Nixon’s Back Channel to Moscow. Confidential Diplomacy and Détente

Secret negotiations have been a useful tool of foreign policy for centuries. In the annals of recent American diplomatic history, no administration seems to have proven this point more clearly than Richard M. Nixon's. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I), the opening to China, and the negotiations to end the Vietnam War were all, to varying degrees, outcomes of back-channel diplomacy directed from the White House and operated, with the president's consent, by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Justified as a method to bypass cumbersome bureaucratic impediments and public backlash, these back channels seem to have delivered, by 1973, the key ingredients that Nixon characterized as the structure of peace.
In Nixon's Back Channel Richard A. Moss reconstructs, expertly and in detail, the most enduring of the Nixon-Kissinger back channels: the secret link to Moscow via Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Moss examines the role of the Kissinger-Dobrynin back channel from its inception in early 1969 to the signing of SALT I at the Moscow summit in 1972. Along the way he revisits a number of key episodes: the Cienfuegos (Cuba) crisis of 1970, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, the opening to China, efforts to end the Vietnam War, and talks on the status of Berlin.