{"id":5829,"date":"2023-12-12T09:55:09","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T16:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/?p=5829"},"modified":"2023-12-12T09:55:09","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T16:55:09","slug":"kissinger-me-and-the-lies-of-the-master","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/2023\/12\/12\/kissinger-me-and-the-lies-of-the-master\/","title":{"rendered":"Kissinger, Me, and the Lies of the Master"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A very interesting article from Seymour Hersch on his dealings with Henry Kissinger, the right hand man of David Rockefeller, and one of the masterminds of the OCGFC in the conspiracy to rule the world. I have an interesting post<\/a> on Kissinger’s visits with Putin to read him in on what is planned and acceptable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/seymourhersh.substack.com\/p\/kissinger-me-and-the-lies-of-the<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
\u2018Off off the record\u2019 with the man who secretly taped our telephone calls<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

By Seymour Hersh<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing of the White House in 1969. \/ Photo by Wally McNamee\/Corbis via Getty Images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I left the New York Times<\/em> in 1979, after many good stories and some not so good times, to write a book, The Price of Power<\/a><\/em>, about Henry Kissinger and his years as a manipulating and dissembling national security adviser and secretary of state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I interviewed no less than one thousand officials, including scores who had worked for Henry, as he was known to all, and the 698-page book was published in 1983. It was a success in terms of sales, publicity and led to a year\u2019s worth of speeches at colleges and universities throughout America. But the book did little to diminish the mainstream press\u2019s intense love affair with all things Henry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The obituaries that followed his death last week were as fawning as the coverage when he lied and manipulated his way to fame while in office. The reality is that his role in weaning Russia and China from their support of North Vietnam at the height of that horrific war has often been overstated. He was a facilitator of diplomatic realities that were initially promulgated by President Richard Nixon, whose public awkwardness masked a shrewd insight into the willingness of great powers to betray even the closest of allies. (Forget about my tome if you want the deepest insights into the most deadly of Nixon and Kissinger\u2019s scheming: in 2013, Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton and former reporter for the Economist<\/em>, published The Blood Telegram<\/em>, a focused account of the mass murder that Nixon and Kissinger made inevitable in 1971 in what was then known as East Pakistan, with only the slightest of acknowledgement by the international media.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My dance with Kissinger did not begin until early 1972 when I was asked by Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor of the Times<\/em>, to join the newspaper\u2019s staff in Washington and write what I wanted as an investigative reporter about the Vietnam War\u2014with the proviso that I had better be damn sure I was right. By then, I had won lots of prizes, including the Pulitzer, for my reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and published two books, enough to land me a job at the best place in the world for a writer: as a reporter for the New Yorker<\/em>. But Rosenthal\u2019s offer and my hatred for the war led me to leave the magazine for the daily rush of a newspaper. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I arrived at the Washington bureau in the spring of 1972, my desk was directly across from the paper\u2019s main foreign policy reporter, a skilled journalist who was a master at writing coherent stories for the front page on deadline. I learned that around 5 pm on days when there were stories to be written about the war or disarmament\u2014Kissinger\u2019s wheelhouse\u2014the bureau chief\u2019s secretary would tell my colleague that \u201cHenry\u201d was on the phone with the bureau chief and would soon call him. Sure enough, the call would come and my colleague would frantically take notes and then produce a coherent piece reflecting what he had been told would invariably be the lead story in the next morning\u2019s paper. After a week or two of observing this, I asked the reporter if he ever checked what Kissinger had told him\u2014the stories he turned out never cited Kissinger by name but quoted senior Nixon administration officials\u2014by calling and conferring on background with William Rogers, the secretary of state, or Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOf course not,\u201d my colleague told me. \u201cIf I did that, Henry would no longer deal with us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please understand\u2014I am not making this up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kissinger, who had made no public remarks about my writings on the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, suddenly invited me to the White House for a private chat. I had just returned from a reporting trip to North Vietnam for the Times<\/em>\u2014I was the second mainstream American reporter in six years to be given a visa by Hanoi\u2014and we were to discuss it. I had written about North Vietnam\u2019s view of the secret peace talks Kissinger was conducting with the Vietnamese in Paris, but that was not the issue. He wanted, so I concluded, to stroke me. There was no question that, as a total loose cannon suddenly installed at the Times<\/em>, I was of special interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He asked me about my impressions of the North Vietnamese, as seen in a closely watched three-week visit to Hanoi and elsewhere in the North. I had been taken to areas that were under heavy American bombing attacks and witnessed the North\u2019s amazing ability to repair bombed-out rail lines within a few hours after an attack. Extra rails and the equipment needed to make repairs were hidden every few hundred yards along the tracks from Hanoi to the main harbor in Haiphong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He asked about the morale of the residents in Hanoi. I told him I had seen no signs of panic, fear, or desperation in my many unguarded (so I believed) walks throughout the city. Every morning, in fact, a group of schoolboys en route to class who had seen me when I first arrived would walk by my hotel in central Hanoi at the same hour\u2014I made a point of being outside then\u2014and cheerfully say \u2018Good morning, sir!\u201d in English to me. But I was always aware that I was in enemy territory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The schoolboys and other anecdotes prompted Kissinger to summon a prominent former ambassador who was his senior aide for matters related to the war and say to him, in front of me, in obvious mock anger: \u201cThis fellow is giving me more information about the morale in the North than I get from the CIA.\u201d I remember thinking \u201cIs this it? Is this all he\u2019s got? Does the guy really think this kind of obvious flattery is going to win me over?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the next few years Kissinger continued to take my calls, with the proviso that all of our conversations must be, as he once said, \u201coff off the record.\u201d I was not allowed to quote him by name and learned years later that I was the only one on our phone calls who played by the rules. An academic doing research on Kissinger told me that my allegedly private chats with the man were transcribed within hours\u2014he had obtained copies through the Freedom of Information Act\u2014and made available to Kissinger or his longtime aide, Army General Alexander Haig.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was pulled off the Vietnam beat by Rosenthal in late 1972, despite my heated objections, when the Watergate scandal broke and the Times<\/em> was being pummeled by the reporting of the Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Once again I found myself reporting on Kissinger, whose willingness to do anything to stay in Nixon\u2019s good graces knew no limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the spring of 1973, a soon-to-retire high-level FBI official, who clearly shared my obvious distaste for Kissinger, invited me to lunch at a joint near the FBI headquarters that was a haunt for senior bureau honchos. It was a truly astonishing invitation but those were days of nothing but such moments as the Nixon administration unraveled, and so off I went. We had a pleasant talk about the vagaries of Washington and as lunch ended, he asked me to pause for a moment or two before leaving the restaurant: I would find a packet on his chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It contained sixteen highly classified FBI wiretap authorizations, all but two signed by Kissinger. Those taps included a few reporters, ten or so members of Kissinger\u2019s own national security staff, and the senior aides to the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. The documents specified that the wiretaps were to be installed on the targets\u2019 home telephones, and they included the names of the FBI technicians who would install the taps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took me a day or two to track down a few of the installers and corroborate that the documents were real. I knew I had to do so before telling the senior editors at the Times<\/em> what I had. With Nixon on the ropes, Kissinger was the go-to guy on all foreign policy issues, including a crisis then emerging in the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First came a call to Kissinger. The immediate response was a total denial and anger at being accused of such police-state tactics. Then came a not unexpected second call saying that he had had it with constantly being maligned by the press and was going to resign. A half hour later James Reston, known to all as Scotty, the wonderful Times<\/em> columnist who was close to Kissinger, although aware of his shortcomings, padded up to my desk in the slipper-like shoes he sometimes wore in the office and asked if I realized that Henry was serious about resigning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was impossible not to like Scotty, but he clearly was not sure that my kind of reporting belonged in the Times<\/em>. Being Jewish, I had volunteered the winter before to work a double shift in the Washington bureaus on Christmas Eve, which usually meant I only had to write a weather story or something equally trivial. Just me, a good book, and a teletypist from morning to late at night. At one point Scotty, dressed in black tie, with his wife and a prominent Washington diplomat and his wife in tow, swooped into the bureau. My guess was the liquor stores in the city were closed and Scotty, who was clearly a bit tipsy, was there to retrieve a bottle or two from his office. Reston gave me a very cool look and said\u2014I still laugh recalling it\u2014\u201cHey Hersh, aren\u2019t you going to get that exclusive interview with Jesus for the second edition?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe you had to be there to appreciate the story, but Scotty was the real thing. He was where he was\u2014as the most respected columnist for the Times<\/em>\u2014because presidents and their minions knew he could be counted on to relay their point of view in a crisis. And I was writing stories, especially about Kissinger\u2019s possible link to Nixon\u2019s wrongdoing, that Scotty did not think the paper needed to publish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mumbled something to Scotty\u2014about how whether or not Kissinger quit was none of my business\u2014and continued filing the story to New York. The deadline for the front page was around 7 pm and close to that time Al Haig telephoned me. \u201cSeymour,\u201d he said, which got my attention\u2014those who knew me, including Al, called me Sy\u2014and said the following words, which I will never forget: \u201cDo you believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in police state tactics such as wiretapping his own aides? If there is any doubt, you owe it to yourself and your beliefs and your nation to give us one day to prove your story is wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, I understood that Kissinger had begged Haig to make the foolish call, but he had done it. The story ran on the front page the next morning, and Kissinger survived, as I was sure he would. He\u2019d have to be caught with a knife in his hand, blood dripping from it, and the body still twitching to ever suffer consequences for his actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he did hurt the careers of some ofthose who did dirty work for him inside the bureaucracy, as I learned a few months after joining the Times<\/em>. There was a scandal involving a four-star Air Force general named John Lavelle who had been publicly sacked and demoted after acknowledging that he had secretly authorized his Air Force crews in Thailand to conduct bombing missions on unauthorized targets in North Vietnam. Lavelle\u2019s disgrace had become public, which was unusual, and he was nowhere to be found. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At an early point in the ongoing Lavelle mystery, I was called by Otis Pike, a New York Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. Pike had been a Marine Corps bomber pilot in the Pacific during World War II, and he urged me to get into the story. He told me he could not say all that he knew but that I had to find Lavelle and get him to talk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had learned during years covering the Pentagon for the Associated Press in the mid-1960s of the value of the Pentagon telephone directories. I also knew that Lavelle, who had been assigned to the Pentagon years earlier as a two- or three-star general, undoubtedly had a very bright Air Force captain or two assigned as his personal aides. Odds were that one of his hotshot aides was back in the Pentagon as a major or lieutenant colonel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure enough, I found one who was living in a suburb. I called him at home that night and made sure to tell him who I was and what I wanted: to find out where Lavelle was living and just what in hell was going on. He gave me the information I needed. I tracked down Lavelle the next day playing golf with his two sons at a course in rural Maryland. I always loved golf, and I hit a few irons with him and the boys\u2014reporters will do anything to get someone to talk. Lavelle, who knew nothing about me other than the fact that I could hit a five-iron, told his boys to wait in the car and walked me to a bar in the clubhouse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was very warm, I remember, and we both had cold bottles of Miller High Life. I took a swig, and I asked Lavelle to tell me what the hell happened. He was cool, like fighter pilots are, and he told me that for six months or so he had indeed authorized bombing raids inside the North that were off limits. He protected his deputies, he said, by not telling them that he did not have specific authorization from Washington to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember the next exchange well. I said: \u201cC\u2019mon general, if you did what you said you and I both know you would have been court-martialed.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lavelle gave me a cool look and said: \u201cTell me when was the last time a four-star Air Force general or admiral has ever been court-martialed?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t know the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that point, I really began to like the guy. I sensed\u2014just knew it\u2014that he had been given backchannel orders to do the illegal bombing and that those orders had to have come from Kissinger and Nixon. I told him so, and he said nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told the general I was going to report his explanation but would suggest that he had taken the fall for the White House because the president and his national security adviser wanted to expand the war against the North without officially doing so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so I did. I kept on writing about the Lavelle mess in the Times<\/em> for weeks. Eventually, there were hearings organized by Senator John Stennis, the conservative Democrat from Mississippi who was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Stennis was a hawk on the Vietnam War and a bigot when it came to African Americans, but he suspected that Kissinger was behind the Lavelle disgrace and was all for me doing what I could. He and I continued to talk\u2014I could reach him anytime I wished via a private phone line in his office\u2014until Nixon was out of office. We were another odd couple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote a series of stories about Lavelle that were full of insinuations that the general did what he did for Kissinger and Nixon, but the general chose to honor his commitment to the men in the White House. A decade later, when Nixon and Kissinger\u2019s White House tapes became public\u2014Lavelle died in 1979\u2014there were a few chats between Nixon and Kissinger about Lavelle\u2019s plight as my first stories on him were being published in the Times<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To his credit, Nixon felt guilty about the railroading of the general, as I noted in a memoir I wrote a few years ago. \u201cI don\u2019t want him to be made a goat,\u201d he told Kissinger. A few days later, when there were newspaper reports about possible Senate hearings into Lavelle\u2019s dismissal, Nixon again told Kissinger: \u201cI just do not feel right about pushing him into this thing and then he takes a bad rap.\u201d Kissinger urged him to stay out of it. Nixon agreed to do so, but again said, almost plaintively: \u201cI do not want to hurt an innocent man.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was as if the president believed, or chose to believe, that he had no power to intervene. He was, in that moment of duplicity, in Kissinger\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A very interesting article from Seymour Hersch on his dealings with Henry Kissinger, the right hand man of David Rockefeller, and one of the masterminds of the OCGFC in the conspiracy to rule the world. I have an interesting post on Kissinger’s visits with Putin to read him in on what is planned and acceptable. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5830,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5829\/revisions\/5830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}