Heinz Alfred Kissinger, better known to the world as Henry Kissinger, hit the headlines when he turned 100 on May 27, 2023. Less than two months later, he made news again when he flew to Beijing July 18-20, 52 years after his secret visit to the city in July 1971 to pave the way for then US President Richard Nixon to normalise relations with China.
Kissinger was 16 when he migrated to the US with his family to flee Nazi Germany, and excelled academically, earning his masters and a PhD from Harvard University. Drafted into the Army, his fluency in German led to his induction in the military intelligence section and then the counter-intelligence corps, where he led a team in Hanover tasked with tracking down Nazi sympathisers. He also taught at the European Command Intelligence School, which also doubled as an interrogation centre.
On his return to the US, he worked as a faculty at Harvard and advised various government agencies and politicians like Republican presidential contender Nelson Rockefeller on foreign policy issues, but switched to Richard Nixon’s team when he won the nomination, and was named National Security Adviser when Nixon became president in 1969. Some reports say he deliberately scuttled President Lyndon B Johnson’s attempt to halt the Vietnam war in order to bolster Nixon’s win.
Subsequently, Kissinger was directly involved in some of the worst atrocities in the history of the world.
Between 1969 to the early 1970s, Kissinger under Nixon oversaw, and some say directly instigated, the massacre of millions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. He personally approved the deliberate targeting of civilian areas during 3875 illegal carpet bombing raids on Cambodia, although the country was not officially a party to the Vietnam war.
The bombing of Laos, another neutral nation, led to 2,093,100 tonnes of ordnance raining down on the country, making it the most heavily bombed country in the world per capita. Over 20,000 people, more than half of them children, have died from unexploded ordnance since the Vietnam war ended in 1975, and it is estimated that it could take another 50 years before they are totally cleared.
In 1975, he supported and armed Indonesian dictator Suharto’s genocidal attack on East Timor, killing over 200,000 people through large-scale massacres and starvation.
A year later, he personally approved the violent purge of leftists by the military Junta in Argentina. This dirty war, as it became known, led to the slaughter, torture and disappearance of over 30,000 people.
He played a key role in toppling the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, who was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, a brutal fascist who murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands during his 16 -year reign.
In ‘The trial of Henry Kissinger’, British-American author and journalist Christopher Hitchens refers to “Kissinger’s recruitment and betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, who were falsely encouraged by him to take up arms against Saddam Hussein in 1974-75, and who were then abandoned to extermination on their hillsides when Saddam Hussein made a diplomatic deal with the Shah of Iran…” as “depraved realpolitik, and do not seem to have violated any known law…
“In the same way,” he continues, “Kissinger’s orchestration of political and military and diplomatic cover for apartheid in South Africa and the South African destabilization of Angola, with its appalling consequences, presents us with a morally repulsive record.”
In South Asia, Kissinger under Nixon supported Pakistan’s military ruler Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, who ordered the massacre of millions of Bengalis in east Pakistan to teach them a lesson for having won the general elections in 1970, the first since Independence. This led to a flood of refugees into India, and the India-Pakistan war of 1971, which ended with the dismemberment of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh, despite Nixon’s attempt to intimidate India by sending a carrier group led by the USS Enterprise towards the Bay of Bengal.
“The Indians are bastards,” Kissinger reportedly told Nixon following Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s state visit to Washington in November 1971, just before the war. “They are the most aggressive goddamn people around.”
Declassified tapes and documents reveal Nixon’s racist and visceral anti-Indian stance. Apart from routinely describing Indira Gandhi as “that bitch”, he even described his own ambassador in New Delhi Kenneth B. Keating a ‘bastard’ for defending New Delhi’s position, and recalled the US Consul General in Dhaka, Archer Blood, whose reports of the genocidal attack on Bengalis in East Pakistan are now known as the ‘Blood Telegrams’.
Asked how India had managed to win Keating’s support, Kissinger reportedly replied: “They (Indians) are superb flatterers, Mr President. They are masters at flattery. They are masters at subtle flattery. That’s how they survived 600 years. They suck up – their great skill is to suck up to people in key positions.” In retrospect, many people wonder if Kissinger was describing himself.
Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, along with Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho, for negotiating the ceasefire in Vietnam. As the Nobel Foundation website puts it, “the latter refused to accept the Prize, and for the first time in the history of the Peace Prize two members left the Nobel Committee in protest.”
Nixon was forced to resign following the Watergate Scandal in 1974, but Kissinger continued as Secretary of State under Gerald Ford. In 1975, he helped Union Carbide set up its chemical plant in Bhopal, securing funds from the US and working with the Indian government of Indira Gandhi. Describing her as an “extraordinary character” he urged that his earlier abuse and foul language be seen in the context of “the Cold War atmosphere.”
He quit as Secretary of State a year later when Democrat Jimmy Carter became President, and went on to advise various corporations and think tanks, forming Kissinger Associates in 1982, which among other things has reportedly brokered the privatization of national industries in Russia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as considerable economic interests in China. It also represented Union Carbide after the plant’s 1984 chemical leak disaster, which killed over 4000 people and maimed and disfigured another half a million, negotiating a meagre out-of-court settlement for the victims.
In an interview to The Economist in April just ahead of his 100th birthday, Kissinger declared that he was “very enthusiastic about close relations with India,” and that “I have very high regard for the way the Indians conduct their foreign policy now, because it shows balance.”
Critics say Kissinger’s latest trip to China is an attempt to revive his considerable reputation as a statesman and offset the growing evidence about his involvement in less savoury activities and calls for his indictment as a war criminal.
In her 1976 book ‘Interview with History’, Italian journalist Orlano Fallaci recounted a pre-interview conversation with Nixon in November 1972, where he reportedly said: “..China has been a very important element in the mechanics of my success. And yet that’s not the main point. The main point. .. Well, yes, I’ll tell you. What do I care? The main point arises from the fact that I’ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn’t shoot. He acts, that’s all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western.”
If that assessment still holds, when Kissinger takes his final ride into the sunset, despite the blood of millions of innocents on his hands, chances are he will get a farewell reserved for heroes.
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