Kissinger’s Shadow (15 page)

Suharto was in even more of a hurry than Kissinger. He had been planning the invasion for some time but fear of diplomatic isolation led him to hold off. Now that he had his green light, he began the assault on East Timor the next day. At least 102,800 Timorese were killed in the invasion and during the twenty-four-year Indonesian occupation, either in combat or by starvation and illness, according to a United Nations truth commission. Other sources estimate an even higher number of victims, including hundreds of thousands put in Indonesian concentration camps. This out of a population of less than 700,000. Throughout it all, Suharto continued to receive thousands of M-16s and other small arms, armored cars, and aircraft, including Bronco planes, specially designed during the Vietnam War for counterinsurgent operations, able to fly low over rugged terrain like that found in East Timor. Major fighting went on for three years, followed by a low-intensity counterinsurgency that continued until 1999.

Kissinger left his mark in South Asia as well, having, in 1971, condoned West Pakistan's invasion of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Nixon and Kissinger knew that “selective genocide,” as the US envoy to Dhaka described the brutality of the invasion, was taking place. But they silently extended military aid to Pakistan. The result was half a million dead, hundreds of thousands of women raped, and millions of refugees pouring into India. At one point, Nixon compared the slaughter to the Holocaust, indicating that he realized the immorality of remaining quiet. Kissinger told him not to worry. Kissinger wanted to appease Pakistan's ally, China. And Pakistan itself was an important Cold War friend. He also hated India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi (“a bitch,” he called her), and didn't think highly of Indians in general (“bastards,” he thought). Besides, he told Nixon that if Bangladesh were to break from Pakistan, the new country would “go left anyway.” Bengalis “are by nature left.” And indeed, a left-wing government did emerge to rule what eventually, after India intervened to stop the killing, became an independent Bangladesh. But in August 1975, that government was overthrown in a bloody coup that Kissinger almost certainly knew about in advance and supported, bringing to power an Islamic, pro-American, and anti-Indian military regime.
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AFRICA

Focused as he was on Southeast Asia, Kissinger often treated Africa as little more than an object of ridicule. He was known to make racist jokes (“I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like?” he asked Arkansas senator William Fulbright on the way to a dinner for African ambassadors) and referred to at least one African head of state as an “ape.”
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Bigotry might have been yet another way to ingratiate himself with arch-racists in the White House like Haig, Nixon, and Haldeman.

As far as policy was concerned, early in Nixon's administration, Kissinger implemented what became known as the “tar baby option” for southern Africa, which included strengthening ties with the white supremacist nations of South Africa and Rhodesia, expanding arms sales to their militaries, and establishing clandestine networks to conduct covert operations to counter liberation movements. And just as a hard line in Southeast Asia had its domestic component, carried out with an eye toward Nixon's 1972 reelection, support for Pretoria and Salisbury was meant to advance the “southern strategy.” The “tar baby option” played well in the US South, as did Kissinger's and Nixon's insistence that the internal affairs of apartheid regimes were not any business of the United Nations—a clear echo of the segregationist defense of “states' rights.”
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But southern Africa was fast becoming a major battleground, convulsed by movements demanding an end to racial oppression and colonialism. Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique had collapsed, giving rise to civil wars between broadly popular liberation movements and “freedom fighters” backed by Washington, South Africa, and Rhodesia.

Kissinger came into open conflict with area experts, in the CIA and State Department, who actually knew something about southern Africa. For example, both Washington's consul general to Angola and the CIA's station chief felt that the country's largest insurgent organization, the left-leaning Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or MPLA, composed of engineers, agronomists, teachers, doctors, and economists from the colony's educated middle class, “was the best qualified movement to govern Angola.”
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Kissinger disagreed, dismissing those soft on the MPLA as “missionaries,” “anti-white,” “obsessively liberal,” and “bleeding hearts.” Kissinger, who believed these experts were underestimating Soviet influence in the region, also clashed with his assistant secretaries of state for Africa. One he fired, and the other resigned in protest over policy.
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Kissinger would later write that “nuance” had to guide statesmen and that diplomats needed to avoid applying a “mechanical blueprint” to “day-to-day foreign policy.” But Kissinger looked at southern Africa in the 1970s and all he could see was Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The United States, Kissinger argued in a planning meeting in mid-1975 would have to take “an active role” in Angola's conflict in order to “demonstrate that events in Southeast Asia have not lessened our determination to protect our interests.” What was going on in Angola was more than a civil war, he said. Ever on the lookout for that crisis when spontaneous action could create order out of chaos, Kissinger said that Angola was an “opportunity.” During a moment of “great uncertainty,” America had a chance to prove “our will and determination to remain the preeminent leader and defender of freedom in the West.”
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Angola barely figured.

Again, we have the demonstrative effect as both means and ends: specific objectives are left unstated, aside from an implied circularity; we need to demonstrate resolve in order to protect our interests and defend freedom, with “interests” and “freedom” defined entirely as our ability to demonstrate our resolve.

For once, though, Kissinger wasn't the most casually cruel person in the room. “We might wish,” Ford's secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, said during one strategy session, “to encourage the disintegration of Angola.”
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In July, Kissinger stepped up covert aid to a pro-American insurgency in Angola that he had already been running. He also urged South African mercenaries and the apartheid regimes' regular forces to invade. Conducting these operations through the CIA and proxy white supremacists in Rhodesia and South Africa was useful, since it allowed Kissinger to avoid all those cumbersome restrictions placed on him by the “McGovernite Congress.” In fact, at the
very
moment Kissinger was apologizing to a congressional commission for having used the CIA in Laos, he was doing the exact same thing in southern Africa.
*

In his memoir, John Stockwell, the CIA agent in charge of operations during the early stages of Kissinger's covert war in Angola, wrote that “coordination was effected at all CIA levels and the South Africans escalated their involvement in step with our own.” This was done, Stockwell said, “without any memos being written at CIA headquarters saying ‘Let's coordinate with the South Africans.'” “There was close collaboration and encouragement between the CIA and the South Africans,” Stockwell testified to Congress, and Kissinger, along with the CIA director, was in charge of the operation.
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Similar coordination in fact took place throughout the region, in Angola as well as in Mozambique, Zaire, and Namibia.
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Kissinger's wars in southern Africa were catastrophic. In Angola, the MPLA was proving formidable, and South Africa's incursion prompted Cuba to enter the war, with Fidel Castro's army routing the US-backed invaders. Kissinger began to waver. “Maybe we should let Angola go,” he said to Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, in early 1976. “This is going to turn into a worse disaster.”

It did. The civil wars spun out of control. Panicked white-minority governments in Pretoria and Salisbury were striking first this way, then that. In response, Havana made it known that it would increase its support for freedom struggles. Castro's remarkable victory in Angola had already raised his prestige. If the war were to escalate and if Cuban troops were to vanquish white supremacy elsewhere, in Rhodesia, for example, that prestige would increase many fold.

Adding to Kissinger's worries was a series of critical articles, starting in 1974, in the US and international press on his “tar baby tilt.” Morally defending anti-Communism, even if it meant relying on murderous dictators, was one thing. Justifying his support for white supremacy and racism was quite another. Kissinger was forced to reverse course and play the peacemaker. In April 1976, he took a tour of Africa, meeting with left-leaning leaders, talking about universal and “common” values, and affirming African “aspirations.” He visited Victoria Falls, toured a game park in a Land Rover, donned a dashiki, and referred to Rhodesia as Zimbabwe. “Africa for Africans,” Kissinger told
Jet
magazine upon his return, saying that Washington shouldn't force the diversity of the region into a Cold War template.

Then, in order to preempt another triumph for Castro, Kissinger helped negotiate the surrender of Rhodesia's white supremacist government. “I have a basic sympathy with the white Rhodesians,” Kissinger, the refugee from Weimar Germany, said, “but black Africa is absolutely united on this issue, and if we don't grab the initiative we will be faced with the Soviets, and Cuban troops.”
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This about-face notwithstanding, the damage was done. Kissinger left behind him a terrorist infrastructure that would be rebooted by the New Right. Hard-liners in the Reagan White House, as part of their revival of the Cold War, continued to support apartheid in South Africa and, even more tragically, murderous pro-Washington insurgents in Mozambique and Angola.
*
In Mozambique, RENAMO, or Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, was brutal, known for cutting off limbs and mutilating the faces of civilians. “There can be no ambiguity as to the terrorist activities of RENAMO,” wrote the US embassy in Maputo; its “insurgents have engaged in increasingly cruel and senseless acts of armed terrorism.”
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In Angola, Washington-backed rebels were led by Jonas Savimbi, described by the British ambassador to Angola as a “monster” whose “lust for power had brought appalling misery to his people.”
21

Savimbi was first cultivated by Kissinger, who spent millions on him. Now, he was taken up by Reagan, who in 1986 hosted him in the White House and praised him at the annual dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference. After hailing “the rise of the New Right and the religious revival of the mid-seventies and the final, triumphant march to Washington in 1980,” Reagan turned to the revolution abroad, toasting Savimbi. The “revolutionary” struggle of Angola's “freedom fighters,” led by Savimbi, “electrifies the world.” “Their hopes,” Reagan said, “reside in us, as ours do in them.”
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Two months later, the administration provided Savimbi's rebels with a $25 million aid package, including surface-to-air missiles.

Scholars estimate Savimbi's insurgency cost 400,000 lives. All told, historians guess that these wars killed as many as two million Angolans and Mozambicans. Neither country “disintegrated.” But they were devastated, their infrastructure ruined, their governments militarized and bankrupted, their hospitals and morgues filled beyond capacity. Mozambique's civil war ended in 1992, while fighting in Angola dragged on for yet another decade.
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THE MIDDLE EAST

December 1975 was a busy month in a busy year for Kissinger. Just about ten days after okaying Suharto's assault on East Timor, Kissinger met with Iraq's foreign minister, Sa'dun Hammadi. Hoping to turn Baghdad against Moscow, Kissinger promised Hammadi that in exchange for toning down Iraq's Baathist radicalism and moving away from the Soviet Union, Ford would bring Israel to heel and force it to give up its occupied territories. “Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world,” Kissinger said to Iraq's foreign minister. “We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel, but we can reduce its size to historical proportions.”
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Kissinger had no intention of doing anything of the kind. Over the course of the previous two years, since his “shuttle diplomacy” helped end the 1973 Arab-Israel War, Kissinger had been working out the contours of what political scientist Stephen Walt describes as the “ascendency of the United States” in the region.

This ascendance involved many different elements. But its essence entailed the combustible combination of creating inseparable alliances with
both
Israel and oil-producing Arab nations, telling each what they wanted to hear. To Arab states, he was promising (as he told Hammadi) that Washington would press Israel to give back its occupied territory. But to Israel, he pledged something else entirely. In September 1975, for example, he signed a secret agreement with Israel that committed the United States to neither “recognize” nor “negotiate” with the PLO until the PLO acknowledged “Israel's right to exist” (while exempting Israel from having to reciprocate and recognize Palestine's “right to exist”). Kissinger's guarantees to Israel had the effect of locking in the crisis, proving a method to manage the impasse, not to resolve it. As the historian Salim Yaqub writes, Kissinger “
deliberately
designed the step-by-step approach to be a mechanism for Israel's indefinite occupation of Arab land, a function it continued to serve in later decades, whatever the intentions of his successors.”
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