An official ceremony will honor a diplomat who paid a steep price to cross the master of realpolitik.
When the
State Department hosts a gathering next week to dedicate a conference room to
the memory of Archer K. Blood, the official man of the hour will be the late
American diplomat who in 1971 protested a U.S. ally’s shockingly bloody
crackdown in what was then East Pakistan. But another name will likely linger,
unspoken: Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of State most associated with
America’s support for what many scholars now understand as a genocide.
It’s not
hard to interpret the honor as an implicit slap at the 99-year-old master of
realpolitik, delivered in the Foggy Bottom building that Kissinger used to rule
— and where Blood saw his career derailed for protesting his policy.
Not that
it’s being billed that way. To the department, it’s all about celebrating an
individual’s heroism, not sticking it to his stateside antagonist. “Fifty years
later we think back to the values that were required at that point and hope
that we continue to hold those values as part of our own professional ethics,”
says Kelly Keiderling, a deputy assistant secretary in the South and Central
Asian Bureau, which is organizing the commemoration. No institutional rebuke of
Kissinger — or broader post-Trump embrace of civil servant dissent — is
intended.
In fact,
Blood’s story offers a lot to admire, with or without a malevolent Kissinger
cameo. But its central conflict involves a run-in with the White House over
democratic values, national interests and the duties of federal employees — a
clash that seems all too politically relevant today, however apolitical the
intent may be.
A career
Foreign Service officer, Blood spent 1970 and 1971 as the U.S. consul in Dhaka,
now the capital of Bangladesh but then the major city in Pakistan’s
impoverished, restive eastern wing. The posting in the isolated, military-ruled
province made Blood the senior American witness to one of the worst
humanitarian crises of the twentieth century, a campaign against separatists
that erupted into a mass-murder of students, intellectuals and the local Hindu
minority. Ten million refugees fled to neighboring India.
“A reign
of terror,” Blood reported in a cable back to Washington soon after Pakistan’s
launch of “Operation Searchlight.” “Thousands were slaughtered, innocent along
with allegedly guilty.” In another cable, he called it “selective genocide.”
The
problem for Blood was that Washington didn’t want to hear it. As far as Richard
Nixon’s administration was concerned, Pakistan was a crucial cold war partner
and the staffers calling attention to the violence were an unwelcome
complication. Nixon and Kissinger had their reasons: That same deadly Pakistani
regime was facilitating Kissinger’s secret outreach to China; the Bengalis’
supporters, meanwhile, included the Soviet Union and India, a Moscow-friendly
government the administration loathed. (White House tapes captured Nixon
deriding Indians in racist terms.)
Kissinger,
then the national security adviser, argued against even asking the Pakistanis
to avoid violence, according to meeting notes from the time. To officers
stationed in violence-haunted Dhaka, conveying reports of friends massacred, it
was an excruciating policy to abide by.
Two
weeks into the crackdown, young colleagues from the consulate used the
department’s newly established “dissent channel,” designed to let diplomats
register their disapproval of American policy without being punished for it.
Blood endorsed and joined the cable. The document “was probably the most
blistering denunciation of U.S. foreign policy ever sent by its own diplomats,”
in the words of Gary J. Bass, a Princeton professor and former journalist who
wrote an award-winning book about Blood.
“Our
government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy,” the telegram
reads. “Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has
failed to take forceful measures to protect its own citizens while at the same
time bending over backwards to placate the [West Pakistani] 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. ... Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as
professional public servants, express our dissent with the 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.”
The
cable did not alter American policy. But in Washington, and particularly within
the culture of the State Department, what became known as the Blood Telegram
had a profound effect, one that continues to reverberate. The classified cable
leaked, to the administration’s chagrin. Nine employees in Washington signed a
memo endorsing its content. (Full disclosure: One of them was my late father.)
Beyond the specifics of the Pakistan crisis, it’s easy to see why this first
use of the dissent channel drew admiration: At a time when officials were
delivering glowing reports about imminent victory in Vietnam, the spectacle of
staffers speaking unwelcome truth to power appeared downright heroic.
A
half-century later, it doesn’t take a leadership coach to understand why an
organization might want to celebrate that sort of legacy. The five decades
since the Blood Telegram have featured no shortage of imbroglios that might
have been avoided by listening to folks on the ground, far from the
group-think.
Of
course, it didn’t play out that way at the time. The telegram enraged
administration higher-ups. In a tape-recorded Oval Office conversation with
Nixon, Kissinger called Blood “this maniac in Dhaka.” In short order, Blood was
recalled to Washington, sacked. Once a rising star, he was consigned to an HR
job. A critical annual evaluation accused him of whipping up underlings in an
anti-Pakistan frenzy. Pressured by his bosses to stay out of sight, he rode out
Kissinger’s secretary of State tenure seconded to the Army War College, not
taking another overseas post until after Kissinger had departed. He never
became an ambassador.
***ArcherBlood_Telegram:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22066822-archerblood_telegram
The
story doesn’t end there, though — for Blood or for Kissinger.
Blood
was an obscure figure when he retired, but thanks in part to Bass’ book has
since become a hero of sorts, the straight-laced career man who told the truth.
“An honorable, highly professional, extremely talented Foreign Service officer
who did his professional and his moral duty when it was personally dangerous
and professionally dangerous,” Bass says. “He’s exactly the sort of person who
you want working for the United States government.” When he died in Colorado in
2004, the government of now-independent Bangladesh sent representatives to his
funeral.
Kissinger,
meanwhile, remains one of the most famous figures in America, but the makeup of
his admirers has changed, for reasons relevant to the Blood story. Always
loathed on the left, in the past couple decades he fell out of favor on the
right, too, first as Republicans embraced democracy-promotion during the George
W. Bush era. (Ironically, when Bush’s moralistic neocons were riding high, the
Foreign Service — Blood’s home — was derided for allegedly preferring a more
cold-blooded, Kissingerian approach.) The GOP swung in a radically different
direction during the Trump years, but Kissinger the globetrotting advocate of
alliances, balance-of-power and global order was never going to be an idol for
the America First set.
“The
Biden administration, including Tony, is consulting him regularly,” says Martin
Indyk, a former two-time U.S. ambassador under Bill Clinton, Middle East envoy
under Barack Obama, and author of a well-reviewed recent book on Kissinger,
referring to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “It’s one of the ironies of his
arc that these days he’s more appreciated by liberals than by conservatives
(including me!).”
I
reached out to Kissinger to ask how he felt about the State Department naming a
room for the man he’d called a “maniac.” In an email sent via a spokesperson,
the former Secretary of State said he didn’t think it was inappropriate. “It is
appropriate for the State Department to honor a Foreign Service Officer who
protested in pursuit of his conception of duty,” he wrote. But is it a slap at
his own tenure? Unlikely. “If the purpose was an institutionalized criticism of
a preceding Secretary of State, it would be unprecedented.”
The
email from Kissinger’s spokesperson also said that “you might also note that
his protest did not impede Mr. Blood’s career during Dr. Kissinger’s remaining
five years in office,” a claim that Bass scoffs at: “He can try and deny stuff
decades later, but the facts of what he did are frozen on the tapes.”
Washington
may be officially elevating Blood to its pantheon, but it’s not clear that
things are any easier today for employees who stand on principle. Perhaps the
most famous example since Blood, former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, also lost
her post after running afoul of an administration — in her case, being accused
of undermining an effort to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on Donald Trump’s
political rival Joe Biden. Yovanovitch testified at the hearings ahead of
Trump’s first impeachment, a much more public forum than a dissent-channel
cable. But she, too, wound up out of a job. Six days before Trump’s acquittal,
she announced her retirement.
***Michael
Schaffer is a senior editor at POLITICO. His Capital City column runs weekly in
POLITICO Magazine.