In the Cold War Trenches With Kissinger and His Adversaries

On Dec. 10, 1971, at an apartment secretly managed by the CIA in New York City, then-National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger handed over a file of American intelligenceinformation on the Soviet Union with a flourish to Chinese Ambassador Huang Hua and his aides.

“You don’t need a master spy. We give you everything,” Kissinger told Huang, who was China’s new representative to the United Nations. “We read that you brought a master spy with you. You don’t need him. He couldn’t get this by himself.”

The Chinese participants laughed, and Huang thanked Kissinger profusely. The transcripts of this clandestine meeting--and many others in which Kissinger met with leaders of the Soviet Union and China--have been published for the first time in a book, “The Kissinger Transcripts,” that is being made public today.

The book is essentially an unauthorized version of many of Kissinger’s top-level conversations with leaders in Beijing and Moscow throughout the Nixon and Ford administrations. The records of the talks were originally made for internal U.S. government use by Kissinger aides who sat in on the meetings and took handwritten notes.

While many details of Kissinger’s dealings with leaders of the two countries have appeared previously in his own writings, the transcripts published today are accounts omitted from those memoirs.

“By definition, this is what he didn’t want the public to see,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a research library at George Washington University that obtained the transcripts by using the Freedom of Information Act and by scouring presidential libraries and archives.

Although some of the transcripts have been made public before and have been used in accounts by historians and journalists, others provide new information. Kissinger’s own records remain closed in the Library of Congress until 2002.

Sheila McGinley, an assistant at Kissinger’s New York office, said he had not seen the new book and was out of the country, unavailable for comment.

The transcripts confirm the prevalent portrait of Kissinger as a veteran negotiator, forced to battle an array of domestic opponents in Congress, in the federal bureaucracy and at the Pentagon as he pursued his passion of defining relations with Washington’s two biggest Cold War adversaries.

In a series of talks in Moscow in 1974 and 1975, he joined Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev in condemning congressional opponents of detente, the one-dimensional perspectives of all generals and what he called “the stupidity of bureaucracy.”

But most of all, the book demonstrates how Kissinger, first as national security advisor and then as secretary of State from 1973 to 1976, carried out triangular diplomacy--keeping the Soviet Union and China off balance by cultivating better relations with both of the Communist powers than they had with one another.

In theory, the policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations were aimed at treating the Soviets and Chinese on a roughly equal footing.

However, the transcripts demonstrate that in practice, Kissinger’s diplomacy strongly favored China. He gave China detailed briefings about his meetings with Soviet leaders, but he did not tell the Soviets much about his talks with the Chinese.

Several previous books have described how Kissinger secretly provided China with data about the Soviet Union, such as information from American satellites about Soviet troop deployments in the Far East. Yet the transcripts show in detail how Kissinger repeatedly offered intelligence as a way of demonstrating how the United States could help China.

“This is not something that involves reciprocity or any formal relationship, but advice based on our experience and some regularized intelligence information,” he told Chinese Premier Chou En-lai in Beijing in November 1973. What that meant, Kissinger said, was “the regularized information from us to you, not the other way.”

Some details, such as his use of intelligence information to play the China card to Moscow’s detriment, confirm his reputation for furtive diplomacy. Others humanize him and his Cold War Communist counterparts.

At various points, the transcripts also:

* Note how badly Kissinger, Brezhnev and others misjudged the importance of the Helsinki Final Act, the 1975 agreement that gave limited rights to Soviet and East Bloc dissidents--freedoms that eventually undermined the Soviet empire. For Kissinger, the talks seemed worthless except as a way to keep Moscow engaged on issues higher on his agenda, such as a Middle East peace deal and nuclear arms limitations talks.

“They can write it in Swahili for all I care,” he said of the Final Act.

Brezhnev too dismisses the human rights elements of the Final Act, describing them as “chicken feed.”

* Capture lighter moments in superpower diplomacy, such as the vanity of Kissinger and Brezhnev as both worry openly to each other about their weight. “I’m fat,” laments Kissinger at one point, while Brezhnev admits that he too has added pounds. Their frequent black-humor banter often started major meetings.

At such moments, Brezhnev suddenly is no longer the dour, slab-faced personification of Soviet communism, but he is instead an oddly playful character who variously fires off a toy cannon, suggests his cigarette case is nuclear-tipped and jests that he might target Kissinger’s home with a nuclear missile.

In keeping with the mood, Kissinger jokingly tells the Soviet leader that if French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert continues to make anti-American speeches, some U.S. missiles aimed at the Soviet Union might have to be retargeted toward France.

* Show how Kissinger worked to contain the effect of a threatened impeachment of President Nixon and maneuvered repeatedly to keep the Watergate scandal from damaging his foreign policy. “Once you are here for some time,” he told a Chinese visitor to Washington as Watergate blossomed in 1973, “you will see that there are always fits of hysteria descending on Washington in which people talk about nothing else. And six months later, it’s difficult to remember exactly all the details of the controversy.”

In a March 1974 meeting of his senior staff at the State Department, Kissinger frets about how the scandal might influence Nixon’s treatment at a summit planned for later that year.

“Do they still want the president to travel in Russia again?” he asks.

The collection--compiled by William Burr, a diplomatic historian working for the National Security Archive--does not include transcripts of some of Kissinger’s most important meetings. For example, the record of Kissinger’s first conversation with Chou in Beijing in July 1971, on the first trip by any American official to China in more than two decades, is not in the book.