For more information:
Svetlana Savranskaya – svetlana@gwu.edu
202/994-7000

www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., May 27, 2004 – “Happy birthday to you,” said Anatoly Dobrynin to Henry Kissinger on May 26, 1973. “Tomorrow is my birthday,” replied Kissinger. “I know tomorrow, but tomorrow you will be in New York, I couldn't reach you, so I plan to sing it today: Happy birthday to you,” said (sang?) Dobrynin, in one of many bantering, familiar, personal conversations between the U.S. national security advisor and the Soviet ambassador to Washington released yesterday in the Kissinger telcons and posted today on the National Security Archive web site.

Next to the Kissinger conversations with President Nixon, the Dobrynin file probably ranks as the most important material in the 20,000 pages of telephone transcripts now available at the National Archives and Records Administration, according to Dr. William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archive and author of The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: The New Press, 1999, 515 pp.).

“The Dobrynin back channel, direct from the White House to the Soviets, excluding the State Department, was probably the signature foreign policy mode of the Nixon years,” commented Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, which started legal proceedings five years ago that compelled the recovery and release of the telcons.

The Dobrynin-Kissinger telcons posted today show the two men joking about Kissinger's social life (Kissinger calls Dobrynin a “dirty old man” and hopes his own upcoming date “isn't a nice girl”), commiserating about “the madmen in the Middle East,” arranging summit meetings between their heads of state, trading countries like chess pieces on the makeup of a UN peacekeeping force, and defusing crises while complaining about their respective militaries.

Follow the link below to read the Kissinger/Dobrynin telcons:

www.nsarchive.org

PS – Tune in to NPR's All Things Considered this evening at 5:30 or at 7:30 to hear Archive director Thomas Blanton discussing the release of the Kissinger telcons.
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