Title: Encounters with Kissinger.

• Author: Bridges, Peter

Text:

Henry Kissinger left government service in 1977; after serving earlier as National Security Adviser he was replaced as Secretary of State by Carter's incoming Secretary, Cyrus Vance. Now it was 1984; since 1981 I had been the deputy chief of mission to Reagan's ambassador to Italy, Maxwell Rabb. We learned that Dr. Kissinger was coming to Venice to brief the board of a major American corporation that was meeting there. Max Rabb asked me to go to Venice and make sure the Italians would provide proper protection for the famous--some would have said infamous--man.

I went north and met with the Prefect of Venice, the senior representative of the interior ministry, and members of his staff. They had taken all precautions. Terrorists in Italy liked to strike targets after studying their usual routes, as they had done in 1978 when they kidnapped and later killed former prime minister Aldo Moro, and as they did in Rome in June 1984 in killing our former Foreign Service colleague Leamon Ray Hunt, director general of the Sinai peacekeeping force. Kissinger's Venice visit was unadvertised but he would have been a high-priority target. In the event, the two of us had a pleasant but not very substantive breakfast on a terrace overlooking the Grand Canal, and I went home to Rome.

About that same time he and his wife, Nancy, came to Rome on a private visit and stayed with the Rabbs. One evening my wife, Mary Jane, and I drove over to the residence in my somewhat-armored embassy Ford, and the four of us went for a moonlight drive through the old city to Piazza Navona, Piazza del Quirinale, a few old side streets, and the Pincio, to look down at Piazza del Popolo and the Tiber and Vatican dim beyond us. Thank goodness, no one recognized the former Secretary of State in the dimness.

I doubt Kissinger knew that years earlier, in 1969, I had turned down a chance to work on his staff in the White House, after he became the National Security Adviser. His friend Helmut "Hal" Sonnenfeldt soon became Kissinger's senior NSC staffer for the Communist world. I had known Hal from the time I served as a junior officer on the State Department's Soviet desk and he was a mid-grade analyst in INR, the Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Duties in Rome

In the autumn of 1969, I was three years into my first tour of duty at Rome, with a year yet to do. I was the embassy's sole contact with the large Italian Communist Party--although I suspected (rightly, I...