It was a carefully planned hoax.
During a state dinner in Pakistan in July 1971, White House Security Advisor Henry Kissinger says he feels suddenly ill.
He attributes his discomfort to fatigue and recent changes in his diet, as he has been touring Asian countries for several days.
Your host, President Yahya Khan, proposes to host you at Nathia Gali, a government vacation home in the mountains, about 2, 74 meters high and several hours away from Islamabad, ensuring that the cool climate will allow the visitor to rest and achieve a speedy recovery.
Two days later, the senior US official “returns recovered” and ready to finish his tour with a last stop in Paris.
That was the official story, but not what really happened. Kissinger was not in Nathia Gali.
Aboard the limousine that went up to the mountain residence was, in fact, a secret service agent occupying the seat of the White House adviser.
Meanwhile, President Khan – his ally and accomplice – sent Kissinger in a car with his private driver to the Chakala airport, located on the outskirts of Islamabad, where at four in the morning he boarded a Pakistani civilian plane that would take him to China.
That was the beginning of the “Marco Polo operation” that half a century ago allowed him to establish with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai the secret talks that would make possible the historic trip of President Richard Nixon to China .
With this, the doors were opened to the subsequent establishment of diplomatic relations between both countries that during the last half century has redrawn geopolitics worldwide.
A very b ien covert
Kissinger’s visit to China was an operation that remained carefully covert not only in the eyes of the world, but also from many members of the Nixon government itself .
Pakistani President Yahya Khan assisted the Nixon government in establishing communication with China. “Even for people who were familiar with the highest levels of diplomacy, this was quite surprising,” James tells him. Carter, historian specialized in modern China from Saint’s Joseph University in Philadelphia, to BBC Mundo.
“ In the State Department itself ( M Ministry of Exteriors ) American did not know this was happening , because this was a very well kept secret within the gob hell. Something that Nixon wanted to achieve and that Kissinger supported ”, he adds.
The trip was the product of an indirect dialogue that Washington and Beijing developed during several months with the mediation of the President of Pakistan, Yahya Khan .
In a secret message from 21 April 1971, later declassified, Prime Minister Chinese Zhou Enlai points out that to restore relations between the two countries – defeats since China’s establishment as a communist nation in 1949 – a high-level meeting is required.
And therefore, that Beijing is willing to “publicly receive in Beijing a special envoy of the president of the United States (for example, Mr. Kissinger) ”.
However, Nixon did not want public knowledge of his attempt to approach the Chi a communist until he had a firm invitation to meet with the revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.
“That would have aroused great opposition in Congress and in the population, in the context of the Vietnam War ”, says Carter.
“ It would have generated such a reaction great that it would have been difficult to get the meeting it happened, so they did their best to keep it a secret until the Nixon administration could present it to Congress and the public as a fait accompli. ”
That’s how the 15 July 1971, in a televised address, Nixon announced that he had been invited to visit China and that he had already accepted, reducing by the Due to the facts, the margin of maneuver for those who opposed this idea.
To achieve this, it was necessary to prepare Kissinger’s visit to Beijing with the utmost secrecy, to the point that despite the fact that they were top-secret documents, the messages used cryptic language and instead of mentioning Kissinger by name or position, referred to him as the “main traveler” .
“My additional trip is already confirmed from 9 to July ”, writes Kissinger in a memorandum sent on 22 June to the then US Ambassador to Pakistan, Joseph Farland.
He was one of those who helped materialize the deception that allowed him to secretly travel to Beijing.
In his book White House Years , published in 1979, Kissinger highlights as a fortunate fact that Farland was a man who was “outside the establishment a regular in the Foreign Service ”, which allowed him to cooperate with discretion without involving his bosses in the State Department.”
Farland was the one who suggested that Kissinger his put A hat and sunglasses when embarking to Beijing , as can be read in a declassified memorandum that established the different actions necessary to keep the trip secret.
There, among other measures, the importance of avoiding at all costs that the doctor from the US embassy traveled to Nathia Gali to verify Kissinger’s health is pointed out.
To do this, it was suggested that a member of the delegation call the embassy to report that “the main traveler was relaxed, feeling better, that he wanted to be undisturbed and that he would call the doctor if necessary.”
It was also established that once he returned to the Chakala airport, the car that would transfer Kissinger back to Islamabad had to follow a route that would mule that came from the mountain residence.
The complexity of the entire operation forced Kissinger’s assistants to have three different itineraries that, according to Carter, they shared with the members of the delegation according to the level of involvement they had in the plot.
Many historians, in fact, consider that the only real goal of Kissinger’s tour that also took him to Guam, Saigon, Bangkok, New Delhi, Islamabad, and then Paris, was to go to China, so the other destinations were excuses to justify their trip without attracting attention .
“I think the general consensus is that they were a cover for his trip to China, “says Carter, who admits that there were certainly many reasons for an official like Kissinger to travel to these destinations, but that – in reality – was what allowed the deception
“Much of this was done as a montage prepared so that he could make this trip to China ”, he adds.
The enemy of my enemy
Nixon had spoken about the importance of reaching out to China even before he reached the White House in January of 1969.
“From a long-term perspective, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to feed its fantasies, harbor their hatred and threaten their neighbors, “he wrote in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs Released in October 1967.
From the beginning of their presidency, Washington and Beijing began a series of efforts They kept quiet to open communication.
Since they did not have formal relationships, they usually used countries that were friendly to both such as France, Poland, Romania or Pakistan.
As of April 1971, when Zhou Enlai sent the message announcing his readiness to receive a high-level envoy from Nixon, there had already been more of a hundred secret meetings between both parties.
What encouraged them to seek a rapprochement? That shared a common enemy: the Soviet Union .
Although since the late 1950 A rift between China and the USSR had begun, it was not until the end of the decade of 1960 when Washington saw the opportunity to breach the communist camp by taking advantage of the confrontation between Beijing and Moscow.
China expressly condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 Y, a few months later, Moscow and Beijing collided militarily in a border incident that caused dozens of deaths and was on the verge of leading to war.
As a result of these episodes, China began to change its strategic reading of the world, placing the USSR and not the United States as its greatest threat.
“ Both China and the United States saw the Soviet Union as their main antagonist and the objective of both was to establish mutual relations that they could use to counterbalance what perceived as the Soviet threat, ”says Carter.
Although there were many topics on the agenda, to clear the way to a meeting There were several obstacles to overcome between Mao and Nixon.
One of them had to do with the way Nixon’s visit to China would be presented to the world. Neither party wanted to appear more interested than the other in this event.
“ We wanted to show in essence that the Chinese wanted President Nixon to come to China. The Chinese basically wanted to show that Nixon wanted to come to China and that they were kind enough to invite him, ”said Winston Lord, one of the officials who accompanied Kissinger on the trip decades later.
After hours of debate, they agreed on a compromise text in which a kind of balance was achieved and no part was too exposed.
Another big obstacle was the Taiwan issue. The Americans knew that this was going to be a matter of great importance to the Chinese.
Nixon warned Kissinger that at no time should it seem like states United was betray do to Taiwan and that it should be as enigmatic as possible about Washington’s willingness to make concessions on this issue, according to a declassified memorandum about a meeting held at the White House on 1 July 1972.
According to a report that Kissinger sent to Nixon at finish the tour, during their meetings Zhou Enlai spoke of Taiwan as the main issue in China’s relationship with the United States.
And he pointed out that in order for there to be a full reestablishment of diplomatic relations, Washington should accept that the island was an inalienable part of China and a province of China, annul the Mutual Defense Treaty signed with Taiwan and recognize the Communist Party of China as the only government of China.
Kissinger assures in his text that he e told Zhou that the United States did not support the solution of “two Chinas” nor of “one China – a Taiwan ”, but would accept any political evolution agreed by the parties and that he hoped that this evolution would be
Their dialogues covered many more topics: the Vietnam War, the threat from the Soviet Union, the concern of China on a possible rearmament of Japan, the situation in the city of Berlin, among others.
In the introduction to the same report, dated 14 July 1969, Kissinger makes clear what that trip to China meant to him.
He wrote: “My two-day visit to Beijing resulted in the most profound, sweeping and meaningful discussions I have ever had in government.”
But that secret trip was also momentous for the rest of the world.
“During the following decades, the United States and China have been instrumental in almost every geopolitical issue,” says Carter.
“They have been at the center of almost any diplomatic, military, economic, cultural discussion that is taking place around the world. And it all starts with Kissinger’s trip that made Nixon’s visit to China possible ”, he concludes.
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