Conspiracy Theories

Matthew Petti | 9.18.2024 1:38 PM

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........

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