Archer Blood, American Hero in E. Pakistan

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He was true hero.

Opinion

Joe Galloway: Rest in Peace Archer Blood, American Hero

November 3, 2004

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WASHINGTON - When Archer K. Blood died last month, in retirement in Colorado, there was family, a few old friends and an entire nation to mourn his passing, but the nation that grieved for him was not his own. It was Bangladesh.

Arch Blood was 81 years old and a retired diplomat. He might have had an unremarkable if satisfying career, moving from Greece to Germany to Afghanistan to New Delhi, but in the bloody year of 1971 he found himself consul-general in Dhaka, East Pakistan.

There Blood witnessed the beginning of a massacre that would take hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. The Pakistan army, faced with an incipient rebellion among the Bengalis, slaughtered thousands in a pre-emptive attack on the University of Dacca and the barracks of Bengali police. Columns of troops followed the roads throughout the country, burning and killing.

Blood in his first cable described what he termed a “selective genocide,” alerted President Richard Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger to what was happening and urged them to pressure Gen. Yahya Khan, the Pakistani dictator, to stop the killing.

His cable, dated March 28, 1971, was declassified last year. In it Blood wrote: “Here in Dacca we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror of the Pak military …”

The trouble was that Nixon and Kissinger had tilted toward Pakistan as a counter to Soviet influence in the subcontinent. The administration didn’t want to hear what Blood was reporting.

That cable was followed by another, signed by 20 Americans stationed in East Pakistan with various U.S. government agencies, decrying the official American silence as serving “neither our moral interests broadly defined nor our national interests narrowly defined …”

Blood did not sign that cable, but he added a footnote subscribing fully to the views it expressed and then wrote prophetically: “I believe the most likely eventual outcome of the struggle under way in East Pakistan is a Bengali victory and the consequent establishment of an independent Bangladesh.” He argued strongly against “pursuing a rigid policy of one-sided support to the likely loser.”

Nixon chose an option of trying to help Khan negotiate a settlement with the Bengalis, but added, in his own handwriting, “To all hands: DON’T squeeze Yahya at this time.” So nobody in authority squeezed Yahya Khan, the killings continued and 20 million Bengali refugees poured into India.

To counter reports of the army’s massacre, the Pakistanis brought in a few foreign journalists for a tightly controlled tour that it said would prove that it was actually Bengali Hindus slaughtering non-Bengali Muslims. At the end of the tour the reporters would be packed off without hearing any other stories.

I was on that trip. At the end of the tour, on ancient crop-duster planes literally coated with DDT, I simply declared myself deathly ill and refused to leave. Security was heavy when I left the hotel and so it was too dangerous to interview on the streets, but they couldn’t follow me into the American consulate.

There I met Arch Blood, who told me that he had been officially “silenced” by Washington, but that my suspicions of a continuing slaughter of Bengalis by the Pakistan army were quite correct.

Blood said he couldn’t speak, but he had scores of Bengalis on the consulate staff. He pointed to an office across the hall and said: “It’s yours for as long as you need it. Those staffers who want to tell you their stories will come visit you there.”

For the better part of a day I listened to men and women who wept as they told how parents, siblings, even children had died in Dhaka and in towns from Chittagong to Naryanganj to the hill country tea plantations. When my plane lifted off from Dhaka I began banging out a lead I still remember:

"Fear, fire and the sword are the only things holding East and West Pakistan together … "

I never saw Arch Blood again, but I never met a more upright and courageous diplomat. Not long after that he was called back to Washington and put in the doghouse, for as long as Nixon was in the White House.

In 1971 his colleagues in the American Foreign Service voted Arch K. Blood the recipient of the Christian A. Herter Award for “initiative, integrity, intellectual courage and creative dissent.”

His death made headlines in Bangladesh, the nation that emerged in 1971 as Blood predicted. A delegation of Bengalis attended his memorial service in Fort Collins, Colo. His wife, Margaret, has been swamped with mail from Bangladesh.

Arch Blood spread the news of a new nation being born amid calamity. He ought to be remembered as an American hero as well.

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When Bangladesh was born

Reviewed by Sabih Mohsin

Despite the famous alleged 'tilt' of the US government in favour of Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis of 1971, many in Pakistan believe that America, one of the two super powers in those days, had played a role in the separation of the eastern wing. The book under review has been written by an American diplomat and is an attempt at proving that the 'tilt' was confined merely to the top and the sympathy for Pakistan, if any, was too ineffectual to prevent any US official from taking sides. Of course, one reason for this was the mishandling of the situation by the then president of Pakistan and his military and political advisors.

Archer K. Blood, the author of The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh, was the US Consul General in East Pakistan from March 1970 to June 1971. The book extensively quotes from the now de-classified diplomatic cables between the US consulate in Dhaka and the embassy in Islamabad or the State Department in Washington. They describe and comment on the situation in the area. As such it reflects the perceptions of the author and his colleagues in the US Foreign Service about the events of that period.

Regarding the developments preceding the fateful December 7 elections, the author writes that he never considered the Six Points to be "a viable programme". But the Awami League's strong commitment to it and the vehement opposition to some of these points from the West Pakistanis had led him to believe that even if the Six Points were adopted after some modifications, the experiment would fail leading to the separation of the two wings.

According to him, Mujib made several attempts, before and after the elections, to involve the US government in the matter but following the official policy of neutrality both, the consul general in Dhaka and the Ambassador in Islamabad, did not respond to it. However, things began to change after the indefinite postponement of the March 3 session of the National Assembly.

When Yahya Khan announced his intention to go to Dhaka for talks with Mujib, the latter sent a representative to the consul general to request him to advise his government to urge upon the president to work for a "political solution" of the crisis. Under the circumstances then existing, this would have called for a confederation of the two wings. Consul general Blood obliged the Awami League leader. But the suggestion was turned down by Washington as it would have been considered an "unwarranted interference in Pakistan's domestic affairs, lending substance to suspicions in West Pakistan that the US supports separatism".

Yahya arrived in Dhaka on March 15, which was, as pointed out by the author, the Ides of March. By March 23, an agreed plan for the transfer of power seemed to be in sight. But the next day Mujib sent word to Blood that being under pressure from military hawks, Yahya might back out and requested the US government to urge Yahya to work for a 'political solution'. The consul general informed Ambassador Farland of Mujib's apprehensions but added that there was nothing to substantiate his fears. Accordingly, the ambassador did not take the action requested by Mujib.

But Mujib's fears were not unfounded. Yahya, opting for the military solution, left Dhaka in the evening of March 25 and soon after, the army crackdown began. That transformed the situation for many, including the author. His reports became so eloquent about the excesses of the army that his own colleagues in the US Embassy in Islamabad and many of them in the State Department in Washington refused to believe them. However, he continued to report with the same tempo.

On April 6 a cable, sent on behalf of himself and his officers, expressed strong dissent on the US policy towards Pakistan and urged the US government to give up appeasing the West Pakistan dominated government in Islamabad and to intervene to stop the "genocide" in the east wing. Further, the consul general expressed the opinion that since the struggle would result in the establishment of an independent Bangladesh, it would be foolish to continue supporting the likely loser.

As the author learnt later, nine officers at the State Department who had specialized in South Asian affairs, sent a memorandum to the Secretary of State supporting the views expressed in the cable and asking for the suggested measures to be taken immediately.

One curious aspect with respect to this cable was that although its contents were of highly sensitive nature, it was marked simply as "confidential" with no distribution restriction. As a result of this low classification, the contents were leaked immediately creating a furore in the US media. The dissent was also reported elsewhere, including India. Blood was accused by his superiors of "having deliberately put a lower classification on the message with the hope that it would be leaked". The author accepts that he was at fault but maintains that it was out of "carelessness, not malignance".

But it is hard to believe that Mr Blood, a seasoned and highly efficient diplomat, could be so careless, particularly when only a few days earlier another incident of leakage of his report had caused considerable embarrassment to his government and to Ambassador Farland. On March 27, two days after the army's action in the east wing, the BBC, All India Radio and the VOA had reported, quoting the US consul general in Dhaka as its source, heavy fighting in the city. Farland was immediately called to the Pakistan Foreign Office and an "emphatic perturbance" was registered on the incident in which another US government agency, the VOA, was also involved.

The Ambassador was doubly embarrassed because not only was a US diplomat quoted as the source of a highly damaging report but also because it implied that the US consulate in Dhaka was using an unauthorized transmitter link to send messages, as all authorized links had been cut off.

Perhaps it was this kind of reporting and its persistent leakage that led to the author's recall from Dhaka. But it also earned for him the Herter Award instituted by the American Foreign Service Association, for his "creative dissent". The award was given personally by the Secretary of State Rogers on June 24, 1971 while the crisis in East Pakistan was still unresolved.

Given the subject of the book and the direct involvement of the author in the crisis, what he writes is of great importance to the readers in Pakistan and Bangladesh. It certainly sheds light on a significant aspect of our own political history.

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The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat

By Archer K. Blood