Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  17.  House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Africa, United States–Angolan Relations (1978), p. 13.

  18.  John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (1978). See also Butler, “Into the Storm.”

  19.  Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, p. 390.

  20.  Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (2013), p. 281.

  21.  Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, p. 10.

  22.  “Remarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference,” January 30, 1986, in The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1986 (1988), pp. 104–05.

  23.  “Memorandum of Conversation,” December 17, 1975, Paris, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. 27 (2012), document 302, p. 812.

  24.  Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013), p. 2; Yaqub, “The Weight of Conquest: Henry Kissinger and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” in Logevall and Preston, Nixon in the World, p. 228.

  25.  Richard W. Cottam, Iran and the United States (1989), p. 150.

  26.  For senior diplomat George Ball holding Kissinger responsible for the 1979 Iranian Revolution, see Schlesinger, Journals, p. 458.

  27.  Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (2011), p. 21.

  28.  The Wall Street Journal (July 25, 1974) reported Hanover Trust was estimating that “about $1 billion to $1.5 billion of new ‘petrodollar’ funds is available for investment each week,” a “major portion likely would be sopped up by various governmental actions, including the direct investment of funds into special U.S. Treasury securities.” “Wouldn’t the federal Reserve love it,” as one economist put it, “if they got all the credit from Congress for a drop in interest rates when it was really the Arabs” who did it by pumping the money they took from US consumers back into the economy. By the mid-1970s, “as much as $50 to $60 million [of Iranian deposits] a day passed through Chase,” which in turn loaned the money back to Iran to fund “big industrial projects,” which in turn paid interest back to Chase. The new petrodollar interface also reflected a changing relationship between Washington and the developing world. As the historian Christopher Dietrich argues, Kissinger used the energy crisis to respond to third-world economic nationalism in a way that prioritized a “free-market vision of globalization, one that undercut broader visions of international economic justice.” Where nationalists from energy importing countries demanded that petrodollars be distributed through a public institution, like the International Monetary Fund, as a kind of third-world Marshall Plan to capitalize industrial production, Kissinger successfully insisted on recycling oil wealth through private capital markets and private investment banks. Kissinger argued that “to play politics with the international economy was irrational and dangerous.” There’s an irony here, for it was exactly Kissinger’s “free-market vision” that gave rise to the “irrational and dangerous” forces that would lead the assault on détente. In the U.S., the rapid increase of energy costs and influx of petrodollars empowered “independent” resource extractors that would become a key economic constituency of the fast-growing New Right (such as the Texas Hunt brothers or today’s more well-known Koch brothers). They were “independent” in the sense that they weren’t part of the corporate oil titans—Standard, Gulf, Texaco, and so on—that dominated energy production and that had largely resigned themselves to the fact of nationalization of oil production in countries like Libya and Venezuela. “The companies are dumb enough for socialism,” Kissinger said in 1975, of the corporate establishment’s willingness to work with OPEC. But those corporations might have provided the ballast for Kissinger’s broader vision of global political stability. The “independents,” on the other hand, would unite with other sectors of the New Right behind Ronald Reagan to tear down Détente and drive back into the third world. For the Kissinger’s “dumb enough” quote, see National Archives, RG 59, Records of Henry Kissinger, Box 10, Classified External Memoranda of Conversations, January–April 1975, available at: http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v37/d39#fn1). Dietrich, “Oil Power and Economic Theology: The United States and the Third World in the Wake of the Energy Crisis,” Diplomatic History, forthcoming (quotation from personal correspondence with author). For the quotations and discussion in the footnote, see Cooper, The Oil Kings, pp. 107; 127–34; 137; 139; 183; for Iran paying for US military R and D, see Cooper, The Oil Kings, p. 147, who interviewed former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (2015), pp. 138–40; 183–86; “In Oil Riches for Arabs, a Silver Lining,” New York Times, March 10, 1974; Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliance [2013], p. 127. For the “oil price floor” plan, see “Compromise Seen on Kissinger Oil Floor Price Plan Cook,” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 1975; “Kissinger Presents Oil Plan to Faisal,” Baltimore Sun, February 16, 1975; Cooper, The Oil Kings, p. 225, and Steven Schneider, The Oil Price Revolution (1983). For the role of the “independent” energy sector in funding the domestic “Sagebrush Rebellion” and pushing Reagan to reopen the third world, making possible the eventual take-back of nationalized industries, see Ferguson and Rogers, Right Turn, pp. 89–96.

  29.  “Memorandum of Conversation,” Henry Kissinger, Richard Helms, Harold Saunders, July 23, 1973, Washington, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. 27, Iran, Iraq, 1973–1976 (2013), document 24, p. 83.

  30.  “Minutes of Senior Review Group Meeting,” July 20, 1973, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. 27, Iran, Iraq, 1973–1976 (2013), document 23, p. 70.

  31.  “Meeting between the Shah of Iran and the Secretary of Defense,” July 24, 1973,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. 27, Iran, Iraq, 1973–1976 (2013), document 26, p. 91.

  32.  Mark Kesselman, Introduction to Comparative Politics (2009), p. 603.

  33.  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister in 1975, was a supporter of the 1971 military assault on Bangladesh. In early 1975, he met in Washington with Ford and Kissinger to discuss a restoration of military aid. After the meeting, Kissinger told Ford that Bhutto “was great in ’71.” “That was one of Nixon’s finest hours,” he said, of Nixon’s support for Pakistan as it committed what his own ambassador considered genocide (“Memorandum of Conversation, February 5, 1975,” from the National Security Adviser’s Memoranda of Conversation Collection at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, available online).

  34.  “A feature of the Kissinger-Shah relationship,” writes Andrew Scott Cooper in The Oil Kings, “was its emphasis on oral agreements and the absence of a paper trail.”

  35.  Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (1995), pp. 15–16.

  36.  Selig S. Harrison, “How the Soviet Union Stumbled into Afghanistan,” in Cordovez and Harrison, Inside Story.

  37.  Some writers, like Steve Coll in Ghost Wars (2005), downplay the CIA role in supporting the Islamist groups that eventually coalesced around Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda, saying that “CIA archives contain no record of any direct contact between a CIA officer and bin Laden during the 1980s.” Assuming that Coll had complete access to the CIA’s archives, and assuming that those archives contain a complete record of all the CIA’s covert activities, focusing on establishing responsibility for the action of one individual misses the larger context: the networks built, the arms supplied, the turbocharging of the ISI. According to the journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele (“The Oily Americans, Time, May 13, 2003), the CIA in Afghanistan ran “one of its longest and most expensive covert operations, supplying billions of dollars in arms to a collection of Afghan guerrillas fighting the So
viets.”

  7: SECRECY AND SPECTACLE

     1.  See Perlstein, Invisible Bridge, pp. 523–24.

     2.  William Shannon, “On His Own Terms,” New York Times, September 13, 1973. Kissinger testified in closed executive session and in a public hearing. The transcript of the public hearing is published as Nomination of Henry A. Kissinger: Hearings, Ninety-Third Congress (1973). See p. 29 for the quote.

     3.  Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, p. 123.

     4.  See the documents at “East Timor Revisited,” on the NSA Web site: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/.

     5.  Michael Howard Holzman, James Jesus Angleton (2008), p. 301.

     6.  Geraldine Sealey, “Hersh: Children Sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on Tape,” Salon, July 15, 2004; available at http://www.salon.com/2004/07/15/hersh_7/.

     7.  The indispensable Michael Paul Rogin, “‘Make My Day’: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990), for the relationship of spectacle to secrecy.

     8.  Hearings, p. 356.

     9.  New York Times, “Excerpts From Transcript of the Proceedings on Impeachment,” July 31, 1974.

  10.  Perlstein, Invisible Bridge, p. 524. See also United States Congress, Bombing in Cambodia: Hearings, Ninety-Third Congress, First Session (1973); Miraldi, Seymour Hersh, p. 166; Time, August 5, 1974.

  11.  Perlstein, Invisible Bridge, p. 428.

  12.  Berman, No Peace, p. 279.

  13.  Ford Library, National Security Adviser, NSC Meetings File, box 1. Top Secret; Sensitive. The meeting was held in the White House Cabinet Room; available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v10/d285#fn1.

  14.  Ford Library, National Security Adviser, NSC Meetings File, box 1, chronological file. Top Secret; Sensitive. The meeting was held in the White House Cabinet Room. Available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v10/d295#fn1.

  15.  Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 563.

  16.  Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 651.

  17.  Thomas Paterson et al., American Foreign Relations: Volume 2: Since 1895 (2014), p. 417.

  18.  Butler, “Into the Storm,” p. 137.

  19.  I have found no secondary accounts of the Cienfuegos “crisis” supporting the assertion that the Soviets were building a major military installation that didn’t rely on Kissinger’s account of the crisis, either the memos he produced at the time or his subsequent writing. Hersh’s The Price of Power deals with the affair, basing its conclusions on testimony to Congress: “Intelligence experts in the State Department, the CIA, and even the Pentagon saw no tangible evidence of a major installation. In their opinion, Cienfuegos was meant to be a rest-and-recreation facility for Soviet submarines that would permit the Soviet navy to lengthen its normal overseas tours.” Colonel John Bridge, identified by Hersh as the chief of the Soviet area office of the Defense Intelligence Agency, “testified that ‘they [the Soviets] have established—we say it is a facility, at Cienfuegos, which might support naval operations, including those of submarines. It is by no means to be construed, I think, as a formal full-scale base. It is a support facility, a possible support facility.’ As for the barracks, he testified, they were built of wood, obviously temporary facilities for crew stopovers. The concrete buoys which so alarmed Kissinger had been in place since 1968, well before the arrival of the Russians.… Similarly, the new dock Kissinger had noticed enclosed ‘a small area, perhaps … a swimming area, or something like that.’ The water was far too shallow for any other use, one officer said.” In the New York Times, Tad Szulc (“White House Charge on Cuba Puzzles U.S. Officials,” September 30, 1970) wrote: “American officials said today that the United States had only dubious and dated information to indicate that the Soviet Union might be planning to build a strategic submarine base in Cuba. For this reason, these officials, who include members of the intelligence community, said they were at a loss to explain why the White House chose last week to warn Moscow against the establishment of such a base.” Also from Szulc: “Officials said there was still no evidence of suspicious construction activities, despite flights by U-2 surveillance planes.” See also “Soviet Naval Activities,” CQ Almanac 1971, which described hearings on the matter held by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs. Colonel Bridge is quoted here as saying: “I must make it very clear that we have absolutely no indication that any submarine ever entered Cienfuegos harbor.” Bridge also makes clear that the main piece of intelligence was the guesswork related to what sport Cubans played: “Our people place some significance on the fact that a soccer field was built there—and it quite obviously by all description is a soccer field—because soccer is not a sport that is common to Cuba. A baseball diamond, we would have said, you would expect to find baseball diamonds.” See also Dallek’s account, Nixon and Kissinger, pp. 230–31.

  20.  Hersh, Price of Power, p. 257; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 211. Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, pp. 229–30, also suggests that Kissinger was posturing for Nixon. Nixon nursed a grudge against Castro, whose revolution he believed cost him the 1960 presidential election by allowing JFK an opening to run to his right. Nixon also had deep ties to the anti-Communist Cuban exile community (two of the Watergate burglars were anti-Castro Cuban exiles and at least two others were anti–Cuban Revolution activists who had been involved in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion) and soon after his 1969 inaugural had stepped up covert operations against Castro and Cuba. In 1977, Newsday reported that “with at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic. A U.S. intelligence source told Newsday last week he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U.S. Army base and CIA training ground in the Panama Canal Zone, with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group.” Former CIA agent Howard Hunt reportedly “mentioned something about planning for the second phase of the Bay of Pigs around the beginning of Nixon’s second term,” which if true, was yet another idea—along with restarting the bombing of North Vietnam and imposing an austerity budget on the United States—derailed by Watergate. William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh in their recent book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (2014), write that Kissinger helped moderate Nixon’s hostility toward Castro, a process interrupted by Castro’s Angola intervention, discussed in this chapter.

  21.  For Cuba in Angola and Kissinger’s reaction, see Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom and Conflicting Missions, and Kornbluh and LeoGrande, Back Channel to Cuba. For the quotations, see Memorandum of Conversation, Ford, Kissinger, and Scowcroft, February 25, 1976. Available here: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB487/docs/01%20-%20Memorandum%20of%20Conversation,%20February%2025,%201976,%20Ford%20Library.pdf.

  22.  Still, the United States might indeed have “cracked the Cubans,” as Kissinger said he wanted to do. On October 6, 1976, CIA- and FBI-supported Cuban exiles, led by a notorious anti-Castro activist named Orlando Bosch, bombed Cubana flight 455, after it had just taken off from Barbados, killing all seventy-three passengers—fifty-seven Cubans, eleven Guyanese, and five North Koreans—and all five crew members. At the very least, the CIA knew of the plans of the group (which went by different names, among them “Condor”) to bomb a Cuban airliner as early as June. There are, however, two pieces of evidence suggesting that Kissinger didn’t sanction this bombing. The first is that Bosch apparently had also targeted Kissinger for execution in retribution for attempting to normalize relations with Cuba, at least according to another CIA-linked anti-Castro Cuban trying to ingratiate himself with Washington. The second is that Kissinger authored a memo immediately after the bombing that s
aid that Washington “had been planning to suggest Bosch deportation before Cubana Airlines crash took place for his suspected involvement in other terrorist acts and violations of his parole.… Suspicion that Bosch involved in planning Cubana Airlines Crash led us to suggest his deportation urgently.” Bosch wasn’t, however, deported. See Ann Louise Bardach, Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana, p. 190.

  23.  National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Tapes, Oval Office, Conversation No. 517-4; available at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve10/d101#fn1.

  24.  See the declassified documents at the National Security Archive, “Nixon: Brazil Helped Rig Uruguayan Elections,” at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB71/.

  25.  Kissinger’s congratulation was in a November 24, 1973, cable made available by WikiLeaks: https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1973STATE231341_b.html. For sources related to the discussion on Guatemala in the footnote, see the following documents found in the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E-10, Documents on American Republics, 1969–1972 (available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve10/ch10): Document 343: Memorandum from the President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs (Haig) to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, November 16, 1970; Document 346: Memorandum from Arnold Nachmanoff of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, November 23, 1970; Document 348: Telegram 22560 from the Department of State to the Embassy in Guatemala, February 10, 1971; Document 355: Memorandum for the Record, Washington, August 16, 1971; Document 356: Paper Prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, undated; Document 357: Memorandum from Arnold Nachmanoff of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, August 19, 1971; Document 358: Memorandum for the Record, Washington, September 16, 1971; Document 364: Memorandum from William J. Jorden of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, September 28, 1972. Along with Cambodia, Kissinger is most defensive about his role in destabilizing Chilean democracy. He has consistently blamed Allende for provoking the coup against him, once even misquoting Zhou Enlai to suggest that the Chinese premier believed that Allende had brought about his own downfall as a result of his own reckless policies. In the official memorandum of the November 1973 conversation, Zhou says, “It was good because it could show a bad thing could be turned into good account. That is our way of seeing this thing. We told them about this, but they didn’t believe us. That kind of phenomenon was caused by themselves. We give only limited support to Latin American countries’ revolutions. We are still learning”—the Chinese premier was suggesting that the coup would usefully end Chile’s misplaced faith in bourgeois democracy. Kissinger in his memoir refigures these remarks to read: “We told them about [the risks], but they didn’t believe us. That kind of phenomena was caused by themselves.…” For the original (translated and transcribed) conversation, see National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, Kissinger Office Files, box 100, Country Files, Far East, Secretary Kissinger’s Conversations in Peking, November 1973 (available here: http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v18/d59#fn1). See Years of Upheaval, p. 405, for Kissinger’s use of it.