Chile, 9/11/73
Declassified documents reveal
the US government's role
in the Pinochet coup
by Peter Kornbluh
The Nation magazine, September
29, 2003
In September 14, 1970, a deputy to then
National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wrote him a memo, classified
SECRET / SENSITIVE, arguing against covert operations to block
the duly elected Chilean socialist Salvador Allende from assuming
the presidency. "What we propose is patently a violation
of our own principles and policy tenets," noted Viron Vaky.
"If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart
from them only to meet the gravest threat to us., e.g. to our
survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.?" Vaky asked.
"It is hard to argue this."
Kissinger ignored this advice. The next
day he participated in a now-famous meeting where President Nixon
instructed CIA Director Richard Helms to "save Chile"
by secretly fomenting a coup to prevent Allende's inauguration.
When those covert operations failed, Kissinger goaded Nixon into
instructing the entire national security bureaucracy "on
opposing Allende" and destabilizing his government. "Election
of Allende as president of Chile poses one of [the] most serious
challenges ever faced in this hemisphere," says a newly declassified
briefing paper Kissinger gave to Nixon two days after Allende's
inauguration. "Your decision as to what to do may be most
historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have
to make this year.... If all concerned do not understand that
you want Allende opposed as strongly as we can, result will be
steady draft toward modus vivendi approach."
Had Washington adopted a "modus vivendi
approach," it is possible that Chileans, indeed citizens
around the world, would not be solemnly commemorating the thirtieth
anniversary of the coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to
power. In the United States, the meaning of this anniversary is,
understandably, overshadowed by the shock and tragedy of our own
9/11. But Chile reminds us that the topics of debate on US foreign
policy today-pre-emptive strikes, regime change, the arrogance
of unilateral intervention, unchecked covert action and secrecy
and dishonesty in government-are not new. From the thousands of
formerly classified US documents released over the past several
years, the picture that emerges strikes some haunting parallels
with the news of the day.
Chile, it must be recalled, constitutes
a classic example of a preemptive strike-a set of operations launched
well before Salvador Allende set foot in office. Nixon ordered
the CIA on September 15, 1970, to "make the economy scream"
and to foment a military move to block Allende from being inaugurated
six weeks later, in November; the Chilean leader had yet to formulate
or authorize a single policy detrimental to US interests. "What
happens over [the] next 6-10 months will have ramifications far
beyond US-Chilean relations," Kissinger predicted in a dire
warning to Nixon only forty-eight hours after Allende actually
took office. "Will have effect on what happens in rest of
LA and developing world; our future position in hemisphere; on
larger world picture...even effect our own conception of what
our role in the world is."
As in the distorted threat assessment
on Iraq, this was sheer speculation-unsupported, indeed contradicted,
by US intelligence. In August 1970 CIA, State and Defense Department
analysts had determined that "the US has no vital national
interests within Chile," and that the world "military
balance of power would not be significantly altered" if Allende
came to power. But an Allende victory would create "considerable
political and psychological costs," including "a definite
psychological advance for the Marxist idea."
Indeed, the recently declassified record
reveals that what really bothered the White House was not what
actions a narrow, distant country that Kissinger had once disparaged
as "a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica" could
take but the fact that Allende could establish a model for democratic
socialist change. As Kissinger informed Nixon on November 5, 1970,
the "example of [a] successful elected Marxist gov. in Chile
would have .[an] impact on-and even precedent value for-other
parts of the world, especially Italy. . .similar phenomenon elsewhere
would in turn significantly affect world balance and our own position
in it." When the President convened his National Security
Council the next day to discuss how to "hurt" Allende
and "bring him down," he made this point: "Our
main concern in Chile is the prospect that [Allende] can consolidate
himself and the picture presented to the world will be his success."
The story of US efforts toward regime
change in Chile is well known. Since Allende was democratically
elected (with a margin of victory that far exceeded George Bush's
edge in Florida), operations needed to be covert, and plausibly
deniable. For three years the CIA engaged in a destabilization
campaign in Chile-what CIA Director William Colby described in
secret testimony as "a prototype or laboratory experiment"
to discredit and undermine an elected government. Covert ops consisted
of political action to divide Allende's coalition; massive propaganda
operations aimed at disrupting the economy and discrediting the
government; covert funding of opposition political parties, including
those agitating for a coup; and contacts with the Chilean military.
By necessity, these operations were accompanied
by rampant official deception. WhenAllende was brought down by
a vicious military coup led by General Pinochet on September 11,
1973, Kissinger testified later before the Senate Poreign Relations
Committee that "the intent of the United States was not to
destabilize or to subvert [Allende] but to keep in being [opposition]
political parties." Kissinger also testified that Washington
was maintaining a "neutral" policy toward the incoming
junta. In reality, within forty-eight hours of the coup, a cable
went to the embassy with this secret message for Pinochet: "The
USG wishes [to] make clear its desire to cooperate with the military
junta and to assist in any appropriate way."
Washington had worked to destabilize a
democratically elected government; now US officials rushed to
help a cutthroat dictatorship consolidate its rule-with full knowledge
of the atrocities it was committing. "I think we should understand
our policy," Kissinger admonished his top aides as reports
of mass slaughter flowed into Washington in the several weeks
following the coup: "However unpleasant they act, this government
is better for us than Allende was." But when the CIA covert
operations were exposed a year later by Seymour Hersh in the New
York Times, US officials publicly defended their actions on the
grounds that their policies were intended to preserve democracy
in Chile, not foster a climate for a coup. This was, submitted
President Gerald Ford in one of the most famous official statements
regarding US intervention against Allende, "in the best interest
of the people of Chile and certainly in our best interest."
Pinochet murdered more than 3,100 Chileans,
disappeared | 1,100 and tortured and jailed thousands more. He
closed the ' Chilean Congress, banned political parties, censored
the press and took over the universities. Through decree, the
barrel of the gun and the touch of the electrode he imposed a
seventeen-year dictatorship that became synonymous with human
rights abuses at home and terrorist atrocities abroad-including
the 1976 car-bombing that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt
in Washington, DC.
According to declassified memos and cables,
at least some US officials acknowledged that the regime was neither
in the best interests of Chile nor of the United States. Defense
Intelligence Agency analysts compared Pinochet's secret police,
DINA, to Hitler's Gestapo. "A documented case can be made
for the proposition that the current regime in Chile is militaristic,
fascistic, tyrannical and murderous ' one State Department intelligence
analyst imported in early 1974. Washington's support for the Pinochet
regime, another State Department official wrote in a memo to the
Assistant Secretary for Latin America a year later, "is one
more reason why much of the youth of this country is alienated
from their government and its foreign policy." "In the
minds of the world at large, we are closely associated with this
junta, ergo with fascists and torturers," according to Richard
Bloomfield. "Chile is just the latest example for a lot of
people in this country of the United States not being true to
its values."
That is, perhaps, the only positive aspect
of the legacy of US policy and operations in Chile. Along with
concerns about Vietnam, public and Congressional anger over events
in Chile generated a national debate about the corruption of American
principles in the making and the exercise of US foreign policy.
The Kissingerian disregard for Pinochet's abuses incited the mobilization
and institutionalization of the human rights movement as we know
it today; indeed, during the mid-1970s, Chile became the battleground
of the first major fight between Congress and the executive branch
over making human rights a criterion in US foreign policy. Similarly,
revelations of CIA intervention in Chile contributed to a dramatic
national reevaluation of the propriety of such practices and to
the first Congressional hearings on covert action. The public
reaction to US policy in Chile reflected widespread alarm over
the abuses of power and secrecy inside the executive branch and
a demand that US conduct abroad return to the moral precepts of
American society.
Thirty years later, public fears over
government secrecy and deception are pervasive once again. To
be sure, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan differ in many ways
from the US intervention in Chile; and the security threat of
terrorism, as opposed to the non-threat of Allende's election,
is real, as we know from our own 9/11. Even so, in the wake of
September 11, 2001, the lessons of September 11, 1973, demand
to be remembered, as US foreign policy becomes further removed
from the values, morality and real national interests of the American
public. As Secretary of State Colin Powell was forced to concede
when questioned about Chile on the eve of the invasion of Iraq:
"It is not a part of American history that we are proud of.
Peter Kornbluh is the author of a new
book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and
Accountability (New Press).
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