Kissinger Drew Up Plans to Attack Cuba, Records Show

Kissinger Drew Up Plans to Attack Cuba,
Records Show
By FRANCES ROBLES SEPT. 30, 2014
MIAMI — Nearly 40 years ago, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger
mapped out secret contingency plans to launch airstrikes against Havana
and “smash Cuba,” newly disclosed government documents show.
Mr. Kissinger was so irked by Cuba’s military incursion into Angola that
in 1976 he convened a top-secret group of senior officials to work out
possible retaliatory measures in case Cuba deployed forces to other African
nations, according to documents declassified by the Gerald R. Ford
Presidential Library at the request of the National Security Archive, a
research group.

The officials outlined plans to strike ports and military installations in
Cuba and to send Marine battalions to the United States Navy base at
Guantánamo Bay to “clobber” the Cubans, as Mr. Kissinger put it, according
to the records. Mr. Kissinger, the documents show, worried that the United
States would look weak if it did not stand up to a country of just eight
million people.
“I think sooner or later we are going to have to crack the Cubans,” Mr.
Kissinger told President Ford at a meeting in the Oval Office in 1976,
according to a transcript.
The documents are being posted online and published in “Back Channel
to Cuba,” a new book written by the longtime Cuba experts William M.
Leo Grande, a professor of government at American University, and Peter
Kornbluh, the director of the archive’s Cuba Documentation Project.
The previously undisclosed blueprint to strike Cuba highlights the
tumultuous nature of American-Cuban relations, which soured badly after
the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.
Mr. Kissinger, who was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977, had
previously planned an underground effort to improve relations with Havana.
But in late 1975, Mr. Castro sent troops to Angola to help the newly
independent nation fend off attacks from South Africa and right-wing
guerrillas.
That move infuriated Mr. Kissinger, who was incensed that Mr. Castro
had passed up a chance to normalize relations with the United States in
favor of pursuing his own foreign policy agenda, Mr. Kornbluh said.
“Nobody has known that at the very end of a really remarkable effort to
normalize relations, Kissinger, the global chessboard player, was insulted
that a small country would ruin his plans for Africa and was essentially
prepared to bring the imperial force of the United States on Fidel Castro’s
head,” Mr. Kornbluh said.
“You can see in the conversation with Gerald Ford that he is extremely
apoplectic,” Mr. Kornbluh said, adding that Mr. Kissinger used “language
about doing harm to Cuba that is pretty quintessentially aggressive.”
The plans suggest that Mr. Kissinger was prepared after the 1976
presidential election to recommend an attack on Cuba, but the idea went
nowhere because Jimmy Carter won the election, Mr. LeoGrande said.
“These were not plans to put up on a shelf,” Mr. LeoGrande said.
“Kissinger is so angry at Castro sending troops to Angola at a moment when
he was holding out his hand for normalization that he really wants to, as he
said, ‘clobber the pipsqueak.'
The plan suggested that it would take scores of aircraft to mine Cuban
ports. It also warned that the United States could seriously risk losing its
Navy base in Cuba, which was vulnerable to counterattack, and estimated
that it would cost $120 million to reopen the Ramey Air Force Base in
Puerto Rico and reposition destroyer squadrons.
The plan also drafted proposals for a military blockade of Cuba’s shores.
The proposal warned that such moves would most likely lead to a conflict
with the Soviet Union, which was a top Cuba ally at the time.
“If we decide to use military power, it must succeed,” Mr. Kissinger said
in one meeting, in which advisers warned against leaks. “There should be no
halfway measures — we would get no award for using military power in
moderation. If we decide on a blockade, it must be ruthless and rapid and
efficient.”
Mr. Kissinger, now 91, declined a request to comment.
The memos show that Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was secretary of
defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Ford, and again under President
George W. Bush, was also present at the meeting when Mr. Kissinger
ordered up the contingency plan. Mr. Rumsfeld, 82, also declined a request
to comment.
Some Cuba historians said the revelations were startling, particularly
because they took place just as the United States was coming out of the
Vietnam War.
“The military piece dumbfounds me a little bit,” said Frank O. Mora, a
former deputy assistant secretary of defense who now directs the Latin
American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University. “For
Kissinger to be talking the way they were talking, you would think Cuba had
invaded the whole continent.

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