The Blood Telegram Read online

  Temperate as this was, Kissinger was unswayed. Saunders remembers that his boss held fast to the principle that the United States should not tell other leaders how to run their countries: “So he didn’t buy it.” Saunders says that, in retrospect, “the China thought was paramount.”

  In a Situation Room meeting that day, Saunders had to sit silently while Kissinger resisted putting any pressure on Pakistan. Kissinger batted away proposals for cutting off military aid or development loans, which would bring “a substantial rupture of our relations with Yahya.” He stood firm against confronting Yahya: “no matter what our view may be of the savagery of the West Pakistan troops, we would just be pulling India’s chestnuts out of the fire if we take on West Pakistan.”

  Kissinger had repeatedly reminded senior officials that Nixon “does have a special feeling about Yahya.” Each time that Kissinger invoked presidential authority, he emphasized how hard it would be to drive any wedge between Nixon and Yahya: “The President thinks he has a special relationship with Yahya; he would be most reluctant to take him on. This reluctance might be overcome, but we can’t do it at this level.” Kissinger ended the meeting by saying he would go to the president. Everyone in the Situation Room knew what that meant.38

  On April 21, Zhou Enlai sent a breakthrough message using Yahya, in which the Chinese premier suggested that Kissinger, Rogers, or even Nixon himself come to Beijing. Zhou suggested that all the arrangements could “be made through the good offices of President Yahya Khan.”39

  At this point, the White House retired its other China channels. Bucharest, Warsaw, Paris—all were shut down. Kissinger had written another letter for Jean Sainteny in Paris, which was now abandoned. Saunders remembers that Kissinger thought the Romanian government was untrustworthy. The Chinese leadership did not trust any communist country, Lord notes. Nor would they rely on France, a U.S. ally.40

  Nixon and Kissinger relished their coming triumph. This, Kissinger told the president, would end the Vietnam War this year. They left the State Department in the dark. When Nixon suggested sending George Bush to Beijing, soon after the future president had argued for India’s right to speak about human rights, Kissinger was withering: “Absolutely not, he is too soft and not sophisticated enough.” This was a job that Kissinger wanted for himself.41

  Winston Lord, Kissinger’s special assistant, was primarily concerned with how useful Yahya’s government had been with China. But as he uncomfortably wrote to Kissinger, “We can afford neither to alienate Pakistan nor to ignore Indian sensitivities, the nasty practices of Yahya’s army, and the fact that almost all observers believe that Bangla Desh will eventually become an independent entity.”42

  But Yahya won fresh appreciation from the White House. With perfect timing, his newfound role in the opening to China came precisely as the Nixon administration was firming up its policy on Pakistan. “Yahya sent you the message from Zhou Enlai,” Kissinger told Nixon, “saying that it’s the first time we’ve had a direct report from a president, through a president, to a president.” This was a phrase that Nixon would savor for the rest of his days—it even, he later claimed, echoed in his mind on his last, dark night in the White House before resigning.43

  Nixon and Kissinger bitterly remembered the Blood telegram as an act of unbearable insolence. But almost nothing of the reporting and advocacy by Blood’s consulate had any lasting impact on them. A month into the slaughter, the Nixon administration firmed up its Pakistan policy in the quiet of the Oval Office. Kissinger urged the president to continue support for Yahya, with only a little retreat.

  Kissinger firmly believed in exercising leverage over other governments. He once told Nixon that “pressure gets you to places, or the potentiality of pressure. No one has yet done a thing for us because we needed it or because we were nice guys.” But here, despite crucial U.S. diplomatic and economic support and ongoing military supply—which Kissinger called “relatively small” but “an important symbolic element”—he avoided wielding any such pressure. No doubt there were limits to U.S. influence, but Kissinger never explored them.44

  He was coy about whether Pakistan could survive as a single country. He admitted that even if the rebels were soon crushed, East Pakistan would remain a tinderbox of “widespread discontent and hatred,” but he also offered Nixon some hope: the Pakistan army would probably soon retake control of the cities, with the Bengali nationalist resistance too weak and poorly armed to prevent that now.

  Kissinger recommended trying to help Yahya reach a negotiated settlement to the war. On paper, this was not the most extreme possible option (in the classic Washington trick, he had included two other sucker choices, one totally pro-Pakistan and one pro-Bengali), but on closer examination, it meant strong support for Yahya. There would be nothing like the duress that Blood wanted: “We would not withhold aid now for the sake of applying pressure.” (That would only be contemplated much later, he wrote, after the West Pakistanis had been given every chance to negotiate themselves a settlement.) To the contrary, the United States would give emergency economic help, and would support assistance from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

  Kissinger never suggested that the massacres should be a factor in U.S. policy, even as an indicator of Yahya’s misjudgment or unreliability. Nor did he broach complaining to Pakistan about its use of its vast arsenal of U.S. weapons against civilians. Instead, he only considered future shipments of arms and military supplies, which would be a small fraction of what Pakistan already had on hand. Here, Kissinger wanted to help as much as possible without running afoul of Congress: “allowing enough shipments of non-lethal spares and equipment to continue to avoid giving Yahya the impression we are cutting off military assistance but holding shipment of more controversial items in order not to provoke the Congress to force cutting off all aid.”

  It was, in the end, no choice at all. Nixon dutifully initialed the option that Kissinger recommended. Lest the bureaucracy get any ideas, Kissinger had also suggested that Nixon should specify that nothing should be done to squeeze West Pakistan. Duly coached, Nixon added his own commentary, veering closer to the sucker option of total backing for Pakistan. The president scrawled, “To all hands. Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.” He underlined the word “Don’t” three times.45

  “THIS MANIAC IN DACCA”

  Richard Nixon was not the kind of president who indulged whistleblowers or dissenters. Although formally his administration had created the dissent channel, he had no patience for those who dared step out of line. “We never fire anybody,” he once complained. “We always promote the sons of bitches that kick us in the ass.… When a bureaucrat deliberately thumbs his nose, we’re going to get him.… The little boys over in State particularly, that are against us, we will do it.” Another time, he told his staffers that he welcomed dissent memoranda sent directly to him, but immediately sarcastically noted that he would “be sure, once he’s received it, that it’s marked Top Secret so it will get out in all the newspapers.”46

  “We’ve got a lot of little people who love to be heroes,” the president complained to his cabinet in June. He loathed someone like Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Nixon had no patience for such showy displays of conscience, as he told the cabinet: “I get a lot of advice on PR and personality and how I’ve got to put on my nice-guy hat and dance at the White House, so I did it, but let me make it clear that’s not my nature.”47

  Kissinger worked Nixon up. “It shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President,” he said. “[T]hese leaks are slowly and systematically destroying us.… It could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy.” Nixon’s fury went beyond the law. “We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy,” he told H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff. “They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?” He created a team—the Plumbers—to hunt down leakers, and ordered Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Insti
tution and Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, seeking material for a smear campaign. “You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it.”48

  Kissinger, with his professorial background, presented himself as someone who could handle criticism. But he hated leaks, once telling a Chinese delegation that “our bureaucracy doesn’t always speak with one voice, and … those who don’t speak with one voice usually speak to the New York Times.” His bullying of the State Department went so far that few there dared stand up to him. “You don’t have to threaten us or intimidate us,” a much-vilified State Department official once snapped at him. “You will scare the hell out of so many people in this building that no one will give you the information you should hear.”49

  So the Blood telegram invited stern retaliation from the White House. The spectacular act of the dissent cable had lodged firmly in Kissinger’s memory. He (garbling Blood’s and Farland’s postings) complained, “The Embassy in Dacca and the Consul in Islamabad are at war with each other.” In a private conversation with Nixon in the Oval Office, he later denounced Blood as “this maniac in Dacca, the Consul General who is in rebellion.”50

  There was a familiar Nixonian remedy: fire Blood. “It was the kind of thing that was done in those days,” says Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide at the White House. “They did remove people from posts that they didn’t like. In the context of the time, it seemed quite natural.”51

  By late April, as Nixon reached his decision not to squeeze Yahya, Blood was shoved out of the Dacca consulate. The ambassador in Islamabad informed Blood that a decision had been made “at the highest level” to move him out of Dacca. He was asked to request home leave and transfer back to the State Department—in other words, unceremoniously sacked from his position as consul general in Dacca.52

  “They were cleaning out the house of miscreants,” remembers Scott Butcher, the Dacca consulate’s junior political officer, sarcastically using the term that the Pakistan army leveled against Bengali nationalists. Hoskinson says, “It was almost surprising he lasted as long as he did.” Since sending in the dissent cable, Blood had expected this, but, he later recalled, it “still came as a jolt.” He was particularly wounded to learn that his fellow diplomats questioned his judgment. It was the low point of his career. As he put it afterward, he “hit rock bottom.”53

  At the White House, Hoskinson and Harold Saunders watched in queasy silence. Saunders says respectfully of Blood, “He took the responsibility. He paid the price.” “Hal and I had the same attitude about this throughout,” says Hoskinson. “It’s like, this is above our pay grade. Henry makes his mind up, and out goes Blood. This is not something that you ask Henry why you did it. Maybe the president wants him out. One did not want to be perceived as being too much on Blood’s side. I was always a little vulnerable in this regard.”

  Saunders says about Blood, “He was just an honest FSO”—Foreign Service Officer—“who had experience in this part of the world. And he thought this needed to be put at the top of the agenda.” Saunders says that over eight years in power, Kissinger came to have enormous respect for the Foreign Service, but “when he came into his White House job, he had a view of them as bleeding hearts. They were certainly not the realpolitik thinkers that he would have been looking for. It was a prejudice, a bias.” Saunders had no illusions about how Kissinger responded to dissenters: “I know how he felt about people who would speak up. He was not tolerant of a lot of that.”54

  After being told that he was sacked from his post, Blood managed to fire off some final reporting on the persecution of the Hindus. But he was a lame duck, and even before he left Dacca, the situation reports from East Pakistan started to come from another diplomat, Herbert Spivack—who had not signed the Blood telegram. Spivack, says Eric Griffel, the development official, was “a much more conservative character.” (Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob of the Indian army is less polite: “Spivack was a clown.”) The new boss was, Griffel says, “quite a different person. Emotionally uninvolved. We were all emotionally involved.” Griffel recalls, “Spivack was a much more old faithful bureaucrat. The cables became much milder. Also, everyone knew that the battle had been lost as far as the consulate was concerned.”55

  Nobody in the Dacca consulate could have guessed at the time exactly what Nixon and Kissinger were saying about them in the Oval Office. But Eric Griffel laughs out loud when told of Kissinger’s description of Blood as “this maniac in Dacca.” He says, “I can think of few people in the world who are less maniacal than Arch Blood. The thing about Blood that is rather remarkable is that he is very much a product of the State Department. A very loyal officer. A very conservative—not in the political sense—human being.”

  Scott Butcher, hearing about what was said in the Oval Office, blows up. “It’s totally wrong,” he says heatedly. “They cast a lot of aspersions on our professionalism. We were on the ground. Arch Blood’s prognostications were absolutely right. Shame on them.” Meg Blood says calmly, “We recognized at the time that they were going to do this. They were going to simply ignore the reality of who he was.”

  “Had Blood not done this,” says Griffel, “he would have hit rock bottom in a different way. And possibly a worse way. Not for everyone, but for a man like Arch, there are worse things than losing your career. I don’t like using words that don’t have an accurate meaning, but he was a man of honor. In his own view, he would have lost his honor.”

  Chapter 8

  Exodus

  It was Biblical,” remembers Sydney Schanberg, who reported on the refugees for the New York Times.

  Schanberg, steeped in the worst horrors of war from Vietnam and Cambodia, goes quiet at the memory of the desperate millions who fled into India. “You don’t tune out,” he says, “but there’s a numbness. Either that or you feel like crying. There was a tremendous loss of life on those treks out.” He remembers, “Their bodies have adjusted to those germs in their water, but suddenly they’re drinking different water with different germs. Suddenly they’ve got cholera. People were dying all around us. You’d see that someone had left a body on the side of the road, wrapped in pieces of bamboo, and there’d be a vulture trying to get inside to eat the body. You would come into a schoolyard, and a mother was losing her child. He was in her lap. He coughed and coughed and then died.” He pauses and composes himself. “They went through holy hell and back.”

  Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, the gruff, battle-hardened chief of staff of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, went to the border to watch the refugees streaming in. “It was terrible, pathetic,” he recalls. The displaced throngs inescapably called to mind nightmare memories of Partition in 1947, not so long before. “It’s a terrible human agony,” says Jaswant Singh, a former Indian foreign minister. “It was as if we were reliving the Partition.”1

  The mounting demands of providing food, shelter, and medical care were more than an impoverished country like India—which could not cope with the needs of millions of its own desperately poor and sick citizens—could possibly handle. By late April, with the monsoons looming, the rush of refugees became a public health disaster. India frantically built refugee camps, each one holding some forty thousand people. Indira Gandhi’s government quietly tried to link these camps to the Awami League authorities, and even did some social engineering, mixing Hindus and Muslims together in the Indian secular way. While it was almost impossible to count the refugees precisely, by the middle of May, India estimated that it was sheltering almost two million souls, with about fifty thousand more arriving daily.2

  From Tripura, a hard-hit border state, the lieutenant governor warned Gandhi of the massive scale of it: “It is clear now that the Pak Army’s objective is to push across our borders as many people as possible with a view to disrupt completely life here.” The Tripura government was housing exiles in camps in school buildings and haphazard temporary shelters. They could handle at best
fifty thousand refugees, but already had over twice that many. The roads and railways could not bring in enough supplies. And commodities prices were soaring, with awful consequences for poor Indians.3

  These displaced masses greatly ratcheted up the popular pressure on India’s democratic government. Indian reporters raced to the borders, shocking their readership with gruesome coverage of the refugees’ harrowing ordeals. From Tripura, one newspaper showed the individual faces in the human tide: desperately poor peasants selling their utensils, because it was all they had left; privileged, well-educated lawyers and architects who suddenly found themselves dodging soldiers; and a movie actress with deals inked for a dozen films who slogged through the mud for two days seeking safety, just like everyone else.4

  At every rank, Indians seethed. Swaran Singh, the ordinarily unflappable foreign minister, indignantly told his diplomats, “Artillery, tanks, automatic weapons, mortars, aeroplanes, everything which is normally used against invading armed forces, were utilised and very large-scale killings took place; selective killings of individuals, acts of molestation and rape against the university students, girls, picking out the Awami League leaders, their supporters and later on especially concentrating on the localities in which Hindus predominated.” P. N. Haksar anxiously wrote that “our people have been deeply stirred by the carnage in East Bengal. Government of India have endeavoured to contain the emotions which have been aroused in our country, but we find it increasingly difficult to do this because of the systematic effort on the part of Pakistan to force millions of people to leave their hearths and homes taking shelter in our territory.”5