Henry: Portrait of an Imperial Killer

Kissinger Turns 100

I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of Henry Kissinger, but it’s been clear to me, throughout his seemingly endless career, that he has a lot of admirers. Many of them were around this week to congratulate him on his 100th birthday. The Wall Street Journal hailed the ‘great strategist’ whose ‘appetite for the world he’s spent a lifetime setting to rights is still zestful.’ In the Mail, Dominic Sandbrook described Kissinger as ‘an extraordinary man: a shy, stammering refugee who became one of the most powerful men in the world, dated some of Hollywood’s most beautiful women and seemed to hold the fate of the nations in the palm of his hand.’

Unlike the WSJ, Sandbrook did at least recognise that Kissinger was ‘intensely controversial’, though he also question why the man who once ‘beguiled Brezhnev and Mao’ has been singled out for ‘ferocious criticism’ compared with other US Secretaries of State.

It’s certainly true that Kissinger has tended to attract more negative attention than some of the other men and women who have occupied the same post, but the ferocity of the criticism directed against him has done nothing to harm his reputation. Whatever bad things Kissinger has done, there are always more people willing to forget about them than there are to hold him to account. Few other American diplomats have been so widely-revered, and so constantly present. Of all the ‘national security managers’ who oversaw US foreign policy during the Cold War, Kissinger has acquired a unique aura of statesmanlike gravitas. He is the diplomat-celebrity, the realpolitik man, the magus of the global ‘chessboard’, whose owlish wisdom always seems relevant to every world crisis.

These qualities tend to overshadow the often bloody and sinister events that have punctuated his long career.

The secret bombing of Cambodia; Pakistan’s brutal devastation of Bangladesh; the Indonesian invasion of East Timor; Vietnam; the Chilean coup; the Angolan civil war; El Salvador and Central America in the 1980s - inevitably Kissinger’s name crops up when there are dirty deeds to be done, providing support for regimes carrying out the most atrocious acts and dismissing those who criticise them, as he once did with Pakistan, when he sneered at the people who ‘bleed’ for the ‘dying Bengalis.’

Maybe it’s not polite, when a great man reaches his hundredth year, to dig too deeply into such unpleasantness, but this landmark provides as good an opportunity as any to revisit the profound cynicism that underpinned his decisions.

Anyone who doubts this, should read some of the cables and documents regarding Kissinger’s backroom support for the Argentine dictatorship, such as the chilling account of Kissinger’s meeting in Chile on June 6 1976, with the Argentine Foreign Minister, Vice-Admiral Cesar Guzzetti, that was released many decades later.

Kissinger was then Foreign Secretary in Gerald Ford’s caretaker government, and the meeting took place less than three months since the junta had seized power in Argentina. After some cheery banter about football and American politics, Guzzetti cuts to the chase, and informs Kissinger that

our main problem in Argentina is terrorism…There are two main aspects to the solution. The first is to ensure the internal security of the country; the second is to solve the most urgent economic problems over the coming 6 to 12 months. Argentina needs United States understanding and support to overcome problems in these areas.

To which the Great Man replies:

We have followed events in Argentina closely. We wish the new government well. We wish it will succeed. We will do what we can to help it succeed. We are aware you are in a difficult period. It is a curious time, when political, criminal, and terrorist activities tend to merge without any clear separation. We understand you must establish authority.

At that time, the Argentine military government was ‘establishing authority’ through a state-sponsored regime of murder, torture, and forced disappearance, in which political, criminal, and (state) terrorist activities did indeed ‘tend to merge’. Some of this was known abroad, as Guzzetti indignantly points out:

the foreign press creates many problems for us, interpreting events in a very peculiar manner…It even seems as though there is an orchestrated international campaign against us.

Yes, why can’t we throw people from helicopters without people saying nasty things about us? Once again Henry is sanguine and sympathetic:

I realize you have no choice but to restore governmental authority. But it is also clear that the absence of normal procedures will be used against you.

Note that Kissinger’s concern - and the concern of his government - with this ‘absence’ is entirely political. If there is any outrage and disgust at the ‘procedures’ introduced by a savage and lawless military dictatorship, it is not present in this conversation.

The Great Chessmaster

In Kissinger’s diplomatic world, there are times for shaking hands with Mao and there are times when people have to die, although this can never be openly acknowledged by a powerful democracy that couches its war on totalitarianism and communist tyranny as a moral project. As the arch-practitioner of ‘realpolitik’, in the sense of politics ‘based on practical objectives rather than ideals’, Kissinger understood this very well.

Publicly, the United States exercised ‘moral leadership’ against an irredeemably evil enemy. Privately, Kissinger knew better, and he wasn’t the only one. This becomes clear when the conversation turns to the subject of Chilean refugees in Argentina, many of whom, Guzzetti insists, ‘provide clandestine support for terrorism’. Guzzetti offers no evidence for this, and none is needed, given Kissinger’s personal contribution to the overthrow of Allende. Instead the Vice-Admiral tells Kissinger that governments in all the southern cone countries are integrating their efforts to ‘create disincentives to potential terrorist activities’, whereupon the following exchange occurs:

KISSINGER: Let me say, as a friend, that I have noticed that military governments are not always the most effective in dealing with these problems.

GUZZETTI: Of course.

KISSINGER: So, after a while, many people who don’t understand the situation begin to oppose the military and the problem is compounded…If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you must get back quickly to normal procedures.

This is one of those conversations, familiar to masters of the global ‘chessboard’ and also to certain gangsters, in which its participants know exactly what they are referring to, but are too decorous to spell it out directly. There are merely ‘things that have to be done’, and what Guzzetti can take from this exchange is that the United States will not oppose what his government is doing, either nationally or internationally, as long as Argentina gets it done quickly, after which ‘normal procedures’ must be resumed.

Even so, the Vice-Admiral still needs further reassurance, which the chessmaster is pleased to give him:

GUZZETTI: The terrorists work hard to appear as victims in the light of world opinion even though they are the real aggressors.

KISSINGER: We want you to succeed. We do not want to harass you. I will do what I can. Of course, you understand that means I will be harassed. But I have discovered that after the personal abuse reaches a certain level you become invulnerable.

Kissinger might have said, that when you reach a certain level of statesman-celebrity status in a global superpower operating under a veneer of plausible deniability, you become invulnerable, because even then, he was.

This is why he can be found in a declassified document, giving one of the worst regimes of the 20th century - and its partners - a carte blanche to do the ‘things that have to be done’. It’s also why the Argentine dictator Jorge Videla invited Kissinger to the World Cup in 1978. Kissinger was a private citizen then, but his invitation was a pointed rejection of the Carter administration’s human rights-focussed foreign policy, which made US economic and military assistance conditional on not using ‘thumbscrews’ as Carter’s formidable Assistant Secretary of State Patricia Derian, once put it.

In 1977, the former civil rights activist Derian visited Buenos Aires, where she spoke with Argentine human rights official, journalists, and the US Embassy Country Team, as a result of which she concluded:

The [Argentine] government method is to pick people up and take them to military installations. There the detainees are tortured with water, electricity and psychological disintegration methods. Those thought to be salvageable are sent to regular jails and prisons where the psychological process is continued on a more subtle level. Those found to be incorrigible are murdered and dumped on garbage heaps or street corners, but more often are given arms with live ammunition, grenades, bombs and put into automobiles and sent out of the compound to be killed on the road in what is then reported publicly to be a shootout or response to an attack on some military installation.

These were those ‘things that have to be done’ in Kissingerspeak. During her visit, Derian also met the sinister Admiral Massera, to whom she showed a floor plan of the building they were meeting in and declared: ‘You and I both know that as we speak, people are being tortured in the next floors.’

The regime was not used to being spoken to like this, and it didn’t like it, especially when Derian explained to Congress why the Department of State decided to withhold a credit of more than $200 million for a dam project in Argentina.

The reason for our advice was the continuing violation of basic human rights by Argentina. The systematic use of torture, summary execution of political dissidents, the disappearance and the imprisonment of thousands of individuals without charge, including mothers, churchmen, nuns, labor leaders, journalists, professors and members of human rights organizations, and the failure of the government of Argentina to fulfill its commitment to allow [a] visit by the Inter American Commission on human rights.

Kissinger took a different view during his World Cup visit. An avid soccer fan, he was feted by Videla and his cohorts, and he returned the compliment by applauding ‘Argentina’s efforts in combatting terrorism’ whenever he could. An American diplomatic cable at the time described such pronouncements as ‘the music the Argentine government was longing to hear, and it is no accident that his statements were played back to us by the Southern Cone countries during the O.A.S General Assembly.

The Carter human rights policy was never entirely effective or coherent, and it turned out to be a temporary lull, as the Reagan administration subsequently reversed it. But Carter himself was sincere, and Derian tried hard to put these new principles into practice. In 2016 she died at the age of 86.

That same year, Jon Lee Anderson asked whether Kissinger had a conscience. Anderson described what happened when the journalist Stephen Talbot interviewed Kissinger, shortly after the release of Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary about Robert McNamara - another of the Cold War ‘national security managers’, who at least expressed some regret at the consequences of the policies he had been involved in.

According to Talbot:

I told him I had just interviewed Robert McNamara in Washington. That got his attention. He stopped badgering me, and then he did an extraordinary thing. He began to cry. But no, not real tears. Before my eyes, Henry Kissinger was acting. ‘Boohoo, boohoo,’ Kissinger said, pretending to cry and rub his eyes. ‘He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty.’ He spoke in a mocking, singsong voice and patted his heart for emphasis.

That’s the great chessmaster for you. In an obituary for Patricia Derian, the New York Times wrote that ‘thousands of lives may have been spared because of her work.’ That is something no one will ever be able to say of the man who turned 100 last week, of whom it would be more accurate to say that thousands of lives may have been lost because of his work.

Too many people forget that. Or they simply don’t care. And however long Henry Kissinger lives for, one thing is certain: he will go to his grave as untroubled by any of the ‘things that have to be done’ as he was when he sat down to chat, in 1976, with the foreign minister of one of the worst regimes on earth.