The Blood Telegram Page 15
On April 22, Manekshaw held a meeting about having the army take charge of the Border Security Force, which was leading India’s help to the rebellion. Manekshaw and Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, another top officer, would give directions, and the Border Security Force would work closely with the army’s units. The force was secretly in touch with the East Bengal Regiment and the East Pakistan Rifles. As a top secret Border Security Force memorandum shows, Manekshaw wanted to “step up the tempo” of guerrilla operations, with a focus on “demolition by small parties.”39
A top secret R&AW report says that “the charge of imparting training to Mukti Fouz was given to the local Army authorities early in May.” General Jacob remembers, “The government asked us to train the Mukti Bahini, so we set up camps, with the BSF [Border Security Force] at the border areas.” There were, Jacob says, “two factors required to keep that insurgency going: firm bases, and lines of supply for arms, ammunition, and money. As long as those two factors obtain, that insurgency will continue.”40
The Indians were torn between providing proper training or quickly getting fighters into combat. Jacob recalls, “I first started with eight camps. I visualized one thousand in each camp, three months’ training.” Manekshaw, he says, wanted more guerrillas and less training. “Manekshaw didn’t agree,” Jacob says. “He said I should get one hundred thousand. I said, ‘How can I train one hundred thousand?’ He said, ‘Three weeks is enough.’ I said, ‘What do you think, it’s a sausage machine? A young Bengali comes in and he comes out a Gurkha in three weeks?’ ”
India did not dare publicly admit what it was doing. (To this day, Indian officials lie about the country’s sponsorship of the insurgents.) The Indian foreign ministry denounced allegations about India arming the rebels as a cynical attempt to divert the world’s attention from Pakistan’s “carnage and systematic genocide in East Bengal.”41
But only fools were fooled. India’s own newspapers figured it out fast. From Calcutta, it was possible for an enterprising Indian reporter to meet up with a group of Mukti Fouj commandos, join them for a firefight with a Pakistani army garrison, and return to camp with a terrific story to file. Foreign correspondents quickly got the story too. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times was eager to get back into East Pakistan after being expelled by the Pakistan army. “It was forbidden,” he remembers. Like other foreign reporters, he groused that they were being told by Indian authorities to stay away from the border areas. But he found a way: “I got permission to go to [Tripura] where the border patrol were training the Mukti Bahini. So I wrote that story.”42
He spent four days touring the border and venturing across into East Pakistan. There he spoke to young rebels determined to avenge their dead families. “They have made me an orphan,” one glassy-eyed guerrilla told him. “My life is unimportant now.” Schanberg saw Pakistani soldiers throwing phosphorus grenades into thatch huts and setting villages ablaze, apparently to deny hiding places to the guerrillas. He reported that, at a minimum, tens of thousands of people had been systematically killed by the army. The troops had killed much of the Bengali leadership class, including engineers, doctors, and students. He wrote, “As smoke from the thatch and bamboo huts billowed up on the outskirts of the city of Comilla, circling vultures descended on the bodies of peasants, already being picked apart by dogs and crows.”43
Nor was the U.S. government hoodwinked by India’s claims of noninvolvement. “Nobody believed it,” recalls Samuel Hoskinson, the White House aide. Many American reporters, like Schanberg, talked to U.S. officials about what they had seen: Border Security Force men running training camps, and India providing weapons. The CIA informed Kissinger about what was happening. Kissinger told Nixon that India would train Bengalis for a long guerrilla war. Kenneth Keating, the U.S. ambassador to India, urged his own government to turn a blind eye to India’s secret war.44
While Pakistan denounced India’s covert activities, India offered increasingly threadbare denials. Swaran Singh, India’s foreign minister, indignantly denied these reports, while less brazen diplomats preferred to dodge, neither admitting nor denying what India was obviously doing. “Pakistan is fully aware of our activities vis-a-vis East Bengal,” an Indian envoy told the foreign ministry. “I shall of course deny them but … this will not carry conviction.”45
By May, Indira Gandhi and her team were covertly backing what Haksar called a “total struggle for national liberation.”46
According to top secret Indian records, the prime minister herself covertly met with a representative of the self-declared Bangladesh government. On May 6, a leader identified only as T.—probably Tajuddin Ahmad, the exile prime minister—had a night meeting with her. Haksar briefed her that this Bengali leader had talked to Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the general officer commanding-in-chief of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, about their future plan of action. Covering his tracks, Haksar added that everything they were doing for Bangladesh was carried out at the Bangladeshi exile government’s behest.47
Haksar had high hopes for the insurgents. He wanted a “common strategy of warfare over a comparatively prolonged period,” using “guerilla tactics, with the object of keeping the West Pakistan army continuously off their balance and to, gradually, bleed them.” Preparing Gandhi for a meeting with opposition legislators, he outlined a military path to victory: “If the struggle could be sustained over a period of time of 6 to 8 months, it is not unreasonable to expect that [the] sheer burden on Pakistan of carrying on this struggle will become, sooner or later, unbearable.”48
From Moscow, Dhar rather condescendingly expressed the “delighted surprise of all of us that the East Bengalis have it in them.” (This echoed the widespread conceit, prevalent not just in Pakistan but in India too, that, as one Indian activist casually put it, “Bengalis are not a martial race.”) Dhar candidly laid out India’s awkward mix of lofty and low motives: “Apart from the laudable cause of the Bengali aspirations for freedom and a life of respect and dignity, we have to remember our national interests. What we have to plan for is not an immediate defeat of the highly trained and superior military machine of West Pakistan; we have to create the whole of East Bengal into a bottomless ditch which will suck the strength and the resources of West Pakistan.”49
But the guerrillas faced a terribly difficult fight. R. N. Kao, the R&AW spymaster, gave Gandhi a bleak appraisal. “The Pakistan Army continues to be on the offensive,” he wrote, “fanning out in strength from their main bases to capture positions held by the Liberation Forces.” Despite some heavy fighting, Kao warned, “the Army is slowly gaining the upper hand,” especially in controlling the cities.50
Archer Blood and his staff at the U.S. consulate in Dacca, tracking the fight in a makeshift war room, were privately dismayed to see the Pakistan army seize the main cities. The lieutenant governor of the border state of Tripura informed Gandhi that Pakistani troops were ruthlessly taking the cities and moving out into the countryside, strafing and bombing the guerrillas. The Pakistani forces’ next goal was to seal the border to isolate the insurgents, but that was not feasible, so it would still be possible for “the freedom fighters to infiltrate and carry out the hit-and-run guerilla tactics which will alone ‘bleed’ the enemy.” He implored Gandhi to “extend the maximum assistance to the Resistance Force short of direct involvement.”51
Without Indian help, the Bengali guerrillas would be in even more dire straits. The Indian government was dismayed that the insurgents had been taken by surprise by Yahya’s assault. Writing to Gandhi, Haksar worried that the “desperate heroic resistance” of the rebels from the East Pakistan Rifles and the East Bengal Regiment was being squandered. Trained as regular soldiers, they would all too often launch frontal assaults against the Pakistan army and thereby suffer grievous losses, when they would have been better off trying guerrilla tactics.52
So there was every reason for Gandhi’s government to believe that the Bengali rebels would not be
able to win alone, even with Indian support, and that Indian troops would need to join their fight directly. Subrahmanyam, the strategist, had warned that rebels alone would probably be quashed. Dhar, arguing for backing the insurgents, calmly accepted the likely consequence of an Indian war with Pakistan, which he reckoned almost inevitable.53
The Bengali rebels had more expansive battlefield ambitions than the Indian army, and pulled India along. General Aurora, as the R&AW noted, wanted to dismantle the East Pakistan Rifles and East Bengal Regiment and train their troops—as well as the new volunteers—for guerrilla warfare. But the Bengalis drilled for both insurgency and conventional war, seeking at least five battalions. To build up this rudimentary army, the Bengalis came up with a plan of what they needed from the Indian army. Gandhi’s government approved this escalation: “This scheme was approved in toto by the highest authorities in Delhi and the Army was asked to implement it.”54
Still, Gandhi, sobered by the warnings from her senior military men, was not yet ready to send her troops to war against Pakistan. Haksar argued that India should not recognize Bangladesh, which would “raise false hopes that recognition would be followed by direct intervention of the Armed Forces of India to sustain and support such a Government.” For a meeting with opposition lawmakers, Haksar briefed Gandhi to say, “We cannot, at the present stage, contemplate armed intervention at all.… [A]ll the sympathy and support which the Bangla Desh has been able to evoke in the world will be drowned in Indo-Pak conflict. The main thing, therefore, is not a formal recognition, but to do whatever lies within our power to sustain the struggle.”55
Chapter 7
“Don’t Squeeze Yahya”
Winston Lord was a patrician young New Yorker who had glided from the secrecy of the Skull and Bones tomb at Yale to the State Department. He would later ascend to be Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to China and then an assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton. In 1971, he held a cherished White House job as Henry Kissinger’s special assistant and indispensable aide on China. Cerebral and hardworking, he became so close with his boss that on Richard Nixon’s first visit to Beijing in 1972, Kissinger brought the thirty-four-year-old staffer along to take notes on the meeting with Mao Zedong himself. His image had to be cropped out of official pictures to avoid incensing William Rogers, the secretary of state, who got left out.1
Lord was one of the tiny clique of people who knew the single most important fact about world politics: that Nixon and Kissinger were secretly planning an opening to China. And he also knew something that nobody in the Dacca consulate could have guessed: that Yahya, while crushing the Bengalis, was also carrying messages from China to the Nixon team.
Lord, who is keenly intelligent and enduringly loyal to Kissinger, remembers their China project with a high moral purpose: “If you’re talking about human rights, if you’re trying to prevent nuclear war, constraining the Soviets, if you have to hold your nose with some of your allies, balancing was also a human right if it kept the world from blowing up.”
But he recalls the daunting challenges in opening to China after twenty-two years of mutual isolation. He asks, “How did you get in contact with the Chinese? The only channel we had was propaganda exchanges in Geneva and Warsaw”—mostly useless recitations of talking points, he says, and too visible anyway.
Pakistan was one of many options. “Nixon and Kissinger tried several channels,” says Lord. “There was a halfhearted attempt with de Gaulle in ’69. They tried through Romania.” The Americans could have got to Beijing through Bucharest or Paris—or some other city—instead of Islamabad. Kissinger later told Nixon that “you thought up Romania, you were the one who thought up the Polish deal, and you were the one who talked to Yahya the first time you were there in Lahore.” Kissinger also made an approach through Paris, asking his old friend Jean Sainteny, a veteran French diplomat, to set up a private channel there through the Chinese ambassador to France. And Kissinger met with Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, Romania’s brutal despot, asking him to facilitate communications with China.2
Yahya leaped at his chance. As early as October 1970—before the cyclone and the Pakistani elections—Nixon had personally told Yahya that it was essential for the United States to open negotiations with China, and Yahya had volunteered himself as a conduit for secret diplomacy. The Pakistani strongman, who was going to Beijing soon, pledged to explain to the Chinese that the White House would consider a clandestine meeting in Rawalpindi, or perhaps Paris. As promised, Yahya spoke personally to Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, and scored impressive results: an invitation from Mao himself for the United States to send a special envoy to Beijing. According to Yahya, Zhou had praised the use of him as an intermediary, since he was a head of state and Pakistan was “a great friend of China.” Kissinger considered a meeting in Rawalpindi.3
“The picking of channels was done by Kissinger and Nixon,” Lord recalls. “We laid out a smorgasbord, and they picked Pakistan.” But while the choice seems overdetermined in retrospect (Kissinger would later claim that “we had no other means of communication with Peking”), it was not at the time. Pakistan, says Lord, was not the only option acceptable to the White House.4
On March 25, when the slaughter started in East Pakistan, the White House was still weighing several other China options. Ceaus¸escu had delivered a success too, bringing back an almost identical invitation from Mao as the one from Yahya. When Nixon replied to Zhou, he sent his message through both Pakistan and Romania. A week after the Blood telegram, Nixon and Kissinger were weighing meetings with Yahya and Ceaus¸escu as back channels, as well as talking about letters sent through Sainteny. A few days later, Kissinger told Nixon that they now needed a direct channel to China, and considered sending a general to Warsaw to set up communications. In late April, Kissinger was still considering using Sainteny. And on April 22—almost a month into the Bengali bloodshed—Kissinger told Nixon that Ceaus¸escu had sent a top official to Beijing, carrying back a message for the White House.5
Kissinger and his team often justify the tilt toward Pakistan as vital for the opening to China. Harold Saunders, the senior White House aide, remembers Kissinger’s focus on China. “China will be looking at how we’ll be treating an ally,” he says, explaining his boss’s thinking. “That was the governing factor. I know I took a lot of flak from my State colleagues, but I couldn’t tell them that. It was a very tightly held secret.”
But Kissinger later wrote that he thought their Pakistan policy was “correct on the merits, above and beyond the China connection.” Lord has said, “It’s a huge exaggeration to say that we did this solely as a favor to the Chinese.” He is skeptical about how much the China channel really mattered for the White House’s backing of Pakistan, and instead frames the issue in the Cold War: “India was allegedly nonaligned, but we considered it pro-Soviet, getting Soviet weapons. So you already had an American bias toward Pakistan before the opening to China. It was geopolitical. India’s on the Russian team, so we’ll put Pakistan on our team.… To say we tilted toward Pakistan because of the opening to China is an oversimplification. We might have done that anyway.”6
“NEEDLING, NASTY LITTLE THINGS”
On the curb of a main downtown intersection in Dacca, there lay a corpse. The dead man was a worker, barefoot, and had been lying there for hours. Nobody touched him. Nobody even dared to look at him. People simply stepped over the body. This was not out of callousness, but fear. A U.S. official in Dacca noted that “people have been shot for moving bodies.” The army seemed to want as many people as possible to see the dead.7
The Dacca consulate’s staffers kept up their stubborn daily project of feeding their superiors with bad news. This was, in the end, a more significant achievement than the sensational dissent telegram. Ignored by Washington, they became, as Archer Blood remembered later with some pride, “testy and pugnacious,” often “real pains in the neck.” One official in Blood’s consulate wrote that most foreigners in East Pakistan “stay bec
ause there is still the faint hope that the constant reporting will finally produce more than echoes within the corridors, and because it is extremely difficult to leave fearing the future of those left behind.”8
Blood and his team believed they had some reason to hope. Thanks to intrepid reporters who snuck into East Pakistan, newspapers and television news ran vivid stories about the killing. Throughout the first month of slaughter, the U.S. government held a loud internal debate about its South Asia policy. There was voluminous input from the State Department and the two feuding ambassadors in Delhi and Islamabad, as well as the renegade consul in Dacca—although none of them knew what Winston Lord did. Still, despite having every opportunity to hear opposite points of view, Nixon and Kissinger—the only two people who counted—did not budge.9
Rogers, the Secretary of State, reflecting some of the ferment among his underlings, told Nixon the time had come to reevaluate U.S. policy toward Pakistan—in particular “the Pakistan Army’s use of U.S.-supplied military equipment,” which was embarrassing for public opinion. From Islamabad, Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador there, weighed in for a nonintervention policy, but added some mild disapproval of Pakistan. At most, he wanted to privately suggest to Pakistani officials that force would not work in the long run, and find bureaucratic excuses to suspend new shipments of arms and ammunition. He warned against alienating Yahya, and doubted that economic sanctions would work any better against Pakistan than they had with South Africa or Rhodesia.10