The Maxwell Affair

[struggle4progress]

Last November Foreign Affairs, the prestigious journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a review of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, a new book by Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project. Written by the council's chief Latin America expert, Kenneth Maxwell, the review upset two former statesmen who figure prominently in the book and who also happen to be influential actors at the council: Henry Kissinger and his longtime associate William Rogers. In May, after an acrimonious exchange between Rogers and Maxwell in Foreign Affairs--an exchange that Maxwell insists was abruptly curtailed as a result of pressure from Kissinger and Rogers--Maxwell resigned in protest from the council. His departure raises questions about intellectual freedom at the council; about editorial independence at Foreign Affairs, where Maxwell spent eleven years as Western Hemisphere book reviewer; and about Kissinger's and Rogers's influence on the nation's pre-eminent foreign policy think tank.

Maxwell's review, "The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973," was not a slashing polemic but a measured essay on American intervention in Chile in the 1970s. Maxwell expressed certain reservations about The Pinochet File, yet acknowledged that Kornbluh had assembled a dossier that "significantly amplifies" our historical knowledge of the campaign against President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by a military coup on September 11, 1973. Halfway through the essay, the reviewer directed his ire at the Nixon-era policy-makers--Kissinger chiefly among them--who contributed to Allende's demise: "What is truly remarkable," Maxwell noted, "is the effort--the resources committed, the risks taken, and the skullduggery employed--to bring a Latin American democracy down, and the meager efforts since to build democracy back up. Left to their own devices, the Chileans might just have found the good sense to resolve their own deep-seated problems. Allende might have fallen by his own weight, victim of his own incompetence, and not become a tragic martyr to a lost cause."
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Leaving the council, and vacating an endowed chair, was not an easy decision for Maxwell, a soft-spoken, English-born, 63-year-old historian who has taught at Yale, Princeton and Columbia and who writes for The New York Review of Books. "The burden was on me to make a decision on an issue of principle," he says. "That's never easy. It's easier to acquiesce. But in this case I didn't feel like acquiescing." On July 1 he will become a senior fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.

Oddly enough, Maxwell's departure coincides with the release of a 20,000-page cache of Henry Kissinger's telephone conversations from the 1970s, some of which concern Chile. "We didn't do it," Kissinger informed President Nixon after President Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet. "I mean we helped them." In light of these new transcripts, Maxwell's call for an American "truth commission" on Chile seems more appropriate than ever. But don't expect to find the details in the pages of Foreign Affairs.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040621&s=sherman



Dispute Over Pinochet Book Claims Another Casualty

A Princeton University expert on Latin America says he has abandoned plans to become Foreign Affairs magazine's book reviewer covering the Western Hemisphere, citing accusations that the journal bowed to pressure from Henry A. Kissinger and his associates.

The expert, Jeremy Adelman, agreed in May to take on the reviews later this month when Kenneth Maxwell leaves his post as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs. But Mr. Adelman said that he had second thoughts after reading accounts of a dispute between Mr. Maxwell and his editors and senior officials of the council.

Mr. Maxwell resigned in protest on May 13 after reviewing "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability," by Peter Kornbluh. His review angered Mr. Kissinger, the secretary of state when Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in 1973, and William Rogers, the former assistant secretary of state for Latin American Affairs under Mr. Kissinger. (Mr. Rogers is now a vice president of the consulting firm Kissinger Associates.) Mr. Rogers contended that the review exaggerated United States responsibility for the downfall of the Chilean president Salvador Allende.

Foreign Affairs then published an exchange between Mr. Rogers and Mr. Maxwell, and gave Mr. Rogers the last word in a subsequent letter. Though the journal customarily lets authors reply to criticism, it has refused to publish Mr. Maxwell's rebuttal, in what he charges is a bid to silence debate over United States policy on Mr. Kissinger's watch. Mr. Adelman said that soon after accounts of the dispute appeared in The Nation, The New York Times and the Folha de São Paulo, a Brazilian daily, he received numerous e-mail messages , some attacking him as "a scab." His resignation was reported on Sunday in the Folha and in another Brazilian daily, O Globo.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/books/16COUN.html?ex=1087963200&en=3c91dfa25dcf94f5&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE


LIFTING OF PINOCHET'S IMMUNITY RENEWS FOCUS ON OPERATION CONDOR

Despite denials by the office of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the argument advanced by Council on Foreign Relations Latin American specialist Kenneth Maxwell that the September 1976 car-bombing in Washington D.C. might have been prevented is bolstered by declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The declassified State Department records chart U.S. foreknowledge of Operation Condor, a network of Southern Cone secret police agencies that coordinated terrorist attacks against political opponents of their regimes around the world in the mid and late 1970s.

Operation Condor has received renewed international attention over the last several weeks. On May 28 a Chilean court stripped Gen. Augusto Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution for Condor-related crimes.

The documents are among the evidence that Maxwell, the director of the Council's Latin American program and senior reviewer for its journal, Foreign Affairs, used in a rebuttal to a letter from Henry Kissinger's former assistant secretary of State, William D. Rogers, which appeared in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. As reported in the New York Times on June 5 ("Kissinger Assailed In Debate on Chile"), and in The Nation magazine ("The Maxwell Affair") the prestigious journal has refused to publish Maxwell's response and he has resigned in protest.

The censored debate in Foreign Affairs centers on Operation Condor and what actions U.S. officials took in response to CIA intelligence that the Pinochet regime, along with other military governments in the region, had "plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians, and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad," according to agency sources. The progression of documentation shows that the CIA withheld information from the State Department on Condor plotting for weeks in the summer of 1976. In late August Henry Kissinger's office belatedly sent out a diplomatic warning to the Southern Cone military governments that was not, in the end, actually delivered. A September 20th cable from Kissinger's top deputy on Latin America, discovered by Archive analyst Carlos Osorio, instructed U.S. ambassadors in the region to "take no further action" on deterring Condor plots because "there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme."
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http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB125/index.htm

[LittleApple81]

1. Truth against powerful criminals is almost always punished. n/t