Kissinger’s Shadow Page 13
Rather than expose Menu as a crime, the Senate’s inquiry came close to justifying the deception. “Some members” of Congress might have taken the bombing seriously, but by the final days of the public hearings held by the Committee on Armed Services (which ran July 16 to August 9, 1973), only three of its fourteen members bothered to attend: Stuart Symington and Harold Hughes, Democrats from Missouri and Iowa, and South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond. Symington summed up the “dove” position: “What I do not like about this is that we did not know about it,” he complained to one witness, General Creighton Abrams, “we put the money up for one thing and it was used for another.” Symington was the only senator who questioned the consequences of the secret bombing, and he did so only once: “As an experienced military man, would you not think this pressure [from bombing] made it almost inevitable that they would have to expand their area of control or operations, thus bringing them into increasing conflict with the Cambodian authorities?” General Abrams’s answer was succinct: “Yes, I think that is a fair statement.”8
The hawks (Thurmond, mostly, but also Senators Barry Goldwater, Sam Nunn, and John Tower the few times they showed up) dominated the proceedings. They not only insisted that the bombing was an effective and legitimate policy, but argued that the burning of documents was really just an extension of secrecy protocols, and secrecy was an accepted practice of war. “I do think that we have to endorse the idea of a degree of covertness, cover, deception and secretiveness,” said Tower, “particularly in an open society like ours, which is already in a difficult position in time of war when confronted by a closed society as it was in the case of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.” “How about the Normandy invasion?” Nunn asked, wanting to know if the committee’s main witness, the whistle-blower Major Knight, would have felt compelled to reveal that operation. Others took the argument further, maintaining that there was no inherent “intent to deceive” in falsifying information if that falsification was conducted in response to “genuine and legal orders.” One senator suggested that the code Knight used when he called Saigon to indicate that he had successfully burned all evidence (“the ballgame is over”) was itself accurate reporting. Hence, no deception had taken place.
The committee’s hawks kept repeating, over and over again, that the bombing was necessary to “save American lives,” with doves all but conceding that, had the White House come to them in 1969 with that argument, they would have both approved the operation and kept it secret. What, then, was the issue?
The public’s attention soon turned to the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, which was largely treated as a domestic crime; and the destruction of Cambodia receded into memory. In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee finally approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon, all related to the domestic obstruction of justice. The committee declined, by a vote of 26 to 12, to pursue a fourth charge of not seeking Congress’s approval to wage war on Cambodia. Committee member John Conyers dissented, thinking it the worst of Nixon’s impeachable offenses. But a bipartisan majority disagreed. “We might as well resurrect President Johnson and impeach him posthumously for Vietnam and Laos,” the Democrat Walter Flowers said, or Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs and Truman for Korea.9
Political forgetfulness is also created through the transformation of the crime into a procedural question or a domestic drama between two political parties: one party executes, the other explicates. Framing whatever the controversial policy is—be it the bombing of a neutral country, domestic wiretapping, the support of coups, torture—as a technical matter, as an argument over the legality of the means in which the policy was carried out creates an implied affirmation that the objective of the action is agreed upon by all. Kissinger was a master at this kind of re-framing. In 1975, for instance, he consented to be questioned by Congress, appearing before the Pike Committee, which was chaired by New York representative Otis Pike and charged with investigating the covert activities of the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency. Kissinger was grilled extensively by Representative Ron Dellums on various clandestine matters. “Frankly, Mr. Secretary,” said Dellums, thinking he had cornered Kissinger, “and I mean this very sincerely, I am concerned with your power, and the method of your operation, and I am afraid of the result on American policy.… Would you please comment, sir?”
Kissinger gave a pitch-perfect response, delivered with just a hint of borscht-belt syntax: “Except for that,” he asked, “there is nothing wrong with my operation?”10 The room laughed and the evening TV news had its clip, which for millions of viewers summed up the hearings: a pushy congressman getting pushed back by a rapier wit.* Over a decade later, in Senate hearings into the illegal sale of high-tech missiles to Iran and the diversion of funds to support the Nicaraguan Contras, Colonel North and his coconspirators would say it more solemnly but they said pretty much the same thing: if you agree with our ends, then why question our means?
* * *
The symbiotic relationship between spectacle and secrecy is pronounced in Henry Kissinger’s post-Vietnam diplomacy. Kissinger felt that public displays of resolve would help America restore its damaged credibility and legitimacy. “The United States must carry out some act somewhere in the world,” he said to reporters shortly after the 1975 fall of Saigon, “which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.”11 Some act. Somewhere. In the future, he wrote in a “Lessons of Vietnam” memo to Gerald Ford, who had become president just a few months earlier, Washington will have to take “tougher stands” in the international arena “in order to make others believe in us again.”12 Inaction needs to be avoided to show that action is possible.
The opportunities were limited as to where the United States might put on such a show. Take, for instance, Kissinger’s and Ford’s “rescue” of the crew of the US container ship Mayaguez.
On May 12, 1975, Khmer Rouge forces seized the Mayaguez, along with thirty-nine merchant seamen. Cambodia was then in chaos, the genocide under way at home. The crew and ship were taken to a nearby, heavily fortified island named Koh Tang in the Gulf of Thailand, near the coast of Cambodia.
Nearly all involved in the series of White House meetings called to deal with the crisis seized on the incident to take that “tougher stand” (though historian Rick Perlstein points out that calling it a crisis is a stretch since it is quite common for US merchant ships to be taken and then released by foreign navies). Kissinger was forceful. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, describes him in one of these meetings as “leaning over the Cabinet Room table and speaking with emotion,” saying “the U.S. must draw the line.… We must act upon it now, and act firmly.” And not just Kissinger. “I think a violent response is in order,” said Kissinger’s old boss, vice president Nelson Rockefeller. “The world should know that we will act and that we will act quickly.”13
Kissinger advised that the United States “do something that will impress the Koreans and the Chinese.” Ford’s speechwriter, Bob Hartmann, said a tough response might contribute to Ford’s popularity at home: “We should not just think of what is the right thing to do, but of what the public perceives.”14
“This crisis, like the Cuban missile crisis, is the first real test of your leadership,” Hartmann told Ford. Kennedy had responded to that crisis methodically, opening up back channels of communication with the Soviets, considering his every move, and offering key concessions to resolve the crisis. But Kissinger, in 1975, couldn’t wait. He didn’t even try to contact Phnom Penh to make a deal. Instead, he urged Ford to launch a military rescue, let the B-52s loose on Cambodia one last time, and sink Cambodian ships at will. And not gradually but all at once. “I’m afraid that if we do a few little steps every few hours,” Kissinger said, “we are in trouble. I think we should go ahead with the island … and the ship all at once. I think people should have the impression that we are potentially trigger-happy.” The incident also gave Kissinger a chance to tutor the new president in the madman theory of internationa
l relations. “This is your first crisis,” he said, “you should establish a reputation for being too tough to tackle.”15
There was no need for any of it. Even before the assault on the island began, the Cambodians had signaled they would give the ship back. And the crew had been released, put aboard a fishing ship, and returned to the US Navy. But the military operation went forward anyway. Eighteen Americans were killed trying to take the island, and another twenty-three died when their helicopter went down preparing for the raid. Nobody knows how many Cambodians were killed in the attack, but B-52s hit the mainland, destroying a railroad yard, port, oil refinery, and over three hundred buildings. Nine Cambodian ships were sunk.
“Let’s look ferocious!” Kissinger said, urging Ford not to waver.16 Ford later said the Mayaguez rescue was one of his most important foreign policy decisions. “It convinced some of our adversaries we were not a paper tiger.” “It was wonderful,” Barry Goldwater agreed. “It shows we’ve still got balls in this country.”17
* * *
Kissinger didn’t want a crisis “like” the Cuban crisis. He wanted the real thing. And a few years before the Mayaguez incident, during Richard Nixon’s first term, he almost had one. In September 1970, Kissinger rushed into Bob Haldeman’s office with reconnaissance photographs taken of an area around the port city of Cienfuegos, on Cuba’s southern coast. “These pictures show the Cubans are building soccer fields,” he said. “These soccer fields could mean war, Bob.” Haldeman seemed confused, until Kissinger told him, “Cubans play baseball. Russians play soccer.”18 Kissinger insisted that Moscow was building a permanent naval base to house nuclear submarines. More photographs were taken, high-level meetings were held where Kissinger lectured on the lessons of Kennedy’s bold actions eight years earlier, and contingency plans to blockade Cuba were drawn up.
The submarine base seems to have been a fantasy.19 The Soviets didn’t back down, because they were doing nothing to back down from (or at least no evidence was ever produced that they were doing anything to back down from). Of course Cubans play soccer, they had been since the 1920s, and the Cuban Revolution even brought a renewed interest in the sport. Reconnaissance flights photographed every inch of Cienfuegos and couldn’t find one piece of heavy equipment that could be put to building such a port. There were no cranes, no dredges, no deep-water docks. They couldn’t find a Soviet submarine in the harbor. No matter. This “crisis,” taking place just after the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, gave Kissinger yet another opportunity to impress Nixon with his toughness, using his perceived victory over the Soviets in his ongoing rivalry with Secretary of State Rogers, who, “baffled by Kissinger’s warning,” seemed indecisive and weak.20
To this day, in memoirs and other published writings, Kissinger presents his charge that the Soviets were building a sophisticated deep-water nuclear submarine port at Cienfuegos as a fact. It is hard, however, to find anything other than befuddlement in official documents recording the Soviet response to Kissinger’s charges.*
* * *
Kissinger wasn’t yet finished with Cuba, and his subsequent dealings with the island, along with the rest of Latin America, help reveal the dependent relationship between the overt and the covert, the spectacular and the secret, the way very real limits on what the United States could do in the world in the wake of being driven out of Indochina led to a reliance on clandestine “black-bag” work.
In February 1976, Kissinger, after engaging in some effort to normalize relations between Havana and Washington, suddenly found himself in a geopolitical standoff with Fidel Castro, when Castro sent Cuban troops to southern Africa to defend Angola against US-backed South African mercenaries. The Cuban intervention—an audacious stroke on Castro’s part, saving the Angolan capital of Luanda for the left-wing Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola and routing Washington’s allies—was the kind of action Kissinger might have appreciated if it hadn’t been directed at undermining his foreign policy.
In one move, Castro had exposed the unviability of Kissinger’s “tar baby” tilt in southern Africa—that is, his efforts to uphold white supremacy there—to the whole world: the Iranians, Pakistanis, and Latin American allies all remarked on Cuba’s action, expressing admiration for its success but fear as to what Castro would do next. Egypt said that Washington’s “association with South Africa is anathema in African eyes,” making an “impassioned plea” that the United States be more “understanding and tolerant of emerging African movements,” even if they were left-leaning.21
Kissinger pushed for a harder line. “If the Cubans destroy Rhodesia then Namibia is next and then there is South Africa,” he said at a high-level crisis meeting on March 24, 1976. “I think we have to humiliate them,” Kissinger said at an earlier meeting, instructing his aides to draw up contingency plans that included political and economic sanctions, air and naval blockades, the mining of Cuba’s ports, punitive strikes, and even an invasion. “There should be no halfway measures,” Kissinger instructed; whatever they did, it needed to be “ruthless and rapid and efficient.” As with the Mayaguez a year earlier, Kissinger insisted that what was at stake with Cuba in Angola was a matter of appearance. “If there is a perception overseas that we are so weakened by our internal debate [over Vietnam] so that it looks like we can’t do anything about a country of 8 million people, then in three or four years we are going to have a real crisis.”
It is true that, with the broadcast images of the April 1975 fall of Saigon and the chaotic evacuation of remaining US troops and embassy staff fresh in the public’s mind, there was little enthusiasm for military operations abroad. But it wasn’t America’s “internal debate” that “weakened” Kissinger in southern Africa. Rather, Castro had revealed the paralyzing contradiction that lay at the heart of Kissinger’s “little war” thesis. On the one hand, Kissinger argued that little wars in areas of marginal importance could remain limited in scope. On the other hand, he demanded that no limits be placed on the force statesmen and military leaders could use to fight those wars (including the tactical use of nuclear weapons). Diplomacy, Kissinger had consistently argued, needed to be backed up by credible threats, and threats could only be credible if they were limitless.
In small places of true insignificance, such a paradox could be contained. Brutalizing a small island in the Gulf of Thailand and killing an unknown number of Cambodians to “rescue” the Mayaguez was one thing. Unleashing a war on Cuba, allied with the Soviet Union, was another. But his advisers told him that, unlike Kennedy’s success in 1962, “a new Cuban crisis would not necessarily lead to a Soviet retreat.” The crisis could “escalate in areas that would maximize US casualties and thus provoke stronger response.” “Serious business,” Kissinger admitted. There was no way to imagine a “little war” against Cuba that might not lead to what Kissinger’s advisers called a “general war” between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Kissinger knew he was backed into a corner. There was nothing Washington could do that wouldn’t seem like it was playing catch-up to Havana. Ignore Cuba, and the United States appears weak. Hit Cuba, and it seems reactive, dramatizing that the world’s greatest power had been played by a small island nation, a giant swatting at a fly. Kissinger admitted as much: “The problem is that no matter how we build our policy in southern Africa anything that happens will appear to have resulted from Cuban pressure.” Just so. Castro had checkmated Kissinger.
“I think we are going to have to smash Castro,” Kissinger told Ford, but, he conceded, “we probably can’t do it before the elections,” referring to the presidential vote in November 1976.22 “I agree,” Ford responded. And that was that. Afterward, Kissinger reversed his “tar baby” tilt, implementing what some commentators called an African détente.
* * *
In Latin America, Kissinger, having been denied a public triumph, continued private plotting. In 1969, when he first took office, only Paraguay and Brazil in South America were ruled by right-wing dictators
hips. Nearly every other country was experiencing a revolutionary upheaval, inspired, to some degree, by Cuba. That would soon change. Bolivia was the first Latin American democracy to fall to a military coup on Kissinger’s watch. “We are having a major problem in Bolivia,” said Kissinger on June 11, 1971, telling the CIA to “crank up an operation, post-haste.”23 On August 21, a military coup installed a right-wing dictator promptly recognized by Washington (according to the State Department, the CIA moved in “response to a White House request for a political action program to arrest the leftward trend” of the Bolivian government). A few months later, Brazil, acting as Nixon and Kissinger’s deputy, “helped rig the Uruguayan elections,” as Nixon put it, making sure a popular left coalition could not take power.24 The turmoil that ensued fed directly into a June 1973 coup led by Juan María Bordaberry, who turned Uruguay into a police state. Shortly after the coup, Kissinger sent Bordaberry a note wishing him “best wishes on this happy occasion.”25 The dictator’s wife had just given birth to their second child.*
Then came Chile, on September 11, 1973. It was Kissinger who had pushed Nixon to take “a harder line,” as he himself put it, against the country’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, who died in the coup.26 Chile was followed by coups in Peru and Ecuador. Then on March 23, 1976, the Argentine military took over the government. This putsch corresponded with Kissinger’s renewed obsession with Cuba in Southern Africa. And as it became clear that Castro was going to win the day in Angola—and then possibly send his troops into Rhodesia—Kissinger moved closer toward Latin America’s new praetorians.