Henry Kissinger
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Henry Kissinger occupies a special seat in John Kiriakou's demonology, the war criminal Washington chose to canonize.

Greece and Cyprus

For Kiriakou, a Greek-American whose politics were forged partly by the junta years, the declassified record settles it: the Greek military junta was allowed to remain in power "because Henry Kissinger wanted it so." He tells of a cab driver in Nicosia asking out of nowhere, "Do you know Kissinger? The butcher of Cyprus", Kiriakou had met him exactly once, as a brand-new CIA officer.

The origin of the junta he attributes to Kissinger personally, and takes some care to correct the usual assumption. It was not the CIA's doing: the White House and the State Department installed the colonels, and Kissinger, who held no official title in 1967, advised President Johnson to go ahead and overthrow the government. The early files Kiriakou saw showed the agency going along with a course recommended from outside it. What followed was a coup by generals who lasted only weeks before a group of colonels displaced them and held Greece for seven years, the generals, in his summary, being too liberal, and the colonels wanting to crack heads.

On Cyprus he rests the charge on a declassified transcript of a recorded conversation between the president and Kissinger, in which the secretary of state acknowledged advance knowledge of Turkey's plan to invade and occupy a third of the island. Kiriakou blames the United States for the division of Cyprus outright: the Turks would not have had the nerve to go in without the signal they received.

"The biggest war criminal alive"

Kiriakou asks what bigger war criminal walks the earth, "the butcher of Cyprus, the butcher of Chile, we could go on", and is appalled that he still dictates foreign policy through acolytes like John Bolton and admirers like Hillary Clinton, who cited him as friend and mentor in a debate. His advice on encountering the man: "your natural impulse if you ever meet Henry Kissinger should be to become involuntarily violent." Kissinger belongs, he says, in the same breath as Westmoreland and Nixon, not on a foreign-policy altar both parties pray at. He also relishes the Ellsberg whiplash: Kissinger took credit for Daniel Ellsberg as his brilliant student, then, in Nixon's service, branded him "the most dangerous man in America."

The Mao viewing

The Kissinger story Kiriakou tells at length is second-hand but first-person: a station chief he worked for had come to the CIA from the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and in 1976 travelled to China on Kissinger's protective detail. From the moment they landed Kissinger pressed to see Mao, and the Chinese kept deferring, yes, Chairman Mao is looking forward to seeing you, but first this official, then that one. Only as the party was about to leave for the airport were they told Mao was ready.

They were walked into an empty room with a wall of drapes; the drapes were opened and Mao was in bed. Kiriakou's friend whispered to Kissinger, "He's dead, isn't he?", and Kissinger whispered back, "Don't tell anybody." China did not announce Mao's death for another month, and Kissinger returned to tell President Ford what they had seen.

The signature on the USAID letter

Kissinger also supplies Kiriakou's documentary proof that the CIA used USAID as cover. Senator Ted Kennedy, having heard that the agency was paying Laotian mercenaries through USAID, wrote to ask whether it was true, and, to his surprise, received an answer confirming it, from the director of central intelligence and, in an identical letter from the department under which USAID fell, over Kissinger's signature.

Proximity

Kiriakou has been closer to the Kissinger orbit than the invective suggests. When he needed help, Mack McLarty, Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff, gave him an office and a part-time secretary at the Washington firm then called Kissinger McLarty Associates, a kindness he says left him indebted; Kissinger later broke off and McLarty renamed the firm after himself. He also reaches for Kissinger as precedent on process rather than morals: asked whether one person may hold two of the government's senior national-security jobs at once, his answer is that Kissinger was both secretary of state and national security adviser from 1975 to 1976, so it is not far out of line.

The concession

And yet Kiriakou grants the devil his craft. Nixon and Kissinger "were not saints, they were killing people in the millions in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, but they also could be rational": the China opening was made for stability, and it was Kissinger's doing. When even Kissinger says he sees no aim in current U.S. foreign policy, Kiriakou takes the point: "as much of a genocidal maniac as Kissinger was, he at least had goals... you knew what his policy was. Realpolitik was real."

See also

- Petrodollar & Kissinger
- Daniel Ellsberg
- Richard Welch
- Mack McLarty
- 1953 Iran coup
- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
