Back Channel to Cuba.

• Author: Johnson, Joe B.
• Position: Book review

Back Channel to Cuba by William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC, ISBN-13: 978-1469617633, 2014, 544 pp., $19.24 (Kindle), $25.82 (Hardcover).

The highest-level official meeting of American and Cuban diplomats in decades, held January 21-22, 2015 in Havana, began a process of normalizing bilateral relations after 55 years of prickly and sometimes hostile coexistence.

The meetings followed joint announcements by President Obama and Raul Castro expressing the intention to normalize relations. The initiative had been in secret preparation since June 2013; both Obama and Castro gave credit to the Government of Canada and the Vatican for serving as intermediaries.

The discrete process behind the headlines was typical of 55 years of U.S.-Cuban negotiations. Generally, the two countries have conducted major negotiations outside traditional diplomatic channels.

And that is the subject of Back Channel to Cuba, published late last year: a very timely prequel to the normalization story. The book lives up to its subtitle, "The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana," relying on previously classified and private documents as well as extensive interviews with many of the players. Acknowledgements include interviews with former presidents Jimmy Carter and Fidel Castro.

The National Security Archive, an award winning nonprofit that tries to pry open government secrets, sponsored the research effort. Co-author Peter Kornbluh is director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project and of the Cuba Documentation Project. William LeoGrande, who specializes in Latin American studies, is a professor of Government and former Dean of the American University School of Public Affairs.

Some of the "back channels" were targets of opportunity. One example is Frank Mankiewicz, a Democrat political strategist and former president of National Public Radio. In April 1974, Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon's National Security Advisor, recruited Mankiewicz to approach Castro while he was setting up a television interview with the Cuban leader. Kissinger developed a secretive dialogue with Castro about normalizing relations through a coterie of agents outside the State Department's organization chart.

Lawrence Eagleburger, who later rose to become Secretary of State, was a principal actor. To maintain secrecy, the players developed a set of pseudonyms, coded language and...