The Blood Telegram Page 21
Chapter 10
The China Channel
Richard Nixon, feeling the sting of betrayal from the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, developed a renewed appreciation for Yahya. Carrying the most secret of messages back and forth from China, Yahya proved himself a thoroughgoing loyalist and flawlessly discreet. Compared to Daniel Ellsberg or Archer Blood, the Pakistani dictator looked pretty good.
“This is the kind of thing that the leader of a country is going to be personally managing,” remembers Winston Lord, Henry Kissinger’s special assistant at the White House. “You better have trust in that person.”
Yahya had decisively beaten out the rival options for the prized role of go-between. Pakistan, notwithstanding Archer Blood’s hectoring cables about genocide, had distinct advantages. “Pakistan was a good friend of both of ours, in the Cold War context,” Lord says. The Chinese leadership, he recalls, would feel that they could trust Yahya. “The case for secrecy was very strong,” says Lord. “Above all, even though we were trying to reassure each other through Pakistani channels that Kissinger and Nixon’s visits would go well, we couldn’t be sure. There was no assurance that it would work out. It was still somewhat a gamble.” The stakes were high: “You don’t want a big public display of an initiative that falls flat on its face.” If news of the upcoming trip got out, Lord says, then Nixon would face opposition from conservatives and pro-Taiwan advocates, while Congress tried to constrain him. Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s senior aide for South Asia, remembers the necessity of finding a clandestine channel: “We did need someone to keep it secret, even from State.” When a White House aide suggested trying to garner publicity for the early covert steps, Nixon barked, “Don’t screw it up.”1
Kissinger might have made a cooler calculation of the strategic relationship between the United States and Pakistan, but for Nixon this trust was deeply personal, resting on his friendship with Yahya. “Nixon did do a lot of traveling as vice president,” Lord says, “that’s one way he got so expert on foreign policy. He remembered on his trips who was treating him nicely, back when his political career looked like it might be over. If he got a good reception, and he did from Yahya and the Pakistanis, he would certainly remember that. I don’t think Kissinger had any such feelings.”2
Ironically, it is Kissinger’s own worldview that makes the strongest argument against overvaluing Yahya. To a realist thinker like him, if two states were facing a grave threat from a common foe, they would be forced together. Since the two countries’ shared fundamental strategic interests would propel them into partnership, the logistical details of arranging some meetings should not matter too much. As Kissinger, while praising the U.S. and Chinese leadership, recently wrote, “That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time. It would have happened sooner or later whatever the leadership in either country.” But his younger self, fretting and hoping in his West Wing office, was not so confident.3
“HE’S A DECENT MAN”
In this uncertain landscape, Yahya was, more than ever, the essential man. Saunders reminded Kissinger that “the prospect of the Peking trip imposed limits” on criticizing Pakistan “that had nothing to do with South Asia, except that the Pakistanis were in position to exploit those limits.”4
Those limits were on display in a remarkably warm letter from Nixon to Yahya in May. As Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, candidly told Nixon, “I have toned down” the letter “to eliminate any inference of pressure from you.” Thus Nixon wrote that Yahya must “be deeply disappointed not to have been able to transfer power to a civilian government according to the plan you had adopted”—as if Yahya had had no choice in the matter. Saying nothing about the slaughter, Nixon blandly voiced “our concern over the loss of life and human suffering”—even for the president, the word “concern” was the maximum extent of U.S. rhetoric. While noting the opposition among the American people and Congress to U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan, he hoped that would fade as the civil war continued to subside. Nixon expressed solicitude for the man who had chosen carnage: “I understand the anguish you must have felt in making the difficult decisions you have faced.” This was hardly the kind of thing to concentrate the minds of the generals in Rawalpindi.5
There were advantages to working with a dictatorship. As Saunders points out, only two Pakistanis had to be involved—Yahya and his ambassador in Washington—making it easier to dodge the U.S. agents spying on the Pakistani embassy’s communications. “Keeping it out of U.S. government channels was not easy,” Saunders remembers. “Having someone who could play that game was important.” Yahya would personally deliver the White House’s notes to the Chinese ambassador in Islamabad, bound directly for Beijing, usually arriving there a day later.6
With so much traffic going through the China channel, Nixon brought Joseph Farland, the loyal U.S. ambassador in Pakistan, in on the secret. The president had Farland hastily manufacture some plausible personal excuse to travel from Islamabad to meet Kissinger in Palm Springs, California, not breathing a word to anyone else. The ambassador, with no clue what he was there to do, launched into stroppy denunciations of rivals who were out to trash Pakistan: Kenneth Keating, the ambassador in Delhi, had gone “berserk,” leaking the essence of Blood’s reporting to Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times; the Dacca press corps were inexperienced “missionaries” who were exaggerating the amount of killing there.
But Kissinger, with far bigger fish to fry, notified the dumbfounded ambassador that for some time the White House had been sending messages through Pakistan to China. Farland would now be responsible for personally passing along to Yahya letters classified dauntingly as TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE/EXCLUSIVELY EYES ONLY. Kissinger was hoping to meet Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, in Pakistan or somewhere in China that was easily reachable from Pakistan, with Yahya setting up the trip. Kissinger, comforted that Farland was “a man outside the regular Foreign Service Establishment,” told him to get in touch with him if he ever got “intolerable” instructions from the State Department.7
A few days later, on May 10, Nixon replied to the Chinese, proposing a “preliminary secret meeting” between Kissinger and Zhou, “on Chinese soil preferably at some location within convenient flying distance from Pakistan.” Nixon’s own visit would follow soon after. All the details would be figured out through the Pakistani channel: “For secrecy, it is essential that no other channel be used.”8
Kissinger’s time horizon shrank. He said, “Yahya must be kept afloat for six more months.” When told that Yahya could not hold on to East Pakistan in the long run, Kissinger said that “all we need is six months.” Or maybe less: Kissinger pressed Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary who was now running the World Bank, to help keep Yahya in power by providing international economic support, saying, “We really need these guys for three months and then we will relent.” Kissinger made the same pitch to John Connally, Nixon’s Treasury secretary: “We really need these guys for the next three months.”9
On May 23, Kissinger told Nixon that “that is the last thing we can afford now to have the Pakistan government overthrown, given the other things we are doing.”10
Yahya’s channel came at a terrible cost. The State Department estimated publicly in late June that at least two hundred thousand people had already died in East Pakistan. Not long after, in the New York Times, Sydney Schanberg reported that, according to his reliable diplomatic sources, the Pakistan army had killed at least two hundred thousand Bengalis.11
The Nixon administration had ample evidence not just of the scale of the massacres, but also of their ethnic targeting of the Hindu minority—what Blood had condemned as genocide. This was common knowledge throughout the Nixon administration. Kissinger once told the president himself, “Another stupid mistake he [Yahya] made was to expel so many Hindus from East Pakistan. It gave the Indians a great cause” for war. Kissinger, in a memorandum drafted by Saunders, ale
rted Nixon to the difficulty of getting Hindu refugees to return. The undersecretary of state said to Nixon, “The Hindu population has suffered strong persecution, and many have fled the country.”12
Kissinger was repeatedly alerted about this genocide. Harold Saunders informed him about reports that the Pakistan army was “deliberately seeking out Hindus and killing them,” while a senior State Department official notified him that Pakistan’s policy was “getting rid of the Hindus.” In a Situation Room meeting, another State Department official plainly told Kissinger, “Eighty percent of the refugees are Hindus.” In the same meeting, the CIA director doubted the prospects of refugees returning to East Pakistan, no matter what Yahya said to them: “The way the Pakistanis have been beating up on the Hindus, the refugees would have to be convinced they wouldn’t be shot in the head.”13
Even Farland’s embassy in Islamabad—helmed by an ambassador who saw the best in Yahya—admitted that the “army has clearly been singling out Hindus for especially harsh treatment,” although he did not think that “army policy as such is to expel Hindus.” He wrote, “Coupled with official anti-Hindu propaganda, army brutality has effect of spurring Hindu exodus.” He noted “an emotional anti-Hindu bias” in the “thinking of West Paks.” Even if Yahya’s government was not “officially encouraging mass exodus, we doubt it [is] sorry Hindus are leaving. Pak military probably view Hindu departure as blessing which reduces element [they] regard as untrustworthy and subversive.”14
None of this put much of a dent in Nixon’s fondness for Yahya. “He’s a decent man,” Nixon said, “for him to do a difficult job trying to hold those two parts of the country separated by thousands of miles and keep them together.”15
As millions of refugees fled into India, the Nixon administration had ruled out using all of its major diplomatic tools: threats to withhold military or economic aid, or rumbles of public denunciation. Instead, the United States was left with nothing more than making private suggestions to Yahya.
Nixon told a senior envoy from Pakistan that Yahya was a “good friend,” and empathized again with the “anguish” of the decisions that the Pakistani dictator had had to make. While warning that he was boxed in by Congress, legal restrictions, and public opinion, Nixon reassured the envoy that the United States was not going to tell Pakistan how to deal with its political problems. It was “wrong,” Nixon said, “to assume that the US should go around telling other countries how to arrange their political affairs.”16
The only stern words came not from Nixon, Kissinger, or Rogers, but merely from a friendly ambassador. Farland—in the middle of his other China business—told Yahya that he first needed “to stop the shooting and to start the rebuilding,” and reminded him of the pervasive fear in East Pakistan. On May 22, after almost two months of targeted slaughter of the Hindus of East Pakistan, Farland finally gingerly raised these killings with Yahya, in a tense meeting at the President’s House in Karachi. He read Yahya some sanitized sections of a recent cable from Archer Blood. This stung Yahya, who raged about Indian propaganda, pledging that this persecution definitely was not happening with his government’s assent. When he cooled off, he said he would look into it.17
After Yahya declared a general amnesty for refugees returning home, Farland in June recommended that he emphasize that exiles of all religions—including Hindus—could come back. Yahya, still denying that Hindus were targeted, agreed. Farland warned him that this ongoing “Hindu exodus” could spark a war with India, and that the flow of refugees would not let up until the army stopped its repression of the locals, particularly the Hindus. India was predictably unimpressed: Indian diplomats in Islamabad wrote that Pakistan’s real goal was eliminating the Hindus from East Pakistan and Yahya’s assurance to them could not be taken seriously.18
Nixon wrote to Yahya, praising him for this amnesty declaration, as well as for saying that he would restore power to civilians. In his firmest warning yet, Nixon voiced “deep concern” about the risk of war, writing that it was “absolutely vital” for peace to create conditions in East Pakistan that would allow the swift return of the refugees.19
This uptick in U.S. private criticism had no obvious impact. Yahya, taking full advantage of his utility from the China channel, showered Nixon with beseeching mail. He urged Nixon to maintain his personal support, to help get Pakistan international aid, and to ward off India. Indira Gandhi, Yahya wrote, was “determined to exploit the presence of displaced persons in India to … justify military intervention in East Pakistan.” But Yahya could only rather limply point to the return of thousands of refugees—nothing compared with the 154,000 fleeing daily in June, or the 21,000 fleeing every day in July, or the millions who had already fled.20
On June 28, Yahya delivered a national address, calling for refugees to return and seeking a new constitution and a new East Pakistan government. But the Awami League remained banned; any previously elected Bengalis who were deemed secessionist would be disqualified from taking their seats; the constitution would be written by carefully selected experts, rather than by the elected members of the National Assembly; and martial law would remain in place for an unspecified period of time. The State Department saw such halfhearted gestures as failures, with one senior official telling Kissinger there could be no political solution so long as the Awami League remained banned: “It’s like telling Ted Kennedy not to be a Democrat.” The White House staff told Kissinger that Yahya had not done what was necessary to get the refugees to return. And the U.S. embassy in Delhi angrily pointed to the ongoing flood of refugees as proof that Yahya had done nothing to restrain his army. Since U.S. support was the “mainstay” of the survival of Yahya’s government, it was “indefensible” not to lean on him: “We are the key factor in all of Yahya’s calculations for the immediate future.”21
THE AMBASSADOR’S CONSCIENCE
In the next Chinese message delivered through Yahya, Zhou Enlai welcomed the prospect of Kissinger’s visit. When Kissinger got this word, he was, according to H. R. Haldeman, “ecstatic.”22
The White House was galvanized. They quickly fixed the dates of July 9 through 11, with Kissinger to fly in and out of Beijing on a Pakistani Boeing aircraft. Kissinger told Nixon that Yahya had “set up a tremendous cover operation.”23
But Kissinger had some drearier business to handle before that momentous day. He had to personally face down a remaining dissenter, Kenneth Keating, the U.S. ambassador to India. Keating—unaware of the China channel, not knowing that his timing was terrible—made himself impossible to ignore with a trip to Washington. He was in town to sit in on meetings with Swaran Singh, the Indian foreign minister, and wanted to meet both Kissinger and Nixon privately.
Archer Blood had been easily dismissed, but it was trickier to oust a well-connected former Republican senator. It would look bad to fire the ambassador in the middle of a crisis. And Keating leaked plenty to the press while he was still working for the administration; he could have done far worse if sacked. “He’s got all the credentials,” remembers Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s staffer. “When he says it, then people have to listen to it.”
Hoskinson recalls Nixon and Kissinger’s anger: “We were aware that Keating was on the bad guy list. ‘What’s happened to Ken?’ ” He explains, “What really upset them is Keating is not just another ambassador. He is a man of Washington, with an independent reputation. He knows how to get the word out, he knows how to deal with the media, he has his own base of influence, he’s well respected by other Republicans. This is not just Archer Blood anymore, not this guy out there in Bangladesh and a couple of Foreign Service Officers.”24
Meeting Kissinger at the White House, Keating vented his anguish. Kissinger, noncommittal, explained that Nixon wanted to give Yahya a few months. Kissinger said that “the President has a special feeling for President Yahya. One cannot make policy on that basis, but it is a fact of life.”
Keating shot back that he recognized Nixon’s “special relationship�
� with Yahya, but was baffled by it. He could not see why the United States should stick up for Yahya “just out of loyalty to a friend.” He vehemently argued that ammunition shipments and military assistance to Pakistan should be “just out of the question now while they are still killing in East Pakistan and refugees are fleeing across the border.”
Rather than merely sending toothless notes, Keating wanted U.S. economic aid to Pakistan to be conditional on an end to the killing. Echoing Blood, he reminded Kissinger that the army was concentrating on the Hindus. At first, the refugees fleeing into India had been in the same proportion as existed in the overall population of East Pakistan, but now 90 percent were Hindus.
Kissinger did not respond to most of this. He merely tried to assure the ambassador that the White House had no illusions that the Pakistani government could hold on to East Pakistan, and had no interest in its doing so. They just wanted to buy time for a gradual process.25
The next day, in the Oval Office, Kissinger complained to Nixon, “He’s almost fanatical on this issue.” Nixon resented having to meet with Keating. The president thought his man in Delhi had gone completely native: “Keating, like every Ambassador who goes over there, goes over there and gets sucked in.”
Nixon asked, “Well what the hell does he think we should do about it?” When Kissinger explained—“he thinks we should cut off all military aid, all economic aid, and in effect help the Indians to push the Pakistanis out of” East Pakistan—it was more than Nixon could take: “I don’t want him to come in with that kind of jackass thing with me.”
Kissinger railed against the Indians: “Those sons-of-bitches, who never have lifted a finger for us, why should we get involved in the morass of East Pakistan?” He wrote off the future of Bangladesh before it had even been born: “if East Pakistan becomes independent, it is going to become a cesspool. It’s going be 100 million people, they have the lowest standard of living in Asia. No resources. They’re going to become a ripe field for Communist infiltration.” He attempted to fathom the depths of Indian perfidy: “they’re going to bring pressure on India because of West Bengal. So that the Indians in their usual idiotic way are playing for little stakes, unless they have in the back of their minds that they could turn East Pakistan into a sort of protectorate that they could control from Calcutta.” Nixon had a simpler explanation: “Oh, what they had in the back of their mind was to destroy Pakistan.”