The Trial of Henry Kissinger (15 page)

Kissinger
: Look, I think we all got the point now...

Nairn
: My question, Mr. Kissinger, my question, Dr Kissinger, is twofold. First will you give a waiver under the Privacy Act to support full declassification of this memo so we can see exactly what you and President Ford said to Suharto? Secondly, would you support the convening of an international war crimes tribunal under UN supervision on the subject of East Timor and would you agree to abide by its verdict in regard to your own conduct?

Kissinger
: I mean, uh, really, this sort of comment is one of the reasons why the conduct of foreign policy is becoming nearly impossible under these conditions. Here is a fellow who's got one obsession, he's got one problem, he collects a bunch of documents, you don't know what is in these documents...

Nairn
: I invite your audience to read them.

Kissinger
: Well, read them. Uh, the fact is essentially as I described them [thumps podium].

Timor was not a significant American policy problem. If Suharto raised it, if Ford said something that sounded encouraging, it was not a significant American foreign policy problem. It seemed to us to be an anti-colonial problem in which the Indonesians were taking over Timor and we had absolutely no reason at that time to pay any huge attention to it.

Secondly you have to understand these things in the context of the period. Vietnam had just collapsed. Nobody yet knew what effect the domino theory would have. Indonesia was ... is a country of a population of 160 million and the key, a key country in Southeast Asia. We were not looking for trouble with Indonesia and the reason I objected in the State Department to putting this thing on paper; it wasn't that it was put on paper. It was that it was circulated to embassies because it was guaranteed to leak out. It was guaranteed then to lead to some public confrontation and for better or worse our fundamental position on these human rights issues was always to try to see if we could discuss them first, quietly, before they turned into a public confrontation. This was our policy with respect to emigration from Russia, in which we turned out to be right, and this was the policy which we tried to pursue in respect to Indonesia and anybody can go and find some document and take out one sentence and try to prove something fundamental and now I think we've heard enough about Timor. Let's have some questions on some other subject, [applause from audience]

Amy Goodman
: Dr Kissinger, you said that the United States has won everything it wanted in the Cold War up to this point. I wanted to go back to the issue of Indonesia and before there's a booing in the audience, just to say as you talk about China and India, Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world. And so I wanted to ask the question in a current way about East Timor. And that is, given what has happened in the twenty years, the 200,000 people who have been killed, according to Amnesty, according to Asia Watch, even according to the Indonesian military ... Do you see that as a success of the United States?

Kissinger
: No, but I don't think it's an American policy. We cannot be, we're not responsible for everything that happens in every place in the world, [applause from audience]

Goodman
: Except that 90 percent of the weapons used during the invasion were from the US and it continues to this day. So in that way we are intimately connected to Indonesia, unfortunately. Given that, I was wondering if you think it's a success and whether too, with you on the board of Freeport McMoRan, which has the largest gold-mining operation in the world in Indonesia, in Irian Jaya, are you putting pressure, since Freeport is such a major lobbyist in Congress on behalf of Indonesia, to change that policy and to support self-determination for the people of East Timor?

Kissinger
: The, uh, the United States as a general proposition cannot fix every problem on the use of American weapons in purely civil conflicts. We should do our best to prevent this.

As a private American corporation engaged in private business in an area far removed from Timor but in Indonesia, I do not believe it is their job to get itself involved in that issue because if they do, then no American private enterprise will be welcome there anymore.

Goodman
: But they do every day, and lobby Congress.

It is interesting to notice, in that final answer, the final decomposition of Kissinger's normally efficient if robotic syntax. (For more material on his involvement with Freeport McMoRan, and his other holdings in a privatized military-political-commercial complex, see Chapter 10.) It's also fascinating to see, once again, the operations of his denial mechanism. If Kissinger and his patron Nixon were identified with any one core belief, it was that the United States should never be, or even appear to be, a "pitiful, helpless giant." Kissinger's own writings and speeches are heavily larded with rhetoric about "credibility" and the need to impress friend and foe with the mettle of American resolve. Yet, in response to any inquiry that might implicate him in crime and fiasco, he rushes to humiliate his own country and its professional servants, suggesting that they know little, care less, are poorly informed and easily rattled by the pace of events. He also resorts to a demagogic isolationism. In "signaling"

terms, this is as much as to claim that the United States is a pushover for any ambitious or irredentist banana republic.

This semi-conscious reversal of rhetoric also leads to renewed episodes of hysterical and improvised lying. (Recall his claim to the Chinese that it was the Soviet Union that had instigated the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.) The idea that Indonesia's annexation of Timor may be compared to India's occupation of Goa is too absurd to have been cited in any apologia before or since. What Kissinger seems to like about the comparison is the rapidity with which Goa was forgotten. What he overlooks is that it was forgotten because (1) it was not a bloodbath and (2) it completed the decolonization of India. The Timor bloodbath represented the
cementing
of colonization by Indonesia. And clearly, an Indonesian invasion that began a few hours after Kissinger had stepped off the tarmac at Jakarta airport must have been planned and readied several days before he arrived. Such plans would have been known by any embassy military attaché worth the name, and certainly by any visiting secretary of state.

We have the word of C. Philip Liechty, a former CIA operations officer in Indonesia, that: Suharto was given the green light to do what he did. There was discussion in the Embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time.

Without continued heavy US military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off.

Given that legal and international responsibility for East Timor rested with Portugal, a long-term NATO ally of the United States, the decision to disregard this, and at the admitted minimum to say nothing to the Indonesians about it, must have been deliberate. Given Kissinger's acute preoccupation with the fate of the Portuguese empire - as we will see – it may have been even more than that. It certainly cannot have been the result of inattention, or of the pressure of other distracting world events in (to take Kissinger's own cited instance) the other Portuguese colony of Angola.

The desire to appear to have been uninvolved may - if we are charitable - have arisen in part from the fact that even Indonesia's Foreign Minister, Adam Malik, conceded in public a death toll of between 50,000 and 80,000 Timorese civilians in the first eighteen months of Indonesia's war of subjugation (in other words on Kissinger's watch) and inflicted with weapons that he bent American laws to furnish to the killers. Now that a form of democracy has returned to Indonesia, which in its first post-dictatorial act renounced the annexation and

- after a bloody last pogrom by its auxiliaries - withdrew from the territory, we may be able to learn more exactly the extent of the genocide.

Kissinger's surreptitious conduct is made very plain by the State Department cable of December 1975, and the subsequent memorandum concerning it. In point of fact, the essential decisions about Portugal's ex-colonies had been made during the preceding July, when Kissinger had secured presidential permission for a covert program of military intervention, coordinated with the South Africans and General Mobutu, to impose a tribalist regime upon Angola. The following month, as a matter of record, he informed the Indonesian generals that he would not oppose their intervention in East Timor. The only bargaining in December involved a request that Indonesia delay the start of its own colonial adventure until after Air Force One, carrying Ford and Kissinger, had left Indonesian airspace.

This "deniable" pattern did not dispose of two matters of legality, both of them in the province of the State Department. The first was the violation of international law by Indonesia, in a case where jurisdiction clearly rested with a Portuguese and NATO

government of which Kissinger (partly as a result of its support for "decolonization") did not approve. The second was the violation of American law, which stipulated that weapons supplied to Indonesia were to be employed only for self-defense. State Department officials, bound by law, were likewise bound to conclude that United States aid to the generals in Jakarta would have to be cut off. Their memo summarizing this case was the cause of the tremendous internal row that is minuted below, in a declassified State Department transcript: SECRET/SENSITIVE

MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION

Participants: The Secretary [Henry Kissinger]

Deputy Secretary [Robert] Ingersoll

Under Secretary [for Political Affairs Joseph] Sisco

Under Secretary [Carlyle] Maw

Deputy Under Secretary [Lawrence] Eagleburger

Assistant Secretary [Philip] Habib

Monroe Leigh, Legal Advisor

Jerry Bremer, Notetaker

Date: December 18,1975

Subject: Department Policy

The Secretary
[Kissinger]: I want to raise a little bit of hell about the Department's conduct in my absence. Until last week I thought we had a disciplined group; now we've gone to pieces completely. Take this cable on [East]Timor. You know my mind and attitude and anyone who knows my position as you do must know that I would not have approved it. The only consequence is to put yourself on record. It is a disgrace to treat the Secretary of State this way....

What possible explanation is there for it? I had told you to stop it quietly. What is your place doing, Phil, to let this happen? It is incomprehensible. It is wrong in substance and procedure.

It is a disgrace. Were you here?

Habib
: No. Our assessment was that if it was going to be trouble, it would come up before your return. And I was told they decided it was desirable to go ahead with the cable.

[Kissinger]
: Nonsense. I said do it for a few weeks and then open up again.

Habib
: The cable will not leak.

[Kissinger]
: Yes it will and it will go to Congress too and then we will have hearings on it.

Habib
: I was away. I was told by cable that it had come up.
[Kissinger]
: That means that there are two cables! And that means twenty guys have seen it.

Habib
: No, I got it back-channel - it was just one paragraph double talk and cryptic so I knew what it was talking about. I was told that Leigh thought that there was a legal requirement to do it. Leigh: No, I said it could be done administratively. It was not in our interest to do it on legal grounds. Sisco: We were told that you had decided we had to stop.

[Kissinger]
: Just a minute, just a minute. You all know my view on this. You must have an FSO-8 [Foreign Service Officer, Class Eight] who knows it well. It will have a devastating impact on Indonesia. There's this masochism in the extreme here. No one has complained that it was aggression.

Leigh
: The Indonesians were violating an agreement with us.
[Kissinger]
: The Israelis when they go into Lebanon - when was the last time we protested that?

Leigh
: That's a different situation.

Maw
: It is self-defense.

[Kissinger]
: And we can't construe a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?

Leigh
: Well...

[Kissinger]
: Then you're saying that arms can't be used for defense?
Habib
: No, they can be used for the defense of Indonesia.

[Kissinger]
: Now take a look at this basic theme that is coming out on Angola. These SOBs are leaking all of this stuff to [
New York Times

reporter] Les Gelb.

Sisco
: I can tell you who.

[Kissinger]
: Who?

Sisco
: [National Security Council member William] Hyland spoke to him.

[Kissinger]
: Wait a minute - Hyland said ...

Sisco
: He said he briefed Gelb.

[Kissinger]
: I want these people to know that our concern in Angola is not the economic wealth or a naval base. It has to do with the USSR

operating 8,000 miles from home when all the surrounding states are asking for our help. This will affect the Europeans, the Soviets, and China.

On the Timor thing, that will leak in three months, and
it will come out that Kissinger
overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law.
How many people in L [the legal advisor's office] know about this? [italics added]