THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

Chapter 3:  A SAMPLE OF CASES: KISSINGER'S WAR CRIMES IN INDOCHINA

SOME STATEMENTS ARE too blunt for everyday, consensual discourse. In
national "debate," it is the smoother pebbles that are customarily gathered
from the stream, and used as projectiles. They leave less of a scar, even
when they hit. Occasionally, however, a single hard-edged remark will
inflict a deep and jagged wound, a gash so ugly that it must be cauterized
at once. In January 1971, General Telford Taylor, who had been chief pros-
ecuting counsel at the Nuremberg trials, made a considered statement.
Reviewing the legal and moral basis of those hearings, and also the Tokyo
trials of Japanese war criminals and the Manila trial of Emperor Hirohito's
chief militarist, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Taylor said that if the stan-
dards of Nuremberg and Manila were applied evenly, and applied to the
American statesmen and bureaucrats who designed the war in Vietnam,
then "there would be a very strong possibility that they would come to the
same end he [Yamashita] did." It is not every day that a senior American
soldier and jurist delivers the opinion that a large portion of his country's
political class should probably be hooded and blindfolded and dropped
through a trapdoor on the end of a rope.

In his book Nuremberg and Vietnam, General Taylor also anticipated
one of the possible objections to this legal and moral conclusion. It might
be argued for the defense, he said, that those arraigned did not really know
what they were doing; in other words had achieved the foulest results but
from the highest and most innocent motives. The notion of Indochina as
some Heart of Darkness "quagmire" of ignorant armies has been sedu-
lously propagated, then and since, but Taylor had no patience with such a
view. American military and intelligence and economic and political mis-
sions and teams had been in Vietnam, he wrote, for much too long to
attribute anything they did "to lack of information." It might have been
possible for soldiers and diplomats to pose as innocents until the middle
of the 1960s, but after that time, and especially after the My Lai massacre
of 16 March 1968, when serving veterans reported to their superior offi-
cers a number of major atrocities, nobody could reasonably claim to have
been uninformed and of those who could, the least believable would be
those who -far from the confusion of battle -read and discussed and
approved the panoptic reports of the war that were delivered to
Washington.

General Taylor's book was being written while many of the most repre-
hensible events of the Indochina war were still taking place, or were still to
come. He was unaware of the intensity and extent of, for example, the
bombing of Laos and Cambodia. However, enough was known about the
conduct of the war, and about the existing matrix of legal and criminal
responsibility, for him to arrive at some indisputable conclusions. The first
of these concerned the particular obligation of the United States to be
aware of, and to respect, the Nuremberg principles:

Military courts and commissions have customarily rendered their judg-
ments stark and unsupported by opinions giving the reason for their
decision. The Nuremberg and Tokyo judgments, in contrast, were all based
on extensive opinions detailing the evidence and analyzing the factual and
legal issues, in the fashion of appellate tribunals generally. Needless to say
they were not of uniform quality, and often reflected the logical shortcom-
ings of compromise, the marks of which commonly mar the opinions of
multi-member tribunals. But the process was professional in a way seldom
achieved in military courts, and the records and judgments in these trials
provided a much-needed foundation for a corpus of judge-made interna-
tional penal law. The results of the trials commended themselves to the
newly-formed United Nations, and on December 11, 1946, the General
Assembly adopted a resolution affirming "the principles of international
law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judg-
ment of the Tribunal."

However history may ultimately assess the wisdom or unwisdom of the
war crimes trials, one thing is indisputable. At their conclusion, the United
States Government stood legally, politically and morally committed to the
principles enunciated in the charters and judgments of the tribunals. The
President of the United States, on the recommendations of the Departments
of State, War and Justice, approved the war crimes programs. Thirty or more
American judges, drawn from the appellate benches of the states from
Massachusetts to Oregon, and Minnesota to Georgia, conducted the later
Nuremberg trials and wrote the opinions. General Douglas MacArthur,
under authority of the Far Eastern Commission, established the Tokyo tri-
bunal and confirmed the sentences it imposed, and it was under his
authority as the highest American military officer in the Far East that the
Yamashita and other such proceedings were held. The United States delega-
tion to the United Nations presented the resolution by which the General
Assembly endorsed the Nuremberg principles. Thus the integrity of the
nation is staked on those principles, and today the question is how they
apply to our conduct of the war in Vietnam, and whether the United States
Government is prepared to face the consequences of their application.

Facing and cogitating these consequences himself, General Telford Taylor
took issue with another United States officer, Colonel William Corson, who
had written that "Regardless of the outcome of. ..the My Lai courts-martial
and other legal actions, the point remains that American judgment as to the
effective prosecution of the war was faulty from beginning to end and that
the atrocities, alleged or otherwise, are a result of failure of judgment, not
criminal behavior." To this Telford responded thus:

Colonel Corson overlooks, I fear, that negligent homicide is generally a
crime of bad judgment rather than evil intent. Perhaps he is right in the
strictly causal sense that if there had been no failure of judgment, the occa-
sion for criminal conduct would not have arisen. The Germans in occupied
Europe made gross errors of judgment which no doubt created the condi-
tions in which the slaughter of the inhabitants of Klissura ( a Greek village
annihilated during the Occupation] occurred, but that did not make the
killings any the less criminal.

Referring this question to the chain of command in the field, General
Taylor noted further that the senior officer corps had been:

more or less constantly in Vietnam, and splendidly equipped with helicop-
ters and other aircraft, which gave them a degree of mobility unprecedented
in earlier wars, and consequently endowed them with every opportunity to
keep the course of the fighting and its consequences under close and con-
stant observation. Communications were generally rapid and efficient, so
that the flow of information and orders was unimpeded.

These circumstances are in sharp contrast to those that confronted General
Yamashita in 1944 and 1945, with his troops reeling back in disarray before the
oncoming American military powerhouse. For failure to control his troops so
as to prevent the atrocities they committed, Brigadier Generals Egbert F. Bullene
and Morris Handwerk and Major Generals James A. Lester, Leo Donovan and
Russel B. Reynolds found him guilty of violating the laws of war and sentenced
him to death by hanging.

Nor did General Taylor omit the crucial link between the military com-
mand and its political supervision; this was again a much closer and more
immediate relation in the American-Vietnamese instance than in the
Japanese-Filipino one, as the regular contact between, say, General
Creighton Abrams and Henry Kissinger makes clear:

How much the President and his close advisors in the White House,
Pentagon and Foggy Bottom knew about the volume and cause of civilian
casualties in Vietnam, and the physical devastation of the countryside, is
speculative. Something was known, for the late John Naughton (then
Assistant Secretary of Defense) returned from the White House one day in
1967 with the message that "We seem to be proceeding on the assumption
that the way to eradicate the Vietcong is to destroy all the village structures,
defoliate all the jungles, and then cover the entire surface of South Vietnam
with asphalt."

This remark had been reported (by Townsend Hoopes, a political antago-
nist of General Taylor) before that metaphor had been extended into two
new countries, Laos and Cambodia, without a declaration of war, a notifi-
cation to Congress, or a warning to civilians to evacuate. But Taylor
anticipated the Kissinger case in many ways when he recalled the trial of the
Japanese statesman Koki Hirota:

who served briefly as Prime Minister and for several years as Foreign
Minister between 1933 and May 1938, after which he held no office whatever.
The so-called "Rape of Nanking" by Japanese forces occurred during the
winter of 1937-38, when Hirota was Foreign Minister. Upon receiving early
reports of the atrocities, he demanded and received assurances from the
War Ministry that they would be stopped. But they continued, and the Tokyo
tribunal found Hirota guilty because he was "derelict in his duty in not
insisting before the Cabinet that immediate action be taken to put an end to
the atrocities." and "was content to rely on assurances which he knew were
not being implemented." On this basis, coupled with his conviction on the
aggressive war charge, Hirota was sentenced to be hanged.

Melvin Laird, as Secretary of Defense during the first Nixon administra-
tion, was queasy enough about the early bombings of Cambodia, and
dubious enough about the legality or prudence of the intervention, to send
a memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking, "Are steps being taken, on a con-
tinuing basis, to minimize the risk of striking Cambodian peoples and
structures. If so, what are the steps? Are we reasonably sure such steps are
effective." There is no evidence of Henry Kissinger, as National Security
Advisor or Secretary of State, ever seeking even such modest assurances.
Indeed, there is much evidence of his deceiving Congress about the true
extent to which such assurances as were offered were deliberately false.
Others involved, like Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and William
Colby, have since offered varieties of apology or contrition or at least
explanation: Henry Kissinger never. General Taylor described the practise
of air strikes against hamlets suspected of "harboring" Vietnamese guer-
rillas as "flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention on Civilian
Protection, which prohibits 'collective penalties' and 'reprisals against pro-
tected persons' and equally in violation of the Rules of Land Warfare." He
was writing before this atrocious precedent had been extended to "reprisal
raids" that treated two whole countries -Laos and Cambodia -as if they
were disposable hamlets.

For Henry Kissinger, no great believer in the boastful claims of the war-
makers in the first place, a special degree of responsibility attaches. Not
only did he have good reason to know that field commanders were exag-
gerating successes and claiming all dead bodies as enemy soldiers -- a
commonplace piece of knowledge after the spring of 1968 -- but he also
knew that the issue of the war had been settled politically and diplomati-
cally, for all intents and purposes, before he became National Security
Advisor. Thus he had to know that every additional casualty, on either
side, was not just a death but an avoidable death. And with this knowledge,
and with a strong sense of the domestic and personal political profit, he
urged the expansion of the war into two neutral countries -violating inter-
national law -while persisting in a breathtakingly high level of attrition in
Vietnam itself.

From a huge range of possible examples, I have chosen cases which
involve Kissinger directly and in which I have myself been able to interview
surviving witnesses. The first, as foreshadowed above, is Operation Speedy
Express.

My friend and colleague Kevin Buckley, then a much-admired corre-
spondent and Saigon bureau chief for Newsweek, became interested in the
"pacification" campaign which bore this breezy code name. Designed in the
closing days of the Johnson-Humphrey administration, it was put into
full effect in the first six months of 1969, when Henry Kissinger had
assumed much authority over the conduct of the war. The objective was the
disciplining, on behalf of the Thieu government, of the turbulent Mekong
Delta province of Kien Hoa.

On 22 January 1968, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had told the
Senate that "no regular North Vietnamese units" were deployed in the Mekong
Delta, and no military intelligence documents have surfaced to undermine his
claim, so that the cleansing of the area cannot be understood as part of the
general argument about resisting Hanoi's unsleeping will to conquest. The
announced purpose of the Ninth Division's sweep, indeed, was to redeem
many thousands of villagers from political control by the National Liberation
Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC). As Buckley found, and as his magazine
Newsweek partially disclosed at the rather late date of 19 June 1972:

All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering
number of noncombatant civilians -- perhaps as many as 5,000 according to
one official -- were killed by us firepower to "pacify" Kien Hoa. The death
toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison. ...

The Ninth Division put all it had into the operation. Eight thousand
infantrymen scoured the heavily populated countryside, but contact with the
elusive enemy was rare. Thus, in its pursuit of pacification, the division
relied heavily on its 50 artillery pieces, 50 helicopters (many armed with
rockets and mini-guns) and the deadly support lent by the Air Force. There
were 3,381 tactical air strikes by fighter bombers during "Speedy Express." ...

"Death is our business and business is good." was the slogan painted on
one helicopter unit's quarters during the operation. And so it was.
Cumulative statistics for "Speedy Express" show that 10,899 "enemy" were
killed. In the month of March alone, "over 3,000 enemy troops were killed. ..
which is the largest monthly total for any American division in the Vietnam
War," said the division's official magazine. When asked to account for the
enormous body counts, a division senior officer explained that helicopter
gun crews often caught unarmed "enemy" in open fields. ...

There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cong were
well armed. Simple civilians were, of course, not armed. And the enormous
discrepancy between the body count (11,000) and the number of captured
weapons (748) is hard to explain -except by the conclusion that many
victims were unarmed innocent civilians. ...

The people who still live in pacified Kien Hoa all have vivid recollections
of the devastation that American firepower brought to their lives in early
1969. Virtually every person to whom I spoke had suffered in some way.
"There were 5,000 people in our village before 1969, but there were none in
1970;' one village elder told me. "The Americans destroyed every house with
artillery, air strikes, or by burning them down with cigarette lighters. About
100 people were killed by bombing, others were wounded and others became
refugees. Many were children killed by concussion from the bombs which
their small bodies could not withstand, even if they were hiding under
ground."

Other officials, including the village police chief, corroborated the man's
testimony. I could not, of course, reach every village. But in each of the
many places where I went, the testimony was the same: 100 killed here, 200
killed there.

Other notes by Buckley and his friend and collaborator Alex Shimkin (a
worker for International Voluntary Services who was later killed in the
war) discovered the same telltale evidence in hospital statistics. In March
1969, the hospital at Ben Tre reported 343 patients injured by "friendly fire"
and 25 by "the enemy," an astonishing statistic for a government facility to
record in a guerrilla war where suspected membership of the Viet Cong
could mean death. And Buckley's own citation for his magazine of "per-
haps as many as 5,000 deaths" among civilians in this one sweep -is an
almost deliberate understatement of what he was told by a United States
official, who actually said that "at least 5,000" of the dead "were what we
refer to as noncombatants": a not-too-exacting distinction, as we have
already seen, and as was by then well understood (italics mine).

Well understood, that is to say, not just by those who opposed the war
but by those who were conducting it. As one United States official put it to
Buckley:

The actions of the Ninth Division in inflicting civilian casualties were worse
( than My Lai] .The sum total of what the Ninth did was overwhelming. In
sum, the horror was worse than My Lai. But with the Ninth, the civilian
casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most
of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned
by the command's insistence on high body-counts. ... The result was an
inevitable outcome of the unit's command policy.

The earlier sweep which had mopped up My Lai -during Operation
Wheeler Wallawa -- had also at the time counted all corpses as those of
enemy soldiers, including the civilian population of the village, who were
casually included in the mind-bending overall total of 10,000.

Confronted with this evidence, Buckley and Shimkin abandoned a lazy
and customary usage and replaced it, in a cable to Newsweek headquarters
in New York, with a more telling and scrupulous one. The problem was not
"indiscriminate use of firepower," but "charges of quite discriminating use --
as a matter of policy in populated areas." Even the former is a gross viola-
tion of the Geneva Convention; the second charge leads straight to the
dock in Nuremberg or The Hague.

Since General Creighton Abrams publicly praised the Ninth Division
for its work, and drew attention wherever and whenever he could to the
tremendous success of Operation Speedy Express, we can be sure that the
political leadership in Washington was not unaware. Indeed, the degree of
micro-management revealed in Kissinger's memoirs forbids the idea that
anything of importance took place without his knowledge or permission.

Of nothing is this more true than his own individual involvement in the
bombing and invasion of neutral Cambodia and Laos. Obsessed with the
idea that Vietnamese intransigence could be traced to allies or resources
external to Vietnam itself, or could be overcome by tactics of mass destruc-
tion, Kissinger at one point contemplated using thermonuclear weapons to
obliterate the pass through which ran the railway link from North Vietnam
to China, and at another stage considered bombing the dikes that pre-
vented North Vietnam's irrigation system from flooding the country.
Neither of these measures (reported respectively in Tad Szulc's history of
Nixon-era diplomacy and by Kissinger's former aide Roger Morris) was
taken, which removes some potential war crimes from our bill of indict-
ment but which also gives an indication of the regnant mentality. There
remained Cambodia and Laos, which supposedly concealed or protected
North Vietnamese supply lines.

As in the cases postulated by General Telford Taylor, there is the crime
of aggressive war and then there is the question of war crimes. (The Koki
Hirota case cited above is of importance here.) In the period after the
Second World War, or the period governed by the UN Charter and its
related and incorporated Conventions, the United States under Democratic
and Republican administrations had denied even its closest allies the right
to invade countries that allegedly gave shelter to their antagonists. Most
famously, President Eisenhower exerted economic and diplomatic pressure
at a high level to bring an end to the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France
and Israel in October 1956. (The British thought Nasser should not control
"their" Suez Canal; the French believed Nasser to be the inspiration and
source of their troubles in Algeria; and the Israelis claimed that he played
the same role in fomenting their difficulties with the Palestinians. The
United States maintained that even if these propaganda fantasies were true,
they would not retrospectively legalize an invasion of Egypt. ) During the
Algerian war of independence, also, the United States had repudiated
France's claimed right to attack a town in neighboring Tunisia that suc-
coured Algerian guerrillas, and in 1964 Ambassador Adlai Stevenson at
the United Nations had condemned the United Kingdom for attacking a
town in Yemen that allegedly provided a rear guard for rebels operating in
its then colony of Aden.

All this law and precedent was to be thrown to the winds when Nixon
and Kissinger decided to aggrandize the notion of "hot pursuit" across the
borders of Laos and Cambodia. Even before the actual territorial invasion
of Cambodia, for example, and very soon after the accession of Nixon and
Kissinger to power, a program of heavy bombardment of the country was
prepared and executed in secret. One might with some revulsion call it a
"menu" of bombardment, since the code names for the raids were
"Breakfast," "Lunch," "Snack," "Dinner," and "Dessert."  The raids were flown
by B-52 bombers which, it is important to note at the outset, fly at an alti-
tude too high to be observed from the ground and carry immense tonnages
of high explosive: they give no warning of approach and are incapable of
accuracy or discrimination because of both their altitude and the mass of
their shells. Between 18 March 1969 and May 1970,3,630 such raids were
flown across the Cambodian frontier. The bombing campaign began as it
was to go on -- with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with fla-
grant deceit by Mr Kissinger in this precise respect.

For example, a memorandum prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
sent to the Defense Department and the White House said plainly that
"some Cambodian casualties would be sustained in the operation" and
"the surprise effect of attack could tend to increase casualties." The target
district for Breakfast (Base Area 35) was inhabited, said the memo, by
about 1,640 Cambodian civilians. Lunch (Base Area 609) was inhabited by
198 of them, Snack (Base Area 351) by 383, Dinner (Base Area 352) by 770,
and Dessert (Base Area 350) by about 120 Cambodian peasants. These
oddly exact figures are enough in themselves to demonstrate that Kissinger
was lying when he later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that
areas of Cambodia selected for bombing were "unpopulated."

As a result of the expanded and intensified bombing campaigns, it has
been estimated that as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos, and 600,000 in
Cambodia, lost their lives. (These are not the highest estimates.) Figures for
refugees are several multiples of that. In addition, the widespread use of
toxic chemical defoliants created a massive health crisis which naturally fell
most heavily on children, nursing mothers, the aged and the already infirm,
and which persists to this day.

Though this appalling war, and its appalling consequences, can and
should be taken as a moral and political crisis for American institutions, for
at least five United States presidents, and for American society, there is
little difficulty in identifying individual responsibility during this, its most
atrocious and indiscriminate stage. Richard Nixon as Commander in Chief
bears ultimate responsibility, and only narrowly escaped a congressional
move to include his crimes and deceptions in Indochina in the articles
of impeachment, the promulgation of which eventually compelled his
resignation. But his deputy and closest advisor, Henry Kissinger, was some-
times forced, and sometimes forced himself, into a position of virtual
co-presidency where Indochina was concerned.

For example, in the preparations for the invasion of Cambodia in 1970,
Kissinger was caught between the views of his staff -- several of whom resigned
in protest when the invasion began -and his need to please his President. His
President listened more to his two criminal associates -- John Mitchell and
Bebe Rebozo -- than he did to his Secretaries of State and Defense, William
Rogers and Melvin Laird, both of whom were highly skeptical about widen-
ing the war. On one especially charming occasion, a drunken Nixon
telephoned Kissinger to discuss the invasion plans. He then put Bebe Rebozo
on the line. "The President wants you to know if this doesn't work, Henry, it's
your ass." "Ain't that right, Bebe?" slurred the Commander in Chief. (The
conversation was monitored and transcribed by one of Kissinger's soon-to-
resign staffers, William Watts.') It could be said that in this instance the
National Security Advisor was under pressure; nevertheless he took the side of
the pro-invasion faction and, according to the memoirs of General William
Westmoreland, actually lobbied for that invasion to go ahead.

A somewhat harder picture is presented by former Chief of Staff H.R.
Haldeman in his Diaries. On 22 December 1970, he records:

Henry came up with the need to meet with the P[resident] today with Al
Haig and then tomorrow with Laird and Moorer because he has to use the
P[resident] to force Laird and the military to go ahead with the P[resident]'s
plans, which they won't carry out without direct orders. The plans in ques-
tion, involved ... attacking enemy forces in Laos.

In his own memoirs, White House Years, Kissinger claims that he usurped
the customary chain of command whereby commanders in the field
receive, or believe that they receive, their orders from the President and
then the Secretary of Defense. He boasts that he, together with Haldeman,
Alexander Haig and Colonel Ray Sit ton, evolved "both a military and a
diplomatic schedule" for the secret bombing of Cambodia. On board Air
Force One, which was on the tarmac at Brussels airport on 24 February
1969, he writes, "we worked out the guidelines for the bombing of the
enemy's sanctuaries." Air Force Colonel Sit ton, the reigning expert on B-52
tactics at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that the President was not at the
meeting but had said that he would be discussing the subject with
Kissinger. A few weeks later, Haldeman's Diaries for 17 March record:

Historic day. K[issinger] 's "Operation Breakfast" finally came off at 2.00 PM
our time. K[issinger] really excited, as was P[resident].

The next day's entry reads:

K[issinger]'s "Operation Breakfast" a great success. He came beaming in
with the report, very productive.

It only got better. On 22 Apri1 1970, Haldeman reports that Nixon, follow-
ing Kissinger into a National Security Council meeting on Cambodia,
"turned back to me with a big smile and said 'Kissinger's really having fun
today, he's playing Bismarck."'

The above is an insult to the Iron Chancellor. When Kissinger was
finally exposed in Congress and the press for conducting unauthorized
bombings, he weakly pleaded that the raids were not all that secret, really,
because Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia had known of them. He had to be
reminded that a foreign princeling cannot give permission to an
American bureaucrat to violate the United States Constitution. Nor, for
the matter of that, can he give permission to an American bureaucrat to
slaughter large numbers of his "own" civilians. It's difficult to imagine
Bismarck cowering behind such a contemptible excuse. (Prince Sihanouk,
it is worth remembering, later became an abject puppet of the Khmer
Rouge.)

Colonel Sit ton began to notice that by late 1969 his own office was
being regularly overruled in the matter of selecting targets. "Not only was
Henry carefully screening the raids;' said Sit ton, "he was reading the raw
intelligence" and fiddling with the mission patterns and bombing runs. In
other departments of Washington insiderdom, it was also noticed that
Kissinger was becoming a Stakhanovite committeeman. Aside from the
crucial Forty Committee, which planned and oversaw all foreign covert
actions, he chaired the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), the
Verification Panel, which was concerned with arms control, the Vietnam
Special Studies Group, which oversaw the day-to-day conduct of the war,
and the Defense Program Review Committee, which supervised the budget
of the Defense Department.

It is therefore impossible for him to claim that he was unaware of the
consequences of the bombings of Cambodia and Laos; he knew more
about them, and in more intimate detail, than any other individual. Nor
was he imprisoned in a culture of obedience that gave him no alternative,
or no rival arguments. Several senior members of his own staff, most
notably Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, resigned over the invasion of
Cambodia, and more than two hundred State Department employees
signed a protest addressed to Secretary of State William Rogers. Indeed, as
has been noted, both Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird were
opposed to the B-52 bombing policy, as Kissinger himself records with
some disgust in his own memoirs. Congress was also opposed to an exten-
sion of the bombing (once it had agreed to become informed of it) but,
even after the Nixon-Kissinger administration had undertaken on Capitol
Hill not to intensify the raids, there was a 21 percent increase of the bomb-
ing of Cambodia in the months July-August 1973. The Air Force maps of
the targeted areas show them to be, or to have been, densely populated.

Colonel Sitton does recall, it must be admitted, that Kissinger requested
that bombing avoid civilian casualties. His explicit motive in making this
request was to avoid or forestall complaints from the government of Prince
Sihanouk. But this does no more in itself than demonstrate that Kissinger
was aware of the possibility of civilian deaths. If he knew enough to know
of their likelihood, and was director of the policy that inflicted them, and
neither enforced any actual precautions nor reprimanded any violators,
then the case against him is legally and morally complete.

As early as the fall of 1970, an independent investigator named Fred
Branfman, who spoke Lao and knew the country as a civilian volunteer,
had gone to Bangkok and interviewed Jerome Brown, a former targeting
officer for the United States embassy in the Laotian capital of Vientiane.
The man had retired from the Air Force because of his disillusionment at
the futility of the bombing and his consternation at the damage done to
civilians and society. The speed and height of the planes, he said, meant
that targets were virtually indistinguishable from the air. Pilots would often
decide to drop bombs where craters already existed, and chose villages as
targets because they could be more readily identified than alleged Pathet
Lao guerrillas hiding in the jungle. Branfman, whom I interviewed in San
Francisco in the summer of 2000, went on to provide this and other infor-
mation to Henry Kamm and Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, to
Ted Koppel of ABC, and to many others. He also wrote up and published
his findings in Harper's magazine, where they were not controverted by any
authority. Under pressure from the US embassy, the Laotian authorities
had Branfman deported back to the United States, which was probably,
from their point of view, a mistake. He was able to make a dramatic
appearance on Capitol Hill on 22 April 1971, at a hearing held by Senator
Edward Kennedy's Senate Subcommittee on Refugees. His antagonist was
the State Department's envoy William Sullivan, a former ambassador to
Laos. Branfman accused him in front of the cameras of helping to conceal
evidence that Laotian society was being mutilated by ferocious aerial
bombardment.

Partly as a consequence, Congressman Pete McCloskey of California ( a
much-decorated veteran of the war in Korea) paid a visit to Laos and
acquired a copy of an internal US embassy study of the bombing. He also
prevailed on the US Air Force to furnish him with aerial photographs of the
dramatic damage. Ambassador Sullivan was so disturbed by these pictures,
some of them taken in areas known to him, that his first reaction was to
establish to his own satisfaction that the raids had occurred after he left his
post in Vientiane. (He was later to learn that, for his pains, his own tele-
phone was being tapped at Henry Kissinger's instigation, one of the many
such violations of American law that were to eventuate in the Watergate
tapping-and-burglary scandal: a scandal that Kissinger was furthermore to
plead in an astounding outburst of vanity, deceit and self-deceit -as his
own alibi for inattention in the Cyprus crisis.)

Having done what he could to bring the Laotian nightmare to the atten-
tion of those whose constitutional job it was to supervise such questions,
Branfman went back to Thailand and from there to Phnom Penh, capital of
Cambodia. Having gained access to a pilot's radio, he tape-recorded the
conversations between pilots on bombing missions over the Cambodian
interior. On no occasion did they run any checks designed to reasssure
themselves and others that they were not bombing civilian targets. It had
been definitely asserted, by named us government spokesmen, that such
checks were run. Branfman handed the tapes to Sydney Schanberg, whose
New York Times report on them was printed just before the Senate met to
prohibit further blitzing of Cambodia (the very resolution that was flouted
by Kissinger the following month).

From there Branfman went back to Thailand and travelled north to
Nakhorn Phanom, the new headquarters of the us Seventh Air Force. Here,
a war room code-named "Blue Chip" served as the command and control
center of the bombing campaign. Branfman, who is tall and well-built, was
able to pose as a new recruit just up from Saigon, and ultimately to gain
access to the war room itself. Here, consoles and maps and screens plotted
the progress of the bombardment. In conversation with the "bombing offi-
cer" on duty, he asked if pilots ever made contact before dropping their
enormous loads of ordnance. Oh, yes, he was assured, they did. Worried
about hitting the innocent? Oh, no -- merely concerned about the where-
abouts of CIA "ground teams" infiltrated into the area. Branfman's report on
this, which was carried by Jack Anderson's syndicated column and also in
, the Washington Monthly, was likewise uncontroverted by any official denial.

One reason that the United States command in Southeast Asia finally
ceased employing the crude and horrific tally of "body count" was that, as
in the relatively small but but specific case of Speedy Express cited above,
the figures began to look ominous when they were counted up. Sometimes,
totals of "enemy" dead would turn out, when computed, to be suspiciously
larger than the number of claimed "enemy" in the field. Yet the war would
somehow drag on, with new quantitative goals being set and enforced.
Thus, according to the Pentagon, the following are the casualty figures
between the first Lyndon Johnson bombing halt in March 1968 and the
same date in 1972:

The US Senate Subcommittee on Refugees estimated that in the same four-
year period rather more than three million civilians were killed, injured or
rendered homeless. In the same four-year period, the United States
dropped almost 4,500,000 tons of high explosive on Indochina. (The
Pentagon's estimated total for the tonnage dropped in the entire Second
World War is 2,044,000.) This total does not include massive sprayings of
chemical defoliants and pesticides, the effects of which are still being reg-
istered by the region's ecology. Nor does it include the land-mines which
detonate to this day.

It is unclear how we count the murder or abduction of 35,708
Vietnamese civilians by the CIA's counter-guerrilla "Phoenix program"
during the first two and a half years of the Nixon-Kissinger administration.
There may be some "overlap." There is also some overlap with the actions
of previous administrations in all cases. But the truly exorbitant death tolls
all occurred on Henry Kissinger's watch, were known and understood by
him, were concealed from Congress, the press and the public by him -at
any rate to the best of his ability and were, when questioned, the subject
of political and bureaucratic vendettas ordered by him. They were also
partly the outcome of a secretive and illegal process in Washington,
unknown even to most cabinet members, of which Henry Kissinger stood
to be, and became, a prime beneficiary.

On that closing point one may once again cite H.R. Haldeman, who had
no further reason to lie and who had, by the time of his writing, paid for his
crimes by serving a sentence in prison. Haldeman describes the moment in
Florida when Kissinger was enraged by a New York Times story telling some
part of the truth about Indochina:

Henry telephoned J. Edgar Hoover in Washington from Key Biscayne on the
May morning the Times story appeared.

According to Hoover's memo of the call, Henry said the story used
"secret information which was extraordinarily damaging." Henry went on to
tell Hoover that he "wondered whether I could make a major effort to find
out where that came from. ..and to put whatever resources I need to find
out who did this. I told him I would take care of this right away."

Henry was no fool, of course. He telephoned Hoover a few hours later to
remind him that the investigation be handled discreetly "so no stories will get
out." Hoover must have smiled, but said all right. And by five o' clock he was
back on the telephone to Henry with the report that the Times reporter
"may have gotten some of his information from the Southeast Asian desk of
the Department of Defense's Public Affairs Office." More specifically, Hoover
suggested the source could be a man named Mort Halperin (a Kissinger
staffer) and another man who worked in the Systems Analysis Agency. ...
According to Hoover's memo, Kissinger hoped "I would follow it up as far as
we can take it and they will destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no
matter where he is."

The last line of that memo gives an accurate reflection of Henry's rage, as
I remember it.

Nevertheless, Nixon was one hundred percent behind the wiretaps. And
I was, too. And so the program started, inspired by Henry's rage but ordered
by Nixon, who soon broadened it even further to include newsmen.
Eventually, seventeen people were wiretapped by the FBI including seven on
Kissinger's NSC staff and three on the White House staff.

And thus occurred the birth of the "plumbers" and of the assault on
American law and democracy that they inaugurated. Commenting on the
lamentable end of this process, Haldeman wrote that he still believed that
ex-President Nixon (who was then still alive) should agree to the release of
the remaining tapes. But:

This time my view is apparently not shared by the man who was one reason
for the original decision to start the taping process. Henry Kissinger is deter-
mined to stop the tapes from reaching the public. ...

Nixon made the point that Kissinger was really the one who had the
most to lose from the tapes becoming public. Henry apparently felt that the
tapes would expose a lot of things he had said that would be very disadvan-
tageous to him publicly.

Nixon said that in making the deal for custody of his Presidential papers,
which was originally announced after his pardon but then was shot down by
Congress, it was Henry who called him and insisted on Nixon's right to
destroy the tapes. That was, of course, the thing that destroyed the deal.

A society that has been "plumbed" has the right to demand that its
plumbers be compelled to make some restitution by way of full disclosure.
The litigation to put the Nixon tapes in the public trust is only partially
complete; no truthful account of the Vietnam years will be complete until
Kissinger's part in what we already know has been made fully transparent.

Until that time, Kissinger's role in the violation of American law at the
close of the Vietnam war makes the perfect counterpart to the 1968 covert
action that helped him to power in the first place. The two parentheses
enclose a series of premeditated war crimes which still have power to stun
the imagination.

_______________

* According to Woodward and Bernstein, Watts then had a word with General Alexander
Haig, who told him: "You've just had an order from your Commander in Chief. You can't
resign." "Fuck you, Al," said Watts. "I just did."

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