Gary J. Bass - The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by Gary Jonathan Bass

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-35047-1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-70020-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bass, Gary Jonathan, [date]
The Blood telegram : Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide / by Gary J. Bass.First Edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. United StatesForeign relations19691974. 2. BangladeshHistoryRevolution, 1971Atrocities. 3. GenocideBangladesh. 4. Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 19131994. 5. Kissinger, Henry, 1923 6. United StatesForeign relationsSouth Asia. 7. South AsiaForeign relationsUnited States. I. Title.
E855.B34 2013
327.7305409047dc23 2013014788
by Mapping Specialists
Cover image: Telegram #959 from Archer Blood, the U.S. consul general in Dacca, to the State Department, March 28, 1971. The National Archives at College Park, Maryland
Cover design by Chip Kidd

v3.1

For K.G.B.

[T]he bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh,... and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

MILAN KUNDERA , The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Archer Blood, the United States consul general in Dacca, was a gentlemanly diplomat raised in Virginia, a World War II navy veteran in the upswing of a promising Foreign Service career after several tours overseas. He was earnest and precise, known to some of his more unruly subordinates at the U.S. consulate as a good, conventional man.

He had come to like his posting to this impoverished, green, and swampy land. But outside of the consulates grimy offices, in the steamy heat, the city was dying. Night after night, Blood heard the gunshots. On the night of March 25, 1971, the Pakistan army had begun a relentless crackdown on Bengalis, all across what was then East Pakistan and is today an independent Bangladesh. Untold thousands of people were shot, bombed, or burned to death in Dacca alone. Blood had spent that grim night on the roof of his official residence, watching as tracer bullets lit up the sky, listening to clattering machine guns and thumping tank guns. There were fires across the ramshackle city. He knew the people in the deathly darkness below. He liked them. Many of the civilians facing the bullets were professional colleagues; some were his friends.

It was, Blood and his staffers thought, their job to relay as much of this as they possibly could back to Washington. Witnessing one of the worst atrocities of the Cold War, Bloods consulate documented in horrific detail the slaughter of Bengali civilians: an area the size of two dozen city blocks that had been razed by gunfire; two newspaper office buildings in ruins; thatch-roofed villages in flames; specific targeting of the Bengalis Hindu minority.

The U.S. consulate gave detailed accounts of the killings at Dacca University, ordinarily a leafy, handsome enclave. At the wrecked campus, professors had been hauled from their homes to be gunned down.

At least two mass graves on campus,

This was, Blood knew, the last thing his superiors in Washington wanted to hear. Pakistan was an allya military dictatorship, but fiercely anticommunist. Blood detailed how Pakistan was using U.S. weaponstanks, jet fighters, gigantic troop transport airplanes, jeeps, guns, ammunitionto crush the Bengalis. In one of the awkward alignments of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon had lined up the democratic United States with this authoritarian government, while the despots in the Soviet Union found themselves standing behind democratic India.

Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the brilliant White House national security advisor, were driven not just by such Cold War calculations, but a starkly personal and emotional dislike of India and Indians. Nixon enjoyed his friendship with Pakistans military dictator, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, known as Yahya, who was helping to set up the top secret opening to China. The White House did not want to be seen as doing anything that might hint at the breakup of Pakistanno matter what was happening to civilians in the east wing of Pakistan.

The onslaught would continue for months. The Dacca consulate stubbornly kept up its reporting. But, Blood later recalled, his cables were met with a deafening silence. He was not allowed to protest

This book is about how two of the worlds great democraciesthe United States and

For the United States, as Archer Blood understood, a small number of atrocities are so awful that they stand outside of the normal day-to-day flow of diplomacy: the

But Pakistans slaughter of its Bengalis in 1971 is starkly different. Here the United States was allied with the killers. The White House was actively and knowingly supporting a murderous regime at many of the most crucial moments. There was no question about whether the United States should intervene; it was already intervening on behalf of a military dictatorship decimating its own people.

This stands as one of the worst moments of moral blindness in

The ongoing Bengali slaughter led within a few months to a major war between Pakistan and India. In that time, the White House had every opportunity to grasp how bad these atrocities were. There were sober misgivings voiced in the White House, and thunderous protests from the State Department and its emissaries in Delhi and Dacca, with Archer Blood the loudest voice of all. But throughout it all, from the outbreak of civil war to the Bengali massacres to Pakistans crushing defeat by the Indian military, Nixon and Kissinger, unfazed by detailed knowledge of the massacres, stood stoutly behind Pakistan.

As its most important international backer, the United States had great influence over Pakistan. But at almost every turning point in the crisis, Nixon and Kissinger failed to use that leverage to avert disaster. Before the shooting started, they consciously decided not to warn Pakistans military chiefs against using violence on their own population. They did not urge caution or impose conditions that might have discouraged the Pakistani military government from butchering its own citizenry. They did not threaten the loss of U.S. support or even sanctions if Pakistan took the wrong course. They allowed the army to sweep aside the results of Pakistans first truly free and fair democratic election, without even suggesting that the military strongmen try to work out a power-sharing deal with the Bengali leadership that had won the vote. They did not ask that Pakistan refrain from using U.S. weaponry to slaughter civilians, even though that could have impeded the militarys rampage, and might have deterred the army. There was no public condemnationnor even a private threat of itfrom the president, the secretary of state, or other senior officials. The administration almost entirely contented itself with making gentle, token suggestions behind closed doors that Pakistan might lessen its brutalityand even that only after, months into the violence, it became clear that India was on the brink of attacking Pakistan.