The Trial of Henry Kissinger (21 page)

Joe Laitin

Bethesda, Md.

[November 19 2000]

Nixoniana

To the Editor:

In his and Brent Scowcroft's letter (Nov. 5), former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger denied having been associated with Defense Secretary James Schlesinger in directing the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore orders from President Richard Nixon. As one who during 1973-75 served on one of the Battle Staff units, on permanent standby to brief the president and top commanders in the event of a nuclear crisis, I know otherwise. As I have testified in secret debriefings and in both open and closed sessions of House and Senate committees as far back as 1975, Kissinger signed or countersigned at least three such orders in the final year of the Nixon presidency. I have so testified under penalty of perjury several times.

After the first such order in 1973 signed by Kissinger, the Joint Chiefs demanded that any subsequent ones be countersigned by at least one other Nixon cabinet officer. A second such order, again an instruction not to obey the president until further notice, was signed by Kissinger and, to the best of my recollection, Elliot Richardson. At least one other was jointly signed by Kissinger and Defense Secretary Schlesinger. Such orders were always sent "Top Secret, Eyes Only, Limited Distribution," bypassing other traffic. Sometimes they remained in effect for a week, most times only two to four days. The orders were issued at times of perceived Nixon mental instability, I repeatedly received them in my own hands, as did numerous others serving in sensitive nuclear control positions during that last horrific year of the Nixon presidency.

Barry A. Toll

Painesville, Ohio

[December 12 2000]

To the Editor:

The letter by Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, referring to our Nixon biography, "The Arrogance of Power," was an inept barrage. They

assert that allegations of Nixonian sabotage of the 1968 Johnson peace effort are

"unsubstantiated by persuasive evidence," then fail to counter any of our detailed analysis -

which includes the recently released record of F.B.I, surveillance conducted on the eve of the election that brought Nixon to power.

Kissinger and Scowcroft cite Soviet archival sources, of all things, to insinuate that the Johnson peace initiative was just a political ploy "to get Hubert Humphrey elected." Any reading of the record of the pivotal White House meetings, available at the Johnson Library, dispels that notion. But even if that had been the case, it would not mitigate the offense indicated by the mass of information suggesting that Nixon did the unconscionable - as an unelected political candidate he meddled in the government's conduct of highly sensitive peace negotiations.

Readers of our book will find that we account, page by page, for our sources - which included more than a thousand interviews. Had Kissinger granted us an interview, we would have faithfully reported his views on relevant matters. We made nine written requests over a two-year period, but he ducked and weaved and never came through.

Anthony Summers

Robbyn Swan

Cappoquin, Ireland

[December 12 2000]

Unpublished

To the Editor:

I suppose it is a distinction of some sort to be attacked at such length by Henry Kissinger and (for some reason) his business partner General Brent Scowcroft. It is certainly fascinating to see the evident nervousness with which they approach the allegations I made.

The record of Henry Kissinger's underhand involvement with the Nixon presidential campaign of 1968 is so extensively documented by now, including by Nixon himself, that one rubs the bleary eyes to read a denial of it. "Neither of us," write the two men, "was associated"

with that campaign. Misery is said to love company; I have never bothered to inquire whether General Scowcroft played any part in that unhappy episode but his own modesty - perhaps disappointment - only serves to put his coauthor's credibility in starker contrast with the facts.

Mr. Kissinger was hired as Nixon's principal advisor for national security as soon as the election was over, even though the two men had met only once. It was, moreover, Nixon's first appointment. Does Kissinger now deny that this was unconnected to the many surreptitious services performed by him, from Paris, for John Mitchell and for Nixon himself? If so, the flabbergasting denial of established facts would be interesting only insofar as it suggested something hitherto unguessed-at: the prickings of an uneasy conscience.

I make this perhaps unwarrantable suggestion because of a peculiar formulation later in the same paragraph, where Mr Kissinger (I've done with Scowcroft for now), says that: the record shows that the South Vietnamese foot-dragging (alleged to be at the behest of Nixon underlings) -
even if the account were true
- could not have had the consequence that Summers claims. The expanded Paris peace talks began in early November, and any delay was therefore very brief; Nixon

- as president-elect and at the peak of his leverage - encouraged President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to cooperate with the Johnson administration. (Italics added.)

This is a finely crafted paragraph and no mistake. But it is also very dishonestly argued. The South Vietnamese foot-dragging is not "alleged" but has been asserted and extensively documented. If the other emphasis of "alleged" is the intended one, then it was not at the

"behest of underlings" - the now-familiar "deniable" scheme whereby the chief is never told what his deputies do - but at the direct instigation of Nixon himself. This has been solidly phrased by many Democratic and Republican high-level participants in these momentous events, and is not challenged, let alone rebutted, by Kissinger. "Early November" may sound suitably autumnal as a description of the seasonal setting of these same events, but it stretches to cover the date of the election itself and is thus designed to obscure what it purports to illuminate. What Kissinger means is that in the short interval when the actual "foot-dragging"

took place, and as a thinkable consequence of that precise interval, one regime replaced another in the White House. That is, after all, the whole hypothesis (and the whole accusation) in the first place. Once President, Nixon did indeed appear to hew to the Johnson line - which is another element in the case against him and his newly promoted "National Security Advisor," who had no principled differences with that line to begin with.

The preceding and succeeding passages also betray unease. Kissinger does not say that there is no evidence for this grave allegation. He says that the evidence is not persuasive. Does he care to say what is unpersuasive about the evidence adduced by so many historians and participants, from the hawkish Bundy and Haldeman to the more skeptical Clark Clifford?

Evidently he does not. Instead, there comes a breathtaking and highly suggestive change of subject:

If the issue is political motivation, any discussion of this question has to begin with the indications from Soviet archives that Soviet leaders were led to believe that a main motive of rushing the bombing halt and peace talks was to get
Hubert Humphrey
elected. (Italics in original.) This clumsily constructed sentence deserves a close parsing. Apparently, political motivation is an allowable sub-text of the argument over the Paris negotiations after all, since if it can be alleged - actually only suggested -about the Democratic incumbents it can also surely be alleged about their Republican opponents. So one is grateful for Kissinger's perhaps inadvertent concession of common ground. However, if the Johnson-Humphrey regime sought to time the talks for their own electoral purposes (and this writer was not and is not in any position to approve of anything they undertook) then they did so in public view, and as the legally elected and constituted government of the United States. In that capacity, too, they would have been subject to the judgment of the voters as to their likely opportunism. Whereas Messrs Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell and Kissinger (only one of them so far unindicted for one abuse of power or another) would have been conducting a "diplomacy" with unaccredited interlocutors, illegal under the Logan Act, concealed not only from both the public and denominated negotiators of the country but also from its electorate! This indeed is part of the essential
gravamen
of the charge. To put the two notions on the same footing, and to lard them with vague and unsupported innuendoes about "Soviet" knowledge, is to take the same attitude to the United States Constitution that Kissinger was later to adopt towards the Chilean one.

It is obviously true to say, in a military-technocratic sense, that there is some extensive cross-over between the war as waged by Johnson and Humphrey and the war as "inherited"

by Nixon and Kissinger. To that extent, some of the assertions of point (3) need not be disputed. ("One-third would be more nearly accurate." Good grief - so Kissinger has been counting them after all, while daring to accuse me of playing "the usual numbers game") However, if the "legacy" transmitted from one administration to the next was indeed passed through a filter of illegal secret dealing with an undisclosed third power - as has been authoritatively argued, and as the outgoing administration certainly believed - and if the effect of this was to enhance the level of violence rather than to diminish it, then the case for regarding

Mr. Kissinger as a war criminal, careless only of
American
deaths, is complete on those terms alone.

Your readers might care to note that in seeking further to dilute the above implications, he says nothing to my original point about hugely increased Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian casualties during the years 1969-1975; a period when the war and its devastation was extended into large new tracts of formerly neutral and civilian territory. Such an omission cannot be accidental; it is the sort of "oversight" which results from a racist world-view and hopes - I am sure in vain - to concentrate the attention and sympathy of your audience only upon its "own" losses.

The remaining paragraphs of his letter are replete with boilerplate propaganda and pitiful falsehood, much of it ably disposed of by the later letters you have printed from Mr. Laitin and Mr. Toll. My forthcoming book
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
will, I hope, supply the refutation of the residual claims.

Christopher Hitchens

Washington, DC

[A PS for readers: I do not complain of not seeing my own letter in print; it was excessively lengthy and I had already had my say in the columns of the Book Review. I also delayed too long in sending it, in case Kissinger - or even the hapless Scowcroft - might choose to take on the annihilating replies they had received from Laitin and Toll. But answer came there none, so I allowed myself the satisfaction of finishing an argument Kissinger had started and then abandoned.]

APPENDIX II

THE DEMETRACOPOULOS LETTER

DOBROVIR & GEBHARDT

SUITE 1105

1025 VERMONT AVENUE, N. W.

WASHINGTON, d. C. 2OOO5

(202) 347-8118

TELEX: 6503136357

September 3, 1987

BY MESSENGER

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

c/o James E. Wesner, Esq.

Ginsberg, Feldman, Weil & Bress

Suite 700

1250 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20036

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

You will recall correspondence I sent to you, care of your attorney James Wesner, in 1980, concerning NSC documents referring to Elias P. Demetracopoulos. You never replied to those letters, in particular to the last, October 24, 1980, letter. From what you had told us through your attorney at that time, we were led to believe that neither you nor NSC possessed any of the described documents. Events since then require us to renew this matter with you.

1. Papers of Richard M. Nixon, released in May 1987, included John Dean files relating to Mr. Demetracopoulos, but no NSC files, as far as we know.

2. As you know (since we sent you copies), NSC released to us copies of computer indices showing that while you were National Security Advisor and Chairman of the "40 Committee,*

the NSC did have copies of documents relating to Mr. Demetracopoulos. NSC informed us that the documents, if not in the Nixon papers (as they do not seem to be), were taken by you and presumably repose in your personal files, those files sent to the National Archives, or those files you have deposited in the Library of congress but which are closed to the public until 2001.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

September 3, 1987

Page 2

3. One of the NSC computer indices shows a document, dated December 18, 1970, which refers to "Mr. Demetracopoulos death in Athens prison." That was about the time that the first attempts were made by the Greek dictatorship to kidnap Mr. Demetracopoulos, then living in this country, presumably to spirit him back to Greece to his "death in [an] Athens prison."

This has recently been documented in sworn statements of knowledgeable Greek officials.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by the late Sen. Frank Church, began investigating the incident in connection with its study of intelligence activities relating to Greece: but, according to Committee sources, as reported by Seymour Hersh in his book The Price of Power, you urged the Committee to drop the investigation, and it did so.

4. Documents released by the CIA since 1980 refer to briefings for then President Ford in October 1974. The document refers to a "trace paper" about Mr. Demetracopoulos, a

"derogatory blind memo" and "the long Kissinger memo on Elias [Demetracopoulos]," "left ...

with General Skowcroft." Copies of pertinent documents are enclosed.

You should be aware that after a great deal of discussion, correspondence and congressional investigation, both the FBI and then Director William Webster and the CIA under the late Director William Casey, acknowledged that their information about Mr. Demetracopoulos. A copy of a document is enclosed.

We cannot help but assume that you possess at least a copy of "the long Kissinger memo" on Mr. Demetracopoulos, and you may also possess copies of the "trace paper" and the