Kissinger Accused of Blocking Scholar
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

Published: June 5, 2004
 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/05/arts/05CHIL.html

The chief Latin American expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, the nation's pre-eminent foreign policy club, has quit as a protest, accusing the council of stifling debate on American intervention in Chile during the 1970's as a result of pressure from former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

Kenneth Maxwell, a senior fellow for inter-American affairs at the council, announced his resignation in May 13 letters to James F. Hoge Jr., the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, where Mr. Maxwell had reviewed a book on American involvement in Chile, and to Richard Haass, president of the council's board.

"There is a question of principle at stake here," Mr. Maxwell wrote to Mr. Hoge. "It was made abundantly clear to me, as you know, that there was intense pressure on you, on Foreign Affairs and on my employer, the Council on Foreign Relations, from Henry Kissinger and others, to close off this debate about accountability and Mr. Kissinger's role in Chile in the 1970's."

Mr. Kissinger is traveling, said an assistant, Jesse Incao, and could not be reached for comment.

Officials at the Council on Foreign Relations strenuously denied that Mr. Kissinger, whose friends include some of the council's biggest donors, had exerted any pressure, directly or indirectly, to silence Mr. Maxwell on this issue.

The roots of the current dispute date back to last winter, after Mr. Hoge invited Mr. Maxwell to write an extended review of "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability" by Peter Kornbluh (New Press), a book that re-examines the American role in helping to unseat Salvador Allende, the socialist president who died during the military coup that brought the brutal regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. The book is based on 25,000 United States government documents that were declassified in recent years.

Mr. Maxwell's essay largely summarized the unresolved questions surrounding American actions in Chile, mentioning three issues in particular: the 1970 assassination of a Chilean general, René Schneider; the September 1973 coup against Allende; and the assassination of Orlando Letelier, Allende's former foreign minister, in September 1976.

The review, though critical of Mr. Kornbluh's book in some respects, said that it confirmed "the deep involvement of the U.S. intelligence services in Chile prior to and after the coup."

The review outraged William Rogers, the former assistant secretary of state for Latin American Affairs under Mr. Kissinger and a vice president of his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, who wrote a lengthy response in the following issue of Foreign Affairs.

"There is, in short, no smoking gun," Mr. Rogers wrote. "Yet the myth persists. It is lovingly nurtured by the Latin American left and refreshed from time to time by contributions to the literature and Mr. Maxwell's review of that book."

Mr. Maxwell fired back, "William Rogers overreaches." He added, "To claim that the United States was not actively involved in promoting Allende's downfall in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary verges on incredulity."

After the exchange, Mr. Hoge said, Mr. Rogers approached him once again, saying that Mr. Maxwell's response to his letter had raised new charges that he felt entitled to address. Specifically, Mr. Rogers felt he and Mr. Kissinger were being accused of complicity in the Letelier assassination, Mr. Hoge recalled.

Mr. Maxwell said that he was not accusing the men of complicity but rather of failing to stop the campaign to assassinate opposition figures abroad. He cited an August 1976 order from Mr. Kissinger to ambassadors in South America, to warn governments there that the United States would not countenance political assassinations on its territory. At least in Chile, that order appears not to have been delivered, nor was it insisted upon. The next month, Letelier's car was blown up by Chilean secret service agents on a Washington street.

Mr. Hoge said he had told Mr. Rogers that if he stuck to the historical issue, the journal would not run any response from Mr. Maxwell this time.

"He promised me that I would have the last word and that Maxwell was shut off," Mr. Rogers said in an interview this week.

Mr. Maxwell agreed he had said he wouldn't need to respond as long as there were no personal attacks, but he changed his mind after seeing the actual letter.

Mr. Hoge still said no.

Mr. Hoge said he was not reacting to any private pressure from board members or elsewhere, but felt that the time had come to put an end to a debate that was going nowhere.

"I thought both of them had had a good go at their feelings of the Pinochet book," Mr. Hoge said.

Whether or not there were any hidden strings pulled to give Mr. Rogers the final word, as Mr. Maxwell claims, the dispute underscores an intense competition under way to shape the way that history is told, particularly regarding the United States involvement in Chile, as more and more documents touching on Mr. Kissinger's legacy are released.

"The key is the suppression of debate on foreign policy by a major figure in a major foreign policy magazine," said Mr. Maxwell, who is now headed for Harvard University as a senior fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Nor was Mr. Kornbluh pleased. He, too, had tried to submit a letter, but was also turned down.

"I thought that Foreign Affairs was being grossly unfair to me as the author of the book that was the foundation for the entire debate, and to Ken Maxwell, who was obviously their own analyst and their own reviewer," Mr. Kornbluh said.

The incident has sparked dismay in some quarters. A letter to Foreign Affairs from Latin American experts who are members of the council severely criticized the way the prestigious journal handled the dispute, particularly in denying Mr. Maxwell the right to reply. The decision, it said, "denied readers an opportunity to weigh competing views, contrary to the journal's policies and traditions."

This time, Mr. Hoge said, the dissent would appear in the letters column of Foreign Affairs' next issue.