Kissinger’s Shadow (40 page)

Authors: Greg Grandin

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The use of torture by US security agents in Latin Americaâand the training provided by Washington to Latin Americans on how best to tortureâtook place both before and after Kissinger's time in public office. But some of the most famous US torturers plied their trade while Kissinger was presiding, as chair of the 40 Committee, over covert activities in the region. Dan Mitrione, for instance, was sent in 1969 to Uruguay, where he taught the police how to torture. “Before all else, you must be efficient,” Mitrione instructed. “You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more.” Mitrione taught by demonstration, reportedly torturing to death a number of homeless people kidnapped off the streets of Montevideo. “We must control our tempers in any case,” he said. “You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.” Many of the techniques practiced and taught by Mitrione were codified in the Pentagon's infamous “torture manuals” in the 1980s and subsequently influenced the practices described in Senator Dianne Feinstein's 2014 “torture report.” According to journalist Marcy Wheeler, after the Pentagon destroyed copies of its infamous torture instruction manuals it had used to train Latin American allies, Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, and his legal counsel, David Addington “saved the only known copies” for their personal files. Also, one of the CIA agents, Jose Rodriguez, who ran the CIA's post 9/11 torture program had spent thirty years working in Latin America. See Wheeler, “The Thirteen People Who Made Torture Possible,”
Salon,
May 18, 2009; for Rodriguez, see the links in my “Misery Made Me a Fiend: Latin America and the Torture Report,”
Nation
, December 11, 2014.

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Kissinger never lost his sense of bewilderment about Reagan, the idea that there was no difference between substance and surface, no interiority, that he was a mirror or a recording device repeating the world back to itself. In 1981: “I don't have the impression that he ever ingests anything you tell him. I used to brief him for Nixon when he was governor. I find that years later he could tell me almost verbatim something I told him back then. He remembers exactly, but I have the feeling that the item has lain unused in his mind all those years.” Again in 1981: “He is a nice man, a decent man. One odd thing, though. When he talks, all his illustrations are drawn from the movie business.” In 1982: “I have known a number of Presidents and of presidential candidates. With all the rest, when you talk to them, you can feel them translating what you are telling them into âWhat can I do about this?' With Reagan, you feel him translating it into âWhat can I say about this?' Words are the reality for him.â¦ He is the only president with whom I would rather have someone else in the room when I see him. If you talk to him alone, you can be sure that nothing will ever happen.” In 1986: “He has a kind of instinct that I cannot explain.”

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Kissinger escaped association with the Watergate scandal, but starting in 1974 he became a primary target of right-wing anger, in the tabloids and alternative conservative press, over having lost Vietnam. In March 1974, for example, the
Review of the News
published a lengthy essay by Frank Capell called “The Kissinger Caper,” which made the case that Kissinger, while in Europe in Army intelligence during World War II, had been recruited by Soviet intelligence and given the code name “Bor.” Capell was a vehemently anti-Communist gossipmonger who published the newsletter
Herald of Freedom
. He tied his allegation that Kissinger was a Soviet agent to the 1974 fall of West German chancellor Willy Brandt, who resigned when it was revealed that one of his top aides, GÃ¼nter Guillaume, was an East German Stasi spy. Capell, best known for reporting on the relationship between Robert F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, expanded his essay into a short book,
Henry Kissinger, Soviet Spy
, which he self-published in 1974. Also supposedly involved in the conspiracy was Frank Wisner, a retired CIA agent who killed himself in 1965, and Kim Philby, who was a KGB spy in British intelligence. Wisner had a long-standing connection with William Y. Elliott, Kissinger's Harvard mentor. The idea that Kissinger was a Soviet agent was embraced and repeated by the rank-and-file New Right. Beyond accusations of treason, Kissinger was subject to an increasing number of unflattering profiles in the populist press, including an August 12, 1975, profile in the
National Enquirer
. “The Real Kissinger” alleged that he enjoyed humiliating his first wife in public. It quoted Maury Feld, an old Harvard associate from the International Seminar days, saying that he was often “repelled” by Kissinger's “calculating approach with people.” The article also quoted a former housekeeper who reported that Kissinger was a “restless sleeper,” ripping the sheets off the bed every evening. Many of these reports reflect the xenophobia and anti-Semitism that mark the American Right. On July 8, 1974, William Loeb, the editor of New Hampshire's
Manchester Union
, raised the (extremely unlikely due to constitutional prohibition) prospect of Kissinger's running for president: “An educated man who can't even speak the English language without a heavy accent is disgusting.” Interestingly, grassroots conservatives in the 1970s saw themselves as opposed to the corporate interests of the fossil fuel industry and were particularly angry at Kissinger's “oil floor price” (discussed in chapter 6) which one conservative identified as a plan “to sell a large chunk of America” to “the major oil producers to convince them to formalize their support for the ânew world order.'” The writer continued: “It is sort of a perpetual hijacking plan whereby we pay tribute continually to the major petroleum interests.” See William Hoar, “Henry Kissinger: This Man Is on the Other Side,”
American Opinion
, June 1975. Some of these clippings are found in box 47 of the Nathaniel Weyl Papers, found at the Hoover Institution Archives.

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The CIA's estimate of Soviet power was wrong. In 1989, the agency reviewed its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and found that in each year Soviet strength had been “substantially overestimated.” Many of the neocons who resurfaced in the 2000s had worked on Team B or were instrumental in its establishment, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Richard Pipes. Others not directly connected to Team B, such as Fox pundit William Kristol, made the argument that since Team B won the Cold War its assumptions on how to read intelligence should be resurrected to confront Al Qaeda. Frank Gaffney, ever present on cable news making the case for war and warning about Islam, has joined other militarists, including Lieutenant General William Boykin, who served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Pentagon during the Iraq War, in what they call “Team B II.”

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All political speeches, especially ones given at presidential nominating conventions, are partisan, but Kissinger's remarks at the 1980 Republican Convention are notable for two reasons. First, they mimic nearly perfectly Reagan's attacks on him four years earlier. Kissinger sounds like a movement-conservative critic of Kissinger, excoriating policies that have made America “impotent,” saying that the Soviets can't be trusted, and denouncing a “philosophy of abdication.” Once again, Kissinger, as he did in the 1950s (and Reagan and Team B did in 1976), invoked a nonexistent missile gap. “We are falling behind,” he said, endorsing Reagan's proposal to dramatically increase defense spending. Secondly, Kissinger's litany of complaints against the Carter administration read like a roll call of the consequences of
his
policies: revolution in Iran, Cuban troops in Africa, high oil prices and America's “dependence” on Gulf producers, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were all problems that were, if not created, then certainly worsened by Kissinger's initiatives. Just as in the 1950s Kissinger urged Washington not to flinch in fighting little wars in the world's gray areas, here he was again telling America to “prepare” itself “for battle” in what Kissinger called the “developing world.” This time he was more frank about the motive. Perhaps wanting to hold on to some distinction between his worldview and the heavy-handed moralism on display at the convention, he said: “to guarantee our access to vital minerals and raw materials.”

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The Iran-Contra scandal, which became public in 1986 and nearly brought down the Reagan administration, was an important step in the reformation of the national security state. The scandal was about many things, centering on the illegal triangle trade by which the United States sold high-tech missiles to Iran's ayatollahs and then used the money to fund anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But its overarching motivation was to figure out how to counteract the cynicism and antimilitarism that had infected America's political institutions. Based in the National Security Council, Oliver North ran a shadow foreign policy, establishing unaccountable sources of funding, bypassing the State Department, dodging Congress, and running domestic psych-ops to neutralize the press and skeptical public opinion. But before there was Oliver North, there was Henry Kissinger. His reorganization of the NSC in 1969 entailed transforming it from an office whose responsibility was primarily to advise the president into a body that made and executed decisions. Jimmy Carter reversed much of this, returning authority back to the Department of State. But, as Harold Koh argues, Kissinger's precedent was crucial. Koh, a professor of law at Yale University and a former State Department official, writes that Kissinger's NSC provided the blueprint for Reagan's militarists: Iran-Contra, Koh argues, “only brought full circle an inversion of institutional responsibility” that Kissinger orchestrated in the late 1960s. And Kissinger's covert war in Angola rehearsed many of the tactics that would be deployed in Iran-Contra, including the use of proxy countries and the running of propaganda campaigns within the United States to neutralize the post-Vietnam “adversary culture.” As Koh's remark suggests, it is important not to isolate Iran-Contra as its own isolated conspiracy. To do so, would be to miss two of its key elements. The first is the way it really was just one phase in the evolution of the national security state. The second is how Iran-Contra was part of Reagan's broader push to restart the Cold War in the Third World. In 1993, for instance, a yearlong Senate inquiry turned up what one investigator called a “precursor to Iran-Contra, an illegal, off-the-shelf operation involving the NSC and private funds just like Iran-Contra”âa covert plan, drawn up as early as March 1981, to “roll back communism worldwide by aiding resistance forces in Afghanistan, Cuba, Grenada, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Cambodia and Laos.” Laos in particular was an early focus; there, a “Reagan administration official secretly used donations from POW-MIA groups to arm and supply Laotian rebels in the early 1980s. It “sounds like a dry run” for Iran-Contra, said Jack Blum, a former investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (“Report Says Reagan Aide Sent POW Funds to Rebels,”
Washington Post
, January 14, 1993; “Probe Links âReagan Doctrine' to Covert Aid to Laos Rebels,”
Los Angeles Times,
January 23, 1993). The report is published as United States Senate,
Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. POW/MIA's. Special Report 103-1
(1993).

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