by It was the last game of the second group stage. Earlier in the day, Brazil had beaten Poland 3-1, which meant that Argentina had to beat Peru by four goals to reach the 1978 World Cup final. Before it started, Jorge Videla, the leader of the military junta that seized power in Argentina in 1976, and Henry Kissinger, who was the secretary of state of the United States, visited the Peruvian team in their dressing room until the previous January. This, according to the Peruvian players, was very strange.
Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, loved football and attended games often. In 1976, for example, after flying to Britain to discuss the crisis in Rhodesia, he went to Blundell Park for Grimsby’s victory over Gillingham with the foreign secretary, Tony Crosland, a passionate Grimsby fan.
Eight months later, Crosland made him watch Chelsea draw 3-3 with Wolves in the old Second Division. Then, too, he visited the dressing room, to widespread bewilderment.
“He said he loved soccer,” said Chelsea striker Steve Finneston. “Comments from the players ranged from ‘Okay guys?’ to ‘Who’s that wanker?’ … Not much respect was shown.”
But what happened in Rosario was more sinister. “It looked like they were there just to greet and welcome us,” said Peru’s captain at the time, Héctor Chumpitaz. “They also said that they hoped it would be a good game because there was a lot of respect among the Argentine community. He wished us luck, and that was it.
“We started looking at each other and thinking: shouldn’t they have gone to the room in Argentina, not to ours? What to expect? I mean, they wanted us luck? Why? It left us thinking…”
Kissinger’s office said he had “no recollection” of the incident.
Argentina won 6-0, which raised eyebrows. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence of a fix – unproven allegations that the Argentine government sent 35,000 tons of grain and possibly some weapons to Peru, and that the central bank released $50m of frozen Peruvian assets.
The allegations made by a Peruvian senator, General Ledesma, to a Buenos Aires judge in 2012 were that the game was staged as part of Operation Condor, a sinister plan that involved South American dictators torturing each other’s dissent in which Kissinger was implicated. with Videla accepting 13 prisoners from Peru in return.
“Were we pressured? Yes, we were pressured,” midfielder José Velásquez told Channel 4. “What kind of pressure? Pressure from the government. From the government to the team managers, from the team managers to the coaches.”
That may be true, but anyone watching the game looking for a clear fix will be disappointed. Peru hit the post in the first half and their goalkeeper, Ramón Quiroga, made some fine saves. To top it all off, Peru, with nothing to play for, seemed to just collapse in the second half under the pressure of a relentless Argentine attack and a ferocious home crowd.
As for Kissinger’s presence, he was an ally of Videla – “If things have to be done, you should do them quickly,” he told him after the coup in 1976 – and he loved football.
As a boy growing up in Bavaria, he was a fan of his hometown club, Greuther Fürth, who were German champions three times between 1916 and 1929. When Richard Nixon became security adviser in 1969, the team would send reports on. the team’s games in its Monday morning news papers.
He also played football, first as a goalkeeper and then, after breaking a bone in his hand, as an inside player. He invented new tactics which he claims, in the account he gave to Brian Kilmeade in The Games Do Count, were the forerunners of catenaccio, although it seems more like massing players behind the ball. “The system was to push the other teams forward without letting them score, by keeping so many people back as defenders,” he says. “It’s very difficult to score when there are 10 players lined up in front of the goal.” Little wonder that the ends were more important to him than the means.
Although his family’s flight to the US to escape Nazi persecution took him away from football, Kissinger continued to find himself a useful diplomatic tool, particularly with Leonid Brezhnev who had a long discussion about Garrincha at a summit in Moscow in 1973. spy plane photos of Cuba in 1969 showed baseball fields that noted the presence of Soviet troops on the island – “Cubans play baseball,” Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, is said to have quipped. He helped João Havelange unseat Stanley Rous as FIFA president in 1974 and to arrange Pelé’s move to the New York Cosmos a year later, as part of a wider plan to improve relations between the US and Brazil.
Havelange, however, fell out with Kissinger, apparently over the doomed US bid to host the 1986 World Cup, and accused him of match-fixing in the second leg of the 1974 World Cup when the Netherlands beat Brazil. 2-0. By that time, his reputation was such that he could be credibly accused of turning them, wherever there was a wheel within a wheel.
And why, since he was one of the first senior figures to recognize the potential of world sport in politics, wouldn’t he turn to football?
