Knee-Capped By Kissinger

During the Nixon presidency, National Security Adviser (and, later, Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin held regularly scheduled secret meetings and frequent phone conversations outside normal diplomatic channels. For Kissinger, a major reason to keep the talks secret was that he didn't want his bureaucratic rival, Secretary of State William Rogers, to butt in. Over the past decade, records of these once-classified "back channel" meetings have been released by the U.S. government. Last month, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs returned the favor and, in collaboration with our State Department, released Dobrynin's side of the story in a bound and footnoted volume of English translations of the ambassador's cables home under the title, Soviet American Relations, The Détente Years 1969 – 1972.

One of Dobrynin's memos illustrates the strenuous lengths that Kissinger went to in order to keep Rogers out of the loop.