The man still advises the high and mighty.
Frances Robles is
reporting at
The New York Times:
Nearly 40 years ago, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger mapped out secret contingency plans to launch airstrikes against Havana and “smash Cuba,” newly disclosed government documents show.
Mr. Kissinger was so irked by Cuba’s military incursion into Angola that in 1976 he convened a top-secret group of senior officials to work out possible retaliatory measures in case Cuba deployed forces to other African nations, according to documents declassified by the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library at the request of the National Security Archive, a research group.
The officials outlined plans to strike ports and military installations in Cuba and to send Marine battalions to the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay to “clobber” the Cubans, as Mr. Kissinger put it, according to the records. Mr. Kissinger, the documents show, worried that the United States would look weak if it did not stand up to a country of just eight million people.
The documents are being published in a book,
Back Channel to Cuba, and
have been posted online. The authors, Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, and William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University will hold a press conference on the subject Wednesday at 8 AM ET in New York.
Henry Kissinger, who couldn't keep his mitts off Latin America and other parts of the world anymore than Teddy Roosevelt, the Dulles Brothers, Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan could, definitely had brass. Today Secretary of State John Kerry and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton consult the 91-year-old unindicted godfather of a slew of war crimes apparently without the slightest cognitive dissonance.
Kornbluh told the Times:
“Nobody has known that at the very end of a really remarkable effort to normalize relations, Kissinger, the global chessboard player, was insulted that a small country would ruin his plans for Africa and was essentially prepared to bring the imperial force of the United States on Fidel Castro’s head,” Mr. Kornbluh said.
Pure aggression. Listen to the man:
“If we decide to use military power, it must succeed,” Mr. Kissinger said in one meeting, in which advisers warned against leaks. “There should be no halfway measures—we would get no award for using military power in moderation. If we decide on a blockade, it must be ruthless and rapid and efficient.”
He forgot to mention bloodthirsty.
There's a bit more below the fold.
Angola gained its independence in 1974, but when it did, the three rebel groups that had fought the Portuguese for a decade started fighting with one another. The United States encouraged the Zairian Army to attack the Soviet-backed MPLA, which it did, sending 1,200 soldiers. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. was apprised that apartheid South Africa would be invading Angola to fight the MPLA, another outside group whose intervention it approved (and encouraged). The U.S. also provided direct aid to the two other rebel groups, especially Jonas Savimbi's highly skilled UNITA. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1975, the fighting was fierce.
Worried that it would lose, the MPLA sought 100 Cuban technical advisers. It finally got 500 in August for what was supposed to be a short-term mission, as in six months. That turned out to be a good deal longer and to the advisers were added thousands of combat troops.
In the face of widespread U.S. intervention, the objections of Kissinger to Cubans intervening—just two years off the successful coup in Chile that he promoted—was typical of the realpolitik for which Kissinger is today so often praised.
Savimbi, seeing the handwriting on the checks, jettisoned his long-term association with Maoism and became a darling of the Heritage Foundation, several of whose leaders met with him in clandestine camps after the wily guerrilla leader adopted a free-market patina to his public pronouncements.
More than a million dead in that civil war, aided by Cold War politics, guns and money. Both sides in Angola were ruthless in battle and reckless with civilian lives. Stories of atrocities could fill libraries.
Kissinger clearly was eager to add to them with his own ruthlessness in Cuba.