A History of Secret U.S. Channels, From Jefferson to Kushner
A History of Secret U.S. Channels, From Jefferson to Kushner
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — There was Robert F. Kennedy’s still-mysterious phone call with an Izvestia correspondent, actually a Soviet spy, on Dec. 1, 1960, signaling that his brother, the president-elect, wanted to change the nature of the United States’ relationship with its Cold War adversary. It wasn’t exactly a success: First came the Bay of Pigs, then the Cuban missile crisis.
There was Richard M. Nixon’s secret channel to the South Vietnamese through Anna Chennault, a prominent Republican fund-raiser, urging the South Vietnamese to deflect President Lyndon B. Johnson’s effort to join peace talks in Paris because Nixon, she said, would give them a better deal. Fifty years later, historians are still arguing over what Nixon’s direct role was, and whether, as Johnson railed, the action was “treasonous.”
READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/world/a...
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — There was Robert F. Kennedy’s still-mysterious phone call with an Izvestia correspondent, actually a Soviet spy, on Dec. 1, 1960, signaling that his brother, the president-elect, wanted to change the nature of the United States’ relationship with its Cold War adversary. It wasn’t exactly a success: First came the Bay of Pigs, then the Cuban missile crisis.
There was Richard M. Nixon’s secret channel to the South Vietnamese through Anna Chennault, a prominent Republican fund-raiser, urging the South Vietnamese to deflect President Lyndon B. Johnson’s effort to join peace talks in Paris because Nixon, she said, would give them a better deal. Fifty years later, historians are still arguing over what Nixon’s direct role was, and whether, as Johnson railed, the action was “treasonous.”
READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/world/a...
