A look back: History of secret U.S. back channels, from Jefferson to Kushner
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 fundraiser, 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 still are arguing over what Nixon’s direct role was, and whether, as Johnson railed, the action was “treasonous.”
Back channels during presidential transitions are not unprecedented, but they are always fraught, as President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have discovered in recent weeks.
In the end, the trouble hinges entirely on the content. “Getting-to-know-you is fine,” said James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama who raised the alarm when he saw intercepts suggesting a series of contacts between the Trump transition team and Russians. The risk, he said, comes when those doing the talking violate “the tradition of one president at a time.”
Kennedy probably did not go over the line, the evidence suggests. Nixon probably did.
Whether Kushner and Michael T. Flynn, and perhaps others in the Trump transition team, crossed that line is still an open question. The answer may be different for each of them. Kushner has never talked, at least publicly, about the content of his meeting with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, or a later session with a Russian banker. That session has been described in various ways, as everything from a business meeting to an effort to open a back channel to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Flynn, who was later removed as national security adviser for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about discussions on U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, was clearly discussing the specifics of policy. Whether he was trying to undermine sanctions placed on the country by the Obama administration is a matter of judgment — and of continuing investigation.
A central question, reported by The Washington Post, is why there was talk of conducting future discussions through Russian communication lines, presumably channels the parties hoped could not be intercepted by the National Security Agency or the FBI. That would seem to suggest the back channel was meant to be hidden from the sitting government.
“What is not normal,” wrote Eliot A. Cohen, a historian and former State Department official who led opposition to Trump among Republican national security officials last year, “is asking a hostile government to provide secure comms to avoid F.B.I./N.S.A. surveillance.”
Back channels themselves are as old as U.S. diplomacy. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast — he often routed around his secretary of state, once sending a secret letter to the U.S. envoy in France, Robert Livingston, that contained a coded message.
It was part of the secret effort that led, the next year, to the Louisiana Purchase. “There may be matters merely personal to ourselves, and which require the cover of a cipher more than those of any other character,” Jefferson wrote at the time.
Almost every president since has similarly indulged, up to Obama’s decision to dispatch Jake Sullivan and William Burns to feel out an opening with Tehran that laid the groundwork for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
But try the same trick in the midst of a presidential transition, and there is all kinds of room for mischief, misunderstanding and, by some lights, criminality.
Robert F. Kennedy’s meeting, as described nearly two decades ago by Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko in “One Hell of a Gamble,” a book on the Cuban missile crisis, was ostensibly with a Soviet reporter who also was a KGB officer. But as Naftali wrote in Slate a few days ago, “The R.F.K. meeting likely came at the request of the Russians, not the Americans. It was not held in secret — it was noted on R.F.K.’s telephone log.”
Moreover, noted Philip D. Zelikow, a historian at the University of Virginia and a former member of the George W. Bush administration who has worked extensively on the Kennedy era, the purpose of the meeting was to “signal hopes for good relations and defer expectations for an immediate summit meeting.”
It was not intended, he said, “to set up a back channel to actually conduct policy business. I think the Kennedy brothers actually were following the rules about not trying to do foreign policy before the inauguration.” All the substantive talk of Berlin and Laos, he noted, happened after the inauguration.
The story of the Nixon effort to slow peace talks — which Nixon always denied — got new life early this year, just as the Trump administration’s communications with the Russians were underway. John A. Farrell found previously undiscovered notes at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in which Nixon told H.R. Haldeman, his most loyal aide, to “monkey wrench” peace talks in Vietnam. He worried that if Johnson made headway, it would help Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.
“Now we know Nixon lied,” Farrell wrote in The New York Times this year, describing the document, which he included in his book “Richard Nixon: The Life.” The instrument of the effort to sabotage the talks was Chennault, who was playing on the fears of the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, that the Johnson administration was so desperate for a peace deal that it would happily sell him out.