History of U.S.-China Ties a Secret at CIA : Archives: Agency won’t declassify exhaustive study on Nixon-era negotiations and later high-level dealings with Beijing.

After four years of review, the CIA has decided that an exhaustive classified report on the history of U.S.-China relations cannot be released, sealing from the public for now the full story of the secretive Nixon-era negotiations, as well as this nation’s high-level dealings with Beijing during the Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations.

The intelligence agency--which, under some pressure, has said it will be more open in its handling of Cold War-era archives--rejected a Freedom of Information Act request by The Times to declassify and release the China history. Commissioned by the CIA in 1985, the study is comparable in some ways to the Pentagon Papers, which offered a history of U.S. diplomacy in Vietnam.

Former President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger have published their memoirs, and other participants, historians, and experts have given their versions of what transpired in the critical era of U.S.-China diplomacy.

But the CIA’s study would shed light on a number of important issues of recent American history, such as: What did American and Chinese leaders tell or promise each other about the war in Vietnam and what was said about American and Chinese policy toward Taiwan, Cambodia, Japan or the former Soviet Union?

The China history, which reconstructs and analyzes secret negotiations between Washington and Beijing from the Nixon era through 1984, is officially characterized as “the only comprehensive survey of the negotiating record, based on official documents” held by the White House, the National Security Council, the departments of State and Defense, several presidential libraries and Kissinger’s archives.

In issuing its August decision, Douglas J. MacEachin, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, wrote The Times that the CIA’s Information Review Committee had decided the ground-breaking history must be kept private “in its entirety.” He cited the importance of keeping foreign policy and defense matters secret and of preserving intelligence sources and methods.

However, some experts speculated that the contents of the report might prove embarrassing to some of the American officials involved in the diplomatic maneuvers at the time.

The study was written for the CIA by Richard H. Solomon, a China specialist then working for the Santa Monica-based RAND Corp. think tank. Solomon, a one-time aide to Kissinger, served as assistant secretary of state for Asia in the George Bush Administration.

“I would have to say the material (in the report) is still pretty sensitive,” Solomon said in a telephone interview, noting that it covers talks with top leaders such as Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai.

But Warren Cohen, an academic historian, questioned that judgment.

“When you’re talking about officials such as Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, who’ve been dead for 17 years, what difference does it make?” he asked.

Former U.S. Ambassador to China James Lilley told The Times: “There would be sections of (the historical record on China) that might be sensitive but not many.” Keeping the report secret, he said, “is more a matter of the situation having changed, and (former U.S. officials) not looking too good. . . . There was a lot of buttering up of the Chinese that wouldn’t look too good today.”

Two other former U.S. officials who were involved in the secret China diplomacy said one of the main reasons the full history of the period is not being released is that it would prove embarrassing to former senior officials, such as Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser.

Neither of the officials was willing to be quoted by name.

A short, declassified summary of the study’s findings, published six years ago by the Foreign Service Institute, concluded that in diplomatic negotiations Chinese officials regularly seek “to identify foreign officials who are sympathetic to their cause; to cultivate a sense of friendship and obligation in their official counterparts; and then to pursue their objectives through a variety of stratagems designed to manipulate feelings of friendship, obligation, guilt or dependence.”

While refusing to release the China report, the CIA did turn over to The Times a chronology accompanying the study which lists the key events in the development of ties between the United States and China. But more than half of the subjects discussed at meetings between the powers were blacked out.

Some parts of the chronology overlap with the Nixon and Kissinger memoirs but in greater detail or with less euphemistic wording.

For example, the chronology says that during Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, “after facing a prospect of collapse of the communique negotiations, HAK (Kissinger) withdraws request for the Taiwan paragraph change.” Kissinger’s memoirs allude to these events, but do not actually say that he backed down from changes he had requested.

The study itself addressed the touchy issue of whether Presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan and top advisers like Kissinger and Brzezinski got the best deals they could in negotiations over the future of Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia--or whether they were outmaneuvered by the Chinese.

“The fact that this report was commissioned in 1985 suggests that there are questions about whether we (the United States) got as much as we could have from these negotiations,” said Harry Harding of the Brookings Institution.

Harding is the author of the book “A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China since 1972,” and is one of the leading scholars on the period. But he, like other experts, said he has not seen the CIA study compiling the full historical record on China, which is classified as secret.

The CIA’s decision not to publish the report underscores the fact that there is information that has not been made public about U.S. dealings with China in the period when the two countries were collaborating with one another against the Soviet Union and, for a time, against Vietnam.

Among the still unanswered questions:

* To what extent, if any, did Nixon and Kissinger promise to help China in its military confrontation with the Soviet Union? In the late 1960s, Chinese and Soviet troops clashed along the two countries’ 4,000-mile border and fear of Soviet attack was the principal factor prompting China to move to ease ties with the United States.

* How far did Chinese leaders Mao and Chou go in pledging to help the United States in obtaining peace from Hanoi in the early 1970s and did the Chinese leaders deliver on their promises? Parts of the chronology were deleted for January, 1973, in the period when the final details of the Paris Peace Accords on Vietnam were being worked out.

* What did the Ford and Carter Administrations tell the Chinese about the future of Taiwan in negotiations leading up to Carter’s decision to begin normal relations with Beijing in 1979?

* What message did Reagan and his Republican campaign advisers pass on to Chinese leaders during an August, 1980, mission to Beijing by Bush, then Reagan’s vice presidential running mate?

“There are 101 questions to ask (about the secret diplomacy between the United States and China),” said Harding. “To me, the most important and interesting area is during the period from 1973 on, where the Kissinger memoirs get frustratingly vague or stop altogether.”

The CIA’s refusal to release the China study also demonstrates that, despite the agency’s claims to have entered a new era of openness with respect to its Cold War files and archives, in practice it is continuing to resist making public most of these records.

Last month, U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the New York Times that the CIA has decided to make public next year the files on the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, the overthrow of the president of Guatemala in 1954 and the 1953 coup that restored Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran.

But these files are being released after a prolonged controversy in which academic historians and Congress repeatedly criticized the CIA.

Three years ago, the State Department published what is supposed to be the complete historical record of U.S. foreign policy toward Iran in the early 1950s, without any mention of the CIA’s participation in the coup--even though retired American intelligence officials such as Kermit Roosevelt already had acknowledged their roles in published memoirs.

As a result, Cohen, the historian, branded the work a “fraud” and resigned as chairman of a panel of outside experts appointed to work with the State Department’s Office of the Historian.

Two national groups of academic historians protested to then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III about the danger of distorting American history. And Congress passed a provision requiring the CIA to cooperate more fully in the process of producing official State Department histories.

The Times first requested the CIA’s history of China negotiations in July, 1989. A year later, the agency rejected the request but agreed to an appeal. After another 2 1/2 years, the CIA concluded it would release parts of the chronology but not the study itself.

One former U.S. official said of the U.S. government’s refusal to make the report public: “I think Henry (Kissinger) doesn’t want it released, because he made some obsequious remarks (to Chinese leaders).”

But Brent Scowcroft, who took part in the early U.S. negotiations with China as Kissinger’s top deputy, said he did not believe the details of the Nixon-era talks should be made public yet.

“In foreign policy, one lets a decent period pass” before making public the substance of confidential communications, Scowcroft said. For example, he suggested, if the CIA study were made public, some details of talks between Chinese and American leaders could be used by political factions in China against domestic opponents.

Former CIA Director Robert M. Gates also rejected suggestions that the China study might be withheld to prevent embarrassment to former officials such as Kissinger and Brzezinski. In declassifying CIA documents or handling Freedom of Information requests, Gates said, “everything goes through a bureaucratic system of review. By and large, it’s done by GS-13s and GS-11s (mid-level U.S. government officials).

” . . . The bureaucrats may be too cautious. But they are not protecting people who were in charge 15 or 20 years ago.”