Another voice

Kissinger: the grim truth

Auberon Waugh

From time to time I receive letters, pamphlets and other material through the post from a gentleman whom I think I have never met, but who runs his own news service entirely devoted to arguing that Henry Kissinger is a Soviet agent. His accusations are amazingly specific, naming the time and place of Kissinger's recruitment, the agent who recruited him and the code name by which he is known to his East German contacts.

My first reaction — unlike, I imagine, that of most people — was to believe this information, or at any rate to give it a whirl. It was only when the evidence began to mount up — I believe it has now been published in a book — that I started having doubts. The CIA was already in possession of all the relevant information, I read, but the files were mysteriously missing and the Satanic Doctor has 'issued a nolle prosequi.

It has always seemed to be more likely than not that a fair sprinkling of men and women in public life are Soviet agents, whether through political conviction, or avarice, or blackmail, or a combination' of the three. Certainly where journalism, the House of Commons and book publishing are concerned — the three areas where I have personal experience — I am almost sure this is the case, and I should not be surprised to discover that the pattern is repeated elsewhere. My reason for supposing it more likely than not that many branches of government are infiltrated at a fairly high level is to be found in published material on the enormous resources which, Russia devotes to exactly this aim: how every single application for a visa to visit the Soviet Union, even for some half-witted student on a Thomson tour, is made the subject of a KGB decision on whether the applicant should be seen as a target for recruitment whether he should be compromised in some way with a view of later blackmail, or merely be treated as someone who has already been recruited by the western intelligence agencies and prevented from seeing anything.

So, as I say, I would not be in the least bit surprised to learn that several household names are also part-time Soviet agents. A witch-hunt would be unlikely to expose the real ones, and in any case I have never been able to see how they can do much harm. The Russians will come when the British are ready for them, not before. As a matter of fact, I have always had the gravest doubts about Mr. Wilson, although needless to say, I have never had a scrap of evidence or reason for these doubts beyond intuition. In Kissinger's case, I do not even feel this twinge of intuition.

The Prime Minister of Great Britain is chickenfeed beside an American Secretary of State, in any case, but my own explanation for the Kissinger phenomenon is that he is something far more sinister than a Soviet agent: he is an astute and successful democratic politician. In other words, his policy of "detente" with the Soviet Urdon, which seems so murderously stupid and unprincipled to the rest of us, and which despite Angola and Portugal remains the main plank of American foreign policy, was not Adopted in order to sell America down the river, any more than it was adopted because it had any prospect of success. It was adopted for the only reason that this is what a majority of articulate Americans wish to have as their foreign policy at the present time.

If I am right, then the phenomemon is far more dangerous than anything that might be involved in having a Soviet agent at the head of the State Department or in Downing Street. It seems to me that in the aftermath of Vietnam the majority of articulate Americans are not content to say that America was wrong to fight the war; they must also believe that the Communists were right. Communism is morally correct and any attempt to oppose it is morally incorrect.

Nothing else can explain various phenomena on the American Scene, of which the public hounding of the CIA is only the most obvious. Last week we learned that the CIA had paid US $6 million in assistance to various centrist parties in Italy. Bully for them, I would have thought. No doubt the Soviet bloc pays a comparable amount in various ways to the Italian Communist Party. This information was given to a Congressional Committee set up to harrass the CIA and promptly leaked to the Press.

Again, there is nothing wrong with that. Secrecy in government is always a bad thing, and I see no reason why this sort of expenditure should not be debated. What is interesting is the calculation on the part of the leakers that publication will create a public furore, and help to bring an end to this sort of philanthropy on the CIA's part. It is not enough that the American public recoils violently — and understandably — from any course of action which might involve the country in another Vietnam. It now opposes any opposition to world Communism at all. Perhaps the American cult of Success provides half an explanation: the Communists won in Vietnam, therefore Com munism is bigger, better and more efficient than capitalism. Even this, I think, does not quite explain the eagerness with which doc trines and attitudes which ten or fifteen years ago were the preserve of a handful of "Liberals" — mostly in the academic and literary worlds — have been adopted by such an enormous proportion of the American intelligentsia, and here I use "intelligentsia" to describe anyone who reads a literate weekly or buyS a non-trashy novel. It is as if America had just discovered the stale assumptions of Marxism which Europe has been seeing hideously and bloodily discredited for the past fifty-eight years.

A novel by E. L. Doctorow, called Ragtime, sold 265,000 copies in hard-back in the United

States, and the paper back rights were sold for a record $1,850,000. I shall be reviewing it elsewhere when it is published here next week,

but four years ago, I reviewed its predecessor, The Book of Daniel (also published by Macmillan) for the Spectator. This was a fictional

treatment of events surrounding the trial and execution of the Soviet spies Julian and Ethel Rosenberg in June 1953 and marked, as I said at the time (Spectator 19 February, 1972) a significant shift in the American Marxist tradition: from describing themselves as "Liberals" and assuring the world that anybodY

accused of being a Soviet agent was ipso facto innocent and the victim of a McCarthyite witch-hunt against fellow Liberals. Marxists,

now described themselves as "radicals" and argued that anyone accused of being a Soviet agent was not only innocent but also quite right to be a Soviet agent, since this was the onlY thing for decent idealistic liberals to be. In The

Book of Daniel, Doctorow went further than this, introducing undigested chunks of crude Soviet propaganda worthy of the Dutt-Pauker newsagency: "We may tentatively define Cold War as a condition of incipient bomb-falling hostility by which the United States proposed to apply such pressure upon Soviet Russia that its government would collapse and the power of the Bolsheviks would be destroyed."

At this stage, he even warns against the self-indulgent tendencies of Trotskyism and anarchism: the Communist Party of the Soviet

Union remained the fount of all wisdom and the only hope for progress in the world. Now perhaps he has grown more sophisticated — I have not finished reading Ragtime, so

I am not sure. It arrives with the same line of

Glowing Testimonials from the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, the Boston Sunday Globe, the New York Times, Village Voice, and "Liberal" (or perhaps one should now call them "radical") reviewers on Time,. Saturday Review, Newsweek, and Literdry Journal. But this time, it has already sold 265,000 copies in hard back and we are told that Macmillan has printed 85,000 copies over here. I think and hope that Macmillan will be, looking very silly at the end of the day. Englan° went through this particular madness in the. fifties and early sixties. Its flotsam and jetsam still clutter our literary scene, buitl nobody wants to study this sort of rubbisi any more and it generally has to be heav! eY subsidized by the Arts CounCil. I shall b_ examining one particular national madnesas nBeuxbtbwleeek under the heading of the North Se