The Blood Telegram Page 24

  Eric Griffel was the top development officer posted in the Dacca consulate, admired by his colleagues for leading the U.S. relief after the cyclone. Griffel, who had signed the Blood telegram, had been on a personal visit to Los Angeles, but raced around the globe to Islamabad for the opportunity to challenge Kissinger. He was spoiling for a fight. Kissinger, Griffel thought, had “a disdain for anyone on the subcontinent,” and had “the Lawrence of Arabia view of the locals. If they don’t ride horses, they’re no good.” He says, “He’s impressed by Pakistani men in uniform and he doesn’t like shopkeepers.32

  “He knew of the [Dacca] consulate’s position on East Pakistan,” recalls Griffel, “which was quite different from his. We were allowed to state the case. He listened quite politely, and was rather charming. But he obviously had other fish to fry, since he was on the way to Peking”—something that Griffel had not known at the time. “He obviously paid no attention.”

  Griffel spoke up repeatedly, bluntly contradicting more compliant officials and discomfiting Kissinger whenever he could. He told Kissinger that the insurgency was local enough to survive without Indian help (the Bengalis could “run a good terror campaign”), alerted him to the Bengalis’ “abiding fear and hatred of West Pakistan,” and recounted a story about the “fanaticism” of a young Pakistani army officer. When Kissinger said that the United States had wanted to stay out of “another civil war in Asia,” Griffel shot back that if there was a war, India would win swiftly. He warned Kissinger that the United States had limited influence, but that so long as U.S. economic aid flowed, it would be harder for the Pakistani government to realize that what they were doing was “nonsense.”

  Kissinger, demonstrating that the Dacca consulate’s frequent warnings about genocide against the Hindus were familiar to him, asked him “why the army was driving out the Hindus.” Griffel replied curtly that it was “simply an opportunity to purify East Pakistan.” Farland, only a notch more pleasingly, added that the army thought that the Hindus were behind Mujib’s plot. Griffel warned that more refugees might flee because of hunger, and that there were seven million Hindus still in East Pakistan who were particularly vulnerable.33

  Griffel, who pugnaciously savors the memory of the clash, had little hope that he was going to change Kissinger’s mind. “It was really something to get off my chest, maybe to soften our policy a little bit,” he remembers. “I did not at that time have any hope that the policy would change.” Was he worried about confronting Kissinger? “There was a risk that he’d say, ‘Get this man out of there.’ But A, I didn’t think it would happen, and B, it wouldn’t have worried me terribly.” He had had enough of Dacca, he says, and the dissenters were emotional. “We were really very annoyed,” he says. “We were probably not acting as coolly as we might some other time.”

  The other diplomats were less inclined to rough up Kissinger, but still painted a grim picture. Dennis Kux, an insightful political officer, did not think Yahya would remain in power long, doubted that there would be a political compromise, noted that the refugees—especially the Hindus—were not going back, and put the chances of war at one in three. Kissinger said that after his Delhi trip, he would give war a better chance than that. He wearily said that this was “one damn thing we didn’t need.”

  One of the men in the room was Chuck Yeager, the test pilot who broke the sound barrier. Yeager, serving as U.S. defense representative, relished advising the awestruck officers of the Pakistan Air Force. “I was damned impressed,” he wrote later. “These guys just lived and breathed flying.” Yeager predicted, with uncanny accuracy, that the Pakistan army would only last about two weeks in a war against India. A militant supporter of Pakistan who had clashed with Blood, he had his own dissent with U.S. policy: there were not enough military shipments. (When war finally came, India would get its own back by pounding into oblivion Yeager’s little light airplane, which was caught on the ground in a bombing raid at Islamabad’s airport. Yeager would later growl, “It was the Indian way of giving Uncle Sam the finger.”)34

  Kissinger, settling in at the president’s guest house in nearby Rawalpindi, got a warm reception from the Pakistani government. He and top Pakistani officials commiserated about the bias of the media: it was a pleasure, he said, to see newspapers that were not reporting critically about him—not mentioning that Pakistan had a censored press.

  Kissinger told his hosts that he was “really shocked by the hostility, bitterness and hawkishness of the Indians.” He made no threats, exercised no leverage, and gave no proposed blueprint for a political compromise. He said that he “did not presume to advise the Pakistanis,” but urged them to think hard about their dilemma. “The refugees today can be represented to the world by India as a cause of war,” he said. He told a senior Pakistani official that seven million refugees was an intolerable burden for India—and the Indians thought they would win a war.35

  Kissinger met alone with Yahya. Winston Lord was leery of him, remembering that he found the dictator “cordial, friendly, but you didn’t mistake the fact that he was a tough guy. He was quite gregarious. But you had no illusions, this guy was no Thomas Jefferson.” Kissinger passed along a friendly letter from Nixon praising Yahya’s unsuccessful steps to get refugees to return and promising to push forward with new economic aid soon.36

  Kissinger did not leave notes on his meeting, so all that is known is a sketch. He told the Pakistani strongman of the hawkish mood in Delhi, and coaxed him to consider appointing a new civil authority in East Pakistan to try to lure back refugees. Yahya said he would think about it.37

  Yahya did manage to convince Kissinger that he was an idiot. “Yahya is no genius,” Kissinger later told Nixon, forsaking the president’s sentimental fondness for the man. Soon after his return to Washington, Kissinger said scornfully, “it is my impression that Yahya and his group would never win any prizes for high IQs or for the subtlety of their political comprehension. They are loyal, blunt soldiers, but I think they have a real intellectual problem in understanding why East Pakistan should not be part of West Pakistan.” He later recalled that “fundamentally he [Yahya] was oblivious to his perils and unprepared to face necessities. He and his colleagues did not feel that India was planning war; if so, they were convinced that they would win. When I asked as tactfully as I could about the Indian advantage in numbers and equipment, Yahya and his colleagues answered with bravado about the historic superiority of Moslem fighters.”38

  At a dinner—where Kissinger started showily complaining of a stomachache—Yahya bellowed, “Everyone calls me a dictator.” He went around the table asking all the guests, Pakistanis and Americans, “Am I a dictator?” Everyone tactfully said that he was not, until he came to Kissinger. “I don’t know, Mr. President,” replied Kissinger, “except that for a dictator you run a lousy election.”39

  TURMOIL UNDER HEAVEN

  At long last the moment arrived for Kissinger to affect succumbing to a wicked case of Delhi belly, and for Yahya to pretend to gallantly tend to his ailing guest with some rest at his hill resort of Nathiagali. “Yahya was enthralled by the cops-and-robbers atmosphere of the enterprise,” Kissinger later wrote. Harold Saunders was left behind in Pakistan, while his boss winged off into history. “I was the decoy,” Saunders says. “I kept Henry’s appointments on Friday. The press got bored. By Saturday afternoon things quieted down. I went and bought a rug. I went down to the souk.” Bracing himself, Yahya handed Saunders a piece of paper with his personal telephone number to call if there was a leak back in the United States. Yahya would then phone Beijing.40

  Although Saunders noted growing suspicions in Islamabad about Kissinger’s illness, this was not for lack of trying by Yahya’s government. Yahya sent out a dummy motorcade ostensibly bearing Kissinger up to Nathiagali. To cover Kissinger’s forty-nine-hour absence, they planted stories in the newspapers about the comings and goings of top Pakistani officials to the indisposed American.41

  In fact, Kissinger later rec
alled, he boarded a “Pakistani plane in pre-dawn obscurity.” Yahya provided a PIA Boeing 707 flown by his personal pilot, who knew to beware of radio intercepts. On board, Kissinger was greeted by several top Chinese officials, who had flown in from Beijing just for the trip. The journey, he later grandly wrote, was so extraordinary that it jolted him back to childhood “when every day was a precious adventure in defining the meaning of life. That is how it was for me as the aircraft crossed the snow-capped Himalayas, thrusting toward the heavens in the roseate glow of a rising sun.” (As the plane approached Chinese territory, Winston Lord was closest to the front, allowing him bragging rights as the first American official to enter China since 1949.) From a Beijing military airport, the Americans were, as Kissinger told Nixon afterward, “whisked in Chinese-built limousines, curtains drawn, through wide, clean streets, with little traffic except bicycles.”42

  Kissinger, ensconced in the graceful Diaoyutai compound, was awestruck. From Beijing, he wrote that the talks had been “the most intense, important, and far reaching of my White House experience.” On his return, he would tell Nixon that he had had “the most searching, sweeping and significant discussions I have ever had in government,” starting a process too large to be contained by any one metaphor: “We have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history.” He was dazzled by Zhou Enlai’s “clarity and eloquence,” his “philosophic sweeps, historical analysis, tactical probing, light repartee.” Kissinger ranked him with Charles de Gaulle as “the most impressive foreign statesmen I have met.” In full swoon, he wrote to Nixon, “I am frank to say that this visit was a very moving experience. The historic aspects of the occasion; the warmth and dignity of the Chinese; the splendor of the Forbidden City, Chinese history and culture; the heroic stature of Chou En-lai; and the intensity and sweep of our talks combined to make an indelible impression.”43

  Kissinger never felt anything like that about India. As Winston Lord has noted, Kissinger worried about Indian militarism, but tended to give Chinese belligerence a free pass. He did no such rhapsodizing about what was, for all its flaws, the world’s largest democracy. “They’re never going to say they didn’t like the fact that India was a democracy,” says Lord, about Nixon and Kissinger. “I think they thought that it’s sometimes easier to deal with dictators for decision making than with a messy democracy with all its free debate and parliament. I’m sure there’s some rueful sense of, if you go with Mao and Zhou Enlai that’s all you need to do. The same thing is true for Yahya, I’m sure. India is much messier.”44

  Zhou was all elegance and courtesy on their first day, but on the second day he threw Kissinger off balance. Kissinger was taken aback by the Chinese leadership’s venomous, seething hostility to India. As Kissinger told Nixon later, he was struck by Zhou’s “contempt” and “historical distrust” of India. The Chinese premier seemed obsessed with China’s 1962 war against India, repeatedly blaming India as the aggressor.45

  In one of their marathon meetings in the cavernous Great Hall of the People, Zhou icily accused India of planning aggression, and implied that India was getting clandestine U.S. support. This came as a genuine jolt to Kissinger, who was unaccustomed to being labeled a bosom friend of India. Kissinger was baffled: “Mr. Prime Minister, India doesn’t get military equipment from us.” Zhou retorted, “That’s what I heard, but you are giving Pakistan some equipment.” “Yes,” said Kissinger, “but so are you.”46

  Zhou blamed the entire current crisis on India. “The so-called Government of Bangla Desh set up its headquarters in India,” he said. “Isn’t that subversion of the Pakistani Government?” Kissinger was confounded again: “The Prime Minister doesn’t think that we are cooperating with this, does he?” Kissinger assured the Chinese premier that they were on the same page about Pakistan: “You know from President Yahya Khan the strong friendship we feel for him and his country.”47

  There was, it turned out, a government in the world that was even more strongly supportive of Yahya than the Nixon administration. This bitter Chinese animosity toward India took Kissinger’s breath away—and he quickly realized that this could be useful for leverage against India. To close their historic meetings, Zhou’s final words were about Pakistan: “Please tell President Yahya Khan that if India commits aggression, we will support Pakistan. You are also against that.” To Kissinger, that sounded like a pledge of military support. He replied, “We will oppose that, but we cannot take military measures.” “You are too far away,” agreed Zhou, asking him to use the United States’ “strength to persuade India.” Kissinger promised to do his best. As Kissinger explained to Nixon afterward, Zhou worried “that we might not be able to do too much because we were 10,000 miles away. China, however, was much closer. Chou recalled the Chinese defeat of India in 1962 and hinted rather broadly that the same thing could happen again.”48

  For the flight back to Pakistan, the Chinese loaded up the plane with a last round of delectable Chinese food, a new English version of Mao’s works, and souvenir photo albums of the trip. The stage was set for Nixon’s own visit to Beijing. “You have had many barbarian invasions,” Kissinger drily told the Chinese, “but I am not sure that you are prepared for this one.”49

  With that, Yahya’s special usefulness to the United States and China expired. There were now easier ways to talk to the Chinese. “There was quite a bit of briefing of the Chinese about what we were doing,” recalls Winston Lord. “The way we communicated was through the UN mission in New York and through Paris.” The White House could now send secret letters through a trusted military attaché in Paris, who would hand them over to the Chinese ambassador there. “I have come to France secretly eleven times by five different methods,” Kissinger later told the Chinese ambassador in Paris. “I am going to write a detective story when I am through.”50

  But that gratitude to Yahya lingered. “Please tell President Yahya that when necessary we’ll still use his channel,” said Zhou. “We have a saying in China that one shouldn’t break the bridge after crossing it.” Kissinger courteously agreed: “We might exchange some communications through him for politeness.” Zhou said that the Americans had “confidence in him, and we also respect him.” Still, both sides knew that Yahya had served his purpose. “There are just some things which we don’t want to say through friends, no matter how trustworthy,” said Kissinger. “We’ll send nothing substantive,” agreed Zhou.51

  Kissinger now argued that U.S. demonstrations of fealty to Pakistan would play well for the Chinese. Summing up for Nixon, the national security advisor wrote, “The Chinese detestation of the Indians came through loud and clear. Conversely, China’s warm friendship for Pakistan as a firm and reliable friend was made very plain. The lesson that Chou may have been trying to make here was that those who stand by China and keep their word will be treated in kind.” Kissinger wanted to match that. As Lord remembers, “This was the first crisis that was happening after twenty-two years where we were talking” to China. “So certainly a calculation by Nixon and Kissinger was that we had to show that we shared some of the same perspectives on this crisis, that we could be a reliable interlocutor.” Saunders says, “We did not want the Chinese to see us as doing anything except supporting Pakistan.”52

  Thus even after Pakistan had outlived its utility as a back channel, it secured another continuing claim on the White House. Nixon and Kissinger’s unwavering support for Pakistan’s government throughout the killing would demonstrate to Mao and Zhou the reliability of the United States as an ally through thick and thin. A while after Kissinger returned from Beijing, he said, “We cannot turn on Pakistan and I think it would have disastrous consequences with China that after they gave us an airport we massacre them.” (In this case, for Kissinger, “massacre” meant putting pressure on a government, not the actual massacres.) The White House did not want to let the Chinese leadership think that the United States was a fickle friend, cutting Pakistan loose for what it did to its own people. That would
be a troubling prospect for Mao, whose own body counts exceeded even Yahya’s, soaring into the millions.53

  When Kissinger landed back in Islamabad, the Pakistanis maintained the deception, driving him out of town and then back into the city, as if returning from the Nathiagali Hill station. Kissinger, paying a quick thank-you call on Yahya, found him “boyishly ecstatic at having pulled off this coup”—a somewhat unfortunate phrase for a military dictator. Harold Saunders remembers his boss’s excitement. “There was a feeling of real achievement,” he says. “Henry was not one to show real exuberance, but he was very strongly moved.” He adds, “You see the depth in which he thought about the relationship with Zhou, which translates back into how we conducted the relationship with Pakistan.”54

  At Nixon’s mansion in San Clemente, California, the president waited anxiously. Nixon said that “when Henry gets back, he’ll be the mystery man of the age.” The president did not want to let in daylight upon magic: “the key to this whole story … is to create doubt and mystery. Never deny the ‘stomachache’ thing in Pakistan. Say it was true, but then the other things also happened.” When a beaming Kissinger finally landed in San Clemente at 7 a.m. on July 13, he was greeted by the president, who took him to a celebratory breakfast. H. R. Haldeman noted, “It’s pretty clear that the Chinese want it just as badly as we do.” Kissinger’s team was met by Alexander Haig, the deputy national security advisor, who, as Saunders recalls, “came over and warned each of us individually not to tell anyone where you’d been.” He remembers, “We didn’t want it to come out until Nixon announced it. Al said, ‘Now I have to go explain to Secretary Rogers what happened.’ ”55

  Two days later, on July 15, Nixon went on national television to astound Americans by announcing that he had accepted an invitation to visit China. People around the globe were flabbergasted at Kissinger’s secret mission. From the Islamabad embassy, Joseph Farland informed Kissinger, he “had never seen so many jaws drop.”56