Behind the Bastards - Part Six: Kissinger

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Robert is joined again by Gareth Reynolds & Dave Anthony (The Dollop) for the sixth and final part of our epic six part series on Henry Kissinger.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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So this is episode six, you know, we're what, eight hours into talking about Mr. Kissinger. I'd love to meet me from eight hours ago. It's like when Bill and Ted meet each other halfway through and they don't know the journey they're about to go upon. Buddy, buckle up. So the thing that Kissinger gets the most credit for that we haven't mentioned, we've talked about a bunch of the things that he gets credit for, is bringing peace to the Middle East. He does get credit for being that guy. Obviously, he did not do that.

But he did play a significant role in stopping what had been a decades-long cycle of wars between Israel and the Arab nations around it. Now to call that bringing peace would be ignoring a tremendous amount of ongoing violence against the Palestinian people. But Kissinger did help ensure like, you know, there were all these different like everyone would invade, yada, yada, yada, there'd be a bunch of fighting. That doesn't really happen anymore and Kissinger is part of why that doesn't happen anymore. The gist of it is that on October 6th, 1973, on Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated assault on Israel that for a time threatened the state's very existence. Kissinger had not spent much of his time working on Middle East related stuff up to this point. This was partly because Nixon thought having a Jewish man negotiate with Arab countries would be a bad idea. It was also because Kissinger was kind of buried in Vietnam stuff, right?

But by October of 1973, negotiations with Hanoi had been concluded. U.S. forces had stepped back from an active role and Kissinger had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize with his Vietnamese counterpart, Lee Duck Toe. Yes. Absolutely. There's no counter-argument. Absolutely. No, he nailed it. What? I mean, the Nobel Peace Prize really doesn't, I mean, they must hit sometimes.

I'm just familiar with a lot of the nose, though. It seems mostly to be misses in my experience. When he got that, that's called the no Nobel Peace Prize. And you know who felt that way, Gareth? Lee Duck Toe, who was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Kissinger. I don't want mine. I don't want mine. Yeah, he literally was like, no, I'm not going to take it. The war isn't over yet. All he's done, all we've done is negotiate the U.S. no longer murdering people on the scale they had been. And he was in charge of it.

And specifically, he was angry because right before the armistice was signed in order to like try and force Hanoi to agree on some points, Kissinger orchestrated a massive nighttime bombing campaign on Christmas of Hanoi. They didn't bomb on Christmas Day, just the day before and a bunch of the days after. But it gets called the Christmas bombing campaign. We're worried we'll hit Santa. I don't want that jolly blood on my hands. So Lee Duck Toe was like, I'm not going to take an award for peace with this guy. Fuck him. So Kissinger accepted it alone.

Oh my God. He's such a cool dude. He's such a cool dude. Wow. More credit for me. I can't believe I'm the only one who got it this year. I must be really good at this stuff. So yeah, he's like the Kanye of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, right. Sorry, you did great, but Kissinger had the best war of all time, of all time.

It would have been really funny if Henry Kissinger had like shoved Taylor Swift off stage. Excuse me. You had a great war. You did great with peace, but come on. We're talking about the goat here, baby. So by October of 73, Kissinger is free and clear and ready to get it on in the Middle East. And this actually went better than you might think. Weirdly enough, Henry Kissinger was probably one of the fairest negotiators the United States ever sent into that conflict. In fact, he was more or less in constant tension with Israel because he would do stuff like try to halt arm shipments there.

Like during the Yom Kippur War, right? Israel's on a back foot. They're in real danger of being overrun. They want U.S. weapons and like U.S. arms and a bunch more F-4 Phantom planes. And Nixon agrees to give them to him, but Kissinger is like, we're not giving them anything until they can arrange for commercial flights to ship the weapons to them. Because I don't want, I'm trying to negotiate with Syria and Egypt. And if they see U.S. military aircraft landing in Jerusalem to give the Israelis weapons, that's going to fuck up my negotiations. So like, he's actually really unpopular with a lot of folks in Israel because he does stuff like this. And in fact, Kissinger's, and obviously, like every U.S. negotiator in this conflict, Kissinger is more on Israel's side than anyone.

But it's probably fair to say he's less on Israel's side than any other negotiator we ever put in there, which is like weird. Sounds like he's the most progressive because, I mean, like obviously we could give a fuck now. He's not a Zionist for one thing. He doesn't have like, there's not a, you know, he's Jewish, but he's not really that like... There is some amount of like, as a Holocaust survivor, he believes strongly that like, you know, Israel needs to exist. So he does have that going for him. Again, he eventually agrees to ship them weapons on U.S. planes after it becomes enough of an issue. But he like... Still, that moment of principles. The fact that there's like any of that at all is weird. Yeah.

He probably had like a little Nixon on his shoulder who was like, I know you're just going to be a Jew about this. He was like, no, I will not. I will not devil Nixon. It's weird how plugged in you are to how Nixon reacts to everything. Is that exactly what those are? Yeah. Oh man. So Kissinger's best relationship in the Middle East wound up being with Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt. The two like were legitimately good buddies. They would kiss each other on the cheek like they liked each other.

They found the one. Yeah. Meanwhile, Kissinger and Golda Meir, which was the leader of Israel, had a really contentious relationship. At the end of the day, Kissinger, again, would always side with Israel on existential issues. But he wound up giving them a lot more shit than you might expect. Now, the fact that the U.S. eventually sins in arms turns the war around for Israel, which allows them their forces to deal decisive blows to Egyptian and Syrian militaries. But once Israel was out of kind of the period of most risk for them as a state,

Kissinger starts to push back on them even harder. He's particularly enraged at the fact that they kept attacking while he was trying to negotiate a ceasefire. And again, his main concern here, this is not because he just like wants to stop the bloodletting. It's really important to him to negotiate a peace and it be seen as Henry Kissinger brought peace to the Middle East. So he's pissed that they're fucking over his negotiations. And he cares more about his reputation than he does about Israeli military success. They're forgetting about the people of Kissinger. Yes, exactly.

The real chosen people. So when Israeli forces surround the Egyptian Third Army and encircle it, violating a ceasefire, Kissinger is livid. And he's particularly angry. We're not getting as much into this aspect of his beliefs, but his whole thing in this period. As we talk about in our China episode, this three-way diplomacy thing that he deals with China and the Soviet Union, he wants what's called a balance of power. That's his whole thing. He's a big cold warrior.

Obviously, he overthrows a lot of communist governments. But he's not one of these people who thinks we can eliminate communism. Instead, he really wants this balance of power. And he wants a balance of power in the Middle East between Israel and her neighbors, too. And he's livid about, in part, that they violated the ceasefire. But he's also worried that, well, if the Israelis wipe out the Egyptian Third Army, that's going to mean Egypt is humiliated. And if they're humiliated, Sadat can't actually make peace and there's going to be another war.

And I want to try and stop the next war. Plus, the BFFing is so hard right now. Yeah, it was so good for him. But he is broadly on the right side of this. Right. Yeah. Over the course of several chaotic days, he makes numerous trips between each of the belligerent nations in this war negotiating with their heads of state.

And one of his primary tactics is to mock whoever he'd just been talking to when he's in front of the next person. So, like... Yeah, how did he miss that guy? He's an MC. Yeah. So, when he's dealing with Hafez Assad or Anwar Sadat, this means talking shit about the Israelis and often Jewish people in general

to get on their good side. Wow. When Israel violates that ceasefire, he is heard to complain in a meeting, quote, if it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic. Oh, my God. Wow. On another occasion, he says, quote, and I need to remind you, this is a Holocaust survivor saying this.

Oh, boy. Any people who have been persecuted for 2,000 years must be doing something wrong. Oh, Jesus Christ. He fucking said that. Wow. Holy shit, man, we are just... We are just such fucking assholes. I haven't just seen this.

Guys, listen, I'm on fire. I'm just lifting right now. This is so good to write. Someone write this down. No, don't worry. I'm wiretapping myself. He kills at the clubs in Damascus. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. And yeah, he is actually really popular with... Not all, because there are other... We have quotes from other people who are particularly other Egyptian military leaders under Sadat who are like, well, Sadat's fallen for it. He's obviously just saying whatever he thinks will make us like him. Clearly, he can't believe this shit. He's just trying to...

There are people who see through it, but he's able to trick the folks who matter, which in this case are Sadat and Hafez. So all that aside, this period is, again, broadly speaking, the one where Kissinger does the most actual good, but it's worth noting that even when he's on the right side of things, I think negotiating an end to a war is generally the right thing to do when there's a war. But even when he's on the right side of things, his ego plays a massive and often toxic role in how everything shakes out.

See, while all this is going on, Nixon is barreling towards impeachment. And a big part of why he's constantly over there, like while all of the big milestones in the Watergate case hit, like when Nixon is like ordering the cover-up and shit and doing the things that will get him impeached, Kissinger's always away. Like he's like very studiously. As soon as the story breaks, like,

I need to be overseas as much as fucking possible. So is it possible he's competently trying to negotiate Middle East peace because he's trying to save his own ass and doesn't want... Yeah, yeah. That is literally what's going on. Because he's not a dumb man. He sees that Nixon is fucked. So he doesn't... He's like, well, I can't just be doing nothing.

Yeah. Nixon, why don't I actually try to make this work, I guess? I'm in a lot of trouble domestically. Yeah, I mean, that's it. Like he wants to... Because part of it is he doesn't want to be near Nixon because Nixon's toxic. And part of it is like, well, if the last thing everyone remembers about Henry while Nixon is going down is that he ended war in the Middle East,

I'm going to keep being Secretary of State, you know? There's a friend of mine who had this theory when he was like... He said when... Or it might even be a bit. I don't remember. But like when he's in like a rideshare, he won't talk. And then the last two minutes, he'll just take great interest. So he leaves on a real high note. And so it's like he's kind of like distant and not really doing much.

And then the last two minutes will be like, oh, that sounds great. Well, good luck with your family. And then so that's kind of like he's just trying to leave like... Yeah, leave on a high note. So the last thing he's going to try to do is actually decent after a bunch of bullshit. Yeah. When I... When I enter a party, I set off an IED at the start of it. So everyone's really like shaken up.

But then at the end, I handle it a six pack of beer. And that means everybody is like... That was the guy who dropped the IED. Oh, come on. He's the six pack guy in my opinion. That's who that guy is. That is how Henry Kissinger handles everything. So, yeah.

Now, again, but here's the thing. The fact that like this is all existential for Henry, right? Ending the war in between Israel and her neighbors is like... He knows he has to do this or he's not going to keep his gig. So not only is he trying to negotiate peace, but he can't let anyone else play a role in bringing peace to the Middle East, right? Because this is how... This is his job interview. And you know how Henry Kissinger treats job.

You've seen what he'll do for a job interview, right? I know. I know something he won't do to get a job. I'd like to see that list. So this becomes a problem when while this is all going on, this Egyptian and Israeli general, you've got this massive encircled Egyptian army, the Egyptian general in charge of that and the Israeli general meet each other in the field between their armies

and sit down and start negotiating a ceasefire and figuring out how to pull... They start talking like people. It's one of these weird moments in military history. These guys are like, I think we can work something out. We don't need to be doing this anymore. Quiet, you guys! Be quiet! Shut up!

Shoot the bit! Kill them quick! So Henry is enraged when he hears this happening. And he starts, again, all these people who like, in any other situation, like an Israeli general or an Egyptian general in the 1970s, not guys you would expect to be the voices of reason, but because Kissinger's in the story.

So he starts maneuvering to make these guys shut the fuck up. He sends a letter to the Israeli ambassador asking, what is Yarev? Yarev's the Israeli general selling here. Tell him to stop. Suppose Yarev comes out a great hero on disengagement. What do you discuss on December 18th, which is the next round of negotiations?

Oh my God! He's such a... Yeah, I mean, it's just what a heinous asshole. I mean, I feel like he could still tilt the credit towards him, but he's like, I want my finger print solely on this. I don't want to get too into what might have happened because I'm not an expert on either Egyptian or Israeli military history,

but you have to think maybe it would have been good if an Israeli general and an Egyptian general had brought peace to the conflict and maybe that had been part of the military legacy in the area. Might have been nice, I don't know. You realize we're staring down the barrel of a tragedy right now. I might not be recognized as the one who did this. So Kissinger, a biography, continues the story.

Quote, At Kissinger's behest, both Sadat and Meir reigned in their generals at the Kilometer 101 talks. That's like where this army is encircled. The Israeli ambassador, although a Kissinger partisan, felt that it was largely a matter of ego. Kissinger's view was that if any concessions were to be made,

they should be made by him, in its recall. He was very upset when he found out that things were actually being settled by the generals at Kilometer 101. We had to make them stop. Ego was a weakness of his, but it was also the source of his greatness, which I might quibble with.

Ego was a weakness is understating. I would let you call it an airstrike. Can we kill both generals? I think we're going to need to find the generals. These guys are getting a long way too well, and I wasn't there. Listen, Dick, I know the Watergate stuff has you, but can we invade both countries?

For sure. Complete camp! So, to his sort of credit, though, the peace that Henry helped negotiate to end the Yom Kippur War would prove to be durable, and it set up diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel for the next time. There's this very powerful moment when, like,

go to my ear, because, like, Sadat still can't talk directly to Israel. There's a whole, like, diplomatic thing going on, but he tells Kissinger to tell her, like, I'm taking off my military uniform and I'm never going to wear it again. Basically, like, things do, like, this is a really, like, good move in a lot of ways.

Obviously, you could say this also, like, paves the way for nobody ever coming to help the Palestinians again, which is worth noting, but it does bring it into this series of, like, constant wars. So, yeah. What an amazing risk to take, though, to be like, you guys stop. We'll do my version.

We got to do it my way. And the fractionature of Middle East peace negotiations. That is kind of the reputation he gets, because, obviously, this plays incredibly well for Americans. And so, Kissinger is seen as still this, like, massive hero, even while this is a big part of why he's so popular, even as the rest of the

admin goes down in flames. Now, this inaugurates a period of what comes to be known as shuttle diplomacy. That's a term you'll hear associated with Kissinger all the time. And it's him flying all these different countries in the Middle East and in Africa, him flying from, like, capital to capital

for weeks on end doing these negotiations where he's always the man in the center of things. Henry actually kind of grew addicted to throwing himself in the middle of international crises and flying nonstop between capitals to do these negotiations. It was this and the popularity he earned from being seen as a peacemaker

that guaranteed him to keep his job in Ford's cabinet. One of the few upsides to Kissinger's career prior to the 70s is that he hadn't really fucked with Africa to any appreciable degree. Now, this is not because Henry Kissinger would have an issue with fucking with Africa, but it is because the U.S., like, we didn't have a huge footprint in the continent

until the 60s. You know, that's just not... I'm so swamped right now. There's so much going on. There's so many countries to ruin. Yeah. Yeah, this is like him learning Spanish. He just never found the time. Yeah, look, I'm a little older

and I get the times I can ruin Africa, but my God. So, yeah, the U.S. footprint in Africa started up when the CIA, in like the early 60s, I think, when the CIA murdered or allowed other people to murder, it's a little unclear.

Patrice Lumumba, the left-wing democratically elected leader of the Congo. The U.S. backed a right-wing general, well, even calling it like right and left are less useful terms in this, but we back a general called Joseph Mobutu, who proceeded to spend the next couple decades robbing the country blind.

I think this seems like a pattern. Yeah, it happens. It's weird that it keeps happening all the time. While there was other U.S. fuckery in Africa throughout the 60s and early 70s, it stated a fairly low ebb until April of 1975 when Saigon fell to North Vietnam,

now known as just Vietnam. 1975 was known by some in the media as the year of intelligence, not because any particularly good decisions were being made, but because Congress was investigating the presidency over Watergate and there was this big flood of public questions about clandestine foreign actions

carried out under the ages of Cold War politics. A lot of the stuff we were talking about in episodes like two, three, and four had started to leak by this point and so people are like, there's this big national discussion about like, what should we be doing? Should we have like a CIA? Should we maybe?

And there are like the CIA gets like, there's a reforming of the CIA that occurs in this period. Oh, that always works. Yeah, you can question the degree to which it mattered. Yeah, it may have made them less good at doing the bad things that they did, but not for lack of traffic.

Hard to imagine. It's the reform in the CIA is the difference between overthrowing Salvador Allende and those like U.S. guys pissing themselves in Venezuela after getting like arrested by fishermen. For Henry Kissinger though, the year of intelligence was a year where he spent trying to reorient the United States

towards a new anti-communist conflict. His target this time was the nation of Angola. Now, Angola is a mid-sized African nation located on the southwest coast of the continent, directly under the Congo and directly above Namibia. It's close enough to South Africa to get fucked with, but not so close that they can just send troops right over the border, you know,

which is a better place to be than directly bordering South Africa in this period. In 1961, the people there decided to have themselves a good old-fashioned war of independence which lasted 13 years, killed tens of thousands of people and only ended when a coup overthrew the dictator of Portugal. Now, this coup was, by the way, very weird.

Most sources will describe it as a left-wing coup against the dictator. The reality is a lot more muddled. The guy who winds up in charge of Portugal on paper is a monocle-wearing general who's like a real... I loved him already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm in.

And he's not really leftist, but the powers behind him are some very left-wing army officers. They form a new democratic government which includes several elected communist leaders. So Portugal has, like, elected communist deputies now. Okay. Henry Kissinger flips the fuck out at this. He is certain the country will fall to Soviet influence.

Interestingly, like this detente he's worked at with the Soviets, a big part of it is this idea that, like, well, the Soviets have their sphere of influence in the east, and we have, like, the west has its sphere of influence in Western Europe, and the Soviets kind of hold to that here because they don't get involved in Portugal. They don't, like, try to make push things further in their direction. Henry is, like, convinced they're going to and is absolutely wrong.

He got paranoia from Nixon. He was like, Yeah, yeah. Portugal eventually elects other people. Like, again, the government stays fairly left-wing by his standards, but, like, it does not... You might notice it does not join the Iron Curtain, you know? Yeah, right. Like, it's... Yeah.

Kissinger is just, like, there's... We have some quotes from him. He's absolutely certain that, like, they're about to go full Stalinist because, again, he's wrong about most things, actually. He does not have a good understanding of, like, what's going to happen anywhere. No, it's just almost at this point he's hung around so long that you're kind of just, like, I guess he must know... I mean, you want a Nobel Peace Prize?

Like, you're like, he must know something. You... I think it's worth looking at, like, what happens. Like, Henry's expectations for what's going to happen in Portugal versus what happens, and then think back to Chile, where, like, Henry's like, Oh, Ainde's going to lead to... They're going to go full communist, and it's going to be, you know... No, maybe if Ainde had stayed in power,

there just wouldn't have been a dictator and things would have been fine, and they would have had a lot less problems than they... And let's see the communist version. How many people die in the communist version? Probably less. The puppets that we put in power are not, like, these amazing, like, peacekeepers.

It's just, like, we're like the Midas of Genocides. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, the biggest international result of the coup is that the new Portuguese government had no stomach for colonies, right? They negotiated a treaty with the three largest militant groups in Angola in 75. These were the FNLA, the MPLA, and UNITA. The non-acronym names of all these groups are in French. I'm not even going to try that.

You can do it. Dave has a... Absolutely not. What you need to know is that the MPLA were Marxists, right? Kind of Marxists. They were formed at least... The organization had been formed by members of Angola's intelligentsia who were Marxist and Marxism had, like, a big influence on the MPLA. Unfortunately, like, yeah, meanwhile, like, kind of...

So that's one faction. The FNLA and UNITA are generally described as being right-wing groups, but this is one of those things where, like, grafting Western political terms onto the Civil War in Angola does not work great. All of these groups, even the ostensibly Marxist MPLA, are very tribal in origin. And by that, I mean, like, they are based on specific tribal grievances

and tribal, like, arguments, right, that are going on in the region, as opposed to, like, being clearly, like, well, we're pro-communist or we're anti-communist. Like, that's really less of what's going on. We're getting shirts made. Yeah. For an example of how useless a strict ideological lens is here, UNITA was initially very left-wing in its messaging,

attacking the United States as, quote, the notorious agents of imperialism. UNITA's fighters were literally trained by North Korean soldiers. But by the end of the Civil War in Angola, they had been receiving arms from the Reagan administration for years, brokered via their paid representative, Paul Manafort. Oh, my God. What the hell is this? That's the kind of war this is where, like,

UNITA starts off being like, we're going to end American imperialism. And by the end, they're like, Paul Manafort, get us weapons. If you're in a party, get next to this Manafort character. He is a good guy. Hey, yeah, for just, like, to show you how weird this is, technically, in the Angolan Civil War, Paul Manafort and North Korea are on the same side. I feel like Paul Manafort's 250 years old.

Yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, and by the end, it is fair to say that, like, by the end of the Civil War, UNITA's, like, leader Jonas Evimby is calling himself an anti-communist. That's his messaging. But he's less about anti-communism than, again, their specific local grievances he has with the MPLA.

And, like, that's more why they're fighting than that he, like, believes strongly in anti-communism. He just knows that's how you get weapons, you know? Right, okay, that's right. He's speaking the language, right. Yeah, and when North Korea is training his guys, he's not into Juche, you know, he's like, he wants the dudes to train his guys. Yeah, right.

Now, the FNLA is led by a guy named, and that's the other usually called a right-wing faction, is led by a guy named Holden Roberto, who used to work with Sevimby before Sevimby formed UNITA. I know this is a very complicated conflict, I'm sorry. Um, they're generally described as, like, right-wing, and they did receive aid from the CIA, so that would, like, okay, yeah, definitely right-wing,

getting aid from the CIA. They also got military aid from China, Romania, India, Algeria, Zaire, the AFL-CIO, and the Ford Foundation, or at least aid of some sort. So again, like, the sides here are just fucking baffling. They're like the Tinder swindler. They're just working every side.

Yeah, China, the CIA, and the AFL-CIO shaking hands over backing the FNLA. Finally getting some agreement, yeah. It's like Big Brother. Wait, you guys here too? This is amazing. Oh, the Ford Foundation. Well, well, well.

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The MPLA, which these again are the kind of Marxist guys, and if you're of the three factions, they are the ones who most do believe in like a political thing that like we would recognize in terms of like left-right sides. They are partly armed by the Soviet Union, which should not be surprising, but most of their military aid comes from Cuba. And we're not really going to get into it, but it's worth noting like how substantial Cuban aid is to the MPLA.

Cuba starts sending soldiers to Angola in November of 75, and by 1988 they had more than 55,000 soldiers in the country. And like, that's a trek. I don't know if you guys know this, but Cuba in the west coast of Africa, not super close. Yeah, it's a bit of a jaunt. And that's also a long involvement. You know, they're in there more than a decade.

There's a lot of commitment here. So as is generally the case. It's actually Cuba now, to be fair. As is generally the case, all of the communists were not in agreement about Angola. The People's Republic of China did not particularly care about like a left-wing struggle in Angola. They wanted to keep Soviet power at bay on a continent where they were starting to do some business themselves. So China and the US worked together to support the FNLA in United.

This is exactly the sort of thing Kissinger had been going for when he pushed to connect the US diplomatically to China. I want to quote now from a write-up by Maria Gouda of Wilfrid Laurier University. Quote, This was part of Kissinger's grand strategy of triangular diplomacy. Triangular diplomacy was essentially the US exploiting the relationship between communist China and the Soviet Union to create a three-way detente between the countries with the US at the helm.

Kissinger was not pushing for covert operations through the CIA in order to elevate American standing in China because Nixon and Kissinger were orchestrating something else. This was to use China as a counterweight against the Soviets. Kissinger's emphasis on triangular diplomacy caused him to view regional conflict in terms of involvement on the Chinese and the Soviets, not in terms of a local struggle. So he very much sees this as a battleground between different ideologies,

but anyone who knows anything about the Angola-Soviet, knows that, like, no, that's not really what's going on. Like, everyone is, like, everyone is in here and it is certainly not, like, about what kind of political shit individual parties believe. Yeah. Yeah, you can't graft these easily under, like, a Western axis. But as Isaacson writes, Angola became, quote,

a vivid example of Kissinger's tendency to see complex local struggles in an east-west context. In all respect to Kissinger, wrote Jonathan Quittney in his study of the Angolan War, one really has to question the sanity of someone who looks at an ancient tribal dispute over control of distant coffee fields and sees it as a Soviet threat to the security of the United States. I mean, what a guy.

Yeah. It's like, I mean, it's also, I mean, it's so, again, I mean, the ego on this fucking dude to be able to just go into things, massive conflicts, have no clue, and make it that binary and think that he's doing anything. I mean, he's just, he's just so emboldened. Yeah, he's emboldened. He's just like, he's so arrogant that he's like, well, I don't need to.

Would you guys do me a favor? Could some of you wear red shirts and some of you wear blue? Let's do shirt skins, huh? Yeah, I don't need to, like, I, Henry Kissinger, don't need to, like, understand the actual dimensions of why these sides are fighting. I can just assume that it grafts on to every other conflict I've ever cared about.

Yeah, knowledge is weakness. Yeah. And this is like, he's not the only American to be arrogant in this specific way about a conflict in Africa, right? But he's the last, he's the last one. He would be the last, thank God. He's the last. Since then.

So, CIA funding for UNITA and the FNLA was initially quite low, but Kissinger pushed for an escalation, and soon the agency had poured $22 million in covert support for both of these groups. Kissinger felt they were thinking small, though. He believed that after suffering a public defeat in Vietnam, U.S. foreign policy needed a comeback, and Angola was, yeah, baby, yeah.

Come back. Yeah. And what a better place than Angola. Everybody cares. Every American's like, what have you done in Angola? Everyone's plugged in. You're gonna love my new stuff. The problem with Vietnam is that it was too distant

from American concerns. Angola. That's it, that's the problem. Now, yeah, so he believes that Angola's gonna be our fucking comeback tour. It's the equivalent of, I don't know, one of the times Elton John did a farewell tour. Yeah.

Something like that. He's on his night. Yeah. There's a lot of similarities between Henry Kissinger and Elton John's musical career. Yeah. Bumming and the Jets. Yeah, actually, Tiny Dancer, that song is about,

is about Henry Kissinger. Yeah, he is the Tiny Dancer. He is a little guy. So, yeah. Kissinger wants to prove that the United States is still a global power. And he also wants to prove that Henry Kissinger is still a secretary of state with some teeth, you know?

Thank God. He's just seeded a bunch to the fucking, in these negotiations with Vietnam. We need to break peace of mind to Henry Kissinger. Yeah. He is like, everyone is going to see Vietnam as an L for me. Oh, I need a win, baby. So, yeah, you could kind of see his attitude in Angola

as like the powerful sociopath version of buying a sports car to impress like 20-year-olds. Right. Like when you're, you know, an old man. Yeah, right. He's in his midlife war crisis. And the people around Kissinger are a lot less bullish about escalating involvement in Angola.

And in fact, this includes like the fucking CIA. But they had really big shoes to fill, to be fair. Yeah. Just like we don't want any part of this right now. He's like, wow, you guys are really negative. Yeah. You guys, it's Angola. It's Angola.

He's like, where is the win? Got to be a fucking hole in one, baby. In June of 75, Kissinger holds a meeting with President Ford, the defense secretary, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the head of the CIA. They discussed the invasion of Angola. And while most of that meeting is still classified, we know Kissinger urged what he called

a diplomatic offensive. Quote, if we appeal to the Soviets to not be active, it will be a sign of weakness. He played on stereotypes of Africa as mysterious and wild, claiming it is an area where no one can be sure of its judgments. Next, Gouda writes, quote, revealing his talent for manipulation, Kissinger used daunting and dramatic language

to illustrate the situation in Angola as he saw it. By giving the impression that there was no way to tell how the Angolan civil war would play out, Kissinger pushed forward the idea that the U.S. better get involved in Angola through tangible or covert means before it was too late. The U.S. through the CIA needed to support the FNLA in United to prevent the dominance of the Soviet-backed MPLA.

This view wholly disregards the idea that the Angolan civil war was indeed that, a civil war. Kissinger was positioning Angola in a wider East versus West context. Oh, my God, you got Biggie, you got Tupac. I mean, only the United States can want to be, only the United States can be sold on getting involved in a conflict where he's like, we have no clue what's going on, so we got to get our hats on.

We're gonna really throw our dicks in this one. Come on, guys, let's get moving. It could be crazy. This is one where the U.S. actually doesn't really want to get involved. This Kissinger is the one pulling everyone else in here. He's a marketing wizard. Yeah, and based on his urgings, the CIA comes up with a plan called IA Feature.

It was a covert paramilitary operation in which U.S. military advisors and special forces would be sent to Angola in a manner basically identical to how U.S. involvement in Vietnam started. Kissinger's literally like, let's do that again, baby. Let's see, it goes pretty good when we do it. This is how I get to bomb Namibia. That's on my vision board. He has dreams of flattening the Congo.

Oh, I woke up. I thought I had done it. Now, despite the fact that the CIA did come up with this plan at his behest, there's intense resistance within the agency, a lot of whom think Kissinger has lost his fucking mind. He has lost. And thus, CIA director William Colby joins our pantheon of bad guys who seem reasonable because Henry Kissinger is involved.

Right. Jesus Christ. So Colby is pretty rattled by how Vietnam ended and also by the fact that there's all these congressional inquiries into the CIA doing a bunch of other terrible shit. They're actively being investigated right now. So this isn't Colby being a good guy. This is Colby being like, I don't want to drive when I've got shit in the car.

I'm holding right now. Honestly, any other time, I'm just fucking Angola like crazy. I'm just fucking going nuts. But it's just not the right time. Right now? Yeah. He's a guy who's like, Kissinger's on a casino floor and he's been cheating and the security's gathered and they're whispering and pointing at him.

He notices and he's still playing. Yeah, he keeps going. He's going to let it ride on black one more time. How many times do I have to say hit me? So the 40 committee, which again, Kissinger heads, approves IA feature. But William Colby is like, OK, but I'm going to insist we actually go to Congress to have the funds appropriated for this secret option. Who's Congress?

Oh, that branch? Those guys? What? Are they still here? Oh, my God. You are all fashioned, Colby. So while Kissinger argues for his covert operators, South Africa sends troops in to support the FNLA in United,

who would again originally been trained by North Korea. So there's FNLA troops who received training from both South Africa and North Korea. Jesus. This is just a very weird war. So China has the reaction we're all having and is like, you know what? This is too messy for me. I don't even need this right now. Like I got other shit going on.

And they kind of bounce from the situation. OK. The Soviets and the Cubans though extend more aid to the MPLA who win the war handily and install themselves in the capital, Luanda, by the end of 1975. So a few weeks after this, the CIA holds an interagency working group meeting with Kissinger to discuss how to ask Congress to send in U.S. advisors. And like at this point, the war is lost. And Kissinger is like, no, we got to get some guys in there.

Come on, guys. No one else wants this, right? Everyone else is like, this seems like way more of a hassle. He's showing up to the party at like 2.45 a.m. Come on. Let's keep going. Let's do shots. What do you mean the kegs tapped?

Yeah, the CIA is already puking from how much they've had to drink in Vietnam. Come on. Who wants to drink the keelers? Come on. I brought absinthe. Let's go. Coolers. So Kissinger or so, yeah, they have this meeting.

And like, so Kissinger has a meeting with one of this, like a guy in this with this, a bunch of people. And then like, they hold a separate meeting afterwards with the CIA about what Kissinger had said. So they're having the side meetings on Kissinger now? Yeah. So basically they present Kissinger with a report on like what would have to be done to send U.S. advisors into Angola.

And Kissinger reads the report and rather than giving a yes or a no, he grunts and walks out of his office. Wow. So after this, all of these CIA guys have to sit down and decide like, what does Henry Kissinger grunting mean? We've bought in our grindologist. Was this a yes or a no? Yeah.

This guy is really good at deciphering what Henry grunts mean. Well, gentlemen, it was a pretty long grunt, which is never good. It's a side grunt, which for Henry means he's a little agitated. I'm going to quote about writing about this meeting, Kissinger, a biography by Walter Isaacson. Everyone found this rather disconcerting, especially since Kissinger was heading off for Beijing. Well, someone asked, was it a positive grunt or a negative grunt?

Mokahi paused. It was just a grunt, he explained. Like, oomph. I mean, it didn't go up or down. Stockwell, the agent in charge, marveled as a group of somber officials supervising the nation's only extant war, sat around a table trying to decipher a Kissinger grunt. Mokahi provided his imitation of the grunt once again, emphasizing its flatness. Someone else at the other end of the table tried it.

There were a few experiments contrasting positive grunts with the voice rising, then a negative one with the voice falling. Different people attempted it. Well asked the CIA officer who was chairing the meeting. Do we proceed with the advisors? Mokahi scowled and puffed on his pipe. We'd better not, he finally said, trying to decipher his boss's mind. Kissinger just decided not to send Americans into the Sinai.

There were a lot of nods. The request for advisors was shelved. It was an amazing way to run a war. Mokahi said years later as he recalled the incident. Oh yeah. By the way, they accidentally wrote a home improvement script at the end of this. This is actually where the pilot to that show came from. Tim the tool man, Taylor.

It was like, no, no. It was like, yeah. Okay. That sounds a little more positive. Yeah. It's just like, what a moment for the United States. All these fucking spooks with blood on their hands being like, was it like, or like, you know. I mean, because you do at least at some point in your existence, for the most part, you do believe

that when someone is saying the central intelligence agency, that it is really like working on intelligence and is intelligent and is a body that is actually, you know, processing information that potentially you don't have access to. And instead they're just sitting around a fucking table going like, do the grunt again, Jim. Yeah. Do the grunt again. It reveals.

And this is, I think, where a lot of folks on the left kind of mix up. Viewing the CIA is like hyper competent. Yeah. And it's where a lot of people everywhere fuck up viewing Kissinger as hyper competent. Like, no, they have a lot of power and they use it badly. But like at the end of the day, Kissinger doesn't have the balls to like say yes or no on something. And so he grunts and then all of these fucking, again, bloody handed monsters spend an entire meeting like repeating the grunt and trying to figure out if it means yes or no.

And there's no, like, it's so unchecked. I mean, yeah, you there and it's still is that it. But it's just there's nobody there to be like, hey, this is fucking nuts. Yeah. Instead, they're like, do the grunt again. Try the grunt again. Yes or no. Damn, have the best grunt.

Damn, do it again because I want to play it slow for everyone. That's a baby to me, bro. While I think it sounds ambivalent, having known Henry for a little while, he's pissed. So the CIA's request for another $28 million in funding and the discussion of sending in advisors was again leaked to Seymour Hirsch. Congress cut off all aid. Obviously, he puts out an article about it. Congress cuts off aid to Angola as a result of this.

Kissinger does not get his way. But the CIA money he'd already funneled into United helped the group stay alive. The Angolan Civil War did not officially end until 2002. Although, again, this is one of those things. This is a really nasty Civil War. It lasts a ridiculous amount of time. Kissinger gets a lot of the blame, but we should also note that Paul Manafort is much more on this. Manafort's the guy who brings Savimbi to DC and gets Reagan to send a fuckload of weapons over to really escalate things.

Thank God for Reagan. Yeah, thank God for Reagan. But it is amazing that this fucking goes on until 2002. That's insane. What a legacy. What a legacy. So, I have teased y'all that Kissinger has a Rhodesia connection. And yet again, the funniest thing about this is that it's one of the least fucked up things he's ever involved in.

But the story is kind of funny, so I'm going to tell it anyway. So, in Rhodesia, you've got this country where about 8% of the population at the height of white population in Rhodesia, about 8% of them are white, but they hold effectively 100% of the political power. This obviously is not something a lot of the black people living there like. Sure. For reasons I don't think I need to explain. No. So, some of them decide to fight back and there's a number of rebel groups and soon an ugly insurgent war between the Rhodesian government,

which by the way is an international pariah, right? They're like actually not supposed to exist, basically. So, no one can legally sell them arms, so everything has to get smuggled through South Africa. And the Soldier of Fortune magazine winds up sending a bunch of fighters over, William F. Buckley Jr., or William F. Buckley raises money for them. Yada, yada, yada, very nasty war. We've talked about it in other episodes. The GoFundMe war. Yeah, it is a GoFundMe war.

So, by the time Kissinger is in office, the white minority government of Rhodesia has spent years locked into the losing side of a grinding insurgent campaign. The international community widely condemns Rhodesia as an apartheid state and there's a bunch of arms embargoes. And in fact, pretty much everyone hates Rhodesia except for South Africa and the U.S. right wing, who see the Rhodesies as anti-communist crusaders. Sure. Kissinger was locked into an awkward position here. He wanted to negotiate an end to the fighting and an end to the white supremacist government of Rhodesia, but he also doesn't want to piss off his right wing base too much, you know? This is like a really messy situation for Henry. So, policy towards Rhodesia in the Nixon years.

There's a plan Nixon approved through South Africa in 1969 that is like U.S. policy in Rhodesia for nearly a decade. And it is literally called, I am sorry for saying this, but Nixon calls U.S. plans, like the U.S. stance towards Rhodesia, quote, the tar baby option. Oh, my God. See you guys later. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Oh, my God. At least there's no stream of white supremacy through American power. No.

This was the one time. It's like, I can't believe the guy fucking recorded himself. This is not just recorded himself. This isn't just like Nixon saying a slur in a conversation with his buds. This is official U.S. government policy. These are title pitches. We write this out places. Someone wrote it and was like, okay, I'll hand it in.

If you're sure, Mr. President, it seems pretty good to me. And this is not just towards Rhodesia. This is towards all of South Africa to these white minority governments in Africa. And the premise is that, quote, the whites are here to stay. And the only way that constructive change can come is through them. It's so... And it really hasn't changed that much. We just have fancier titles.

Yeah, we don't put the slurs right in the title. We don't record the president and we don't put the slurs in the title. So the policy is sold to American liberals and moderates by basically saying the only way to liberate black Africans is to improve their economic outcomes through trade. And that means dealing with the white governments, right? Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, it's really bleak. All it did, we just changed it to tech. We've just changed it to tech, essentially. Yeah. We would maintain, the document declared, public opposition to racial repression, but relaxed political isolation and economic restrictions on the white states. I mean, it's fucking crazy.

Like, you know, the problem here is that people don't like the 8% white people that run the entire fucking place. It's one of those... We continue and we'll always have debates over, like, sanctions and, like, when they're good and bad ideas. Yeah. But the argument here is that, like, we can't sanction South Africa and Rhodesia because it'll hurt black people.

And the degree to which that's a lie is that, like, well, you're saying we have to start selling them fucking weapons so that they can oppress black people in order to improve economic outcomes for black people? Right. And perhaps that's fucking insane. Right. Yeah.

It's a little more nuanced than that by not by a lot. Not much. Not much. Yeah. To his credit, when Nixon is out and Ford is in, Kissinger kills the racial slur option and he authorows a new plan, one that is a lot better and that is actually focused on spirited opposition to white minority rule in Rhodesia. Kissinger gives a big speech in Lusaka

that immediately enrages the right wing of the Republican Party. Basically, he's like, our plan, like, under Ford, we want to bring an end to the government in Rhodesia. Like, this government cannot be allowed to exist. And the right wing is, like, unbelievable. Yes. Ronald Reagan. The over 7% of the populace.

You can't disenfranchise 7% of Rhodesia. Have you seen the color of their goddamn skin? That is essentially what Ronald Reagan says. He denounces Kissinger's plan as undercutting the possibility of a, quote, just an orderly settlement and argues that it will provoke a massacre of white people. Boy, I mean, you want to have a head popping moment. Try to find a good guy in a Reagan-Kissinger debate. It is.

It is an amazing fight. Well, yeah. I hate everyone involved in this. We should pay more attention to the white people. I think we need to be careful. I feel like you're both conning me into something. I feel like you guys are good cop, bad copping, and you're working for the same outcome.

Look, Henry, I'm not 100% sure why I think you're wrong in this, but you must be. The other guy's got to be wrong, too, though, so I don't really know what to do here. I don't trust Reagan and hate him, but Kissinger, you're the worst person on the planet. So I would not call a bit of a pickle. This is a doozy of an issue.

You're on the other room and do some grunting. Yeah. So, yeah, what's happening here is that Kissinger is trying to wrench U.S. government policy in Africa away from supporting explicitly racist regimes in Africa and Reagan and the right wing under Reagan. He's trying to get into a country club or something. There's got to be some angle of...

I mean, obviously, it's the same reason he does anything, right? He wants to be seen as being the guy who negotiates into these big issues, and he's trying to, I think he recognizes by this point that, like, well, Republicans aren't going to stay in power forever, but I, Henry Kissinger, want to have a shot at being in power still, and maybe if I get rid of this bad government Rhodesia, people will be like, Henry K., let's give him a gig, you know?

He accidentally stumbles into the proper outcome because, personally, he wants to end it, and so he sees the way to end it is actually the way that's good. We're lining up Henry's personal interests with a prudent solution, and what happened, that eclipse is very rare. Yeah, he's like a guy who, like, stops a home invader

from murdering a family, but it's later found out that it's because he was hitting on a 15-year-old girl. Like, he was trying to flirt with their daughter and stuff. It's like that sort of situation where it's like, well, good, I guess. Like, he stops a robbery because he was peeping through a window that he fell through. Yeah, exactly.

It is hard to find the moral lesson to take out of this. So, yeah. Obviously, the Reagan right loses their minds over what Kissinger's doing here. Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon speechwriter, writes in a column, quote, it is too early to determine if Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's safari through Black Africa

did greater damage to U.S. policy interests or to President Ford's hopes in the remaining primaries. I mean, again, I like, it just, it needs to stop where, like, this never-ending, what is it due to your reelection chance is shit. It's like, we are so conditioned to that being how we operate and do everything, as opposed to actually just trying to do the thing

that does long-term good. Well, why would you do the thing that does long-term good? Is my point, Gareth? Yeah, you're right, you're right. I mean, it's true, but it's, like, I don't know. It's just, it's a foregone conclusion now that everything is viewed through the prism of what does it do to the poll numbers?

Can I just say take off your masks? Yeah, right, yeah. So, Kissinger did not achieve a tremendous amount in Rhodesia while he was Secretary of State. He got Ian Smith, who's the leader of Rhodesia, to agree to a two-year turnover from minority rule to an actual democracy. But the way he did this was by assuring Smith

that black moderates had agreed that during the turnover, whites would remain in control of the military and police. This was a lie. The black moderates in Rhodesia had never agreed to this. He's just lying to Smith to get him to agree to this. Awesome. It's like a two-year deal that you're like, that's just your way of, like, letting it sort of settle

so that you can push in you the fuckery, exactly. Yeah, yeah. The story of the negotiations is classic Kissinger. He's telling everyone what they want to hear and then kind of weaseling his way into getting people to sign things that make him look good. This write-up from the New York Times sums it up well. Mr. Smith has said he agrees to the five-point plan

he made in public because he had received assurances from Mr. Kissinger that the black leaders had accepted the whole package, including Mr. Smith's addition on the white ministers. In his view, either the blacks have reneged or Mr. Kissinger misled him. The blacks, such as President Julius Nuerere of Tanzania, insist that they did not give their approval

to the details of the five-point plan, only to the general thrust of majority rule in two years, leaving it to Britain to work out details later with black and white Rhodesians. They say they would have rejected the proposal for white ministers. Mr. Kissinger and his aides have been evasive. Mr. Kissinger said on television that

I think everybody is telling the truth. Wow. What an incredible guy. Wow. That is the best, that is the best bullshit statement I've ever fucking heard. It's outstanding. I believe I'm not sure or I don't know.

Everyone's lying. It's awesome. Who is the bad guy in Rhodesia? Nobody. Nobody. Everybody's really good. Everyone's really cool. Why do you need a bad guy?

In the end, the talks collapsed. The war continued on for two more years until the Rhodesian Strategic Fuel Reserve was blown up by insurgents and the government was forced to the table. Kissinger and his supporters would later claim that the eventual peace was negotiated on the terms laid out during Kissinger's negotiations.

That's kind of questionable. It is fair to say that by coming in very strongly and he was very unequivocal about condemning the government of Rhodesia by doing this as the Secretary of State Kissinger caused a shift that led to a significant increase

in trust of the U.S. by black African nations. No wonder Reagan was so pissed off. Yeah, obviously. It's one of his better moves from an ethical standpoint. But it's an ego move still, right? Everything is an ego move.

Obviously, it's a sign of how much more fucked up things become that doing this broadly good thing causes the beginning of the end of his career in politics. Of course. You can't help the black people.

That's it. You're done. But to be fair, it worked for me. That's why I did it. We know, everybody. We know, buddy. We know what won't fail to bring peace to Rhodesia.

What's that? The sponsors of this podcast orchestrated the destruction of the Rhodesian Strategic Field Reserve. My God. That is, we are sponsored entirely by the Rhodesian rebel forces. Here's an ad.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And on the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. To distance itself in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one

that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth,

his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Good stuff. So, yeah,

on the whole, Kissinger's last year or so as Secretary of State involved his least number of war crimes per month, which might point to personal growth, but probably points to the fact that he and Nixon had just exhausted the US government's ability to do shady shit. We needed a breather, right?

We had to take a breather. It took us a few years to get geared up for Reagan, you know? Sad, he's like, he's been... Go ahead, Dave. We've just killed so many. Like, when do we dig up? We dig them up and kill them again? We're out of ammunition.

He's not longer a starting QB, he's being traded, he's riding the pine. Yeah, he's got a wrist injury, you know? Yeah, he's on IR for the year. Yeah. So, the last one of his escapades we're going to cover then is Kissinger's relationship with the Kurds.

Oh, fuck. Yeah, baby. Jesus fucking Christ. The Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group on Earth without a nation of their own. There are chunks of southern Turkey, southern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeast Syria. Now, if you look at this kind of broad Kurdistan region

on a map, you'll notice a couple things. For one, it's all landlocked, which means if you were... And there was a lot of talk when colonial powers left started to leave the Middle East after World War II that should... And promises were, in fact, made to the Kurds. One of the issues that comes up

is that it's going to cause severe economic difficulties because they would be landlocked. You'll also note that their territories all tend to exist in chunks of states that have wound up fighting each other repeatedly over the last half-century or so, right? On purpose. Turkey and Syria, Iran, exactly.

And the Kurds were used on purpose by basically everyone as buffer zones and proxy fighters in these conflicts. Now, starting in the Nixon administration, the Shah of Iran had a problem. He was engaged in an escalating conflict with a new sexy young dude on the block, Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

Now, can I just say right away I like both these guys? They seem like they're both going to go good places. Yeah. So, the Shah decides he wants to arm... He wants the U.S. to arm Kurdish fighters in order to give Saddam some trouble

and ease up pressure. The ostensible leader of the Kurdish people struggle in Iraq at this time is a guy named Mustafa Barzani. Now, Mustafa had been leading his people in battle against the Iraqi state prior to Saddam taking power for like a decade at this point. And he had repeatedly begged the United States

for aid. The U.S. traditionally did not like Barzani because he had spent a decade exiled in the Soviet Union and had some socialist e-tendencies. But the Israelis and the Shah had experienced great luck in using the Kurds to keep Saddam, who had taken power pretty recently

off of their back. Kurdish rebels tied up 80% of the Iraqi military during the 1967 war against Israel and are probably a big part of the reason why Iraq did not join in that war. In April of 1972, Saddam signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union.

This finally tipped things for the Nixon administration. Treaty of friendship is just a great term. It is a nice term. We're buds! We're bros! Can you sign my bro contract? It means we're bros forever. It comes with AK-47s.

We are signing the BFF Treaty. So, this finally tips things for the Nixon administration, and Kissinger gives the go-ahead for CIA director Richard Helms to express American sympathy with the Kurds and declare our, quote, readiness to consider their requests

for assistance. Next, from a write-up in foreign policy. In early 1974, Saddam violated the terms of the March Accord and unilaterally imposed a watered-down version of autonomy for the Kurds. Barzani responded by traveling to Iran, where he met with the Shah and the CIA station chief

to discuss backing for a plan to set up an Arab Kurdish government that would claim to be the sole legitimate government of Iraq. As Kissinger wrote in his 1999 memoir Years of Renewal, Barzani's request triggered a flood of communications among U.S. officials focused on two questions. Whether the United States would support

a unilateral declaration of autonomy and what level of support the United States was willing to give the Kurds. The CIA in particular warned against increasing U.S. assistance. But Kissinger was dismissive of CIA of William Colby's caution, writing, quote,

Colby's resistance was as unrealistic as Barzani's enthusiasm. Nixon ultimately decided to increase U.S. assistance to the Kurds, including the profusion of 900,000 pounds of Soviet-made weapons that the CIA had stockpiled and a $1 million lump sum of refugee assistance.

In April of 1974, Kissinger said... Can I... Why the Soviet weapons? Is that to confuse things? You don't want people seeing them with U.S. weapons. That's going to make it seem like we're involved in. What an amazing... What an amazing move.

I mean... It's dope. I stole a car to commit a murder. So, in April of 1974, Kissinger sent Nixon's orders to the U.S. Ambassador in Tehran. This cable was important because it laid out a succinct proclamation of U.S. interests

vis-a-vis the Kurds. Number two, A, give the Kurds capacity to maintain a reasonable base for negotiating recognition of rights by Baghdad government. B, to keep present Iraqi government tied down. But C, not to divide Iraq permanently because an independent Kurdish area would not be economically viable.

And U.S. and Iran have no interest in closing the door on good relations with Iraq under moderate leadership. Yeah, but there are... I mean, I'm not great, but there are landlocked countries that are economically viable. And Kurdistan has a huge amount of oil.

Yeah. It's such a crazy thing that they're saying. It's fucking insane. What they are doing, and what Kissinger is establishing and writing here, is U.S. policy towards Kurdish people for more than half a century. And the idea comes down to,

we will provide them with aid and weapons when they fight our enemies, but only to such an extent that they achieve minor tactical successes, never enough to allow them permanent autonomy to upset the balance of power, right? This has been ever since. This is what we do with the Kurds, right?

And Kissinger is the guy who lays it out first. Now, Mustafa Barzani made the terrible mistake of believing that the U.S. actually supported his people's independence. For three years, the Kurds battled Saddam, sustaining thousands of casualties. But then in 1975, the Shah and Saddam

made peace, and the Shah asked the CIA to cut off all aid to the Kurds as part of a deal with Iraq. The weapons Kurdish fighters had relied upon suddenly dried up. Barzani's fighters were massacred. Thousands fled to Iran, but were turned away by the Shah. Desperate, Mustafa

cabled Kissinger, whom he had gratefully sent three rugs in a golden pearl necklace as wedding gifts just months earlier. Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people. Kissinger never replied. Later that year, the House Intelligence Committee

asked him to justify this betrayal. He said, covert actions should not be confused with missionary work. Oh my God. It's so cool. You don't understand that sometimes I'm also just doing missionary stuff. Yeah.

The key is that I don't give a shit. As he stands naked on his rug with just his pearl necklace on. Speaking of missionary. So in the 1976 presidential elections, Ronald Reagan attempted to primary Gerald Ford from the right. The Reagan campaign targeted Kissinger heavily.

Not for his numerous war crimes, but because of the fact that he had made a detente with the Soviet Union. That's why they're in. That's amazing. You know what? The right section got a point. He committed war crimes in Vietnam. You're talking about a guy who's killed millions

of innocent people. That's fine with all that. It's the peace stuff we're pissing at. A little angry at some of this peace stuff he's been locking in. That part of the detente means Kissinger was like we're not going to fuck with Soviet

spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. And Reagan and his colleagues are like well this means they're just giving up Eastern Europe to communism. Always communism. Exactly. It's fascist hate communists. And Kissinger's political instincts

and charm were sufficient to fend off an attempt. Because there's within the Ford administration an attempt to get Ford to promise to fire him in a second term. Largely because they think it'll help him win the primary against Reagan. And Nixon beats everyone here.

He manages to get Ford to be like no I would never fire Henry Kissinger. No, no, no, not Nixon. Kissinger succeeds in doing that with Ford. I thought like I was like if you're listening to Nixon at this point. There's a lot of Nixon here. He's just in a cupboard in the White House still.

Gerald, give me some gin. Also, keep Hank around. The fact that Henry wins the fight within the Ford administration means that he becomes like a major marketing term for the Reagan campaign. Right? Like they do not stop. In fact, they institute a plank

in the Republican Party that year. That's basically the anti-Kissinger plank that says like you will never accept that communist states should exist anywhere. Essentially, that's kind of what they do. It's just stabbing him in the heart. Yeah, it is. It's amazing. It's a mark of like how much he fuck things up

that you can't even feel good about his downfall because he's replaced by people who just suck even more. Ronnie felt the spheres of influence that Kissinger had established with the Soviet Union were giving up the eastern like block to communism. He also attacked Kissinger for negotiating

with Panama's new government because Henry was willing to give the Panama canal back to the Panamanian people. That was huge. Big Panama canal. The right wing was so... And Reagan wrote that thing but they were so fucking mad about it.

No, there's no claim to that canal. Yeah, Reagan said in a speech we built it, we paid for it and we're going to keep it. Refer to our two-parter on the U.S. and Panama for more on that one. So, Reagan's primary attempt failed but by struggling

against the rising far right Kissinger had hammered the final nail into his political career's coffin. In the Ford administration's last days a dark alliance materialized and smelling blood in the water they acted to cut Kissinger off from any future career in Republican politics.

The three main members of this alliance were Paul Wolfowitz from the CIA Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Wright. Oh, my God! Oh, baby! Yeah!

It's like there's four Kissingers. It's like killing Satan and then three winged demons fly out of him. Yeah, it's so funny. It is so funny. Finally, some good guys. It's really funny.

And in fact, so Kissinger like, Rumsfeld, he sees as almost like a protege, like he and Rumsfeld are very close. And when Rumsfeld turns against him, Kissinger describes him as, quote, the rottenest person I've known in government. Which is

Henry from you, utterly meaningless. Like absolutely meaningless from you. I mean, you're not allowed to. Yeah. It's so funny. It's so funny. So it's not funny for

all the people who are going to die. It's funny in like an existential sense. Like if you're an alien looking at all this like a TV show, it's pretty funny. Yeah, you'd be like, why don't they get a good guy? You're like, well, it's really hard to explain, but they just don't.

If you can't laugh at all the people dying, are you an American? Yeah, no. The answer is no. By the way, the first time that Nixon heard that Kissinger was working with a guy named Rumsfeld, he was like, pour him in a glass for me, get some ice on it. Sounds fucking delicious. Put some cellar in.

Mm-hmm. So Rumsfeld and Cheney worked within the White House. Oh my God, I can't believe I got to hear their names. I know. I know, baby. I know. While Wolfowitz is part of the CIA's Team B. Now, Team B is an intelligence review board set up by Gerald Ford

as a SOP to the far right. The Reagan conservatives, who he's again trying to win over and get behind him so we can win the election against Carter, the Reagan conservatives were certain the agency had been, the CIA, I mean, had been underreporting Soviet military power because the Soviet military and

the early chunk of the Ford administration is like, they're actually not doing great. Like, we really don't need to keep buying a shitload of weapons. They're not, they don't have the kind of military assets that we've been saying for years. So we now are getting a shady CIA

inside of the shady CIA? Yes, this is like, it's like a Russian nesting doll of the CIA inside the CIA that's even worse than the other CIA. It better not be a Russian nesting doll. So the Reagan conservatives were certain that the

CIA had been underreporting Soviet military power and Team B, like was basically, Ford gave them Team B so that they could get new appraisals that showed that the Soviet Union was actually increasing their military assets. So basically what we, like, what, like, I mean, essentially like

what would eventually happen with Iraq where you're like, look, I'm not liking the non-distilled information. Give me a bunch of bullshit. That's exactly what's happening. And one of the things that's fascinating here is that in essence, this is a return of missile gap logic, right?

Which Kissinger helped get off the ground. But now, because he supports the state-taunt policy and that's like his big claim to like fame within, you know, his career that he reached the top of the Soviet Union, he's on the opposite side of like a missile gap bullshit myth, right?

Oh, man. Leopards ain't my face. Yeah! That moment for him. I never thought it could happen to me. And then they came for the Kissingers and there was no Kissingers left to speak for me. It's the same thing as like

Dick Cheney speaking out against the Trump administration and watching his daughter get slandered and stuff. And it's what it's going to be in 20 years when, you know, Trump is welcomed into the president's funeral and we're going, you know, Trump really wasn't that bad. I like the way he said we shouldn't

nuke everyone on earth as opposed to the next guy who nuked everyone on earth. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Jill Biden handed him a piece of peppermint candy. He's not that bad. So, former CIA analyst Melvin Goodwin later said of Team B, quote,

they wanted to toughen up the agency's estimates. Cheney wanted to drive the CIA so far to the right that it would never say no to the generals. Not how estimates work. You don't toughen up like their estimates. Yes. Pause this and listen to our episodes

on the Dolis Brothers and then realize that Cheney's like, I want them further right than that. That's not nearly right-wing enough. That is the craziest fucking thing I've ever heard yet. It's like someone in a gang bang being like, I want more orifices.

Not enough holes here. I can't stick my dick in enough stuff. So, in December of 1976, as the Ford administration prepared to hand over power to Jimmy Carter, the CIA finished and released a 55-page report. Greg Grandin describes this as, quote,

the rights answer to the Pentagon Papers, a nearly perfect negation of the document Daniel Ellsberg had leaked three years earlier. The scholars and policymakers who composed the Pentagon Papers represented the kind of men Kissinger disdained. Experts enthralled to facts. In contrast, the members of Team B

were admitted ideologues. Its members, as J. Peter Scoblik notes, saw the Soviet threat not as an empirical problem, but as a matter of faith. What kind? I mean, you just... It's a church. It's a war church.

It's also what's happening here, because they are against Kissinger, but as Grandin notes, they're using the kind of logic he used, right? He's not... They're with him on all of the murder, crazy American shit,

but they're like, he's just not racist. I mean, they're basically like, we gotta get rid of Kissinger so we can worship his tactics properly. That's exactly what's going on here. And in Kissinger's shadow, Grandin continues, quote, previewing what would become known as

Dick Cheney's 1% doctrine, Team B interpreted threats with the smallest probability of occurring as likely to occur. Team B's failure to find a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine system was evidence that there could well be

one. Which makes sense. Of course. There is no evidence that I have egot it and won an Emmy and an Oscar and a Grammy. So that's pretty solid evidence

that I have. You have all of them. So in December of 1977, The New York Times published a front page story on the intelligence findings of Team B which provided legitimacy to the bogus estimates and ensured the next decade

of defense spending was geared towards stopping a rising Soviet Titan that did not exist. Oh my god. Thanks, New York Times. Nailed it on that one. Star Wars on top of that, which is... Star Wars proceeds directly from it. And it proceeds directly like

Team B is laying the groundwork for Star Wars, right? So while Team B's tactics ran directly counter to Kissinger's current positions, they rested directly on what Grandin calls his philosophy of history. Henry had been an advocate on the value of intuition in assessing

threats and guiding responses. Historian Anna Hessin-Kahn writes that they used Kissinger's own philosophy to quote, belittle, besmirch, and tarnish Henry Kissinger. Had to be a tough spot for Kissinger where he was like, it's a shame that I've been vilified,

but god damn do I love the way they did it. So me. So me. That's why when people you look at the current situation in Russia and everyone's like, we got to get rid of them

and I'm always like, but just remember whenever the US gets what it wants it's always worse. Every time. It can be worse. He can be gone, he's a fucking monster, but don't be surprised. What comes after is really fucking bad.

And the idea of not questioning shit. We're the country who cried war. At some point you have to be like, look, sorry everybody you're really going to need to step up with a lot of evidence because you constantly

just fucking invention. If you are forming organizations inside of bullshit organizations meant to bring like if there's no submarines, it means there are submarines. I mean, it's just kind of like and the fact that it's still effective

it's constantly effective. It's never it's never stopped. This is just a continuation and it's even like this is a domestic version of what we what happens everywhere else. We just create more and more worse things. Yeah.

It's what we do. Don't worry. We'll make it worse. Yeah. That is that is the promise that the United States makes itself in the world. Don't worry. We can fuck this up more. Lifeguard waits to throw on you. Yeah. I mean, we fucking created Putin. If you go back and look

at it like we're behind all that shit. It's looking at the bombing of Kiev and going, you know what will fix this if Bangladesh doesn't get COVID-19. Yeah. Which at some point is going to be like we will at some point solve something just totally on accident.

So when he left office in 1977, Henry Kissinger would never return to direct political power. He desperately wants to. So since then he has always wanted to. Yeah. That's nice. Now I understand 2016.

Yeah. He really wanted it to happen, but he never quite made it, pulled it off. He eventually started a consulting firm which he would rapidly grow into an 8 to 10 million dollar a year business for himself. Oh Christ. He makes a ton of money doing this shit.

Of course he goes into consulting. Oh, absolutely. A consultant's job is to get the worst advice. Yeah. And to make people feel good and he's great at that. I'm a shit oracle. Now, Walter Isaacson, author of the biography Kissinger

claims that Henry was actually much more ethical in this period of his life than most former government officials who start consulting businesses. He waited an unusually long time to start his business. He avoided for years directly connecting his clients to people he'd worked with in the State Department.

What a low bar. It may be accurate that he is more ethical in his conduct here than most people, but again that's a low ass bar. Yeah. Most of his business, the business he does in this period can be boiled down to like he's helping oil and gas and other extractive industries. Oh, so he's like doing nice

anthropical stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so he's just destroying the world. Well, yeah, absolutely. He's a middleman for the people destroying the world. Let's be clear about it. You know, he's making connections between people who are willing to kill the planet. And to be fair,

he's pining to be in charge of it again. He is. He has most morally questionable moment in like, I guess, a conventional sense is that so like right after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, he shows up on Peter Jennings show

to argue that like whatever went on the U.S. should not impose any economic consequences on China. And this is again not due to a principled stand against sanctions. It's because Kissinger was working on a massive business deal that involved the Chinese government and several large corporations. And here's the thing.

He's working as a journalist at that point. He is a regular columnist for the L.A. Times and the Washington Post. And he advocates in both magazines not putting any kind of economic like doing any economic harm to China over this, which is like

an ethical issue as a journalist because again, he does not disclose that he has any of these business relationships and it causes a minor uproar. And it's one of those things where it's like yeah, that's unethical behavior, but also in Kissinger terms, like not even

on the fucking radar, right? For most people, this is an abhorrent act. But congratulations on turning over a new leaf, Henry. Yeah. Wow, Henry, you've really improved. You really are less shit. You waited until after the thing to do something bad. So in his post-power

years, he became even more of an international celebrity. He's actually surprised when he starts doing this job. Making, racking up huge amounts of money as like a public speaker. And he and his like accountant expect the value of him as a speaker. Well, it's obviously it's going to decline over time. People will learn

that you're horrible. It just gets bigger. He just becomes more and more valuable as a public speaker. Now, for some insight into his life in what we might call retirement. I found a New York magazine article from 2006. He bonds with Oprah Winfrey

over their shared love of dogs. He recommended an artist to paint a portrait of Kissinger's lab. And with Alex Rodriguez over their shared love of the Yankees, he and A-Rod had lunch at the Four Seasons last year. He and his wife of 32 years, Nancy McGinnis, spend every Christmas with close friends Oscar

and Annette de la Renta in the Dominican Republic. Asked about the nature of that friendship given the unlikely connection between a former statesman and a fashion mogul, Kissinger says they are dear friends of mine. They have no utility. I'm going to try to kill them. I will kill them. My plans to

kill them soon. Can we finally agree that Oprah Winfrey is a fucking monster? Yeah, I mean, right? Oprah buddies with Henry K Winfrey? Yes. Dr. Phil Dr. Oz She creates the fucking terrible

I'm not going to stick around for any Dr. Oz shit talk, but the other ones you got me on. Don't forget Don't forget John of God. Yeah, right under your toe tattoo, Garrett Dr. Oz High-fiving Henry Kissinger.

Now to be honest, this before he got his show, so I liked him early. This was just this was just like aspirational, you know? Yeah, I didn't know. He's a great pal. So Kissinger became a New York socialite and was reputed to enjoy the city's social scene

because, quote, Manhattan social life is more generous than Washington's political life. He should not be allowed to pick where he wants to go out. I mean, he should have to like get food raised to his cell in a bucket. It's the same thing as that what the cook was a David cook, the one that just died, but it was the same thing.

Everyone just accepted him in those fucking circles and it's like, no, he's a fucking monster. And then Charles Koch is the one who's like, you know, was like on a rehabilitation tour for like six months. Yeah. And you know, major news outlets are reporting like, look, he

recognizes they fucked up a little bit. He feels bad. He feels bad. I don't give a fuck. Yeah. Degenitalize him. So Kissinger was regularly and I think probably still is regularly seen on the arm of Barbara Walters, who calls him a loyal friend.

In fact, she was hanging out with Henry and his wife one night at a dinner party when Kissinger endured one of his few public shamings. It came courtesy as the real, the only real hero of these episodes, ABC news anchor Peter Jennings who sees Kissinger at a restaurant

and is fucking enraged and screams out, how does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry? Oh, yes! Peter Jennings, baby! And of course, Peter Jennings is gone, so no longer do we get that. Yeah, he dies, yeah.

Kissinger probably like invaded his lungs. Yeah. That should happen every restaurant it goes into. And to all these fucking people. Yeah, Jennings is basically the only person at Kissinger's social level who calls him out. And I mean, he is a nightly

news anchor on a major network. Imagine if you had that sort of vitriol pointed at some of these people that we have in present day who are again not only allowed to walk around but are still in spheres of power but Dick, like we were saying about Dick Cheney,

like, you know, George W. Bush should not, he should not be in public, he should not be releasing thoughts on Russian invasions. No, he certainly shouldn't be fucking painting. It's shocking. Yeah, he shouldn't be fucking painting. He shouldn't be getting mints. No, fingers. No.

His daughter should not be on the fucking Today Show, like, I don't know. I like strawberry in my margarita. So, I want to continue this story because we're not done with the story of Peter Jennings like calling Kissinger out at a restaurant. And to finish that tale, I'm going to quote from The New York Magazine again.

The subject of Kissinger's past sins was very much in the air at the time. Judges in both France and Spain were seeking Kissinger for questioning as the long simmering debate over his connection to Chilean general Augusto Pinochet's brutal killing of dissidents in the 70s returned with a vengeance, not least in Christopher Hitchens' right-ringing indictment,

the trial of Henry Kissinger. These developments clearly rattled Kissinger, who had preemptively written a lengthy article for foreign affairs, decrying the dangerous legal precedent of using universal jurisdiction to try state actors for past actions. The same precedent under which German courts hoped to try Donald Rumsfeld.

The question, and the question by Peter Jennings, how does it feel to be a war criminal, stunned the dinner guests who included Time, Inc. editor Henry Grunwald, who also died last year. And yeah, and former ABC chairman Thomas Murphy. Grunwald told Jennings the comment was

unsuitable. That's really an unsuitable thing to say. It wasn't as unsuitable as bombing Cambodia, like Jesus fucking Christ. This is the thing. It manners. They care about manners. They don't care about all the fucking bodies. And to his credit, when like, Grunwald is like

Peter, that's really unsuitable. Peter's like, I don't give a shit, he's a fucking war criminal. He doesn't say that exactly, but he says the emotional equivalent of that. It's such a bummer. Barbara Walters later said of the moment, I tried to change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment.

Let's talk about Cambodia. Kissinger's wife reacted very strongly and hurt. Kissinger said nothing. It really is like, you know, you see this a lot when like protestors will go into events and they will, you know, they'll have a message, they'll have

signs, they'll have something orchestrated set up. And not only will the politician and the people on the politicians dais sort of be like, okay, okay, but the people at the event will be the ones who are like, you know like a congressional here, this isn't the time or place.

This isn't the time, it's like there's no time or fucking place. Where's the fucking time and place? What do you fucking expect? It's all we have at this point is that's the only thing you can really do is try to make them hate living in the world they're ruining.

It is a fucking mark of how fucked up any kind of accountability to the political classes in our society that the most consequence Henry Kissinger ever faces is Peter Jennings yelling at him once for dinner. A man who's been dead for 20 years, 15 years.

When Sarah Huckabee Sanders was out to dinner and some people yelled at her, I mean you saw both sides condemning it. Some fucking dudes yell at fucking Tucker Carlson from his lawn. There are Republicans and Democrats who always condemn that sort of stuff and it's not because people believe in public decorum,

it's because they don't want it to show up on their fucking doorsteps. Right, right. They don't want that shit to come back on them. I'm sure if someone's going to point out Peter Jennings did something fucked up, he must have. He was in media for a very long time. Oh right, he did 9-11.

That was Peter Jennings. He threw those planes right into those towers. I'd forgotten about that, Gary. That's how he died. That's how he died. But at fucking least, he was there and didn't mince words. Just like, you're a war criminal. Not like, how does it feel to be here where American

boys are dying. We're like, no, no, you did war crimes, Henry Kissinger. Fuck you, someone has to say it. In his many decades worth of declining years, Henry has focused his remaining powers in an attempt to secure his legacy. In 2003, he opened up his White House archives

to a British historian named Niall Ferguson, whose book, also just titled Kissinger, I've cited a few times in these episodes. Ferguson claimed his biography would, quote, provide a warts and all look at the man. But quotes he made about the relationship put the light of that. And this is Ferguson, like, writing about

how jazzed he is to be hanging out with Henry. I'm in Henry Kissinger's swimming pool talking about his meetings with Mao Zedong, thinking I must be dreaming. Shit in that pool. I know. Fucking hell, Niall. Everyone. Now, obviously I have quoted from this

biography because of the details the information Kissinger provides about his early life. It is not without value. It's probably the most detailed look at his childhood we have. It also only goes up to 1968, which neatly avoids the most controversial moments of Kissinger's life, right?

That's not great. And now we end the story. That was the end of Henry Kissinger. Blah, blah, blah. Even when journalists and historians that Henry hasn't authorized specifically interview him, they

are likely to find themselves enraptured or at least tripped up by his clever wordplay. Bob Woodward, who first interviewed Kissinger in 74, wrote, he wants to control not just what he says, but people's perceptions of what he says. And it's kind of like one long book review where he is arguing with the reviewer of his book

or his life or his policy. Seymour Hirsch was more blunt in 1983 when he wrote, he lies like most people breathe. Wow. Wow, yeah. The most comprehensive biography of Henry Kissinger. And the one I would, if you were looking, if you're looking for just a book on

Kissinger's influence in like the US and how toxic it was, I recommend Kissinger's Shadow by Grandin. If you want an actual biography of Kissinger's whole life and time and power, I recommend Walter Isaacson's 1992 book Kissinger. I actually think Isaacson is too fair to Henry Kissinger.

But even so, even though he clearly like does not wholly condemn the man, I find the book utterly damning, right? Like the book condemns him even if Isaacson doesn't entirely do so. Even when you're not trying to fully condemn such a piece of shit you have no choice. It's just impossible not to if you're accurate.

I think Isaacson is pretty accurate. Yeah, the facts. That's it. Yeah. Now, the best thing I can say about Isaacson's book, Kissinger, is that Henry Kissinger himself complained endlessly about it. He whined to Isaacson's boss, Henry Grunwald, who defended Isaacson

and said he felt the book was balanced and down the middle. Kissinger responded, what right does that young man have to be balanced and down the middle about me? Ugh, I mean... Wow. Wow. That just shows you.

He should never be in the position where he should be pointing out that other people are crazy. No. No. You don't get to say that, Henry. Yeah. As New York Magazine notes, Kissinger denies that exchange ever happened.

Oh, I believe Henry. I mean, the guy doesn't lie. He seems like an honest man. I bet Nixon still had him wiretapped. Here's a quote from that article that's very funny. I've never read the Isaacson book. He says, then quickly clarifies, I've read a few parts of the Isaacson book, which I didn't like, but I understand

that there are many parts of the book that are very positive. I missed those, he says, with a sly smile. That is so, that is so trumpy. I know. It really is, right? Yeah. Yeah. I did read it. I read parts one through five to 110.

Yeah. Isaacson says, Kissinger wrote him a series of letters contesting numerous passages. My view, and this is Isaacson, my view is that if Kissinger re-read his own memoirs, he would be outraged that they did not treat him favorably enough. Kissinger.

Who wrote this? You did. Oh, fuck. That's son of a bitch. I've got to get me. Kissinger claims to be unconcerned about his place in history. I cannot defect my legacy, he says. And what does he think his legacy is? I have no

view, he says. I can't control it by what I say. I tell him I don't believe him. You're not in your eighties yet, he replies. Now, a lot has been made about Kissinger's purported role in the invasion of Iraq. He did apparently urge Bush and Cheney to go through with it.

I think crediting him specifically with having an impact on that is not realistic because this is Bush and Cheney. By the time they talked to Kissinger about this, they had made up their fucking lies. He didn't push them into invading Iraq. It's similar when Queens of the Stone Age have Dave Grohl on

drums. He's a player for sure, but he's not writing all the songs. I mean, Josh always got this. Kissinger's definitely the Dave Grohl of the Bush administration. Great drum. I think that rather than actually being a meaningful

role in arranging consent for the invasion of Iraq, I think Kissinger was doing here what he always did. He was sucking up to powerful people by telling them what they wanted to hear. And the best example of this comes from 2008, when during a presidential debate, both John McCain and Barack Obama cited Kissinger

as supporting their positions towards Iran. Both men held opposite views of what the U.S. should do in regards to that country. You might expect, and I don't think either of them is lying. I think they're both, because I think Kissinger just would be like, yeah, of course, that's the right call.

Absolutely. What would the start date be just so I can put it in my calendar? Yeah. Good call, guys. That's great. You're both right. We should invade them and leave them alone. Yeah. Yeah. As a young

law student at Yale, Hillary Clinton had taken part in outrage protests against Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia. As Secretary of State, she praised the astute observations he shared with her and wrote in a review of one of his books, Kissinger is a friend. And again, the astute observations are Kissinger saying

whatever she wanted to do was the right thing to do, right? That's why these people like him and think he's astute. He's not. I think he does today get kind of like looked at as the secret power pulling the strings. I think instead he's just like the ultimate kiss-ass. He's just like, oh, you're

in power now. Yeah, whatever you want to do is the good thing to do. Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. I always, I would tell people like, if you're young and you don't understand what it means to see a Hillary Clinton standing there with Kissinger, it's

no different than in 10 years if all of a sudden your Democrat candidate is standing next to Cheney. Yeah. If you're like, what the fuck is going on? And I guarantee you that lost her. A bunch of people didn't vote for her because they saw her standing next to Kissinger. Yeah. I guarantee it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think though, when you're trying to talk about like his actual influence and like the fucked up things that have been happening in the last couple of decades, it's less than whatever advice he was giving politician ARB and it's more in the way he shaped the way the U.S. government functions in terms of foreign

policy. He centralized power and set the precedent of allowing the executive branch to execute military actions without consent of anyone outside the White House. And obviously there were like things that were done to restrict the power of the executive branch from doing that but then those things were all undone after the

right, like it's this kind of tug-of-war thing. But Kissinger, even though he did not set obviously the policy after 9-11 that expanded the executive government's ability to do military shit abroad, he did set the precedent of like how you would actually

centralize power in that way within the executive. And he made up, he set a lot of ideological and philosophical trends that are still shaping the way the U.S. government functions in regards to foreign policy today. Sure. Yeah. And if you're looking for perhaps the most direct and

succinct explanation for how Kissinger influenced the world of modern American politics, you can find it in this quote he himself wrote in 1963 there are two kinds of realists those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able

to create their own reality. Wow. Wow. What a fuck. Wow. To not to not be able to define realists in your two-tier definition of realism is absolutely delusional. Yeah. For neither of your definitions of realists

to involve people who care about material reality. Yeah. I heard you say in the first one I was like, oh, and the second one's going to be realists. It's like, no. No. No. No. No. The other one is realists. No. So that's Henry Kissinger. It's so unbelievable.

And to what, like, you know, he really, he, his legacy, like you're sort of saying, is not just directly connected to the things he's connected to because there was no prosecution for what Nixon did.

No. And there's no prosecution for what Reagan did. And there's no prosecution because we never prosecute and we never actually hold any of these people accountable. You know, you do see the seeds of that flourish now. Like

you can invade. I mean, we're at the point where most people don't even know we've invaded countries we've invaded. Like, at least with Vietnam, people had access to seeing it and being disgusted by it.

And then under Bush, it was like, well, we're not going to show the coffins returning. I mean, it's not just Republicans. You see it under Democratic presidents too. It just is kind of more egregious at times under Republican presidents. But, you know, every president gets more powerful, does more,

and it does kind of boil down to they're going to be evil. Journalists and media need to recognize what their fucking jobs are. If you're in some of these jobs, it should not be a popularity contest

for access only. You should be beholden to doing good and making these people held accountable because it's so relevant in what you talk about with Kissinger that they just

let the access to him because he became a popular figure completely blind them as to what was actually going on. Well, it's actually worse than not punishing them. Remember, when Obama was elected, everyone was like, these guys have to be tried for war crimes.

Yeah. And he said, we got to move on. And, you know, we're talking about torture and war crimes and everything else. But it went further than that because they gave Bush like the medal of freedom. I mean, there's a picture of

fucking Biden hanging on his chest and they also honored this guy named Henry Kissinger. They sure did. They sure did. Honored him. So it's beyond not doing anything. Well, it's not even just

him. I mean, it's just systemic. And you know what, if you are a fucking anchor at CNN, like if you're Jim Acosta, think of how fucking popular you would be if you did just start using your access to just

be like Peter Jennings. We are craving this fucking figure. But they would be immediately fired. I mean, they would be. But you would also, I mean, having even a moment of that

would carry your career. Like if we had that Peter Jennings shit now, it would go so viral and people would talk about that person endlessly. I mean, it's like when billionaires

started competing over being philanthropists, you know, at some point you're so far in the other direction that you're not that far off from just doing the thing that what you're supposed to do

is going to be such a radical move. It's this, it's very frustrating. Like right now, you have all of these big media figures like moving their shows to Ukraine to be able to film Shelling in the distance. Obviously, to be a journalist covering combat up close, covering war crimes

up close requires a lot of physical courage. There's like Sky News reporters who got fucking shot and shit. The Daily Beast reporters who got fucking shot. But like being, like Leicester Holt, like having your show filmed with like Shelling in the distance, they have massive security teams.

They have massive resources invested in making sure they are in as little danger as they can possibly be and more than anything, they are out there and doing it for the fucking clout because that, that is easy to like pills like I'm brave. What's actually brave is Peter Jennings

yelling at Henry Kissinger at a fucking dinner party full of powerful people and making sure that for just a second, he has a moment of accountability. And if one of them was willing to do fucking that to any of these goals, I would have a lot more respect than I would of them filming Shelling in Kiev from a mile and a half away. Yeah, look, there, there

was a Wolf Blitzer who during the first Gulf War put on a helmet and was in Saudi Arabia where stud missiles were flying and it sang how in danger he was. At the same time, there were journalists, American journalists, in the

fucking bag that hotel being shot at and rocketed by American troops and those guys didn't work anymore and Wolf Blitzer got his own TV show on CNN. Or Brian Williams when he talked, when he was like the way that he embellished his

his story about like getting off of a helicopter and taking RPG fire. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. We could use another Jennings or two, at least in this regard. Yeah, I mean, it's hard because it's like, what would you

like, we want a politician for the people and it's like, that's what you wish for. But the step first is to just have these people vilified for the things they should be vilified for. Yeah. It would be nice

if there was a journalist. That's the end of the step of the fuck. Well, honestly, this was just fucking incredible and just such a ridiculous thing. He's the worst American.

He's a pretty bad one, right? I don't think there's a worse American. It's hard to pick. I think he's the worst. I know that there was talk of into the countries of trying him outside of not having him there to travel.

But can he travel anywhere he wants or is he restricted? He can't. I'm not aware of. He's also now he's become this watery figure. So he's kind of like the T-1000 where if you just get close to him, he turns into silver goo and just can go through a drain or something.

You can't put a handcuff around a pile of watery goo. He is a big part. He argues vociferously for why Rumpsfeld shouldn't be able to be charged and I think Germany it is. And he's doing it like selfishly. Then it would put Kissinger in danger, right?

Is that doing it out of loyalty to Rummy who he probably hates at this point? Although I don't know that Kissinger can take things personally, actually. So maybe, I don't know. He's like the Bill Walsh coaching tree of war criminals. Yeah, I don't know what that means.

Well Bill Walsh coached the 49ers and invented the West Coast offense and you just see the ripple effect through the NFL for generations and decades. Yeah, it changed football. It just changed everything and it's like that's what he did. He just was the guy who was like,

you know, I came up with a new offense and it's like everyone's just reading off of that playbook and tweaking it. Yeah. That's a sports reference, Robert. F.Y.I. Robert football is when... Okay, Robert.

That's the title of this episode. I really liked the that guy Gareth said of but a football but a politics. I liked the two jazz I don't know who that guy is. No, I have no idea. Hey, who is that? It's like in basketball

when Phil Jackson made the triangle offense. Triangle diplomacy. It's like the triangle thing. There we go. All right, all right, a triangle. And offense is the opposite of defense, right? That's what everyone says.

In my opinion, it definitely is. The team with the most points wins. Well, for sure. That's going to be critical. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when the overtime gets a first down, that's really that's causing a problem. You've nailed it already.

Absolutely. Three pointer. Touchdown for Robert. Let's go. Globetrotters. Well, honestly, thank you for allowing us to enter your dojo and mess around for a little while. I don't know. Thank you is the right

answer. I thank you for listening to me read 31,000 words about Henry Kissinger. Oh, my God. Oh, because we talked about it and I was like, I can't do it because it's not one episode. It's so many episodes.

Yeah, this is like the minimum I think you can responsibly cover Henry Kissinger. Like we could have done another couple episodes. Hey, let's do it. You know what? Let's just riff a couple. Yeah.

We'll get a couple of photos of him hanging out with Jill St. John, joke about his hog. Yeah. Let's take it on the road. We can get another 40 minutes of content out of that. Honestly, we could just keep redoing parts of this on the road for a year and a half.

The dollop and behind the bastards present three guys going through shots of Henry Kissinger at fancy parties and talking about the shape of his dick under his pants. Honestly. It should work. Looks like he was having a chub day today. What do you think, Dave?

Well, I'll tell you what. The wall nut's on the table. That's the only one I'm focused on. Look at those tennis shorts. This is how we make our millions. Well, genuinely, thank you for this. I'm generally super scared.

Having watched how Colin Powell was treated when he died being scared about people are going to react to Kissinger's death. Because you're going to watch liberals be like, he was fucking awesome and you're just like, everything about him was bad. Yeah. W.

It'll be fun. Any plugables at the end here? Sure. Yeah. Listen. Well, first of all, we've got the Kissinger. We should do Kissinger Live and we should use the Kiss Fond. And we should also wear the Kiss Makeup and we should just do Kissinger.

Yeah. We will be in Australia and America, the best country on earth. We'll be in Australia in the middle of April to May. You can go to dolloppodcast.com for all that information. We're all over the place and then I am doing standup in Australia and also

over the summer. So you can go to garethrenolds.com for all that information and you can follow us on social medias with our... I'm at Reynolds Gareth. Dave's at Dave underscore Anthony. On Instagram. Reynolds Gareth on Twitter. Dave's at Dave Anthony on Twitter.

Whoo! All right. Thank you for having us again. Motherfuckers. Everyone go pray for Henry Kissinger's painful demise. Yes.

Yeah. Let's all hope that Tim Allen takes him out somehow. He smuggles Coke into a party and Kissinger's at and it just blows out the old man's heart. Or he just starts doing war improvement with Kissinger as his character.

Yeah. Kissinger would be the... the owl. He's the owl. Right. Right. Oh, you got a bomb Cambodia, Tim. All right. There's a good... Hi, everybody. Robert Evans here and my novel After the Revolution is available for pre-order now from akpress.org.

Now, if you go to akpress.org, you can find After the Revolution just Google akpress.org after the revolution. You'll find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book. And if you pre-order now from either these independent bookstores or from akpress, you'll get a custom signed copy

of the book, which I think is pretty cool. You can also pre-order it in physical or in Kindle form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold. So please Google akpress after the revolution or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre-order it.

You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protest. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth

for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on Trial

on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.