RICHARD NIXON believed he was at his best in a crisis—sharper, stronger, tougher. When India and Pakistan went to war at the end of 1971, he armed the outgunned Pakistanis: a very tough call, utterly illegal, in blatant violation of an international weapons embargo.
But the president hated India with a passion: “These people are savages,” he said bluntly. And as Kissinger put it, Nixon had “a special feeling” for Pakistan’s military dictator, Yahya Khan: the general who had created the crucial link to China.
The long and unhappy alliance between the United States and Pakistan went back to the Eisenhower administration, when Pakistan provided secret airfields for flights of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. The United States provided military assistance in return. Pakistan itself was created by the catastrophic British Partition of India in 1947, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths as Muslims and other minorities fled to the newly created West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The two Pakistans, flanking India and separated by twelve hundred miles, never were one nation in reality; that fiction was created by partition. Their deep political differences exploded into violent conflict in the spring of 1971, after the first free elections in East Pakistan gave General Yahya’s opponents a measure of power.
General Yahya, who ruled from West Pakistan, imposed martial law on the East. His soldiers indiscriminately killed his opponents; the death toll ran well upward of one million. As late as December 2014, his political allies were still being convicted of war crimes. “The Pakistani army was just murdering people,” said Nicholas A. Veliotes, then a State Department official, later ambassador to Egypt under President Reagan. “There was a genocide plan there: anyone who was educated, the Paks were going to kill.” American diplomats who witnessed the onslaught bluntly called it genocide in a rebellious report to Washington on April 6, 1971, signed by the American consul general in East Pakistan, Archer Blood. The “Blood Telegram” boldly condemned the Nixon administration’s failure to denounce the atrocities.
Nixon deliberately did nothing. “Don’t squeeze Yahya,” he wrote in a note to Kissinger on April 28, underlining the first word three times.
India, the world’s most populous democracy, had received billions in American economic assistance over the years. But in August 1971, shortly after Nixon announced the opening to China—the Chinese and the Indians had fought a vicious border war nine years before—India signed an alliance with the Soviets. This infuriated Nixon. “If they’re going to choose to go with the Russians, they’re choosing not to go with us,” he told Kissinger. “Goddamn it, who’s giving them a billion dollars a year? Shit, the Russians aren’t giving them a billion dollars a year.”
India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, received a politically correct reception when she visited the president on November 4, 1971. But the next day, Nixon and Kissinger said what they really thought of her.
“She is a bitch,” Nixon said.
“Well, the Indians are bastards anyway,” Kissinger replied. “But, Mr. President, even though she was a bitch, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that we got what we wanted, which was we kept her from going out of here saying that the United States kicked her in the teeth.”
President Nixon met at the White House with the Pakistani foreign secretary, Sultan Khan, on November 15, 1971. “We will do everything we can to try to help you in your cause,” Nixon pledged. But a war was coming, with India’s forces supporting the separatists in East Pakistan and Yahya Khan mobilizing against India.
“Yahya is beginning to feel cornered,” Ambassador Joseph Farland reported to Kissinger from Islamabad on November 19. “This thing could blow.” Three days later, it did. Yahya told Farland that India had attacked and that he was declaring a national emergency. The dictator sent President Nixon the message that Pakistan was at the point of no return.
“Is Yahya saying it’s war?” Nixon asked Kissinger in the Oval Office.
“Yeah, they’re saying it’s war.”
“The Indians say it isn’t?” the president said.
“That’s right,” Kissinger replied.
The White House “didn’t have any confirmation” one way or the other, Haldeman noted in his diary that night: “Our vast intelligence network doesn’t seem to be able to tell us when a couple of major nations are at war, which is a little alarming, to say the least.”
Kissinger sent a back-channel cable to Ambassador Farland on November 24, saying that he was convening daily meetings of his crisis team: the Washington Special Actions Group. These meetings, he wrote, led to STRICTEST PRESIDENTIAL INSTRUCTIONS TO TILT TOWARD PAKISTAN.
Nixon made this explicit in an Oval Office conversation with Kissinger and Secretary of State Rogers that same day. “To the extent that we can tilt it toward Pakistan, I would prefer to play that,” Nixon said. He cautioned them: American military aid had to be completely clandestine. “I don’t want to get caught in the business where we take the heat for a miserable war that we had nothing to do with,” the president said.
* * *
The miserable war went ballistic on December 3, 1971. Prime Minister Gandhi charged that Pakistan’s air force had bombed six Indian airfields in Kashmir and the Punjab and that artillery shells were striking Indian positions from West Pakistan.
India, Gandhi said, was going to crush its enemy.
The president was trying to unwind in Key Biscayne. “Pakistan thing makes your heart sick,” he told Kissinger. “And after we have warned the bitch.”
Kissinger called the next morning. “We have had an urgent appeal from Yahya. Says his military supplies have been cut off,” he told Nixon. “Would we help through Iran?” The shah of Iran was a key American ally. Placed in power by a CIA coup under President Eisenhower, he bought billions in weapons from the United States. Nixon asked, “Can we help?” Kissinger replied, “I think if we tell the Iranians we will make it up to them we can do it.”
The CIA station chief in Tehran met with the shah on December 5 and encouraged him to send arms and ammunitions to Pakistan. The shah indicated that he would be glad to help, on the condition that the United States replace what he sent. On the same day in Amman, the capital of Jordan, King Hussein showed the American ambassador, Dean Brown, a telegram from Yahya asking for at least eight American F-104 fighter jets from the Jordanian air force.
On December 6, back at work in the White House, Nixon authorized the arms transfers to Pakistan, on the condition that they were conducted under the strictest cover. The shah was ready and willing to help, and apparently so were the Saudis. But Nixon double-checked on the transfer of fighter jets from Jordan.
“The way we would do that is to tell the King to move his planes and inform us that he has done it,” Kissinger said. “We would have to tell him it is illegal, but if he does it we’ll keep things under control.”
“All right,” Nixon said. “That’s the way we play that.”
The president and Kissinger met in the Oval Office that night, after another meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group, to discuss Indira Gandhi, General Yahya, and the war. “I was too easy on the goddamn woman when she was here,” Nixon said. “She suckered us.… But let me tell you, she’s going to pay. She is going to pay.”
“This has been a great operation for the Indians,” Kissinger replied. “It’s going to lead to the overthrow of Yahya.”
“Such a shame,” said Nixon. “So sad. So sad.”
* * *
Nixon, Kissinger, and Attorney General John Mitchell had a long talk about the crisis on the afternoon of December 8. All three were tense and tired, Haldeman recorded. Kissinger was threatening to resign, as he often did. Mitchell was dismayed at the prospect of running Nixon’s reelection campaign. The president was once again suffering his dreadful insomnia, sinking into dark moods.
Nixon said they had to “cold-bloodedly make the decision” to act. “No more goddamn meetings.”
Kissinger warned that West Pakistan could be smashed by “Soviet arms and Indian military force.” This would affect “many countries threatened by the Soviet Union,” especially in the Middle East. China might think that the United States was “too weak” to stop the destruction of an ally. He concluded, “We could give a note to the Chinese and say if you are ever going to move, this is the time.”
Nixon agreed: “All right, that’s what we’ll do.”
Mitchell concurred: “All they have to do is put their forces on the border.”
The president told Kissinger to go to New York, convene a meeting with the American and Chinese ambassadors to the United Nations, George H. W. Bush and Huang Hua, and suggest that Chinese troops should threaten India. “I tell you, a movement of even some Chinese toward that border could scare those goddamn Indians to death,” Nixon said.
Using the emergency “hot line” to the Kremlin for the first time, Nixon sent a stern message to Moscow: if India continued its attacks, it could lead to a U.S.-Soviet confrontation. Then the president ordered a ten-ship navy battle group, led by a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, into the theater of war—a show of force in the Bay of Bengal, on India’s southeast coast. That would really scare them, Nixon said with satisfaction.*
But soon he became apoplectic, at times apocalyptic, as he reviewed the correlation of forces. What if the Chinese moved against India and the Soviets reacted with force? The regional conflict could become a global war.
“What do we do if the Soviets move against them?” Nixon wondered on December 12. “Start lobbing nuclear weapons in?”
“That will be the final showdown,” Kissinger said. “If the Russians get away with facing down the Chinese and if the Indians get away with licking the Pakistanis, what we are now having is the final—we may be looking down the gun barrel.”
Nixon stared down it and said, “You’ve got the Soviet Union with 800 million Chinese, 600 million Indians, the balance of Southeast Asia terrorized, the Japanese immobile, the Europeans of course will suck after them, and the United States the only one.”
Kissinger said, “You’ll be alone.”
Nixon replied, “We’ve been alone before.”
* * *
On December 16, 1971, Yahya surrendered. He fell from power. The new nation of Bangladesh emerged from the ashes of East Pakistan. India was triumphant; Nixon was enraged. “Savages,” he said. “We cannot have a stable world if we allow one member of the United Nations to cannibalize another. Cannibalize, that’s the word.”
By then, a new war had broken out inside Nixon’s White House.
Two days before, on December 14, the muckraking syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson began publishing a series of articles describing Nixon’s “tilt toward Pakistan” with startling accuracy. Anderson quoted word for word from the transcribed minutes of Kissinger’s war council, the Washington Special Actions Group, which met in the Situation Room, the most closely guarded office of the White House. The members included the chiefs and deputies of the CIA, the State Department, and the Pentagon. The transcripts Anderson cited were classified above top secret. They came from meetings held the week before his first column went to press and painted a particularly unflattering picture of Kissinger at his most imperious and intemperate.
John Ehrlichman, playing his role as Richard Nixon’s private eye, quickly and indisputably established the source for Anderson’s work. On December 21, ten minutes after the president arrived at the White House by helicopter, following a flight from Bermuda, Ehrlichman delivered his devastating news in the Oval Office. The documents Anderson had quoted from were kept in “only one place in the whole federal government,” he said. “And that was here, in the Joint Chiefs of Staff liaison office of the National Security Council.”
“Jesus Christ!” said Richard Nixon. He did not startle easily when it came to matters of political espionage.
“There were only two men in that office, and one’s an admiral, and one’s a yeoman,” Ehrlichman continued. A yeoman is a navy petty officer—a clerk. The man in question was Yeoman Charles Radford. He knew Jack Anderson. They were friends and fellow Mormons.
“He had dinner with Jack Anderson the previous Sunday,” Ehrlichman said. “He had been stationed in India for two years. He felt strongly about the India-Pakistan thing. So there was motive, opportunity, and access.”
Radford, tearfully, had confessed to all this and more. Nixon was astonished. “How in the name of God do we have a yeoman having access to documents of that type?” he asked. Ehrlichman explained that Radford had been the eyes and ears of an admiral who reported directly to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Radford was not only Anderson’s source. He was the officially approved spy for the Joint Chiefs inside the White House.
The yeoman kept the nation’s highest military officers informed about Nixon’s secret plans and political agreements, about what went on behind the scenes between the president and foreign leaders. He had “systematically stolen documents from Henry’s briefcase, Haig’s briefcase, people’s desks, anyplace and everyplace in the NSC apparatus that he can lay his hands on, and has duplicated them, and turned them over to the Joint Chiefs, through his boss, and this has been going on now for about 13 months,” Ehrlichman said.
“Has that been a Joint Chiefs practice for a long time?” Nixon asked.
“Apparently so,” Ehrlichman said.
J. Edgar Hoover himself had warned Nixon before his 1969 inauguration that he should be careful about what he said on the telephone: the Army Signal Corps monitored the presidential communications system and the White House switchboard. A corporal could eavesdrop on a president. But this was inside intelligence of a higher magnitude: the four-star generals and flag admirals of the Joint Chiefs spying on Nixon, Kissinger, and the National Security Council.
“Prosecuting is a possibility for the Joint Chiefs,” the president said.
He turned to the attorney general for counsel. Mitchell was succinct. Cover it up, he said. “If you pursued it by way of prosecution, or even a public confrontation,” he advised, “you would have the Joints Chiefs allied … directly against you.” Mitchell concluded: “Paper this thing over.”
The dilemma was deep. It went to the heart of the Constitution’s command that elected civilians must control the uniformed military. Yeoman Radford was spying on the White House because the military chiefs of the United States did not trust their civilian leaders, up to and including Richard Nixon.
Radford had confessed to countless violations of the Espionage Act, the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, which could send him to prison for life. He had acted on orders from his superior, Adm. Robert Welander, the Joint Chiefs’ liaison officer at the National Security Council. Welander reported directly to Adm. Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Both admirals were as guilty as the yeoman. Public disclosure of these facts could make the Pentagon Papers case look like a misdemeanor.
That made going after Jack Anderson a very tricky question for the president. “If you start opening upon Anderson,” Attorney General Mitchell said, “Lord knows where this is going to lead.”
What about the yeoman? the president asked. “You wouldn’t do anything about him?” Ehrlichman said, “You can’t touch him because it would—” Nixon finished the thought: “Hurt the Joint Chiefs.”
The White House tapes spun as Nixon hammered his fist down on his desk, righteously appalled. “We can’t have this goddamn security problem!” The case, he said, was “a federal offense of the highest order.”
* * *
Ehrlichman summoned Admiral Welander to his office in the West Wing of the White House for a taped-recorded interview on December 22. Ehrlichman said at the outset that he served as “the house detective” for the president. His aide David R. Young took notes. Young, thirty-five, intelligent, intense, a lawyer interested in everything from treaties to terrorism, was a founding member of the White House Special Investigations Unit, the crew charged with stopping leaks; he had been in on the botched black-bag job against Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The placard on his door at Room 16 of the Executive Office Building read, “Plumber.”
Slowly, skillfully, with increasing severity, and with significant help from Young, who had put Yeoman Radford through an intense interrogation on a polygraph, Ehrlichman wrung a confession from the admiral.
“Your alter ego, this yeoman, was at a very critical crossroads, so to speak, in the transmission of information in the national security apparatus,” Ehrlichman said. “He has access to everything”: CIA reports, NSC records, classified State Department cables, Situation Room transcripts.
“I cover the whole waterfront,” said Admiral Welander, and Radford worked “exclusively for me.”
Ehrlichman dug deeper: “This Anderson stuff. Can you account for it in any way?” The admiral admitted, “I know it all comes from my files.”
“Does Admiral Moorer know?” Ehrlichman asked.
“The most significant things,” Welander said, and “he knows that Radford picked this up.”
Ehrlichman and Young pressed him harder. The more they probed, the worse things appeared. Yeoman Radford had stolen top-secret files from Kissinger and Haig. Radford had rifled not only Kissinger’s briefcases but his “burn bags,” copies of top-secret material designated for destruction in the name of national security. He backhanded everything to Welander, who slipped it all to Moorer and the Joint Chiefs. The Joint Chiefs and their White House spies saw decision papers drafted for Nixon before the president read them. They had their hands on proposals for foreign policies before Nixon saw them. They learned about Kissinger’s secret negotiations with the Chinese in Beijing and the North Vietnamese in Paris as they happened—and not even Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence, had known about that.
“I’ve got a full account of our involvement in Cambodia from Day One, which would make the Pentagon Papers pale by comparison,” Welander said. “Almost anything you name.”
How to shut down the spy ring without rupturing relations with the Joint Chiefs? Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell wrestled with the problem that day, and the next, sitting in the Oval Office while the lights of the White House Christmas tree twinkled nearby in the identically shaped Blue Room.
The president truly wanted to prosecute the yeoman. But Haldeman cautioned against a criminal case. And Mitchell sided with him.
“What we’re doing here is, in effect, excusing a crime,” Nixon said. “It’s a hell of a damn thing to do.” But the admirals and generals had to be kept silent and loyal.
“I think they’d be shocked to know what this guy did,” the president said.
“They know!” Ehrlichman said. “Absolutely!”
“And they knew that he was stealing from Kissinger?”
“They had to.”
The hard question confronted the president. Should there be a criminal prosecution or a court-martial? There was only one other alternative: cover-up.
“That’s the question now,” Ehrlichman told the president on December 23. “Admiral Welander thinks that we should put the yeoman in jail. Admiral Moorer thinks we should put Welander in jail.” And Haldeman said Kissinger wanted Moorer keelhauled. “As you go up the ladder,” he added, “everybody’s going to crucify the guy under him.” Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman laughed bitterly. “Everyone else should go to jail!” the president said.
But they absolutely had to “take care of the yeoman,” Nixon said with finality on Christmas Eve. “Got any ideas?” he asked Ehrlichman.
“Yeah, but they’re all illegal.”
“All of them illegal?” the president said with a chuckle.
“Put him in a sack and drop him out of an airplane.”
“That would do it,” Nixon said.
* * *
Mitchell, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, rested his case. He firmly decreed that the best course would be to prevent this high crime from becoming public knowledge. Keep it out of court. Close the liaison office. Consign the yeoman to oblivion—Radford went to a tiny naval base in Oregon—and send his commander to sea half a world away from Washington. Mitchell himself told Admiral Moorer that his spy ring was broken.
Above all, said Mitchell, they had to stop “the fuck-up of security” inside the White House. The president agreed. “The main thing is to keep it under as close control as we can,” Nixon said to him. They ordered a warrantless wiretap on Radford.
Nixon refused Kissinger’s demand for Moorer’s dismissal. “I don’t care if Moorer is guilty,” the president said. “The military must survive.” Kissinger flew into a towering rage. “They can spy on him and spy on me and betray us!” he shouted at Ehrlichman. The Radford case would have very serious consequences, he warned. And it did. “The worst thing about it is … you start getting paranoid,” Haldeman told the president. “You start wondering about everything and everybody.” Nixon replied that even paranoids had enemies. “Don’t be too damn sure about anybody!” he warned. “If there’s ever anything important, just don’t tell anybody.”
“It’s a horrible way to have to work,” Haldeman sighed. “But it’s essential.”
Already secretive by instinct and experience, Nixon immediately tightened his inner circle so closely that very few people knew his mind on any crucial matter at any given time. None was in his Cabinet. Alone, unquestioned, unchallenged, Nixon ran the military, intelligence, and national security policies of the American government through Kissinger and Haig. And Kissinger himself later reflected that the Radford affair fueled a far greater disaster. While the fear and secrecy and willful ignorance might not exonerate the crimes of Watergate, he wrote a decade later, “it might partially explain their origin.”
On January 5, 1972, Richard Nixon formally began his last race. He placed Mitchell, still attorney general, in charge of his reelection. Some of the most tough-minded and least-sensible aides to Haldeman and Ehrlichman moved one block down Pennsylvania Avenue, to the headquarters of the Committee to Re-elect the President, inevitably nicknamed CREEP. The Plumbers ran rampant. Very quickly, things started happening that no one knew about.