The Blood Telegram Read online

  The tape quality is bad, but Kissinger said, “Mr. President, actually we’ve got to keep Yahya, we have to keep Yahya [unclear] public executions for the next month”—evidently a call to temporarily prevent Yahya from carrying out any public killings.

  Wrapping up, Nixon was emphatic that the opening to China was not his only reason for backing Pakistan: “Look, even apart from the Chinese thing, I wouldn’t do that to help the Indians, the Indians are no goddamn good.”26

  On June 15, Keating got his chance to directly confront the president. Waiting in the Oval Office for the showdown, the president groused to Kissinger, “Like all of our other Indian ambassadors, he’s been brainwashed.” He added, “Anti-Pakistan.”

  The brawling began immediately. As Keating entered, Nixon threw him off balance by asking, “Where are your sandals?” Decoding this mystifying gibe, the president explained, “I hope you haven’t turned the Embassy over to those hippies like your predecessor.” Keating—a World War I and World War II officer and former Republican senator with a fondness for seersucker suits, infrequently mistaken for a hippie—tried to regain his footing, as Nixon reminded him who was boss: “We don’t normally have ambassadors in.”

  Despite this presidential onslaught, Keating rallied. The elderly Republican stalwart tried to show his loyalty to the White House, noting that he had repeatedly stood up to the Indians over Vietnam and other issues. But he argued that India was a strong and stable power, while Pakistan was in turmoil. “What do they want us to do?” asked Nixon, about the Indians. “Break up Pakistan?” Keating assured him they did not, but they could not stand the strain of some five million refugees. Nixon suggested, “Why don’t they shoot them?”

  Keating, prudently letting that pass without comment, launched into an impassioned plea. The Pakistani government had killed the Bengalis’ intellectuals, arrested Mujib as a traitor, and outlawed the political party that had won all but two of the available seats. The former senator from New York explained that three million of the refugees were in Calcutta: “Calcutta is the size of New York. It’d be like dumping three million people into New York, except that Calcutta is in much worse shape than New York. Not too much, but it’s worse.”

  In the Oval Office, the ambassador directly told the president of the United States and his national security advisor that their ally was committing genocide. The reason that the refugees kept coming, at a rate of 150,000 a day, was “because they’re killing the Hindus.” He explained that “in the beginning, these refugees were about in the proportion to the population—85 percent Muslim, 15 percent Hindus. Because when they started the killing it was indiscriminate. Now, having gotten control of the large centers, it is almost entirely a matter of genocide killing the Hindus.”

  Neither Nixon nor Kissinger said anything. With those awful words hanging in the air, Keating kept going. The Hindus would never go back, but the Muslims might if there was a political settlement and an end to the killing. He said that the Bengalis’ bitterness was so great that he—as well as Joseph Farland, his counterpart in Islamabad—believed that the old Pakistan was finished. He demanded new pressure on Yahya’s government. But Nixon, while pledging to be conciliatory to India, would not “allow the refugee problem to get us involved in the internal political problems. You see that’s our policy too.”

  Nixon could not mention one of his motives: the secret China channel. Keating soothingly told Nixon, “Now, I am conscious of the special relationship that you have with Yahya. And I respect it.” The president opaquely replied, “Not only just that, but there are some other major considerations.” A little later, he mysteriously said that Pakistan’s collapse was “not in our interest,” especially now, “for reasons we can’t go into. Under those circumstances, what we have to do, Ken, is to find a way to be just as generous as we can to the Indians, but also we do not want to do something that is an open breach with Yahya—an open breach, an embarrassing situation.”

  Nixon made a brief effort to speak nicely of the Indians. It did not go well. “Let me say this,” he intoned, “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression about India. There are 400 million Indians.” Keating corrected him; there were actually 550 million Indians. Nixon was surprised: “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country but they do.” Trying to revert to kindness, he said that India had “some semblance of democracy” and that “we want them to succeed. Because there are 550 million people, we want them to do well.” Then, as if overtaxed by that niceness, he added, “And they always hate us … internationally, we know that.”27

  When the troublesome ambassador departed, Nixon and Kissinger were left in the Oval Office to splutter. After Nixon’s most direct, personal confrontation with one of the dissenters in his own administration, he and Kissinger were unswayed. They never mentioned the accusation of genocide, nor expressed a hint of compassion for the Hindus or the refugees. But they were furious at Keating and Blood.

  “I don’t know what the Christ we are up to,” said Nixon as soon as the coast was clear. “The most insulting way we can—” started Kissinger, before the president cut him off. Nixon asked, “My God, does Farland, is he sending memoranda that he thinks Pakistan is finished also?” (He was.) Kissinger blasted away at Archer Blood: “Baloney. He’s got this maniac in Dacca, the Consul General who is in rebellion.”

  Kissinger reassured the president that he had told the Indian government that “we need 3 or 4 months to work it out. We will find them some money, we will gradually move into a position to be helpful, but we’ve got to do it our way. Just to shut them up.” Kissinger warned Nixon not to speak “in front of Keating he’ll blab it all over.” Nixon agreed: “Keating will go blab it over to the State Department.”

  Kissinger had the China channel uppermost in his mind: “Well it would be considered such an insult by Yahya that the whole deal would be off.” Nixon repeated, “I don’t know what the Christ he’s talking about.” Kissinger resolved to reduce their dependency on Yahya: “I will, when I’m talking to the Chinese, set up a separate channel so that we’re not so vulnerable.”

  Nixon, shaken, dolefully contemplated Yahya’s fall: “I don’t know, Henry, it just may be that the poor son-of-a-bitch can’t survive.” He wondered how big the refugee problem was: “Five million? Is it that bad really or are they exaggerating?” Kissinger, echoing Nixon’s comment about how Indians reproduced, applied the same unkind thought to the breeding of Bengalis: “Of course, I don’t know how many of them they generate?”28

  THE SHIPPING NEWS

  The day after that Oval Office clash, Nixon and Kissinger had an opportunity to urge restraint on India. Swaran Singh was wrapping up his emergency tour of foreign capitals with a visit to Washington.

  Kissinger—who later called Singh, an elegant Sikh, “that bearded character”—instructed Nixon to show him a mixture of sympathy and great firmness. Kissinger’s goal was simple: “I’m just trying to keep them from attacking for 3 months.” He reminded Nixon of what to say: “that you think that overt pressure on Pakistan would have a counter-productive effect, and that you are working with Yahya in your own way. It’s a little duplicitous, but these bastards understand that.” (Nixon took a moment to stew over his man in Delhi: “I must say I am not too damned impressed with Keating. I think he’s just gone overboard.”) Kissinger kept the president focused on the real point of the meeting: “We have to keep them from attacking for our own reasons.”29

  To hold back an Indian assault, the Nixon administration boosted the amount of refugee aid they would give India to $70 million. In his Oval Office meeting with Singh, the president dazzlingly turned on the charm, commiserating with India’s “terrible agony” and suggesting that he could try to influence Yahya, although not “in a public, blunt way.” While Singh was grateful for the $70 million, Nixon admitted that even ten times that amount would not “buy the problem away.” The president conceded that this cash was not enough for six million
refugees: “For how long? Not long. It’ll help.” Singh was so impressed that he reckoned Nixon more helpful than the State Department, and overoptimistically thought he had pledges in hand that the United States would now pressure Yahya. For once, Nixon’s and Gandhi’s governments savored a rare moment of harmony.30

  It lasted for all of six days. On June 22, the White House got a rude surprise. The New York Times ran a front-page scoop: there was a Pakistani freighter in New York harbor, ready to sail, loaded up with U.S. military spare parts and eight aircraft. Another ship, bearing parts for armored personnel carriers, had already sailed early in May and was about to arrive in Karachi.31

  This blindsided the Indian government in general and Swaran Singh in particular, who had returned from Washington to Delhi in good cheer, and now looked like a chump. The Indian foreign ministry was convinced that this was a policy approved at the highest levels. Humiliated, Singh went before both houses of India’s freshly enraged Parliament to say that the United States should stand up for its democratic principles by stopping all shipments of arms to Pakistan so long as it kept up its atrocities and refused to deal with the Awami League. A few weeks later, he denounced the United States’ supply of weapons as an “intervention on the side of the military rulers of West Pakistan against the people of Bangla Desh” and a “condonation of genocide in Bangla Desh.”32

  These shipments were the inevitable consequence of a muddled policy, born of different clashing bits of the U.S. government. On the one hand, the State Department still maintained an informal administrative hold on military supplies to Pakistan, well short of a formal embargo. Congress was waiting in the wings to legislate a new outright ban if the White House did not cool its support for Pakistan. On the other hand, Nixon and Kissinger did not want to slap Yahya in the face with an embargo. Yahya, Kissinger’s staff wrote, seemed grateful that the White House had not joined in the worldwide condemnations of Pakistan by establishing such a ban. As Kissinger had recently explained in the Situation Room, Nixon wanted to proceed with spare parts for ongoing programs, but try to delay any bigger shipments for now, and figure that out later. Nixon recoiled from the “positive hostile act” of stopping the spare parts. Kissinger said, “The President is eager to avoid any break with Yahya.” So rather than a simple policy of trying to halt all shipments, they were confusingly allowing whatever was left in the pipeline to go forward, waiting for that to gradually run dry over the coming months.33

  But nobody was quite sure what really was in the pipeline. The White House scrambled to find out how many other potential unpleasant surprises might be lurking on a freighter somewhere. Samuel Hoskinson, the South Asia expert on Kissinger’s staff, was the White House official in charge of figuring out what U.S. weapons might still be on their way to Pakistan. “I never felt like I could get a handle on that,” he remembers miserably. “Henry was anxious and I couldn’t come up with numbers. As soon as you came up with numbers, something happened. Whoops, two more ships have gone.”

  As Kissinger told Nixon, there were still military supplies moving toward Pakistan (anything with a valid export license that had already been turned over to Pakistani shippers or was coming to Pakistan directly from a commercial U.S. supplier). But with so many suppliers, it was hard to figure out exactly what was where. And even as the bloodshed went on, Pakistan continued to try to secure hefty military licenses for U.S. military equipment. Hoskinson had countless collisions with the Pentagon, with shifting numbers at every stage. “I don’t think the Pentagon knew,” he says. “I finally came to the conclusion: it’s not that they’re hiding this from us; they don’t know.”34

  The White House and State Department cobbled together a rather wobbly impression of what Pakistan was due to receive: mostly spare parts for aircraft, tanks, and other military vehicles, as well as some ammunition, replacement parts for engines, communication hardware, and some small submarine components. There was $29 million worth owed to Pakistan, but about half of that was temporarily halted. That left about $15 million worth of military supplies left in the pipeline to Pakistan, which would trickle away to about $4 million by the end of August.35

  The dollar sums of arms sales do not indicate the real value of weaponry and matériel, however, since it is often sold to friendly governments for below the market price. And while spare parts are cheap, they make a big difference in the functioning of any military—a fact well known by Alexander Haig, a veteran of wars in Korea and Vietnam, who wanted to quietly continue the sale of spare parts as if everything were normal. Harold Saunders reminded Kissinger that a supply of spares was “essential to keeping the US-equipped part of the Pakistan air force flying. As you know, the air force has been used in East Pakistan.”36

  Yahya dreaded the stopping of U.S. military shipments—for the immediate consequences and the humiliation, and because it would encourage other foreign governments to follow the Americans’ example. In another context, Nixon and Kissinger would surely have seen the leverage that this afforded them: since Yahya really feared it, they could effectively threaten him with it. But they never tried to play this strong hand.37

  These freighters were the last straw for the State Department, which asked Nixon to suspend all military shipments to Pakistan until they could screen out anything that might have an impact on the killing in East Pakistan. Kissinger flatly refused. He urged Nixon to continue their current policy, ruling out even a temporary suspension of military items outside of U.S. control. He kept open the option of releasing more military equipment after “the current flap dies down.” Nixon agreed. It was worth taking the hit with Congress, Kissinger told the president, to avoid the unfriendly signal to Pakistan.38

  During all this, Yahya was busily contriving an elaborate ruse to sneak Kissinger into China. Kissinger would go to Pakistan, fake sickness, retreat to Yahya’s hill resort to recover, and then secretly fly from there to Beijing. After his meetings with the Chinese leadership, he would fly back and return to public view in Pakistan, feeling much improved. Yahya confidently notified Kissinger that “absolute foolproof arrangements will be made by us and he need have no anxiety on this count.”39

  Farland suggested that Kissinger be disguised with a hat and sunglasses. Winston Lord and two other White House staffers would go to Beijing, as well as two Secret Service agents, leaving Harold Saunders behind in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, to keep up appearances. Farland was under strict orders to prevent the U.S. embassy doctor from tending to Kissinger. To the last minute, the team fretted that its secret would slip out. Kissinger, Saunders recalls, “had to be ready to plausibly deny.”40

  Nixon and Kissinger were thrilled. “I’ve been talking to Yahya for years, a couple years now about this,” reminisced Nixon. On June 28, as Haldeman recorded, the president privately said that “we’re sitting at a great watershed in history, clearly the greatest since WWII. Henry interjected that he considered it to be the greatest since the Civil War.” Nixon later remembered Kissinger bursting into the Lincoln Sitting Room late at night, out of breath and trembling. The two men toasted their epoch-making success with two glasses of very old brandy. Haldeman noted, “The P obviously is really cranked up about this whole Chinese thing, and did go on and on talking about it.”41

  Kissinger’s route to Beijing might have literally gone through Dacca. One early U.S. plan suggested that Kissinger “stop at Dacca for first hand look at our humanitarian interests,” and then secretly fly into China. Later, as part of the evolving secret operation, Yahya offered transportation on a Pakistan International Airlines aircraft “on either Hindukush or Dacca route.” As Kissinger’s plane approached Dacca’s fortified airport, he could have looked out his window at the smoldering city. While he waited for takeoff, he might have been able to watch the Pakistan Air Force’s U.S.-made C-130s or F-86 Sabre jet fighters in action. But someone either in Washington or Islamabad had the tact to choose another route for him.42

  Chapter 11

  The East Is Red
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  On July 6, aboard a U.S. Air Force airplane that was bristling with Secret Service and military officers, Henry Kissinger descended toward Delhi’s airport. Since the presidential aircraft were all being used, Kissinger had to content himself with a modified command plane borrowed from the Tactical Air Command. The uncomfortable, hulking airplane would only grudgingly lift off runways, as Kissinger later noted: “On takeoff one had the feeling that the plane really preferred to reach its destination overland.” Cruising down toward the landing strip, he was keenly aware that he was on a genuinely historic trip, quite probably the most important of his lifetime. It was not his two-day visit to India. He dutifully did the rounds in Delhi and then Islamabad, but the real point of his journey was his secret final destination: Beijing.1

  India was a stopover for Kissinger in every possible way. In order to get to China, he needed to go through Pakistan; but in order to get to Pakistan, for balance, he had to show his face in India. His perfunctory visit there made a tidy symbol of how little that country mattered in the Nixon-Kissinger cosmology.

  Harold Saunders was along for the ride. As Kissinger’s senior aide for India and Pakistan, he had to be there to allay suspicions. “The India stop was for general obvious deflection reasons,” he remembers. “He [Kissinger] presented himself in a normal way there. And then on to Pakistan.”