The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 3: A Man Named Blood

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

You are listening to Part 3 of a multi-part series on the 1971 Bangladesh War.

Now we have a lot of ground to cover today, but before we get started, I want to issue a small correction for the previous episode. In Part 2, I referred to John. F. Kennedy as “the youngest man to ever hold the office of U.S. President.” What I *should* have said, is that he was the youngest man to ever be ELECTED to the office of President. The former superlative actually belongs to Teddy Roosevelt, who became President at the age of 42, succeeding to the office after the assassination of President William McKinley. /Succeeding William McKinley after the latter’s assassination.

So anyway – it’s a small thing, but as they say the devil is in the details, and I wanted to get that corrected. Hopefully that’ll save me from / spare me a tide of angry letters from JFK enthusiasts.

But we are not here to talk about Teddy Roosevelt, or JFK; we’re here to talk about Bangladesh.

This is one of those topics, that the deeper you go, the more complicated it gets. There are so many overlapping interests, so much backstory, and so many figures involved, that assembling a coherent narrative is a bit like navigating the Bengal delta itself. There are so many detours and dead-ends, so many ways to get lost and bogged down, without ever finding your way to the sea.

But as this story progresses, I’ve started to think of it, structurally, as a series of concentric circles. With each passing chapter, our world is getting a little bit bigger. As things get worse in Pakistan, the conflict starts to widen, drawing more and more nations into its sphere. And today’s episode represents a shift into a much larger circle. This time, our story is going to truly become international, and things are gonna start moving very, very quickly.

But before get into it, I think it’d be helpful to take a moment and remind ourselves what happened last time. This episode gonna start with a bang – literally - so I’d like you to have all that background fresh in your mind.

The events discussed in last episode, Part 2: Bhutto’s Game only spanned about four months: December of 1970 to March of 1971. But those four months were extremely turbulent. What’s the old Lenin quote? “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Well On December 8^th, 1970, President Yahya Khan, the military dictator of Pakistan, woke up to some very surprising news. ]The big election he had organized, the freest and fairest of its kind in Pakistan’s history, had yielded some unexpected results. East Pakistanis, long neglected and economically exploited by their cousins in the West, had voted in droves for a political party called the Awami League, led by a charismatic Bengali named Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. It was a shocking, landslide victory – one that gave Bengalis a clear majority in Pakistan’s incoming representative government.

Well, to the military leaders and the power brokers in West Pakistan, this was – in a word – terrifying. If Mujib became Pakistan’s Prime Minister, he would remake the nation into something unrecognizable. For 23 years, the West had treated the East as a colony, juicing it like an overripe mango, leaving only the rind. But now, they would have to treat the Bengalis as equals. Even more horrifying, they would have to defer to the Bengali majority on key issues like defense, the economy, and civil codes.

But in the nervous weeks after the election, Mujib and his majority did not go unopposed.

In the West, another political movement was rising. The Pakistan People’s Party, led by the silver-tongued aristocrat, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had won big in the election too. [Bhutto and his alliterative affiliation] They didn’t have enough seats to overrule the Bengali majority, but it was enough to obstruct the transfer of power. To grind the entire process to a halt.

But Zulfikar Bhutto and the PPP wouldn’t have been able to obstruct anything without the willing partnership of Pakistan’s main man in khaki, our old pal Yahya Khan. In the weeks following the election, Bhutto convinced Yahya that they could not trust Mujib – that once he had attained power, the Bengali leader would betray them all. He’d break up the country, or sell them out to India, or any number of apocalyptic scenarios. Yahya found Bhutto’s arguments convincing, and he delayed the transfer of power indefinitely in the early months of 1971.

As the legendary British author John le Carre once wrote: “All power corrupts. The loss of power corrupts even more.”

Their patience exhausted, their anger inflamed, the Bengalis did some obstructing of their own. In March of 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman launched a province-wide hartal – or non-cooperation movement in East Pakistan. Trains stopped running, ships stopped docking, offices stopped working. The authority of Yahya’s government was rejected, and the Awami League ruled the streets. Dacca became a sea of green, covered in the flag of a new nation, Bangladesh.

Bhutto and Yahya flew to Dacca in a last-ditch attempt to break the deadlock, but even as peaceful negotiations were happening, more violent solutions were being prepared by the Pakistani military. Mujib was a proud man, and it was unlikely that he would abdicate his democratically won majority and bow his head to West Pakistani demands.

Yahya Khan’s answer to this problem was a military operation, codenamed “Searchlight”. Conceived by his generals earlier that year, Operation Searchlight’s goals were simple, yet brutal. Bring Dacca back under federal control by any means necessary. No begging, no bargaining – cooperate or die. There was no need to be gentle, no need for tear gas or rubber bullets. As Searchlight’s operational commander told his subordinates that night: “I want the land. Not the people.”

I wish I could say the story gets brighter and more hopeful from here. That the worst-case scenario is narrowly avoided through the power of dialogue and compromise. But that would  be a lie. From this point on we are walking into some very dark, emotionally distressing territory. As historian Gary J. Bass writes:

“The slaughter in what is now Bangladesh stands as one of the cardinal moral challenges of recent history, although today it is far more familiar to South Asians than to Americans. It had a monumental impact on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—almost a sixth of humanity in 1971. In the dark annals of modern cruelty, it ranks as bloodier than Bosnia and by some accounts in the same rough league as Rwanda.”

So…basically….buckle up.

Welcome to The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 3: A Man Named Blood.

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It’s the evening of March 25^th, 1971.

We’re in Dacca, the largest city and de facto capital of East Pakistan. Although no one here calls it East Pakistan anymore. Above every house, every home, every hovel – a new flag is hanging. A red circle on a field of green. The flag of Bangladesh.

To Bengalis, the flag is a symbol of defiance; a shorthand for hope.

But to the 40,000 West Pakistani soldiers descending on the city, that ragged flag is nothing but an insult. A bruise on their honor. A glob of spit on their face. And tonight, that insult will be avenged once and for all.

When the clock strikes 11PM, the nearby Pakistani military base comes alive like a nocturnal animal. Helicopter rotors spin and become a blur. Diesel engines clear their throats. Live ammunition is hand-fed into hungry chambers.

Tonight is the big night.

Operation Searchlight is a go.

All across Dacca, dial tones go dead. Radio waves turn to static. The telecommunications equivalent of a wet rag stuffed into the city’s mouth. Bound, gagged and at the mercy of the West Pakistani military. Tonight, the mass delusion of Bengali independence will come to an end. Tonight, the Awami League is going to die in the dark.

Blinding headlights whip down the narrow roads and alleyways of Dacca. Armored Personnel Carriers, tanks, and light vehicles – a great and terrible convoy worms its way into the city’s bloodstream. Each of the soldiers in this procession has a very specific objective, a task that must be carried out to the letter.

But of all these tasks, the most important one belongs to the men of the 3^rd Battalion Special Services Group. The name of their outfit might sound benign, but these are talented killers to a man. The best of the best. A platoon of 40 hand-picked commandos who have flown 1,000 miles from West Pakistan to accomplish one very important objective.

And as they ride in the back of an armored personnel carrier towards their objective, a shadow of doubt tickles at the back of their brains. A flawless military operation is a very rare thing, and sometimes things go wrong. Mistakes are made, rendezvous are missed; covert operations become overt operations – shit happens, in other words. But that is a luxury these commandos do not have. The task they must accomplish tonight cannot go wrong – not under any circumstances. Operation Searchlight hinges on their success. Indeed, the very future of Pakistan rests on their calloused trigger fingers. 

It's almost midnight, but in the airless, suffocating hold of the APC, the commandos are baking. Their khaki uniforms are soaked with sweat. Their socks are damp, their hair is damp, everything in this godforsaken swamp of a province is damp. Not like home. Not like West Pakistan – the real Pakistan. And after tonight, the rightful supremacy of West over East will never be challenged again. As one Pakistani commander commented that evening: “We will sort out of the Bengalis well and proper for at least a generation.”

Eventually, around 1AM, the APC sputters to a halt, and the diesel engine settles into a patient purr. The commandos exchange glances, check their weapons, and leap out of the vehicle. They have arrived at their destination. They have arrived at House 677, 32 Road, in Dacca’s upscale Dhanmondi neighborhood.

At first glance, it looks like just another house. Two stories, white paint, a wall, a gate, a little garden ‘round back. But this is not just another house.

This is the private residence of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family.

As they encircle the house like a noose, the Pakistani commandos encounter evidence of a prepared and defiant target. Barricades have been erected, and tree trunks have been felled. Mujib, it seems, has made a meagre effort to defend himself.

But it’s nothing a well-aimed rocket launcher can’t solve. In a shower of splinters, the barricades vanish, and the commandos pour through the gap.

Inside the house, Mujib’s head whips towards the sound of the explosion outside. He has been waiting for this moment. Dreading it, really. The consequences of his disobedience campaign have come, quite literally, to his doorstep. For almost 15 years, he has lived in this house. It’s the house he raised his children in. The house he composed his speeches in. And tonight, it’s the house he’s going to die in. After all, what else could he expect from an unimaginative jackboot like Yahya Khan?

They will kill him in his own home.

And they’ll do it in front of his children.

He could’ve fled, of course. Could’ve gone underground or slipped across the border to India, into the arms of the sympathetic government there. But that was a luxury 75 million Bengalis did not have. They couldn’t run away from Yahya’s crackdown; they couldn’t flee to fight another day. And so, Mujib has decided to stay. To face the consequences. Even if they arrive in the form of a bullet to the back of his skull. Better to die as a martyr than live as an exile.

Outside, Mujib hears gunfire. His personal guards have engaged the Pakistani Commandos in a firefight. But it’s a fight they cannot win, and one by one, their weapons fall silent. As Mujib listens to the battle from his bedroom, he hears the boom of a grenade, and the thump-thump-thump of heavy boots coming up the stairs. Just before they can kick it down, Mujib opens the door, raises his hands, and prepares to meet God.

For a very long moment, the commandos point their rifles, still smoking, at the leader of Bengali separatism. He is the cause, in their eyes, of untold misery and frustration and political turmoil. It would be so easy to end it right here, right now. A tug of the trigger, a whiff of cordite, and it’s all over. But as much as they’d like to give Old Four Eyes a fifth one right in his forehead, their orders are crystal clear.

Mujib is to be captured alive.

->

At 1:30 AM on March 26^th, 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is arrested, handcuffed, stuffed into the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser. But before they haul him away, Mujib has one small request for the Commandos: “I have forgotten my pipe and tobacco,” he growls, “I must have my pipe and tobacco.” The commandos roll their eyes and grudgingly allow Mujib to go back into his house to retrieve his precious pipe.

A small mercy for a big prize.

Back at Pakistani Army HQ, the good news crackles over the air waves: “Our boys have caged the big bird [referring to Mujib]. Repeat: big bird is in the cage. Over.”

But elsewhere in Dacca, the Pakistani Army is not so gentle. They’d bagged the head, now it was time to dismember the rest of the Bengali body politic. And while Mujib needed be taken alive, no such restrictions apply to the rest of the city.

“During Operation Searchlight’s critical first hour,” write Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, “the shock-and-awe operation aimed to liquidate Dacca’s soft targets—including universities, newspaper offices, police stations, government institutions, and known Awami League residences—before anyone had a chance to escape.”

Capturing Mujib was of paramount importance, but it was only one of several key objectives that Yahya Khan and his commanders had circled on their chalkboard back at HQ.

“The objectives were to neutralize the political power of the Awami League and to reestablish public order,” write Leo Rose and Richard Sisson, “First, the top leadership of the party had to be captured. The second priority was to neutralize its more radical elements, in particular student leaders and organizations and various cultural organizations that advocated a Bengali renaissance. Several residential halls at the University of Dhaka would need to be cleared of students and checked for arms that were believed to be there in preparation for rebellion.”

About a mile-and-a-half from Mujib’s house, 7-year-old Odhir Dey is sound asleep in his bed when a loud noise jolts him awake. Odhir lives on the campus of Dacca University, where his father runs a small restaurant. Just a normal little kid, with a normal little family, and a normal little life. But the trauma that will sear itself into his 7-year-old brain tonight is going to stick with Odhir for the rest of his days. As he remembered many years later:

“I woke up from my slumber with a sudden shock at about 11.30 p.m., hearing heavy gunfire and ammunition. My parents, my brother and his wife, and my siblings all woke up. They moved the curtain a little and peeped out to see what was happening. I joined them and watched Jagannath {juh-guh-naaT] Hall in high flames and saw that people were screaming for rescue, ‘ Help! Help! ’

The Pakistani Army has come.  

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An institution of higher learning might seem like an odd target for a military operation, but Dacca University was considered to be a hotbed of Bengali separatism and a virtual recruiting ground for the Awami League. The campus was all but synonymous with militant political activism. As Carney and Miklian write: “Dacca University wasn’t just East Pakistan’s Oxford; it was also the launching pad for almost every major Bengali political movement since Partition.”

As such, the student dormitories and faculty quarters have been targeted for liquidation. Hundreds of fish in a very large barrel.

“One company of a hundred and fifty troops drove tanks through the Dacca University gates, firing shells at the buildings and emptying assault rifles at anything that moved,” continue Carney and Miklian, “They split into two groups. One went after the students in the dorms, while the rest were tasked with carrying out more symbolic destruction. They ordered the university’s grand banyan tree, the spiritual home of the Bengali language and shade-giver for infinite Bengali student debates, uprooted and chopped to bits. An American Chaffee tank made quick work of the thousand-year-old landmark.”

In the dormitories, students wake up to the sound of fists pounding on their doors and boots crunching over broken glass. Room-by-room, door-by-door, scream-by-scream, the West Pakistani soldiers murder every student and faculty member they can find. As one survivor remembered:

“Soldiers came in the night through the halls where our flats are located. Any door that wasn’t locked they shoved open and entered. We could hear our colleagues pleading with them, and their wives sobbing and begging, but what could we do? We were too terrified to go to help them.” -

Horrified visitors to the campus the next day will find “bloody handprints on the walls, and the floor stained with pools of blood. There are red streaks as if wounded or dead bodies have been dragged across it. Although gore is spattered everywhere, the most awful sight to me is finding the bloody prints of a student’s bare feet. Wounded, he must have run to find refuge in the bathroom, where the tracks suddenly come to an end.”

As they move from room to room, the Army’s purge takes on a sickening rhythm. Knock-scream-bang. Then onto the next dorm room. Knock-scream-bang. Knock-scream-bang. Over and over and over again.

Eventually the soldiers arrive at the living quarters for on-campus workers. Inside one of the flats, Odhir Dey, the 7-year-old boy, clings to his mother. He looks around the room and sees half a dozen terrified faces. His father, his brothers, his pregnant sister-in-law.

Odhir can hear a soldier’s voice shouting through the door in Urdu. But his family doesn’t speak Urdu; they speak Bengali. They don’t know what’s being said, or how to comply, or even how to beg for their lives. Thinking quickly, Odhir’s father opens the door in an effort to appease the soldiers outside. Seven heavily-armed West Pakistanis plod/thump into the room, carrying repeating rifles and gleaming bayonets. And then, people start dying. As Odhir remembered:

“They started destroying all our belongings. We screamed and rushed back to hide ourselves. Some of us took shelter under a cot, some of us in the toilet, and some hid inside the cupboard. Ranjit, my eldest brother, fled to the third floor. Our house was on the second floor. Then the bloody brute saw my Ranjit’s wife, Rina. She started running to and fro within the house. When they were about to catch her, Ranjit rushed to the spot and said, ‘ Rina! Rina! Hold up your hands! ’ As soon as he said it, the soldiers turned back and shot him. My sister Ranu was very near to my brother. The bullet pierced my brother’s chest and came out through his back, and then it hit Ranu’s cheek. Dada (my other brother) fell down on the floor at once. The floor around him was soaked with blood. After that, the military shot my Rani. She was pregnant then. The bullet hit her chest. I saw the dead body leaning against the wall and it seemed to me that it was not bullet but panic that was responsible for her death. Then they snatched Rani’s earrings from her ears.

After that, they went back to kill my father in the [flat next to ours]. My younger brothers and sisters and I were all sobbing bitterly. My mother was horrified seeing the bloody dead bodies of Ranjit and Rina. When the military aimed their gun to shoot my father, my mother ran to him and stood in front of him spreading her hands. She begged the military, ‘ You have ruined me! You killed my son, my daughter-in-law. Don’t kill him, I beg for his life! ’ They did not pay any heed to her appeal, and instead ordered her to go away. They tried to drag her forcibly but failed. Lastly, out of rage, they cut both of her hands with a bayonet. Her hands were hanging just on the skin. Then they shot her. The bullet hit her throat, exposing her tongue. Even after she died, they shot her body several times in front of my father. Father also got shot. Both bodies were wet with blood.”

Slowly, systematically, the Pakistani Army turns Dacca University into a graveyard. No arrests are made, no prisoners are taken. A conversation between Army HQ and Operational command confirms the full extent of the slaughter:

“How many preys in the university?”, HQ asks, “How many liquidated, wounded, or captured? Over.”

“Three hundred or so,” answers Operational Command, “Over”

“Very well,” HQ responds, “Three hundred liquidated, imprisoned, or wounded? Over.”

“No, no. Finished off completely,” says Command, “The game is over. Over.”

“Well done!”, beams HQ, “Very well done.”

At some point during the night, a joke starts making the rounds among the soldiers. When asked what they did with this student over here or that family over there, they laugh: “We sent them to Bangladesh.” It was their euphemism for summary execution.

But the killing is not confined to the University. All across Dacca, the red-and-green Bengali flag, once a symbol of pride and patriotism, is now effectively a death sentence. Any house seen flying one is guaranteed to receive a very special visit from the Army – or in some cases, a tank shell. Orders from Army HQ squawk over the comms channels:

“The Joi Bangla flag everywhere must be brought down. If the flag is flying atop any house, the owner must be punished. If any such flag is seen anywhere in the city, the consequence will be fearsome and terrible. If any barricade is seen, those in the locality will be punished. Raze all houses on both sides of the road. Repeat: both sides of the road. Wherever a barricade is seen, all inmates of the houses on either side of the road will be shot. Explain this clearly to all.

If the Joi Bangla flags are spotted, administer the right medicine. Search every house, turn over every brick. Eliminate as you please. Annihilate everything. Over.”

As the Army sweeps across the city like all-consuming grassfire, pockets of resistance begin to rise up. Bengalis grab kitchen knives and axes and antique rifles. They cut down trees or push rusty vehicles into the road in an attempt to slow the advance of the West Pakistani soldiers. But very few things can stop an artillery shell or an M-24 tank. Bones and bodies and barriers are crushed under the tracks, and the resistance washes away like delta silt. Shouts of ‘Joi Bangla’ turn to death rattles or pleas for mercy in their throats.

One Pakistani officer, watching the operation from a distance, was struck by the sight of an entire city under attack. As he remembered, rather poetically, years later:

“Flames were shooting up to the sky. At times, mournful clouds of smoke accompanied the blaze but soon they were overwhelmed by the fire trying to lick at the stars. The light of the moon and the glow of the stars paled before this man-made furnace. The tallest columns of smoke and fire emerged from the university campus.”

With Mujib captured, the University liquidated, and resistance all but crushed, Operation Searchlight moves into its final stage. One last task to achieve. Before the night is over, the Pakistani Army will have to cut out the cancer in its own body. They will have to purge their ranks of undesirable elements – in other words, any Bengali wearing a Pakistani uniform will need to be disarmed, disabled, and disabused of any notions of mutiny. As writer and former Indian Army Officer Hitesh Singh writes:

“The plan of Operation Searchlight was based on the premise that all Bengali uniformed personnel including regular East Bengal Battalions would revolt once the plan was put into action. Therefore, these troops would have to be disarmed.”

At military installations all across East Pakistan, from tiny encampments to sprawling bases, Bengali soldiers were stripped of their weapons and herded into enclosures. It didn’t matter that they worshipped the same God, or served the same government, their dark skin and thick accents were a uniform they could never take off. It marked them as ‘other’. A foreign object in the real Pakistani Army that needed to be surgically excised before it metastasized into an angry uprising.

Yahya and his commanders logically assumed that Bengali officers would have some serious objections to slaughtering their own people. Consequently, these officers were a threat; and they too needed to be liquidated alongside their civilian brethren. Many Bengali officers who had commanded soldiers on the morning of March 25^th were executed by those very same men the next morning. Shot in the back of the head and tossed into fresh ditches before the sun came up. As the writer K.S. Nair describes:

“The Pakistani operation included the summary killing of serving Bengali officers in East Pakistan, within the first few days of Operation Searchlight. Those executed included virtually all Bengali personnel of the ranks of Colonel and Lieutenant Colonel, and many senior majors who were taken into custody, with most being executed by April 1971. In addition, around a hundred junior officers and thousands of unfortunate soldiers of Bengali origin, including serving members of the EPR paramilitary and police stationed in East Pakistan, were summarily executed.”

And as hundreds of Bengali officers sink into the dirt, countless sparks and embers rise into the air over the flaming city of Dacca. To horrified observers on balconies and verandas, it would’ve looked like an ocean of fireflies soaring up to an indifferent, moonlit sky. And somewhere in that sky, on a private plane 35,000 feet above, the architect of this atrocity is working on his second or third glass of scotch & soda.

President Yahya Khan is breathing a whiskey-scented sigh of relief.

Since his plane furtively departed Dacca airport on the evening of March 25^th, Yahya has been receiving updates on the progress of Operation Searchlight. And by all accounts, it has gone off without a hitch. Executed even more smoothly, ironically, than the election that had started all this mess in the first place.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, brainless bastard that he is, fell for the trap. And now the Bengali messiah is sitting in a cell, cuffed and cold and muzzled. With only his pipe and tobacco to keep him company. Dacca University, meanwhile, is in flames. The Awami League has been gelded, and the Pakistani Army has been purged of all Bengali traitors.

Everyone thought Yahya was sooo stupid. An intellectual pygmy compared to giants like Bhutto or Mujib. Well, who was stupid now?

Yes, the scotch is hitting very, very good tonight.

But despite Operation Searchlight’s apparent success, Yahya knows he is entering very dangerous territory. He has just ordered an unambiguous attack on 75 million of his own citizens. That is not a decision that makes friends and influences people. To avoid becoming an international pariah, he will have to control the flow of information to the outside world. He will need to warp and reshape and polish this crackdown to a PR-friendly shine. And that means cleaning up the crime scene. A crime, after all, can’t be called a crime if there’s no evidence of it. And thankfully, the Pakistani Army, gun barrels still smoking from the evening’s bloody work, is already removing the evidence of its rampage. 

At Dacca University, lifeless students are being dragged from their dorms, heaped into piles, and bulldozed into mass graves. Bengali newspapers and TV stations are being shut down. Foreign journalists have been quarantined and threatened. In one stroke, the city has been cut off from the world. With any luck, Yahya thinks, no one will ever know the full extent of what happened here tonight.

“In the first twelve hours of Operation Searchlight,” write Carney and Miklian, “Pakistani troops killed more than 25,000 unarmed civilians, as well as hundreds of Awami League activists who tried to put up an impromptu resistance with axes and farm implements.”

But numbers can be adjusted. Facts can be finessed. As far as the world is concerned, Operation Searchlight is just an unfortunate, but necessary response to a radical rebellion by a small group of extremists. President Yahya Khan, sadly, was forced to do this, thanks to the “obstinacy, obduracy and absolute refusal to talk sense” of one Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. A leader whose party’s only goal was to “to break away completely from the country. To attack the solidarity and integrity of this country.”

But there was one thing Yahya Khan did not count on. One factor he did not foresee. As it turned out, Dacca had not gone completely dark. The Pakistani Army had cut the phone lines, jammed the radio stations, and muzzled the press. But they had forgotten something. There was one last, lonely communication channel capable of relaying the truth to the outside world.

A few miles from the slaughter, a squat little building broods. It is the site of the United States Consulate, a satellite embassy for Pakistan’s stalwart and steadfast friend - America. And on a nearby balcony overlooking the city, an American foreign service officer looks out over the carnage. All night long, he has been, in his own words, “watching with horror the constant flash of tracer bullets across the dark sky and listening to the more ominous clatter of machine gun fire and the heavy clump of tank guns.”

He has decided that the world needs to know the truth. But it won’t be easy. Amid all this careless carnage, he’s just one guy. Just one man.  

A man named Blood.

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It’s March of 1970.

Exactly one year before Operation Searchlight.

We’re in the city of Athens, the capitol of Greece.

Now when most people think of Athens, they think of crumbling columns, promiscuous deities, and wise philosophers with fluffy white beards. It is one of the oldest cities in the world, birthplace of the simple idea that in a healthy society, everyone should have an equal say.

But the Athens of the late 1960s and early ‘70s is a far cry from the cradle of democracy. Like most nations in Europe – indeed, the world - Greece has been drafted into the ugly game of diplomatic dodgeball that historians call the Cold War. And in 1970, Greece is wearing a red, white & blue jersey. The United States has decided that it would be in Greece’s best interest to serve America’s best interest – to become a peninsular brick in a continental wall erected for one very simple purpose: stopping the spread of Communism.

But sometimes, stopping Communism means shaking hands with some very bad people. A lesser evil for a greater good. At least that was the rationale back at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. At this time, writes historian Gary J. Bass, “Greece was languishing under a military junta supported by the CIA.” The birthplace of democratic thought had become a military dictatorship that repressed its people and banned elections - all supported, armed and funded, by Uncle Sam.

The irony, it seemed, was thicker than a good moussaka.

And the cruelty of that irony is not lost on the intrepid men and women of the United States Embassy in Athens. As Foreign Service Officers, representatives of the American government on faraway soil, it is their job to keep the junta happy, to wake up every morning with a lie on their lips and a fake smile tugging at their cheeks. For many of them, it is intolerable, soul-crushing work.

And it is particularly soul-crushing for a 48-year-old man named Archer Blood.

That’s Archer, A-R-C-H-E-R, Blood, B-L-O-O-D.

Archer Blood hates his job. And he loves his job. But mostly, he hates it.

He loves the idea of his job, is the best way to put it.

When young Arch Blood had first joined the foreign service back in 1947, the world seemed so fresh and new. And in a way, it was. The Nazis had just been defeated, America was on the rise, and the Soviet Union presented more of a stimulating challenge than an existential threat.

“From the first time he realized there was such a thing as the Foreign Service, he was keenly interested in it,” remembered Archer’s wife, Meg Blood..“He had always looked at the world, and thought that everything had meaning.”

In a slick, forward-thinking new diplomatic corps, Archer Blood very much looked the part. He was, writes Gary J, Bass, a “sincere and rather bookish man from Virginia; tall and solidly handsome, with kindly eyes and an athlete’s frame, wearing his dark hair slicked back.” A movie adaptation of his story might put Matt Damon or a younger Tom Hanks in the starring role.  

And in his 23 years as an American diplomat, those kindly eyes had seen some truly exotic places. Algeria, Afghanistan and West Germany to name a few. But the most memorable of those foreign adventures had been a brief, yet intoxicating stay in the city of Dacca, in East Pakistan. From 1960 to 1962, Arch Blood worked in the consulate there…and in that short time, he fell in love with Bengal.

In some ways, it was love at first sight. Looking out at the country for the first time from airplane window, Blood’s wife, Meg, thought the Bengali waterscape looked like “an ocean; green and flowering, but definitely a land of water.”

“There was a magical quality to this ubiquitous water,” remembered Archer, “which heightened the green of the rice paddies and the purple of the water hyacinths and furnished a shimmering mirror for the famed golden sun of Bengal.”

Dazzled by its natural beauty, the Bloods quickly settled into their new home. As Gary J. Bass describes:

“Archer Blood was soothed by the pounding tropical rain on his roof. He loved to trek around the most remote hinterlands, eating humble chicken curry, finding serenity in long trips by rickety train or river steamer. He liked to be out on a tumbledown steamer, meandering down a tributary of the Ganges, watching hundreds of multicolored country boats speckling a river so vast that he could not see either bank. “I was never really in a hurry to get anywhere,” he later recalled.

“Our lives were delightful,” says Meg Blood. The social scene was relaxed, and they made fast friends both among Bengalis and West Pakistanis. “We spent our evenings discussing tigers.”

While most of the foreigners and diplomats living in their peaceful tree-lined neighborhood kept to themselves, the Bloods welcomed Bengali children into their home for homework sessions and slumber parties, chatting with them, as curious about their lives as they were about theirs.”

The people were friendly. The job was rewarding. And the air was so thick you could scoop it into a bowl and top it with shrimp.

ALT: Blood embraced all the charms of Dacca. He liked the people, the language, he even liked the food; Although his digestive tract might’ve had one or two things to say about it.

But even in the early 1960’s, Blood could sense a profound tension in that humid Bengal air. He could see how East Pakistanis were exploited and disenfranchised by the central government 1000 miles away in West Pakistan, and most of his day-to-day work, writes Gary j. Bass, consisted of “relaying those grievances back to his superiors.”

“This annoyed Washington,” Blood recalled, “because Washington liked to believe that Pakistan was a stable, united country. But overall, the atmosphere, despite the grumblings of the Bengalis, was one of progress and hope.”

All plum gigs, however, must come to an end; and in 1962, Archer Blood was shipped off to a new consulate, a new posting, a new life. But he hoped, deep in his heart, that one day his career path would arc/bend back East once again.

And 8 years later, in the spring of 1970, he got his chance.

By that time, working in Athens, Greece had ground Blood’s spirit down to the nub. He was disgusted and disillusioned by his government’s Faustian pact with a goose-stepping, right-wing junta. The so-called greatest democracy in the world, nursing authoritarianism in the birthplace of democracy itself. The cognitive dissonance made him miserable. Every word of false praise he had conjure up for Greece’s generals rose like a half-digested meal in his throat. The Athens embassy was, according to Gary J. Bass, “toxic”.

 “If you said anything mistaken as critical about members of the junta,” Blood remembered, “the C.I.A. would explode in anger.”

And when his boss had the audacity to suggest that selling more weapons to the Greek generals would somehow persuade them to embrace democratic ideals, Blood exploded right back: “This is a lie. These people will never bring back Greece to democracy.”

It didn’t matter if they wore Army boots or penny loafers…Archer Blood did not like bullies. But just as the black clouds of professional purgatory were beginning to loom over Blood’s head, a beam of light broke through the storm. As it happened, a brand-new position had just opened up. Far away from the corrosive culture in Athens. The U.S. consulate in Dacca, in East Pakistan, needed a new man-in-charge, a new Consul General, and we were thinking, old boy, that you might be just the man for the job.

Blood, of course, replied with an enthusiastic YES; and departed with all but a gleeful middle-finger to the CIA sycophants. Goodbye kebabs, hello curry. A few weeks later, Archer and Meg Blood were once again peering out an airplane window at the dreamy, watery world of Bengal. In a way, it must’ve felt like coming home.

But cities are like people. They change over time; whether you want them to or not. And the Dacca that Archer Blood arrived to in 1970 was a bit different from the one he remembered. The atmosphere had shifted palpably. The air was even thicker, meaner, angrier. Bengalis wanted change, and they wanted it yesterday. It was hard to blame them, of course; the military government in Pakistan was just a repressive and anti-democratic as the khaki goons back in Athens. Another day, another dictator. But unlike in Greece, the Pakistanis were being given a rare opportunity to make their voices heard – a national election that had the potential to change everything.

Suffice to say, it was a highly charged, highly challenging arena for even a seasoned diplomat. But thankfully, Archer Blood had a rock-solid team watching his back at the Dacca Consulate, an unassuming beige building that the younger officers referred to as “Camp Swampy”. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“Dacca was not everyone’s idea of a plum posting, but for scrappy, ambitious juveniles, it was a rush. “This was not your tea-and-crumpets European assignment,” remembers Scott Butcher, Blood’s junior political officer. “This was a difficult part of the developing world.”

In short, Blood’s team in Dacca was young, hungry, and deeply idealistic. They wanted to make East Pakistan - and by extension the world -  a better place. They wanted to help. And with a good boss like Archer Blood, making a difference actually seemed possible. As one colleague remembered:

“Blood was a very nice, easygoing, conventional Foreign Service officer. Able, did his job well, hardworking. He was always there. There was no golf playing, this sort of thing. He was patriotic, very much so, but he didn’t wear it ostentatiously. A very plain, good American civil servant.”

“He was clearly someone who was going on to much higher positions in the State Department,” another colleague remembered.

In a tight spot, you could count on Archer Blood to do the right thing. But if anyone was looking to him for an impassioned, self-righteous screed, they were barking up the wrong Virginia pine tree.

“Blood was no rebel,” writes Gary J. Bass, “Amid the hippies and burnouts of the 1960s and early 1970s, he was unreservedly square. […] His most radical affectation was, in the torrid tropical heat of Dacca, to sometimes shed his dark business suit.”

And as Blood settled into his new role as Consul General, the temperature in East Pakistan only continued to rise. In his first 10 months on the job, Blood witnessed a layer cake of historical events that would’ve left anyone’s head spinning. It made Athens, Greece look like sleepy little hamlet by comparison.  

->

From his office at the Consulate, Blood had a front-row seat to all the events and drama we’ve covered in the past two episodes: The devastating cyclone that wiped away almost half a million Bengalis like an Etch-a-Sketch. The big election that delivered a shocking, game-changing victory for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League. And finally, the long, languishing stalemate between Yahya Khan, Zulfikar Bhutto and Mujib.

Blood saw all of this; and what he saw, made him worry.

As January 1971 became February became March, and power had still not been handed over to Mujib and his majority coalition, the delta was boiling; The situation in Pakistan was like a tangled knot; the harder each side pulled, the tighter it became; the more hopeless any thought of unravelling it seemed. The Bengalis were furious, waving signs and chanting in the streets, hanging red-and-green flags from their doors. And truth be told, Archer Blood could not help but sympathize, and even admire, their zeal.

”I must confess a certain lack of objectivity,” he admitted in a cable back to Washington. “It is difficult to be completely objective in Dacca in March 1971 when, out of discretion rather than valor, our cars and residences sport black flags and we echo smiling greetings of ‘Joi Bangla’ as we move about the streets. “Daily we lend our ears to the out-pouring of the Bengali dream, a touching admixture of bravado, wishful thinking, idealism, animal cunning, anger, and patriotic fervor. We hear on Radio Dacca and see on Dacca TV the impressive blossoming of Bengali nationalism and we watch the pitiful attempts of students and workers to play at soldiering.”

“It was a vast number of people who had suddenly become political,” remembered Meg Blood. “They had been insulted because their vote had been ignored.”

The birth of an independent Bangladesh was looking more and more like a political inevitability. And as the Dacca airport filled up with troop transports, tanks and West Pakistani soldiers, Blood worried that things might turn violent. As he wrote in March 1971:

“The ominous prospect of a military crackdown is much more than a possibility, but it would only delay, and ensure, the independence of Bangladesh.”

But still, he held out hope that President Yahya Khan and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman could squeak out a deal and forestall a civil war. Those hopes were somewhat dimmed, however, by the presence of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the prim and preening demagogue from the Pakistan People’s Party.

Three days before Operation Searchlight, Archer Blood passed Zulfikar Bhutto in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Dacca. Bhutto had flown from West Pakistan to negotiate with his rival Mujib, but even in that brief moment, Blood got a very bad vibe from Bhutto. The dashing aristocrat, flanked by armed guards, struck him as “malevolent”. Bhutto seemed to know something; something the rest of them did not.

But Arch Blood had been around the block long enough to know that fearsome men, are often, (deep down,) fearful men. As Bengali protesters screamed obscenities from the street, Blood remembered, more than anything, Bhutto’s eyes. They were “reptilian, fixed on the wall. He was in the enemy’s camp and he knew it.” When you take away the crowds and the speeches, big men like Bhutto seem very small indeed - afraid of losing what they think they are owed.

On the morning of March 25^th, 1971, Archer Blood sent a cable back to Washington. It said “Storm before the calm? [question mark]” It was a cautiously optimistic analysis. Despite all the hatred between East and West Pakistanis, despite the deadlocked negotiations and irreconcilable demands, maybe the worst-case scenario might not come to pass.

He was, of course, sorely mistaken.

Later that evening, Blood received word that President Yahya Khan had left the city, abandoning negotiations. Blood, like any experienced political operative, knew exactly what that meant. As word spread throughout the city, and Mujib’s frenzied declaration of independence went out over the radio, Bengalis started barricading their homes and pushing obstacles into the streets.  By midnight, the Pakistani Army had swept over the city, bringing the full force of Operation Searchlight down upon tens of thousands of innocent people.

All through the night, Archer Blood stood on the rooftop of his official residence, absorbing a scene that would haunt him for the rest of his life. “Across the city,” write Carney and Miklian, “buildings belched tongues of flame and black smoke so high into the sky that they blotted out the moon.”

The sky, recalled his wife Meg, was “dark with flak. It was not like fireworks. It was continual. It was exploding all over the sky.”

In that moment, Archer Blood felt paralyzed, unable to help the people he had grown to respect and admire. “He knew the people in the deathly darkness below,” writes Gary J. Bass, “He liked them. Many of the civilians facing the bullets were professional colleagues; some were his friends. “

In their minds, every pop of a rifle, or crash of an explosion was a dead friend, a wounded colleague, a grim reminder that they had failed. “We could hear rhythmic firing which sounded like executions,” remembered one of Blood’s junior officers, “One time a jeep with machine guns went roaring down our street. We could hear them firing off some rounds.”

When the sun came up on March 26^th, it cast harsh light on a dead and decaying city. When Blood tried to contact his friends in other neighborhoods, Bengalis he had grown close to, there was no answer. The phone lines were all dead. The radio stations only seemed capable of playing patriotic Pakistani anthems, or robotic recitations of a strict curfew.

But Blood and the rest of the U.S. consulate knew that they could not afford to remain catatonic with shock. They were representatives of the United States government, the most powerful country on the face of the earth. It was their job, their duty, to find out the full extent of what had happened, document it as best they could, and inform their leaders back in Washington.

“Blood his team grimly got down to work,” writes Gary J. Bass, “gathering reliable information from as many sources as they could find. Stymied by the curfew, without functioning telephones, they managed to check in with aid workers, people from the Pakistan SEATO Cholera Laboratory, professors, missionaries, and others. Discounting what they heard from Awami League partisans, the U.S. diplomats instead secured dependable eyewitness reports, many from trusted Americans. These people had seen dead bodies and burning shantytowns. One American who worked at the posh Dacca Club’s golf course saw a dozen corpses. There were, Butcher remembers, “lots of stories of atrocities, of heavy-handed military action.”

But the evidence of what had happened was disappearing quickly.

The Pakistani Army was already in full containment mode, shoveling bodies and burning their traces to ash. Having cut out Dacca’s heart, Yahya’s Army intended to puncture its ear drums, gouge out its eyes, and snip out its tongue. After all, a city that is blind, deaf and dumb, cannot tell tales. And that meant containing and deporting foreign journalists as quickly as possible. If any of the dozens of reporters staying at the Intercontinental Hotel had any Pulitzer aspirations forming in their mind’s eye, they received a rude awakening from the Pakistani army. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“On March 26, Pakistani troops stormed into the Intercontinental Hotel. An officer warned, “Anyone who leaves the hotel will be shot.” […] When a stubborn reporter tried to sneak out of the hotel, a Pakistani soldier stopped him. “I have killed my countryman,” the soldier said. “Why shouldn’t I kill you?”

As the old adage goes, ‘guests are pests’. And within a few days, almost every foreign journalist was on a plane, train or automobile out of Dacca. It stung to leave, to abandon the full truth of East Pakistan’s fate, but as the journalist Sydney Schanberg put it:

“I wasn’t ready to die, so I got on the plane.” (Schanberg)

But there was one communication channel the West Pakistanis had overlooked. And that was Archer Blood and his team. Their phones were dead, and they were effectively confined to the consulate grounds, but Blood had found a way to get information back to Washington. Something that the Pakistani army did not know about. As Bass writes:

“The consulate’s only line out was a secret wireless transmitter, unauthorized by the Pakistani authorities. Unbeknownst to Yahya’s government, Blood could still send cables to the State Department.”

And so, Blood began sending secret telegrams back to the United States. He was sure that once his government discovered the awful truth of Operation Searchlight, there would be hell to pay. America would not stand for what had happened here in Dacca. It would not tolerate such a flagrant, murderous crackdown from a client state. What purpose did the Unites States serve, if not to stop this kind of thing? If anyone could bring Yahya’s butchers to heel, it was the President of the United States.

Back in Washington D.C., printers came alive in the night, spitting out long, winding spirals of paper, replete with credible reports of murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing. All Archer Blood could do now was wait. He didn’t know it then, but his life was about to change.

“March 1971,” he remembered, “was the most horrible month of my life.”

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

It’s September 1938.

33 years before Operation Searchlight.

We’re in New York Harbor, on the waxed, wooden deck of an ocean liner called the Ile de France.

For the last seven days, this 40-ton vessel has braved the waves of the Atlantic, plunging and heaving and swaying towards its destination. At a glance, with its belching smoke stacks and jet-black hull, it looks a little bit like the famous Titanic; although unlike that ill-fated ship, the Ile de France has successfully completed its journey.

After days and days of nothing but endless water, the weary passengers leap out of their cabins for a first glimpse of land. And what a glimpse it is. As they lean against the railing, with cackling seagulls floating at the stern, the New York City skyline rises out of the harbor mist. Most of the passengers, immigrants from Europe, have never seen anything like it in their lives. Massive spires of steel and glass and concrete, defying God and gravity.

It is difficult for the modern mind to fully appreciate the impact a 1,000-foot skyscraper would have on a poor German immigrant, but needless to say, their first impression of America does not disappoint. Most of these people are running away from something, and for many of them, New York City is a sight for scared eyes.

And one of those people on the crowded deck of the Ile de France, is a 15-year-old Bavarian boy named Heinz. Heinz is a Jew. A German Jew. And he and his family have decided to flee the fatherland at exactly the right time / with an impeccable sense of timing. Back home in Bavaria, being Jewish is a health hazard. In a few short years, the Nazis have branded their swastika into every strata of Germany’s social fabric. They have given people permission to hate.

Heinz is only 15-years-old, but those five years have left a mark on him. Growing up Jewish in Nazi Germany was a “cruel and degrading” experience for him. And it happened so fast. As historian Niall Ferguson writes:

Readers who have no experience of life in a totalitarian state must struggle to imagine what it is like, in the space of five years, to lose the right to practice one’s profession or trade, to use public facilities from swimming pools to schools, and to speak freely; more important, to lose the protection of the law from arbitrary arrest, abuse, assault, and expropriation. This was the fate of the Jews of Germany between 1933 and 1938.

Heinz had vivid memories of getting chased and kicked and beaten up in the street. Of cruel blonde boys re-arranging his face with their knuckles and twisting his arm until he begged them to stop. By the end, Heinz had learned to simply cross the street when he saw a group of less-than-gentle Gentiles (boys) walking his way.

But in 1938, Heinz’s father had decided enough was enough. He gathered up his immediate family, filed the necessary paperwork and put them all on a ship to America. It wasn’t easy, what with America’s strict quotas for Jewish immigrants, but Heinz and his family managed to squeak through; just before the oven doors snapped shut. In the coming years, most of the Jews in Heinz’s hometown were shot, gassed, or worked to death. In the end, the Holocaust would claim at least 13 of his extended family members.

But that was not Heinz’s fate. He was in America now – the promised land of baseball and Coca-Cola. It was a fact that he still needed to remind himself of from time to time. As Heinz remembered many years later:

“It was a dream, an incredible place where tolerance was natural and personal freedom unchallenged. . . . I always remembered the thrill when I first walked the streets of New York City. Seeing a group of boys, I began to cross to the other side to avoid being beaten up. And then I remembered where I was.”

But there was one last thing to do before full assimilation was complete. He had to do something about that name. “Heinz” was the name of a ketchup, not the name of a good all-American boy. It was too fussy, too European, too ‘Old World’.  And so, Heinz became Henry. When teachers called roll, his hand shot up, and the boy answered: “Henry Kissinger; Here”

Henry Kissinger owed America a debt; and somehow, someway, he intended to pay it. As Niall Ferguson writes: If the Kissingers had not left Germany when they did, there can be little doubt what their fate would have been. It is unlikely that Heinz Kissinger would have lived to see his twentieth birthday.

33 years later, in March of 1971, Henry Kissinger is no longer a desperate immigrant in New York Harbor. He is in the White House, not as a visitor, not as a guest, but as a National Security Advisor. The little Jewish boy who got the shit kicked out of him by Hitler Youth brats now has an office down the hall from the President of the United States.

And with proximity, comes power.

[AUDIO] “You want me to come by?” “Sure”

Henry Kissinger is, to put it mildly, a controversial figure. Endless shelves of books have been written cataloguing his deeds and misdeeds. Whether you consider Henry Kissinger a monster or a visionary depends largely on your world view. After all, one man’s war crime is another man’s foreign policy achievement/accomplishment. For some, he is a paragon of pragmatism, for others, he’s a kind of evil Forrest Gump, always popping up at the nastiest moments in Cold War history. We, however, do not have the time to litigate the complicated legacy of Henry Kissinger. We’ll save that discussion for another episode, and another series. That said, he does have a very important part to play in the story of Bangladesh.

And that part that begins now, on March 26^th, 1971.

Before he opens the door to the Oval Office, Dr. Henry Kissinger takes a moment to smooth back his wavy hair and straighten his horn rim glasses. Working directly for any U.S. President is no easy task, but this particular President requires a special kind of finesse.

As Kissinger enters the Oval Office, President Richard Nixon turns on his heel to greet his most trusted advisor. Of all the people at his command, of all the minions in his administration, Nixon relies on Henry Kissinger the most. The President is famously no fan of Jews – you can’t throw a rock across the Beltway these days without hitting one of the Tribe, Nixon noted – but Henry was one of the good ones. Harvard education. A frightening intellect. And best of all, a ruthless sense of loyalty. Yes, Henry would disembowel a puppy if Nixon asked him to – bonus points if it benefited the United States. It was a shame about that damn accent, though. In his three decades as an American, Henry had not been able to tame his thick Bavarian lilt.  

Well, no one’s perfect.

In America, if you go back far enough, we all come from somewhere else.

With pleasantries exchanged and coffee cups drained, the President and his National Security Advisor get down to business. In the spring of 1971, the Nixon administration is under siege, beset by perceived enemies on all sides. From muckrakers in the press to cutthroats in Congress everyone in Washington wants a bite out of the Nixon administration. Even late into the night, Nixon’s over-active imagination is crowded with knives twinkling in dark corners.

But today, Nixon and Kissinger’s concerns are foreign, rather than domestic. In the same room that a young Zulfikar Ali Bhutto spoke with President John F. Kennedy, the conversation once again turns to Pakistan.

The close ties between Pakistan and the United States went back almost 20 years. At the dawning of the Cold War, America needed a reliable bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence in South Asia. Pakistan needed money and guns to protect itself against its neighboring nemesis India. If you watch our back, we’ll scratch yours. That said, it was a stormy partnership. As journalist Declan Walsh writes:

“The United States and Pakistan had been feuding and falling in love for decades. People often compared their tempestuous, co-dependent relationship to a bad marriage, but it was more accurately the worst kind of forced marriage – a product of shared interests rather than values, devoid of genuine affection.”

Yes - a love-hate thing if ever there was one. When America began providing economic aid to India in the mid 1950s, the Pakistanis bristled. One Pakistani Finance Minister snarked that it was, “similar to that of a prospective bride who observes her suitor spending very large sums of money on a mistress …”

It was true, most America Presidents simply tolerated Pakistan as a necessary link in an anti-communist chain – like Greece and Iran and all the other two-bit tyrants. But that is where Richard Nixon broke the mold. As mentioned back in Episode 1 of this series, Nixon had a genuine soft-spot for Pakistan and its hoo-ra junta. He admired Yahya Khan and the Pakistanis almost as much as he hated their Indian rivals. Strong men with big guns – and a populace that could not talk back. If only it were that simple here at home, Nixon swooned.

But today, on March 26^th, 1971 – Pakistan is a problem.

For some time, Henry Kissinger had been aware of the crisis clotting in the troubled heart of East Pakistan. The situation, he told Nixon, is “highly uncertain […] there is very little material left in the fabric of the unity of Pakistan.”

And now it seemed, that thread had finally snapped. President Yahya Khan had attacked his own people. The reports trickling in indicated a full-blown military crackdown in East Pakistan. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been handcuffed and stuffed into a jeep, and the Awami League rank-and-file had been slaughtered in the night. Tens of thousands more were dispatched with flamethrowers and 50 caliber machine guns.

It was quick, efficient work. There were certainly a few Democrats in the Senate that Nixon would’ve liked to give the old Searchlight treatment to, eh Henry? But jokes aside, Yahya’s murderous crackdown created issues of perception. Massacring your political opponents is not exactly consistent with democratic ideals, and surely the United States – the world’s greatest champion of representative democracy - would be expected to scold, condemn, and even restrain Yahya. There were, after all, so many levers to pull. So many pressure points to squeeze. Superpowers can apply soft power in hundreds of creative ways. 

And yet, when Henry Kissinger’s team asked him what President Nixon wanted to do about the crisis in East Pakistan, what were their marching orders, what the was plan to contain this catastrophe…the National Security Advisor’s reply shocked them into momentary silence:

“Nothing,” said Kissinger. “The President’s inclination is the same as everybody else’s. He doesn’t want to do anything. He does not favor a very active policy.”

Henry Kissinger could speak five languages, but he was also fluent in bullshit. That laconic reply was just his way of saying: The President of the United States does not want to rock the boat in Pakistan. And do not ask me about it again. Drop it.

As they shuffled back to their desks, Kissinger’s subordinates could not reconcile his answer with the harrowing reality of the situation. People were dying over there. And once their ears stopped ringing, the Bengalis were not gonna just take their bullets lying down. This was going to be a civil war. One of the nastiest the region had ever seen. Any hopes of keeping East Pakistan and West Pakistan together now were dead; Operation Searchlight, wrote one historian, was a “obituary” for a United Pakistan.  

An army of 40,000 West Pakistanis could never hope, long-term, to subdue 75 million people. And what if India got involved? Or China? Or god forbid, the Soviet Union. This might mean the breakup of Pakistan and a complete realignment of the Cold War status quo! As one advisor remembered thinking:

“Why doesn’t Kissinger understand? Why doesn’t he understand the realities there and adjust policy accordingly? We don’t understand why they don’t understand what we understand.”

It was a feeling of bewilderment shared by the staff of the U.S Consulate 8,000 miles away in Dacca. As he fired off cable after cable after cable into the void, Archer Blood was becoming very, very angry.

“Wanton acts of violence by military are continuing in Dacca,” he wrote desperately.

In the frantic, fearful days following Operation Searchlight, Blood and his team spent every waking hour accumulating evidence of the ongoing slaughter. Every day seemed to bring new stories, new witnesses, new atrocities. An overwhelming mosaic of hundreds, thousands, of personal tragedies began to form, each one worse than the last.

“One Bengali who worked with the consulate,” writes Gary J. Bass, “tearfully told Blood how the army had burst into his home to search for weapons, and had fatally bayoneted his seventeen-year-old sister when she tried to protect him.”

A pair of American expats named John and Cornelia Rhode stumbled upon some of the Army’s grisliest work in the neighborhoods surrounding their flat. As Carney and Miklian write:

“Each body was a case study in ways that humans slaughter each other in war. A woman’s corpse showed a bullet wound in the palm of her hand. The bullet’s explosive force had torn half of her face and neck away. She died trying to ward off the bullet or, perhaps, begging the soldier for her life. Some people took bullets in their backs as they ran away. Others lay in a fetal position with single headshots.”

A terrified family of Bengali survivors told the Rhodes that they had seen:

“Army men torch the houses in the bustee near us. The people had no choice but to run outside. The army shot them even though they were screaming for mercy. So many people were killed. We’re afraid they will come back and kill us too.”

Dacca had been the epicenter of the violence, but the killing quickly radiated out into the surrounding countryside. One Bengali reported that he had seen “400 bodies floating down the river.”

“Villages burn,” wrote a U.S. official traveling in the ravaged countryside of East Pakistan. “[W]e saw some burning Friday, villagers scurrying, bundles on their heads, children with suitcases, running, away, anywhere. Those that are fortunate have made it to India. Those that are rich have made it to the US or UK. The majority remain either waiting in their village for the attack to come, or living as refugees in the homes of Muslims, Christians, or other Hindus.”

Survivors of the violence were left only with the memories of what they had seen. As one Indian Army officer wrote in his memoir of the war:

“Many saw their daughters raped and heads of their children smashed in. Some watched their husbands, sons; and grandsons tied up at wrists and shot in more selective male elimination….No sedative will calm a girl now in Bongaon Hospital–-she is in permanent delirium crying, ‘They will kill us all, they will kill us all…’

For Archer Blood and his staff, these atrocities were not just academic. [This was the country where they lived and socialized and worked in, some of them for many years. They knew these people and cared for them. This was becoming personal. As Meg, Archer’s wife, recalled:

“Arch made some very close friends there. A number of them were executed at their front doors. He lost friends. One was a Hindu gentleman who had been very generous about invitations to go out on the river and study the life that teems on the rivers.”

Blood, his staff and their families, faced with the immensity of the suffering, decided that they would have to break their vow of neutrality and put themselves in harm’s way. As Blood remembered;

We were also harboring, all of us were harboring, Bengalis, mostly Hindu Bengalis, who were trying to flee mostly by taking refuge with our own servants. Our servants would give them refuge. All of us were doing this. I had a message from Washington saying that they had heard we were doing this and to knock it off. I told them we were doing it and would continue to do it. We could not turn these people away. They were not political refugees. They were just poor, very low-class people, mostly Hindus, who were very much afraid that they would be killed solely because they were Hindu.”

Indeed, Hindu Bengalis seemed to bear the brunt of the Pakistani Army’s cruelty. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“Govinda Chandra Dev was an elderly philosophy professor at Dacca University and the author of several books, including one with the unthreatening title Buddha, the Humanist. He was a Hindu, but reminded Blood, who was friendly with him, of Santa Claus. “He was a roly-poly, gray-haired, jovial guy,” recalls Scott Butcher, who knew him. “He was a very pacifistic figure, well known and well liked in American circles. He was apolitical as far as I could tell.” Early in the crackdown, Dev was dragged out of his home, hauled to a field in front of the Hindu dormitory at the university, and shot dead. “There was no other reason that he was killed other than being a Hindu professor,” says Butcher.

->

But for Blood and his staff, perhaps the most nauseating aspect of Operation Searchlight, was that it was being perpetrated with American weapons. Yahya’s soldiers were using military hardware manufactured and shipped directly from the USA to Pakistan, part of a long pattern of ongoing support dating back to the 1950s. American weapons, replacement parts and combat vehicles constituted a “huge chunk of Pakistan’s total stockpile,” writes Gary J. Bass. Anywhere from 40 to 80%. In terms of dollars and cents, the bullets and bombs amounted to $44 million worth of military equipment.

If you could walk up to a dead body in Dacca, and press a cosmic ‘rewind button’, you would’ve seen the bullet wriggle out of the flesh, and leap back into the barrel of a gun with a puff of white smoke. From there, the soldier would march backward through a setting sunrise to a military base, where the gun’s magazine would deposit itself into an ammunition crate. That crate, in reverse, would hop into a truck, which would reverse to the airport, which would slide up the ramp of a plane. Which would fly backwards to the Unites States, through customs, back onto a truck, until it arrived at an American munitions factory, packed up by American hands.

Suffice to say, Yahya’s Army was murdering its people with hardware they had purchased, on generous credit, from America. And Archer Blood made sure to put that right at the top of his cables. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“He detailed how Pakistan was using U.S. weapons—tanks, jet fighters, gigantic troop transport airplanes, jeeps, guns, ammunition—to crush the Bengalis.”

Even back in D.C., it was undeniable. “There is evidence,” noted a member of Kissinger’s staff, “that U.S.-supplied equipment is being utilized extensively, including planes (F-86s and C-130s), tanks and light arms.”

But as the days slipped by, and more and more Bengalis died, Blood and the rest of his staff heard barely a peep out of Washington. It was as if they were just talking to themselves. As one angry staffer put it:

“We’re out at Camp Swampy, totally out of touch. No one is listening to us.””

“We’re sending in all these spot reports on incidents,” another complained, “and not getting any particular reaction. Arch is engaging at the higher policy level, and still not getting any reaction.”

“The silence from Washington was deafening,” remembered Blood, “suggesting to us that less credence was being given to our reporting than to the Pakistani claims that little more was involved than a police action to round up some ‘miscreants’ led astray by India.”

President Yahya Khan, it was true, had been doing damage control from day one, framing the crackdown as a regrettable but necessary suppression of a treasonous, secessionist movement. As he huffed and puffed in a radio address to the country on March 26^th:

“It is the duty of the Pakistan Armed Forces to ensure the integrity, solidarity and security of Pakistan. I have ordered them to do their duty and fully restore the authority of Government … I appeal to my countrymen to appreciate the gravity of the situation for which the blame rests entirely on the anti-Pakistan and secessionist elements.“

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, safely escorted out of Dacca by the military, co-signed Operation Searchlight with a terse, but performative statement to the press:

“By the grace of Allah, Pakistan at last has been saved.’

Washington, it seemed, was taking all of this propaganda at face value, dismissing the cables from Blood as the hysterics of a bleeding heart. The only response the Dacca consulate received was a stern rebuke from Blood’s direct superior, the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan ensconced in the military stronghold at Islamabad:

“Regardless of our personal feelings, what has happened is strictly an internal affair of Pakistan’s about which we, as representatives of the US Government, have no comment. Since we are not only human beings but also government servants, however, righteous indignation is not itself an adequate basis for our reaction.”

For some inexplicable reason, the Nixon administration did not want to antagonize Yahya Khan – didn’t want to get his bushy eyebrows in a twist. To Blood and his team, it made no sense. Why the velvet gloves? Why this hesitation to throw our considerable weight around? What is the point of being a global superpower, they thought, if you can’t exert influence over a client state to stop a mass killing?

Well…fine, Blood thought. If Washington would not listen, he would make them listen. As he remembered:

For three days we had been flooding Islamabad and Washington with graphic reports of a vicious military action, only to be answered with a deafening silence. I was suddenly tired of shouting into the dark and I decided to ratchet the intensity of our reporting up a notch.”

And so, in his next cable, he typed out an 8-letter word that he knew would light up phones from the White House to the Pentagon. The dreaded “G” word.  G-E-N-O-C-I-D-E.  Genocide.

“Thus,” writes Gary J. Bass, “Blood sent a furious cable with a jolting subject line: “Selective Genocide.” He was not a lawyer, but the use of the word “genocide” was meant to shock, to slice through the anodyne bureaucratic niceties of State Department cables. Blood held nothing back: “Here in Dacca we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pak military.”

These days, the term ‘genocide’ is used a bit liberally, but the word itself has only existed for about 80 years. And back in 1971, it still had all the power of sudden backhand to the face. It got people’s attention, and rightfully so.  A combination of the Greek word “genos” (meaning tribe or race) and the Latin word “cide” (meaning killing), the term ‘genocide’ was coined in the late 1940s by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe. Less than 30 years later, the Holocaust was still glowing red-hot in the hearts and minds of people the world over. When you accused a government of the g-word, people stood up and listened.

But in Blood’s view, it wasn’t just cheap shock value. He believed that there was more than enough credence to the claim, sensational as it sounded. Since March 25^th, the West Pakistani Army had been systematically butchering Bengalis, with a specific focus on Hindu Bengalis.

Pakistan, of course, had always considered itself a Muslim country, but it did contain a sizable Hindu minority, mostly concentrated in East Pakistan. Ten million people, about 13 percent of the East Pakistani population, were Hindu.

But because the Hindus were “tainted by purported association with India, and were outliers in a Pakistani nation defined in Muslim terms,” writes Gary J. Bass, they enjoyed special attention from the West Pakistani Army.

“You heard stories of men having to pull down their pants,” one American foreign officer recalled, “If they were circumcised, they were let go. If they were not, they were killed. It was singling out the Hindus for especially bad treatment, burning Hindu villages, it was like a pogrom. It was ridding the province of these people.”

Still, some of Blood’s staff weren’t entirely convinced that this qualified as a true Genocide. As Gary I Bass explains:

“There was considerable confusion in the consulate about what exactly genocide meant, and what they meant by using the word (Blood, no lawyer, at one point sloppily suggested that the “Webster’s definition” could apply to the killing of Awami League followers.) […] Was this a genocide against the Bengalis, or against the Hindu minority among the Bengalis?

As one foreign officer in Dacca named Eric Griffel recalled:

“It probably wasn’t [a genocide]. Genocide implies to me a determination to kill a whole group of people. This was a determination to kill some people. I would differentiate it from Hitler or the Armenian massacre or even from Cambodia.”

Although if Griffel had been able to talk directly to the West Pakistani soldiers doing the shooting, burning, and raping, he might have felt a bit differently. When asked if they were committing a genocide, most Pakistani soldiers tended to respond with a wink and a grin. A Colonel Naim of the 9^th Division told a Pakistani journalist embedded with the Army that:

“Hindus have completely undermined Muslim masses with their money, they bleed the province white. Money, food, and produce flow across the border to India. It has reached a point where Bengali culture is in fact Hindu culture, and East Pakistan is virtually under the control of businessmen in Calcutta. We have to sort them out to restore the land to the people, and people to their faith.”

And that attitude went all the way down the chain of command. A Major Bashir told the same journalist:

“This is war between pure and impure. People here may have Muslim names and call themselves Muslims but they are Hindus at heart. Those who are left will be real Muslims. We will even teach them Urdu.’

“They brought it on themselves,” another officer shrugged.

For decades, scholars and historians have wrestled over the semantics of whether Yahya’s crackdown did or did not technically qualify as a genocide, but Blood’s invocation of the term in his cables had the desired effect.

Washington was listening now.

And they were furious – for all the wrong reasons.

===== MUSIC BREAK =====

It’s April 6th, 1971; and Henry Kissinger has Blood on his hands.

Archer Blood, to be specific.

As he broods in the Situation Room in the White House, the President’s most trusted National Security Advisor cannot help but feel a spike of anger when he thinks about that meddling, moralistic diplomat in Dacca. A white knight in a world of grey.

For almost a week now, Archer Blood, whatever his name was, had been sending hysterical messages from a cozy consulate office in East Pakistan. “Blood” – what a name for a foreign service officer with a weak stomach.

Men like Blood were the bane of Kissinger’s existence. They were small, myopic do-gooders who couldn’t see the forest for the trees – not even if a branch smacked them in the face. Here they were, soaring aloft on the thermals of history, and Archer Blood could only cringe at the height.

Initially, Kissinger viewed Blood with a sort of amused disdain. “He was regarded as being squishy,” a one staffer recalled, “Maybe a little bit too enamored with the Bengalis and their leadership, a little soft-headed on this stuff. He just didn’t have the credibility. There was always the tendency to believe more what was coming from Islamabad.… And we got this bleeding heart out there in Dacca.”

But then, Archer Blood started using the g-word.

For the second time in his life, the g-word was causing serious problems for Henry Kissinger.

First Nazis, now West Pakistanis.

When Nixon got word of Blood’s sensational cables, Kissinger moved quickly to discredit him. “That Consul in Dacca doesn’t have the strongest nerves,” he told the President, “They are all in the middle of it. The main thing to do is to keep cool and not do anything. There’s nothing in it for us either way.”

Nixon agreed. Now was not the time squeeze Yahya Khan over a few Bengali fishwives and Hindu professors – if ever. There were bigger plans in the making. After all - there was a reason the Nixon administration was not restraining Yahya. There was a reason they did not seem to care. There was a reason Archer Blood’s desperate cables fell on deaf ears.

At the time, less than a dozen people were aware of a monumental fact: The Nixon administration was on the verge of one of the greatest foreign policy achievements of the Cold War.

And Yahya Khan - simple, stupid Yahya Khan - was at the very center of it.

Let’s put our forefingers on the rewind button for a moment, and zip back in time to August 1^st 1969. You may recall, that back in Episode 1, President Richard Nixon visited the Pakistani city of Lahore. He stepped off the plane and was greeted by a bagpipe orchestra on the tarmac. That evening, Nixon was wined, dined, and politically intertwined with Yahya Khan. You may also recall, that at one point, the two heads of state retired to a private room, where they discussed a very sensitive matter. When that door opened up, Yahya Khan had secured a boatload of new American weapons for his army.

But Nixon had gotten something too. Something more valuable to him than all the tanks, planes, and bullets in the world. A glittering, ruby-red prize called…China. As Scott Carney and Jason Miklian explain:

“Ever since he was a junior senator from California, China fascinated Nixon. Mao Zedong’s communists overthrew the Chinese government at around the same time as Partition. The Americans pretended that the ousted government holing up in Taiwan would come back any day, while Mao led the country in a radically new and, at times, horrific direction.

Twenty years had passed, and Nixon thought it was time to give up the charade. He saw China’s potential to be a major world power and wanted to restore diplomatic and economic relations. It would be a radical break in American foreign policy and the most consequential change since World War II. There was just one problem: China was a complete black box for Nixon and his administration. They didn’t have access to anyone in Mao’s inner circle, and any attempts to reach out through formal channels would be an embarrassing display of weakness.

For years, Richard Nixon had been obsessed with the People’s Republic of China. Where other Americans saw an irredeemable enemy, he saw a ticking time bomb. One that would blow up in their faces if it wasn’t managed, courted, and tamed.

“We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations,” Nixon had written in a 1967 Foreign Policy article, “there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors.”

“In 25 years, China will have a billion people,” Nixon told a fellow head of state a couple years later. “If fenced off by others, it makes for a terribly explosive force that may destroy the peace of that time.”

When he accepted the Republican nomination for President in 1968, Nixon made his views on Communist China clear to the American people :

“After an era of confrontation, the time has come for an era of negotiation. Where the world’s super powers are concerned, there is no acceptable alternative to peaceful negotiation. We do not seek domination over any other country. We shall never be belligerent but we shall be as firm in defending our system as they are in expanding theirs. Instead we believe this should be an era of peaceful competition, not only in the productivity our factories but in the quality of our ideas. We extend the hand of friendship to all people, to the Russian people, to the Chinese people, to all people in the world

To many Americans, including the President’s own staff, the idea of opening a dialogue with Communist China was…fanciful, to say the least. At that time, America had not yet landed on the Moon. And going to China seemed just as difficult and dangerous. A remote, alien, inhospitable world. And few people doubted the President’s aspirations more, than his new National Security Advisor, Dr. Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger loved his job. And he hated his job. But mostly, he loved his job.

To be more accurate, he hated the idea of his job, tonguing the boots of a sweaty charlatan / clown like Richard Nixon.

Very few people in the working world have the luxury of liking their boss, and Dr. Henry Kissinger was no exception. During Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign, Kissinger had called him “unfit to be President.” A potential “disaster”; “Richard Nixon,” Kissinger sneered from his office at Harvard, “is the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president.”

But then, Nixon won. And to Kissinger’s surprise, Tricky Dick’s recruiters came calling. This disastrous, dangerous man wanted to offer him a job. Nixon, it seemed, subscribed to the philosophy of his Presidential predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who famously said: “Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

Henry Kissinger, for his part, could not resist the temptation to touch the levers of power. Maybe, he could tame Nixon’s worst instincts. Maybe he could steer policy in a better direction. But above all, maybe he could repay the debt that he owed his adopted home. For al his faults, Henry Kissinger was, according to one historian, a “genuine patriot”, deeply committed to this delightful, dysfunctional country called America. And so, Kissinger agreed to work for the White House. Better that, he thought, than whining on the sidelines in pundit purgatory.

When Nixon told his staff about his earnest and urgent desire to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, Kissinger told the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig: “Our Leader has taken leave of reality”.  When a colleague asserted that the President “seriously intends to visit China before the end of the second term,” Kissinger scoffed, “Fat chance.”

The Communist Chinese, or “ChiCom” for short, were notoriously cagey, dogmatic and inflexible. They had a better chance of opening a McDonald’s in Moscow than opening a dialogue with Mao Zedong. But in time, Kissinger came to see the wisdom of Nixon’s crazy idea. Actually, when he really thought about it, it wasn’t crazy at all. It was smart and sensible; pragmatic and prescient.

Maybe he had more in common with his new boss after all.

Both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger considered themselves realists – acolytes of realpolitik principles. They believed, in the words of historian Chris Tudda, “that the United States should accept the world the way it was, not the way it would like it to be.”

700 million Chinese weren’t going anywhere. And nobody, not even Mao, wanted nuclear war. Better to put ideology aside and find a way to work with them, than plug your ears, shut your eyes and wait for the bombs to fall. As the writer Barry Gewen explains:

“This was a world where competition among states was never ending, problems could not be solved, only mitigated, and on those occasions when seemingly permanent solutions were found, new problems would inevitably arise to replace them. There was no end to it all, no cessation to the conflicts and contradictions brought on by individuals’ ubiquitous will to power, no prospect for eternal peace. Policymakers exhausted by their killing workloads could be left to feel that they were little more than corks bobbing in a sea of troubles. “The public life of every political figure,” Kissinger said, “is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” And what did it mean to live in this world of nonstop challenges without the comforting illusion of utopian aspirations or perfectionist hopes as road maps for decision makers? “There are no plateaus in foreign policy,” Kissinger wrote.

Nations who wanted to survive long-term in the jungle of history would have to think beyond petty politics and short-sighted orthodoxy. They would have to, Gewen writes, “weigh means against ends, a kind of situational, pragmatic ethics that rejected the left’s moralistic strictures.”

In other words, there is no room in international politics for sentimentality or naïve notions about right and wrong. The “right thing’, so to speak, is the success and dominance of the United States of America in a relatively peaceful international community. Nothing else matters.

If relations with Communist China thawed, the United States could exert more pressure on the Soviet Union, and pretty much every other country on earth. At the time, it seemed like a brilliant chess move.

And so, with Kissinger finally, fully, on board, the Nixon administration carefully and quietly went about contacting China. There was just one problem: They didn’t know anyone in China. How can you become friends with someone who won’t take your calls?

But it just so happened that America did know someone who could serve as an intermediary. A mutual friend, as it were. And wouldn’t you know it – this special someone was a person that  Richard Nixon already got along with very, very well. The one, the only, Yahya Khan. As Carney and Miklian write:

“It just so happened that Pakistan had recently made an alliance with China. Now Pakistan was a Cold War player in a prime position to help. Nixon didn’t grovel. But he needed a man whom Mao trusted to help set up a meeting. Even more difficult, Nixon needed a man whom he himself trusted in order to pull it all together. Yahya Khan was the only man on the planet who ticked both boxes.”

On August 1st, 1969, when Yahya Khan and Richard Nixon met behind closed doors in Lahore, beyond the earpieces of even his Secret Service detail, Dick explained his dilemma. Yahya, my friend, I need to get into China. I need to get a message to Chairman Mao. And only you, my dear friend, can do that for me. But here’s the thing – no one can know. Not a living goddamn soul can catch wind of the idea that the United States of America is making overtures to Communist China. The Soviets will flip, the State Department will raise hell, Mao will get spooked, and the entire thing will fall apart. I’ll be a laughingstock. You don’t want me to be a laughingstock do you, Yahya? So please, old friend, do this for me.

When the doors opened back up, Nixon had a willing, emphatic, intermediary.

“Yahya was enthralled by the cops-and-robbers atmosphere of the enterprise,” Kissinger remembered years later.

And so, for months and months, they waited. Like two shy teenagers flirting through a mutual friend, the Nixon administration and Communist China exchanged clandestine letters. In the middle school cafeteria of international diplomacy, it is so hard to convey your true feelings. Notes can be misinterpreted, signals can be misread, offense can be taken over perceived slights. There were moments when Nixon and Kissinger were pretty certain their deal was dead in the water.

But to their pleasant surprise, Yahya Khan delivered/came through. As Gary J. Bass writes: “Carrying the most secret of messages back and forth from China, Yahya proved himself a thoroughgoing loyalist and flawlessly discreet.”

“The letters couldn’t look like it came from a Chinese hand or be on Chinese paper, so Yahya carefully rewrote them himself and sent them on to Washington via encrypted cipher,” explain Carney and Miklian, “Even the carbon copies of his letters were dutifully burned. He ordered his ambassador in Washington, DC, to read the letters to Kissinger aloud, then destroy them before he left the White House.”

In November of 1970, just one month before Pakistan’s big election, about the same time East Pakistan was being drowned by the Bhola Cyclone….a breakthrough occurred. No storm could cast clouds over Yahya’s sunny smile / bright mood when he informed Nixon that he had a message directly from Mao Zedong himself.

“A special envoy from President Nixon,” the Chairman said, “would be most welcome in Peking (Beijing).”

This was indeed a momentous event, the Chinese went on to say in their message: “We have had messages from the United States from different sources in the past, but this is the first time that a proposal has come From a Head of State, Through a Head of State, to a Head of State!”

If Nixon and Kissinger were the high-fiving type, their palms would’ve been sore. A message from the Oval Office pinballed its way back to Beijing, that yes, that all sounds very nice to us. And over the next several months, the Nixon administration waited for more details to coalesce. And in those intervening months, Pakistan’s crisis erupted, Operation Searchlight was launched, and the Bengalis died in their tens of thousands. It could not have come at a worse time, a more delicate time.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger certainly had no illusions about what Yahya’s army was doing in East Pakistan.

->

When Kissinger was informed that a former student of his, a Professor Razak, was among those murdered at Dacca University, the news didn’t cause so much as a ripple in the pond of his composure. “Here was a moment,” writes Gary J. Bass, “when the abstractions of high policy and impersonal numbers—thirty thousand troops, seventy-five million people—might have melted away, replaced with the individual human face of a pupil from more innocent days. Henry Kissinger, seemingly referring to past Muslim rulers of India, replied, “They didn’t dominate 400 million Indians all those years by being gentle.”

“Human rights simply did not rank among the priorities of Nixon’s foreign policy,” writes Srinath Raghavan, “Kissinger and Nixon evinced not an iota of outrage at the atrocities.”

“To Realists like Nixon and Kissinger notions of justice, though not to be ignored entirely, had to be subordinated to the larger goals of foreign policy,” explains Barry Gewen.

“I wouldn’t put out a statement praising it,” Nixon told Kissinger, “but we’re not going to condemn it either.”

Restraining Yahya for the sake of the Bengalis was not only politically inconvenient, but potentially disastrous for his secret outreach to China. As a senior White House aide named Harold Saunders recalled: 

“China would be looking at how we’re treating an ally; That was the governing factor. I know I took a lot of flak from my State Department colleagues, but I couldn’t tell them that. It was a very tightly held secret.”

Nixon completed his justification with a dazzling routine of mental gymnastics: “if East Pakistan becomes independent, it is going to become a cesspool. It’s going be 100 million people, they have the lowest standard of living in Asia. No resources. They’re going to become a ripe field for Communist infiltration.”

The same Communists who they were currently courting, mind you. No, Nixon did not want to anger or alarm the Chinese by publicly or even privately rebuking a key intermediary in their secret talks. Mao Zedong, Yahya Khan, East Pakistan – the whole thing was a swaying stack of cards that Nixon didn’t dare so much as breathe on. Especially not for the sake of a few hundred thousand illiterate fishermen.

The President’s position was summed up in a classified memo that spring:

“To all hands. Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.” 

“The “Don’t”, notes Srinath Raghavan, “was underlined three times.”

As Yahya’s army burned and butchered its way through East Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger decided to look the other way and whistle a happy tune. But then, Archer Blood, the Consul General in Dacca, started sending his cables. Not just one cable, or two. But mountains of the things, telegram after telegram. And they all said more-or-less the same thing.

We have to do something! Why won’t you do something?

Back in Dacca, Blood and the rest of his staff at the Consulate were hoarse from shouting into the void. For the past two weeks, they had been all but ignored by Washington. Swept under the rug for unknown, unfathomable reasons. Even the dreaded “g”-word, “Genocide” had failed to illicit a response from Kissinger, much less Nixon.

But there was one last option available to them. One last way to salvage their self-respect. They could send something called a “dissent cable” back to Washington. It was, writes Gary J. Bass “a new device in the Foreign Service, a Vietnam-sparked reform meant to encourage candor by allowing diplomats to speak out confidentially against official policy.”

Realistically, it was just a scrap of paper, one that wouldn’t do much. It wouldn’t stop the killing; It wouldn’t convince Kissinger; It wouldn’t even make it to the press; dissent cables were, by their nature, strictly confidential. The only thing it might accomplish, if anything, was get them demoted or drummed out of the Foreign Service, packed off to the American equivalent of Siberia.

And yet, when the final draft of the dissent cable arrived at Archer Blood’s desk on April 6^th, twenty Dacca Consulate officials had attached their signatures to it. Kissinger could ignore this, but he couldn’t bury it. Dissent cables got very wide distribution; Half the State Department would read this thing; and their rebuke of a callous, complicit administration would be etched into the granite of history.

But it all depended upon the approval of Archer Blood.

“Nobody knew if Archer Blood would sign it,” writes Gary J. Bass, “He had the most to lose.”

For Blood, attaching his name to this piece of paper was a huge risk. If he kept his head down, kept his nose clean, and didn’t rock the boat, he could ride the Pakistan crisis out and eventually become a fully-fledged ambassador. That had always been his dream. As his wife Meg remembered him telling her during an early posting in West Germany: “I can’t imagine not wanting to be an ambassador. It’s the top.”

“Blood weighed his decision, aware that he could wreck his career,” continues Gary J. Bass, “But he knew what he had seen and he knew his duty. He joined the dissent and endorsed the cable. His staff was thrilled, and a little apprehensive too. “He said that what we were doing was not going to help in anyone’s career,” remembers Eric Griffel. “That was a heroic action on his part,” says Scott Butcher. “He could have just left it as, ‘I obviously cannot subscribe to these views, but I am sending it out.’ He could have pulled his punches totally. But instead, he not only authorized it, but endorsed it and embellished it.” Griffel says, “Blood risked everything.”

The dissent cable that was sent back to Washington has become known to history as THE BLOOD TELEGRAM. According to the always-irascible writer Christopher Hitchens:

“It was not so much reporting on genocide as denouncing the complicity of the United States government in genocide. It was the most public and the most strongly worded demarche from State Department servants to the State Department that has ever been recorded.”

It’s worth reading the main text of the Blood Telegram in full. Imagine, if you can, Henry Kissinger absorbing this through his horn-rimmed glasses. Here is THE BLOOD TELEGRAM:

“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak 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, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya a message defending democracy, condemning arrest of leader of democratically elected majority party (incidentally pro-West) and calling for end to repressive measures and bloodshed.… [W]e have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely [an] internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional public servants express our dissent with 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.

Archer Blood affixed his own commentary below the main text:

“I support the right of the above named officers to voice their dissent. I believe the views of these officials, who are among the finest US officials in East Pakistan, are echoed by the vast majority of the American community, both official and unofficial.”

The idea of the dissent cable eventually crossing Richard Nixon’s desk exhilarated some of the younger, more rebellious staffers. As one man named Myers recalled:

“I figured, take my job and shove it.”

When the telegram arrived in Washington, Henry Kissinger reacted with a level of anger that surprised even his staff. “Henry was just furious about it,” remembered a junior staffer named Samuel Hoskinson.

Another staffer, Harold Saunders, even found himself agreeing with the Blood Telegram, although he dared not voice that to his boss.

“These people weren’t crazy. They weren’t liberal bleeding hearts. They just saw a massive population being dealt with in a way that was inconsistent with values here in this country. The big mystery for me was, why was he furious about this? Why are they so upset about this? Is it not clear that this is happening, and how do we deal with it?” I remember thinking, has he lost his mind? This is not being made up out there. Everyone says this is a good team on the ground in Dacca. But he’s furious. A furious Henry Kissinger in those days was not a pleasant sight. He would rant and rave a little bit about things.”

Through thick wooden doors, nervous staffers at the White House could gear Kissinger shouting

“The Dacca consulate is in open rebellion!”

And Henry Kissinger wasn’t the only one blowing a gasket over the Blood Telegram. The Secretary of State, William Rogers, complained to Kissinger about “that goddam message from our people in Dacca. It’s miserable. They bitched about our policy and have given it lots of distribution so it will probably leak. It’s inexcusable. It’s a terrible telegram. Couldn’t be worse—says we are morally bankrupt. Quite a few of them signed it. You know we are doing everything we can about it. Trying to get the telegrams back as many as we can. We are going to get a message back to them. To me it is outrageous they would send this.”

“Blood was telling power in Washington what power in Washington didn’t want to hear,” remembered one White House staffer.

President Richard Nixon was not pleased either. “He was not the kind of president who indulged whistleblowers or dissenters,” wrote one historian, “Although formally his administration had created the dissent channel, he had no patience for those who dared step out of line.”

“We’ve got a lot of little people who love to be heroes,” Nixon would tell his Cabinet later that year.

Well, Archer Blood certainly didn’t feel very much like a hero, when later that month (April 1971), he was told that he would no longer be serving as the Consul General in Dacca. In fact, he would not be serving as Consul General anywhere. “The decision has been made at the highest level”, explained the Ambassador in Islamabad. He had been, writes Bass, “unceremoniously sacked".

“He took the responsibility,” remembered one Kissinger staffer, “He paid the price. […] He was just an honest Foreign Service Officer.”

One of Blood’s officers in Dacca agreed, recalling:  “For a man like Arch, there are worse things than losing your career. I don’t like using words that don’t have an accurate meaning, but he was a man of honor. In his own view, [had he not done this] he would have lost his honor.”

Dr. Henry Kissinger had long aspired to be a great man. But Archer Blood, it seemed, was content with just being a good one.

“He had considerable backbone,” remembered one junior officer in Dacca.

And as he flew back home to the United States, demoted and disgraced, Archer Blood might’ve squeezed Meg’s hand and looked out the window one last time. As the sun splashed his face with gold, he might’ve peered through the glass at the vast verdant waterscape that had been their home. And far below, spiraling up from the lush Delta, were coils of black smoke from burning villages. Operation Searchlight was still rampaging through East Pakistan, with no signs of stopping.

In the spring of 1971, one thing became abundantly clear to the Bengalis. The United States of America would not help them. But there was another nation who might. That massive, sympathetic, and very well-armed democracy to the immediate southwest.

India.

---- OUTRO ------

Well guys, that is all the time we have for today.

Next time, in Part 4, the civil war between East and West Pakistan will begin to really heat up as the Bengalis organize themselves to fight back, supported, trained and encourage by the nation of India. We’ll meet some brand new cast members, and check in with some old ones who didn’t grace the stage in this episode. And finally, we’ll continue the story of Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and their secret talks with Communist China. To say any more would be a spoiler, so for today, we’ll just leave it at that.

As always, thank you for spending your valuable time with me, and I hope you have an awesome day.

This has been Conflicted. I’ll see you next time.

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