Kissinger’s Shadow (17 page)

Kissinger wasn't alone in thinking that the new era of congressional oversight would cripple the national security state. In 1976, James Angleton, the CIA's former chief of counterintelligence, likened Congress to a pillaging “foreign power,” with the agency suffering the indignity of having “our files rifled, our officials humiliated and our agents exposed.” Far from being “imperial,” the presidency, Angleton said, was “impotent.”
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Such fears were misplaced, and not just because many of the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate reforms have since been repealed or gutted (especially after 9/11). Over the last four decades, since Kissinger has left office, the very nature of the relationship between secrecy and spectacle has changed. Those two qualities—secrecy and spectacle, the covert and the overt—might seem antithetical but they have come to comprise a unified form of modern imperial power. Secrecy is fine and well when possible to achieve. But secrecy no longer is really required for the national security state to function. What is needed is political forgetfulness, or amnesia, and that amnesia is created not in the shadows but on the stage.

The Senate Church Committee, which Angleton complained about, previewed what has turned out to be a perpetual pageant: from the Pike Committee to the Rockefeller Commission, from William Fulbright's many inquiries to the Walsh Report on Iran-Contra and Senator John Kerry's hearings on the CIA's use of drug runners to support its illegal activities in Nicaragua, and now to Senator Dianne Feinstein's torture report, and the too-many-to-count investigations between: the safe has been thrown open and the family jewels of clandestine activity have been cast to the public. WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, the nongovernmental National Security Archive, Edward Snowden, and tell-all books by apostate agents like Philip Agee add to the mountain of information. Fact upon top-secret fact, witness upon witness, and document after declassified document—the Pentagon Papers ad infinitum: assassinations, coups, Cambodia, Cointelpro, Iran-Contra, support for jihadists to counter the Soviets; torture; endless surveillance; psychological operations run against US citizens; manipulation of intelligence and the press; Blackwater; Abu Ghraib; war profiteering; the torture memos; drones. And yet today the national security state—its endless war, its all-pervasive system of domestic spying, and the ability of its agents to defend any action, no matter how illegal or immoral, from indefinite detention and targeted assassinations of individuals not charged with any crime to unregulated drone warfare and torture—is stronger than ever.

Much of the information gathered on these topics remains secret, including the bulk of Senator Feinstein's torture report and apparently the “worst” of the Abu Ghraib images, including videotapes of young children being raped by US soldiers.
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But, really, what don't we know? Certainly the fact that we had been torturing people—and training our allies to torture people—long before 9/11 was known to anyone who wanted to know. Kissinger was right: information alone is not knowledge; too much data can overwhelm wisdom; the “truth” revealed by “facts” is not self-evident.

There are a number of ways that the spectacle of congressional hearings, and similar public investigations, produces political amnesia, or at least political indifference.
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There's the vicarious enjoyment of the theater of the hearings, which can have the effect of turning citizens into spectators, with its endless regression of witnesses and inquisitors embodying the soft pleasures of contemporary visual entertainment. Think of the crisp Oliver North squaring off against his shaggy Democratic questioners in the Iran-Contra hearings.

Amnesia, or paralysis, is also created by the fact that the two parties in our two-party system basically share a common set of assumptions regarding national defense and the righteousness of American power in the world. Consider Cambodia. The bombing of that country conducted under Operation Menu (1969–70) stayed secret for longer than anyone had believed possible, mostly because the North Vietnamese made a decision not to issue a complaint. It wasn't until mid-1973 that the Senate held an inquiry, prompted by the letter from Major Hal Knight informing Congress that it was his job to burn all the paperwork related to the raids. For a brief moment during the hearings, politicians and journalists, a few anyway, made the connection between Watergate and the bombing. “Some members” of Congress, Seymour Hersh wrote in July 1973, “are convinced that the secret bombing of Cambodia will emerge as another, perhaps more dangerous, facet of the Watergate scandal.” And in July 1973, the very first impeachment resolution against Nixon, introduced in the House by Massachusetts representative Robert Drinan, focused not on the Watergate break-in but on the illegal war on Cambodia. But Drinan's colleagues didn't take up the resolution and the Senate never did establish it was Kissinger who had, along with Haig and Sitton, created the double bookkeeping system for the destruction and falsification of flight data.

Rather than expose Menu as a crime, the Senate's inquiry came close to justifying the deception. “Some members” of Congress might have taken the bombing seriously, but by the final days of the public hearings held by the Committee on Armed Services (which ran July 16 to August 9, 1973), only three of its fourteen members bothered to attend: Stuart Symington and Harold Hughes, Democrats from Missouri and Iowa, and South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond. Symington summed up the “dove” position: “What I do not like about this is that we did not know about it,” he complained to one witness, General Creighton Abrams, “we put the money up for one thing and it was used for another.” Symington was the only senator who questioned the consequences of the secret bombing, and he did so only once: “As an experienced military man, would you not think this pressure [from bombing] made it almost inevitable that they would have to expand their area of control or operations, thus bringing them into increasing conflict with the Cambodian authorities?” General Abrams's answer was succinct: “Yes, I think that is a fair statement.”
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The hawks (Thurmond, mostly, but also Senators Barry Goldwater, Sam Nunn, and John Tower the few times they showed up) dominated the proceedings. They not only insisted that the bombing was an effective and legitimate policy, but argued that the burning of documents was really just an extension of secrecy protocols, and secrecy was an accepted practice of war. “I do think that we have to endorse the idea of a degree of covertness, cover, deception and secretiveness,” said Tower, “particularly in an open society like ours, which is already in a difficult position in time of war when confronted by a closed society as it was in the case of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.” “How about the Normandy invasion?” Nunn asked, wanting to know if the committee's main witness, the whistle-blower Major Knight, would have felt compelled to reveal that operation. Others took the argument further, maintaining that there was no inherent “intent to deceive” in falsifying information if that falsification was conducted in response to “genuine and legal orders.” One senator suggested that the code Knight used when he called Saigon to indicate that he had successfully burned all evidence (“the ballgame is over”) was itself accurate reporting. Hence, no deception had taken place.

The committee's hawks kept repeating, over and over again, that the bombing was necessary to “save American lives,” with doves all but conceding that, had the White House come to them in 1969 with that argument, they would have both approved the operation and kept it secret. What, then, was the issue?

The public's attention soon turned to the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, which was largely treated as a domestic crime; and the destruction of Cambodia receded into memory. In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee finally approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon, all related to the domestic obstruction of justice. The committee declined, by a vote of 26 to 12, to pursue a fourth charge of not seeking Congress's approval to wage war on Cambodia. Committee member John Conyers dissented, thinking it the worst of Nixon's impeachable offenses. But a bipartisan majority disagreed. “We might as well resurrect President Johnson and impeach him posthumously for Vietnam and Laos,” the Democrat Walter Flowers said, or Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs and Truman for Korea.
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Political forgetfulness is also created through the transformation of the crime into a procedural question or a domestic drama between two political parties: one party executes, the other explicates. Framing whatever the controversial policy is—be it the bombing of a neutral country, domestic wiretapping, the support of coups, torture—as a technical matter, as an argument over the legality of the means in which the policy was carried out creates an implied affirmation that the objective of the action is agreed upon by all. Kissinger was a master at this kind of re-framing. In 1975, for instance, he consented to be questioned by Congress, appearing before the Pike Committee, which was chaired by New York representative Otis Pike and charged with investigating the covert activities of the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency. Kissinger was grilled extensively by Representative Ron Dellums on various clandestine matters. “Frankly, Mr. Secretary,” said Dellums, thinking he had cornered Kissinger, “and I mean this very sincerely, I am concerned with your power, and the method of your operation, and I am afraid of the result on American policy.… Would you please comment, sir?”

Kissinger gave a pitch-perfect response, delivered with just a hint of borscht-belt syntax: “Except for that,” he asked, “there is nothing wrong with my operation?”
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The room laughed and the evening TV news had its clip, which for millions of viewers summed up the hearings: a pushy congressman getting pushed back by a rapier wit.
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Over a decade later, in Senate hearings into the illegal sale of high-tech missiles to Iran and the diversion of funds to support the Nicaraguan Contras, Colonel North and his coconspirators would say it more solemnly but they said pretty much the same thing: if you agree with our ends, then why question our means?

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The symbiotic relationship between spectacle and secrecy is pronounced in Henry Kissinger's post-Vietnam diplomacy. Kissinger felt that public displays of resolve would help America restore its damaged credibility and legitimacy. “The United States must carry out some act somewhere in the world,” he said to reporters shortly after the 1975 fall of Saigon, “which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.”
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Some act. Somewhere. In the future, he wrote in a “Lessons of Vietnam” memo to Gerald Ford, who had become president just a few months earlier, Washington will have to take “tougher stands” in the international arena “in order to make others believe in us again.”
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Inaction needs to be avoided to show that action is possible.

The opportunities were limited as to where the United States might put on such a show. Take, for instance, Kissinger's and Ford's “rescue” of the crew of the US container ship
Mayaguez
.

On May 12, 1975, Khmer Rouge forces seized the
Mayaguez
, along with thirty-nine merchant seamen. Cambodia was then in chaos, the genocide under way at home. The crew and ship were taken to a nearby, heavily fortified island named Koh Tang in the Gulf of Thailand, near the coast of Cambodia.

Nearly all involved in the series of White House meetings called to deal with the crisis seized on the incident to take that “tougher stand” (though historian Rick Perlstein points out that calling it a crisis is a stretch since it is quite common for US merchant ships to be taken and then released by foreign navies). Kissinger was forceful. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, describes him in one of these meetings as “leaning over the Cabinet Room table and speaking with emotion,” saying “the U.S. must draw the line.… We must act upon it now, and act firmly.” And not just Kissinger. “I think a violent response is in order,” said Kissinger's old boss, vice president Nelson Rockefeller. “The world should know that we will act and that we will act quickly.”
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Kissinger advised that the United States “do something that will impress the Koreans and the Chinese.” Ford's speechwriter, Bob Hartmann, said a tough response might contribute to Ford's popularity at home: “We should not just think of what is the right thing to do, but of what the public perceives.”
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“This crisis, like the Cuban missile crisis, is the first real test of your leadership,” Hartmann told Ford. Kennedy had responded to that crisis methodically, opening up back channels of communication with the Soviets, considering his every move, and offering key concessions to resolve the crisis. But Kissinger, in 1975, couldn't wait. He didn't even try to contact Phnom Penh to make a deal. Instead, he urged Ford to launch a military rescue, let the B-52s loose on Cambodia one last time, and sink Cambodian ships at will. And not gradually but all at once. “I'm afraid that if we do a few little steps every few hours,” Kissinger said, “we are in trouble. I think we should go ahead with the island … and the ship all at once. I think people should have the impression that we are potentially trigger-happy.” The incident also gave Kissinger a chance to tutor the new president in the madman theory of international relations. “This is your first crisis,” he said, “you should establish a reputation for being too tough to tackle.”
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There was no need for any of it. Even before the assault on the island began, the Cambodians had signaled they would give the ship back. And the crew had been released, put aboard a fishing ship, and returned to the US Navy. But the military operation went forward anyway. Eighteen Americans were killed trying to take the island, and another twenty-three died when their helicopter went down preparing for the raid. Nobody knows how many Cambodians were killed in the attack, but B-52s hit the mainland, destroying a railroad yard, port, oil refinery, and over three hundred buildings. Nine Cambodian ships were sunk.