Regarding Henry

Christopher Hitchens has built up a reputation as a writer of insightful wit and scathing opinion in his tenure as columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation . He catches both sacred cows and immoral dogs in his cross hairs, including Mother Teresa ( The Missionary Position) and Bill Clinton ( No One Left To Lie To). Not surprisingly, he doesn't mince words in The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Even readers who don't agree that the target of this polemical masterpiece is an emanation of "official evil" will appreciate the verve and style brought to Hitchens' fiery brief. The book itself brings together two Harper's essays in which he makes the case for prosecuting the former secretary of state as a war criminal, gathering together the evidence that has already made for powerful reading in titles such as No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam by Larry Berman, The Arrogance of Power: the secret world of Richard Nixon by Anthony Summers, and Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power . Read the case for the prosecution in Andrew Mueller's interview with Christopher Hitchens.

Amazon.co.uk: What do you think are the chances of Kissinger ever actually standing trial for alleged crimes?

Christpher Hitchens: It may only be a civil suit from relatives of disappeared people, but he's unlikely to die without having some of this come back to him through the law. It will probably only inconvenience him, but it will change the way his obituaries are written, which will annoy him in advance. It doesn't count exactly as justice, but it will be educational and it will help to confirm the gradual way that international law is evolving to a single standard, even to the powerful.

Amazon.co.uk: Of all the crimes of which you accuse Kissinger, is there one in particular that made you want to study him in greater detail?

Hitchens: There were two. The first was Cyprus. I became very interested in Cyprus in 1974-75. I thought what had happened there was terrible, and that people were trying to avoid responsibility for it. When I went into it, I could see why they would want to avoid responsibility, because it was a very dirty story. Kissinger had colluded with the Greek subversion and destabilisation of Cyprus, and also the Turkish invasion of it, and tried to keep the British, who were the only ones with a responsibility for stopping it, out of it. He then walked away from Cyprus and never mentioned it again.

Amazon.co.uk: In Kissinger's book Diplomacy, there is no mention of Cyprus. Or Timor, come to that.

Hitchens: In the second volume of his memoirs, he says he's not going to talk about Cyprus, even though it's bang in the middle of that time frame. He's very reluctant to mention it. When he does, finally, it's extremely revealing--without him intending it to be, as I point out in my book. He says that the problem was Makarios. Well, that means I was right--he was trying to get rid of Makarios.

Amazon.co.uk: The one player in the whole scenario who'd actually been elected.

Hitchens: The only democratically elected politician involved, exactly. But there was a general tendency to say "It's only the Cypriots fighting each other again, what can you do?" But that is evading responsibility. It wasn't squabbling Cypriots, it was started by outside meddling of a very malign kind. I got a bee in my bonnet about Cyprus and I still have one, and I knew something of what Kissinger had done in Chile so I looked into that a bit more.

I didn't blame any individual American for the Indo-China war, when I was interested in that in the 1960s and hadn't heard of Henry Kissinger, but now I go back over it and realise that if you can make any individual more culpable than others for the way that policy ruined everything in Indo-China, and also gravely damaged the US, that person is Kissinger.

So the second answer I'd give about what motivated me is the story I start the book with, the story of what happened in 1968. There is no single author of that story, it's been told in bits and pieces, but it has become possible to pull it together and say this really did happen, and I don't think anyone but me has so far managed to tell the whole story in one place, how it subverted American procedures as well as having terrible consequences for three countries in Indo-China.

Amazon.co.uk: A question the book doesn't answer, and which would form at least part of the case for any future prosecution, is motive. Having amassed this catalogue of havoc you lay at the feet of Kissinger, did you come up with any reasons why he might have done it?

Hitchens: I've been tempted to do a longer book on the man himself, but I decided to exempt anything that wasn't, so to speak, indictable. It would take forever to go into complete detail, but I do have a view of this, yes. He began life as a mediocre academic with an eye to the main chance--basically an academic in search of a patron. His first serious book is about nuclear weapons--essentially, how to make them less frightening. That was in that period where there were people trying to say, look, there are worse things than a nuclear exchange. He was one of those.

He then did this rather potboiling history of the Congress of Berlin, the post-Waterloo settlement of Europe, basically praising it and calling it a world restored--standard reactionary history, not very distinguished, but indicative. Again, the sort of thing that gets you applauded by the establishment. So he was a kind of barnacle looking for someone to attach himself to.

So, come 1968 he's got a certain position in the foreign policy establishment. And he's not stupid--he's nothing like as bright as people sometimes believe, but he's not dumb--and in the think-tank and policy world he's got a foot in most camps. He's a name. And he gets this amazing chance in Paris. He's trusted by the Democrats, by Johnson's negotiators, but he suddenly realises he's got a better offer from the other side and if he can keep quiet about it he can parlay it into his own gain. I don't know how much he knew about Nixon's other secret diplomacy but I think it's reasonable to believe he knew something of it.

So, suddenly, from being a not much better than average cold war professoriate member, he's National Security Adviser, the first appointment Nixon makes, and Nixon tells him his job is going to be to run foreign policy without the knowledge of the state department. This is real power, but he has to pay off the debt--he has to indulge all Nixon's resentments and fantasies.

Amazon.co.uk: Do you think his motivations can really be boiled down to insecurity and ego?

Hitchens: If one was looking at Nuremberg, say, Kissinger would be the Albert Speer. Speer would have worked for Weimar if it had carried on. He would have worked for Stalin if he'd been nimble enough. He happened to work for the Fuhrer. I do think that Kissinger has a private relish for violence, and ruthlessness and cruelty and secrecy and intrigue. He is an expert in all those paltry skills of the courtier, and he has the fatal temptation of a lot of intellectuals, or pseudo-intellectuals, which is to show that they're not just ivory-tower types, but they can get the gloves off and get down and dirty. That's a big temptation, power worship, and he suffers from that acutely.

Amazon.co.uk: You don't think that at any level he was driven by conviction or principle of any sort?

Hitchens: I would say one-hundred per cent absolutely not. Kissinger was known for being a reliable friend of Brezhnev and Mao Tse-Tung, and was distrusted by a lot of the real cold warriors precisely because he would make any deal with any communist if he thought it would suit him or his president. So I would say, with high confidence, that he never had any difference of principle with the communists, or with communist totalitarianism. That's an excuse he's made up, simply for imperialising his own office and his own reputation, and also for breaking American laws.

Amazon.co.uk: At a few points in the book, you note with some incredulity that Kissinger has never been directly asked about the specifics of his involvements in Chile, Timor, Cyprus, or wherever. Why do you think that is?

Hitchens: Everyone uses the phrase "celebrity culture" now. It's supposed to be something we're all worried about, but it's not that new. It is a permanent temptation for the media to personalise and glamorise politics and public life, and one of the important landmarks in the evolution of that was the creation of the reputation of Henry Kissinger. It was done the same way celebrities generally do it: you give access to certain people, you keep them guessing as to who is favoured and who isn't, you trade access and leaks in return for your version appearing in the paper and you get them to write you up as someone larger than life.

Once they've done that it's hard for them to climb down and say "Actually, we blew up a rather dubious and mediocre fellow into a superhuman figure." In order to take him down, they have to admit that they not only missed the story first-time round, but that they were part of the falsification of the record. It has only been a couple of people--Seymour Hersh notably, and a few others--who have decided that it might be better to judge someone's reputation by their actions, instead of the other way round

Amazon.co.uk: Which is more or less a quote from your Mother Teresa book ( The Missionary Position).

Hitchens: Indeed. It's a point I'm stuck with making about a lot of people, because that's the clue to the relationship between the mediocracy--as I call it--of celebrity culture, and the media.

To return to the question, though, there's that, and then I think there is also a lack of curiosity or a lack of professional skill from the press. For example, why has Kissinger not been asked, after East Timor has become a huge issue--and everyone understands that something truly terrible happened there--"Dr Kissinger, you were in the room with the Indonesian generals the day before the invasion, and it started as your plane left the tarmac. So when you were in that room, did the subject of Timor come up, and if so, what did you say?"

He's never been asked that, and he couldn't possibly answer. He has, once or twice, been caught at public forums, and he's lied, and said it didn't come up. Well, we know that it did, because we have the minutes. But he's never had that put to him. Jeremy Paxman ambushed him about the secret bombing of Cambodia. But Jeremy asked a lot of very general questions, suggesting that he'd been responsible for some large-scale things. But you think all that about Kissinger or you don't--it's all well known. Paxman had him in the studio, and he could have said "Did you or did you not order the assassination and/or kidnap of the leader of the Chilean General Staff in 1970, before President Allende had even taken the seals of office? Did you or didn't you?" That's a question he can't bluster his way out of.

It's the micro questions that would do it. Not arm-waving ones about whether he secretly bombed Cambodia, which gives him 50 things he can say. It's very bad professionally, it makes one whimper. It's like watching White House press conferences--you never see a pointed question asked, never see a follow-up question, never see a line of questioning develop that the president cannot just walk away from.

Amazon.co.uk: Do you have any hopes or expectations for the effect the book might have?

Hitchens: I think that its timing may be right, in that it catches a moment in which there's an evolution in the way international law is applied. I think I judged right the moment, post-Pinochet, almost post-Milosevic, where this has become salient. If I'd published these remarks five years ago, it wouldn't have been the same. I think it's possible that now is a catalytic moment in the law. Certainly, in Washington, they don't laugh any more about the idea of Kissinger on trial--they realise that this has serious implications for the US.

So I hope that it helps to crystallise that. I hope to put some heart into people who thought they were the only ones who thought this about Kissinger. It's part of trying to educate people into being citizens, saying that what happens in your name is your responsibility, and that if that is not taken up, the vacuum will be filled by people like Henry.