Thus, Cherry may have followed Boster's instructions and yet contacts could have continued outside of pre-January channels. It is conceivable that one of Mustaque's aides may have travelled to the US or to another meeting point to discuss plans for the coup. It is also possible that military attaches or officers of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which has had history of strong historical links with Pakistan's military might have been involved in monitoring plans for the coup.

Only a Congressional inquiry with subpoena power at its disposal could sort through these conflicting claims. Despite some efforts on the part of Congressman Stephen Solarz and his staff associate, Stanley Roth, an inquiry into the Bangladesh coup never happened. In a detailed report in Prothom Alo and The Daily Star published on 24 August 2000 I described how Solarz's efforts were systematically derailed.

Additional evidence from the Bangladesh side exists that American officials were in contact with those planning the coup and were monitoring plans for the coup before it occurred. In 1997, I met an authoritative source with intimate and direct knowledge of the planning which took place for the August coup. This individual, a retired Bangladesh military officer, was the consummate "insider" to the events of August 1975 and the step-by-step planning that preceded it. I had met this individual briefly in 1975 and had hoped to meet him again.

However, more than two decades would elapse before a meeting between the two of us occurred once again. A request came from this individual through intermediaries asking if he could meet me. He had his own reasons for wanting to see me. After prolonged negotiations through intermediaries who I trusted I flew from the United States and made contact with this individual in a European capital. He also flew in from another continent. Our meeting lasted five hours.

Among the many things that this individual discussed with me one important point concerned his description of how both Mustaque and General Ziaur Rhaman had been in contact and in discussions with the Majors for more than six months prior to the actual coup. This individual had personally attended numerous meetings that Major Rashid had separately held with Zia and Mustaque. In a British television interview in August 1976 with The Sunday Times' journalist, Anthony Mascarenhas, Rashid described a meeting with General Zia on March 20, 1975, in which a coup was discussed in detail. This meeting took place five months before the coup. My source attended this meeting with General Zia but claimed it was not the first in which plans for a coup were discussed.

General Zia, who was then Deputy Chief of the Army, expressed reluctance to take the lead in the required military action but made clear about his interest in the matter. The junior officers had already worked out a plan, Rashid told Zia, and they wanted his support and leadership. Zia temporized. According to the account given by Rashid to Mascarenhas and confirmed by my source, Zia told him that as a senior officer he could not be directly involved but if the junior officers were prepared, they should go ahead.

According to my informant, the Majors hoped right up until the end that Zia would take the lead in the coup. Although they were in constant, yet discreet, contact with Mustaque, their view was that the best option would be one that did not make Mustaque head of a new government. The best option from the Majors perspective was to establish a Military Council as the commanding authority after the coup. In fact, it was largely Rashid who was in charge of defining the options for his group. It was their hope that Zia would lead such a council. While the junior officers might have preferred a senior officers' coup with Zia at the head, they secured the next best option. With General Zia's neutrality assured, the junior officers could move ahead without fear that Zia would throw his forces against them at the crucial moment.

My remarkably well-placed source made a rather interesting comment when he noted that he had been present during two different meetingsone with Zia and a separate one on a different day with Mustaquein which Major Rashid independently raised a question concerning what the attitude of the United States would be to the planned coup. "Both Zia and Mustaque independently told us that they had checked with the Americans," said this former military officer. "Their answers were almost the same. They each said it [the overthrow of Mujib] was 'not a problem' for the Americans. I then realized that both had their separate channels to the Americans. After that the subject didn't come up again."

The Majors hoped until the last that Zia would take command of a new Military Council that would be set-up in the immediate aftermath of the coup. Even on August 15th they believed this was still a possibility. But, according to this source, Zia stepped back into the shadows once it emerged that a massacre had occurred at Mujib's house and the houses of other relatives in which women and children were mercilessly killed alongside their men folk.

According to this source, Rashid himself was shocked at the killings and believed in the years that followed that there had been a "hidden plan" submerged within the coup that he neither knew about nor controlled. Nevertheless, neither Rashid nor Farooq, the two junior military principals of August 15th, publicly disowned the killing of the families. Walking on thin ice they were not about to disown the actions of the small contingent of soldiers which were solidly behind them and now deeply implicated in an action that Rashid and Farooq had led them into.

Indeed, this source claims some killings were indeed planned for August 15th. At least four Awami League leaders were to be removed from their residences and taken to a designated location where they would be executed. This plan included the killing of Sheik Mujib. However, this source claims there was no premeditated plan among the officers organizing the coup to fire weapons on the families. As in many such situations, the unpredictable ruled and brutality took command.

After the coup there was very little analysis of the contradictory phenomena which existed. Ignored was the stark juxtapositin that, in the two years prior to the coup, it was the country's organized left wing parties such as the JSD, the National Awami Party (Bhashani), and the underground organizations like the Sharbohara Party, which had developed and mobilized public sentiment against Mujib's regime; yet, when the critical moment of collapse came for Mujib, it was not from a leftist mass uprising"The Revolution"as had been feared, but from a narrowly-based conspiracy of the right.

The challenge being developed and prepared by radical nationalist forces was pre-empted by the August events. The coup itself was an inside job by right wing elements within Mujib's own party, his own cabinet, his own secretariat, his own national intelligence service, and the national army, who viewed Mujib's leadership as no longer capable of holding out against a left wing challenge to their interests.

Clearly, these conservative elements within the establishment organised themselves to act according to their own distinctive "doctrine of pre-emption" before other forces had an opportunity to act or Mujib found a path out of the deepening crisis his government faced. Some of the elements that backed the coup within the security services retained a distinct nostalgia for the days of Pakistan and would themselves constitute a force in the years ahead seeking to turn back the clock through the establishment of a new dictatorship.

Those planning the coup clearly believed that in approaching the US there were elements within the American government who might well be sympathetic to their plans. What they did not count on was an American Ambassador who decisively took a position that on his watch the US Embassy would have nothing to do with any politician or army officer planning to overthrow Mujib.

Clearly, Ambassador Boster took the view that such interventions could have dire consequences not only for the country concerned but also for the United States. This was the message of the Church and Pike Committee reports. Yet, Boster was serving directly under a Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who operated under a philosophy of imperial intervention.

Only two years earlier Kissinger had left his and Nixon's deadly mark on Chile with the overthrow of Salvador Allende. There an American Ambassador, Edward Korry, had been left in the dark when an operational decision was taken to unambiguously support a military coup. Of course, the Chile and Bangladesh cases are distinct and very different. However, the real question remains whether there were any similarities.

Eugene Boster, the American Ambassador to Bangladesh, thought that by January 1975 he had unambiguously broken and shut down all links and forms of encouragement by any member of his embassy staff who may have been or could have been involved directly or indirectly in causing a coup to take place. Yet, eight months later after Mujib's death, Boster believed an American link very probably still existed. If it did, the question is by whose authority and by what instrument did it happen. After all these years this is the question that still must be answered.

Lawrence Lifschultz was South Asia Correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong). He has written extensively on European and Asian affairs for The Guardian (London), Le Monde Diplomatique, The Nation (New York), and the BBC among numerous other journals and publications. Lifschultz is editor and author of several books including Why Bosnia? (with Rabia Ali) and Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History & The Smithsonian Controversy (with Kai Bird). Lifschultz was a Visiting Fellow at Yale University's Center for International and Area Studies from 1998 to 2004. He is currently at work on a book concerning the Kashmir conflict.