Henry Kissinger, Jim Thompson and Me
A Chance Encounter with Kissinger in 1999, and What Followed
In 1999 I began making my first documentary, “Jim Thompson, Silk King”, a biography of the American architect, former OSS officer and Renaissance Man. In Bangkok after World War II, Thompson created the Thai silk industry, revived Thai vernacular architecture and brought Southeast Asian art to international prominence, but he was best known for his own disappearance. Because that event—which took place on Easter Sunday, 1967, in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia—remained unsolved, it eclipsed Thompson’s accomplishments, which were varied, important and achieved in a dazzling span of twenty years.
I wanted to re-focus attention on Thompson’s life, not his mysterious end, and I became a documentarian to do it. In the summer of 1999, after two years of preproduction and three weeks of principal photography and interviews in Thailand, I continued to shoot in France, New York and Los Angeles. On October 18th,* having finished the New York interviews, I invited two old friends to have lunch with me and my cameraman—my then-15-year-old son, Ian— at Le Bernardin.
I was deep into a description of Jim Thompson’s disappearance—the fateful post-lunch walk he took after telling his hosts he was going to nap, the absence of any clues, and the weeks-long search of the Highlands that turned up no trace of him—when I noticed both my friends’ growing alarm. Both spoke Japanese, as do I, and one said, “Someone is listening.” This seemed unlikely, but I responded in kind: “Dare?” (“Who?”), as if it were a joke. “Gaimushō no yūme na hito,” (“A famous person from the Foreign Ministry”) she said ominously. I couldn’t imagine who it might be, so I shifted slightly in my chair and—despite her pleas not to—turned my head.
There was Henry Kissinger, in the midst of a what appeared to be a business lunch, eavesdropping on my conversation. Somehow he managed to focus a degree of attention on his lunch partner—an elegant thirty-something black woman—while fixing his eyes and ears on me. He did nothing to disguise his interest, and if he reacted when I abruptly stopped talking, I didn’t see it. A pall fell over our table, and if we talked about anything else until the check came, it was of no consequence.
I was still wondering about the incident when I called my mother and told her what had happened. “Isn’t it weird?”, I said, but her reaction was more alarm than amusement. “I hope he’s not going to do anything,” she said darkly. Like what?, I thought. At that point Kissinger was twenty-two years retired from the State Department, but his influence had remained robust. He was a fixture on the lecture circuit; advised presidents, diplomats and captains of industry; wrote books and published articles and Op-Ed pieces. In short, he still had power and knew how to use it.
There’s no doubt that Kissinger knew who Jim Thompson was. He also might have known his fate, something no deathbed confession has revealed. Among the many theories about Thompson’s abrupt end is that the CIA was involved, which I came to believe was true. While his disappearance was made to look like an accident—a ludicrous claim, given Thompson’s OSS experience as a paratrooper trained in jungle survival—it was almost certainly a political assassination, so skillfully accomplished that not a drop of blood or piece of clothing was left behind. (I would learn more about why Thompson was a likely target in the future, and detail that information in a subsequent version of “Jim Thompson, Silk King”.)
The fear instilled by Jim Thompson’s disappearance was still evident in 1999, when all my American interviewees in Thailand insisted on its unsuspicious nature. One man even repeated the ludicrous theory that Thompson “fell into a tiger trap”. More bizarrely, his biographer Bill Warren recanted claims he’d made in his book, saying, “It was an accident!”
On Easter Day, 1967, Kissinger was not yet in government, but that summer he became an unofficial go-between in secret talks with North Vietnam officials and French diplomats. At that point Thompson’s disappearance was the story in Asia, apart from the escalating Vietnam War. Some of his friends fled Thailand, fearing for their safety even before Thompson was presumed dead. His vanishing sparked a wave of fear among expatriates in other Asian countries, including those in Tokyo, where I lived. Because many had met Jim Thompson, shopped in his store in Bangkok, visited his Thai-style house, and seen his gorgeous silks in “The King and I”, his fate consumed them. He was one of us, and the prevailing sentiment was If someone so famous can disappear, what about me?
For the next year and a half, as I finished the documentary and began showing it in film festivals, I wondered whether Kissinger would have any influence over its completion—or its broadcast. If he had sway over American networks I’ll never know, but to this day the documentary has been shown on television only in Europe. Though I continue to sell DVDs and downloads**, “Jim Thompson, Silk King” has never found a wide audience in the United States.
As for that lunch at Le Bernardin, I’ve never written about it until now. I also never saw Kissinger again, but Ian did, in 2014 at The Four Seasons. The occasion was a festive dinner for him and his wife, or would have been if not for Henry Kissinger holding forth in the bar, launching his new book. “His presence cast a dark shadow over the evening,” Ian remembers.
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* I know the date because an account of Kissinger’s morning appeared in the next day’s New York Times. He had returned to his childhood neighborhood of Washington Heights to speak, rather uncomfortably, to students at a Teach For America event. You can read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/19/nyregion/kissinger-s-latest-mission-briefs-sixth-graders-in-visit-to-his-old-neighborhood.html?searchResultPosition=3
**”Jim Thompson, Silk King” is available on my website, www.hopeandersonproductions.com