They were both federal government contractors with unique access to classified information when they carried out arguably treasonous leaking based on political predilections and personal interests. Both subsequently became vocal mouthpieces for Vladimir Putin’s Russian terrorist state and continued to service the global mobster even after last year’s invasion of democratic Ukraine. One American was “elected” to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2016, just two years after Russia violently annexed Ukraine’s Crimea and Moscow-supported separatists shot down a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine. Last year, the other became a Putin-sponsored citizen of Russia.

There is, however, a significant difference in the way each is treated.

Before recent revelations (based in large part on declassified government documents) showed that he very well might have helped commit treason regarding unfolding peace talks over the Vietnam War in the run-up to the 1968 presidential election, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry and Russian Academy of Sciences international member Kissinger had already been reputably accused of being complicit in, when not the author of, war crimes in several parts of the world.

As a federal government consultant with access to the peace parley, Kissinger passed inside information about the negotiations to the campaign of the Republican candidate, former Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Faced with the fact that sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey was steadily rising in pre-election polls, Kissinger kept Nixon updated on secret last-minute U.S. government efforts to end the Vietnam War, an action that scuttled both the talks and Humphrey’s political fortunes and threw then President Lyndon B. Johnson into a rage, calling it “treasonous.”

Despite this, now approaching his 100th birthday Kissinger remains for most of the Washington establishment revolving door a public policy virtuoso, a mainstream media example of just how badly fawning replaces facts in much of the press as well as in the bureaucratic merry-go-round.

Yet, beyond unaccounted for responsibility in war crimes and possible treason, it was Kissinger who inaugurated a pernicious behavior perhaps only matched by national security leaker Edward Snowden, the second Putin apologist and national security leaker and someone who that same Washington establishment detests.

As a government contractor and former National Security Agency employee, Snowden stole highly-classified documents far in excess of those he supposedly took to make his “public service” argument against NSA, and then fled U.S. legal reach and into Putin’s arms. Even a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy like Sean Penn found himself obliged to note that Snowden was not “legitimate,” his acts “based on the narcissism of the so-called ‘whistleblower’.”

As the cases of Ukraine, Chechnya and Georgia show, former KGB officer Putin is a master at deception and propaganda. Six days before Russia crossed into Ukraine, initiating the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, Snowden wrote to his five million followers on Twitter that the possibility of war in Ukraine, “is frankly so terrible to me it is difficult to even contemplate… Just unthinkable.” That, it turned out, was quintessential KGB disinformation.

In March 2022 the U.S. Department of State called on Americans living there to leave immediately due to potential harassment and “terrorism.” Last September, when Snowden received Russian citizenship, his Russian lawyer claimed the leaker was “happy and thankful to the Russian Federation ... he’s now a fully- fledged citizen of Russia,” a national and international terrorist state responsible for, among the many others, the deaths of real whistleblowers and independent journalists.

“Kissinger, who has maintained close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is now positioning himself as an intermediary between the Kremlin and the incoming Trump administration,” warned Zach Dorfman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, in a January 6, 2017 article in Politico:

...To the best of my knowledge there has never, before now, been proof of Kissinger’s secret interference in U.S. politics after he left public service. The paper trail for Kissinger dries up; there are no more U.S. government documents subject to declassification. Indeed, we know very, very little about Kissinger’s political affairs after 1977. Since 1983, he has run an international consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, that has facilitated contacts between major corporations and a number of authoritarian regimes. During much of this time, he or other members of Kissinger Associates have sat on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a little-known civilian panel tasked with intelligence oversight duties where members have access to highly classified data.

Critics rightly point out Kissinger that is a war criminal responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions; according to his defenders, whatever else one thinks about his tactics and his allegiances Snowden raised awareness in the United States about a clandestine security state and has not been credibly accused of causing huge body counts, although his role in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion did smell more than a little like those of Joseph Goebbels and the Big Lie.

Perhaps one of the most blatant examples of Kissinger engaging in the purposeful manipulation of classified information was exposed by a fellow conservative, The New York Times columnist William Safire, while reporting on March 8, 1976 on leaked documents “emblazoned TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE/NODIS/CHEROKEE” in which selected portions were “slipped” to a Harvard academic who then went on to laud Secretary of State Kissinger as being “at the apogee of his genius.”

“Anybody who accepts the notion that these documents could have been leaked without the permission of Henry Kissinger is living in a dream world,” Safire wrote. “Despite hypocritical howls of ‘unauthorized,’ this was what is known in the trade as an ‘authorized leak.’” The reporter who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize noted that for the Secretary of State, “The criterion of classification has become intensely personal: What is embarrassing to Henry Kissinger is ‘top secret,’ and the leak must be plugged at all costs; but what makes the Secretary of State appear to be ‘at the apogee of his genius’—no matter how secret —can be leaked with impunity.”

Comparison of their deeds has real world significance, not the least due to the debate about scandals racking Washington of presidents (current and immediately former) and vice presidents running afoul of laws having to do with the possession of classified information. Part of the issue involving security classifications and the response to the cases of the real Donald Trump, Joseph Biden, Mike Pence, and others is a) hugely (bigly) different, and b) calls into public focus whether there are too many government documents that are unnecessarily and/or over classified. Meanwhile, as reported in The Intercept, three U.S. Marines known to have participated in the January 6^th, 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill were later promoted and given highly sensitive security posts.

At this writing, people in the United States, and peoples all over the world, are reassessing in appreciation the historic role played by President Jimmy Carter, the undisputed leader of the U.S. human rights revolution, who has decided to receive hospice care at home. “Jimmy Carter has been wronged by history,” writes the normally reliable Establishment journalist Edward Luce in the Financial Times, “Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, benefits from an eternal free pass.” Marketing, he notes, “is a powerful drug.

Conventional wisdom insists that Carter played Chamberlain to Reagan’s Churchill. After four years of Carterian vacillation, Reagan grabbed the reins in 1981 and the rest is history. Except that it is shoddy history. Understanding how the US won the last cold war is key to managing the next one. … A US president who preached universal rights helped America turn the corner from its Vietnam-era notoriety. Carter’s weaponisation of human rights lit a fuse that contributed to the Soviet Union’s peaceful implosion. … The moral of Carter’s story is that virtue must be its own reward. History is a biased judge. (Italics added.)

The dead Reagan’s eternal free pass was soaked in moral turpitude at home and barbarity abroad. Yet it is Kissinger’s seeming free pass that today represents living impunity and the negation of purported American exceptionalism, the very negation of what all Jimmy Carter stands for in life and leaves as a legacy (not the least of which includes the institutional elimination of secrecy in government).

As Luce pointedly reminds, Carter “also undid Henry Kissinger’s neglect of Soviet dissidents and the satellite states,” the latter into which Kissinger’s (only this year erstwhile) pal and Snowden’s unyielding benefactor Vladimir Putin would recreate in the again bloodied land of a Ukraine fighting to determine its own orbit.

***Martin Edwin Andersen, a frequent LA Progressive contributor, was one of the first federal national security whistleblowers to come out against Snowden and broke the original 1987 story of Kissinger given a “green light” for the neo-Nazi Argentine generals to conduct their “dirty war” as well as adding to the history of his arguably treasonous role before the 1968 presidential elections. Andersen’s whistleblower case against Vice Admiral (ret.) Ann E. Rondeau, the National Defense University, and the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He publishes on Muck Rack.

https://www.laprogressive.com/foreign-policy/kissinger-snowden