by Gary J. Bass
Kissinger’s staffers dared not flout a powerful boss whose viewpoint was perfectly clear. Using Blood and Keating to give them cover, the White House aides suggested that the United States use its leverage from Pakistan’s dependence on U.S. military and economic aid to limit the bloodshed. After all, the country seemed doomed to break up, and the Nixon administration would face “criticism at home and abroad that we are supporting a military terror campaign against the self-determination of a group that won a majority fairly in a national election.” They asked if “in Ambassador Keating’s terms, whether this is a time when ‘principles make the best politics.’ ” Kissinger ignored them.23
Nixon and Kissinger would have been angry enough if Blood’s secret cables had only been read within the administration. But despite the State Department’s energetic efforts to limit official access to Blood’s “Selective Genocide” cable, it leaked to the press in a matter of days. Someone also fed some of Blood’s cables to Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democratic rival whom Nixon particularly loathed. Based on these cables, Kennedy promptly gave a passionate speech denouncing the use of U.S. weaponry and urging the Nixon administration to stop the killing.24
Blood was not the type to leak, and was chagrined about the revelations. Joseph Farland, the ambassador in Pakistan, suspected that Blood was feeding classified information to Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, although Schanberg—who says he never even met Blood—vehemently denies this.25
Still, any number of people at the State Department could have done it, or someone in the Dacca consulate, or many overseas posts. Kissinger became convinced that the culprit was Kenneth Keating, the troublemaking ambassador in Delhi. A little later, Kissinger told Nixon that Keating had “divulged the contents of the Blood cables” to the New York Times. (Schanberg also denies this.) Eric Griffel, the head development official, thinks it was someone in the Dacca consulate, although he refuses to say who. He says that the leaker would only have had to go into the cable room, make a copy, and send it by mail.26
Desaix Myers, who was a fiery critic of Nixon’s policies in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, says that it could have been almost anyone in the Dacca consulate. “We were trying to get the word out to the world,” he remembers. While he says he did not leak the cables, he urgently wanted press coverage of the slaughter, hoping this might stop the Pakistan army. He wrote up a long letter describing the suffering of Hindu villagers and sent it around to friends back home in the United States. He asked that it be shown around discreetly, to be used as the basis for letters to Kennedy, other influential Democratic senators, and Nixon. “Anything that would get to the press with name, source attached would probably mean I’d have to leave,” he wrote, “and I don’t want to leave right now.”27
“STRONG DISSENT”
After a dozen harrowing days, Blood’s staffers had had enough of standard Washington procedure. Scott Butcher, the young political officer, and some other officials talked about a complete indictment of Nixon and Kissinger’s policy. They wanted to send in a dissent cable: a new device in the Foreign Service, a Vietnam-sparked reform meant to encourage candor by allowing diplomats to speak out confidentially against official policy. “This was the height of the Vietnam War,” says Butcher. “We’re out at Camp Swampy, totally out of touch. No one is listening to us.”28
They agreed that they wanted a fierce, uncompromising statement. Butcher wrote it up with gusto. His draft declared their “strong dissent” from a U.S. policy that seemed morally bankrupt, a policy of refusing to speak out against the crushing of democracy and the slaughter of innocents. It called the slaughter a genocide. For several days, this draft dissent cable ricocheted around the consulate. Desaix Myers, the young development officer, signed. “I don’t think we had expectations that we were going to change this,” he says, “so much as we had been filled with the feeling that we can at least make a statement.” At the consulate, members of the Foreign Service, the Agency for International Development, and the United States Information Service all pledged their support. The dissenters rounded up other junior officials to sign on, and then worked on more senior ones like Eric Griffel. Griffel, not one to shy from a fight, tried to make the language even sharper. “I felt bad for the Bengalis,” he says simply. “I liked the Bengalis.”
Nobody knew if Archer Blood would sign it. “Obviously as he proved, he had a considerable backbone,” remembers Griffel. “But that wasn’t obvious before.” Blood was clearly appalled by the killings, but he had the most to lose. Junior officials like Butcher were too lowly to face much backlash from Washington. Griffel says he was not worried about his career: his Dacca tour of duty was almost over, and anyway he took some pleasure in giving a kick to Nixon and Kissinger. Myers, who also enjoyed the prospect of aggravating Nixon, says, “I figured, take my job and shove it.”
This draft would be the Foreign Service’s first formal dissent cable (hundreds more would follow over the years from diplomats around the globe), and while it probably would not shift policy, it was guaranteed to enrage powerful people in Washington. “The stakes were the highest for Arch Blood,” says Butcher. “He’s got all the right credentials for becoming an ambassador.” Blood’s deputy did not want to sign at first, for fear of backing Blood into a corner, making it seem like the whole staff was in revolt. “He knew this was not a career-enhancing action,” says Butcher. “This was a case of doing the right thing.”29
Everyone in the Dacca consulate knew what they were supposed to be telling Washington. This, after all, was the era when many career-minded military and civilian U.S. officials in Saigon had been assuring their superiors that they were winning the war in Vietnam. In Vietnam, as Americans there used to say, the rule was “fuck up and move up”: the system promoted the officials who chose not to make a stir, even as the evidence massed around them. But in Dacca, the bloody facts trumped. “Arch Blood is an extraordinarily professional individual,” says Butcher. “Professionalism means you have objectivity. Like a journalist, you want to get your facts right. The facts were that the place was going to hell in a handbasket on the ground.… They had the guns and they used them.”30
Blood weighed his decision, aware that he could wreck his career. But he knew what he had seen and he knew his duty. He joined the dissent and endorsed the cable. His staff was thrilled, and a little apprehensive too. “He said that what we were doing was not going to help in anyone’s career,” remembers Griffel. “That was a heroic action on his part,” says Butcher. “He could have just left it as, ‘I obviously cannot subscribe to these views, but I am sending it out.’ He could have pulled his punches totally. But instead, he not only authorized it, but endorsed it and embellished it.” Griffel says, “Blood risked everything.”
Blood shared his colleagues’ distress and frustration. The dissent telegram, Blood later wrote, matched his own views. And he was touched by his young staff’s idealism. He did not modify Butcher’s draft cable, since “nitpicking seemed almost a sacrilege in view of the earnestness and conviction of the message.” Butcher, who for years proudly carried around a copy of the original cable, remembers ruefully, “Had he drafted the whole cable himself, it might have been much more sophisticated.” Instead, Blood merely had the dissent cable retyped, and added some of his own commentary at the end. When Blood’s deputy heard, he was freed up to sign on, hastily scrawling his name by hand, so the deputy’s name went out to Washington misspelled. Almost the entire consulate stood behind the Blood telegram.31
On April 6, two weeks into the slaughter, Blood transmitted his consulate’s vehement dissent.
The telegram detonated in all directions, to diplomats in Washington, Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore. The confidential cable, with the blunt subject line of “Dissent from U.S. policy toward East Pakistan,” was probably the most blistering denunciation of U.S. foreign policy ever sent by its own diplomats:
[W]ith the conviction that U.S. policy related to recent developments in East Pakistan serv
es neither our moral interests broadly defined nor our national interests narrowly defined, numerous officers of Am[erican] Con[sulate] Gen[eral] Dacca … consider it their duty to register strong dissent with fundamental aspects of this policy. Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak dominated government and to lessen likely and deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya a message defending democracy, condemning arrest of leader of democratically elected majority party (incidentally pro-West) and calling for end to repressive measures and bloodshed.… [W]e have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely [an] internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional public servants express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation’s position as a moral leader of the free world.
This stark message was signed by twenty officials, from the Consulate’s diplomatic staff as well as the U.S. government’s development and information programs—what Blood later called a “roll call of honor.”32
It is as scorching a cable as could be imagined: in the drumbeat chorus of “Our government has failed”; in its impatience with national sovereignty at a time of massacre; in its blunt accusations of U.S. moral bankruptcy; and in its warning of genocide, given credence by a world-weary sense of how the term is often abused. “It seemed pretty shocking at the time,” recalls Samuel Hoskinson, who read the Blood telegram—as it quickly became known—at the White House. “The word ‘genocide’ seems to have lost a little of its punch because it’s been overused. But not then. This conjured up visions of the Holocaust, of a determined, systematic attempt to wipe out a people. That was shocking.”33
Blood added a kicker of his own. He bore responsibility for authorizing the transmission of the cable, as every recipient knew. He agreed with the dissent with zeal. “I support the right of the above named officers to voice their dissent,” Blood wrote, and gave a fulsome endorsement in a way that went far beyond a simple seal of approval: “I believe the views of these officials, who are among the finest US officials in East Pakistan, are echoed by the vast majority of the American community, both official and unofficial. I also subscribe to these views but I do not think it appropriate for me to sign their statement as long as I am principal officer at this post.” This last token note of propriety—seemingly a last-ditch attempt to minimize the damage to his own career—was given no weight by anyone, neither the anguished team in Dacca nor the senior officers in Washington. More tellingly, he added his own pragmatic dissent from U.S. policy, aimed at his strategic-minded superiors back home: since the Bengali nationalists were pro-American, and would most likely win their struggle and establish an independent Bangladesh, it was “foolish” to alienate the victors with “a rigid policy of one-sided support to the likely loser.”34
At the State Department’s hulking building, the Blood telegram quickly made the rounds. Within hours, nine of the State Department’s veteran specialists on South Asia wrote to the secretary of state that they associated themselves with the dissent cable and urged a shift in U.S. policy. Although Blood and his team in Dacca were unaware of their newfound support, from Dacca to Delhi to Washington, the middle ranks of the State Department were massed in protest.35
The blood telegram provoked rage at the highest levels in Washington. “Henry was just furious about it,” says Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s junior staffer for South Asia. “He made himself infamous as far as Henry was concerned,” says Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s senior aide, about Blood.
The White House staff was taken aback by Kissinger’s wrath. “These people weren’t crazy,” remembers Saunders about the Dacca officials. “They weren’t liberal bleeding hearts. They just saw a massive population being dealt with in a way that was inconsistent with values here in this country.” Hoskinson says, “The big mystery for me was, why was he furious about this? Why are they so upset about this? Is it not clear that this is happening, and how do we deal with it?” He says, about Kissinger, “I remember thinking, has he lost his mind? This is not being made up out there. Everyone says this is a good team on the ground in Dacca. But he’s furious. A furious Henry Kissinger in those days was not a pleasant sight. He would rant and rave a little bit about things.”
He was not the only one. A livid William Rogers quickly got on the telephone with Kissinger to denounce “that goddam message from our people in Dacca.” The secretary of state said, “It’s miserable. They bitched about our policy and have given it lots of distribution so it will probably leak. It’s inexcusable.” (Blood had only classified it as confidential, the lowest level, which he later regretted as careless. It is hard to believe that was unintentional.) Kissinger said, “And it will probably get to Ted Kennedy.” Rogers agreed. Kissinger said, “Somebody gives him cables. I have had him call me about them.”36
Rogers fumed, “It’s a terrible telegram. Couldn’t be worse—says we failed to defend American lives and are morally bankrupt.” Kissinger asked, “Blood did that?” Rogers said, “Quite a few of them signed it. You know we are doing everything we can about it. Trying to get the telegrams back as many as we can. We are going to get a message back to them.” Kissinger decided to keep the Blood telegram away from Nixon for two days, to Rogers’s relief. Kissinger and Rogers accused the Bengalis of committing their own atrocities, and Kissinger doubted some of the reports of massacres of Bengalis. Rogers, still indignant, said, “To me it is outrageous they would send this.”37
A senior state department official called Kissinger about the nine State Department officials who had endorsed the Blood telegram. Kissinger told him that there was no possibility of shifting policy, and that he should get his underlings back in line.38
The State Department scrambled to limit the distribution of the dissent telegram, trying to prevent a leak. Kissinger later accusingly wrote that “the cables were deliberately given a low classification and hence wide circulation.” Encouraged by his talk with Kissinger, Rogers sent a stern reprimand to Blood. The secretary of state, in an unusual cable he personally approved, wrote that he welcomed the “strongly held views,” but insisted that this was “primarily an internal matter of the Pakistan Government,” and sent along a rehash of some of the State Department spokesman’s bland verbiage—nothing more than meek expressions of “concern” over lives lost and U.S. weapons used. Rogers castigated Blood for risking that the cable might leak out.39
Pakistan faced nothing worse than polite suggestions offered by an assistant secretary of state to its ambassador and a tepid State Department statement of “concern” and hope for a peaceful resolution. The carnage continued.40
GENOCIDE
Govinda Chandra Dev was an elderly philosophy professor at Dacca University and the author of several books, including one with the unthreatening title Buddha, the Humanist. He was a Hindu, but reminded Blood, who was friendly with him, of Santa Claus. “He was a roly-poly, gray-haired, jovial guy,” recalls Scott Butcher, who knew him. “He was a very pacifistic figure, well known and well liked in American circles. He was apolitical as far as I could tell.” Early in the crackdown, Dev was dragged out of his home, hauled to a field in front of the Hindu dormitory at the university, and shot dead. “There was no other reason that he was killed other than being a Hindu professor,” says Butcher.41
This kind of deliberate ethnic targeting was the most reliable basis for the Blood telegram’s accusation of genocide. But at first, Blood used the dread term more for shock value than precision. T
here was considerable confusion in the consulate about what exactly genocide meant, and what they meant by using the word. (Blood, no lawyer, at one point sloppily suggested that the “Webster’s definition” could apply to the killing of Awami League followers.) Eric Griffel says that “probably it wasn’t. Genocide implies to me a determination to kill a whole group of people. This was a determination to kill some people. I would differentiate it from Hitler or the Armenian massacre or even from Cambodia.” This is somewhat muddled (under international law, “genocide” means persecution intended to wipe out a group in whole or in part), but the Dacca consulate was not at first clear on which victims they were talking about. Was this a genocide against the Bengalis, or against the Hindu minority among the Bengalis?42
“There was clear targeting of Hindus,” says Scott Butcher. “You might also talk about going after Bengalis as a racial or cultural group. It was an extraordinarily brutal crackdown.” At first, in his hasty cable about “selective genocide,” Blood had meant a genocidal campaign against the Bengalis overall, both the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority. (This was the same way that the Indian government used the word.) “The term ‘selective genocide,’ you had an army crackdown on one set of people,” says Butcher. “There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis. You’d hear snide remarks that these people are less religious, our little brown brothers.” Some West Pakistanis scorned Bengalis—even the Muslim majority—as weak and debased by too much exposure to Hindus among them. As one of Yahya’s own ministers noted, the junta “looked down” upon the “non-martial Bengalis” as “Muslims converted from the lower caste Hindus.” In similar terms, Sydney Schanberg reported in the New York Times on the “depth of the racial hatred” felt by the dominant Punjabis of West Pakistan for Bengalis.43
