Winston Lord was a patrician young New Yorker who had glided from the secrecy of the Skull and Bones tomb at Yale to the State Department. He would later ascend to be Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to China and then an assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton. In 1971, he held a cherished White House job as Henry Kissinger’s special assistant and indispensable aide on China. Cerebral and hardworking, he became so close with his boss that on Richard Nixon’s first visit to Beijing in 1972, Kissinger brought the thirty-four-year-old staffer along to take notes on the meeting with Mao Zedong himself. His image had to be cropped out of official pictures to avoid incensing William Rogers, the secretary of state, who got left out.1
Lord was one of the tiny clique of people who knew the single most important fact about world politics: that Nixon and Kissinger were secretly planning an opening to China. And he also knew something that nobody in the Dacca consulate could have guessed: that Yahya, while crushing the Bengalis, was also carrying messages from China to the Nixon team.
Lord, who is keenly intelligent and enduringly loyal to Kissinger, remembers their China project with a high moral purpose: “If you’re talking about human rights, if you’re trying to prevent nuclear war, constraining the Soviets, if you have to hold your nose with some of your allies, balancing was also a human right if it kept the world from blowing up.”
But he recalls the daunting challenges in opening to China after twenty-two years of mutual isolation. He asks, “How did you get in contact with the Chinese? The only channel we had was propaganda exchanges in Geneva and Warsaw”—mostly useless recitations of talking points, he says, and too visible anyway.
Pakistan was one of many options. “Nixon and Kissinger tried several channels,” says Lord. “There was a halfhearted attempt with de Gaulle in ’69. They tried through Romania.” The Americans could have got to Beijing through Bucharest or Paris—or some other city—instead of Islamabad. Kissinger later told Nixon that “you thought up Romania, you were the one who thought up the Polish deal, and you were the one who talked to Yahya the first time you were there in Lahore.” Kissinger also made an approach through Paris, asking his old friend Jean Sainteny, a veteran French diplomat, to set up a private channel there through the Chinese ambassador to France. And Kissinger met with Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, Romania’s brutal despot, asking him to facilitate communications with China.2
Yahya leaped at his chance. As early as October 1970—before the cyclone and the Pakistani elections—Nixon had personally told Yahya that it was essential for the United States to open negotiations with China, and Yahya had volunteered himself as a conduit for secret diplomacy. The Pakistani strongman, who was going to Beijing soon, pledged to explain to the Chinese that the White House would consider a clandestine meeting in Rawalpindi, or perhaps Paris. As promised, Yahya spoke personally to Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, and scored impressive results: an invitation from Mao himself for the United States to send a special envoy to Beijing. According to Yahya, Zhou had praised the use of him as an intermediary, since he was a head of state and Pakistan was “a great friend of China.” Kissinger considered a meeting in Rawalpindi.3
“The picking of channels was done by Kissinger and Nixon,” Lord recalls. “We laid out a smorgasbord, and they picked Pakistan.” But while the choice seems overdetermined in retrospect (Kissinger would later claim that “we had no other means of communication with Peking”), it was not at the time. Pakistan, says Lord, was not the only option acceptable to the White House.4
On March 25, when the slaughter started in East Pakistan, the White House was still weighing several other China options. Ceaus¸escu had delivered a success too, bringing back an almost identical invitation from Mao as the one from Yahya. When Nixon replied to Zhou, he sent his message through both Pakistan and Romania. A week after the Blood telegram, Nixon and Kissinger were weighing meetings with Yahya and Ceaus¸escu as back channels, as well as talking about letters sent through Sainteny. A few days later, Kissinger told Nixon that they now needed a direct channel to China, and considered sending a general to Warsaw to set up communications. In late April, Kissinger was still considering using Sainteny. And on April 22—almost a month into the Bengali bloodshed—Kissinger told Nixon that Ceaus¸escu had sent a top official to Beijing, carrying back a message for the White House.5
Kissinger and his team often justify the tilt toward Pakistan as vital for the opening to China. Harold Saunders, the senior White House aide, remembers Kissinger’s focus on China. “China will be looking at how we’ll be treating an ally,” he says, explaining his boss’s thinking. “That was the governing factor. I know I took a lot of flak from my State colleagues, but I couldn’t tell them that. It was a very tightly held secret.”
But Kissinger later wrote that he thought their Pakistan policy was “correct on the merits, above and beyond the China connection.” Lord has said, “It’s a huge exaggeration to say that we did this solely as a favor to the Chinese.” He is skeptical about how much the China channel really mattered for the White House’s backing of Pakistan, and instead frames the issue in the Cold War: “India was allegedly nonaligned, but we considered it pro-Soviet, getting Soviet weapons. So you already had an American bias toward Pakistan before the opening to China. It was geopolitical. India’s on the Russian team, so we’ll put Pakistan on our team.… To say we tilted toward Pakistan because of the opening to China is an oversimplification. We might have done that anyway.”6
On the curb of a main downtown intersection in Dacca, there lay a corpse. The dead man was a worker, barefoot, and had been lying there for hours. Nobody touched him. Nobody even dared to look at him. People simply stepped over the body. This was not out of callousness, but fear. A U.S. official in Dacca noted that “people have been shot for moving bodies.” The army seemed to want as many people as possible to see the dead.7
The Dacca consulate’s staffers kept up their stubborn daily project of feeding their superiors with bad news. This was, in the end, a more significant achievement than the sensational dissent telegram. Ignored by Washington, they became, as Archer Blood remembered later with some pride, “testy and pugnacious,” often “real pains in the neck.” One official in Blood’s consulate wrote that most foreigners in East Pakistan “stay because there is still the faint hope that the constant reporting will finally produce more than echoes within the corridors, and because it is extremely difficult to leave fearing the future of those left behind.”8
Blood and his team believed they had some reason to hope. Thanks to intrepid reporters who snuck into East Pakistan, newspapers and television news ran vivid stories about the killing. Throughout the first month of slaughter, the U.S. government held a loud internal debate about its South Asia policy. There was voluminous input from the State Department and the two feuding ambassadors in Delhi and Islamabad, as well as the renegade consul in Dacca—although none of them knew what Winston Lord did. Still, despite having every opportunity to hear opposite points of view, Nixon and Kissinger—the only two people who counted—did not budge.9
Rogers, the Secretary of State, reflecting some of the ferment among his underlings, told Nixon the time had come to reevaluate U.S. policy toward Pakistan—in particular “the Pakistan Army’s use of U.S.-supplied military equipment,” which was embarrassing for public opinion. From Islamabad, Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador there, weighed in for a nonintervention policy, but added some mild disapproval of Pakistan. At most, he wanted to privately suggest to Pakistani officials that force would not work in the long run, and find bureaucratic excuses to suspend new shipments of arms and ammunition. He warned against alienating Yahya, and doubted that economic sanctions would work any better against Pakistan than they had with South Africa or Rhodesia.10
Jousting back, Archer Blood rejected that cringing tone. He warned that the carnage was driving moderate Bengalis into the arms of their leftist radicals, and that the Soviet Union had been more outspoken for human rights and democracy than the United States. On behalf of his whole consulate, he urged Nixon to tell Yahya of “our deep disapproval of suppression of democratic forces and widespread loss of lives and property.” He argued for cutting off U.S. military and economic assistance to Pakistan, urging a new “policy which freezes aid for the time being without apologetic statements and without utterance of hopes that US is desirous of resuming aid and anxiously awaiting G[overnment] O[f] P[akistan] plans.” Blood did not even trust Yahya’s government to deliver food aid, acidly noting that the military authorities’ “concern with food not convincingly demonstrated by continuing razing of markets.”11
From Delhi, Kenneth Keating similarly argued that the Nixon administration should exhort Pakistan to stop its repression and voice its “displeasure at the use of American arms and materiel,” which was proving hugely embarrassing. Keating wanted to stop U.S. military supply and suspend economic aid. He tried a realpolitik argument: “Pakistan is probably finished as a unified state; India is clearly the predominant actual and potential power in this area of the world.” Instead of backing a weak loser, the United States should turn to a strong winner.12
Rather than sticking up for his contrarians in Dacca and Delhi, the secretary of state tried to shut them up. Rogers told Kissinger, “We have Ken Keating quieted down.” Kissinger replied, “I appreciated that.” Thus the only diplomat whose opinion counted was Farland, whom Kissinger reached out to directly, bypassing the State Department, to ask the ambassador to send him a frank assessment.13
Farland decried the State Department’s advocacy for the Bengalis. Although admitting that Pakistan was crumbling, he still did not want to give up on it. The Pakistan army would soon wrap up its offensive and proceed to “mopping up,” which would get it out of U.S. newspapers. If the United States adopted Blood’s policy of leaning hard on Pakistan, Farland threatened to resign. In this private message to Kissinger, Farland slammed Blood: “Embassy has had full-scale revolt on general issue by virtually all officers in Consulate General, Dacca, coupled with forfeiture of leadership for American community there. Dacca’s reporting has been tendentious to an extreme.”14
The only really clear achievement of all this debate was to hurt Archer Blood’s feelings. He was lacerated to slowly realize that his fellow diplomats in Islamabad did not believe him. Despondent, evidently trying to salvage his career, he unconvincingly suggested that everyone—in Dacca, Islamabad, and Washington—was now on “approximately [the] same wave length,” and suggested that these matters were best “discussed over a drink with friends and colleagues.” Since he had just told his bosses that they were morally bankrupt and complicit with genocide, they might not have been inclined to invite him over for a beer.15
At an awkward meeting at the Islamabad embassy, Blood, along with Eric Griffel and Scott Butcher, held his ground, but found his fellow diplomats obviously saddened by them: Blood later wrote that “their formerly respected colleagues in the East Wing had clearly gone off the deep end.” When the deputy from the Islamabad embassy came to visit Dacca, downplaying the atrocities, an astonished Blood blew up at him. He hauled the visiting skeptic to Dacca University, showing him a stairwell that was heavily pockmarked with bullet holes. There was a sickly sweet reek from the bottom of the stairwell. They could make out rotting bodies. Blood’s colleague’s attitude had reminded him of Yahya’s reported response to the cyclone: “It doesn’t look so bad.”16
While the State Department was still busily honing its various arguments, Nixon and Kissinger could hardly have cared less. Pakistan’s role as a channel to China added to their unwillingness to speak up about the killings in East Pakistan. “Thank God we didn’t get into the Pakistan thing,” the president said. “We are smart to stay the hell out of that.” “Absolutely,” agreed Kissinger. “Now, State has a whole list of needling, nasty little things they want to do to West Pakistan. I don’t think we should do it, Mr. President.” Nixon growled, “Not a goddamn thing. I will not allow it.”17
The most neuralgic issue was U.S. military aid to Pakistan. As Blood persistently noted, Pakistan’s armed forces were using lots of U.S. arms against the Bengalis. He gave new specifics about the weapons—F-86 Sabre jet fighters, M-24 Chaffee tanks, jeeps equipped with machine guns—saying there was “no doubt” that it was happening.18
In early April, Kissinger’s staffers, Harold Saunders and Samuel Hoskinson, explained plainly what was at stake in continuing to arm Pakistan: “the rest of the world will assume—no matter what we might say—that we support West Pakistan in its struggle against the majority civilian population in the East. If we cut off their military supply or even suspend or slow it down, the West Pakistanis and the rest of the world will view it at a minimum as a move to dissociate ourselves and at a maximum as a move to halt the war.”19
By concentrating only on the question of what U.S. arms might now be shipped to Pakistan, the White House addressed only the smallest and newest part of the massive U.S. arsenal provided since the Eisenhower administration. Edward Kennedy’s office would calculate that 80 percent of Pakistan’s military equipment was from the United States, while the State Department rather fuzzily claimed that less than half of what Pakistan was currently using was American. Either way, it was a huge chunk of Pakistan’s total stockpile.20
But throughout the bloodshed, the White House did not make any complaints that Pakistan was using its current stores of U.S. weapons against the Bengali civilian population. Of course, even when Pakistani troops were not directly using U.S. tanks or warplanes, the presence of U.S. weaponry in other parts of Pakistan had the effect of freeing Pakistani troops up to mete out violence in East Pakistan. Still, the only weapons that the White House was considering were the latest installments of U.S. military assistance.
The White House struggled to figure out exactly how much weaponry was due to Pakistan. Samuel Hoskinson grimaces at the memory. “There was an endless debate about what was in the pipeline and what wasn’t,” he says. “We could never get a grip on it. It made you crazy. When you deal with the Pentagon, you go into a world of mirrors. It was a morass. Impossible to figure out.”
The details were confounding. Legally, Pakistan was still under a U.S. arms embargo, imposed after its attack on India back in 1965. But Nixon had opened up major arms shipments again in October 1970, when he had made an “exception” to the embargo, offering a big haul, hearkening back to the lavish period of U.S. weapons supply started under Dwight Eisenhower: armored personnel carriers, fighter planes, bombers, and more. None of this had been delivered yet, but Pakistan had put in a down payment for the armored personnel carriers, and was eager to get hold of the rest. Saunders calculated that Pakistan had some $44 million worth of military equipment on order from the United States, including $18 million of lethal arms, $3 million of ammunition, and $18 million of spare parts vital to keep the army and air force functioning. Kissinger somewhat more conservatively told Nixon that altogether, Pakistan was still awaiting delivery of some $34 million worth of military equipment, purchased over the past few years, although the real amount that would ship anytime soon would probably be half of that.21
This, Kissinger knew, would generate all the wrong kinds of headlines. The press was already in full cry over revelations that some ammunition and spare parts were still going out to Pakistan. Kissinger informed Nixon that “we have deliberately avoided” reimposing a total “formal embargo” on Pakistan. But they needed to avoid the embarrassment of major arms shipments to Pakistan at this moment. Through sheer good luck, it turned out that none of the major deliveries were scheduled during the crisis, which let the White House look less obdurate. As Kissinger told Nixon, if some spectacular U.S. weapons systems turned up in Pakistan now, “the appearance of insensitivity” would provoke the Democrats who controlled Congress to legislate their own stop to arms shipments—which would be tougher than anything that the Nixon administration could contemplate.22
As the White House weighed its options, it did not realize that it had already been outmaneuvered by the State Department. Soon after the shooting started on March 25, the State Department had quietly imposed an administrative hold on military equipment for Pakistan, which was ostensibly only supposed to last until the White House could make a formal decision. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the Pakistani military was “very bitter about the arms supply.”23
The result was a quiet suspension of the biggest shipments, like those three hundred armored personnel carriers and the fighter and bomber aircraft. Pakistan was still getting some U.S. supplies that were already under way. This was couched, Kissinger told Nixon, as “simple administrative sluggishness,” rather than a reprimand, because “we wanted to avoid the political signal which an embargo would convey.” Kissinger, evidently trying to drop a mollifying hint to Democrats, told McGeorge Bundy, the former national security advisor to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, that there were a “few spare parts” on their way to Pakistan, but “nothing new is scheduled for shipment for six months or so. So we don’t have to face that for a few months. We’re going to drag our feet on implementing sales and drag out negotiations.”24
Kissinger was clear that neither he nor Nixon would support stopping arms supplies to Pakistan. This was merely a temporary, informal dodge, until the press found something else to write about. Those armored personnel carriers, for instance, were not due to be delivered until May 1972, and Kissinger, while deferring a decision about them, was not about to stop the sale or return the down payment. Kissinger suggested buying time on technical grounds. The deputy secretary of defense admitted that it was possible that some armaments would show up in Pakistan: “Congress may holler and you can just blame it on the stupid Defense Department.”
Some military supply would keep going. When it was pointed out that twenty-eight thousand rounds of ammunition and some bomb parts were due in July, and that Congress might object, Kissinger told a Situation Room meeting, “But we would pay a very heavy price with Yahya if they were not delivered.” He insisted that an explicit decision be taken by Nixon “before we hold up any shipments. This would be the exact opposite of his policy. He is not eager for a confrontation with Yahya.” Kissinger added, “If these weapons could be used in East Pakistan, it would be different”—although in fact the United States had not asked Pakistan to stop using tanks or warplanes against Bengalis.25
Nixon and Kissinger were pleased that the Pakistan army was regaining control of the scorched cities. In April, as his soldiers surged forward, Yahya tried to create a new government in East Pakistan to replace the elected leaders of the outlawed Awami League. He put forward Bengalis who were committed to a united Pakistan and disparaged the Awami League—in other words, the kind of people who had lost the elections. Blood laughed at Yahya’s docile group of collaborationist politicians, seen by the overwhelming majority of Bengalis as a “puppet regime.”26
Blood understood that this was only the first phase of a long civil war. The rebels, he reported, were avoiding direct clashes with the better-armed Pakistan army, to preserve their strength for later guerrilla combat. So the real war would come during the monsoon rains, as the fighting raged on in the countryside.27
The most surreal debate about who would win the civil war came when Blood, on a trip to the Islamabad embassy, had a face-off with, of all people, Chuck Yeager—the famous test pilot who had been the first human to break the sound barrier. Joseph Farland had somehow managed to enlist his fellow West Virginian, now a brigadier general, as a U.S. defense representative. By his own admission, Yeager knew almost nothing about Pakistan (a “very primitive and rough country and Moslem”), but quickly became a vehement supporter of Pakistan’s military.28
As Blood remembered, Yeager sneeringly asked him how the ill-equipped Bengalis could possibly stand up to the disciplined Pakistan army. Blood felt like snapping back, “Haven’t you fellows learned anything from Vietnam?” Restraining himself, he managed a suitably professional reply—that the guerrillas would wear down and outnumber the Pakistan army, and that India could quickly crush the Pakistan army too—but suddenly felt depressed and terribly lonely.29
Pakistan’s military advances throughout April reassured Nixon and Kissinger that Yahya might subdue East Pakistan after all. Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy national security advisor—who would go on to be Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state—reassured Nixon, “The fighting is about over—there is considerable stability now.” Kissinger was bolstered by the CIA’s deputy director, who said that the Bengali rebels were collapsing. Heartened, Kissinger questioned the prospect of a long war. He admitted that if the Bengali nationalists launched mass noncooperation campaigns and marshaled guerrilla forces, the situation could prove “very tough,” but saw no evidence that they were doing that. Instead, he said, “West Pakistani superiority seems evident. I agree I used to think that 30,000 men couldn’t possibly subdue 75 million, which I suppose is the Western way of looking at it”—here he omitted his private discussions with Nixon, in which he had concluded quite the opposite. “But if the 75 million don’t organize and don’t fight, the situation is different.”30
Yahya was effusive in his gratitude to Nixon. In a warm letter, he sympathized about the American public pressure that Nixon was withstanding, and insisted that reports of atrocities were Indian-inspired exaggerations. He was “deeply gratified” that the United States saw the crisis as “an internal affair” to be resolved by Pakistan’s government.31
This was certainly Kissinger’s view. Even relatively minor insults to Pakistan’s sovereign prerogatives were too much for him. When it was suggested that Yahya promise that U.S. food aid would get to rural Bengalis, Kissinger recoiled at that “substantial challenge to the West Pakistan notion of sovereignty.” He said, “It would be as though, in our civil war, the British had offered food to Lincoln on the condition that it be used to feed the people in Alabama.”32
To others, Yahya looked a lot more like King George III than Abraham Lincoln. Keating, the ambassador to India, told a reporter that the concept of national sovereignty could be “overdone” (for which the State Department told him to shut up). And Blood and his consulate refused to accept that Yahya could do whatever he wanted within Pakistan’s sovereign borders, overturning a fair election and killing his citizenry. The “extra-constitutional martial law regime of President Yahya Khan is of dubious legitimacy (how many votes did Yahya obtain?).” They heralded the “anti-colonial” Bengali struggle, comparing it to the American Revolution. “They want to participate in deciding their own destiny,” Blood’s team wrote. “Even our forefathers fought for similar ideals.”33
There was another administration official with rather brighter career prospects who brought up human rights: George H. W. Bush, then the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations. The future president’s mission argued that India should be allowed to criticize Pakistan’s domestic human rights record at a United Nations body, because of the “tradition which we have supported that [the] human rights question transcend[s] domestic jurisdiction and should be freely debated,” notably Soviet and Arab oppression of Jews. “We have never objected to the right of others to criticize domestic conditions in the US maintaining that, as a free society, our policies are fully open to scrutiny.” That had the ring of principle, but Bush was not about to pick a fight with Nixon or Kissinger. Although he knew that something truly awful was happening in East Pakistan—his office had recently reported that the Indian government estimated the Bengali civilian death toll at between thirty thousand and a million, with the sober-minded Indian ambassador at the United Nations reckoning the total at roughly one hundred thousand—Bush made no effort to say anything beyond the official timid line of “concern” about the Bengalis.34
At the White House, Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s senior aide on South Asia, tried a somewhat louder—but still genteel—challenge to U.S. policy. Saunders remembers that he absorbed the angry complaints coming from the State Department, including those from Blood and others. “I was closely working with the people in State, who obviously were close to our people on the ground,” he says. “I realize how strongly they felt. And, I thought, with good reason. I agreed with them.”35
Saunders and Samuel Hoskinson argued that the Bengalis would almost certainly win, breaking free of a distant government in Islamabad with limited resources. The American public would recoil: a military regime was using mass killings to crush a majority that had won a fair election. Soon after, Saunders, appealing to Kissinger’s strategic sensibilities, tried out a realpolitik pitch for India: “Insofar as US interests can be defined simply in terms of a balance of power among states, it would be logical—if a choice were required—for the US to align itself with the 600 million people of India and East Pakistan and to leave the 60 million of West Pakistan in relative geographical isolation.” Kissinger was unmoved: “Whom are we trying to impress in East Pakistan?”36
On April 19, Saunders sent Kissinger a memorandum with the unusually intimate title “Pakistan—a Personal Reflection on the Choice Before Us.” Challenging Kissinger’s hope for Yahya’s military victory, he declared that the disintegration of Pakistan was inevitable. (This was confirmed by an intelligence community analysis, which said there was little chance that the army could put down the Bengali insurgency.) Saunders wanted to coax Yahya to pull back from a ruinous civil war, gently encouraging him toward autonomy for East Pakistan. Rather than threatening to cut off aid, as Blood would, he put his trust in Pakistani goodwill: “I would not tell Yahya that he must do anything.” This, he mildly wrote, would be merely “an effort to help a friend find a practical and face-saving way out of a bind.” In a joint paper with Samuel Hoskinson, he was somewhat more direct, saying that U.S. pressure could “preserve a relationship with Yahya while making a serious effort to get him—and us—off a disastrous course.”37
Temperate as this was, Kissinger was unswayed. Saunders remembers that his boss held fast to the principle that the United States should not tell other leaders how to run their countries: “So he didn’t buy it.” Saunders says that, in retrospect, “the China thought was paramount.”
In a Situation Room meeting that day, Saunders had to sit silently while Kissinger resisted putting any pressure on Pakistan. Kissinger batted away proposals for cutting off military aid or development loans, which would bring “a substantial rupture of our relations with Yahya.” He stood firm against confronting Yahya: “no matter what our view may be of the savagery of the West Pakistan troops, we would just be pulling India’s chestnuts out of the fire if we take on West Pakistan.”
Kissinger had repeatedly reminded senior officials that Nixon “does have a special feeling about Yahya.” Each time that Kissinger invoked presidential authority, he emphasized how hard it would be to drive any wedge between Nixon and Yahya: “The President thinks he has a special relationship with Yahya; he would be most reluctant to take him on. This reluctance might be overcome, but we can’t do it at this level.” Kissinger ended the meeting by saying he would go to the president. Everyone in the Situation Room knew what that meant.38
On April 21, Zhou Enlai sent a breakthrough message using Yahya, in which the Chinese premier suggested that Kissinger, Rogers, or even Nixon himself come to Beijing. Zhou suggested that all the arrangements could “be made through the good offices of President Yahya Khan.”39
At this point, the White House retired its other China channels. Bucharest, Warsaw, Paris—all were shut down. Kissinger had written another letter for Jean Sainteny in Paris, which was now abandoned. Saunders remembers that Kissinger thought the Romanian government was untrustworthy. The Chinese leadership did not trust any communist country, Lord notes. Nor would they rely on France, a U.S. ally.40
Nixon and Kissinger relished their coming triumph. This, Kissinger told the president, would end the Vietnam War this year. They left the State Department in the dark. When Nixon suggested sending George Bush to Beijing, soon after the future president had argued for India’s right to speak about human rights, Kissinger was withering: “Absolutely not, he is too soft and not sophisticated enough.” This was a job that Kissinger wanted for himself.41
Winston Lord, Kissinger’s special assistant, was primarily concerned with how useful Yahya’s government had been with China. But as he uncomfortably wrote to Kissinger, “We can afford neither to alienate Pakistan nor to ignore Indian sensitivities, the nasty practices of Yahya’s army, and the fact that almost all observers believe that Bangla Desh will eventually become an independent entity.”42
But Yahya won fresh appreciation from the White House. With perfect timing, his newfound role in the opening to China came precisely as the Nixon administration was firming up its policy on Pakistan. “Yahya sent you the message from Zhou Enlai,” Kissinger told Nixon, “saying that it’s the first time we’ve had a direct report from a president, through a president, to a president.” This was a phrase that Nixon would savor for the rest of his days—it even, he later claimed, echoed in his mind on his last, dark night in the White House before resigning.43
Nixon and Kissinger bitterly remembered the Blood telegram as an act of unbearable insolence. But almost nothing of the reporting and advocacy by Blood’s consulate had any lasting impact on them. A month into the slaughter, the Nixon administration firmed up its Pakistan policy in the quiet of the Oval Office. Kissinger urged the president to continue support for Yahya, with only a little retreat.
Kissinger firmly believed in exercising leverage over other governments. He once told Nixon that “pressure gets you to places, or the potentiality of pressure. No one has yet done a thing for us because we needed it or because we were nice guys.” But here, despite crucial U.S. diplomatic and economic support and ongoing military supply—which Kissinger called “relatively small” but “an important symbolic element”—he avoided wielding any such pressure. No doubt there were limits to U.S. influence, but Kissinger never explored them.44
He was coy about whether Pakistan could survive as a single country. He admitted that even if the rebels were soon crushed, East Pakistan would remain a tinderbox of “widespread discontent and hatred,” but he also offered Nixon some hope: the Pakistan army would probably soon retake control of the cities, with the Bengali nationalist resistance too weak and poorly armed to prevent that now.
Kissinger recommended trying to help Yahya reach a negotiated settlement to the war. On paper, this was not the most extreme possible option (in the classic Washington trick, he had included two other sucker choices, one totally pro-Pakistan and one pro-Bengali), but on closer examination, it meant strong support for Yahya. There would be nothing like the duress that Blood wanted: “We would not withhold aid now for the sake of applying pressure.” (That would only be contemplated much later, he wrote, after the West Pakistanis had been given every chance to negotiate themselves a settlement.) To the contrary, the United States would give emergency economic help, and would support assistance from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Kissinger never suggested that the massacres should be a factor in U.S. policy, even as an indicator of Yahya’s misjudgment or unreliability. Nor did he broach complaining to Pakistan about its use of its vast arsenal of U.S. weapons against civilians. Instead, he only considered future shipments of arms and military supplies, which would be a small fraction of what Pakistan already had on hand. Here, Kissinger wanted to help as much as possible without running afoul of Congress: “allowing enough shipments of non-lethal spares and equipment to continue to avoid giving Yahya the impression we are cutting off military assistance but holding shipment of more controversial items in order not to provoke the Congress to force cutting off all aid.”
It was, in the end, no choice at all. Nixon dutifully initialed the option that Kissinger recommended. Lest the bureaucracy get any ideas, Kissinger had also suggested that Nixon should specify that nothing should be done to squeeze West Pakistan. Duly coached, Nixon added his own commentary, veering closer to the sucker option of total backing for Pakistan. The president scrawled, “To all hands. Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.” He underlined the word “Don’t” three times.45
Richard Nixon was not the kind of president who indulged whistleblowers or dissenters. Although formally his administration had created the dissent channel, he had no patience for those who dared step out of line. “We never fire anybody,” he once complained. “We always promote the sons of bitches that kick us in the ass.… When a bureaucrat deliberately thumbs his nose, we’re going to get him.… The little boys over in State particularly, that are against us, we will do it.” Another time, he told his staffers that he welcomed dissent memoranda sent directly to him, but immediately sarcastically noted that he would “be sure, once he’s received it, that it’s marked Top Secret so it will get out in all the newspapers.”46
“We’ve got a lot of little people who love to be heroes,” the president complained to his cabinet in June. He loathed someone like Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Nixon had no patience for such showy displays of conscience, as he told the cabinet: “I get a lot of advice on PR and personality and how I’ve got to put on my nice-guy hat and dance at the White House, so I did it, but let me make it clear that’s not my nature.”47
Kissinger worked Nixon up. “It shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President,” he said. “[T]hese leaks are slowly and systematically destroying us.… It could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy.” Nixon’s fury went beyond the law. “We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy,” he told H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff. “They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?” He created a team—the Plumbers—to hunt down leakers, and ordered Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Institution and Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, seeking material for a smear campaign. “You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it.”48
Kissinger, with his professorial background, presented himself as someone who could handle criticism. But he hated leaks, once telling a Chinese delegation that “our bureaucracy doesn’t always speak with one voice, and … those who don’t speak with one voice usually speak to the New York Times.” His bullying of the State Department went so far that few there dared stand up to him. “You don’t have to threaten us or intimidate us,” a much-vilified State Department official once snapped at him. “You will scare the hell out of so many people in this building that no one will give you the information you should hear.”49
So the Blood telegram invited stern retaliation from the White House. The spectacular act of the dissent cable had lodged firmly in Kissinger’s memory. He (garbling Blood’s and Farland’s postings) complained, “The Embassy in Dacca and the Consul in Islamabad are at war with each other.” In a private conversation with Nixon in the Oval Office, he later denounced Blood as “this maniac in Dacca, the Consul General who is in rebellion.”50
There was a familiar Nixonian remedy: fire Blood. “It was the kind of thing that was done in those days,” says Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aide at the White House. “They did remove people from posts that they didn’t like. In the context of the time, it seemed quite natural.”51
By late April, as Nixon reached his decision not to squeeze Yahya, Blood was shoved out of the Dacca consulate. The ambassador in Islamabad informed Blood that a decision had been made “at the highest level” to move him out of Dacca. He was asked to request home leave and transfer back to the State Department—in other words, unceremoniously sacked from his position as consul general in Dacca.52
“They were cleaning out the house of miscreants,” remembers Scott Butcher, the Dacca consulate’s junior political officer, sarcastically using the term that the Pakistan army leveled against Bengali nationalists. Hoskinson says, “It was almost surprising he lasted as long as he did.” Since sending in the dissent cable, Blood had expected this, but, he later recalled, it “still came as a jolt.” He was particularly wounded to learn that his fellow diplomats questioned his judgment. It was the low point of his career. As he put it afterward, he “hit rock bottom.”53
At the White House, Hoskinson and Harold Saunders watched in queasy silence. Saunders says respectfully of Blood, “He took the responsibility. He paid the price.” “Hal and I had the same attitude about this throughout,” says Hoskinson. “It’s like, this is above our pay grade. Henry makes his mind up, and out goes Blood. This is not something that you ask Henry why you did it. Maybe the president wants him out. One did not want to be perceived as being too much on Blood’s side. I was always a little vulnerable in this regard.”
Saunders says about Blood, “He was just an honest FSO”—Foreign Service Officer—“who had experience in this part of the world. And he thought this needed to be put at the top of the agenda.” Saunders says that over eight years in power, Kissinger came to have enormous respect for the Foreign Service, but “when he came into his White House job, he had a view of them as bleeding hearts. They were certainly not the realpolitik thinkers that he would have been looking for. It was a prejudice, a bias.” Saunders had no illusions about how Kissinger responded to dissenters: “I know how he felt about people who would speak up. He was not tolerant of a lot of that.”54
After being told that he was sacked from his post, Blood managed to fire off some final reporting on the persecution of the Hindus. But he was a lame duck, and even before he left Dacca, the situation reports from East Pakistan started to come from another diplomat, Herbert Spivack—who had not signed the Blood telegram. Spivack, says Eric Griffel, the development official, was “a much more conservative character.” (Major General Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob of the Indian army is less polite: “Spivack was a clown.”) The new boss was, Griffel says, “quite a different person. Emotionally uninvolved. We were all emotionally involved.” Griffel recalls, “Spivack was a much more old faithful bureaucrat. The cables became much milder. Also, everyone knew that the battle had been lost as far as the consulate was concerned.”55
Nobody in the Dacca consulate could have guessed at the time exactly what Nixon and Kissinger were saying about them in the Oval Office. But Eric Griffel laughs out loud when told of Kissinger’s description of Blood as “this maniac in Dacca.” He says, “I can think of few people in the world who are less maniacal than Arch Blood. The thing about Blood that is rather remarkable is that he is very much a product of the State Department. A very loyal officer. A very conservative—not in the political sense—human being.”
Scott Butcher, hearing about what was said in the Oval Office, blows up. “It’s totally wrong,” he says heatedly. “They cast a lot of aspersions on our professionalism. We were on the ground. Arch Blood’s prognostications were absolutely right. Shame on them.” Meg Blood says calmly, “We recognized at the time that they were going to do this. They were going to simply ignore the reality of who he was.”
“Had Blood not done this,” says Griffel, “he would have hit rock bottom in a different way. And possibly a worse way. Not for everyone, but for a man like Arch, there are worse things than losing your career. I don’t like using words that don’t have an accurate meaning, but he was a man of honor. In his own view, he would have lost his honor.”