Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

A much graver though equally unfounded allegation is that Kissinger was a Soviet spy. According to Gary Allen — a member of the John Birch Society and speechwriter for the segregationist George Wallace — Kissinger was not only “an agent of the mightiest combine of power, finance, and influence in American politics: The House of Rockefeller”; he was also a Communist with the KGB code name “Bor.” Having inveigled his way into the White House, his “conspiratorial campaign” was “to effect the clandestine unilateral strategic disarmament of the United States by means of the prolongation of the Vietnam War .” 25Similar charges were leveled in a rambling tome entitled Kissinger on the Couch (1975) by the ultraconservative antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly and retired admiral Chester Ward, who accused Kissinger of making “the entire population of the United States hostages to the Kremlin.” 26The bizarre claim that the Soviets had recruited Kissinger in postwar Germany can be traced back to a 1976 article by Alan Stang in the far-right magazine American Opinion, which cited testimony from the Polish defector Michael Goleniewski that Kissinger had worked for a Soviet counterintelligence network code-named ODRA. Goleniewski’s evidence was good enough to expose at least six Soviet moles operating inside Western intelligence agencies, including the British traitor George Blake, who had been “turned” when captured during the Korean War and whose activities cost the lives of at least forty MI6 agents. However, the allegations against “Bor” were never substantiated, and Goleniewski’s later claim to be the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich — the son of Nicholas II and heir to the Russian throne — irreparably damaged his credibility in sane minds.

The out-and-out fantasists do not even pretend to have documentary evidence. The Texan journalist Jim Marrs’s best-selling Rule by Secrecy identifies Kissinger as part of a wholly imagined conspiracy involving the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Freemasons. 27In a similar vein, Wesman Todd Shaw calls Kissinger the “master architect of the New World Order… one of the single most evil individuals still living, or to have ever lived.” 28Len Horowitz asserts that Kissinger is part of a global conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies that are intentionally spreading the HIV-AIDS virus, a claim that appears to rest on an alphanumerical breakdown of Kissinger’s name (which, we are told, “deciphers to 666”). 29According to Alan Watt, Kissinger’s motive for his “AIDS project” was to address the problem of overpopulation; he also blames him for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. 30A plainly unhinged woman writing as “Brice Taylor” insists that, when she was a child, Kissinger turned her into a “mind-controlled slave,” repeatedly making her eat her alphabet cereal in reverse order and taking her on the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland. 31Maddest of all is David Icke, whose “List of Famous Satanists” includes not only Kissinger but also the Astors, Bushes, Clintons, DuPonts, Habsburgs, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and the entire British royal family — not to mention Tony Blair, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Joseph Stalin. (The comedian Bob Hope also makes the list.) According to Icke, Kissinger is “one of the Illuminati’s foremost master minds of the agenda.” Not only is he a “Satanist, mind controller, child torturer, creator of wars of mass murder and destruction”; he is also a “shape-shifter” with a “reptilian bloodline.” “By ‘Satanists,’ of course,” Icke helpfully explains, “I mean those involved in human sacrifice.” 32

No rational people take such nonsense seriously. But the same cannot be said for the allegations made by conspiracy theorists of the left, who are a great deal more influential. In his People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn argues that Kissinger’s policies in Chile were intended at least in part to serve the economic interests of International Telephone and Telegraph. 33In place of evidence, such diatribes tend to offer gratuitous insult. According to Zinn, Kissinger “surrendered himself with ease to the princes of war and destruction.” 34In their Untold History of the United States, the film director Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick refer to Kissinger as a “psychopath” (admittedly quoting Nixon). 35The doyen of “gonzo” journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, called him “a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure”—adding, for good measure, “pervert.” 36One left-of-center website recently accused Kissinger of having been somehow involved in the anthrax attacks of September 2001, when anthrax spores were mailed to various media and Senate offices, killing five people. 37In terms of scholarship, the conspiracy theorists make as valuable a contribution to historical knowledge as the creators of the cartoon series The Venture Bros., which features “a mysterious figure dressed in a black uniform and accompanied by a medical bag that he affectionately calls his ‘Magic Murder Bag’… Dr. Henry Killinger.”

III

All this vitriol is at first sight puzzling. From January 20, 1969, until November 3, 1975, Henry Kissinger served as assistant to the president for national security affairs, first under Richard Nixon, then under Gerald Ford. From September 22, 1973, until January 20, 1977, he was secretary of state — the first foreign-born citizen to hold that office, the highest-ranking post in the executive branch after the presidency and vice presidency. Nor was his influence over U.S. foreign policy confined to those years. Before 1969, he played important roles as a consultant and an unofficial envoy for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Under Ronald Reagan, he chaired the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, which met between 1983 and 1985. From 1984 until 1990, he served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He was also a member of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1986–88) and the Defense Policy Board (from 2001 to the present). In 1973 the Norwegian Nobel Committee jointly awarded Kissinger and Le Duc Tho the Nobel Peace Prize, citing their perseverance in the negotiations that produced the Paris Peace Accords. Four years later Kissinger received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and, in 1986, the Medal of Liberty. In 1995 he was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

Nor can it easily be argued that these offices and honors were wholly undeserved. He was responsible — to name only his most obvious achievements — for negotiating the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. While he held office, the United States ratified the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation Treaty, the international convention banning biological weapons, and the Helsinki Final Act, Article 10 of which (little though Kissinger liked it) committed signatories on both sides of the iron curtain to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.” It was Kissinger who, with Zhou Enlai, opened diplomatic communications between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, arguably one of the turning points in the Cold War. It was Kissinger who negotiated the end of the Yom Kippur War between the Arab states and Israel and whose shuttle diplomacy paved the way for the Camp David Accords.

How, then, are we to explain the visceral hostility that the name Henry Kissinger arouses? In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, the British journalist Christopher Hitchens went so far as to accuse Kissinger of “war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places” (in fact, the only other place discussed in his book is Bangladesh), alleging that Kissinger “ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics who got in his way.” 38Genocide, mass killing, assassination, and murder all feature in the indictment.