Kissinger’s Shadow (16 page)

Notwithstanding what he had told Hammadi, Kissinger was not going to reduce Israel to “historical proportions.” But he did have a more expendable people he could offer up and keep his word: the Kurds. Just three years earlier, he had schemed with Iran to destabilize Baathist Iraq by supporting the Kurds, providing them with weapons (supplied by Israel so as not to alert the State Department) to wage an insurgent war for independence in northern Iraq. Kissinger didn't expect the Kurds to triumph. He often complained about the unworkable size of the United Nations and the last thing he wanted was yet another member state (Bangladesh was bad enough). He just needed the Kurdish insurgency to provide enough pressure on Baghdad to give him leverage.

But now in 1975, believing he had worked out a lasting pro-American balance of power between Iran and Iraq, Kissinger withdrew US support from the Kurds. Baghdad moved quickly, launching an assault that killed thousands and implementing a program of ethnic cleansing. Arabs were moved into the region and hundreds of thousands of Kurds were rounded up and forcibly relocated. According to a congressional committee that later investigated Kissinger's policy, Kissinger and Iran “hoped that our clients”—the Kurds—“would not prevail.” Rather, they wanted that “the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources” of Iraq. The prose of such committee reports is often bland, but the next two sentences convey a cutting mordancy: “This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting.… Even in the context of covert action ours was a cynical enterprise.”
25
*

Also in the Middle East, it was Kissinger who, in 1972, began the “policy of unconditional support” for the shah of Iran, as a way to steady American power in the Gulf as the United States tried to extricate itself from Southeast Asia.
26
And as James Schlesinger, who served as Nixon's CIA director and secretary of defense, noted, if “we were going to make the Shah the Guardian of the Gulf, we've got to give him what he needs.” Which, Schlesinger went on, really meant “giving him what he wants.”
27
And what the shah wanted most of all were weapons—and American military trainers, and a navy, and an air force. “Arms dealers joked,” writes the historian Ervand Abrahamian, “that the shah devoured their manuals in much the same way as other men read
Playboy
.” Kissinger overrode objections by State and Defense to give the shah what no other country in the world had: the ability to buy whatever it wanted from US military contractors. “We are looking for a navy,” the shah told Kissinger. “We have a large shopping list.” Kissinger let him buy a navy. By 1977, Abrahamian notes, “the shah had the largest navy in the Persian Gulf, the largest air force in Western Asia, and the fifth largest army in the whole world”: thousands of modern tanks, 400 helicopters, 28 hovercraft, 100 long-range artillery pieces, thousands of Maverick missiles, 173 F4 fighter jets, 141 F5s, and so on. The next year, the shah bought another $12 billion worth of equipment.

The shah's military buildup was about more than protecting the gulf. It was part of a larger transformation of the global political economy, in which the West grew increasingly dependent on recycled petrodollars.
*
That dependency further increased in 1975, when Kissinger worked out an arrangement with Saudi Arabia that was similar to the one he had with Iran, which included a $750 million contract for the sale of 60 F-5E/F fighters to the sheiks. By this time, the United States already had over a trillion dollars' worth of military agreements with Riyadh. Only Iran had more.
28

The shah also wanted to be treated as a serious statesman, and he expected Iran to be treated with the same respect Washington showed West Germany and Great Britain. It was Kissinger's job to pump up the shah's airs, to make the shah feel like he truly was the “king of kings.” The only person Kissinger flattered more than Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was Richard Nixon.

Reading the diplomatic record, one comes away with an impression that Kissinger must have felt an enormous weariness preparing for meetings with the shah, as he considered the precise gestures and words he would need to make it clear that his majesty mattered, that he was valued. “Let's see,” an aide who was helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, “the Shah will want to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and Brezhnev.”
29
During another prep Kissinger was told that “the Shah wants to ride in an F-14.”
30
A lengthy discussion resulted in the conclusion that this might not be advisable, and it fell on Kissinger to try to dissuade him. “We can say,” Kissinger supposed, “that if he has his heart set on it, okay, but the President would feel easier if he didn't have that one worry in 10,000. The Shah will be flattered.” Once, Nixon asked Kissinger to book the singer Danny Kaye for a private performance for the shah and his wife.

After neighboring Afghanistan's July 1973 coup brought to power a moderate, secular, but Soviet-leaning republican government, the shah pressed his advantage, asking for even more military assistance. Now, he said, he “must cover the East with fighter aircraft.”
31
Teheran began to meddle in Afghan politics, offering Kabul billions of dollars for development and security, in exchange for loosening “its ties with the Soviet Union.”
32
This might have seemed a reasonably peaceful way of increasing US influence, via Iran, over Kabul. Except that it was paired with the explosive initiative of running, via the shah's secret police, SAVAK, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), Islamic insurgents into Afghanistan to destabilize Kabul's republican government.

Pakistan had its own reasons for wanting to destabilize Afghanistan, having to do with border disputes and its ongoing rivalry with India. And Kissinger had long appreciated Pakistan's strategic importance. “The defense of Afghanistan,” he wrote in 1955, in the essay where he urged Washington to fight “little wars” in the world's gray areas, “depends on the strength of Pakistan.” And so in 1975, Kissinger, hoping to put Afghanistan back in play, pushed to restore military aid to Islamabad, which had been cut off since its 1971 rampage in Bangladesh (which Kissinger sanctioned with his silence).
33

As national security adviser and then secretary of state, Kissinger, we know, was involved in planning and executing covert activity elsewhere, in Cambodia and Chile (discussed in the next chapter), for example. No information is available that indicates his direct involvement in encouraging Pakistan's ISI or Iran's SAVAK to destabilize Afghanistan.
34
But we don't need a smoking gun to appreciate the larger context, to consider the negative consequences of his initiatives. In their 1995 book,
Out of Afghanistan
, foreign policy analysts Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, based on research in Soviet archives, provide a good description of how many of the policies Kissinger put into place—the empowerment of Iran, the restoration of military relations with Pakistan, and weapon sales—came together to spark jihadism:

It was in the early 1970s, with oil prices rising, that Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran embarked on his ambitious effort to roll back Soviet influence in neighboring countries and create a modern version of the ancient Persian empire.… Beginning in 1974, the Shah launched a determined effort to draw Kabul into a Western-tilted, Teheran-centered regional economic and security sphere embracing India, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf states.… The United States actively encouraged this roll-back policy as part of its broad partnership with the Shah.… Savak and the CIA worked hand in hand, sometimes in loose collaboration with underground Afghan Islamic fundamentalist groups that shared their anti-Soviet objectives but had their own agendas as well.… As oil profits skyrocketed, emissaries from these newly affluent Arab fundamentalist groups arrived on the Afghan scene with bulging bankrolls.
35

Harrison also writes that “Savak, the CIA, and Pakistani agents” were all involved in failed “fundamentalist coup attempts” in Afghanistan in 1973 and 1974, along with an attempted Islamic insurrection in the Panjshir Valley in 1975, laying the groundwork for the jihad of the 1980s (and beyond).
36

*   *   *

Much has been made of Jimmy Carter's decision, on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to authorize “nonlethal” aid to the Afghan mujahideen in July 1979, six months
before
Moscow sent troops to help the Afghan government fight against the spreading Islamic insurgency.
*
But lethal aid had already been flowing to the jihadists via two key Washington allies: Pakistan and Iran (until its revolution in 1979). This provision of support to radical Islamists, initiated under Kissinger's tenure and continuing on through Carter and Reagan, had a number of unfortunate consequences. It put unsustainable pressure on Afghanistan's fragile secular modernist government. It laid the early infrastructure for today's transnational radical Islam. And, of course, destabilizing Afghanistan provoked the Soviet invasion.

Some celebrate Carter's and Reagan's decision as hastening the demise of the Soviet Union, since it had the effect of pulling Moscow, in December 1979, into its own quagmire. “What is most important to the history of the world?” Brzezinski once asked. “The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” But Moscow's occupation of Afghanistan was a disaster, and not just for the Soviet Union. When Soviet troops pulled out in 1989, they left behind a shattered Afghanistan to face a shadowy network of insurgent fundamentalists, who for years worked closely with the CIA (in what was the agency's longest counterinsurgent operation) and a bulked-up, unaccountable Pakistani ISI.
37
And few serious scholars believe that the Soviet Union would have proved any more durable had it not invaded Afghanistan. Nor did the allegiance of Afghanistan—whether it tilted toward Washington, Moscow, or Tehran—make any difference to the outcome of the Cold War, any more than did, say, that of Cuba, Iraq, Angola, or Vietnam.

What is certain is that individually each of Kissinger's Middle East initiatives—banking on despots, inflating the shah, providing massive amounts of aid to security forces that tortured and terrorized citizens, pumping up the US defense industry with recycled petrodollars, which in turn spurred a Middle East arms race financed by high gas prices, emboldening Pakistan's intelligence service, nurturing embryonic Islamist fundamentalism, playing Iran and the Kurds off Iraq, and then Iraq and Iran off the Kurds, and committing Washington to defending Israel's occupation of Arab lands—has been disastrous in the long run.

Combined, they've helped work the modern Middle East into a knot that even Alexander's sword can't cut.

 

7

Secrecy and Spectacle

Let's look ferocious!

—Henry Kissinger

In his last years in office, Henry Kissinger helped inaugurate a new kind of public spectacle: the congressional inquest into matters of national security and covert action.
1
As national security adviser, Kissinger could invoke executive privilege to rebuff Senate requests that he come testify. But when Nixon named him secretary of state in mid-1973, he had no choice. Confirmation hearings took place in September, exactly at the moment the coup that ousted Allende was unfolding. Senators asked Kissinger about that operation. “We have absolutely stayed away from any coups,” he said. As to the four-year air assault against Cambodia, Kissinger denied that he had anything to do with the “double bookkeeping” that kept Congress in the dark about the bombing. But he insisted that he “believed then, and must say in all honesty that I believe now, that the action itself was correct.” He hedged on his involvement in the first round of wiretaps, which the FBI had placed on journalists and members of his NSC, and he insisted that he had no knowledge of Nixon's black-bag plumbers unit, which conducted the break-in of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate and of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office.
*

These hearings really weren't confrontational.
2
The senators questioned Kissinger with a “mixture of admiration, respect, and bewilderment,” as one magazine noted, unable to reconcile the fact that the man before them
both
orchestrated the secret bombing of Cambodia
and
negotiated rapprochement with China,
both
encouraged the wiretapping of his own staff
and
normalized relations with the Soviet Union,
both
tilted toward Pakistan even as Pakistan was slaughtering Bengalis
and
laid the groundwork for strategic arms talks with Moscow. In any case, Nixon was in freefall due to Watergate, and Kissinger wasn't just nearly the last man in the administration standing; he was the
only
man associated with that administration who seemed “intelligent, articulate, talented, witty, captivating,” who possessed “style … intellectual finesse” and “warmth and humor.” Compared to the preverbal thuggery of the rest of Nixon's inner circle, he at least “speaks the English language.” His confirmation as secretary of state was never in doubt.

Kissinger did, though, complain about these and other hearings. “A merciless Congressional onslaught,” is how he later described legislative efforts to supervise his execution of the war, and he resisted subsequent requests for more testimony or more documentation concerning this or that policy, the bombing of hospitals in North Vietnam, say, or CIA raids into Laos. Kissinger bristled at the very principle of oversight.
3
Having approved Suharto's invasion of East Timor, for example, Kissinger wanted to continue to supply arms to the Indonesian army. To do so, however, would have violated US law, which prohibited weapon transfers to aggressor armies. Kissinger thought he could get around the ban by suspending shipments for a few weeks and then, after public attention had turned away, quietly resuming them. But someone on his staff wrote up a cable listing the legal questions related to the matter. “It will go to congress,” Kissinger complained, “and then we'll have hearings on it.” Kissinger learned there was yet a second cable on the subject. “Two cables!” he cried. “That means twenty guys have seen it.… That will leak in three months and it will come out that Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law.”
4