THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

Chapter 4:  BANGLADESH: ONE GENOCIDE, ONE COUP AND ONE ASSASSINATION

THE ANNALS OF American diplomacy contain many imperishable pages of
humanism, which may, and should, be set against some of the squalid and
dispiriting traffic recorded in these pages. One might cite the extraordinary
1915 despatches of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau from his post in
Ottoman Turkey, in which he employed consular and intelligence reports
to give a picture of the deliberate state massacre of the Armenian minority,
the first genocide of the twentieth century. (The word "genocide" having
not then been coined, Ambassador Morgenthau had recourse to the -in
some ways more expressive -- term "race murder.")

By 1971, the word "genocide" was all too easily understood. It surfaced
in a cable of protest from the United States consulate in what was then East
Pakistan -the Bengali "wing" of the Muslim state of Pakistan, known to its
restive nationalist inhabitants by the name Bangladesh. The cable was writ-
ten on 6 April 1971 and its senior signatory, the Consul General in Dacca,
was named Archer Blood. But it might have become known as the Blood
Telegram in any case. Also sent directly to Washington, it differed from
Morgenthau's document in one respect. It was not so much reporting on
genocide as denouncing the complicity of the United States government in
genocide. Its main section read thus:

Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our
government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to
take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending
over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to
lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against
them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bank-
ruptcy, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya Khan a
message defending democracy, condemning the arrest of a leader of a demo-
cratically-elected majority party, incidentally pro West, and calling for an end
to repressive measures and bloodshed. ... But we have chosen not to intervene,
even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately
the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sov-
ereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional
civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that
our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

This was signed by twenty members of the United States diplomatic team
in Bangladesh and, on its arrival at the State Department, by a further
nine senior officers in the South Asia division. It was the most public and
the most strongly worded demarche from State Department servants to the
State Department that has ever been recorded.

The circumstances fully warranted the protest. In December 1970, the
Pakistani military elite had permitted the first open elections for a decade.
The vote was easily won by Sheik Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the
Bengali-based Awami League, who gained a large overall majority in the
proposed National Assembly. (In the East alone, it won 167 out of 169
seats.) This, among other things, meant a challenge to the political and mil-
itary and economic hegemony of the Western "wing." The National
Assembly had been scheduled to meet on 3 March 1971. On 1 March,
General Yahya Khan, head of the supposedly outgoing military regime,
postponed its convening. This resulted in mass protests and nonviolent
civil disobedience in the East.

On 25 March, the Pakistani army struck at the Bengali capital of Dacca.
Having arrested and kidnapped Rahman, and taken him to West Pakistan,
it set about massacring his supporters. The foreign press had been pre-
emptively expelled from the city, but much of the direct evidence of what
then happened was provided via a radio transmitter operated by the United
States consulate. Archer Blood himself supplied an account of one episode
directly to the State Department and to Henry Kissinger's National Security
Council. Having readied the ambush, Pakistani regular soldiers set fire to
the women's dormitory at the university, and then mowed the occupants
down with machine guns as they sought to escape. (The guns, along with
all the other weaponry, had been furnished under United States military
assistance programs.)

Other reports, since amply vindicated, were supplied to the London
Times and Sunday Times by the courageous reporter Anthony
Mascarhenas, and flashed around a horrified world. Rape, murder, dis-
memberment and the state murder of children were employed as deliberate
methods of repression and intimidation. At least ten thousand civilians
were butchered in the first three days. The eventual civilian death toll has
never been placed at less than half a million and has been put as high as
three million. Since almost all Hindu citizens were at risk by definition
from Pakistani military chauvinism (not that Pakistan's Muslim co-
religionists were spared), a vast movement of millions of refugees -- perhaps
as many as ten million -began to cross the Indian frontier. To summarize,
then: first, the direct negation of a democratic election; second, the
unleashing of a genocidal policy; third, the creation of a very dangerous
international crisis. Within a short time, Ambassador Kenneth Keating,
the ranking United States diplomat in New Delhi, had added his voice to
those of the dissenters. It was a time, he told Washington, when a princi-
pled stand against the authors of this aggression and atrocity would also
make the best pragmatic sense. Keating, a former senator from New York,
used a very suggestive phrase in his cable of29 March 1971, calling on the
administration to "promptly, publicly, and prominently deplore this bru-
tality." It was "most important these actions be taken now," he warned,
"prior to inevitable and imminent emergence of horrible truths."

Nixon and Kissinger acted quickly. That is to say, Archer Blood was
immediately recalled from his post, and Ambassador Keating was described
by the President to Kissinger, with some contempt, as having been "taken
over by the Indians." In late April 1971, at the very height of the mass
murder, Kissinger sent a message to General Yahya Khan, thanking him for
his "delicacy and tact."

We now know of one reason why the general was so favored, at a time
when he had made himself and his patrons -- responsible for the grossest
war crimes and crimes against humanity. In April 1971, a United States
ping-pong team had accepted a surprise invitation to compete in Beijing
and by the end of that month, using the Pakistani ambassador as an inter-
mediary, the Chinese authorities had forwarded a letter inviting Nixon to
send an envoy. Thus there was one motive of realpolitik for the shame that
Nixon and Kissinger were to visit on their own country for its complicity
in the extermination of the Bengalis.

Those who like to plead realpolitik, however, might wish to consider
some further circumstances. There already was, and had been for some
time, a back channel between Washington and Beijing. It ran through
Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania -not a much more decorative choice but
not, at that stage, a positively criminal one. There was no reason to confine
approaches, to a serious person like Chou En Lai, to the narrow channel
afforded by a blood-soaked (and short-lived, as it turned out) despot like
the "delicate and tactful" Yahya Khan. Either Chou En Lai wanted contact,
in other words, or he did not. As Lawrence Lifschultz, the primary historian
of this period, has put it:

Winston Lord, Kissinger's deputy at the National Security Council, stressed
to investigators the internal rationalisation developed within the upper ech-
elons of the Administration. Lord told ( the staff of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace] "We had to demonstrate to China we were a reliable
government to deal with. We had to show China that we respect a mutual
friend." How, after two decades of belligerent animosity with the People's
Republic, mere support for Pakistan in its bloody civil war was supposed to
demonstrate to China that the US "was a reliable government to deal with"
was a mystifying proposition which more cynical observers of the events,
both in and outside the US government, consider to have been an excuse jus-
tifying the simple convenience of the Islamabad link -- a link which
Washington had no overriding desire to shift.

Second, the knowledge of this secret diplomacy and its accompanying
privileges obviously freed the Pakistani general of such restraints as might
have inhibited him. He told his closest associates, including his minister of
information, G.W. Choudhury, that his private understanding with
Washington and Beijing would protect him. Choudhury later wrote: "If
Nixon and Kissinger had not given him that false hope, he'd have been
more realistic." Thus, the collusion with him in the matter of China
increases the direct complicity of Nixon and Kissinger in the massacres.
(There is another consideration outside the scope of this book, which
involves the question: why did Kissinger confine his China diplomacy to
channels provided by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes? Why was an
open diplomacy not just as easy, if not easier? The answer -which also lies
outside the scope of this book is apparently that surreptitiousness, while
not essential in itself, was essential if Nixon and Kissinger were going to be
able to take the credit for it.)

It cannot possibly be argued, in any case, that the saving of Kissinger's
private correspondence with China was worth the deliberate sacrifice of
hundreds of thousands of Bengali civilians. And -- which is worse still --
later and fuller disclosures now allow us to doubt that this was indeed the
whole motive. The Kissinger policy towards Bangladesh may well have
been largely conducted for its own sake, as a means of gratifying his boss's
animus against India and as a means of preventing the emergence of
Bangladesh as a self-determining state in any case.

The diplomatic commonplace term "tilt" -- signifying that mixture of
signals and nuances and codes that describe a foreign policy preference that
is often too embarrassing to be openly avowed -actually originates in this
dire episode. On 6 March 1971, Kissinger summoned a meeting at the
National Security Council and -in advance of the crisis in East-West
Pakistan relations that was by then palpable and predictable to those
attending -insisted that no preemptive action be taken. Those present
who suggested that a warning to General Yahya Khan be issued, essentially
advising him to honor the election results, he strongly opposed. His sub-
sequent policy was as noted above. After returning from China in July, he
began to speak in almost Maoist phrases about a Soviet-Indian plot to dis-
member and even annex part of Pakistan, which would compel China to
intervene on Pakistan's side. (In pursuit of this fantasy of confrontation,
he annoyed Admiral Elmo Zumwalt by ordering him to despatch the air-
craft carrier USS Enterprise from the coast of Vietnam to the Bay of
Bengal, while giving it no stated mission.) But no analyst in the State
Department or the CIA could be found to underwrite such a bizarre pre-
diction and, at a meeting of the Senior Review Group, Kissinger lost his
temper with this insubordination. "The President always says to tilt toward
Pakistan, but every proposal I get is in the opposite direction. Sometimes
I think I'm in a nuthouse." The Nixon White House was, as it happens, in
the process of becoming exactly that, but his hearers only had time to
notice that a new power-term had entered Washington's vernacular of
crisis and conspiracy.

"The President always says to tilt toward Pakistan." That at least was
true. Long before any conception of his "China diplomacy;" indeed even
during the years when he was inveighing against "Red China" and its sym-
pathizers, Nixon detested the government of India and expressed warm
sympathy for Pakistan. Many of his biographers and intimates, including
Kissinger, have recorded the particular dislike he felt (more justifiably, per-
haps) for the person of Indira Gandhi. He always referred to her as "that
bitch" and on one occasion kept her waiting for an unprecedented forty-
five minutes outside his White House door. However, the dislike originated
with Nixon's loathing for her father Pandit Nehru, and with his more gen-
eral loathing for Nehru's sponsorship -- along with Makarios, Tito and
Soekarno -- of the Non-Aligned Movement. There can be no doubt that,
with or without an occluded "China card," General Yahya Khan would
have enjoyed a sympathic hearing, and treatment, from this president, and
thus from this national security advisor.

This is also strongly suggested by Kissinger's subsequent conduct, as
Secretary of State, towards Bangladesh as a country and towards Sheik
Mujib, leader of the Awami League and later the father of Bangladeshi
independence, as a politician. Unremitting hostility and contempt were the
signature elements in both cases. Kissinger had received some very bad and
even mocking press for his handling of the Bangladesh crisis, and it had
somewhat spoiled his supposedly finest hour in China. He came to resent
the Bangladeshis and their leader, and even compared ( this according to his
then aide Roger Morris) Mujib to Allende.

As soon as Kissinger became Secretary of State in 1973, he downgraded
all those who had signed the genocide protest in 1971. In the fall of the next
year, 1974, he inflicted a series of snubs on Mujib, then on his first visit to
the United States as head of state. In Washington Kissinger boycotted the
fifteen-minute meeting that Mujib was allowed by President Ford. He also
opposed Mujib's main request, which was for emergency United States
grain shipments, and some help with debt relief, in order to recuperate the
country so ravaged by Kissinger's friend and ally. To cite Roger Morris
again: "In Kissinger's view there was very much a distant hands-off attitude
toward them. Since they had the audacity to become independent of one of
my client states, they will damn well float on their own for a while." It was
at about this time that Kissinger was heard to pronounce Bangladesh "an
international basket case," a judgment which, to the extent that it was true,
was also self-fulfilling.

In November 1974, on a brief face-saving tour of the region, Kissinger
made an eight-hour stop in Bangladesh and gave a three-minute press
conference in which he refused to say why he had sent the USS Enterprise
into the Bay of Bengal three years before. Within a few weeks of his depar-
ture, we now know, a faction at the US embassy in Dacca began covertly
meeting with a group of Bangladeshi officers who were planning a coup
against Mujib. On 14 August 1975, Mujib and forty members of his family
were murdered in a military takeover. His closest former political associates
were bayoneted to death in their prison cells a few months after that."

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was at that time conducting
its sensational inquiries into CIA involvement with assassinations and sub-
version in the Third World. The "two track" concept, whereby an American
ambassador like Ed Korry in Chile could find that his intelligence officers
and military attaches were going behind his back and over his head, with
secret authorizations from Washington, and running their own show, had
not become a familiar one. However, exhaustive research by Lawrence
Lifschultz of Yale University now strongly suggests that a "two track"
scheme was implemented in Bangladesh as well.

The man installed as Bangladesh's president by the young officers who
had slain Rahman was Khondakar Mustaque, generally identified as the
leader of the right-wing element within the Awami League. He was at pains
to say that the coup had come to him as a complete surprise, and that the
young majors who had led it -- Major Farooq, Major Rashid and four others,
at the head of a detachment numbering just three hundred men -had
"acted on their own." He added that he had never met the mutinous officers
before. Such denials are of course customary, almost matters of etiquette. So
are the ensuing statements from Washington, which invariably claim that this
or that political upheaval has taken the world's largest and most powerful
intelligence-gathering system completely off guard. That expected statement,
too, was made in the aftermath of the assassination in Dacca.

The cover story ( one might term it the coincidence version) leaks at
every joint and comes apart at the most cursory inspection. Major Rashid
was interviewed by Anthony Mascarhenas, the journalistic hero of the
Bangladesh war, on the anniversary of the coup. He confirmed that he had
met Mustaque before the coup, and again on the days immediately pre-
ceding it. In fact, a senior Bangladeshi officer has dated meetings between
Mustaque and the mutineers more than six months before Mujib's
overthrow.

The United States ambassador in Dacca, Davis Eugene Booster, was aware
that a coup was being discussed. He was also aware of the highly controver-
sial congressional hearings in Washington, which had unveiled high-level
official wrongdoing and ruined the career of many a careless foreign service
officer. He ordered that all contact between his embassy and the mutinous
officers be terminated. Thus his alarm and annoyance, on 14 August 1975,
was great. The men who had seized power were the very ones with whom he
had ordered a cessation of contact. Embassy sources have since confirmed to
Lifschultz (a) that United States officials had been approached by, and had by
no means discouraged, the officers who intended a coup and (b) that
Ambassador Booster became convinced that his CIA station was operating
a back channel without his knowledge. Such an operation would be mean-
ingless, and also pointlessly risky, if it did not extend homeward to
Washington where, as is now notorious, the threads of the Forty Committee
and the National Security Council were very closely held in one fist.

Philip Cherry, the then head of the CIA station in Bangladesh, was
interviewed by Lifschultz in September 1978. He was vague and evasive
even about having held the job but did say, "There is one thing. There are
politicians who frequently approach embassies, and perhaps have contacts
there. They think they may have contacts." The shift from officer to politi-
cian is suggestive. And, of course, those who think they may have contacts
may even act as if they do, unless they are otherwise advised.

Not only did Khondakar Mustaque think he had contacts with the
United States government, including with Henry Kissinger himself, but he
did indeed have such contacts, and had had since 1971. In 1973 in
Washington, and in the aftermath of the unprecedented revolt of profes-
sional diplomats against the Kissinger policy in Bangladesh, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace (publisher of the magazine Foreign
Policy) conducted a full-dress study of the "tilt" that had put the United
States on the same side as those committing genocide. More than 150
, senior officials from the State Department and the CIA agreed to be
interviewed. The study was coordinated by Kissinger's former aide Roger
Morris. The result of the nine-month inquiry was never made public, due
to internal differences at Carnegie, but the material was made available to
Lifschultz and it does establish one conclusion beyond doubt.

In 1971 Henry Kissinger had attempted the impossible by trying to
divide the electorally victorious Awami League, and to dilute its demand
for independence. In pursuit of this favor to General Yahya Khan, he had
initiated a covert approach to Khondakar Mustaque, who led the tiny
minority who were willing to compromise on the main principle. A
recently unearthed "Memorandum for the Record" gives us details of a
White House meeting between Nixon, Kissinger and others on 11 August
1971, at which Undersecretary of State John Irwin reported: "We have had
reports in recent days of the possibility that some Awami League leaders in
Calcutta want to negotiate with Yahya on the basis of giving up their claim
for the independence of East Pakistan." This can only have been a reference
to the Provisional Government of Bangladesh, set up in exile in Calcutta
after the massacres, and could only have been an attempt to circumvent its
leadership. The consequences of this clumsy approach were that Mustaque
was exposed and placed under house arrest in October 1971, and that the
American political officer who contacted him, George Griffin, was declared
persona non grata when gazetted to the US embassy in New Delhi a decade
later.

Those involved in the military preparations for the coup have told
Lifschultz that they, too, had a "two track" policy. There were junior officers
ready to mutiny and there was a senior officer -- the future dictator General
Zia -- who was ready but more hesitant. Both factions say that they natu-
rally checked with their United States contacts in advance, and were told
that the overthrow of Mujib was "no problem." This is at least partially
confirmed by a signed letter from Congressman Stephen J. Solarz of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee, who undertook to investigate the matter
for Lifschultz in 1980 and who on 3 June of that year wrote to him: "With
respect to the Embassy meetings in the November 1974-January 1975
period with opponents of the Rahman regime, the State Department once
again does not deny that the meetings took place." This would appear to be
a rebuff to the evidence of Mr Cherry of the CIA, even if the letter goes on
to say: "The Department does claim that it notified Rahman about the
meetings, including the possibility of a coup." If true, that "claim" is being
made for the first time, and in the name of the man who was murdered
during the coup and cannot refute it. The admission is stronger than the
claim in any case.

Congressman Solarz forwarded the questions about CIA involvement to
the office of Congressman Les Aspin of the Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence, which committee, as he said, "has the best chance of
obtaining access both to CIA cable traffic and to the relevant figures in the
intelligence community." But the letter he sent was somehow lost along the
way, and was never received by the relevant inquiring committee, and
shortly afterwards the balance of power in Washington shifted from Carter
to Reagan.

Only a reopened congressional inquiry with subpoena power could
determine whether there was any direct connection, apart from the self-
evident ones of consistent statecraft attested by recurring reliable
testimony, between the secret genocidal diplomacy of 1971 and the secret
destabilizing diplomacy of 1975. The task of disproving such a connection,
meanwhile, would appear to rest on those who believe that everything is an
accident.

_______________

* In December 2000 those responsible were convicted by a Bangladeshi court and
(wrongly, in my opinion) sentenced to death. Some of the accused were unavailable for
sentencing because they had taken refuge in the United States: a feat not achievable by
the average Bengali immigrant.

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