by Gary J. Bass
Winston Lord, a young staffer who became Kissinger’s special assistant, could take the whippings. He found Kissinger inspiring. “It was terrific,” Lord enthuses. “Whatever one’s view of Henry on policy or ideology, even his greatest critics have to admit the guy is brilliant.” Lord relished Kissinger’s intelligence and learned from their discussions of world history and the international scene. He remembers, “He stretched you. He demanded excellence, not to mention hard work.” Lord continues, “He pushed his staff very hard. Having a sense of a person’s particular qualities. He obviously could drive you crazy at times, and I told him that. At a young age, you saw how hard he was working, what the stakes involved.”
Kissinger’s other official dealing with South Asia was Harold Saunders, who outranked Hoskinson. Saunders was not the type to complain; a cordial and kindly man with a blue-blooded manner, he had a PhD from Yale and a tweedy air to match. He had first joined the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson, but quickly became a close aide to Kissinger, sticking with him for some eight years. He would go on to be a key player in Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy between Arabs and Israelis, to work on the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, and to serve as assistant secretary of state—one of the most distinguished American peacemakers in the Middle East. Saunders still greatly admires Kissinger and speaks with amused fondness about him. For Saunders, like Hoskinson, working for Kissinger was a formative experience, although not always an easy one for someone who would build his subsequent career around dialogue and mediation.
All these White House staffers understood well which way the president and his national security advisor leaned. For Indira Gandhi, Hoskinson says, “There was respect, but a kind of visceral dislike.” He explains, “Some of this was a traditional Republican reaction to India and Indians. And of course, this is the Cold War era, and her left-wing approach to things, her socialist approach, her dalliance with the Russians, made them very, very suspicious of them. Everything was viewed through the prism of relationships with Russia, and more with China too in that case.” He says, “She was just a steely personality. A real force to be dealt with.”
Kissinger was somewhat less bluntly hostile to India than Nixon. While he scorned nonalignment, he got along chummily with L. K. Jha, India’s urbane ambassador in Washington, and was less fueled by bigotry than the president. Still, Kissinger took insult easily and nurtured a growing list of his own grudges, and he understood the uses of stoking Nixon’s prejudices for the purposes of making foreign policy.30
Yahya was far more to Kissinger’s taste. Kissinger once said that he had “pretty good relations with Yahya,” although without Nixon’s full embrace. “They liked him,” says Hoskinson. “He was a soldier. He had style. He was kind of a jaunty guy.” Hoskinson admits that Yahya was not the brightest person, but says that for Nixon and Kissinger, “He was a man’s man. He wasn’t some woman running a country.”31
Yahya got a reward for his efforts in late October 1970, when he met Nixon in the Oval Office at the White House. In their last meeting before the crisis erupted, Nixon began to sell weapons to Yahya again, in what was officially billed as a one-time exception to the U.S. arms embargo imposed on both India and Pakistan back in 1965. It was the kind of exception that demolishes the rule.
That embargo had already been eroding under Johnson, but Yahya now secured a moderately big haul—a harbinger of much larger ones likely to come. The promised weapons included six F-104 fighter planes, seven B-57 bombers, and three hundred armored personnel carriers, although they would take some time to be delivered.32
India took it badly. Indira Gandhi would bitterly complain that this resumption of U.S. arms supplies to Pakistan increased the threat to her country. General Sam Manekshaw, chief of the Indian army staff, argued that the U.S. and Chinese supply of weaponry allowed Pakistan to take a belligerent stance against India.33
In the Oval Office that day, it was as friendly a meeting as two heads of state ever have, particularly when one of them was Richard Nixon. Yahya was special. Even Kissinger seemed impressed with his toughness and Sandhurst style. The two presidents spoke chummily of military and economic aid. Nixon pledged to support Pakistan despite “strong feeling in this country favoring India.” He promised that “we will keep our word with Pakistan however; we will work with you; we will try to be as helpful as we can.”
Yahya was grateful. He replied, “We appreciate this; our friendship is not new. We were surrounded by enemies when we became friends. We are no longer surrounded by enemies but still we remain friends. We are a sentimental people and we will never do anything to embarrass you.”34
Chapter 2
Cyclone Pakistan
Archer Blood, the ranking diplomat of the United States in East Pakistan, was a patriot and a career man. “From the first time he realized there was such a thing as the Foreign Service, he was keenly interested in it,” remembers his widow, Margaret Millward Blood. “He had always looked at the world, and thought that everything had meaning.”
A sincere and rather bookish man from Virginia, Blood was tall and solidly handsome, with kindly eyes and an athlete’s frame, wearing his dark hair slicked back. Although courteous and well mannered, he confessed to having a turbulent private side, alternating “between my personal Scylla of bright expectation and Charybdis of black despair.” He kept that to himself.1
His wife, a vivacious and gracious graphic artist from New York, who is vibrant at eighty-seven years old, recalls, “He was an exact person. He could become interested in anything, but he wanted to know the exact facts.” He seemed never to sit down without having a book in hand. She was struck by how disciplined he was when reading. Once, on their honeymoon in Greece, she misquoted a line from a magazine, and he calmly supplied the exact wording, asking her to be careful about such things.
Blood was no rebel. Amid the hippies and burnouts of the 1960s and early 1970s, he was unreservedly square. In the Vietnam era, a group of American officials formed an organization called Foreign Service Officers Against the War, wearing protest badges, sometimes inside their jackets. Not Blood. His most radical affectation was, in the torrid tropical heat of Dacca (today known as Dhaka), to sometimes shed his dark business suit for a short-sleeved white shirt.
In World War II, he served as a supply officer in the U.S. Navy, posted to frigid Alaska to ward off a Japanese onslaught that never came. With the unassuming dedication of the World War II generation, he chose public service. “He was of course a patriot,” says his wife, who goes by Meg Blood. “In those days everyone was geared to the war. The whole world was very, very patriotic, and very anxious to serve.”2
Blood joined the Foreign Service in 1947, part of an entering class made up entirely of white men. He clambered his way up, working relentlessly hard, taking extra duty. His first posting was in Thessaloniki, Greece, during the civil war. He married Meg there. The young couple’s next stop was Munich, in 1949, still shattered in the immediate aftermath of World War II. His wife remembers seeing “whole cities spilled into the street in brick form.” Working in a displaced persons camp, Archer Blood took satisfaction in issuing huge numbers of U.S. visas to Hungarians, ethnic Germans from eastern Europe, many Poles, and even more Jews. He served briefly in Algiers and Bonn, and put in some desk time in Washington, but his career was in the doldrums, and he wanted more challenging political work. In West Germany, a fellow diplomat, asked what his ultimate wish was, replied that he only wanted to be a consul general. Blood was baffled. “I can’t imagine not wanting to be an ambassador,” he told his wife. “It’s the top.”
He grimly rode out the McCarthy era from Bonn, watching with contempt as “McCarthy’s hatchet men” investigated the Foreign Service, driving many good officials out and cowing others into quietude. Blood was not inclined to resign in showy protest, but he rankled at the witch hunts. He believed in independent judgment in the Foreign Service. He remembered that anyone who had served in China was a
utomatically under suspicion, and that careers were ended with accusations of homosexuality. It was, he later growled, “just so obnoxious.” China, soon after its communist revolution, was still a taboo subject at the State Department. One young diplomat in Bonn had worked in China, and Blood was questioned about him. The security officials asked if this young China hand read the New York Times. “The New York Times was considered by the security people as a leftist newspaper. And I was young enough to say, ‘Yes, I hope to hell he does.’ ”3
Two weeks after joining the foreign service, Blood had watched as the flags of newborn India and Pakistan were hoisted above their Washington embassies. Steeped in British stories of the Raj, he had always been fascinated with South Asia. In 1960, he was offered a choice of postings in Madras, in India, or Dacca, in East Pakistan. He chose Dacca out of ambition: he would have more freedom there, far removed from the oversight of the U.S. embassy, and there would be more political turmoil for him to cover.
Blood arrived on the subcontinent in June 1960, as a political officer and deputy principal officer at the Dacca consulate that he would later run. His wife’s first impression, as their plane neared Dacca, was that their new home would be underwater. “It was an ocean,” Meg Blood says. They did not know if there would be enough land to put down an airplane. “Green and flowering,” she remembers, “but definitely a land of water.” For Archer Blood, as he wrote later, “there was a magical quality to this ubiquitous water, which heightened the green of the rice paddies and the purple of the water hyacinths and furnished a shimmering mirror for the famed golden sun of Bengal.”4
Their first exposure was a shock. Driving in from the airport, with the car windows down in the swampy heat, Meg Blood was horrified to find herself face-to-face with a woman beggar with no nose. Their driver explained that the woman had probably been accused of adultery, and her husband had had her nose cut off. The car was surrounded by beggars. They saw disfigured children asking for coins. The water pump at their house turned out to be a twelve-year-old boy.
There had been a young American diplomat who arrived in Dacca, took one look around, and announced his resignation. But the Blood family—with three children in tow—settled in and learned to love their hardship post. “Our lives were delightful,” says Meg Blood. The social scene was relaxed, and they made fast friends both among Bengalis and West Pakistanis. “We spent our evenings discussing tigers,” remembers Meg Blood merrily. The tales grew tall. “There were a great many tigers, and they were causing trouble. They lost about ten people a month to the tigers.”5
Unafraid of tigers was an inquisitive little boy who lived one door down from the Bloods. Shahudul Haque, eleven years old, soon befriended the three American children. He taught them cricket; they wowed him with Cokes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. While most of the foreigners and diplomats living in their peaceful tree-lined neighborhood kept to themselves, the Bloods welcomed the Bengali child into their home for homework sessions and slumber parties, chatting with him, as curious about his life as he was about theirs. Haque fondly remembers how good these friendly Americans were at intermingling.
Archer Blood was soothed by the pounding tropical rain on his roof. He loved to trek around the most remote hinterlands, eating humble chicken curry, finding serenity in long trips by rickety train or river steamer. He liked to be out on a tumbledown steamer, meandering down a tributary of the Ganges, watching hundreds of multicolored country boats speckling a river so vast that he could not see either bank. “I was never really in a hurry to get anywhere,” he later recalled.
Not so at work. Eager for promotion, he threw himself into his duties. Although many Bengalis complained that the Americans were helping West Pakistan exploit East Pakistan, he took pride in the American economic development efforts, like the opening of the renowned Pakistan SEATO Cholera Laboratory, mostly funded and staffed by Americans. When the first young Peace Corps volunteers arrived, he was heartened by their brash vitality. And he enjoyed easy relationships with Bengalis and West Pakistanis alike, once being whirled around at a boisterous dance party by General Muhammad Ayub Khan, then the military dictator of Pakistan.6
Blood’s work as a political officer was, he later remembered, largely about relaying the grievances of Bengalis who felt abused by West Pakistan. “This annoyed Washington because Washington liked to believe that Pakistan was a stable, united country,” he said later. Still, he thoroughly enjoyed the tour of duty. He remembered, “The atmosphere, despite the grumblings of the Bengalis, was one of progress and hope.” He left in June 1962, hoping one day to return.7
Blood got his chance sooner than he expected, when he was promoted into the senior echelons of the Foreign Service. He relished his first major posting as a deputy chief of mission in Afghanistan, where he loved roaming around places like Mazar-e Sharif and Qunduz, and was surprised to find that the U.S. embassy staff was on friendly terms with the Soviets. He hoped to do the same job in Ethiopia, but was instead shunted back to Greece.
Here, for the first time, he found a posting that he hated. Greece was languishing under a military junta supported by the CIA. Blood, along with most of the political wing of the embassy in Athens, found it painful to watch the generals stifle the Greek people. Keen for elections, he worried that the Greek public would enduringly resent U.S. support of the junta.
But the U.S. embassy was bitterly split. The rival American camps, for and against the military rulers, were openly hostile. He had never been at an embassy where he could not speak bluntly about the local government. He recalled later that “if you said anything mistaken as critical about members of the junta, the C.I.A. would explode in anger.” Blood’s rivals tried to brand him as a troublemaker. When a new ambassador arrived, who argued that providing U.S. weaponry to the Greek junta would somehow return Greece to democracy, Blood hit the roof: “These people will never bring back Greece to democracy. And this is a lie.”
The State Department, knowing how despondent Blood was in toxic Athens, came to him with welcome news: there was an opening in Dacca. He grabbed it immediately, bolting Athens in March 1970. Back in Washington, with a little pomp, he placed his hand on a Bible and was sworn in as the consul general of the United States in Dacca. He eagerly flew off to command his first post.8
The U.S. consulate in Dacca was a youthful, boisterous place. Despite the dingy, mildewed offices in their Adamjee Court building, the place hummed with energy. Blood, who was forty-eight at the time—the same age as Henry Kissinger—ranked as the elder statesman of the outpost, but most of his staff was much younger. Their work was exhilarating.9
Long before Bangladesh was written off by Kissinger and others as a “basket case,” it was known as a terrific place for development work. Some of the best poverty-fighting economists and experts flocked there for cutting-edge work on how to boost crop yields and resist cholera. In the city of Comilla, they worked with Akhtar Hameed Khan, whose pathbreaking work on agricultural cooperatives and microfinance would help pave the way for the Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their own microcredit efforts. Blood’s officials were proud of their professionalism and commitment.10
Dacca was not everyone’s idea of a plum posting, but for scrappy, ambitious juveniles, it was a rush. “This was not your tea-and-crumpets European assignment,” remembers Scott Butcher, Blood’s junior political officer. “This was a difficult part of the developing world.” After a relatively quiet stint in Burma, he had gotten word of his posting on April Fool’s Day and at first thought it was a joke. “If you’re a political officer, you’re something of an ambulance chaser in terms of crisis reporting,” he says. “I got that in spades.” While he was on home leave before shipping out for East Pakistan, his predecessor in Dacca, a grizzled former U.S. Army officer, told him to brace himself. When Butcher asked him to sum up the place in a few words, he replied, “Pestilential hole.”
There was conside
rable ridicule about all the sanguinary names at the post, heightened by a deputy political officer with the unfortunate name of Andrew Killgore. “Archer Blood, of all the names,” says Samuel Hoskinson with a laugh. Scott Butcher remembers drily that cables “would be drafted by Butcher, approved by Killgore, and signed by Blood. The anti-Americans thought, ‘Things bode ill.’ ”
Eric Griffel, the chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development team in Dacca, was happy there too. “I had begun to like Dacca, strangely enough,” he recalls. He came from a Polish Jewish family; his parents had fled from Krakow to London just before World War II, and then he had moved to the United States at age seventeen to go to UCLA. Griffel is round-faced and cherubic, belying his brisk, efficient manner. He speaks with a slight Polish accent, in clipped, blunt sentences. He was a rebellious and unflappable man. (The more buttoned-down Blood found him a little abrasive, but also “a pillar of strength.”) Griffel had always been curious about the subcontinent, and East Pakistan was a place with terrible poverty, and he felt needed there.11
Blood’s youthful staff liked the boss. He was dynamic and relatively young. “He and his wife were a very dashing couple, with bright prospects,” recalls Butcher, who greatly respected Blood. “He was clearly someone who was going on to much higher positions in the State Department.” Griffel remembers, “One would have thought he was completely conventional.” (Griffel is nobody’s idea of conventional.) “He was a very nice, easygoing, conventional Foreign Service officer. Able, did his job well, hardworking. He was always there. There was no golf playing, this sort of thing.” He says, “He was patriotic, very much so, but he didn’t wear it ostentatiously.” He sums the man up: “A very plain, good American civil servant.”
