USA looking for scapegoat to cover up scandal : Tass
MOSCOW, Jan. 5.—The Soviet Government yesterday charged that Washington was searching for “a scapegoat” to cover up the present political scandal” created by last week’s publication of columnist Jack Anderson’s account of a White House strategy meeting on the IndiaPakistan war, reports AP.
“But no investigation can conceal the scope of the fiasco suffered by the new foreign political venture of the USA” declared Tass.
Tass said Mr. Anderson’s information had created a “political scandal in the American capital probably even greater” than the revelations of the secret Pentagon papers last year.
The commentary linked the present Government leak with the Pentagon papers by describing the participants of the strategy meeting as “the brain trust”, which “actually determined the course of US action with respect to events in Indo-China.”
Even before the Anderson column, Tass said, “It was known how onesided and illogical the US position was on the India-Pakistan war.”
But the secret materials have now shown “how hypocritical this policy was and how far Washington had gone in its anti-Indian campaign and what unseemly teps it had taken in the UN and outside it in an attempt to drag out the military conflict…
The commentary concluded with the accusation that the US policy “will be appreciated in Peking.”
“It is not by chance,” it stated, “that Washington’s actions had the full support of Peking’s leaders who found themselves in the same camp with the USA as enemies of the Bangladesh people’s liberation struggle.”
UPI adds from Washington: The US State Department yesterday had no official comment on reports that the FRI is conducting an investigation of department officials in connection with the leaking of secret memoranda on President. Nixon’s attitudes during the IndiaPakistan war.
Mr. Anderson has reported the President adopted an extremely negative attitude toward India and was “furious” occasionally that his subordinates did not take a harder, anti-India line.
Mr. Anderson said he hoped his published reports would result in a real security system. AP further adds.
“I think the security system in fact is a censorship system used to hide all activities in diplomacy in general.” Mr. Anderson said in a telephone interview.
For some three weeks Mr. Anderson’s columns, syndicated to 700 newspapers, have quoted from what he said were minutes of a White House crisis team known as the Washington Special Action Group (SAG).
“I know that people in the State and Defence Departments and in the National Security council have been questioned, he said.
“Kissinger is treated like a secret weapon’ everything he does is classified. Nobody knows what he is doing, even Congress. The State Department does not know anything and they are charged with foreign policy. Yet this man operates like some sort of foreign policy has put in”. Mr. Anderson said.
Mr. Anderson said he believed he had the complete set of papers from the White House meetings and that he had about exhausted the subject in print. “I believe. I made the essential points,” he added.
Reference: Hindustan Standard 06.01.1972