Kissinger’s Shadow (18 page)

“Let's look ferocious!” Kissinger said, urging Ford not to waver.
16
Ford later said the
Mayaguez
rescue was one of his most important foreign policy decisions. “It convinced some of our adversaries we were not a paper tiger.” “It was wonderful,” Barry Goldwater agreed. “It shows we've still got balls in this country.”
17

*   *   *

Kissinger didn't want a crisis “like” the Cuban crisis. He wanted the real thing. And a few years before the
Mayaguez
incident, during Richard Nixon's first term, he almost had one. In September 1970, Kissinger rushed into Bob Haldeman's office with reconnaissance photographs taken of an area around the port city of Cienfuegos, on Cuba's southern coast. “These pictures show the Cubans are building soccer fields,” he said. “These soccer fields could mean war, Bob.” Haldeman seemed confused, until Kissinger told him, “Cubans play
baseball
. Russians play
soccer.
”
18
Kissinger insisted that Moscow was building a permanent naval base to house nuclear submarines. More photographs were taken, high-level meetings were held where Kissinger lectured on the lessons of Kennedy's bold actions eight years earlier, and contingency plans to blockade Cuba were drawn up.

The submarine base seems to have been a fantasy.
19
The Soviets didn't back down, because they were doing nothing to back down from (or at least no evidence was ever produced that they were doing anything to back down from). Of course Cubans play soccer, they had been since the 1920s, and the Cuban Revolution even brought a renewed interest in the sport. Reconnaissance flights photographed every inch of Cienfuegos and couldn't find one piece of heavy equipment that could be put to building such a port. There were no cranes, no dredges, no deep-water docks. They couldn't find a Soviet submarine in the harbor. No matter. This “crisis,” taking place just after the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, gave Kissinger yet another opportunity to impress Nixon with his toughness, using his perceived victory over the Soviets in his ongoing rivalry with Secretary of State Rogers, who, “baffled by Kissinger's warning,” seemed indecisive and weak.
20

To this day, in memoirs and other published writings, Kissinger presents his charge that the Soviets were building a sophisticated deep-water nuclear submarine port at Cienfuegos as a fact. It is hard, however, to find anything other than befuddlement in official documents recording the Soviet response to Kissinger's charges.
*

*   *   *

Kissinger wasn't yet finished with Cuba, and his subsequent dealings with the island, along with the rest of Latin America, help reveal the dependent relationship between the overt and the covert, the spectacular and the secret, the way very real limits on what the United States could do in the world in the wake of being driven out of Indochina led to a reliance on clandestine “black-bag” work.

In February 1976, Kissinger, after engaging in some effort to normalize relations between Havana and Washington, suddenly found himself in a geopolitical standoff with Fidel Castro, when Castro sent Cuban troops to southern Africa to defend Angola against US-backed South African mercenaries. The Cuban intervention—an audacious stroke on Castro's part, saving the Angolan capital of Luanda for the left-wing Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola and routing Washington's allies—was the kind of action Kissinger might have appreciated if it hadn't been directed at undermining his foreign policy.

In one move, Castro had exposed the unviability of Kissinger's “tar baby” tilt in southern Africa—that is, his efforts to uphold white supremacy there—to the whole world: the Iranians, Pakistanis, and Latin American allies all remarked on Cuba's action, expressing admiration for its success but fear as to what Castro would do next. Egypt said that Washington's “association with South Africa is anathema in African eyes,” making an “impassioned plea” that the United States be more “understanding and tolerant of emerging African movements,” even if they were left-leaning.
21

Kissinger pushed for a harder line. “If the Cubans destroy Rhodesia then Namibia is next and then there is South Africa,” he said at a high-level crisis meeting on March 24, 1976. “I think we have to humiliate them,” Kissinger said at an earlier meeting, instructing his aides to draw up contingency plans that included political and economic sanctions, air and naval blockades, the mining of Cuba's ports, punitive strikes, and even an invasion. “There should be no halfway measures,” Kissinger instructed; whatever they did, it needed to be “ruthless and rapid and efficient.” As with the
Mayaguez
a year earlier, Kissinger insisted that what was at stake with Cuba in Angola was a matter of appearance. “If there is a perception overseas that we are so weakened by our internal debate [over Vietnam] so that it looks like we can't do anything about a country of 8 million people, then in three or four years we are going to have a real crisis.”

It is true that, with the broadcast images of the April 1975 fall of Saigon and the chaotic evacuation of remaining US troops and embassy staff fresh in the public's mind, there was little enthusiasm for military operations abroad. But it wasn't America's “internal debate” that “weakened” Kissinger in southern Africa. Rather, Castro had revealed the paralyzing contradiction that lay at the heart of Kissinger's “little war” thesis. On the one hand, Kissinger argued that little wars in areas of marginal importance could remain
limited
in scope. On the other hand, he demanded that
no limits
be placed on the force statesmen and military leaders could use to fight those wars (including the tactical use of nuclear weapons). Diplomacy, Kissinger had consistently argued, needed to be backed up by credible threats, and threats could only be credible if they were limitless.

In small places of true insignificance, such a paradox could be contained. Brutalizing a small island in the Gulf of Thailand and killing an unknown number of Cambodians to “rescue” the
Mayaguez
was one thing. Unleashing a war on Cuba, allied with the Soviet Union, was another. But his advisers told him that, unlike Kennedy's success in 1962, “a new Cuban crisis would not necessarily lead to a Soviet retreat.” The crisis could “escalate in areas that would maximize US casualties and thus provoke stronger response.” “Serious business,” Kissinger admitted. There was no way to imagine a “little war” against Cuba that might not lead to what Kissinger's advisers called a “general war” between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Kissinger knew he was backed into a corner. There was nothing Washington could do that wouldn't seem like it was playing catch-up to Havana. Ignore Cuba, and the United States appears weak. Hit Cuba, and it seems reactive, dramatizing that the world's greatest power had been played by a small island nation, a giant swatting at a fly. Kissinger admitted as much: “The problem is that no matter how we build our policy in southern Africa anything that happens will appear to have resulted from Cuban pressure.” Just so. Castro had checkmated Kissinger.

“I think we are going to have to smash Castro,” Kissinger told Ford, but, he conceded, “we probably can't do it before the elections,” referring to the presidential vote in November 1976.
22
“I agree,” Ford responded. And that was that. Afterward, Kissinger reversed his “tar baby” tilt, implementing what some commentators called an African détente.

*   *   *

In Latin America, Kissinger, having been denied a public triumph, continued private plotting. In 1969, when he first took office, only Paraguay and Brazil in South America were ruled by right-wing dictatorships. Nearly every other country was experiencing a revolutionary upheaval, inspired, to some degree, by Cuba. That would soon change. Bolivia was the first Latin American democracy to fall to a military coup on Kissinger's watch. “We are having a major problem in Bolivia,” said Kissinger on June 11, 1971, telling the CIA to “crank up an operation, post-haste.”
23
On August 21, a military coup installed a right-wing dictator promptly recognized by Washington (according to the State Department, the CIA moved in “response to a White House request for a political action program to arrest the leftward trend” of the Bolivian government). A few months later, Brazil, acting as Nixon and Kissinger's deputy, “helped rig the Uruguayan elections,” as Nixon put it, making sure a popular left coalition could not take power.
24
The turmoil that ensued fed directly into a June 1973 coup led by Juan María Bordaberry, who turned Uruguay into a police state. Shortly after the coup, Kissinger sent Bordaberry a note wishing him “best wishes on this happy occasion.”
25
The dictator's wife had just given birth to their second child.
*

Then came Chile, on September 11, 1973. It was Kissinger who had pushed Nixon to take “a harder line,” as he himself put it, against the country's democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, who died in the coup.
26
Chile was followed by coups in Peru and Ecuador. Then on March 23, 1976, the Argentine military took over the government. This putsch corresponded with Kissinger's renewed obsession with Cuba in Southern Africa. And as it became clear that Castro was going to win the day in Angola—and then possibly send his troops into Rhodesia—Kissinger moved closer toward Latin America's new praetorians.

Over the last decade, more and more government documents have been declassified revealing Kissinger's involvement in and cover-up of human rights abuses in Latin America. He's tried to defend himself. “Just to take a sentence out of a telephone conversation when you have 50 other conversations, it's just not the way to analyze it,” he said, after a particularly unflattering recording of him plumping for Pinochet was released. “I've been telling people to read a month's worth of conversations, so you know what else went on.”
27
But now that more information is available, a month's worth of conversations reads like one of Shakespeare's bloodiest plays. Perhaps
Macbeth
, with its description of what today is called blowback: “We but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return.”

There's Kissinger's support of Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile. In August 1975, Kissinger had received Chile's foreign minister, Vice Admiral Patricio Carvajal, in Washington. By this point, Chilean security forces had killed or disappeared thousands, tortured even more, turning Santiago's soccer stadium into a concentration camp. Kissinger had pushed back hard on Congress's attempt to impose sanctions on the country for these violations. And so he opened his meeting with Carvajal with a joke, making fun of the fretting, by some of his staffers, over human rights: “The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there were not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.” The discussion then took a cryptic turn. Carvajal told Kissinger that Chile was having trouble with about two hundred people it had just released from prison. “They are creating problems,” the minister said, and he couldn't find a country that would take them as exiles. Kissinger responded: “You will know what to do. We cannot go beyond what we have said. What other problem do we have to discuss?”

The Pinochet regime did know what to do; torture, murder, and disappearances in Chile continued.

There's his support for the Argentine junta. Shortly after the coup, one of Kissinger's aides advised him not to “rush out and embrace this new regime.” “We've got to expect a fair amount of repression,” the aide said, “probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long. I think they're going to have to come down very hard not only on the terrorists but on the dissidents of trade unions and their parties.” Kissinger disagreed with the suggestion that he keep his distance. “Whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement,” he replied to his cautious aide, “because I do want to encourage them.” The next day, on March 27, 1976, the International Monetary Fund extended $127 million line of credit to the junta, with many millions more to come from both public and private loans.
28

There's also Kissinger's visit to Santiago, Chile, in early June 1976, to attend a session of the Organization of American States. There, he had a one-on-one with Pinochet and assured him that whatever mild criticism he might hear in his remarks to the OAS shouldn't be taken seriously. Just a month later, Kissinger's assistant secretary for Latin America, Harry Shlaudeman, urged Kissinger to help tone down the “rhetorical exaggerations of the ‘Third-World-War' type.” Shlaudeman meant those conservative militants who thought they were on the front line of an international crusade against global Marxism. Chile was the worst of the lot. “Perhaps,” Shlaudeman said, offering understated advice, “we can convince them that a Third World War is undesirable.”

But in his meeting with Pinochet, Kissinger stoked the fire: they commiserated about Vietnam and agreed that the Spanish Civil War was but the first battle in the current “world war.” The general, Kissinger said, is “a victim of all left-wing groups around the world” and that his “greatest sin” was that he “overthrew a government that was going Communist.” Kissinger told Pinochet that he would have to include a few words about human rights in his upcoming remarks to the General Assembly but that Pinochet could safely ignore them: “The speech is not aimed at Chile.”
*

In Santiago, Kissinger also met with Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, of the newly installed Argentine military junta. He gave Guzzetti the same advice he gave to Suharto a year earlier: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures.” As he did with Pinochet, Kissinger encouraged the idea that Argentina was a frontline state in a global war, telling the admiral that the United States “will do what we can to help it succeed.… We understand you must establish authority.” As in the earlier meeting with Pinochet's foreign minister, the problem of displaced peoples came up; these included a number of exiles from the neighboring countries fleeing right-wing repression. Again Kissinger was cryptic: “I understand the problem.” They are creating “unrest,” Guzzetti said. “We wish you success,” Kissinger, himself a refugee, answered.