Kissinger’s Shadow (32 page)

Authors: Greg Grandin

20
.ââHersh,
Price of Power
, p. 257; Kalb and Kalb,
Kissinger
, p. 211. Dallek,
Nixon and Kissinger
, pp. 229â30, also suggests that Kissinger was posturing for Nixon. Nixon nursed a grudge against Castro, whose revolution he believed cost him the 1960 presidential election by allowing JFK an opening to run to his right. Nixon also had deep ties to the anti-Communist Cuban exile community (two of the Watergate burglars were anti-Castro Cuban exiles and at least two others were antiâCuban Revolution activists who had been involved in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion) and soon after his 1969 inaugural had stepped up covert operations against Castro and Cuba. In 1977,
Newsday
reported that “with at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic. A U.S. intelligence source told
Newsday
last week he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U.S. Army base and CIA training ground in the Panama Canal Zone, with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group.” Former CIA agent Howard Hunt reportedly “mentioned something about planning for the second phase of the Bay of Pigs around the beginning of Nixon's second term,” which if true, was yet another ideaâalong with restarting the bombing of North Vietnam and imposing an austerity budget on the United Statesâderailed by Watergate. William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh in their recent book,
Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana
(2014), write that Kissinger helped moderate Nixon's hostility toward Castro, a process interrupted by Castro's Angola intervention, discussed in this chapter.

22
.ââStill, the United States might indeed have “cracked the Cubans,” as Kissinger said he wanted to do. On October 6, 1976, CIA- and FBI-supported Cuban exiles, led by a notorious anti-Castro activist named Orlando Bosch, bombed Cubana flight 455, after it had just taken off from Barbados, killing all seventy-three passengersâfifty-seven Cubans, eleven Guyanese, and five North Koreansâand all five crew members. At the very least, the CIA knew of the plans of the group (which went by different names, among them “Condor”) to bomb a Cuban airliner as early as June. There are, however, two pieces of evidence suggesting that Kissinger didn't sanction this bombing. The first is that Bosch apparently had also targeted Kissinger for execution in retribution for attempting to normalize relations with Cuba, at least according to another CIA-linked anti-Castro Cuban trying to ingratiate himself with Washington. The second is that Kissinger authored a memo immediately after the bombing that said that Washington “had been planning to suggest Bosch deportation before Cubana Airlines crash took place for his suspected involvement in other terrorist acts and violations of his parole.â¦ Suspicion that Bosch involved in planning Cubana Airlines Crash led us to suggest his deportation urgently.” Bosch wasn't, however, deported. See Ann Louise Bardach,
Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana
, p. 190.

25
.ââKissinger's congratulation was in a November 24, 1973, cable made available by WikiLeaks:
https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1973STATE231341_b.html
. For sources related to the discussion on Guatemala in the footnote, see the following documents found in the
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969â1976, Volume E-10, Documents on American Republics, 1969â1972
(available at
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve10/ch10):
Document 343: Memorandum from the President's Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs (Haig) to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, November 16, 1970; Document 346: Memorandum from Arnold Nachmanoff of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, November 23, 1970; Document 348: Telegram 22560 from the Department of State to the Embassy in Guatemala, February 10, 1971; Document 355: Memorandum for the Record, Washington, August 16, 1971; Document 356: Paper Prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, undated; Document 357: Memorandum from Arnold Nachmanoff of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, August 19, 1971; Document 358: Memorandum for the Record, Washington, September 16, 1971; Document 364: Memorandum from William J. Jorden of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, September 28, 1972. Along with Cambodia, Kissinger is most defensive about his role in destabilizing Chilean democracy. He has consistently blamed Allende for provoking the coup against him, once even misquoting Zhou Enlai to suggest that the Chinese premier believed that Allende had brought about his own downfall as a result of his own reckless policies. In the official memorandum of the November 1973 conversation, Zhou says, “It was good because it could show a bad thing could be turned into good account. That is our way of seeing this thing. We told them about this, but they didn't believe us. That kind of phenomenon was caused by themselves. We give only limited support to Latin American countries' revolutions. We are still learning”âthe Chinese premier was suggesting that the coup would usefully end Chile's misplaced faith in bourgeois democracy. Kissinger in his memoir refigures these remarks to read: “We told them about [the risks], but they didn't believe us. That kind of phenomena was caused by themselves.â¦” For the original (translated and transcribed) conversation, see National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, Kissinger Office Files, box 100, Country Files, Far East, Secretary Kissinger's Conversations in Peking, November 1973 (available here:
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v18/d59#fn1)
. See
Years of Upheaval,
p. 405, for Kissinger's use of it.

26
.ââFor Kissinger's “harder line,” see National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Tapes, Oval Office, Conversation No. 517-4. No classification marking; available at
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve10/d42#fn1
. At this point, there is not much more to say about Kissinger's involvement in Chile. His defenders will continue to defend, to read the evidence in the narrowest possible way so as to achieve maximum plausible denial. As chair of the interagency 40 Committee, Kissinger helped organize a comprehensive program of destabilization that financed anti-Allende newspapers, channeled money through third parties to opposition unions, increased aid to the military, sabotaged the economy, ran “black operations to divide and weaken” Allende's coalition, and provided funds to the conservative National Party to create the paramilitary group Patria y Libertad, a death squad. “Our hand doesn't show on this one,” Nixon said to Kissinger shortly after the coup. But over the years, leaked and declassified US documents have shown Nixon and Kissinger's fingerprints everywhere. See Scott Horton's post, “The Case against Kissinger Deepens,” July 6, 2010, on Kissinger's admitting that the CIA did, in fact, kill General RenÃ© Schneider in 1970 in order to prevent Allende's coming to power, in an operation in which Kissinger continues to deny involvement:
http://harpers.org/blog/2010/07/the-case-against-kissinger-deepens-continued/
. See the documents at the National Security Archive's “Kissinger and Chile: The Declassified Record,
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB437/
.

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