The Third Man

If these talks had to carry titles, as even the most humdrum television news documentaries must do, as a come-on for the viewer, I should call this one 'The Third Man'.

I'll say, right away, that the third man is a man that most of you have probably never heard of, Bernard Kalb, official spokesman for the State Department, now former spokesman for the State Department. On Wednesday he resigned, certainly at a time that delivered an embarrassing blow to the president, just before he set off for Iceland.

I'll begin first by saying why the title 'The Third Man', came to mind. The moment Mr Kalb's resignation was announced on the nightly TV news on Wednesday and then on the front pages of Thursday's newspapers, two names sprang to mind which, in this context, would represent the first man and the second man.

The first man has a name which may also mean very little. Even Americans, by now, may have to think twice to identify him. His name is Cyrus Vance. He was secretary of state under Jimmy Carter. A good man, a determined Democrat (with a capital D as also, of course, with a small d) a loyal member of President Carter's team until there came a day when the president and the small circle of advisers that constitutes the National Security Council met in great and successful secrecy to ponder a plan which, if properly executed, might lift off President Carter's shoulders the albatross that had weighed him down for the previous six months and, in the end, would doom his presidency.

The plan was to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Tehran by a daring raid, a flight of helicopters carrying special troops who would overwhelm the fortress where the hostages were held and carry them off to safety. It was a hair-raising plan and when it failed it was called hair-brained. I'm sure that very many of you now remember that appalling episode, how the failure in the desert of two of the raiding helicopters killed two Americans, I think, but also strangled the adventure at birth.

When it was being planned, Secretary of State Vance was, of course, privy to it and he was against it. He could have stayed mum, saying to the president and his security council or just mumbling to himself, 'It'll never work'. Unfortunately, as secretary of state, he was off on a necessary jaunt to Europe and to all questions about the intentions of his own boss, President Carter, he had to assure the allies that what could be done through diplomatic channels to get the hostages released was being done, that no other plan was in the works.

When the adventure did fail, shamefully and tragically, Mr Vance resigned, not because it had failed and he'd been against it from the start, but because he hated having to disguise the truth from America's allies. In a word, he hated having to lie, therefore, he resigned on principle.

The second man's name may be more familiar to more people because the war over the Falklands is perhaps more readily recalled than Mr Carter's dreadful escapade in the desert. The second man is Lord Carrington and his story is more simply told.

Argentina suddenly invaded the Falklands. Through some unsuspected cunning of General Galtieri, or a moment of amnesia in British intelligence, the invasion was a complete surprise. Lord Carrington was the British foreign secretary and although everybody else in the government was caught off-guard and Mrs Thatcher begged him to stay on, he resigned promptly without reservations or rhetorical sobs and sighs. The issue was quite simple to him. He was secretary of state for foreign affairs. He was, therefore, the man responsible for the conduct of them. He didn't know about the impending invasion but, as the responsible minister, he felt he ought to have known. Therefore, he resigned on principle.

I find it sad that these names should stand out in memory so sharply. It's sad because there are so few of them – people, that is, who take themselves out of high office not because they've done anything worse than a hundred others, but because they have a lively conscience and before anyone else can point the finger, they point the finger at themselves. As I say, men of principle.

To the names of Vance and Carrington, there must now be added the third man, Bernard Kalb and, before I put his name on this honour roll, I ought to remind you that Mr Vance was, is, by birth and upbringing, an upper middle-class American and that Lord Carrington is an upper-class Englishman. Both decent Establishment types. Both, you might assume, trained from boyhood to act as they did.

Bernard Kalb is quite another type. He is the son of Max and Bella Kalb, both Polish immigrants to this country. The father, like so many Russian, Hungarian, Austrian, Polish, immigrants, knew one trade: he was a tailor and New York city was the hive of tailoring in its humblest skills. Max Kalb sent his two sons to the New York City public schools – in the American sense, the schools where the public goes.

Bernard worked his way to and through college, graduated in 1942, just in time to be whipped into the army and, like so many other patriotic youngsters who expected to give his all in the fight against Hitler and Tojo, he was assigned or sentenced to a desk job – a very primitive and shivery desk in a hut, a Quonset hut on a small island in the dank, grey Aleutian Islands. He was set to work on a sheet, a so-called army newspaper. The editor of the newspaper was another active exile, you might say, from the Japanese war, one Sergeant Dashiell Hammett, who later graduated to a more comfortable desk and the authorship of 'The Maltese Falcon' and 'The Thin Man'.

After the war, Bernard Kalb went to work for the New York Times, then for a local radio station as a writer and then covered the United Nations. He was sent off by the Times as a correspondent in south-east Asia where he learned a great deal about the difference between news handouts (official news) and the news as a diligent reporter can dig it out. He also acquired a love of – and, by saving his pennies, a small collection of – oriental porcelain.

He was five years in Indonesia, came back to a television network as a diplomatic correspondent and just under two years ago, at the age of 62, he became the State Department's official spokesman – at the best of times, a delicate job. At the worst of times, a brutal test of judging between the whole truth and the publishable truth.

He's the man we've seen once or twice a week before a flock of correspondents gathered at the State Department giving, in carefully measured language, the State Department's account of what's happening, what's being done, what, by implication, the secretary of state and the president are prepared to do about some development in relations with... with Israel, Tokyo, Lebanon, France, Syria, Iraq, OPEC, Abu Nidal, Colonel Gaddafi, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

It's not a job I, myself, would crave. Especially for an old reporter; there are too many times when you simply have to gloss over the truth because somebody in the upper echelons has blundered and you can't say so and are sorely tempted to say the truth must be bottled in the interests of national security.

Last Wednesday, Mr Kalb went to see his boss, Secretary of State Shultz, and resigned. This is how it came about. Along with most of us, Mr Kalb had read an article printed in the Washington Post last week which quoted from a government document it had got hold of, author unknown, proposing that the administration should begin a campaign of disinformation to the press, aimed at bothering and alarming Colonel Gaddafi.

This new, nasty word is a direct translation of the Russian word 'dezinformatsiya'. It means, simply, false information and it's no secret that the Soviet government has a whole department given over to the manufacture of false stories, forged documents, concocted plots, meant to discredit the intentions and the policy of potential enemies.

At some point, Mr Kalb must have learned that this memorandum, or recommendation, the Washington Post had unearthed was written by none other than Admiral John Poindexter, the National Security adviser. Whatever this memo meant to the White House and the State Department, to the press it meant that the absolutely top man in national security was proposing that this administration begin a disinformation programme on the Russian model, putting out false stories about Colonel Gaddafi.

When President Reagan was asked about the Post story, he wriggled around the truth and simply berated the reporter who'd written up the story. Mr Shultz said he did not and never would lie to the press. Mr Kalb believed him. He declared that his boss was a man of integrity, but his boss recalled a fateful quote. After the war, Winston Churchill said, 'In wartime, the truth must be protected by a bodyguard of lies' and he was referring, of course, to the whole system of deception that absorbs the secret intelligence services in wartime.

But, this time, even the president's chief aide suggested that in dealing with some governments, anything goes. The implication was fatally left that in peacetime, too, a government cannot be too open about telling the means it uses to bring down or destabilise an unfriendly government and we know from the record, in this age of elaborate government intelligence departments, that destabilisation can require wholesale bribery, electronic spying, secret mercenaries, rigged elections, even quiet assassination.

It was the president's refusal to say outright that this government has not deceived and will not deceive the press with any campaign of disinformation; it was the hint that, in peacetime, too, the truth might require protection with a bodyguard of lies, that forced Bernard Kalb to what he called 'a choice'.

'As an American,' he said, 'as a spokesman, as a journalist, whether to allow oneself to be absorbed in the ranks of silence or to enter a modest dissent', he chose to enter his dissent. He quit and a silent chorus arose from his Washington colleagues saying, 'Bully for Bernie!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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