Henry Kissinger was President Nixon's national security adviser from 1969 to 1973, when he became secretary of state. At the State Department he balanced his policy of detente toward Moscow with U.S. strategic interests in the growing Cold War competition in the Third World. He was a key figure in negotiating an end to the Yom Kippur war in 1973, and was one of the architects of U.S. policy in Angola. By the end of the Ford administration, however, U.S.-Soviet tensions had torpedoed the complex policy of detente, and Kissinger's policies increasingly came under fire in Congress. After Ford lost the 1976 election, Kissinger left the government, and he has since been advising business and international leaders through his company, Kissinger Associates. Henry Kissinger was interviewed for COLD WAR in March and April of 1997.

On U.S. policy during the Yom Kippur war:

To understand our policy in 1973, you have to go back to 1969. When the Nixon Administration came into office, we found Russia the main arms supplier of the Arabs (or at least to the Arabs in confrontation with Israel), a supporter of the radical Arab peace program, and asking us to collaborate with them in imposing this -- for which we had no incentive, because why should we do this in conjunction with them? We established the policy that we would thwart any move backed by Soviet arms, until some Arab leader would become so frustrated that he would turn to us for diplomacy, and then we would try to take as even-handed a position as we were capable of developing.

And early in the Nixon Administration, when I was quite inexperienced in handling the media, I told a journalist: "Our intention is to expel Russian troops from the Middle East." All hell broke loose -- but it was our policy. So in 1973, we had two strands to our policy. First of all, we wanted to prevent a victory of Russian arms; we did not want Israel to be defeated with Soviet arms, or with any arms. Secondly, we wanted this to be the capstone of a policy where the Arab leaders would learn, as I told them in messages -- I sent out a message early in the war -- saying, "You have made war with Soviet arms, but for peace you need American diplomacy. And keep this in mind as this develops." That was our strategy.

So we saw to it that Israel would not be defeated; but we also wanted to maintain the option of starting a peace process as soon as the war was completed. This was our fundamental approach, and we maintained it rather firmly.

On a U.S. military alert during the Yom Kippur war:

The so-called alert against the Soviet Union occurred not during the war, it occurred at the end of the war. A ceasefire had been negotiated between Brezhnev and me and accepted by all the parties. ...

Then I went from Moscow to Tel Aviv to discuss with the Israelis. On the way back from that, the Israelis jumped off and trapped the Egyptian Third Army -- after the ceasefire. So at this point, the Soviet leaders had every reason to look at it in the sense that there had been some sort of a plot. They reacted very violently, and they sent us an extremely tough note saying that they wanted joint American-Soviet intervention, and if not they would act unilaterally. And the text of this is available, so people can judge now for themselves. But I think Dobrynin agrees that it was unfortunately worded.

I then called a meeting of the National Security Council in the White House to discuss this; and while it was going on I kept calling Dobrynin and said, "Now please tell your leaders not to do something until you have a response." To which the normal reply would be: "Of course not, we will not act until we have your response." But all he said was, "I have to communicate with Moscow, and I will transmit your request to Moscow," which is actually a rather threatening phrase. So we then decided to go on alert. But it's important to under-stand what that means. Normally, there are five levels of alert. Normally, American forces at that time were on the fourth or fifth level of alert. We raised it from the fourth to the third, which meant that troops on leave in paratroop units and at sea and on ships in the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean were called back to their units. The strategic forces, due to the war in Asia, were already on DEFCON 2, and they are always at a high level of readiness, so not much was done to them. The basic purpose was to generate a lot of traffic that the Soviet Union would pick up before they received our reply -- to know that this was getting serious. But this was after the war was completed, and it was a crisis, again, which worked. After 24 hours, the Soviets withdrew their threat, we lowered our readiness, and the crisis disappeared.

On U.S. involvement in Angola:

We thought, with respect to Angola, that if the Soviet Union could intervene at such distances from areas that were far from the traditional Russian security concerns, and when Cuban forces could be introduced into distant trouble spots, and if the West could not find a counter to that, then the whole international system could be destabilized with mercenary or auxiliary forces. And for that reason, while we had no huge conviction about [the] outcome [of the Angolan war], we had the strong conviction that it should not be achieved by Cuban forces. What we really intended to do was to insulate Angola from the Cold War.