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FILM
The wolf minding the chicken coop
BY LOREN KING

News last week that President Bush picked former secretary of state Henry Kissinger to lead a probe into US intelligence lapses before the September 11 attacks couldn’t have been more timely for a new documentary called The Trials of Henry Kissinger, which opens in Boston on Friday, December 6.

Not only did Kissinger’s appointment give many journalists reason to cite British journalist Christopher Hitchens’s controversial book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, 2001), on which the film is based, but it also allowed a fresh airing of the stinging charges in both book and film: that the Nobel Peace Prize winner is a war criminal who, with then-president Richard M. Nixon, orchestrated secret bombings in Vietnam and Cambodia, and who authorized the 1973 CIA-led coup in Chile that put dictator Augusto Pinochet in power. The latter charge has prompted five countries so far to summon Kissinger for questioning in connection with Pinochet’s trial in London for war crimes.

These allegations and others — which the film substantiates with hard evidence, including recently declassified documents and the testimony of key players such as former Kissinger aide Roger Morris and journalists Seymour Hersh and William Shawcross (Kissinger declined to be interviewed for the film) — led to skittishness in the US about distributing the film, says Alex Gibney, who wrote the script and co-produced the film with Eugene Jarecki. Gibney’s long résumé includes work for PBS’s Frontline and as producer of the HBO documentary Soldiers in the Army of God, about the radical fringe of the anti-abortion movement. Still, even PBS shied away from the Kissinger project.

" It was made entirely with foreign money. I complained publicly about Frontline, but a theatrical film really is the right form, " says Gibney. " The film is not dispassionate and measured. The facts are so inflammatory and shocking that Frontline may have felt it wasn’t balanced. "

But when The Trials of Henry Kissinger premiered in New York City in June as part of the annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, the response was so overwhelming and the screenings sold out so quickly that Gibney realized his project had a longer life. " People were scalping tickets outside the theater. It was like Yankee Stadium, " he says. " It gave us the idea that the film could be released theatrically, and theatrical success might get it onto TV. " In October, the film opened at New York’s Film Forum, where it is still playing, and it got positive reviews in the few cities (including Washington, DC, and Los Angeles) where it also has opened so far.

" There is buzz about it. Younger kids are showing up. And it was denounced by William F. Buckley, " says Gibney, who is now at work on The Blues, a documentary miniseries he is producing with Martin Scorsese.

Gibney worried that some audiences would think the film was too rooted in history and not relevant to current events. That’s why the Pinochet controversy and international trial ( " If Pinochet, why not Kissinger? " he says) serve as a fresh linchpin in the film. But now the Bush appointment, with its attendant publicity, raises anew questions about Kissinger’s duplicity, power mongering, and disregard for domestic and international law. The film presents solid evidence that, as Nixon’s national-security adviser, Kissinger masterminded the secret bombing of Cambodia, an event, the film charges, that led to the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. It also exposes his role, as secretary of state under Gerald Ford, in the sale of US weapons to President Suharto of Indonesia, weapons that Kissinger understood would be used to kill civilians in East Timor.

" Kissinger had become the Dr. Ruth of foreign policy, " says Gibney. Kissinger’s new role on the domestic and international stage lends this documentary added resonance. " History lives in the present, " Gibney says. " It always haunts the present. "

Issue Date: December 5 - 12, 2002
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