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1972-01-01

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Anti-India Remark Is Laid to Kissinger

By Benjamin Welles

Page: 2

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31—The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported today that Henry A. Kissinger, Presidential, assistant for national security affairs, told senior Administration officials during the India Pakistani crisis that. President Nixon “does not want to be even‐handed.”

“We are not trying to be even‐handed,” Mr. Kissinger was reported as saying. “The President believes that India is the attacker.”

Mr. Kissinger was also re ported by the columnist to have told top Administration aides that “we cannot afford to ease India's state of mind.”

Warned that United States criticism might turn India toward the U.S.S.R., Mr. Kissinger is said to have replied that. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was “cold‐blooded and tough” and that her country “will not turn into a Soviet satellite merely because of pique.”

“We should not ease her mind,” he is reported to have said, adding that any aide who, objected to this approach could “take his case to the President.”

The views attributed to Mr. Kissinger were published in Mr. Anderson's column, which is syndicated to 700 newspapers, about 100 of them foreign. Mr. Anderson, a colleague, of Drew Pearson, took over the column on Mr. Pearson's death in September, 1969.

Throughout the India Pakistan war, Mr. Anderson has repeatedly asserted that his disclosure of top‐secret Government documents involved no threat to national security, but rather exposed the “activities and often the blunders of our leaders.”

The Kissinger comments reported today came from notes of “secret sensitive” strategy sessions at the White House on Dec. 6 and 8, according to Mr. Anderson. The India‐Pakistan war broke out Dec.3 and ended Dec. 17.

Mr. Anderson's report of Mr. Kissinger's views of the Pakistan‐India conflict was carried in his columns published in newspapers today. In tomorrow's column, continuing his reporting from secret meetings, he says that Mr. Kissinger exclaimed in one session over what he appeared to consider the futility of the United Nations in the situation on the subcontinent.

According to Mr. Anderson, Mr. Kissinger said, “If the United Nations can't operate in this kind of situation effectively, its utility has come to an end, and it is useless to think of United Nations guarantees in the Middle East.

Mr. Anderson charged that the American people “again were. misled by their leaders.”

Specifically, Mr. Anderson contended that the White House explanation of theC reasons for sending the nuclear, powered aircraft carrier Enterprise, plus escorting warships, from Vietnam to. the Bay of Bengal during the India‐Pakistani war was deceptive.

Evacuation ‘Secondary’



Contrasting the official explanation that the mission of the task force was to “evacuate American citizens from embattled Dacca,” Mr. Anderson said that perusal of confidential documents in his, possession showed that there were in fact four primarily military reasons. These were, he reported:

To compel India to divert both ships and planes to shadow the United States task force.

To weaken India's blockade against East Pakistan.

Possibly to divert the Indian aircraft carrier Vikrant from its military mission.

To force India to keep planes on defense alert, thus reducing their operations against Pakistani ground troops.

“The evacuation of American citizens was strictly a secondary mission,” Mr. Anderson wrote, “adopted more as the justification than the reason for the naval move.”

Mr. Anderson wrote that “those anonymous aides who whisper the latest word “from the. White, House Into the ears of newsmen” had now stopped “pretending” that the task force was intended to evacuate stranded Americans.

Instead, he said, they were now “leaking” the story that President Nixon learned of. a Soviet‐Indian plan to “dismember” West Pakistan and sent the task force into the Bay of Bengal as a “deterrent.”

Earlier this week, Joseph Alsop, another internationally Syndicated columnist, reported that “on the eve of the final cease‐fire” the, United States had “unchallengeable” information of the Indian Government's determination to “cause the dismemberment of the surviving western half of Pakistan.”

Mr. Alsop, who has had high level sources through successive Administrations, reported that India's aim was to destroy the Pakistani Army and also to deprive the Pakistani remnants state of any common frontier with Tibet, and thus with Communist China.

Such was the situation, Mr. Alsop wrote, when President Nixon ordered elements of the United States. Seventh Fleet to steam toward the Indian Ocean. In his column, Mr. Alsop attributed to Dr. Kissinger a comparison between Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 and the “strong possibility” that India would become, a “vast new Soviet base area.”

Administration officials, who declined to be named, said today that a security investigation was under way to deter mine who “leaked” information to Mr. Anderson.