National Security Archive Update, February 11, 2002
*Archive Hails Final Turnover of Kissinger Telcons*
GWU Group Persuades National Archives to Recover Telephone Transcripts
Washington, D.C.,11 February 2002 - In answer to a three-year-old National Security Archive request, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today confirmed that former national security adviser Henry Kissinger has returned to NARA's custody the 20,000 pages of transcripts of his telephone conversations conducted while serving President Nixon from 1969 through September 1973. Last August, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher credited the National Security Archive for prompting the Department to recover some 10,000 pages of "telcons" from Kissinger's tenure there (starting in September 1973); but Kissinger's White House telcons remained under lock and key at the Library of Congress until today.
"To look at these transcripts is to be in the room when he's conducting all his telephone diplomacy - the secret opening to China, the secret trips to Paris on the Vietnam War negotiations, his backstage leaks to the press - you name it," commented Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a foreign policy documentation center based at George Washington University. "We congratulate the National Archives as well as the State Department for taking this historic action, and in fact, Mr. Kissinger also deserves credit for doing the right thing at last."
Although NARA warned that declassification review of the telcons may take up to a year, the National Security Archive today posted on its Web site a sample of the Kissinger White House telcons, a phone conversation with President Nixon on 27 April 1971 discussing Chinese premier Zhou En-Lai's invitation for a secret Nixon emissary to come to China and make arrangements for Nixon's 1972 trip. Ironically, while Kissinger's secretaries listened in to make their telcon, Nixon's taping system also captured the conversation (the President and his top adviser wire-tapping each other without either revealing that fact). Archive senior analyst William Burr, editor of The Kissinger Transcripts (New York: The New Press, 1999), found the telcon in other declassified National Security Council files, and provides on the Web site a comparison of the variances between the telcon and the now-declassified Nixon tape.
The Archive's Web site also provides further background on the Kissinger telcons, the legal arguments, and the correspondence between the National Security Archive and the government, as well as the draft legal brief prepared by the Archive's pro bono lawyers, Lee Rubin and Craig Isenberg at Mayer, Brown & Platt, whose presentation of the issues persuaded the State Department, the National Archives, and the National Security Council to take action and right a 20-year-old wrong.
The press release and related links are available at the following URL: <http://www.nsarchive.org/news/20020211>