms, hidden graves, and shadowy paramilitary units. But its effectiveness in spreading terror resided in public knowledge, publicizing death lists, adopting brand names for the death squads—“The White Hand,” “Eye for an Eye,” and so on—and snatching people off the street in broad daylight, never to be seen again. The message was clear.

  In southern Africa, Kissinger wanted to teach Cuba a public lesson for all the rest of the Third World, allies and adversaries, to see. But even as he was drawing up plans to do so, he was running a covert war in multiple countries. In the United States, he didn’t just lie to the public about that war. He ran domestic propaganda campaigns to build support for a harder line in southern Africa. John Stockwell, a CIA operative in Angola, testified before the House’s Subcommittee on Africa in May 1978. What he described sounded like a dress rehearsal for the clandestine Iran-Contra network the Reagan administration would put into place to execute its secret, illegal wars. According to Stockwell (and other sources), Kissinger and the CIA director, William Colby, used proxy nations (Israel and South Africa) to stage military operations and deliver weapons to rebel allies. They also conducted a covert publicity campaign to influence the opinion of American citizens. “Mr. Kissinger and the CIA,” Stockwell testified, “lied to the American people through public statements and false propaganda activities in the United States. The CIA funded and directed the activities of two teams of propagandists inside the United States and fed them false information to be used to influence the United Nations and the American people. It also placed false stories in American newspapers.”35 Later, after 9/11, neoconservatives would hope to confront, and uproot, America’s “adversary culture.” Here, though, not long out of Vietnam, Kissinger was just looking to work around it.

  This coupling of secrecy and spectacle would evolve over the years, finding innovative expression especially during the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. Even as covert operators were reactivating Kissinger’s clandestine wars in Angola and Mozambique, building on Kissinger’s ties with the ISI in Pakistan to destabilize Afghanistan, and starting new operations in Central America and elsewhere, the Pentagon was, as we shall see, testing public displays of military power, sending troops into Grenada, bombing Libya, and invading Panama.

  But it was after 9/11 when the lords of spectacle and secrecy would come fully into their own. And when they did, they would have Henry Kissinger to advise them.

  8

  Inconceivable

  But the spirits once called forth refused to be banished.

  —Henry Kissinger

  In November 1971, Richard Nixon asked Henry Kissinger, who had just returned from one of his California missions to shore up the right flank, what he thought of the state’s governor, Ronald Reagan. Kissinger is known for the “lapidary precision” of his character analysis, his ability to capture a person’s essence in a few exact words.* But Reagan left him at a loss.

  He was a decent enough man, Kissinger said. But “he’s shallow. He’s got no … ur, ur … he’s, he’s an actor. He … When he gets a line he does it very well.” Reagan had apparently told Kissinger, “Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can’t you find a few good lines?” Kissinger laughed nervously when he related this to Nixon. “That’s really an actor’s approach,” he told the president, “to foreign policy—to substantive—”1

  Nixon knew what he meant. “The fellow really is a decent guy, a decent guy. But there isn’t—there’s no, in other words, everything is.…”

  You want to finish Nixon’s sentence: there’s no there there, everything is surface. As to Kissinger, he seemed to intend to dismiss Reagan as a mere actor but hesitated, trailing off when he realized that wasn’t quite what he wanted to say. Acting implies calculation. Nixon and Kissinger were calculated: they manipulated events and choreographed gestures, creating the atmospherics that served their purposes. And even the existentialist Kissinger believed that reality existed. He wasn’t a solipsist. Individuals might not have unmediated access to that reality beyond their relative, subjective perspective, but he did think that that reality set limits and imposed restraints, or “necessities.”

  Reagan was a rung further up the metaphysical ladder, a politician who managed to abolish the distinction between appearance and reality. “There are not two Ronald Reagans,” Nancy Reagan once said, responding to the idea that her husband was a cynic, that his homespun was disingenuous. “You look in back of a statement for what the man really means,” Nancy continued, “but it takes people a while to realize that with Ronnie you don’t have to look in back of anything.”2

  Actors know
they are acting, and Kissinger had a sense that Reagan didn’t. At one point in their conversation, he complained to the governor about Nixon’s “disloyal bureaucracy.” Kissinger, of course, had done more than any of his predecessors to tame that bureaucracy, to neuter its ability to restrain his actions. But he never once doubted that he needed a bureaucracy. Reagan, though, offered a solution to his complaint one better. “Well then,” he said, “why don’t you fire the bureaucracy?” One wonders if at this moment Kissinger saw Reagan as an extension of his policies or their perversion.*

  Nixon asked Kissinger if he could imagine Reagan, who had done surprisingly well in the 1968 Republican primaries considering that he never actually entered them, sitting in the Oval Office.

  “Inconceivable,” Kissinger replied.

  They then wondered what Reagan would do next, and if he might accept the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom. “I’m sure he won’t go,” said Nixon. “We’ve offered it to him. He doesn’t want it.” “But what does he want?” Kissinger asked.

  * * *

  It was against Kissinger that Ronald Reagan broke his so-called Eleventh Commandment: Thou shall not speak ill of any fellow Republican. The breach came in March 1976, after Reagan lost the first four primaries in his bid to snatch the Republican nomination from Gerald Ford. Up until this point, Reagan had kept his criticisms vague, complaining about an aimless foreign policy but not blaming any one person in particular. But having come close to taking New Hampshire and in striking distance of winning Florida, he began to name names, accusing Henry Kissinger and, almost as a second thought, Ford of presiding over a dangerous decline in American global power.