Did Kissinger Leak the Big One?
Nathan, James
Did Kissinger Leak the Big One? by James Nathan “I’ve studied these cases. . . and it’s always a son-of-a-bitch that leaks.” Richard Nixon, July 24, 1971 Watergate’s stain, like some...
...Not only did it report the essential American negotiating position at SALT, it also reported the American fallback position...
...A few weeks later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gently inquired whether the Secretary might explain what he meant by saying that he did not have any “responsibility” in recommen ding illegal wiretaps...
...Curiously enough, the last time Beecher himself was tapped was February, 1971-five months before the SALT leak...
...How did the notorious Beecher leak aid Kissinger’s diplomacy...
...This was the “front channel...
...The official U. S. team was a bureaucratic Frankenstein, whose parts lumbered and lurched in barely controlled, though painfully negotiated, intra-governmental compromise...
...what happened was one negotiating position developed growing out of all these [positions], which was then put to the other side...
...And it explains why Kissinger may have supplied to the Plumbers the names of people who couldn’t possibly have known about the source of the Beecher article-for they could never have revealed that the real source of the story was none other than the White House special assistant, Kissinger, himself...
...For on July 23, 1971, Beecher reported the “unofficial” but real American negotiating position for the SALT talks...
...In late June, 1974, the Senate voted, as Kissinger had demanded, a resolution of confidence in the Secretary of State...
...As Kissinger related the bureaucratic difficulties of SALT to his recent biographers, Marvin and Bernard Kalb: “There were those who said ‘disarmament is necessary’ and there were those who said ‘you can’t trust the Russians.’ And usually...
...Nor did the Pentagon Papers reveal much not previously known...
...Far from being persecuted, as some of the other “national security problems” had been, Beecher actually joined the government...
...The ACDA elements urged speedy agreement, while the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs were suspect of Russian intentions and argued for delay...
...Simply put, the White House considered the Institute a far left-wing source, and was more interested in discrediting “respectable” dissent...
...4) the revelation by Jack Anderson of the American “tilt” toward Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani war in late 1971...
...It is, as a scientist would say, an elegant explanation...
...According to the new book Kissinger, “[BI 0th sides worked off a single draft of the negotiating points...
...In this setting, the Beecher leak had an inevitable result: it gave the front channel its guidance and allowed the negotiations to proceed speedily toward the desired conclusion, without revealing the existence of private talks between Kissinger and Dobrynin...
...Perhaps the reason the culprit was never found is that he who complained loudest about the leak was best served by it and least suspect: Henry Kissinger...
...The Administration has said it was provoked to place taps on the phones of four journalists and 13 government officials because of four “serious” leaks: 1) the disclosure in The New York Times in 1969 that the United States was conducting massive strategic bombings of neutral Cambodia, 2) the release and publication of the Pentagon Papers in June, 197 1, 3) the story in June, 1971, by William Beecher, the Pentagon correspondent of The New York Times, James Nathan teaches political science at the University of Delaware, detailing the American negotiating strategy and aims at the on-going SALT negotiations...
...The Cambodia bombing story was also a Beecher “exclusive...
...Shortly after the taps became public in 1971, Beecher became Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and received a promotion just last month...
...Strange rewards for a dangerous leakee...
...The front channel, in short, only occasionally reflected Kissinger’s position...
...Richard Nixon, July 24, 1971 Watergate’s stain, like some late night sci-fi creature, seems to assume ever new and more gruesome forms...
...Kissinger ran the back channel talks himself...
...At other times, Smith was informed of “pers o na 1 c ommunications” bet ween Brezhnev and Nixon...
...It explains why Beecher did not suffer the kind of White House pressure that Jack Anderson and Joe Kraft endured...
...Similarly, the Anderson leak was hard to disguise...
...On June 11, Henry Kissinger attempted to save himself from the stain by threatening to leave the country in the lurch without a foreign policy if he were associated with any of the Watergate horrors...
...The other leaks were not nearly so sensitive...
...The Beecher leak was said to be by far the most galling...
...This happened in the spring of 1971, when the ABM discussions became linked to negotiations on limiting the number of offensive weapons both sides would possess...
...For instance, the 1969 revelations about the secret bombing in Cambodia could have originated from an earlier article in the Times of London, or from an interview with refugees, which appeared on a Grenada television broadcast in Britain...
...The trick was letting the front channel know what the parameters of the “real” American position were...
...The truth about Kissinger’s real relations to Watergate never emerged: the “primary source” of much information on the course of American foreign policy and the symbol of bipartisan unity in American foreign affairs may have been the inspiration for the July 23, 1971 Beecher article...
...It explains why no leak was ever discovered even after a massive search...
...Apparently, there was more than one set of the Pentagon Papers circulatingin Washmgton before the Times and the Post printed them in June 1971...
...Answer to the JulyJAugust puzzle: The Beecher article of July 23, 1971, was, however, different...
...The entire force movement, which included the assault ship Tripoli (with a battalion of 800 Marines aboard), three escort vessels with ship-to-shore missiles, four destroyers, a nuclear attack submarine and an oiler, was specifically intended to be noticed by the other side...
...First, there was the official American team, headed by Gerard Smith of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), with members representing other elements of the bureaucracy...
...But even though the White House surveillance program began on the very day of the story, May 9,1969, no one got around to tapping Beecher’s phone until a full year later...
...by James Nathan “I’ve studied these cases...
...It met with the Russian official team over a period of years, alternately in Helsinki and Vienna...
...Kissinger’s method of passing along this information was indirect...
...land1 [Nlo carbons were allowed...
...Almost all the basic information contained in the papers had previously entered the public domain...
...According to John Newhouse’s authoritative book, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT, the FBI spent five months trying to locate the origin of this leak alone, with no success...
...Smith was informed of this understanding only a short time before the joint communique was prepared...
...The reasons for the super-secret back channel, whose very existence was unknown to the front channel, had much to do with the nature of the front channel American team which shuttled between Austria and Finland...
...The Institute’s Washington Wages an Aggressive War: A Documented Account of the United States’ Adventures in Indo China, published at almost the same instant that the Pentagon Papers appeared, contains not only material from the Papers but also additional information from the White House, the C.I.A., and the Department of State...
...Let us return to the background of the plumbers and the “national security” wiretaps that preceded them...
...In the winter of 1971, at the time of the IndoPakistani War, the aircraft carrier Enterprise and its accompanying task force cruised near the subcontinent...
...The negotiating position was unwieldy and susceptible to all those dismal features of bureaucratic life of whicq Kissinger despaired at length when at Harvard and later to reporters...
...It gives a logical reason for the incredible detail of the Beecher story...
...Moreover, daily B-52 strikes are such massive operations, in terms of the numbers of U. S. personnel involved and refugees “generated,” that they would have been difficult to disguise for long...
...Then there was the “back channel,” which consisted of secret meetings between then Special Assistant Henry Kissinger and Russian Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin...
...Briefly, there were two channels of communication with the Soviets...
...Dobrynin, at one point, “‘actually complained about the ‘excessive secrecy’ Kissinger kept demanding...
...The Beecher leak, in turn, was the essential motivation for sending the newly formed Plumbers unit into action...
...The answer possibly lies in the peculiar process of the SALT negotiations...
...But in spite of the spectacle of senators rushing to endorse his virtues, there is reason to believe that Kissinger was involved with the creation of the “plumbers” in a more profound way than has been revealed before...
...Why...
...Since the other side almost never came up with a similar proposal, that process had to be repeated over and over again with the result that we were spending more time negotiating with ourselves than the Russians...
...But the Institute for Policy Studies did not receive the same concentrated attention as Ellsberg...
...The Institute for Policy Studies produced a more complete narrative of the decisions and planning of the American intervention...
...At times, the Russian team would give the Americans an indication...
...As it went through the motions of negotiating an agreement, however, the front channel had to be steered jn the proper direction...
Vol. 6 • September 1974 • No. 7
