independence and assurances about the practical problems arising out of their defection. Till then they were willing to go on speaking for Bangladesh but not openly.
During this period Razzaque Khan and Shariful Alam, along with a Bangladeshi student, Mohsin Siddiqui, came forward quite publicly to work with me in lining up contacts with the press and TV and with. Congress so that I could get my message across to them to stop aid to Pakistan. I was given a number of prime time TV appearances which gave valuable publicity to the Bangladesh cause. Warren Una, a well known journalist and TV commentator, was particularly helpful in this respect. Razzaque and Alam functioned as a sort of secretariat for me notwithstanding the fact that they were still on the Pakistan Embassy staff.
On the press front I met Henry Bradshar of the Washington Star, Lewis Simons of the Washington Post, Adam Clymer of the Baltimore Post, Ben Wells of the New York Times and Gilbert Harrison, editor of the prestigious weekly. New Republic. These were the main papers read in Washington and these columnists and their leader writers exercised considerable influence on shaping congressional opinion. It was therefore a major coup for the Bangladesh cause when, more or less simultaneously, all four papers came out with editorials, to coincide with the arrival of M. M. Ahmed in Washington, requesting the U. S. government to suspend their aid commitment to Pakistan as long as the genocide continued in Bangladesh.
I had also been active in the Congress. Here I had been put in touch with two of the most effective supporters of the Bangladesh cause during that period, Senator Edward Kennedy and Senator Frank Church, who was a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Tom Dine, aide to Senator Church, along with Gerry Tinker and Dale Daihen, aides to Senator Kennedy, become close friends and active spokesman for the Bangladesh cause. Through them I met a number of other senators. At that time. led by Kennedy and Church, and Gallagher in the House of Representatives Congressman and Senators had begun to speak out on the floor of the house to denounce the genocide and to demand that U.S. aid to Pakistan be reviewed. Many of these statements, along with documents and letters sent by American's who had come out from Bangladesh, after 26 March, were entered into the Congressional Record.
At that stage I was informed that some old time friends of Pakistan led by Senator Symington, were hosting a tea for M. M. Ahmed to put his views on the events in Pakistan to the Senators. He got a small turn out but it was felt by our friends on the Hill that we should match this. Since Church and Kennedy were leading figures of the Democratic Party it was felt that a less partisan figure in the Senate might be mobilized to host a lunch for me which could attract both Republicans and Democrats. Senator Saxby of Ohio agreed to host such a lunch. This turned out a bigger and more distinguished collection of Senators than had turned up to hear M. M. Ahmed. I had as my audicncc, amongst others, Senators Church, Fulbright, the Chairman of the Senate l'oreign Relations Committee and Senator Socott who was the Senate minority leader of the Republican Party. These distinguished figures of the American political establishment gave a patient hearing to the full facts behind the Pakistani genocide and the complicity of the U. S. government in this act as long as they remained the principal aid donors to
