Who Wanted To Kill Henry Kissinger?
Newly released FBI files show a lot of strange threats against the former secretary of state’s safety—and say a lot about 1970s America.
A lot of people wanted Henry Kissinger dead and made no secret of it. "Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands," travel journalist Anthony Bourdain wrote in A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, referring to Kissinger's role in the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and his apparent satisfaction when the genocidal Khmer Rouge took power afterward.
So it's no surprise that Kissinger's FBI file, which the government began to release bit-by-bit this week under the Freedom of Information Act, is filled with investigations into death threats against him. As national security adviser to the Nixon administration and secretary of state in the Ford administration, Kissinger became the face of U.S. proxy warfare in the 1970s.
However, most of the threats that the FBI was worried about did not come from progressives like Bourdain who believed that Kissinger was a warmonger. Surprisingly, much of the file is concerned with cold warriors who thought that Kissinger wasn't hawkish enough, and possibly a traitor.
The files also shine a light on the FBI's intense surveillance penetration of different parts of American society at the time. Everyone from gas station managers to church staffers and university students was informing the government about what they saw as national security issues. The FBI at times even seemed overwhelmed by the volume of information.
Much of the anti-communists' hatred for Kissinger seems to have come from a series of articles and books by Frank Capell, a conservative journalist from New Jersey, claiming that Kissinger was a Soviet agent. Both members of Congress and ordinary citizens wrote letters asking the FBI to look into Kissinger; each time, the FBI director sent back a form letter stating that there is "no factual basis" to the allegations and that the FBI cannot comment further.
"I received the enclosed mailing which reflects 'the lunatic fringe.' Most likely you already have copies but I thought I should forward it to you just in case it has not been brought to your attention," a rabbi wrote to the FBI in November 1974, attaching a copy of the conspiracy theory literature. Then–FBI Director Clarence Kelley thanked the rabbi for his "interest and courtesy in furnishing us with this information."
The conspiracy theories about Kissinger, who had come to America as a Jewish refugee fleeing from Nazi Germany, often took on an explicitly antisemitic tone.
In July 1974, an anonymous caller with a "deep Southern accent" phoned a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis to complain that "the whole country was being taken over by Jewish intellectuals who loved classical music and commies. Anonymous caller further stated that Kissinger was head of whole thing and when he comes back to this country he would kill Kissinger." The grad student, who reported the call to the FBI, said that he or she "was not the person to whom such a complaint would be lodged and anonymous caller hung up."
In 1977, after a neo-Nazi in Michigan murdered his Jewish neighbor, the FBI probed rumors that the neo-Nazi movement had a broader "hit list" of Jewish and black political figures. A heavily redacted series of documents about that investigation is included in Kissinger's file.
It might have come as a surprise to the neo-Nazis that others considered Kissinger himself a Nazi. During Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy" between Israel and Egypt in July 1975, a group of Israeli military veterans wrote a series of letters to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv threatening to kill "Adolf Kissinger" for his "guile, trickery, threats, lies and hate" against the Jewish nation. Kissinger was transforming "a military victory into a diplomatic defeat," they claimed.
The veterans predicted a coming "war of the sons of light," referring to an ancient apocalyptic prophecy, and threatened that one-fifth of the Israeli government "will be executed as traitors against the people of Israel and the Land of Israel." They named Israeli socialist leader Victor Shem-Tov, who was then a cabinet minister, as their first target, and Kissinger as their second.
Other nationalists had other grievances against Kissinger's policies. His stance on Cuba swung rapidly from one extreme to another. Kissinger reached out to Cuban representatives and helped ease U.S. sanctions in the early 1970s, but he drew up plans to bomb and invade Cuba in 1976, after Cuba sent troops to fight against the pro-apartheid forces in southern Africa.
Because of his earlier outreach, some Cuban Americans considered Kissinger a communist appeaser. In August 1974, an anonymous caller with a Spanish accent told a Miami switchboard that "some Cubans will try to kill Kissinger tomorrow" during his visit to the city. When Kissinger showed up in Miami the next day, no one tried to kill him, the FBI noted, but he was met with Cuban-American protesters—who were joined by Greek-American demonstrators.
The previous month, Turkey had invaded Cyprus in response to fighting between ethnic Greeks and ethnic Turks on the island. Kissinger was often blamed for encouraging the Turkish invasion. (As it turns out, Kissinger privately told President Gerald Ford that "there is no American reason why the Turks should not have one third of Cyprus" and that "the Turkish tactics are right—grab what they want and then negotiate on the basis of possession.")
In addition to the Greek-American protest, the FBI noted a Greek threat to Kissinger's life. In September 1974, someone called a Greek Orthodox church in California to report that they had overheard someone else plotting to kill Kissinger. A church staff member then reported that call to an FBI agent.
"The caller stated that he did not know the name of this person but knew from previous statements heard that the person was well known in San Mateo, California; had fought in the war in Greece in 1922, bragged about killing seventeen Turks and had come to the United Stated [sic] from a Greek island which has the same name as a Greek pastry," the FBI cable says.
In 1979, the Secret Service received a letter claiming that an Iranian-American man, whose name is redacted, wanted to kill Kissinger, the shah of Iran, and then-Sen. Jacob Javits. FBI agents found the Iranian American "cooperative," and although the interrogation notes are heavily redacted, it seems that the Iranian American told the FBI agents that a New York City traffic cop was framing him for the threat after one of them allegedly slept with the other's wife.
The one left-wing threat against Kissinger included in the file is already well known. In 1971, the government accused seven antiwar activists, led by Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, of plotting to kidnap Kissinger and sabotage government infrastructure. After a trial in which the defendants did not call a single witness, a hung jury failed to convict them, and the government declined to try the case again.
Lyndon LaRouche, an eccentric cult figure who preached a paranoid grab bag of ideologies, also led a campaign against Kissinger that attracted the FBI's attention. The file contains a long timeline of LaRouchite pranks against Kissinger in the early 1980s, compiled by Kissinger himself, including a phone call asking the Munich airport lounge to "Tell Kissinger that the five male models—top of the line—will be arriving momentarily…10 year old boy to his satisfaction."
In August 1982, LaRouche wrote an infamous article arguing that "Kissinger is not a Jew, but a faggot….His heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil."
When a November 1982 speech by Kissinger in Pennsylvania was shut down due to a bomb threat, Kissinger told the FBI that he believed the LaRouchites "could be responsible." In February 1983, the New York field office wrote to FBI headquarters that it could either "wait for a new incident by the LaRouche group against Kissinger to further substantiate LaRouche's involvment [sic]," or interrogate a LaRouchite figure "in hopes of gaining admission or deterring future actions."
A few months later, FBI headquarters ordered New York to "hold all investigation in obeyance [sic] until further notice."
A few of the threats against Kissinger had no discernable politics at all. In March 1974, the vice president of a truck stop company in Oregon informed the FBI about a drunken rant against the government he witnessed.
A truck driver had "been drinking heavily and was in an aggravated state of mind towards an unidentified gasoline station that had refused to sell gas to him," the truck stop company informant said. The driver "was making statements to anyone who would listen in the tavern to the effect that he was going to torch a service station" and "that he would like to get rid of Nixon and Kissinger."
The informant emphasized that the driver "used the word 'kill' in the conversation" but that "no one there paid much attention." The FBI forwarded the memo to the Secret Service and the Department of State. It's unclear what, if anything, came out of it.
Another heavily redacted memo from 1974 noted that there had been a threat against Kissinger, but the U.S. attorney "declined prosecutive action on subject as letter involved is insulting with racial and ethnic slurs and with only veiled threat at most. Also since subject is serving prison time for an indefinite period with no capacity to carry out any threat against victim."
The latest case in the file was a letter sent directly to the FBI in December 2003, containing "references to Islam and direct references of violence against Kissinger," along with "a drawing of a clown-like face," the phrase "YOUR ASS IS MINE," and the signature "Your Father, Satan." Even though the FBI was able to identify the sender by 2007, the statute of limitations had expired. Unfortunately, the full contents of the letter are unclear; it was destroyed in 2012 because it had "no further evidentiary purpose," according to an evidence slip.
The files say more about Americans as a whole than Kissinger. While some immigrant groups had real grievances with Kissinger's specific policies, he also became an all-purpose crank magnet. As long as Kissinger was a familiar face on television, every pro-government paranoiac, anti-government paranoiac, and would-be drunk driver identified him with everything that was wrong in America.
On the flip side, the FBI files were a cross-section of the types of Americans who like to inform on their neighbors. Some of the threats in the file were clearly empty words, but members of the public found it necessary to get the authorities involved anyways. A few cranks even snitched on themselves, writing their threats directly to government officials.
And in the end, what seemed to get under the skin of Kissinger and the FBI the most was the LaRouchite harassment campaign. Neither left-wing accusations of mass murder nor right-wing accusations of treason could throw U.S. officials off balance; it took a cult with an incomprehensible view of the world and a bit too much time on its hands.
