The Trial of Henry Kissinger (16 page)

Leigh
: Three.

Habib
: There are at least two in my office.

[Kissinger]
: Plus everybody in the meeting so you're talking about not less than 15 or 20.

You have a responsibility to recognize that we are living in a revolutionary situation.

Everything on paper will be used against me.

Habib
: We do that and take account of that all the time.

[Kissinger]
: Every day some SOB in the Department is carrying on about Angola but no one is defending Angola. Find me one quote in the Gelb article defending our policy in Angola.

Habib
: I think the leaks and dissent are the burden you have to bear. [Kissinger]: But the people in charge of this Department could have lacerated AF [Bureau for African Affairs].

Ingersoll
: I was told it came from up the river.

Eagleburger
: No way.

[Kissinger]
: Don't be ridiculous. It's quoted there. Read Gelb. Was [Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs William] Schaufele called in and told to get his house under control?

This is not minor league stuff. We are going to lose big. The President says to the Chinese that we're going to stand firm in Angola and two weeks later we get out. I go to a NATO meeting and meanwhile the Department leaks that we're worried about a naval base and says it's an exaggeration or aberration of Kissinger's. I don't care about the oil or the base but I do care about the African reaction when they see the Soviets pull it off and we don't do anything. If the Europeans then say to themselves if they can't hold Luanda, how can they defend Europe?

The Chinese will say we're a country that was run out of Indochina for 50,000 men and is now being run out of Angola for less than $50m. Where were the meetings here yesterday. Were there any?

. . .

[Kissinger]
: It cannot be that our agreement with Indonesia says that the arms are for internal purposes only. I think you will find that it says that they are legitimately used for self-defense.

There are two problems. The merits of the case which you had a duty to raise with me. The second is how to put these to me. But to put it into a cable 30 hours before I return, knowing how cables are handled in this building, guarantees that it will be a national disaster and that transcends whatever [Deputy Legal Advisor George] Aldrich has in his feverish mind.

I took care of it with the administrative thing by ordering Carlyle [Maw] not to make any new sales. How will the situation get better in six weeks?

Habib
: They may get it cleaned up by then.

[Kissinger]
: The Department is falling apart and has reached the point where it disobeys clear-cut orders.

Habib
: We sent the cable because we thought it was needed and we thought it needed your attention. This was ten days ago.

[Kissinger]
: Nonsense. When did I get the cable, Jerry?

Bremer
: Not before the weekend. I think perhaps on Sunday.

[Kissinger]
: You had to know what my view on this was.
No one who has worked with me
in the last two years could not know what my view would be on Timor
. [italics added]

Habib
: Well, let us look at it - talk to Leigh. There are still some legal requirements. I can't understand why it went out if it was not legally required.

[
Kissinger]
: Am I wrong in assuming that the Indonesians will go up in smoke if they hear about this?

Habib
: Well, it's better than a cutoff. It could be done at a low level.

[Kissinger]
: We have four weeks before Congress comes back. That's plenty of time.

Leigh
: The way to handle the administrative cutoff would be that we are studying the situation.

[Kissinger]
: And 36 hours was going to be a major problem?

Leigh
: We had a meeting in Sisco's office and decided to send the message.

[Kissinger]
: I know what the law is but how can it be in the US national interest for us to give up on Angola and kick the Indonesians in the teeth? Once it is on paper, there will be a lot of FSO-6s who can make themselves feel good who can write for the Open Forum Panel on the thing even though I will turn out to be right in the end.

Habib
: The second problem on leaking of cables is different.
[Kissinger]
: No it's an empirical fact.

Eagleburger
: Phil, it's a fact. You can't say that any NODIS ["No Distribution": most restricted level of classification] cable will leak but you can't count on three to six months later someone asking for it [
sic
] in Congress. If it's part of the written record, it will be dragged out eventually.

[Kissinger]
: You have an obligation to the national interest. I don't care if we sell equipment to Indonesia or not. I get nothing from it, I get no rakeoff. But you have an obligation to figure out how to serve your country. The Foreign Service is not to serve itself. The Service stands for service to the United States and not service to the Foreign Service.

Habib
: I understand that that's what this cable would do.

[Kissinger]
: The minute you put this into the system you cannot resolve it without a finding.

Leigh
: There's only one question. What do we say to Congress if we're asked?

[Kissinger]
: We cut it off while we are studying it. We intend to start again in January.

The delivery of heavy weapons for use against civilian objectives did indeed resume in January 1976, after a short interval in which Congress was misled as advertised. Nobody, it must be said, comes especially well out of this meeting; the Secretary's civil servants were anything but "pristine." Still it can be noted of Kissinger that, in complete contrast to his public statements, he:

1. Forebore from any mention of Goa.

2.

Did not trouble to conceal his long-held views on the matter, berating his underlings for being so dense as not to know them.

3. Did not affect to be taken by surprise by events in East Timor.

4. Admitted that he was breaking the law.

5. Felt it necessary to deny that he could profit personally from the arms shipments, a denial for which nobody had asked him.

Evidently, there was a dialectic in Kissinger's mind between Angola and East Timor, both of them many miles from US or Russian borders but both seen as tests of his own dignity. (The

"surrounding states" to which he alludes in the Angolan case were apartheid South Africa and General Mobutu's Zaire: the majority of African states, as a matter of record, opposed his intervention on the side of the tribalist and pro-South Africa militias in Angola. His favored regimes have long since collapsed in ignominy; the United States now recognizes the MPLA, with all its deformities, as the legitimate government of Angola. And of course, no European ever felt that the fate of the West hinged on Kissinger's gamble in Luanda.) That Kissinger understood Portugal's continuing legal sovereignty in East Timor is shown by a NODIS memorandum of a Camp David meeting between himself, General Suharto and President Ford on the preceding 5 July 1975. Almost every line of the text has been deleted by official redaction, and much of the discussion is unilluminating except about the eagerness of the administration to supply naval, air and military equipment to the junta, but at one point, just before Kissinger makes his entrance, President Ford asks his guest, "Have the Portuguese set a date yet for allowing the Timor people to make their choice?" The entire answer is obliterated by deletion, but let it never be said that Kissinger's State Department did not know that Portugal was entitled, indeed mandated, to hold a free election for the Timorese. It is improbable that Suharto, in the excised answer, was assuring his hosts that such an open election would be won by candidates favoring annexation by Indonesia.

On 9 November 1979, Jack Anderson's column in the
Washington Post
published an interview on East Timor with ex-President Ford, and a number of classified US intelligence documents relating to the 1975 aggression. One of the latter papers describes how Indonesia's generals were pressing Suharto "to authorize direct military intervention," while another informs Messrs Ford and Kissinger that Suharto would raise the East Timor issue at their December 1975 meeting and would "try and elicit a sympathetic attitude." The relatively guileless Ford was happy to tell Anderson that the United States national interest "had to be on the side of Indonesia." He may or may not have been aware that he was thereby giving the lie to everything ever said by Kissinger on the subject.

9

A "WET JOB" IN WASHINGTON?

AS WE HAVE
more than once seen, Kissinger has a tendency to personalize his politics. His policies have led directly and deliberately to the deaths of anonymous hundreds of thousands, but have also involved the targeting of certain inconvenient individuals - General Schneider, Archbishop Makarios, Sheik Mujib. And, as we have also more than once glimpsed, Kissinger has an especial relish for the Washington vendetta and the localized revenge.

It seems possible that these two tendencies converge in a single case: a plan to kidnap and murder a man named Elias P. Demetracopoulos. Mr. Demetracopoulos is a distinguished Greek journalist with an unexampled record of opposition to the dictatorship that disfigured his homeland between 1967 and 1974. In the course of those years, he made his home in Washington, supporting himself as a consultant to a respected Wall Street firm. Innumerable senators, congressmen, Hill staffers, diplomats and reporters have testified to the extraordinary one-man campaign of lobbying and information he waged against the military gangsters who had usurped power in Athens. Since that same junta enjoyed the sympathy of powerful interests in Washington, Demetracopoulos was compelled to combat on two fronts, and made (as will shortly appear) some influential enemies.

After the collapse of the Greek dictatorship in 1974 - a collapse occasioned by the events I discuss in Chapter 7 on Cyprus above -Demetracopoulos gained access to the secret police files in Athens, and confirmed what he had long suspected. There had been more than one attempt made to kidnap and eliminate him. Files held by the KYP - the Greek equivalent of the CIA - revealed that the then dictator, George Papadopoulos, and his deputy security chief Michael Roufogalis several times contacted the Greek military mission in Washington with precisely this end in view. Stamped with the words "COSMIC: Eyes Only" - the highest security classification - this traffic involved a plethora of schemes. They had in common, it is of interest to note, a desire to see Demetracopoulos snatched from Washington and repatriated. An assassination in Washington might have been embarrassing; moreover there seems to have been a need to interrogate Demetracopoulos before dispatching him. (The Greek junta was in 1970 expelled by the Council of Europe for its systematic use of torture against political opponents, and a series of public trials held in Athens after 1974 committed the torturers and their political masters to long terms of imprisonment.) One proposal was to smuggle Demetracopoulos aboard a Greek civilian airliner, another was to put him on a Greek military plane, and still another was to get him aboard a submarine. (If it were not for the proven record of irrationality and mania among the leaders of the junta, one might be tempted to dismiss at least the third of these plans as a fantasy.) One sentence stands out from the COSMIC cables:

We can rely on the cooperation of the various agencies of the U.S.

Government, but estimate the Congressional reaction to be fierce.

This was a sober estimate: the CIA and the NSC in particular were notoriously friendly to the junta, while Demetracopoulos enjoyed the benefit of many friendships among senators and members of the House.

Seeking to discover what kind of "cooperation" US agencies might have offered, Demetracopoulos in 1976 engaged an attorney - William A.

Dobrovir of the DC firm of Dobrovir, Oakes and Gebhardt - and brought suit under the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act. He was able to obtain many hundreds of documents from the FBI, the CIA and the State Department, as well as the Department of Justice and the Pentagon. A number of these papers indicated that copies had been furnished to the National Security Council, then the domain of Henry Kissinger. But requests for documentation from this source were unavailing. As previously noted, Kissinger had on leaving office made a hostage of his own papers - copying them, classifying them as

"personal," and deeding them to the Library of Congress on condition that they be held privately. Thus, Demetracopoulos met with a stone wall when he used the law to try and prise anything from the NSC. In March 1977, however, the NSC finally responded to repeated legal initiatives by releasing the skeletal "computer indices" of the files that had been kept on Demetracopoulos. Paging through these, his attention was not unnaturally caught by the following:

7024513 DOCUMENT= 5 OF 5 PAGE = 1 OF 1

KEYWORDS ACKNOWLEDGING SENS MOSS BURDICK GRAVEL RE MR

DEMETRACOPOULOS

DEATH IN ATHENS PRISON DATE 701218

"Well it's not every day," said Demetracopoulos when I interviewed him, "that you read about your own death in a state document." His attorney was bound to agree, and wrote a series of letters to Kissinger asking for copies of the file to which the indices referred. For seven years -1 repeat, for seven years - Kissinger declined to favor Demetracopoulos's lawyer with a reply. When he eventually did respond, it was only through his own lawyer, who wrote that: