Kissinger angrily stormed into the secret office of the Chinese Affairs Committee, not far from the Oval Office but hidden from view of any non-Entente staff.
“He’s asleep,” the Secretary of State shouted. Arnold fell asleep.
His collaborators did not know what he was referring to. Kissinger assumed that other mortals assessed circumstances just as quickly. Arnold was his secret special envoy, outside of official contactsto exchange messages with Zu Enlai, Mao’s lieutenant.
Zu and Arnold had attended a Peking Opera performance based on the life of Chiang Jing, Mao’s wife.
Arnold Schewp, the special and secret envoy had clearly fallen asleep in full functionin the front row.
The news reached Kissinger via a special Chinese official in the USA, in turn originally communicated by Zu Enlai himself. It was Mao’s voice.
Except for Mao, Zu and Kissinger, Arnold in China was justified as a “cultural addition”, the classic nickname for spies: Kissinger had not deemed it necessary, in the context of the fluidity of his relations with Mao, to assign him more sophisticated cover.
But that he had fallen asleep so visibly, in front of the billion Chinese, snubbing Mao’s wife – it didn’t matter that the dictator felt only hatred for her, but it was a matter of state -, Mao himself, and putting Zu Enlai in danger , their host, who might even be accused of letting Arnold fall asleep, it represented a diplomatic disaster.
Kissinger himself had undergone one of those narcotic works, a story of an indecipherable baroque style that mixed a first-century emperor with the Maoist Cultural Revolution of 1966. Kissinger had used his enormous behavioral resources to keep from yawning. He got to the point of not batting an eye. Lowering the eyelids in these circumstances represented an unapproachable risk..
Arnoldo I should have taken the necessary precautions: or at least a stimulant. There was no shortage of them in China or America. She fired him ipso facto of his position. He will return directly, except for the stopover in New York, from Beijing to Maryland: he will spend the rest of his life in front of a professor’s desk.
Having lost this resource, Kissinger turned to his transmission chain – which he called Appalachia – to get his message directly to Zu Enlai: How did Mao want this offense to be redressed?
Five months passed before he received a response. A couple of years ago Mao had revealed to him that he could have waited a hundred years to take back the island of Formosa; Five months was an incalculably infinitesimal measurement from that perspective.
The strange reparation requested by Mao was that an Argentine Maoist writer was invited to China – an entire operation organized and financed by the USA – to participate as a specialized spectator in the November work – the story of a farmer cured of a terminal illness thanks to his devotion to Book.Mao Red -, and his celebratory article will be published in Foreign Affairsthe international politics journal supported by the State Department.
Kissinger sent information on the above mentioned.
The first indication, which Kissinger retrospectively deduced, of Mao’s willingness to dialogue with the USA, was the tyrant’s decision to sit next to him, during the review of a march by the American Maoist writer Edgar Snow, in 1970.
Now he has placed a Latin American author in the Peking Opera, seal China’s relations with the Third Worldespecially with Latin America, while consolidating its geopolitical alliance with the American “paper tiger”.
But who was Alcides Bedoya, the Argentine Maoist writer that Mao wanted as a spectator and commentator?
His name was not Alcides nor was his surname Bedoya., revealed the confidential CIA report: his real name and surname were Jacobo Runtein. He had published his first fiction book, Tales from the underworld of Buenos Aireslike Bedoya.
Apparently, the short memo continued, the goal is to renounce one’s Jewish identity. He speaks perfect Chinese; but she hides that she knows even better Hebrew and Yiddish, the mother and everyday language of her parents. She embraces the cult of Mao while her grandfather read the Torah. She has just published a book about her recent trip to China, entitled The infinite revolutionperhaps a deliberate paraphrase of Trotsky’s concept of Permanent Revolution.
The CIA agent, a Peruvian resident in Buenos Aires, allowed himself a curious detail: only a gesture of avant-garde experimental literature could explain the mammoth work of his Maoist book.
He’s a good storyteller, but the book on China seems to have been written by an individual with comprehension problemsto whom incomprehensible contents are dictated.
Celebrate Mao even in the way you brush your teeth. It reproduces contradictory testimonies of militants in charge of factories, cleaners, university professors, who recount small quarrels, with banal but delirious ideological overtones, for which they threw themselves down the stairs or out of the window, and sent each other to concentration camps. forced labor, families were separated forever or committed suicide.
I suspect so If Bedoya himself read this book as a writer, he would throw it in the bin.. I can think of no other explanation than that a Chinese official ordered it on behalf of Mao himself and dictated it word for word.
His wife, Marita Jiménez de Bedoya, who accompanied the writer from the pro-Soviet PC in its split to the PCR, the pro-Chinese Communist Party, has just been discovered by the same husband as a spy for the Communist Party of Moscow: she has transmitted each of his words and its movements from the political break in 1968 until about a month ago. However, Bedoya did not dissolve the marriage or cohabitation. He suffers from a known and unfathomable sadness.
Kissinger finished reading the report, holding his chin. He couldn’t spare more than a few seconds. There was a knock on the door. A special envoy, a French academic, brought disturbing data from his dialogue with North Vietnamese leaders and, worse still, about the situation on the ground. Kissinger dialed a number on the intercom: green light for the Bedoya operation.
In the following weeks the world seemed to collapse on the Secretary of State’s head. The “Vietnamization” of the war that he had attempted to orchestrate with Nixon, implementing an “honorable” withdrawal of American troops, was stalled, much more due to the complications imposed by Congress than due to the inefficiency of the South Vietnamese army.
At the same time, and tacitly citing reasons of “honor”, Sadat had attacked Israel, together with the Syrian dictator.
But in his brain compartmentalized like cells in a honeycomb, Kissinger listened to Bedoya’s route to Beijing. Just days after the reorganization of the American war effort in Vietnam and the closing of what would be known as the Yom Kippur War with an auspicious armistice and the safety of the Egyptian Third Army, Brad Halleck, Kissinger’s new star and advisor secret in his China channel, entered the Pentagon office without knocking. Bruise. He raised his eyebrows as if he couldn’t put the verdict into words.
– Did he fall asleep too? Kissinger asked devastated.
“When the show was over,” Brad tried to describe. Zu Enlai took him by the shoulder and Bedoya’s head fell onto his own chest. He was buried in Beijing, according to his widow’s wishes.
– Died…? Did he die of boredom? -Kissinger was heard asking.
Brad opened his arms in a gesture of ignorance and bewilderment. Perplexed, Kissinger appeared to pray in front of a wall in his official office:
– No one will say Kaddish for him.
Source: Clarin
