Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger once drew up contingency plans to "clobber" and "smash" Cuba after its 1975 military incursion into Angola, newly revealed government records show.
According to The New York Times, Fidel Castro so enraged Kissinger that he organized a top-secret group to map out retaliatory measures to counter any further campaigns on the African continent.
"I think sooner or later we are going to have to crack the Cubans," Kissinger told President Ford, according to a 1976 Oval Office transcript.
His blueprint included plans to strike Cuba's ports and military installations, and using the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay as a base for Marine battalions. The group also determined that it would cost $120 million to reopen the Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico.
The transcript is part of a number of documents that have been recently declassified at the request of the National Security Archive and its Cuba Documentation Project,
the BBC reported.
Along with American University professor William M, LeoGrande, the project's director, Peter Kornbluh, received the documents from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, and analyzed them in a new book "Back Channel to Cuba."
"You can see in the conversation with Gerald Ford that he is extremely apoplectic," said Kornbluh. He used "language about doing harm to Cuba that is pretty quintessentially aggressive."
"These were not plans to put up on a shelf," added LeoGrande. "Kissinger is so angry at Castro sending troops to Angola at a moment when he was holding out his hand for normalization [with the U.S.] that he really wants to, as he said, 'clobber the pipsqueak.'"
Kissinger, 91, has not commented on the newly revealed plans.
Then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who later served again under President George W. Bush, was among those involved in the contingency planning. He has also declined requests for comment on the nearly 40-year-old plot.
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