A just-released transcript of a meeting between Henry Kissinger and a Turkish Foreign Minister 35 years ago provides a bombshell quote that will go a long way toward solidifying the former Secretary of State’s reputation as one of the most Machiavellian insiders of American politics and diplomacy in the 20th century.
During a secret meeting on March 10, 1975 in the Turkish Capital of Ankara with Mehli Esenbel, Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Kissinger, then Secretary of State and Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, told Esenbel:
Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.
Ironically, it was a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that finally pried loose the transcripts of the meeting, albeit three and a half decades later. The transcripts were posted November 5 on the website of the National Security Archive, a research institute and library located at the George Washington University.
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The Turkey-Cyprus Context
Henry Kissinger’s statement occurs during the tense period in which Congress had embargoed aid to Turkey. Kissinger is telling Esenbel that he and President Ford disagree with the congressional action and will continue trying to change minds in the House and Senate, but notes that a congressional reversal in the near future doesn’t look very hopeful. Foreign Minister Esenbel suggests that Kissinger might circumvent the embargo by helping arrange for European governments to transfer U.S. military equipment to Turkey. United States Ambassador to Turkey William Macomber, who was also at the meeting, cautions that such interference would be illegal, which sparks the scofflaw quote from Kissinger. Here is the immediate context of the quote:
Esenbel: The Europeans should find ways to meet quick needs; for example, the Air Force needs spare parts. For other items that they can’t find in the stocks, maybe you could make a deal with the Dutch or others to send it here.
Macomber: That is illegal
Kissinger: Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.
We’ll make a major effort.
The entire transcript can be viewed here.
Contempt for the Rule of Law
Kissinger’s quote is a mocking paraphrase of the World War II motto of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.” In Kissinger’s case, his expressed contempt for the legal restraints of the Constitution merely provides verbal confirmation for what was already plain from his actions. Reviled no less by liberal Democrats than conservative Republicans for his arrogance and deceit, Kissinger is especially detested by the Right for his policy decisions and secretive negotiations that have betrayed America’s allies and harmed America’s national interests. Perhaps foremost among the betrayals remembered by America’s veterans and patriots of the Vietnam War era is Secretary Kissinger’s sellout of Southeast Asia to the communists and his betrayal of hundreds of live American POWs whom he left behind. He not only repeatedly lied to the public about the abandonment of our POW/MIAs, but also later deliberately lied under oath when testifying about the matter before a congressional committee.
Then there is the matter of the State Department documents revealed in 2006 showing that Kissinger had orchestrated a major coverup to suppress information that Yassir Arafat, terrorist chief of the PLO, was the real mastermind of the Black September kidnapping, brutal torture, and murder of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and his Charge d’Affaires George Moore. Herr Kissinger, more than anyone else, helped promote the massive lie of Arafat as the “Man of Peace,” propelling Arafat to Nobel Laureate status and guaranteeing him hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid for the PLO’s coffers.
That’s barely a start on the Kissinger record, which has been covered in considerable detail in the pages of The New American (and its predecessors, The Review of the News and American Opinion) over the past four decades. Meanwhile, TIME, Newsweek, the New York Times, CNN, ABC, CBS, et al. have obscured his sins and presented him to the American people as a godsend, the indispensable world crisis solver. Library shelves full of books have been written about the exalted “Dr. K,” but, unfortunately, few of them dig deep, and most are little more than puff pieces extolling his supposed brilliance and incomparable diplomatic skills.
Is Treason the Reason?
An important exception to the standard sychophantic portraits of “Super K” (one of the monikers given him by his adoring press corps) is Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State, by investigative reporter Gary Allen, published in 1976.
In the second chapter of this slim but important book, Allen (a colleague of this writer) offered a cursory catalog of Kissinger’s misdeeds, before launching into a more thorough examination of the storied (and sordid) career of the “Secretary of the World.” Gary Allen notes that “as presidential adviser, and later as Secretary of State for the outgoing President [Nixon], Henry Kissinger had”:
• Been the primary architect of the “opening” to Communist China, while working secretly behind the scenes to oust the Republic of China {Taiwan} from the United Nations, which Free China had helped found.
• Emerged as spokesman for appeasement of and “rapprochement” with the Soviet Union, and promoted policies which guaranteed the Soviet Union a strategic military superiority over the U.S.
• Arranged for supplying the latest American technology and know-how to the Soviet block, while waiving $11 billion owed the United States by the Soviet government.
• Provided the U.S.S.R. with American wheat on incredibly favorable credit terms, while bread prices skyrocketed at home.
• Designed the Vietnam “peace” accords with the North Vietnamese Communists (for which he shared a Nobel “Peace” Prize), agreements which guaranteed the Communists victory in Vietnam in the first war ever lost by this country.
• Handled the Intermittent Middle East war so ably that, according to his friend, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Kissinger had represented both the Soviets and the United States in the negotiations there.
• Alienated such long-time American allies as Turkey and Greece, thus weakening NATO and allowing the Soviet Union to dominate the entire Mediterranean.
• Urged a policy of “reconciliation” with Communist Cuba, a Soviet satellite successfully planted in the Western Hemisphere which subsequently sent “volunteers” to stage a Communist coup in Angola.
• Attempted, despite massive Congressional and public opposition, to surrender American sovereignty over the Panama Canal, and endorsed the claims of a Moscow-lining Panamanian dictator to the vital waterway.
• Supported a boycott of anti-Communist Rhodesia as a “threat to world peace” with the result that the U.S. became dependent on the Soviet Union for chrome ore.
In subsequent chapters, Gary Allen fleshes out a very damning indictment concerning these and many other charges. In the final chapter of his book, Allen examines an issue that few other biographers/hagiographers of the celebrated “Dr. K” have been willing to broach: The Goleniewski accusation.
Colonel-General Michael Goleniewski is widely credited as being one of the most important Western agents ever to have operated within the Soviet KGB and its satellite agencies. He was the vice chairman of Communist Poland’s military intelligence when he escaped to the West in 1960, bringing thousands of Top Secret Soviet documents as well as information identifying hundreds of highly placed Soviet agents in western governments and intelligence agencies. Among the important communist agents Goleniewski exposed were Kim Philby, George Blake, Gordon Lonsdale, Morris and Lona Cohen, Henry Houghton, Ethel Gee, and Stig Wennerström. So strategic, timely, and reliable were his revelations that the House of Representatives of the 88th Congress passed House Resolution 5507 to honor Goleniewski’s exceptional contributions to American security.
The Resolution said in part that Goleniewski “has collaborated with the government in an outstanding manner and under circumstances which have involved grave personal risk. He continues to make major contributions to the national security of the United States.”
In retrospect, surely the most startling charge leveled by the impeccably accurate Colonel General Goleniewski was that a then relatively unknown German-born Harvard professor was a member of a KGB ring known as ODRA, operating within the U.S. government. Goleniewski identified that professor by name as Henry Kissinger, who, said Goleniewski, went by the code name “Bor.”
Considering Goleniewski’s extraordinary record in these matters and Kissinger’s subsequent atrocious record of pro-communist activities (despite his occasional anti-communist statements), it is nothing short of astounding that not only was Kissinger not subjected to official investigation, but he also received virtually a free pass from the media. Moreover, the same media “watchdogs” merely wagged their tails and rolled over as Kissinger accumulated political power unprecedented for any appointed United States official. As Gary Allen noted:
During his confirmation hearings, it was revealed that Kissinger headed the most immense intelligence-gathering and policy-determining apparatus in White House history. At the time of the confirmation, Kissinger was: a) head of the national Security Council, b) chairman of every important committee on the Council, c) the man to whom the CIA director reported, and d) chairman of the “Forty” Committee, the “covert operations” arm of the NSC. As Senator Stuart Symington observed to our hero:
“If you stay in two positions, head of State and also head of the National Security Council, you are going to be in a position where you are going to have unprecedented authority never granted to anybody but the President.”
And that is just what Kissinger got — with not a yelp from the fawning media.
And the Power Continues
Herr Kissinger’s power has not diminished since his glory days of “ping-pong diplomacy,” “shuttle diplomacy,” and brinksmanship in the 1960s and ’70s. If anything, his prestige, influence — and personal net worth — have skyrocketed. Consider the following remarkable statement made by President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser General James L. Jones at the 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof on February 8, 2009 (which is published on the web page of the Council on Foreign Relations):
Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through General Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here. We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today.
Yes, there is a “chain of command” that has existed for many decades — one that operates outside of the official parameters of our Constitution — extending from Pratt House (the New York City headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations) to the White House, as well as to the Pentagon, State Department, Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and other departments of the federal government. Particularly notable in General Jones’ remark is that all of the individuals mentioned — former National Security Advisors Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Berger — are not only members of the CFR, but leading lights within that organization. Kissinger’s career was launched at the CFR in the late 1950s, where, under the sponsorship of David and Nelson Rockefeller, he was made director of studies and then a member of the editorial board of Foreign Affairs, the CFR journal. He later became a member of the CFR’s Board of Directors. The Council now has an endowed “Henry A. Kissinger Chair in U.S. Foreign Policy” named in his honor.
Scowcroft was a protégé of Dr. K in the Nixon administration and succeeded Kissinger as National Security Advisor to President Ford, a position he also held under President George H.W. Bush. From 1982 to 1989, he was vice chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., Herr Henry’s high-powered and richly paid international consulting firm. That stint, no doubt, greatly assisted Scowcroft in launching his own highly profitable global consultancy, The Scowcroft Group. Like Kissinger, Scowcroft serves on many corporate boards, was a director of the CFR and regularly pens articles for Foreign Affairs and/or speaks at CFR confabs. He is an advisor to President Obama and assisted him in selecting personnel for his administration. Sandy Berger helped orchestrate the disastrous pro-Soviet policies of the Carter administration under Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (CFR) and was later Deputy National Security Advisor for President Clinton under security risk Anthony Lake, whom he succeeded as National Security Advisor. He became a partner at the international law firm of Hogan & Hartson, where he was the point-man and key lobbyist for Red China’s government. Berger went on to form his own lobbying firm, Stonebridge International. Among his many controversial business deals with Communist China is his effort to help Red Chinese princeling Hu Haifeng, son of Chinese President Hu Jintao, secure the contract to provide security for American shipping ports. In 2005, Berger pled guilty to stealing classified documents (some of which he destroyed) from the National Archives. He had smuggled out some of the documents in his pants, socks, and jacket. Thanks to his high-level connections, Berger got off with a mere slap on the wrist — 100 hours community service, a $50,000 fine, and two years probation — whereas almost anyone else under similar circumstances would have been looking at serious jail time. But, instead, the charmed Sandy “Burgler” Berger is an honored speaker at swank CFR soirees of “the great and the good” and writes pieces for Foreign Affairs and internationalist op-eds (with Brent Scowcroft) for CFR fronts such as the Washington Post.
Kissinger, Putin and the “New World Order”
The inimitable Dr. K remains a sensation not only in the United States, but in Russia as well, where, incredibly, in 2007, he and Yevgeny Primakov were appointed by Vladimir Putin to co-chair a bilateral “working group” on international security concerns. Putin, of course, is the “former” KGB-FSB chief who now runs Russia, and Primakov is the former KGB Middle East terror chief and former Russian Prime Minister who now heads the Russian Chamber of Commerce. Kissinger has made numerous off-the-grid jaunts to Moscow to meet with Putin, Primakov, and other Russian officials, which is a continuation of the strange Kissinger modus operandi throughout the Cold War that so alarmed national security personnel: conducting closed, secret meetings with Anatoly Dobrynin, Leonid Brezhnev, and other Soviet leaders, and operating through KGB back channels, which was confirmed years later by retired KGB General Oleg Kalugin. All of which should cause reconsideration of Colonel General Goleniewski’s revelations concerning Kissinger’s alleged membership in the KGB’s ODRA ring.
As noteworthy and alarming as is Kissinger’s ongoing parlaying and hobnobbing with Putin, Primakov, and other top members of the Russian KGB-FSB elite, it has been almost completely ignored by the major media. The New American, however, provided coverage of this striking development here and here.
The Big Media have likewise completely ignored the newly released transcript of the Kissinger quote; news searches on Yahoo and Google yield not a single story about it. This is all the more striking considering that this is the same Big Media that normally hang on every word from the thick-lipped eminence griese with the thick accent, whose guttural utterances could be mistaken for the rumblings of a German cement truck.
This is not the first airing of Kissinger’s flippant boast of criminality and constitutional subversion, but it is the first documented example of it in an official context of which we are aware. We quoted the infamous quip in our predecessor publications The Review of the News and American Opinion, taking it from his interview with the New York Times Magazine of October 28, 1973.
Likewise, Gary Allen, in his previously cited 1976 book (page 13) wrote:
He was the man who said “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” and who was quoted in New York Times magazine as joking, “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
The Times, of course, which has served as one of Dr. K’s premiere PR vehicles, did not criticize Kissinger over the remark, but that was to be expected, since the globalist elites at the Times have for decades shown themselves to be as contemptuous as Kissinger of constitutional limitations.
Like Kissinger, the top folks at the Times are all pedigreed internationalists, with a large percentage holding membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. Ditto for the top echelon journos and execs at the Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and the rest of the “prestige press.” These are the same institutions that for decades protected Soviet agent Alger Hiss (a CFR member), who, like Kissinger, was treated as the brilliant golden boy of diplomacy. The CFR choir in the Big Media protected Hiss as long as it possibly could, pleading his innocence and castigating all efforts to expose him as unfounded and vicious witch hunts. The damage to our national security and the toll in death, misery, and loss of freedom caused by Hiss’s treasonous, pro-Stalin influence on FDR’s policies (not to mention his key role in foisting the United Nations, IMF, and World Bank on the United States and the world) is incalculable. Hiss’s baleful influence was long ago eclipsed by Herr Kissinger, who is rewarded with a multi-millionaire lifestyle, celebrity, and open invitations at venues such as the Times to pen op-eds calling for a “New World Order,” a theme that has always been code in CFR circles for a world government run by the minions of Pratt House, unbridled by the nuisance of constitutional limitations. The CFR coterie has already achieved de facto control over our executive branch of government. If the admission quoted earlier in this article by President Obama’s National Security Advisor General Jones isn’t evidence enough of this, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s address to the CFR at its new Washington, D.C., office last year, in which she admits to taking orders from Pratt House, should be suffice. She begins by thanking CFR President Richard Haass and referring to Pratt House as the “mother ship,” an ominous choice of words, since it confirms what critics (this one included) have said for decades, i.e., that our State Department is under the control of, and operates in the service of, the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s hard to put any other gloss on it, as Secretary Clinton’s words speak for themselves:
Thank you very much, Richard, and I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.
Like Kissinger, Hillary Clinton can boast: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” And, like Kissinger, she has been able, thanks to her CFR connections, to escape the consequences of her criminal activities, as in the sordid case of her illegal fundraising activities with Hollywood mogul Peter Paul.
The history of the Council and its members in government “service” over the past several decades indicates that Kissinger’s quote is not the harmless, humorous witticism they would have us believe it is; it is serious operational code for those who intend to rule without restraint, regardless of the oaths they have taken to uphold and defend the Constitution.
For a more detailed look at the CFR record, see James Perloff’s article in The New American: “Council on Foreign Relations” or his classic, bestselling book on the subject, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline.
Other related articles from The New American:
Kissinger, Putin, and the “New World Order”
POWs: Forgetting Those Left Behind
CIA Documents: Kissinger Covered Up PLO Assassination of U.S. Ambassador
A Bad Investment: Hundreds of Millions of Tax $ to Terrorists
Global Fusion: The G20, IMF, and World Government
IMF as Global Fed: G20’s Agenda Behind the Agenda
Photo of Henry Kissinger (right): AP Images
