Kissinger Video Interview
10. Can you describe your plans to travel to Pakistan?
Henry Kissinger: Well I had scheduled a trip through Asia and I had made it as boring as it was possible to be in order to shake press attention, so by the time we got to Islamabad the word was out that this was really a loser this trip, and so we had only one journalist left who was covering us, and the Yahya invited us to dinner and in the course of the dinner I allegedly fell ill and he allegedly urged me to go to the mountain station he had for recuperation. And we announced to the press that I would spend a couple of days in the mountains. And we even sent off a convoy of cars that they could see. In fact I got up very early in the morning, just before five o'clock, we took off very early. And went to a Pakistan air force airplane, actually was a PIA plane, to take us to Beijing. It was not a, it was a commercial plane used for this purpose. And when I got on the plane and I had the Secret Service with me as I always did in those days we found four Chinese in Mao suits sitting there, whom Chou En-lai had sent to escort me into China, but we didn't know this. And our Secret Service people nearly had a heart attack when they saw what this was.
|
