Conrad uses newspaper to attack old friend Kissinger

Conrad Black is not wasting the hiatus before he reports to jail on March 3. He has used a column in the New York Sun - a fledgling Manhattan broadsheet in which he is an investor - to attack two old friends who, he believes, have betrayed him: Henry Kissinger (pictured with Black in happier times) and William F Buckley.  "Friends don't usually act like that," he wrote, describing how both men had publicly supported him but later indicated they thought he was guilty.

Kissinger, the former American statesman, was once a personal friend and a member of the board of Hollinger, the company at the centre of the fraud case that saw Black sentenced by a Chicago judge to six-and-a-half years in jail. Black seethed in his column: "His statements, publicly and to the FBI, that I am probably guilty of something, but that he 'never deserts a friend', are not heroic or even accurate..."

Having learned more about Kissinger during his research for his recent biography of President Richard Nixon - Kissinger was Nixon's Secretary of State in the 1970s - Black wrote: "I suspected he would behave as [Nixon] told me he generally did when a colleague came under pressure; privately declare solidarity with both sides and separate himself, so neither side would confuse him with the other side, until it became clear which side won."

As for Buckley, the legendary conservative commentator, he wrote a letter to Black's judge swearing to his good character and asking for leniency. But he then used his National Review column last week to say that Black "probably was guilty on at least one of the charges". He said the disgraced newspaper baron believed those prosecuting him were "obtuse and vindictive, and should be put away somewhere to prevent the toxification of Common Law and the resources of reason on Earth".

Black responded in the New York Sun: "This is an endearing exaggeration. But the underlying points of my resistance are not a suitable subject of mockery from one of America's greatest champions of individual liberty." ·