by Greg Grandin
* Kissinger sacrificed the Kurds for nothing; the shah would be gone by 1979 and all that military hardware Washington made available to Iran would be inherited by the ayatollahs. A year later, Iraq and Iran would begin a pointlessly tragic war that would consume hundreds of thousands of lives, with the Reagan administration “tilting” toward Baghdad (which included giving Hussein the material needed to produce sarin gas and the intelligence needed to deploy the gas on the Kurds) while at the same time selling high-tech weapons to Revolutionary Iran [in what became known as Iran–Contra].
* The Los Angeles Times (February 14, 1974) says that the word petrodollar was coined in late 1973, introduced into English by New York investment bankers who courted oil-producing countries of the Middle East. Already by June 1973—with the worst of that year’s many crises still in the future (October’s Arab-Israeli War, the oil embargo, and November’s recession, which lasted for two years), Nixon’s Treasury Secretary George Shultz gave a speech saying that rising oil prices could result in a “highly advantageous mutual bargain” between the United States and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East. Indeed, many began to argue that such a “bargain” might solve a number of problems: create demand for the US dollar (to compensate for Nixon’s 1971 withdrawal from the Bretton-Woods system); inject needed money into a flagging defense industry, which was hit hard by the Vietnam wind-down (Secretary of Defense Schlesinger said that Iranian weapons sales helped pay for military research and development); and cover mounting deficits, through the petrodollar purchase of Treasury bonds. Petrodollars were not a quick fix; high energy prices remained a drag on the US economy, with inflation and high interest rates a problem for nearly a decade. Nor was petrodollar dependence part of a preconceived plan. Rather, that dependence grew fitfully, in response to an array of global events, as illustrated by Kissinger’s evolving relationship to the Middle East. Between 1969 and 1971, Nixon and Kissinger accommodated Arab and Iranian economic nationalism, working, for instance, with Muammar al-Qaddafi after he seized power in Libya in 1969 and forced new terms on Occidental Oil. During these years, “Washington,” the historian Daniel Sargent writes, “had tolerated—and even encouraged—price increases that enhanced Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s capacities to serve as guarantors of Cold War security interests.” But the Arab-Israeli War, followed by the embargo, forced a reckoning: “The United States,” as Kissinger would later sum up the problem, “has an interest in the survival of Israel, but we of course have an interest in the 130 million Arabs that sit athwart the world’s oil supplies.” What to do? Washington’s two gulf “guarantors”—Iran and Saudi Arabia—were proving recalcitrant (the spiraling cost of oil made the shah giddy: “of course it is going to rise. Certainly!” he told an interviewer at the end of 1973; the Saudis, meanwhile, begged Kissinger to understand that they were under pressure from radicals: they had no choice but to send troops to fight Israel and cut oil production, including oil it supplied to the US Seventh Fleet in the Pacific). Kissinger tried saber rattling, working up various military options with Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, including the possible occupation of Abu Dhabi. “Let’s work out a plan for grabbing some Middle East oil if we want,” Kissinger said. “Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?” he asked. But on November 28, the Saudis blinked and backed down. Within less than a year, Saudi Arabia helped end the embargo and agreed to increase production by a million barrels a day, to be sold to the United States. For his part, Kissinger began to promote the idea of a so-called oil floor price policy, below which the cost per barrel wouldn’t fall, which, among other things, was meant to protect the shah and the Saudis from a sudden drop in demand and provide US petroleum corporations a guaranteed profit margin. At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger began to increase US military aid and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Throughout 1974 and 1975, Kissinger continued to fantasize occasionally about a decisive strike: “We may have to take some oil fields.” “I’m not saying we have to take over Saudi Arabia,” he said at a later date, “how about Abu Dhabi, or Libya?” But the foundation for what has become the rock-solid alliance between the House of Saud and Washington’s political class was already in place.
* The rivalry between the two Harvard immigrant grand strategists, Kissinger and Brzezinski, is well known. But Brzezinski by 1979 was absolutely Kissingerian in his advice to Carter. In fact, a number of Kissinger’s allies who continued on in the Carter administration, including Walter Slocombe and David Newsom, influenced the July decision to politically support the jihad. Newsom, Carter’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, stated in a March 30, 1979, meeting that “it was U.S. policy to reverse the current Soviet trend and presence in Afghanistan, and to demonstrate to the Pakistanis our interest and concern about Soviet involvement, to demonstrate to the Pakistanis, Saudis, and others our resolve to stop the extension of Soviet influence in the Third World.” Newsom had earlier been Kissinger’s man in Africa and the “leading public advocate” of Kissinger’s “tar baby tilt”—that is, the set of policy recommendations that led to civil wars in Angola and Mozambique and renewed support for white supremacist governments in South Africa and Rhodesia. Slocombe, Carter’s undersecretary of defense, asked at that meeting if there might not be “value” in continuing to support the Afghan insurgency, “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnam quagmire.”
* David Young, who served as an assistant to both Kissinger at the NSC and to Kissinger’s wife, Nancy Maginnes, when she worked at the Rockefeller brothers’ office, helped run the plumbers. Young received immunity in exchange for testifying against John Ehrlichman.
* The final report of the Pike Committee was never officially released, although it was leaked to the Village Voice, which published a large excerpt. See “The CIA Report the President Doesn’t Want You to Read,” February 16, 1976.
* Compare Kissinger’s memorandum of a conversation he had with Dobrynin (which took place before his meeting with Haig) with Dobrynin’s diary entry of the same meeting. Kissinger describes Dobrynin as “ashen” and “clearly” worried about the “Cuban problem.” He says he dressed the Soviet envoy down, threatened “drastic action,” and warned of the “grave” situation, cutting him off when he tried to change the topic. But Dobrynin’s diary records no such confrontation. They simply matter-of-factly record that the point of the meeting was for Kissinger to pass on Nixon’s “concerns.” “Kissinger,” Dobrynin wrote, “said that the President requests that this message not be regarded as some kind of official representation or protest, but rather as his strictly confidential and important appeal to the Soviet leaders in the hope that it will receive the attention it deserves” (both found in Douglas Selvage et al., Soviet-American Relations [2007], pp. 193, 197). One study noted that Kissinger’s reported “language [was] uncannily reminiscent of the ultimatums of the original Cuban missile crisis.”
* Central America was not a high priority for Kissinger, but he continued giving steadfast support to right-wing dictatorships and death-squad states already in power when he took office. In 1970 in Guatemala, for example, Kissinger and Alexander Haig were involved in passing the names and addresses of “Guatemalan terrorists” to security forces, even though Washington was well aware that the government was using its US-funded counterterror program to eliminate not just armed insurgents but all political opposition and that the great majority of political prisoners taken were summarily executed. Indeed, in 1971, the CIA reported that Guatemala’s president at the time, Carlos Arana, was directly involved “in drawing up death lists.” Repression in Guatemala got so out of hand that a member of Kissinger’s NSC staff urged that the so-called 40 Committee—the committee chaired by Kissinger that brought together various arms of the national security state that helped organize the campaign to overthrow Allende in Chile—reconsider US support for the Guatemalan government. Kissinger, as chair, didn’t think it was an issue worth taking up and robust military support continue
d through to the Carter administration. The mass slaughter of Guatemalan Maya peasants between 1978 and 1983 is often not included in the genocides Kissinger is associated with since it took place after his public service. But throughout his tenure, aid provided by Washington (which strengthened the security forces that carried out the genocide) steadily increased. See note 24 for sources for this discussion.
* The speech was titled “Human Rights and the Western Hemisphere” and began like this: “One of the most compelling issues of our time, and one which calls for the concerted action of all responsible peoples and nations, is the necessity to protect and extend the fundamental rights of humanity.”
* The use of torture by US security agents in Latin America—and the training provided by Washington to Latin Americans on how best to torture—took place both before and after Kissinger’s time in public office. But some of the most famous US torturers plied their trade while Kissinger was presiding, as chair of the 40 Committee, over covert activities in the region. Dan Mitrione, for instance, was sent in 1969 to Uruguay, where he taught the police how to torture. “Before all else, you must be efficient,” Mitrione instructed. “You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more.” Mitrione taught by demonstration, reportedly torturing to death a number of homeless people kidnapped off the streets of Montevideo. “We must control our tempers in any case,” he said. “You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.” Many of the techniques practiced and taught by Mitrione were codified in the Pentagon’s infamous “torture manuals” in the 1980s and subsequently influenced the practices described in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s 2014 “torture report.” According to journalist Marcy Wheeler, after the Pentagon destroyed copies of its infamous torture instruction manuals it had used to train Latin American allies, Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, and his legal counsel, David Addington “saved the only known copies” for their personal files. Also, one of the CIA agents, Jose Rodriguez, who ran the CIA’s post 9/11 torture program had spent thirty years working in Latin America. See Wheeler, “The Thirteen People Who Made Torture Possible,” Salon, May 18, 2009; for Rodriguez, see the links in my “Misery Made Me a Fiend: Latin America and the Torture Report,” Nation, December 11, 2014.
* “His movements were slightly vague,” Kissinger said of Nixon about their first extended meeting, “and unrelated to what he was saying, as if two different impulses were behind speech and gesture” (Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 77).
* Kissinger never lost his sense of bewilderment about Reagan, the idea that there was no difference between substance and surface, no interiority, that he was a mirror or a recording device repeating the world back to itself. In 1981: “I don’t have the impression that he ever ingests anything you tell him. I used to brief him for Nixon when he was governor. I find that years later he could tell me almost verbatim something I told him back then. He remembers exactly, but I have the feeling that the item has lain unused in his mind all those years.” Again in 1981: “He is a nice man, a decent man. One odd thing, though. When he talks, all his illustrations are drawn from the movie business.” In 1982: “I have known a number of Presidents and of presidential candidates. With all the rest, when you talk to them, you can feel them translating what you are telling them into ‘What can I do about this?’ With Reagan, you feel him translating it into ‘What can I say about this?’ Words are the reality for him.… He is the only president with whom I would rather have someone else in the room when I see him. If you talk to him alone, you can be sure that nothing will ever happen.” In 1986: “He has a kind of instinct that I cannot explain.”
* Kissinger escaped association with the Watergate scandal, but starting in 1974 he became a primary target of right-wing anger, in the tabloids and alternative conservative press, over having lost Vietnam. In March 1974, for example, the Review of the News published a lengthy essay by Frank Capell called “The Kissinger Caper,” which made the case that Kissinger, while in Europe in Army intelligence during World War II, had been recruited by Soviet intelligence and given the code name “Bor.” Capell was a vehemently anti-Communist gossipmonger who published the newsletter Herald of Freedom. He tied his allegation that Kissinger was a Soviet agent to the 1974 fall of West German chancellor Willy Brandt, who resigned when it was revealed that one of his top aides, Günter Guillaume, was an East German Stasi spy. Capell, best known for reporting on the relationship between Robert F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, expanded his essay into a short book, Henry Kissinger, Soviet Spy, which he self-published in 1974. Also supposedly involved in the conspiracy was Frank Wisner, a retired CIA agent who killed himself in 1965, and Kim Philby, who was a KGB spy in British intelligence. Wisner had a long-standing connection with William Y. Elliott, Kissinger’s Harvard mentor. The idea that Kissinger was a Soviet agent was embraced and repeated by the rank-and-file New Right. Beyond accusations of treason, Kissinger was subject to an increasing number of unflattering profiles in the populist press, including an August 12, 1975, profile in the National Enquirer. “The Real Kissinger” alleged that he enjoyed humiliating his first wife in public. It quoted Maury Feld, an old Harvard associate from the International Seminar days, saying that he was often “repelled” by Kissinger’s “calculating approach with people.” The article also quoted a former housekeeper who reported that Kissinger was a “restless sleeper,” ripping the sheets off the bed every evening. Many of these reports reflect the xenophobia and anti-Semitism that mark the American Right. On July 8, 1974, William Loeb, the editor of New Hampshire’s Manchester Union, raised the (extremely unlikely due to constitutional prohibition) prospect of Kissinger’s running for president: “An educated man who can’t even speak the English language without a heavy accent is disgusting.” Interestingly, grassroots conservatives in the 1970s saw themselves as opposed to the corporate interests of the fossil fuel industry and were particularly angry at Kissinger’s “oil floor price” (discussed in chapter 6) which one conservative identified as a plan “to sell a large chunk of America” to “the major oil producers to convince them to formalize their support for the ‘new world order.’” The writer continued: “It is sort of a perpetual hijacking plan whereby we pay tribute continually to the major petroleum interests.” See William Hoar, “Henry Kissinger: This Man Is on the Other Side,” American Opinion, June 1975. Some of these clippings are found in box 47 of the Nathaniel Weyl Papers, found at the Hoover Institution Archives.
* Earlier, in 1968, Reagan sounded indistinguishable from Kissinger when he assailed the “fetish of complexity, the trick of making hard decisions harder to make—the art, finally, of rationalizing the nondecision.” Such a bureaucratic mind-set, Reagan said, had “made a ruin of American foreign policy.”
* The CIA’s estimate of Soviet power was wrong. In 1989, the agency reviewed its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and found that in each year Soviet strength had been “substantially overestimated.” Many of the neocons who resurfaced in the 2000s had worked on Team B or were instrumental in its establishment, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Richard Pipes. Others not directly connected to Team B, such as Fox pundit William Kristol, made the argument that since Team B won the Cold War its assumptions on how to read intelligence should be resurrected to confront Al Qaeda. Frank Gaffney, ever present on cable news making the case for war and warning about Islam, has joined other militarists, including Lieutenant General William Boykin, who served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Pentagon during the Iraq War, in what they call “Team B II.”
* In an October 1986 Commentary essay defending the work of Team B, neoconservative historian Richard Pipes charged Kissinger with embracing “positivism.” Echoing the Kissinger of 1950, Pipes complained about the “growing influence of scientific modes of thinking on all aspects of life,” reflected in the White House’s insistence that intelligence agencies, when considering Soviet strength, “concentrate exc
lusively on the technical data or hardware, avoiding what Kissinger called ‘talmudic’ estimates. This had the same effect because by eliminating informed, conscious, and overt political judgment from the estimates, it led to the injection of surreptitious political judgments disguised as hardware analyses.”
* Machiavelli: “There’s such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn how to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation.”