THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

Chapter  1:  CURTAIN-RAISER: THE SECRET OF '68

THERE EXISTS, WITHIN the political class of Washington, DC, an open
secret that is too momentous and too awful to tell. Though it is well known
to academic historians, senior reporters, former cabinet members and ex-
diplomats, it has never been summarized all at one time in anyone place.
The reason for this is, on first viewing, paradoxical. The open secret is in
the possession of both major political parties, and it directly implicates the
past statecraft of at least three former presidencies. Thus, its full disclosure
would be in the interest of no particular faction. Its truth is therefore the
guarantee of its obscurity; it lies like Poe's "purloined letter" across the
very aisle that signifies bipartisanship.

Here is the secret in plain words. In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and
some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace
negotiations on Vietnam. The means they chose were simple: they pri-
vately assured the South Vietnamese military rulers that an incoming
Republican regime would offer them a better deal than would a
Democratic one. In this way, they undercut both the talks themselves and
the electoral strategy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The tactic
"worked," in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on
the eve of the election, thereby destroying the "peace plank" on which the
Democrats had contested it. In another way, it did not "work," because
four years later the Nixon administration concluded the war on the same
terms that had been on offer in Paris. The reason for the dead silence that
still surrounds the question is that, in those intervening four years, some
'twenty thousand Americans and an uncalculated number of Vietnamese,
Cambodians and Laotians lost their lives. Lost them, that is to say, even
more pointlessly than had those slain up to that point. The impact of those
four years on Indochinese society, and on American democracy, is beyond
computation. The chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subse-
quent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger.

I can already hear the guardians of consensus scraping their blunted
quills to describe this as a "conspiracy theory." I happily accept the chal-
lenge. Let us take, first, the White House journal of that renowned
conspirator (and theorist of conspiracy) H.R. Haldeman, published in May
1994. I choose to start with this for two reasons. First, because, on the log-
ical inference of "evidence against interest," it is improbable that Mr
Haldeman would supply evidence of his knowledge of a crime unless he
was (posthumously) telling the truth. Second, because it is possible to trace
back each of his entries to its origin in other documented sources.

In January 1973, the Nixon-Kissinger administration -for which Mr
Haldeman took the minutes -was heavily engaged on two fronts. In Paris,
Henry Kissinger was striving to negotiate "peace with honor" in Vietnam.
In Washington, DC, the web of evidence against the Watergate burglars and
buggers was beginning to tighten. On 8 January 1973, Haldeman records:

John Dean called to report on the Watergate trials, says that if we can prove
in any way by hard evidence that our [ campaign] plane was bugged in '68, he
thinks that we could use that as a basis to say we're going to force Congress
to go back and investigate '68 as well as '72, and thus turn them off.

Three days later, on 11 January 1973, Haldeman hears from Nixon ("The
P," as the Diaries call him):

On the Watergate question, he wanted me to talk to [Attorney General John]
Mitchell and have him find out from [Deke] De Loach [ of the FBI] if the guy
who did the bugging on us in 1968 is still at the FBI, and then [FBI acting
director Patrick] Gray should nail him with a lie detector and get it settled,
which would give us the evidence we need. He also thinks I ought to move
with George Christian [President Johnson's former press secretary, then
working with Democrats for Nixon], get LBJ to use his influence to turn off
the Hill investigation with Califano, Hubert, and so on. Later in the day, he
decided that wasn't such a good idea, and told me not to do it, which I for-
tunately hadn't done.

On the same day, Haldeman reports Henry Kissinger calling excitedly from
Paris, saying "he'll do the signing in Paris rather than Hanoi, which is the
key thing." He speaks also of getting South Vietnam's President Thieu to
"go along." On the following day:

The P also got back on the Watergate thing today, making the point that I
should talk to Connally about the Johnson bugging process to get his judge-
ment as to how to handle it. He wonders if we shouldn't just have Andreas go
in and scare Hubert. The problem in going at LBJ is how he'd react, and we
need to find out from De Loach who did it, and then run a lie detector on
him. I talked to Mitchell on the phone on this subject and he said De Loach
had told him he was up to date on the thing because he had a call from Texas.
A Star reporter was making an inquiry in the last week or so, and LBJ got very
hot and called Deke [De Loach] and said to him that if the Nixon people are
going to play with this, that he would release [ deleted material -national
security], saying that our side was asking that certain things be done. By our
side, I assume he means the Nixon campaign organization. De Loach took
this as a direct threat from Johnson. ... As he recalls it, bugging was requested
on the planes, but was turned down, and all they did was check the phone
calls, and put a tap on the Dragon Lady [Mrs Anna Chennault].

This bureaucratic prose may be hard to read, but it needs no cypher to
decode itself. Under intense pressure about the bugging of the Watergate
building, Nixon instructed his chief of staff Haldeman, and his FBI contact
Deke De Loach, to unmask the bugging to which his own campaign had
been subjected in 1968. He also sounded out former President Johnson,
through former senior Democrats like Governor John Connally, to gauge
what his reaction to the disclosure might be. The aim was to show that
"everybody does it." (By another bipartisan paradox, in Washington the
, slogan "they all do it" is used as a slogan for the defense rather than, as one
might hope, for the prosecution.)

However, a problem presented itself at once. How to reveal the 1968
bugging without at the same time revealing what that bugging had been
about? Hence the second thoughts ("that wasn't such a good idea. .."). In
his excellent introduction to The Haldeman Diaries, Nixon's biographer
Professor Stephen Ambrose characterizes the 1973 approach to Lyndon
Johnson as "prospective blackmail," designed to exert backstairs pressure to
close down a congressional inquiry. But he also suggests that Johnson,
himself no pushover, had some blackmail ammunition of his own. As
Professor Ambrose phrases it, the Haldeman Diaries had been vetted by the
National Security Council (NSC), and the bracketed deletion cited above is
"the only place in the book where an example is given of a deletion by the
NSC during the Carter administration. Eight days later Nixon was inau-
gurated for his second term. Ten days later Johnson died of a heart attack.
What Johnson had on Nixon I suppose we'll never know."

The professor's conclusion here is arguably too tentative. There is a
well-understood principle known as "Mutual Assured Destruction,"
whereby both sides possess more than enough material with which to
annihilate the other. The answer to the question of what the Johnson
administration "had" on Nixon is a relatively easy one. It was given in a
book entitled Counsel to the President, published in 1991. Its author was
Clark Clifford, the quintessential blue-chip Washington insider, who was
assisted in the writing by Richard Holbrooke, the former Assistant
Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1968, Clark
Clifford was Secretary of Defense and Richard Holbrooke was a member of
the United States negotiating team at the Vietnam peace talks in Paris.

From his seat in the Pentagon, Clifford had actually been able to read
the intelligence transcripts that picked up and recorded what he terms a
"secret personal channel" between President Thieu in Saigon and the
Nixon campaign. The chief interlocutor at the American end was John
Mitchell, then Nixon's campaign manager and subsequently Attorney
General (and subsequently Prisoner Number 24171-157 in the Alabama
correctional system). He was actively assisted by Madame Anna Chennault,
known to all as The Dragon Lady. A fierce veteran of the Taiwan lobby, and
all-purpose right-wing intriguer, she was a social and political force in the
Washington of her day and would rate a biography on her own.

Clifford describes a private meeting at which he, President Johnson,
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor Walt Rostow
were present. Hawkish to a man, they kept Vice-President Humphrey out
of the loop. But, hawkish as they were, they were appalled at the evidence
of Nixon's treachery. They nonetheless decided not to go public with what
they knew. Clifford says that this was because the disclosure would have
ruined the Paris talks altogether. He could have added that it would have
created a crisis of public confidence in United States institutions. There are
some things that the voters can't be trusted to know. And, even though the
bugging had been legal, it might not have looked like fair play. (The Logan
Act prohibits any American from conducting private diplomacy with a
foreign power, but it is not very rigorously or consistently enforced.)

In the event, Thieu pulled out of the negotiations anyway, ruining them
just two days before the election. Clifford is in no doubt of the advice on
which he did so:

The activities of the Nixon team went far beyond the bounds of justifiable
political combat. It constituted direct interference in the activities of the
executive branch and the responsibilities of the Chief Executive, the only
people with authority to negotiate on behalf of the nation. The activities of
the Nixon campaign constituted a gross, even potentially illegal, interference
in the security affairs of the nation by private individuals.

Perhaps aware of the slight feebleness of his lawyerly prose, and perhaps a
little ashamed of keeping the secret for his memoirs rather than sharing it
with the electorate, Clifford adds in a footnote:

It should be remembered that the public was considerably more innocent in
such matters in the days before the Watergate hearings and the 1975 Senate
investigation of the CIA.

Perhaps the public was indeed more innocent, if only because of the
insider reticence of white-shoe lawyers like Clifford, who thought there
were some things too profane to be made known. He claims now that he
was in favor either of confronting Nixon privately with the information
and forcing him to desist, or else of making it public. Perhaps this was
indeed his view.

A more wised-up age of investigative reporting has brought us several
updates on this appalling episode. And so has the very guarded memoir of
Richard Nixon himself. More than one "back channel" was required for the
Republican destabilization of the Paris peace talks. There had to be secret
communications between Nixon and the South Vietnamese, as we have
seen. But there also had to be an informant inside the incumbent admin-
istration's camp -- a source of hints and tips and early warnings of official
intentions. That informant was Henry Kissinger. In Nixon's own account,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, the disgraced elder statesman tells us
that, in mid-September 1968, he received private word of a planned
"bombing halt." In other words, the Johnson administration would, for the
sake of the negotiations, consider suspending its aerial bombardment of
North Vietnam. This most useful advance intelligence, Nixon tells us, came
"through a highly unusual channel." It was more unusual even than he
acknowledged. Kissinger had until then been a devoted partisan of Nelson
Rockefeller, the matchlessly wealthy prince of liberal Republicanism. His
contempt for the person and the policies of Richard Nixon was undis-
guised. Indeed, President Johnson's Paris negotiators, led by Averell
Harriman, considered Kissinger to be almost one of themselves. He had
made himself helpful, as Rockefeller's chief foreign policy advisor, by sup-
plying French intermediaries with their own contacts in Hanoi. "Henry was
the only person outside of the government we were authorised to discuss
the negotiations with," says Richard Holbrooke. "We trusted him. It is not
stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source
within the US negotiating team."

So the likelihood of a bombing halt, wrote Nixon, "came as no real sur-
prise to me." He added: "I told Haldeman that Mitchell should continue as
liaison with Kissinger and that we should honor his desire to keep his role
completely confidential." It is impossible that Nixon was unaware of his
campaign manager's parallel role in colluding with a foreign power. Thus
began what was effectively a domestic covert operation, directed simulta-
neously at the thwarting of the talks and the embarrassment of the Hubert
Humphrey campaign.

Later in the month, on 26 September to be precise, and as recorded by
Nixon in his memoirs, "Kissinger called again. He said that he had just
returned from Paris, where he had picked up word that something big was
afoot regarding Vietnam. He advised that if I had anything to say about
Vietnam during the following week, I should avoid any new ideas or pro-
posals." On the same day, Nixon declined a challenge from Humphrey for
a direct debate. On 12 October, Kissinger once again made contact, sug-
gesting that a bombing halt might be announced as soon as 23 October.
And so it might have been. Except that for some reason, every time the
North Vietnamese side came closer to agreement, the South Vietnamese
increased their own demands. We now know why and how that was, and
how the two halves of the strategy were knit together. As far back as July,
Nixon had met quietly in New York with the South Vietnamese ambassa -
dor, Bui Diem. The contact had been arranged by Anna Chennault.
Bugging of the South Vietnamese offices in Washington, and surveillance
of the Dragon Lady, showed how the ratchet operated. An intercepted
cable from Diem to President Thieu on the fateful day of 23 October had
him saying: "Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged
us to stand film. They were alarmed by press reports to the effect that you
had already softened your position." The wiretapping instructions went to
one Cartha De Loach, known as Deke to his associates, who was J. Edgar
Hoover's FBI liaison officer to the White House. We met him, you may
recall, in H.R. Haldeman's Diaries.

In 1999 the author Anthony Summers was finally able to gain access to
the closed FBI file of intercepts of the Nixon campaign, which he published
in his 2000 book The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.
He was also able to interview Anna Chennault. These two breakthroughs
furnished him with what is vulgarly termed a "smoking gun" on the 1968
conspiracy. By the end of October 1968, John Mitchell had become so nerv-
ous about official surveillance that he ceased taking calls from Chennault.
And President Johnson, in a conference call to the three candidates, Nixon,
Humphrey and Wallace ( allegedly to brief them on the bombing halt) , had
strongly implied that he knew about the covert efforts to stymie his Vietnam
diplomacy. This call created near-panic in Nixon's inner circle and caused
Mitchell to telephone Chennault at the Sheraton Park Hotel. He then asked
her to call him back on a more secure line. "Anna," he told her, "I'm speak-
ing on behalf of Mr Nixon. It's very important that our Vietnamese friends
understand our Republican position, and I hope you made that clear to
them. ... Do you think they really have decided not to go to Paris?"

The reproduced FBI original document shows what happened next.
On 2 November 1968, the agent reported as follows:

MRS ANNA CHENNAULT CONTACTED VIETNAMESE AMBASSADOR BUI DIEM, AND ADVISED
HIM THAT SHE HAD RECEIVED A MESSAGE FROM HER BOSS (NOT FURTHER IDENTIFIED),
WHICH HER BOSS WANTED HER TO GIVE PERSONALLY TO THE AMBASSADOR. SHE SAID
THAT THE MESSAGE WAS THAT THE AMBASSADOR IS TO "HOLD ON, WE ARE GONNA WIN"
AND THAT HER BOSS ALSO SAID "HOLD ON, HE UNDERSTANDS ALL OF IT." SHE REPEATED
THAT THIS IS THE ONLY MESSAGE. "HE SAID PLEASE TELL YOUR BOSS TO HOLD ON." SHE
ADVISED THAT HER BOSS HAD JUST CALLED FROM NEW MEXICO.

Nixon's running mate, Spiro Agnew, had been campaigning in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, that day, and subsequent intelligence analysis revealed that he,
and another member of his staff (the one principally concerned with
Vietnam), had indeed been in touch with the Chennault camp.

The beauty of having Kissinger leaking from one side, and Anna
Chennault and John Mitchell conducting a private foreign policy for Nixon
on the other, was this. It enabled him to avoid being drawn into the argu-
ment over a bombing halt. And it further enabled him to suggest that it was
the Democrats who were playing politics with the issue. On 25 October in
New York, Nixon used his tried-and-tested tactic of circulating an innu-
endo while purporting to disown it. Of LBJ's Paris diplomacy he said, "I am
told that this spurt of activity is a cynical, last-minute attempt by President
Johnson to salvage the candidacy of Mr Humphrey. This I do not believe."

Kissinger himself showed a similar ability to play both ends against the
middle. In the late summer of 1968, on Martha's Vineyard, he had offered
Nelson Rockefeller's files on Nixon to Professor Samuel Huntington, a
close advisor to Hubert Humphrey. But when Huntington's colleague and
friend Zbigniew Brzezinski tried to get him to make good on the offer,
Kissinger became shy. "I've hated Nixon for years," he told Brzezinski. But
the time wasn't quite ripe for the handover. Indeed, it was a very close-run
election, turning in the end on a difference of a few hundred thousand
votes, and many hardened observers believe that the final difference was
made when Johnson ordered a bombing halt on 31 October and the South
Vietnamese made him look a fool by boycotting the peace talks the very
next day. But had things gone the other way, Kissinger was a near-certainty
for a senior job in a Humphrey administration.

With slight differences of emphasis, the larger pieces of this story
appear in Haldeman's work as cited, and in Clifford's memoir. They are
also partially rehearsed in President Johnson's autobiography The Vantage
Point, and in a long reflection on Indochina by William Bundy ( one of the
architects of the war) entitled rather tritely The Tangled Web. Senior mem-
bers of the press corps, among them Jules Witcover in his history of 1968,
Seymour Hersh in his study of Kissinger, and Walter Isaacson, editor of
Time magazine, in his admiring but critical biography, have produced
almost congruent accounts of the same abysmal episode. I myself parsed
The Haldeman Diaries in The Nation in 1994. The only mention of it that
is completely and utterly false, and false by any literary or historical stan-
dard, appears in the memoirs of Henry Kissinger himself. He writes just
this:

Several Nixon emissaries -some self-appointed -telephoned me for coun-
sel. I took the position that I would answer specific questions on foreign
policy, but that I would not offer general advice or volunteer suggestions.
This was the same response I made to inquiries from the Humphrey staff.

This contradicts even the self-serving memoir of the man who, having
won the 1968 election by these underhand means, made as his very first
appointment Henry Kissinger as National Security Advisor. One might not
want to arbitrate a mendacity competition between the two men, but when
he made this choice Richard Nixon had only once, briefly and awkwardly,
met Henry Kissinger in person. He clearly formed his estimate of the man's
abilities from more persuasive experience than that. "One factor that had
most convinced me of Kissinger's credibility," Nixon wrote later in his own
delicious prose, "was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy."

But that ghastly secret is now out. In the December 1968 issue of the
establishment house organ Foreign Affairs, written months earlier but pub-
lished a few days after his gazetting as Nixon's right-hand man, there
appeared Henry Kissinger's own evaluation of the Vietnam negotiations.
On every point of substance, he agreed with the line taken in Paris by the
Johnson-Humphrey negotiators. One has to pause for an instant to com-
prehend the enormity of this. Kissinger had helped elect a man who had
surreptitiously promised the South Vietnamese junta a better deal than
they would get from the Democrats. The Saigon authorities then acted, as
Bundy ruefully confirms, as if they did indeed have a deal. This meant, in
the words of a later Nixon slogan, "Four More Years." But four more years
of an unwinnable and undeclared and murderous war, which was to spread
before it burned out, and was to end on the same terms and conditions as
had been on the table in the fall of 1968.

This was what it took to promote Henry Kissinger. To promote him
from being a mediocre and opportunist academic to becoming an inter-
national potentate. The signature qualities were there from the inaugural
moment: the sycophancy and the duplicity; the power worship and the
absence of scruple; the empty trading of old non-friends for new non-
friends. And the distinctive effects were also present: the uncounted and
expendable corpses; the official and unofficial lying about the cost; the
heavy and pompous pseudo-indignation when unwelcome questions were
asked. Kissinger's global career started as it meant to go on. It debauched
the American republic and American democracy, and it levied a hideous
toll of casualties on weaker and more vulnerable societies.

BY WAY OF WARNING:
A BRIEF NOTE ON THE 40 COMMITTEE

In many of the ensuing pages and episodes, I've found it essential to allude
to the "40 Committee" or the "Forty Committee," the semi-clandestine
body of which Henry Kissinger was the chairman between 1969 and 1976.
One does not need to picture some giant, octopuslike organization at the
center of a web of conspiracy: however, it is important to know that there
was a committee which maintained ultimate supervision over United States
covert actions overseas (and, possibly, at home) during this period.

The CIA was originally set up by President Harry Truman at the begin-
ning of the Cold War. In the first Eisenhower administration, it was felt
necessary to establish a monitoring or watchdog body to oversee covert
operations. This panel was known as the Special Group, and sometimes
also referred to as the 54/12 Group, after the number of the National
Security Council directive which set it up. By the time of President Johnson
it was called the 303 Committee and during the Nixon and Ford adminis-
trations it was called the 40 Committee. Some believe that these changes of
name reflect the numbers of later NSC directives; in fact the committee was
known by the numbers of the successive rooms in the handsome Old
Executive Office Building ( now annexed to the neighboring White House )
which used to shelter the three departments of "State, War and Navy," in
which it met. No mystery there.

If any fantastic rumors shroud the work of the committee, this may be
the outcome of the absurd cult of secrecy that at one point surrounded it.
At Senate hearings in 1973, Senator Stuart Symington was questioning
William Colby, then Director of Central Intelligence, about the origins
and evolution of the supervisory group:

Senator Symington: Very well. What is the name of the latest committee
of this character?
Mr Colby: Forty Committee.
Senator Symington: Who is the chairman?
Mr Colby: Well, again, I would prefer to go into executive session on the
description of the Forty Committee, Mr Chairman.
Senator Symington: As to who is the chairman, you would prefer an
executive session?
Mr Colby: The chairman -- all right, Mr Chairman -- Dr Kissinger is the
chairman, as the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Kissinger held this position ex officio, in other words. His colleagues at the
time were Air Force General George Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff; William P. Clements, Jr, the Deputy Secretary of Defense; Joseph
Sisco, the Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs; and the Director of
Central Intelligence, William Colby.

With slight variations, those holding these positions have been the per-
manent members of the Forty Committee which, as President Ford
phrased it in the first public reference by a president to the group's exis
tence, "reviews every covert operation undertaken by our government."
An important variation was added by President Nixon, who appointed his
former campaign manager and attorney general, John Mitchell, to sit on
the committee, the only attorney general to have done so. The founding
charter of the CIA prohibits it from taking any part in domestic operations:
in January 1975 Attorney General Mitchell was convicted of numerous
counts of perjury, obstruction and conspiracy to cover up the Watergate
burglary, which was carried out in part by former CIA operatives. He
became the first attorney general to serve time in jail.

We have met Mr Mitchell, in concert with Mr Kissinger, before. The use-
fulness of this note, I hope and believe, is that it supplies a thread which will
be found throughout this narrative. Whenever any major US covert under-
taking occurred between the years 1969 and 1976, Henry Kissinger may be
at least presumed to have had direct knowledge of, and responsibility for,
it. If he claims that he did not, then he is claiming not to have been doing
a job to which he clung with great bureaucratic tenacity. And, whether or
not he cares to accept the responsibility, the accountability is his in any
case.

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