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For immediate release,
11 February 2002 |
For further information:
Thomas Blanton, Archive director, 202/994-7068
William Burr, senior analyst, 202/994-7032
Lee Rubin, Mayer Brown & Platt, 202/263-3267 |
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ARCHIVE HAILS FINAL TURNOVER OF KISSINGER TELCONS
GWU Group Persuades National Archives to Recover Telephone Transcripts
Washington, D.C., February 11 – In answer to a three-year-old
National Security Archive request, the National
Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today confirmed that
former national security adviser Henry Kissinger has returned to NARA’s
custody the 20,000 pages of transcripts of his telephone conversations
conducted while serving President Nixon from 1969 through September 1973.
Last August, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher credited the National
Security Archive for prompting the Department to recover some 10,000 pages
of “telcons” from Kissinger’s tenure there (starting in September 1973);
but Kissinger’s White House telcons remained under lock and key at the
Library of Congress until today.
“To look at these transcripts is to be in the room when he’s conducting
all his telephone diplomacy – the secret opening to China, the secret trips
to Paris on the Vietnam War negotiations, his backstage leaks to the press
– you name it,” commented Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security
Archive, a foreign policy documentation center based at George Washington
University. “We congratulate the National Archives as well as the
State Department for taking this historic action, and in fact, Mr. Kissinger
also deserves credit for doing the right thing at last.”
Although NARA warned that declassification review of the telcons may
take up to a year, the National Security Archive today posted on its Web
site a sample of the Kissinger White House telcons, a
phone conversation with President Nixon on 27 April 1971 discussing
Chinese premier Zhou En-Lai’s invitation for a secret Nixon emissary to
come to China and make arrangements for Nixon’s 1972 trip. Ironically,
while Kissinger’s secretaries listened in to make their telcon, Nixon’s
taping system also captured the conversation (the President and
his top adviser wire-tapping each other without either revealing that fact).
Archive senior analyst William Burr, editor of The
Kissinger Transcripts (New York: The New Press, 1999), found
the telcon in other declassified National Security Council files, and provides
on the Web site a comparison of the variances between the telcon and the
now-declassified Nixon tape.
The Archive’s Web site also provides further
background on the Kissinger telcons, the legal arguments, and the
correspondence between the National Security Archive and the government,
as well as the draft legal brief prepared by the Archive’s pro bono lawyers,
Lee Rubin and Craig Isenberg at Mayer, Brown & Platt, whose presentation
of the issues persuaded the State Department, the National Archives, and
the National Security Council to take action and right a 20-year-old wrong.
A fraction of the twenty thousand pages of Henry Kissinger's transcripts
of telephone conversations ("telcons") from 1969-1973 have shown up in
the National Security Files in the Nixon Presidential Materials Project
at the National Archives. When Kissinger was in office he would sometimes
circulate "telcons" to staffers when they needed them for their work and
occasionally the documents, such as the one below,
would remain in the files. One of the more fascinating aspects of this
transcript of a telephone conversation between President Richard Nixon
and Kissinger is that while Kissinger's secretary was listening in and
transcribing the conversation, Nixon had a tape recorder
that simultaneously taped the call. Neither realized that
the other was making a record of the conversation.
The "telcon" is very close to the tape
in content although not in all of the wording (no doubt it was difficult
for the transcriber to keep up with every word). The tape (number
2-52 in the Nixon tapes), however, is not available in its entirety; several
portions were excised when the tape was released in 1999. Nevertheless,
the "telcon" in the Nixon presidential materials was released in full last
spring, and it immediately becomes evident that two of the deletions, withdrawn
on privacy grounds, are Kissinger's critical comments on U.S. representative
to the United Nations George H.W. Bush. The other excision made on
"national security" grounds was Kissinger's reference to the secret Pakistani
channel that Nixon and Zhou Enlai used to exchange messages.(1)
That the secrecy censors deleted the reference to Pakistan is astonishing
given that information on the Pakistani channel has been available for
years, not least in Henry Kissinger's memoirs, White House Years
(1979), and has been declassified in numerous documents in the Nixon
Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives.
The substance of the Kissinger-Nixon
phone conversation concerned a message that Kissinger had received
at 6:15 p.m. that day from Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou's message
set the stage for Kissinger's secret visit to Beijing on 9 July, the subsequent
Nixon trip to China, and the beginning of normalization of relations with
China. Zhou's message was delivered through the secret Pakistani
channel between Beijing and Washington that had been established during
1969. Confirming earlier messages, Zhou wrote that the People's
Republic of China was willing to receive a "special envoy of the U.S. (for
instance, Mr. Kissinger) ... or even the President of the U.S. himself
for direct meeting and discussions." Kissinger immediately walked
the message over to the Oval Office and an hour or so later, Nixon discussed
it on the telephone with Kissinger. Zhou had suggested Kissinger
as a "special envoy," but in his phone call to Kissinger, Nixon discussed
anybody else as envoy--New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Vietnam negotiator
Ambassador David K. E. Bruce, U.S. representative to the United Nation
ambassador George H.W. Bush, Secretary of Health Education and Welfare
Elliot Richardson, and even the recently deceased GOP presidential candidate
Thomas Dewey. Nixon was toying with Kissinger, who wanted to go to Beijing.
The next day, Nixon settled the suspense and told Kissinger that he would
be going to Beijing.(2)
The audio clips below are in MP3 format. You will
need to download the clips and open them with an MP3 player such as the
free RealOne
Player.
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Notes
1. Presentation by Craig A. Daigle, History Department,
George Washington University, 9 February 2002, at George Washington
University Cold War Group (GWCW) Conference on the Sino-American Opening
and the Cold War, 8-9 February 2002.
2. For background, see Henry Kissinger, White
House Years (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), pp. 684-732, and F. S. Aijazuddin,
From
a Head, Through a Head, to a Head: The Secret Channel between the US and
China through Pakistan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000)
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