CHAPTER 12
THE SECRET VISIT
NIXON’S TOAST IN THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HE AND KISSINGER received Chou’s invitation was, he admitted, rather formal, but it was, after all, “a moment of historical significance.”1 It was also merely a beginning. So much had to be arranged before Nixon could go to China, from technical details about landing his plane safely to the sorts of subjects he would discuss while he was there. Presidential visits always require detailed advance work, and China was unknown territory. Moreover, until all the details were worked out, there was always the danger that one side or the other would pull back. The choice of the emissary, therefore, was crucial.
In their message that reached Washington on April 27, the Chinese had suggested that Kissinger himself might be Nixon’s special envoy. Kissinger, understandably, longed to go. He had already sent a message through Hilaly telling the Chinese that it was “essential” that he be the first to meet Chou: “No one except Kissinger is best qualified to have these discussions as he is the only person (repeat only) who knows President Nixon’s thinking and his mind and can take decisions on the spot without having to refer back to Washington for advice & instructions.”2 Kissinger was right: he was the obvious choice; but it was one that Nixon shrank from making. He was already envious of the press coverage of Kissinger and of Kissinger’s growing reputation as a smooth man about town. And so Nixon, much as Eisenhower had once done with him, refused to commit himself. Kissinger could not go, he said initially, “because that would break all the china with State.” Kissinger had to sit by as Nixon wondered out loud about going himself. That would be too dangerous, Kissinger argued. What about Rogers? Kissinger rolled his eyes. “Henry wasn’t too enthusiastic,” Nixon recalled later. “Let me put it that way.” Perhaps David Bruce or Henry Cabot Lodge? Nixon ruled them out because they were both too much identified with the American presence in Vietnam. Or Kissinger’s old patron Nelson Rockefeller? “Intriguing,” said Kissinger, but Rockefeller would not obey Kissinger’s instructions. Or George Bush? “Too soft and not sophisticated enough.” Thomas Dewey, the distinguished Republican elder statesman? Unfortunately, said Kissinger, he had been dead for several months.3
“Henry,” said Nixon, “I think you will have to do it.” The decision was hard to avoid. Kissinger knew Nixon’s mind and had been involved in every stage of the secret negotiations. Moreover, said Kissinger, who understood his president well, “of all the potential emissaries I was the most subject to his control.” As a still relatively obscure national security adviser, Kissinger did not have his own constituency or his own power base.4 Nixon still hoped to downplay the significance of what was clearly an extraordinary trip. Perhaps Kissinger could meet Chou somewhere other than Beijing. Kissinger made sure that all other sites were ruled out. Surely, Nixon also suggested, there was no need to have Kissinger’s name appear on any joint communiqué announcing that a representative of the American government had visited China. “Reality,” said Kissinger, “took care of this problem.”5 Kissinger set his staff to preparing briefing books while he and Nixon waited for the final confirmation from the Chinese.
In Pakistan, the American ambassador, Joseph Farland, received a mysterious message ordering him to meet Kissinger somewhere in California. He was to travel to a private airport and ask for a certain airplane. He was not to tell the State Department about his trip. An irritated Farland followed orders and found himself on a patio in Palm Springs with Kissinger. “‘Henry, I’ve come halfway around this damn earth and I don’t know why.’ He said, ‘I want you to put me into China.’ I said, ‘I don’t think that’s very funny, Henry.’” Once Farland was persuaded that Kissinger was serious, the two men concocted a plan. Kissinger was due to take a tour of Asia, which he intended to make as boring as possible in order to shake off the press. His schedule would include a weekend in Pakistan, where the embassy would put out word that he had come down with a bug he had picked up in India. As a result, all his appointments would be canceled and Kissinger, so everyone would be told, would retreat to the hill station of Murree to recuperate. While his airplane remained conspicuously parked on the runway, he would fly into China on a civilian plane provided by the government of Pakistan.6
Pakistan was an obvious jumping-off place for China. Its government had shown its discretion and its loyalty to the Americans in setting up the channel, and its national airline had regular flights to Beijing. Yahya Khan, who promised Washington that he would make “absolute fool-proof arrangements” at his end, entered into the plans with enthusiasm, checking off all the details himself. Farland did his part before Kissinger arrived by insisting that a couple of his more observant staff in the embassy take their annual leave. He sent the embassy doctor off to East Pakistan. The Chinese sent in an aircrew in readiness.7
In Beijing, Chou En-lai set up a special high-level group and himself took personal charge of the preparations for Kissinger’s visit. Under Mao’s orders, he also called together a special meeting of the Politburo to prepare for the negotiations. Chou started the deliberations by explaining that the United States was no longer as powerful as it had been at the end of the Second World War. It had lost ground economically, and its involvement in Indochina, in particular, had done its position in the world much damage. The Americans’ anxiousness to extricate themselves from a hopeless struggle made them need contact with China, and this was China’s opportunity to promote its own security and the reunification of China “by peaceful means.” The Politburo sent its recommendations to Mao, who approved them. To prepare the Chinese people for the shock that a country that had been treated as its main enemy for twenty years was now becoming something else, Chou spoke to a meeting of party officials from around the country to outline the new policy. Mao also ordered that the transcript of his chat with Edgar Snow, in which he invited Nixon to come to China, be released in the Chinese press.
The recommendations demonstrated the importance that Taiwan had in Chinese thinking. The United States must indicate that it was going to withdraw its troops from the island and must recognize that Taiwan was Chinese territory and that the government in Beijing was the only one representing China. On the other hand, China would undertake to liberate Taiwan peacefully. This was significant because up to this point, the government in Beijing had always refused to rule out the use of force. If the Americans brought up the issue of the United Nations, the Chinese must make it clear that they would not accept two Chinas being represented there, a solution that had been suggested by the United States and other nations. The Chinese should also let the Americans know that they should withdraw their troops from the rest of Asia, from Indochina to Japan. If all went well, the two sides might be able to talk about permanent diplomatic representation in each other’s capitals. There was nothing in the recommendations about any sort of concerted policy toward the Soviet Union.8
In Washington, the Americans were also getting ready. Winston Lord, Kissinger’s assistant, prepared separate sets of briefing books, one for those who were going on the public Asian tour and one for those who knew about the secret detour, now christened Polo One, to Beijing. (Somehow, as the Kissinger party made its way from one Asian capital to another, he managed to keep the different briefing notes and itineraries in the right hands.) Kissinger’s own notes for Polo One ran to eighty pages of careful statements of the American position on areas it considered important: Indochina, Taiwan, and relations with the Soviet Union, of course. His briefing book also included the American positions on Korea and on South Asia, where relations between India and Pakistan were fast deteriorating, as well as drafts of the toasts that Kissinger intended to give. The Chinese, he argued, were likely to be tough negotiators. They might well ask that the United States pull its troops out of Taiwan, but the United States had some bargaining chips on its side. China very much wanted to be recognized as a great power, and a summit meeting with Nixon would be “spectacular proof.” The Chinese might also suggest some form of allianc
e directed against the Soviet Union.9
On July 1, the day Kissinger left for Asia, Nixon gave him last-minute instructions with, as Kissinger put it, “his invariable hard-line rhetoric with which he sent me off on every mission.” Nixon warned him against being too forthcoming. Kissinger should be “somewhat enigmatic” on Taiwan and not suggest that the United States was abandoning its support for Taiwan “until it was necessary to do so.” He should raise three specters with the Chinese: what he, Nixon, might do if the stalemate in South Vietnam continued, and the threats to China from Japan and the Soviet Union. If the Chinese wanted a summit with him, they would have to release all the American POWs they still held, be helpful on Vietnam, and—this was to appeal to American farmers—accept some grain shipments from the United States. In return, Kissinger could suggest that, once the summit had been held, the United States would be happy to set up a hotline between Beijing and Washington and perhaps make an agreement on avoiding an accidental nuclear war. Nixon’s advice was mostly “boilerplate,” Kissinger said dismissively in his memoirs.10
Although Kissinger had co-opted some foreign service officers to serve on the National Security Council, he had not shared the news of his upcoming trip to China with the State Department, even with Rogers himself. The State Department was understandably puzzled about why the national security adviser needed to go off on a fact-finding mission to Asia. It was also concerned that, by going to India and Pakistan, he might be giving the impression that the United States was interfering in their already tense relationship. The secrecy also caused difficulties with Vice President Agnew, who had to be talked out of a long-planned visit to Chiang Kai-shek, which would have placed him in Taiwan just as Kissinger was arriving in Beijing. Although Nixon and Kissinger did not know it until later, one part of the government had ferreted out the secret. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, exasperated by the secrecy around American foreign policy, had set their own spy to work. Charles Radford was assigned from the navy to work as a stenographer and clerk at the National Security Council. He simply made extra copies of all documents that came his way and passed them on to his military superiors.11
Fortunately for Nixon and Kissinger, their initiative remained secret. Both men, of course, were taking a great risk. Kissinger was going off into the unknown. According to Yahya, he was apprehensive, even frightened, and asked the president of Pakistan to accompany him on that first trip. “I told him,” said Yahya, “that I’d send one of my generals along, if he wanted moral support, but I personally could not go. Chou En-lai had given me his word that he would look after him.”12 Kissinger was taking a political risk too. If he did not bring back concrete results from his meetings with Chou, his own position in Washington would be weakened and that of the State Department, which had warned all along about rushing too precipitously into negotiations, would be enhanced.
In 1971 Nixon needed successes, particularly in foreign policy, which he had always claimed as his own. He was already looking ahead to the next presidential election, but his record so far was mixed: the war in Vietnam was grinding on and negotiations with the North Vietnamese were stalemated; Laos and Cambodia were slipping further under Communist influence; and the Soviet Union was being difficult. “We’re playing for very high stakes now,” Nixon had said to Kissinger that April as the Americans waited to hear from the Chinese. “We have very little time left, and we cannot diddle around.”13
Kissinger and his party left Washington on the evening of July 1. Because all the presidential planes were in use ferrying Nixon to the West Coast or Agnew off to the Middle East and Africa (his compensation for not going to Taiwan), Kissinger was given a converted air force tanker, so old that it need extra-long runways. “On takeoff,” remarked Kissinger, “one had the feeling that the plane really preferred to reach its destination overland.” While Kissinger had a comfortable large cabin, the rest of his group, which included Winston Lord, John Holdridge and some others from the NSC, and two Secret Service men, were jammed in together along with their typewriters and briefcases. Every so often Kissinger would emerge in his dressing gown to go over his messages. “The scene was reminiscent of a Roman galley,” said Holdridge, “with the captain directing imperiously from the stern and the rowers laboring uncomfortably in banks of two along the hull!”14 The plane lumbered on to Saigon and Bangkok, and then to India, where Kissinger had dinner with an intensely suspicious prime minister, Indira Gandhi. She was covertly supporting the forces in East Pakistan rebelling against Yahya’s government and may have suspected that the United States was planning to offer Pakistan assistance.15
On July 8, Kissinger reached Rawalpindi, in West Pakistan. He was suffering, so his aides said, from an attack of Delhi belly. A sharp-eyed American diplomat was impressed at how much he nevertheless managed to eat at Ambassador Farland’s buffet lunch. That evening Yahya gave a small private dinner. As Kissinger continued to complain about his stomach, Yahya insisted that Kissinger must go with his aides into the hills, to Yahya’s own bungalow, where the cool air would revive him. One of the Secret Service agents with brisk efficiency sent a colleague to check out the presidential quarters; the Pakistani government was forced to keep him there until Kissinger had gone and returned.
At 3:30 in the morning, Kissinger, disguised in a floppy hat and dark glasses, was whisked off through deserted streets to the Rawalpindi airport in a small blue car driven by Pakistan’s foreign minister. The other Americans followed with the luggage. The Pakistan International Airlines plane waited, its engines already running. At the top of the stairs, a party of Chinese officials, among them Nancy Tang, Mao’s personal interpreter, waited to greet the Americans, much to the shock of the Secret Service agents, who had no idea what was going on or where they were off to. One started to reach for his gun. A stringer for a London newspaper who happened to be at the airport seeing his mother off noticed the unusual activity and asked a policeman what was up. “It’s Henry Kissinger; he’s going to China.” The reporter rushed off to send the story to London, where it was spiked because his editor assumed he must have had too much to drink. In the American embassy the next day, rumors went around that something was not quite right about the story of Kissinger’s illness.16
Nixon himself nearly let the secret out when he gave a speech in Kansas City on July 6. He talked in a statesmanlike way of a new world order where the five main powers would be the United States, the Soviet Union, western Europe, Japan, and China. It was essential, he said, that his administration take the first steps toward ending the isolation of China. The comments were overlooked by the American press but picked up by alert British and Asian journalists. The White House managed to persuade them to keep quiet.17
The plane took off into the darkness. Kissinger disappeared into the special VIP cabin, and the rest of the Americans, without thinking, arranged themselves on the right-hand side of the aisle; the Chinese took the left. Dawn came up to reveal the Hindu Kush, the great range of mountains that helps divide China from its neighbors. As the plane crossed into Chinese airspace, Winston Lord, perhaps by design, found himself at the front, the first American official in twenty-two years to reach China.18 The Chinese and Americans chatted politely among themselves. Holdridge, who had visited China as a child before the Second World War, noticed that one of the Chinese aircrew quietly pocketed all the packages of cigarettes the steward brought around. “This seemed a hopeful sign that he was human, and that China was still China.” Kissinger, who spent much of the time poring over his notes, had a brief flash of anger when he realized that his assistant had forgotten to pack a change of shirts for him. He borrowed a couple (as luck would have it, with labels saying “Made in Taiwan”) from the much taller Holdridge. Kissinger managed to hold the sleeves up with elastic bands, but he spent his time in China looking, said Lord, rather like a penguin.19
On the other side of the world, Nixon had just broken the news of Kissinger’s trip to Rogers, whom he had invited to San Clemente partly to keep
an eye on him. It had not been a good few weeks for Rogers. In May, he had been deeply hurt and distressed when he was informed, shortly before it was announced, that Nixon and Kissinger had negotiated a major arms deal, SALT I, with the Soviet Union and that Kissinger had been having regular secret meetings with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington. Now he was given a feeble story about how Kissinger had been in Pakistan when the Chinese had unexpectedly invited him to Beijing to meet Chou.20
The PIA plane flew on, across the vast desert that the Silk Route had once crossed, and landed at a military airport outside Beijing around lunchtime. On the ground, a small party headed by Ye Jianying, one of the four marshals whose reports had started Mao and China down a new path in international relations, waited to escort them to the Diaoyutai. Holdridge found himself in a car with Huang Hua, an experienced diplomat who had just been appointed ambassador to Canada. “You know,” said Huang to open the conversation, “in 1954 at Geneva, your Secretary of State refused to shake the hand of our premier, Premier Zhou En-lai.” Holdridge hastened to assure Huang that there would be nothing similar this time. When Chou arrived at the Diaoyutai that afternoon, he climbed out of his limousine with his arm outstretched. Holdridge remembered the scene years later: “Kissinger strode out to greet him. Kissinger extends his hand, handshake, and boom, boom, boom, boom—flashbulbs all over the place, videotape, etc. This was an historic handshake.” Chinese who were present thought that Kissinger was nervous and tense.21
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