surrender. It appears that Niazi and l'arman Ali had been overruled by Islamabad and were advised that new help was on the way. This suggested that china from the north and the U. S. from the sea may have held out promise to Yahya and Bhutto of such an intervention. Suddenly we found that another that session of the Security Council had been convened which was to be addressed by Bhutto.
Again the Bangladesh U. N. delegation remained spectators in the galleries of the Security Council to Bhutto's antics in the Security Council. Wes spent our time trying to get through to delegates from the member countries of the Security Council, to persuade them to moderate their position demanding a cease fire and impressing them with the inevitability of Bangladesh. In the lobbies most of the spokesman conceded that Bangladesh was a fact and that the best solution was the rapid victory of the allied forces leading to the early surrender of the Pakistan army. They conceded that the Security Council was a sideshow staged by the Americans and Chinese to create the impression that they were doing all they could in support of their Yahya Khan .In these meetings, another Oxford contemporary of mine from the Japanese delegation, regularly met me and kept us informed of the mood and development within the Security Council.
I witnessed the debate in the Council on the eya of the surrender of the Pak army. Whilst Bhutto was putting on his act in the Security Council there were reports that the U.S. Seventh Fleet had been ordered by Nixon to move to Bay of Bangal for as yet unspecified objectives. The U.S. administration had become more strident in its denunciations of India and it was not beyond imagination to visualise a last minute invention by the United States to bolster the fast depreciating position of the Pakistani forces in Bangladesh. The assumption was that had Niazi held out long enough such an intervention could have been engineered and used as a bisis for enforcing a cease fire and settlement which preserved the integrity of Pakistan. The Security Council drama was thus a sideshow to the bigger drama around Bangladesh.
The possibility of an intervention or a diversion by the Chinese in the North Eastern sector of India was also held out as an ancillary hope. We had heard of Bhutto's air dash to Peking with a number of leading Generals of the Pakistan army to solicit such an intervention, I myself had been given some insight it into this possibility. In late October I had held a secret rendezvous in Paris with K M. Kaiser who was Pakistan's ambassador to Beijing. Kaiser had come to Geneva for a conference of Pakistani Ambassadors convened by the Pakistani Foreign Minister. Ile had secretly flown to Paris to meet me and pass on the intelligence that china was not going to intervene militarily to save Pakistan. They would give them arms and diplomatic support but had secretly counscled for a political settlement with the Awami League whatever bluster they may make publicly in support of Pakistan. I was asked to convey all this information to the Bangladesh government. I duty did this. As I gathered latter I was not the only channel of such information since some of the Bengalis in the Pakistan embassy in Beijing had also been asked to pass on this information via the Indian embassy there. To what extent subsequent military strategies in the region were planned on this intelligence I cannot say.
Given these tease both within and without the Security Council concerted by the U.S., China and Pakistan, the resolution of the tension rested on the capacity of the allied
