by Gary J. Bass
Hoskinson wanted to call a meeting to consider Blood’s and Keating’s anguished cables, but Kissinger ignored that. In a Situation Room meeting, the dissenters were laughed out of the policy debate. Someone passed along a joke from William Rogers, the secretary of state, that India might be the first to recognize an independent Bangladesh “unless Ambassador Keating beats them to the punch.”
A State Department official still insisted that Yahya could not win, and warned of “a sort of Biafra situation” as the news got out. But Kissinger, informed that Dacca was quiet and that Chittagong had been smashed, wondered if rural Bengali nationalists would really resist if the cities were under Pakistani control. He asked if Yahya’s crackdown might succeed after all: “Can 30,000 troops do anything against 75 million people?” A general warned that it could be “very bloody,” but a CIA official opined that the Bengalis “are not fighters.”
At the end of the meeting, Kissinger looped back to the reports of a massacre at Dacca University. “Did they kill Professor Razak?” he asked. “He was one of my students.” A CIA official replied, “I think so. They killed a lot of people at the university.” Here was a moment when the abstractions of high policy and impersonal numbers—thirty thousand troops, seventy-five million people—might have melted away, replaced with the individual human face of a pupil from more innocent days. Henry Kissinger, seemingly referring to past Muslim rulers of India, replied, “They didn’t dominate 400 million Indians all those years by being gentle.”55
Chapter 5
The Blood Telegram
Both Richard Nixon and Archer Blood were keenly aware of a disquieting fact: Pakistan’s military, now at war with its own people, had been heavily armed by the United States.
The ongoing assault required a formidable amount of military resources, including perhaps four Pakistan army divisions equipped with armor, as well as the Pakistan Air Force. In this, Pakistan was relying on lots of U.S. weaponry and equipment—everything from ammunition and the spare parts that keep armed forces operating, to major items like tanks and the massive C-130 transport airplanes that shuttled soldiers from West Pakistan to East Pakistan.1
As the crackdown began, Bengalis begged U.S. diplomats not to allow American-supplied weapons to be used for “mass murder.” The Nixon administration made no move against Pakistan’s use of U.S. weaponry; instead, the State Department, ducking embarrassing press questions, tried to avoid headlines about U.S. small arms and aircraft dealing out death in Pakistan.2
Soon before the shooting started, Kissinger had sat in a Situation Room meeting where senior U.S. officials were informed about Pakistan’s evident use of C-130s to reinforce its troops in East Pakistan. Once the killing began, Blood’s officials snooping around the Dacca airport could see those planes in operation. They witnessed frequent flights bringing in Pakistani troops, with one C-130 seemingly constantly coming and going from Dacca.3
Blood’s team also saw the Pakistan Air Force using F-86 Sabres, U.S. jet fighters famed for their performance in the Korean War. Blood reported daily sorties flown by an F-86 squadron at Dacca’s heavily fortified airfield, in flights of two or four. Two F-86s were seen taking off from Dacca to crush Bengali resistance in a nearby town. Another time, a Hindustan Times reporter in East Pakistan got a terrifyingly close view as two F-86s bombed and strafed all around him. And according to two eyewitnesses, in one rebel-controlled town, F-86s fired rockets and machine guns at the market area, the main mosque, and a local college, with many casualties.4
U.S. weaponry was equally noticeable on the ground. On the first day of the killing, one of Blood’s officials had seen three U.S.-made M-24 Chaffee light tanks rolling through the streets of Dacca, one of which fired off a machine-gun burst. In the next ten days, many of Blood’s staffers saw what appeared to be U.S. jeeps bearing U.S. .50-caliber machine guns, sometimes opening fire as they patrolled the city. Blood later noted at least eight M-24 tanks deployed around Dacca. In Chittagong, not long after, a U.S. official would see three of the tanks, evidently getting ready to fight Bengali rebels. British military officials also saw M-24s and F-86s in action in Dacca and Chittagong, as well as jeeps.5
This was known at the highest levels. As Harold Saunders and Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s staff at the White House, informed him, “There is evidence that U.S.-supplied equipment is being utilized extensively, including planes (F-86s and C-130s), tanks and light arms.” Kenneth Keating, the ambassador to India, urged cutting off the U.S. arms supply to Pakistan. He was appalled to find there were ongoing negotiations about new U.S. supplies of aircraft and armored personnel carriers to Pakistan despite “clear and growing evidence of West Pakistani military massacres.”6
Nixon always understood that such weapons could be used for domestic repression; he had recently told another brutal anticommunist strongman, Suharto of Indonesia, that “sufficient military strength is essential also for internal security.” The Nixon administration never asked Pakistan to avoid using U.S. arms and supplies against Bengali civilians. As a U.S. diplomat acknowledged to Pakistan, their arms deals did not forbid using U.S. weapons for “internal security purposes”—something that Pakistan could only take as a green light.7
VOICE OF AMERICA
Dacca grew dangerous for the roughly five hundred American citizens there. Blood was startled into ordering an evacuation by “berserk, anti-foreign action by Pak military.” He later told the State Department that it was “a minor miracle that no American was killed or injured by trigger-happy Pak troops fresh from killing and looting.” Blood had his own family to worry about. Meg Blood did not feel safe in their official residence. “We had had shots into the house,” she recalls.8
Pakistan provided a daily commercial Pakistan International Airlines flight loaded up with Americans, bound for safety in Tehran or Bangkok. Yahya later reminded Nixon about this, implying that the United States owed him. Joseph Farland, the ambassador in Islamabad, admonished Blood to make sure that his evacuated staffers kept their mouths shut around the press.9
For the departing Americans, many of whom had lost Bengali friends and were almost all horrified by the crackdown, their exit from Dacca was a shocking moment. Each day, between three and ten PIA airplanes, under the aegis of the Pakistan Air Force, landed in Dacca from West Pakistan, loaded with fresh troops in civilian clothes, who marched into an adjacent hangar to change into military uniforms. Then the Americans, after watching the soldiers debark, were ushered onto one of the same planes. They realized they were paying for some of the cost of reinforcing the Pakistan army. Blood cabled, “To many Americans, whose close friends had been killed, were missing, or in hiding, this situation made it impossible to leave East Pakistan with even the semblance of self-respect.”10
One of the grief-stricken evacuees was Meg Blood, with their little boy, who took the last flight out, packed onto a PIA plane bound first for Karachi and then Tehran. “It was a strange time in life,” she remembers with quiet outrage. “When Arch decided that the entire American community should leave, and they accepted from the Pakistanis who were behind all of this, the airplanes came complete with men dressed in mufti, who marched off as little brigades, before they turned the so-called rescue planes to us to fly out.”11
Blood was left alone, howling into the wind. “The silence from Washington was deafening,” he remembered later, “suggesting to us that less credence was being given to our reporting than to the Pakistani claims that little more was involved than a police action to round up some ‘miscreants’ led astray by India.”12
Blood would always have preferred a united Pakistan, but these atrocities had doomed that. He cabled with disgust, “A reign of terror began and thousands were slaughtered, innocent along with allegedly guilty. And all in the name of preserving the unity of the country.” Those Bengali moderates who wanted to remain within Pakistan were now discredited by the “continuing orgy of violence,” which had “terrorized populace today but radicalized political
leaderships for tomorrow.” Bengalis would turn to guerrilla warfare to win total independence from West Pakistan. The military, he wrote, had destroyed the country: “guardians of nation’s honor and integrity have struck the sharpest blow conceivable against the raison d’etre of Pakistan.”13
Many sorrowful Pakistanis agreed. One of Yahya’s ministers went to East Pakistan to see the devastation himself. “I went to Dacca,” he later wrote, “and it was the worst experience of my life. Everywhere I went, I heard the same story: one person had lost a son; another a husband; many villages were burnt.” To no avail, he confronted Yahya over “the Army’s atrocities.” Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, who soon became the military commander in East Pakistan, would later frankly write of “the killing of civilians and a scorched-earth policy,” condemning “a display of stark cruelty, more merciless than the massacres … by Changez [Genghis] Khan … or at Jallianwala Bagh by the British General Dyer.”14
As a secret Pakistani postwar judicial commission later noted, many Pakistani military officers complained about “excessive force” unrelated to any threat, as well as “wanton acts of loot, arson and rape.” General Niazi admitted the “indiscriminate use of force” that “earned for the military leaders names such as, ‘Changez Khan’ and ‘Butcher of East Pakistan.’ ” While blaming Bengali nationalists for cruelly provoking the Pakistan army, this judicial inquiry included the testimony of senior Pakistani officers decrying the vengeful attack on Dacca University, the execution of Bengalis by firing squads, mass sweeps in which innocent people were killed, and massacres of hundreds of people. According to a Pakistani brigadier, one general asked his soldiers, “how many Bengalis have you shot?”15
Blood redoubled his reporting, relaying a stream of “horror stories of varying reliability” to Washington. He reported an “atmosphere of terror” meant to cow the Bengalis into quiescence. There were ongoing shootings in Dacca and the surrounding areas, with newly killed corpses being loaded onto a truck. Blood found the few East Pakistani officials who dared come to work “stunned with grief and grim in their denunciation of Pak military brutality,” with one of them sobbing. American priests in Old Dacca told Blood that the Pakistan army, facing no provocation worse than putting up barricades, would set houses on fire and then shoot people as they ran out. The priests thought Hindus had been particular targets. Other Bengalis had witnessed six people gunned down in a shantytown, with the “army going after Hindus with vengeance.” The army was also shooting police, who were seen as Bengali nationalist sympathizers. One policeman told a U.S. official, “Pray for us.”16
Shahudul Haque, the young Bengali who had befriended Archer Blood’s family during his first tour in Dacca, was now twenty-one years old, an engineering student, who had joined in leftist campus protests against Pakistan and briefly been arrested. On the night of March 25, he had been taken completely by surprise by the unfamiliar heavy clatter of machine guns, the tracer bullets arcing across the sky, and the red hue of burning buildings. Rushing out to Dacca University two days later, he had been jolted at the sight of dead bodies, blood, and gore. As the crackdown continued, Haque often visited Blood in the evenings, telling him stark stories about members of his family who had fled to India or joined the rebellion. The consul replied that he and his staff were trying to inform people in the United States about what was happening. “I could feel his frustration that he wasn’t getting what he wanted,” Haque remembers. “But he was very diplomatic. He would not give any details.”
Blood’s team could hear sporadic gunshots at night across the city. “Wanton acts of violence by military are continuing in Dacca,” he cabled. He reported evidence of ethnic targeting, which bolstered his accusation of genocide: “Hindus undeniably special focus of army brutality.” There were large fires and the sound of shots in Hindu neighborhoods. The army was rounding up remaining activists. “Atrocity tales rampant,” Blood cabled, from trusted eyewitnesses. Truckloads of Bengali prisoners went into a Pakistani camp, and one of Blood’s staffers then heard the continuous firing of 180 shots in half an hour.17
Despite the military authorities’ panicked assertions that Dacca was returning to normal, the city was a ghost town, with as much as three-quarters of the population having fled. One eyewitness was stunned at the areas in Dacca burned by the army: he had seen many bombed-out towns during World War II, but the devastation here seemed far more thorough. Americans saw the Pakistan army moving into a Bengali village, bombing huts, rounding up the men, and finally taking half a dozen away. There was a heavy bombardment on Dacca’s outskirts, from what Blood reckoned to be hundreds of rounds of high explosives. Another U.S. official in Dacca cabled that witnesses saw Pakistani troops using tanks, bazookas, and machine guns on two villages made up of thatched-roof huts—rumored to be hideouts for deserters from the police and army.18
The consulate emphasized how Hindus were targeted. One of Blood’s senior staffers privately noted “evidence of selective singling out of Hindu professors for elimination, burning of Hindu settlements including 24 square block areas on edges of Old Dacca and village built around temple.… Also attack night of March 26 on Hindu dormitory at Dacca University resulting in at least 25 deaths.” Although Pakistani forces had concentrated on Awami League activists, “Hindus seem [to] bear brunt of general reign of terror.”19
Beyond Dacca, the situation looked equally grim. One of Blood’s officials saw total devastation in a nearby town. Blood noted reports of the Pakistan army unleashing bombs and napalm in a town outside of Dacca, while the military launched reprisals on another nearby village. After a week of delay, the Pakistani authorities flew some of Blood’s officials into the devastated city of Chittagong, which was in flames, with many residential neighborhoods burned out. Although the Pakistani military held their fire while the diplomats toured, American citizens there had witnessed “numerous incidents of cold-blooded murder of unarmed Bengalis by Pak military.” The Americans in Chittagong told of a Pakistani cover-up campaign to get rid of civilian corpses before the consular officials arrived.20
These reporting trips were often dangerous, with the Americans dodging mortars and hearing gunfire. Desaix Myers, a brash young development official, says, “I was running around Chittagong in my white car, going up to military guys, saying, ‘I’ve heard rumors about your guys violating women, and I know that you as a disciplined officer would not want that to get out to the international press.’ We felt we had diplomatic immunity. It just didn’t seem that risky at the time.”
Myers wrote a desolate letter home to his friends lamenting what he had seen in a small, impoverished Hindu village in the countryside. The army had “lined up people from their houses, shot down the lines, killing close to six hundred.” The people in nearby villages heard the gunfire and fled. The rice mills were burned to charcoal, the rice to ash. The handful of villagers who had returned told their stories through sobs. A tall, frail Bengali man took Myers to his scorched house: “a room with a rice ash heap and charcoaled bed stead, nothing remained to show us that his three children and wife had lived there, died there. Another old man, pan stained teeth, mucus glazed eyes, (glaucoma or tears?), whimpered the loss of his family.” Some of the wounded had escaped to a Christian village, over two hours away by boat. They lay on a concrete floor. “Most have been hit in the hand, or arm; one woman with gangrene has left; a man with an abdominal wound died; a girl of eleven with a bullet hole through her frontal lobe, passing out her right temple, lies quietly, looking at her hand; she is silent but, miraculously, alive.”21
The overall death toll was hard to calculate precisely. “The whole objective of the West Pak army apparently was and is to hit hard and terrorize population into submission,” Blood wrote. Although unsure how many people had perished in Chittagong and elsewhere, he estimated that as many as six thousand had been killed in less than a week in Dacca alone.22
At the White House, Kissinger’s aides were shaken by Blood’s reporting. “I
t was a brutal crackdown,” says Winston Lord, Kissinger’s special assistant, who says he read some of the cables. “In retrospect, he did a pretty good reporting job,” says Samuel Hoskinson, about Blood. “He was telling power in Washington what power in Washington didn’t want to hear.”
So, increasingly, was Hoskinson. He was shocked and saddened by the violence, which was unlike anything he had tracked before. While loyal to Kissinger and eager to please him, he was frustrated by the national security advisor’s lack of response to his warnings. He recalls, “It’s going over there, and there’s no sign of it.” He complained to Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy national security advisor, that nobody was listening to him. “My old friend Al Haig is advising me, be careful, be careful. He didn’t want to get him too riled up.”
Hoskinson says, “I began to feel a little bit more passionate about this—about the reporting we were getting from the Dacca consulate.” He was mystified. “I really didn’t understand why they were leaning so much toward West Pakistan.” Hoskinson knew the depth of Bengali nationalism, and saw a tragedy in the making. Trusting his own regional expertise, he tried to educate Kissinger about a brewing revolution, to no avail. He says, “Why doesn’t Kissinger understand? Why doesn’t he understand the realities there and adjust policy accordingly? We don’t understand why they don’t understand what we understand.”
Harold Saunders, the senior White House official on South Asia, channeled Hoskinson’s emotion into a tentative approach to Kissinger, gingerly asking him to reconsider their policy. Saunders and Hoskinson used Blood’s cables to put the lie to Nixon and Kissinger’s hopes for a quick Pakistani military success: “the Pakistan army has failed to achieve its initial objective of cowing the Bengalis quickly with a ruthless campaign of terror.”
