Kissinger at 100: Statesman or war criminal? His troubled legacy – in pictures

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First as US national security adviser, then as secretary of state, Henry Kissinger intervened around the world during the 1970s, shaping events in China, Africa and the Middle East, with consequences that reverberate today

• How Kissinger’s ‘sordid’ diplomacy in Africa fuelled war in Angola and prolonged apartheid

Main image: Kissinger with the Chilean dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, in June 1976. He ignored aides’ concerns about the Chilean regime’s human rights atrocities, telling Pinochet: ‘We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the west in overthrowing Allende.’ Photograph: National Security Archive

  • Henry Kissinger with the Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, and premier, Zhou Enlai, in 1973 in Beijing. Kissinger was instrumental in brokering the detente between China and the US, which he saw as a key component in extricating America from the Vietnam war and in balancing the cold war superpowers. Kissinger had travelled secretly to Beijing in 1971 to negotiate President Richard Nixon’s visit the following year.
    A jowly middle-aged man with a high forehead in heavy glasses wearing a tie and dark western suit (Kissinger) listens to Mao, an elderly Chinese man in a plain grey tunic, as another Chinese man stands nearby

  • Recently appointed as US secretary of state, Kissinger with President Nixon in the Oval Office in Washington in September 1973. Kissinger, a political scientist and academic, had already been serving as national security adviser and was asked to take on the additional role of secretary of state – the first official to do both at the same time.
    Nixon sitting at a desk in the Oval Office with Kissinger sitting in front of flags

  • Kissinger shakes hands with Le Duc Tho, leader of the North Vietnam delegation, after the signing of the Paris peace accords in January 1973 that ended the direct combat role of the US in Vietnam. As US national security adviser, Kissinger was a key figure in the four-year negotiations to end US involvement in the Vietnam war.
    Kissinger shaking hands with an older Asian man while westerners and Vietnamese men look on

  • The US, with Kissinger as lead mediator, intervened to bring an end to the 1973 Yom Kippur war, where Kissinger negotiated the Israel-Egypt disengagement over eight days. While Kissinger would not countenance an Israeli defeat by the Soviet-armed Arab armies, he was also dubious about an emphatic Israeli victory, pressuring both sides to cease hostilities. This led to suspicions about his motives among some Israelis, with protests in Jerusalem.
    Two Jewish Israeli women at a barrier next to men in kippahs protesting with a sign saying "In Egypt it is Kissinger, in Israel Killinger"

  • Kissinger meets the Israeli defence minister and former general, Moshe Dayan, in Washington in January 1974 to discuss the disengagement of Israeli and Egyptian forces along the Suez canal.
    A man with a black eye patch stands with Kissinger in front of bookshelves

  • The ‘Carnation Revolution’ in Portugal in 1974 that overthrew the Estado Novo dictatorship led to Portuguese withdrawal from Angola and Mozambique, where the country had been trying to suppress liberation wars. Kissinger, who had shown little interest in Africa, saw the end of colonial rule as opening the way for Soviet influence in southern Africa and began his belated and problematic intervention. The sign calls for: ‘Public trial of fascist criminals.’
    Young people ride on a car through Lisbon holding a sign saying 'Public trial of the fascist criminals' as soldiers line the streets

  • Kissinger with Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, in 1975 to discuss a new agreement on Sinai between Egypt and Israel as part of what was called Kissinger’s ‘shuttle diplomacy’. Egypt was seeking the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Sinai peninsula, while Israel wanted a promise of non-aggression from Cairo.
    Kissinger gestures as he sits with a dark Egyptian man smoking a pipe

  • Kissinger viewing the Victoria Falls from a bridge on the border between Zambia and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, during a trip to Africa to discuss the transition to majority rule in April 1976.
    Kissinger and other black and white officials standing on a bridge with a sign in the background saying 'you are now entering Zambia'

  • Kissinger meets the president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko, in 1976. Kissinger met Mobutu a number of times to ensure his support for US policies in Africa. Kissinger regarded his relationship with Mobutu – a CIA-backed kleptocrat who consolidated power by murdering his rivals – as one of his successes, hailing him as ‘courageous, politically astute’ and ‘relatively honest in a country where governmental corruption is a way of life’.
    Kissinger and white officials sit with an African man in a leopard-skin hat and black officials in front of a row of photographers and cameramen

  • Young protesters by a burning bus during the Soweto uprising in Johannesburg in June 1976. At the heart of Kissinger’s belated interest in Africa was his view that a refusal to end white-minority rule in Rhodesia could open a way to creeping Soviet ambitions on the continent. Kissinger leaned on South Africa to persuade Rhodesia’s recalcitrant leader, Ian Smith, to agree to talks and he became the first US secretary of state to visit the apartheid regime in three decades, arriving just after the Soweto uprising, when security forces shot dead more than 100 protesting black schoolchildren.
    Young men surround a burning bus during the Soweto Uprising in Johannesburg 1976

  • A protest pamphlet condemning the relationship between Kissinger and John Vorster, prime minister of apartheid South Africa. It goes on to celebrate the sacrifice of those killed in the Soweto uprising, a trigger for which was the imposition of the Afrikaans language in schools.
    A pamphlet that reads: POWER TO SOWETO! / Defy The Kissinger- Vorster Conspiracy!. The image depicts black South Africans holding placards that read: TO HELL WITH AFRIKAANS. Three paragraphs of text denouncing the massacre of back children and western support for the white-minority regimes are typed below the image.

  • Kissinger meeting Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, in 1976 to discuss the bush war in Rhodesia. Underwhelmed by Kissinger’s cold war take on Africa, Nyerere said later: ‘They would like to think we are fighting for the communists in southern Africa, that we are fighting for the Russians, for the Chinese and the Cubans. We want the United States to be big enough to realise that we are not fighting for a Cuban southern Africa, [referring to Cuba’s intervention in the Angolan war], we are not fighting for Russia, we are not fighting for China – we are fighting for Africa.’
    Kissinger sitting next to an angry-looking African man in a white shirt

  • Kissinger with the South African prime minister, John Vorster, in 1976 during his high-profile trip to the apartheid regime. Kissinger’s visit – in the aftermath of the deadly violence of the Soweto uprising – brought a prestige to the white-minority regime in the country that probably helped extend the life of apartheid.
    Kissinger with South African prime minister John Vorster in 1976

  • Ian Smith, centre, the Rhodesian white-minority leader, on his way to meet Kissinger at the official residence of the South African president in September 1976. Backed by self-interested South African pressure and facing increasingly potent guerrilla forces in the bush war at home, Smith eventually agreed to a transition to majority rule – a move that would be delayed and botched by Kissinger’s follow-up diplomacy.
    A thin older white man among a group of white officials walking through a garden

  • Kissinger with the founding father of Kenya, President Jomo Kenyatta, during his whirlwind tour of Africa in 1976. Over two weeks in April, Kissinger visited six countries, also meeting presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, William Tolbert of Liberia, and Senegal’s Léopold Senghor. Despite these visits, critics said Kissinger was more interested in white minorities in southern Africa, with whom he had more sympathy.
    Kissinger talking with an older African man while other black and white officials stand in the background

  • Kissinger with the Chilean dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, in June 1976. Warning of the ‘insidious model effect’ of the democratic election of a socialist, Salvador Allende, Kissinger plotted to overthrow his government with the CIA and President Nixon. Allende died in the resulting coup in 1973 and thousands of leftists were killed under the dictatorship, which ruled until 1990. Kissinger ignored aides concerned about the Chilean regime’s human rights atrocities, telling Pinochet in 1976: ‘We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the west in overthrowing Allende.’
    Kissinger with a man in military uniform and others in suits

  • Kissinger, and the former US presidents Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter arriving in Egypt for the funeral of Anwar Sadat in 1981. The Egyptian leader and Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, had signed the Camp David Accords that led to the peace treaty between the two countries in 1979. Sadat was assassinated by Islamist militants.
    Men in suits – Jimmy Carter with his wife – walk down the steps from an airliner. The US presidential seal can be seen on the door of the aircraft

  • Kissinger and the American country and western singer Dolly Parton, who was performing at a New York charity event in March 1985.
    Kissinger stares at the décolletage of a buxom blonde woman in a spangly dress

  • Fighters of the Unita guerrilla movement in August 1986. The US- and South African-backed Unita rebels fought the Marxist MPLA government in the Angolan civil war. Kissinger saw Angola as a key battleground in the cold war and backed Unita, led by Jonas Savimbi, as a proxy in the southern Africa conflict. The war in Angola lasted 27 years and claimed the lives of about one million Angolans.
    Black African soldiers holding AK-47 assault rifles

  • Kissinger speaking to Jacob Zuma, then the ANC deputy secretary general and later South African president, in April 1994 in Johannesburg. Kissinger was part of an international delegation mediating between the Inkatha Freedom party, led by the Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and the African National Congress in disputes that had spilled over into violence and which threatened to wreck the country’s first elections after the end of apartheid.
    Kissinger speaks to an African man in a suit in front of a sign for Johannesburg's Carlton hotel

  • Nelson Mandela, ANC president, shakes Kissinger’s hand at their meeting in Johannesburg in April 1994, just before Mandela’s inauguration as South Africa’s first black president. Kissinger was there in an effort to negotiate an end to the bloody dispute between supporters of the ANC and Inkatha.
    Mandela, in a pinstripe suit, and Kissinger shake hands on a terrace outside patio doors
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