[lc]

MAR 01 2005

Jesee Incao

From: David Rockefeller Center [drc-br@fas.harvard.edu]
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 8:12 PM
To: drc-br@fas.harvard.edu
Subject: Sunday Washington Post: "A Plot Thicksens"

"A Plot Thicksens" & "The Case of the Missing Letter in Foreign Affairs"

The Washington Post - Sunday, February 27, 2005

"A Plot Thicksens"

Three Decades After Chile's Right-Wing Coup, Historians Have Yet to Dot All the i's. But One Thinks He May Have Crossed a K.

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Style - Page D01

What a dream. So bizarre. How strange to see himself shrunken, like a pocket-size person. But there he was, Kenneth Maxwell, renowned scholar, rendered a tiny creature trembling at the windswept ramparts of his dream. Gargantuan figures loomed above, gazing down on this mere morsel.

Maxwell awoke. The dream trailed him out of bed.

"I've seen this somewhere before," he thought, vexed for a while until he realized that a picture from his favorite childhood book had scripted his subconscious. He'd become Gulliver, but little as a Lilliputian, facing giants in the phantasmagoric land of Brobdingnag.

The dream seemed to track loosely with Maxwell's reality. He had faced some towering figures of his own. And in a paper to be published that day, Dec. 2, on a Harvard University Web site [ http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu ], he would criticize the credibility of the vaunted Council on Foreign Relations, his former employer and the grande dame of all think tanks.

Maxwell, 64, had been a senior fellow at the council for 15 years. For 11 years, he also reviewed books for Foreign Affairs, the prestigious council journal. And now he would accuse both entities of suppressing debate and silencing his voice because of pressure from Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser, secretary of state and global power broker.

Maxwell's writings indeed upset Kissinger, say Kissinger's associates. Maxwell had revisited a bitter debate, still red-hot after three decades, about Chile and Kissinger and the depth of U.S. involvement in the fall of one regime and the rise of another.

It is, at bottom, a debate about history and the battle to define it. It is about power -- its uses, its abuses.

"In the foreign-policy world, history is power," says Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the council. "Who is right or wrong in the past either gives or withholds power today."

Chile sounds like old news, except that it still is news. The country's former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, keeps popping up in headlines -- most recently regarding the Riggs Bank money laundering scandal. And in December, a Chilean judge ruled that Pinochet can be tried for kidnapping and murder.

Chile still reverberates along America's ideological divides over human rights and foreign policy, echoing the old realpolitik-vs.-moralism debate heard during the Cold War, when Kissinger and people like him saw in Chile a domino about to fall.

1

So the battle over Chile goes on, with the latest skirmish revolving around this question: Did the council cave to pressure from Kissinger and his allies and stop Maxwell's writings about Chile? Council officials deny that they responded to any pressure. Kissinger himself won't comment.

Or did Maxwell, sensitive to any perceived threat to his intellectual freedom, overreact? Maxwell firmly believes his perception of Kissinger's influence was based in fact. And Maxwell is not alone in his belief, for Kissinger, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is known for hitting back at critics, for staunchly policing his image.

"Our sense is that Henry does that all the time," says Riordan Roett, a supporter of Maxwell's who has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations for 25 years and is director of Western Hemisphere studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Maxwell awoke that December morning and realized Kissinger was among the giants in his dream.

"What the hell have I done, taking on all of these people?" he thought.

## A LOFTY PLACE

The Council on Foreign Relations is a formidable place filled with formidable people -- former Cabinet secretaries and ambassadors, current CEOs and pundits of the media elite -- who've fired their reputations over the years in the foreign policy kiln.

Even its headquarters -- at Park Avenue and 68th Street in Manhattan, in a mansion once owned by a Standard Oil director -- speaks of status, of power.

High officials leaving government go to the council to roost. Those seeking the reverse trek use the council to launch government careers. Heads of state give speeches there. Diplomats mix it up. Journalists gather to hash over issues of the day (this writer spoke on such a panel there 5 1/2 years ago). And task forces meet to craft reports on pressing national and global policy.

That's how Kissinger, now 81, got his start back in the 1950s, on a council study group. Council intellectuals, back then, were at the cutting edge of U.S. foreign policy. Those were the days of George Kennan and the doctrine of "containment," of Paul Nitze, the architect of Cold War policy. Kissinger, then the young upstart from Harvard, arrived at the council and wrote a 1957 book, "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy," that planted the notion of "limited" nuclear war in the policy mind-set.

The original limited-war concept actually was Nitze's, Walter Isaacson wrote in his 1992 book, "Kissinger: A Biography." And when Nitze wrote a negative review of Kissinger's book, Kissinger threatened to sue for libel (but didn't). The two men remained at odds for decades, Isaacson wrote.

Over the years, Kissinger's name became virtually synonymous with the council, even though the only high office he held there was a four-year term on the board ending in 1981.

And the extent of his power at the council can be traced through his personal and business relations. He and his New York-based international consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, are closely linked to two of the council's most powerful figures.

Peter Peterson, a secretary of commerce during the Nixon administration, is the council's chair, as well as chairman of the Blackstone Group, a global investment firm. According to Blackstone's Web site, it has a strategic alliance with Kissinger Associates. (Another Kissinger firm is called Kissinger McClarty Associates.)

And Maurice Greenberg, honorary vice chair of the council, is also a Kissinger business associate. Greenberg is chairman of American International Group, the huge insurance and financial firm that owns a stake in Blackstone. Kissinger leads AIG's international advisory board, Greenberg's spokesman said in an e-mail.

With hefty ambitions and huge egos among the council's 4,000 members, it is inevitable that disputes arise, albeit handled quietly, diplomatically.

2

"Interestingly, it's usually about history and how the history books will read," says Gelb, a former assistant secretary of state and New York Times columnist.

## A NEW ASSIGNMENT

In his spacious third-floor office within the council's ornate digs, packed with his thousands of books and his pair of Fernando Botero watercolors of a prototypical Latino caudillo, Maxwell pored over a new book: "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability." The book's release in 2003 marked the 30th anniversary of the overthrow and death of Chilean President Salvador Allende.

Maxwell's editor at Foreign Affairs, James F. Hoge Jr., had asked him to review it.

Being a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs was but one of Maxwell's hats. Another was serving as a senior fellow for the council. A Cambridge- and Princeton-educated historian who is a Brit turned naturalized U.S. citizen, Maxwell is recognized as a virtual guru in his field.

"He's a towering figure in the field of Latin American history and politics," says John Coatsworth, director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, where Maxwell is now a visiting scholar.

The latest of Maxwell's five well-received books (not including the many others he's edited) is 2003's "Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues," which ranges from the history of chocolate to the Amazon to the slave trade.

An intellectually fastidious scholar with a sharp pen and quick wit, Maxwell was somewhat different from others at the council: He had never served in anyone's government and had no intention of doing so. His is the world of ideas, of historic trends, the power of pure scholarship -- in his case, the esoteric details of Latin American and Iberian history, especially colonial Brazil and its Portuguese rulers.

At the council, he organized seminars on Latin America. He researched books. He wrote articles and reviews. But he did not expect his review of "The Pinochet File" to spark the bitter rhetorical skirmishes to come.

## PAGES OF HISTORY

Though 30 years had passed, Chile was "still a lively subject," Hoge said in a recent interview. "On the hard facts of the matter, what exactly was the role the U.S. played [in Chile] is, I think, still open to question." These were the issues that Hoge expected Maxwell would address in his review.

"The Pinochet File" is some 600 pages, a thick collection of declassified U.S. cables and reports compiled by Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, a small nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.

The book, Kornbluh writes, is about "the denouement of democracy and the rise of dictatorship in Chile," and presents "the ultimate case study of morality -- or lack of it -- in the making of U.S. foreign policy."

It deals in great detail with the level of U.S. foreknowledge of, or involvement in, three pivotal events: the 1970 assassination of Gen. Rene Schneider, chief of the Chilean armed forces; the 1973 coup in which Allende died (whether from suicide or murder remains contested) and Pinochet was installed in his place; and the South American murder conspiracy known as Operation Condor, in which the dictators of the continent's "southern cone" helped each other bump off their enemies. Prominent among Condor's victims was the exiled Chilean defense and foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, who was slain in a 1976 car bombing on Sheridan Circle, in the middle of the U.S. capital.

Kissinger was the White House national security adviser under President Nixon, as well as his secretary of state, a post he also held under President Ford. He was closely involved with U.S. maneuvering in Chile, making "The Pinochet File" very much a portrait of his statecraft and a condemnation of it.

COUNTDOWN TO A COUP

3

Drawing on the evidence of Kornbluh's book, Maxwell wrote in the November/December 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs that the United States "knew about, approved of, and had even assisted in planning" the kidnapping of Schneider.

The United States had wanted to foment a coup that would prevent Allende, elected with a plurality of the vote, from assuming the presidency. Allende was a socialist and, in the Cold War paradigm, that made him a threat.

But Schneider would not support military intervention. So other Chilean military officials plotted, with CIA encouragement, to kidnap him. A week before it was to happen, though, Kissinger decided the plan would not work. He "turned it off," as he told Nixon. The Chilean plotters went ahead anyway. And Schneider was killed.

Maxwell recounts all this in his review, which tracks closely with the 1975 report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee, after its chair, Frank Church, the late Democratic senator from Idaho.

The committee noted that the plan was ordered directly by Nixon and that Kissinger was among but a few officials aware of it. (A lawsuit filed in 2001 against Kissinger and the U.S. government by Schneider's family is pending in a federal appeals court.)

Maxwell's rendering of the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that finally did take down Allende also tracks the Church Committee findings: The United States was aware of a coup plan, had encouraged a coup and created a climate for it. The coup was "exactly what Kissinger's boss wanted," Maxwell wrote of Nixon, though he added that there was no direct U.S. involvement in the actual attack on Allende's forces.

In the case of Operation Condor, Maxwell wrote, the United States was aware of the broad conspiracy that involved the intelligence services of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia (as well as Brazil, Peru and Ecuador somewhat later).

In August 1976, Kissinger issued a cable to U.S. ambassadors in the Condor nations, instructing them to warn the heads of states that the United States had heard rumors about Condor actions and that there would be "a most serious moral and political problem" if those rumors were true.

But the demarche for Pinochet apparently was not delivered, according to cables quoted in "The Pinochet File," because of concern about his reaction.

A month later, Letelier was rounding Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row in his Chevrolet Chevelle when a remote control bomb was detonated beneath the car, killing him and one passenger and injuring another.

### KISSINGER CALLING

Kissinger read Maxwell's piece in Foreign Affairs. He was not pleased.

He called Peterson, the council chair, and complained.

Peterson then called Hoge to pass on the complaint.

"I am chairman of this organization," Peterson said in an interview. "This is a member organization. Members pay dues. And people call me and say, 'I'm not pleased,' with one thing or another. I have immense respect for Jim Hoge and even more for the fundamental independence of that magazine. On the other hand, as chairman, when somebody calls me and complains and says, 'I didn't like something,' I turn it over to the people that are responsible."

According to Peterson, his brief conversation with Hoge went this way:

"I said, 'Jim, Henry just called me and he's not happy about some review. I must tell you I haven't read the review. But you're in charge and you're editor.' "

Hoge described the phone call as "an alert" that did not affect his editorial judgment.

"Pete calls when he thinks there's something I ought to know and take into account. It was simply informational," says Hoge.

4

Kissinger declined to be interviewed about the Maxwell controversy. He wrote in "Years of Upheaval," the 1982 installment of his voluminous autobiography, that allegations about U.S. involvement in Chile's chaos are mere "political mythology."

William D. Rogers, a confidant, business partner and sometime lawyer for Kissinger, believes that too. And he doggedly works to counter the myths.

A respected former diplomatic deputy to Kissinger and semi-retired senior partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter, Rogers speaks derisively of those he calls the "myth makers." They include the Latin American left and, in the United States, they include Kornbluh and Maxwell.

In 2003, Rogers even took on Secretary of State Colin Powell. A reporter had asked Powell for a retrospective view on U.S. policy toward Chile in the 1970s.

"It is not a part of American history that we are proud of," Powell responded.

Rogers was outraged.

"He was implying that the U.S. was morally responsible for what happened in Chile," Rogers says heatedly in his office. "He bought the myth. And I thought that was unfortunate. I called Will Taft" -- the State Department's legal counsel -- "who is an old friend, and I said, 'Gee, get him off this.'" Taft does not dispute Rogers's account.

The State Department issued a statement clarifying Powell's comments: The United States "did not instigate the coup that ended Allende's government in 1973."

Rogers's friend Mark Falcoff, a historian and then a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was also outraged by the Powell comment. Falcoff knows Chile well. He authored "Modern Chile 1970-1989: A Critical History." And he too has been working hard to counter the "mythology" of Chile.

In 2003, he worked in tandem with Rogers and Kissinger.

Through Rogers, Kissinger allowed Falcoff to view copies of some of the private transcripts of his 1970s telephone conversations, which at that time were not generally available. (Under pressure from the news media and from Kornbluh's archive, Kissinger agreed last year to allow the Library of Congress to release the transcripts for general consumption.)

Falcoff used them for an article he wrote and tried to place in Foreign Affairs. But Hoge did not accept it.

"It tried to sum up the story [of Chile] before the story can really be summed up," says Hoge. (Falcoff, a friend of Maxwell's since their student days at Princeton, believed for several months thereafter that Maxwell had rejected his piece. He broke off their friendship as a result.)

Instead, Falcoff placed his piece in Commentary, where it ran in November 2003 under the headline "Kissinger and Chile: The Myth That Will Not Die."

In it, he quotes from the Kissinger transcripts -- or rather, he misquotes them.

It is a Sept. 16, 1973, chat between Kissinger and Nixon, discussing the anti-Allende coup that occurred five days earlier. The actual telephone transcript reads:

Nixon: "Well, we didn't -- as you know -- our hand doesn't show on this one though."

Kissinger: "We didn't do it. I mean we helped them. ________ created the conditions as great as possible."

But Falcoff ended Kissinger's quote at "We didn't do it."

Falcoff, who had seen the full quote, said he was not trying to alter history, not trying to create a myth of his own.

5

"I made a mistake," he said when asked repeatedly. "I should have put that part of the quote in the article. I should have done that."

FEUDING IN PRINT

Rogers, meanwhile, geared up to battle Maxwell. He submitted a rebuttal for Foreign Affairs to publish in its January/February 2004 issue.

In criticizing the so-called "case against Kissinger," Rogers wrote that the "myth" of U.S. involvement in Chile was "lovingly nurtured" by the Latin American left and "refreshed" by people like Maxwell and Kornbluh.

"(The Case Against Henry Kissinger" was the title of a two-part 2001 Harpers magazine article by Christopher Hitchens that ultimately became a book and the basis for the 2002 documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger.")

Rogers called it "mischievous nonsense" for Maxwell to mix the Letelier car bombing into a discussion of U.S. foreknowledge or complicity in Chile. He characterized it as "circumstantial at best" any evidence of U.S. responsibility for the Allende coup. And he rejected that the United States had approved of and helped plan the effort to kidnap Schneider.

Hoge printed Rogers's rebuttal, with a response from Maxwell that glibly observed that the dossier of declassified documents "cuts very close to home."

He accused Rogers of "overreaching" and suggested that a "truth commission" could probe the unanswered questions of Chile, rather than answers being "extracted painfully, like rotten teeth."

But what indeed cut close to home was this charge by Maxwell: The Letelier bombing "was a tragedy that might have been prevented."

Rogers shot back hard. In the March/April 2004 issue, he accused Maxwell of "bias." He called it "outrageous" to suggest that the United States could have prevented the bombing.

"One would hope at least that Maxwell's views are understood to be his own and not those of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow," Rogers wrote.

CALLING A CEASE-FIRE

The debate had grown uglier than Hoge anticipated. Now the council itself was being dragged into it.

Caught between competing views on Chile, Hoge sought the advice of a close friend, William H. Leurs, who also happens to be the State Department official who drafted Kissinger's 1976 cable warning the Condor nations about their activities. Basically, Hoge wanted to talk things through with someone who knew the issues.

Leurs, now president of the United Nations Association of the United States, said the tone of Hoge's call was, "What has happened here? Why has this gotten so serious?"

"I don't think he knew how hot an item the Chile question is," says Leurs.

Maxwell wanted to write a response to Rogers. But Hoge resisted. They two met on Jan. 30 of last year. Maxwell claims that Hoge told him he was under intense pressure from Kissinger and that Greenberg had called and swore at him for a half-hour. Hoge denies saying these things; he says he discussed with Maxwell how to end the debate. And Greenberg, who would not answer numerous e-mailed questions, did offer a denial that he called Hoge.

Hoge decided to end the Maxwell-Rogers debate, at least in the pages of Foreign Affairs. Rogers's chastisement of the council was the last word. Hoge says he believed he had secured Maxwell's agreement. But Maxwell disputes that and believes he was robbed of the chance to defend himself. The second rebuttal he submitted to Hoge was never printed.

It read, in part: "I am not the issue here; Chile, Condor and Kissinger are. It would be helpful if Kissinger himself would comment on the statements I have quoted. Rogers cannot forever provide a shield for his boss to hide behind. . . . The way to clarify the record is to release it in full, not to close off debate first by accusations of mythmaking, now

6

Maxwell says Hoge has been "economical with the truth."

All of which raises the question: Who, alas, is right?

But the last word on that -- and on Chile -- has yet to be written.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company http://www.washingtonpost.com

"The Case of the Missing Letter in Foreign Affairs:
Kissinger, Pinochet and Operation Condor"

By Kenneth Maxwell
Harvard Working Papers on Latin America
December 2004 - DRCLAS Paper No. 04/05-3

Available at: http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/uploads/images/104/maxwellaine_papers.pdf

David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) Harvard University 61
Kirkland St. Cambridge, MA 02138 http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu

washingtonpost.com: A Plot Thickens

Page 1 of 9

washingtonpost.com

# A Plot Thickens

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page D01

The dream seemed to track loosely with Maxwell's reality. He had faced some towering figures of his own. And in a paper to be published that day, Dec. 2, on a Harvard University Web site, he would criticize the credibility of the vaunted Council on Foreign Relations, his former employer and the grande dame of all think tanks.

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## A Lofty Place

2/28/2005

Page 3 of 9

w

A New Assignment

In his spacious third-floor office within the council's ornate digs, packed with his thousands of books and his pair of Fernando Botero watercolors of a prototypical Latino *caudillo*, Maxwell pored over a new book: "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability." The book's release in 2003 marked the 30th anniversary of the overthrow and death of Chilean President Salvador Allende.

Pages of History

2/28/2005

Page 4 of 9

## Countdown to a Coup

2/28/2005

## Kissinger Calling

2/28/2005

Page 6 of 9

Rogers was outraged.

"He was implying that the U.S. was morally responsible for what happened in Chile," Rogers says heatedly in his office. "He bought the myth. And I thought that was unfortunate. I called Will Taft" -- the State Department's legal counsel -- "who is an old friend, and I said, 'Gee, get him off this.' " Taft does not dispute Rogers's account.

2/28/2005

Feuding in Print

Rogers called it "mischievous nonsense" for Maxwell to mix the Letelier car bombing into a discussion of U.S. foreknowledge or complicity in Chile. He characterized as "circumstantial at best" any evidence of U.S. responsibility for the Allende coup. And he rejected that the United States had approved of and helped plan the effort to kidnap Schneider.

Calling a Cease-Fire

2/28/2005

Page 8 of 9

It read, in part: "I am not the issue here; Chile, Condor and Kissinger are. It would be helpful if Kissinger himself would comment on the statements I have quoted. Rogers cannot forever provide a shield for his boss to hide behind. . . . The way to clarify the record is to release it in full, not to close off debate first by accusations of mythmaking, now by accusations of bias."

## Disengagement Policy

Maxwell's May 2004 resignation letter shocked Hoge as well as Richard Haass, the council president, Haass says. James Lindsay, a council vice president and director of studies, was stunned too, and tried to convince Maxwell to stay.

"Is there any way we can solve this problem?" Lindsay recalls asking him. Maxwell told him no, he already had secured a new spot at Harvard.

As a historian, Maxwell told the council, he could not abide the suppression of free debate that he felt had occurred when Hoge refused to print his second response to Rogers.

Hoge quickly hired a new book reviewer to replace Maxwell: Jeremy Adelman, chairman of the history department at Princeton. But Adelman says his e-mail inbox "was just exploding" with warnings from friends and colleagues about what had happened to Maxwell. It was more trouble than Adelman wanted to handle. He resigned after three weeks.

"They've taken a big hit in their reputation," Adelman says of the journal. "Ken Maxwell was a flag bearer for a certain well-informed, thoughtful engagement with Latin American affairs that people across the spectrum respected."

Hoge also faced the criticism of 11 academics from around the nation, all members of the council. Led by Harvard's John Coatsworth, the group wrote Hoge to express their disappointment with Foreign Affairs.

Hoge printed their letter in the September/October 2004 issue. He did not print the last line: "We urge you to find an appropriate way to repair this lapse before it becomes a permanent stain on the reputation of Foreign Affairs."

Hoge says he thought that statement "ridiculous and uncalled for and unfair."

He found another Foreign Affairs book reviewer. This time it was Richard Feinberg, a Latin Americanist from the University of California, San Diego, who is a Clinton-era national security aide well known for his 1972 book "The Triumph of Allende: Chile's Legal Revolution." He would not comment for this article.

## The Final Word

2/28/2005

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'The Flawed Architect': Sizing ...

[LCO]

The New York Times
nytimes.com

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September 26, 2004

# 'The Flawed Architect': Sizing Up Kissinger

By MAX BOOT

Few figures in American history have been as reviled and as admired as Henry Kissinger. At the height of his celebrity in the early 1970's, following the opening to China, detente with the

Soviet Union, Mideast shuttle diplomacy and the end of the Vietnam War, for which he shared a Nobel Peace Prize, he was hailed as "Super K," a lone genius who was reshaping international relations. A few years later, he was being denounced as a war criminal who was personally responsible for atrocities ranging from the Indonesian occupation of East Timor to the Khmer Rouge's genocide in Cambodia.

"The Flawed Architect" is an attempt by the Finnish historian Jussi Hanhimaki to "break through the heavy polemics" that have "tended to mar most previous accounts" by presenting "a balanced view of its subject." His book takes the form of a narrative of Kissinger's eight years as national security adviser and secretary of state (positions he held concurrently from 1973 to 1975).

Though "The Flawed Architect" is clearly written and easy to read, its chronological structure probably represents a conceptual mistake on the author's part. The basic story of Kissinger's tenure has been told many times before -- not only in Kissinger's own beautifully written (if inevitably self-serving) memoirs but also in Walter Isaacson's masterly 1992 biography. Hanhimaki touts his use of recently declassified materials, but his account does not contain much, as far as this reviewer can tell, in the way of significant new information. He would have been better advised to adopt a more thematic organization to examine the various charges that have been leveled against Kissinger.

These can be grouped into the critiques of left and right. The former accuse Kissinger of being too aggressive in fighting the cold war, the latter of not being aggressive enough. As a European academic, Hanhimaki is clearly more interested in a dialogue with leftist critics. He sympathetically examines the reckless charges flung against Kissinger by the likes of William Shawcross, Seymour Hersh and Christopher Hitchens. Though he ultimately dissents from any characterization of Kissinger as a war criminal, he feels compelled to apologize for reaching such an "unfashionable" conclusion.
(Unfashionable where? At the faculty club?)

With evident reluctance, Hanhimaki makes some telling points in Kissinger's defense. He argues, for instance, that the rise of Pol Pot cannot be attributed exclusively to Nixon and Kissinger's incursions into Cambodia; "many other factors, including the role of the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Soviets in Cambodia, need to be considered to fully fathom the killing fields." Nor was Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor predicated on a go-ahead from Kissinger; when the Indonesian strongman Suharto notified Washington of what he was planning to do, he "was not asking for permission, he was giving advanced warning."

But ultimately Hanhimaki's defense of Kissinger rests on a questionable assumption: that American

## THE FLAWED ARCHITECT
### Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy.

By Jussi Hanhimaki.

Illustrated. 554 pp. Oxford University Press. $35.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/books/review/26BOOT01.html?pagewanted=print&p... 9/27/2004

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'The Flawed Architect': Sizing ... Page 2 of 2 [LC]

cold war policy was misguided, and that Kissinger was no more culpable for Washington's "unsavory conduct" than numerous other leaders from Truman to Reagan. It does not seem to occur to Hanhimaki that the policies he criticizes as immoral may have contributed to a very moral outcome: the collapse of the Soviet empire.

This brings us to the conservative critique of Kissinger, which "The Flawed Architect" addresses only in passing. It is, essentially, that Kissinger was too dedicated to peaceful coexistence with Communist regimes. Kissinger's reply is that he did the best he could give the dire circumstances he faced while in office. There is a good deal of merit in this self-defense, but Hanhimaki exposes its inadequacy.

Take the issue of South Vietnam. Kissinger has said that the 1973 Paris peace accords represented the best deal he could get, and if Watergate had not come along, the United States would have honored its commitment to defend South Vietnam. But, as "The Flawed Architect" shows, Kissinger privately told the Chinese and Russians that all he wanted was a "decent interval" before North Vietnam swallowed the South.

Kissinger hoped his careful cultivation of Soviet and Chinese leaders would pay off in greater success in handling regional crises, but this did not turn out to be the case. The Communist bosses had no intention of reining in their third world allies, and their continued aggression gradually undermined Kissinger's credibility. By 1976 he had become an electoral liability for President Ford, who had to fight accusations from both left and right that his secretary of state was pursuing an immoral foreign policy.

Hanhimaki agrees that Kissinger was guilty of "immoral realpolitik." He also supports some of the standard criticisms of Kissinger's "domineering, scheming, at times almost paranoid personality" and his excessive penchant for secrecy. Kissinger's personal failings, in Hanhimaki's view, made it difficult for him to muster domestic support for his policies. Still, Hanhimaki is right to hail Kissinger, for all his flaws, as an outstanding diplomatic tactician. The skill with which he conducted complex negotiations with interlocutors ranging from Anwar el-Sadat to Zhou Enlai has seldom been equaled.

The tragedy of Kissinger's tenure, which Hanhimaki only dimly grasps, is that he was brilliant in coming up with new strategies to achieve his ends but strangely stilted in defining those ends. He could not envision a purpose for all his wheeling and dealing beyond managing the status quo. The former Harvard professor lacked the vision of a former movie actor who was determined to end the cold war and consign Communism to the "ash heap of history." "Reagan doesn't know what he's talking about and he's irresponsible," Kissinger fumed during the 1976 primaries. It turns out it was Kissinger who didn't know what he was talking about.

*Max Boot is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.*

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Kissinger's Shadow Over the Council on Foreign Relations

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# Kissinger's Shadow Over the Council on Foreign Relations

by SCOTT SHERMAN

[from the December 27, 2004 issue]

Last year Kenneth Maxwell, a soft-spoken 63-year-old historian of Latin America, published a review of Peter Kornbluh's *The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability* in the November/December 2003 issue of *Foreign Affairs*, the influential journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. As *The Nation* reported in June [see Sherman, "The Maxwell Affair," June 21], Maxwell's essay enraged two former statesmen with deep connections to the council--Henry Kissinger and his longtime associate, William Rogers. Indeed, Maxwell was soon confiding to close friends, "I have clearly trodden on the tail of a very nasty snake here." On May 13 Maxwell resigned from the council, where for fifteen years he had served as the chief Latin Americanist, and from *Foreign Affairs*, where he was the Western Hemisphere book reviewer, a perch from which he had published more than 300 reviews. What triggered Maxwell's resignation was a smoldering exchange with Rogers in *Foreign Affairs*--an exchange, Maxwell insists, that was abruptly curtailed after Kissinger applied direct and indirect pressure on the editor of the journal, James Hoge. "The Council's current relationship with Mr. Kissinger," Maxwell wrote in his resignation letter to Hoge, "evidently comes at the cost of suppressing debate about his actions as a public figure. This I want no part of."

Now, after months of silence about that suppressed debate, Maxwell has emerged with a 13,000-word essay about the affair, "The Case of the Missing Letter in *Foreign Affairs*." His treatise, which is based on e-mail correspondence and a detailed personal diary he kept throughout the controversy, has been published as a heavily footnoted working paper by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, where Maxwell is currently a senior fellow and visiting professor of history. (The paper can be viewed at the center's website, drclas.fas.harvard.edu.) "The Case of the Missing Letter" is a riveting account of a row that has generated headlines throughout Latin America; it is also an unprecedented X-ray of power politics, cronyism and hubris inside the country's pre-eminent foreign policy think tank. That Maxwell's document should carry the imprimatur of the Rockefeller Center at Harvard is an exquisite coincidence, since David Rockefeller himself was chairman of the council's board from 1970 to 1985.

Maxwell's review of Kornbluh's book, "The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973," was not a fiery polemic but a measured assessment of US intervention in Chile in the early 1970s. Leslie Gelb, who was president of the council from 1993 to 2003, told Maxwell that he read it three times and felt that, politically, it was "straight down the middle." Halfway through the piece, Maxwell criticized the Nixon-era policy-makers--primarily Kissinger--who contributed to the toppling of Chilean president

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20041227&s=sherman

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Salvador Allende. "What is truly remarkable," he wrote, "is the effort...to bring a Latin American democracy down, and the meager efforts since to build democracy back up."

Kissinger, who has been affiliated with the council off and on since 1955, and Rogers, who served three terms on its board of directors, reacted swiftly to an essay that might have otherwise generated little notice on its own. Rogers, who worked with Kissinger at the State Department and is currently vice chair of Kissinger Associates, dispatched a furious letter to *Foreign Affairs*, which appeared in the January/February 2004 issue. "The myth that the United States toppled President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 lives," Rogers wrote. "There is...no smoking gun. Yet the myth persists." Rogers also endeavored to minimize Kissinger's involvement in two highly controversial matters that figure prominently in Kornbluh's book: the murder of Chilean Gen. René Schneider in 1970 and Operation Condor, a state-sponsored terror network set up by General Pinochet that from 1975 to 1977 targeted critics all over the Western Hemisphere and Europe. Among Condor's victims was Orlando Letelier, Pinochet's most prominent opponent in the United States, who was murdered, along with Ronni Moffitt, by a car bomb in Washington, DC, in 1976.

Round one of the exchange ended with a rejoinder by Maxwell in the same issue, in which he expressed incredulity at Rogers's assertions and proceeded to interrogate a very delicate matter: Kissinger's response to Operation Condor in general and the murder of Letelier in particular--a tragedy, Maxwell wrote, that might have been prevented had Kissinger maintained a less protective attitude toward General Pinochet. Closing his reply, Maxwell upped the ante and suggested "a way to clear the air" on Chile: "Some countries have established 'truth commissions' to look into such matters. In the United States, however, the record has been extracted painfully, like rotten teeth." Rogers immediately fired off a second letter, which would appear in the March/April issue, in which he accused Maxwell of "bias," denied that Kissinger bore any responsibility for Condor and ominously declared: "One would hope...that Maxwell's views are understood to be his own and not those of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow." Curiously, Hoge promised Rogers--and not his own book reviewer--the last word in the exchange. (Maxwell writes that in his eleven years at *Foreign Affairs*, not a single angry author was ever accorded the last word that was given to Rogers.)

On February 4 Maxwell delivered to James Hoge a seven-paragraph reply to Rogers's second letter--a reply that effectively rebutted Rogers's accusations and called on Kissinger himself to step forward and "clarify the record" about events in Chile. That document--"the missing letter" of Maxwell's title--never appeared in *Foreign Affairs*. In a June interview with *The Nation*, Maxwell insisted that Kissinger and Rogers pressured Hoge to shut down the exchange, but he declined to elaborate on the specific ways in which that pressure was applied: "They know how to act in these matters, and they bring heavy guns to bear."

Maxwell has now identified those "heavy guns": Peter "Pete" Peterson, chair of the council's board of directors, and Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, honorary vice chair of the council and chair and chief executive officer of the embattled American International Group (AIG), the world's largest commercial insurer, which recently agreed to pay $126 million in penalties to the US government to settle a fraud case. Peterson and Greenberg are, in Maxwell's view, a formidable pair: "Neither is a man to be crossed lightly."

"The Case of the Missing Letter" creates new difficulties for James Hoge, who in June vehemently denied that he had received direct (or indirect) pressure from Kissinger. "Mr. Hoge...denied that Mr. Kissinger had pressured him. He demanded that Mr. Maxwell produce proof of his accusation," Diana Jean Schemo wrote in the *New York Times* on June 16. Earlier, on June 1, Hoge had told *The Nation*, "I never talked to Henry Kissinger about this at all, nor has anybody else told me that Henry had a view one way or the other." A few days later Hoge told David Glenn of *The Chronicle of Higher Education*:

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"I didn't talk to Henry Kissinger, I didn't talk to anybody...these are editor's decisions, which I made. Period." However, Peterson, contradicting the editor, admitted to Glenn that he did indeed phone Hoge in December to convey Kissinger's unhappiness, but he denied that he trespassed on editorial decision-making at *Foreign Affairs*: "I have great respect for Hoge and for the independence of that magazine."

In late January Maxwell, seeking to insure that he would have the opportunity to rebut Rogers's second missive, left a number of messages for Hoge, who was traveling. Hoge got back to him on January 26. Writes Maxwell: "He did not want to discuss the Kissinger-Rogers matter on the phone, he said, and insisted on a personal meeting." That discussion took place on Friday, January 30, in Hoge's book-lined office overlooking East 68th Street. "We were alone and I was conscious of the fact he wanted it this way." Maxwell offers this description of the meeting:

> Hoge explained he had been subjected to great pressure from Henry Kissinger. He said that "Henry will not speak to me or shake my hand." He...told me Peterson had called on Kissinger's behalf. He said he was called and "sworn at for half an hour" by [Maurice] Greenberg.... He said of Kissinger: "Henry has a very dark side," and that Kissinger had sought to interfere before in *Foreign Affairs* during the editorship of his predecessor William ("Bill") Hyland. He said that he did not think that the breach that resulted between Kissinger and Hyland, who were old friends, had "ever been fully repaired." Very much on his mind, it seemed to me, was how far he could go in criticizing Kissinger without having a similar breach.

By the time Maxwell resigned on May 13, "Kissinger was...speaking to Hoge again."

The leadership of the Council on Foreign Relations has long maintained that a "church-state separation" divides the council from *Foreign Affairs*, but Maxwell's account turns that assertion on its head. By choosing to exert his influence through two close friends and business associates--Peter Peterson and Maurice Greenberg--Kissinger, Maxwell writes, "had chosen his messengers well." Both Peterson, as chair, and Greenberg, as honorary vice chair, possess gargantuan influence at the council and maintain an active interest in its affairs. On December 18, at the council's holiday staff party, Maxwell learned from Hoge and Peterson that Greenberg, who was not present, was indignant about his review of *The Pinochet File*. As Maxwell confided to his diary the following morning: "[Greenberg, according to Hoge] claimed KM [Maxwell] accused HK [Kissinger] of 'killing babies'--Jim told him [Greenberg] to read piece!" Maxwell was shaken by the holiday party, for it revealed to him for the first time the full dimensions of the "firestorm Kissinger had initiated."

Maxwell has brought the full range of his scholarly abilities to bear on "The Case of the Missing Letter," and the footnotes painstakingly delineate an interlocking web of connections between Kissinger, Peterson and Greenberg. The Kissinger-Peterson relationship began in the Nixon Administration, when Peterson was international economic adviser and later Secretary of Commerce, and carried over into civilian life: The Peterson-led Blackstone Group, according to its website, maintains a "strategic alliance" with Kissinger Associates to provide "financial advisory services to corporations seeking high-level strategic advice." Kissinger, likewise, is no stranger at Greenberg's AIG: In 1987 Greenberg appointed Kissinger chairman of AIG's international advisory group, where, according to Walter Isaacson's *Kissinger: A Biography*, he assisted the insurance giant with lucrative business deals in Argentina, Peru, Malaysia and South Korea.

In turn, Peterson and Greenberg were excellently positioned to assist Kissinger at the Council on Foreign Relations. Both men have been exceedingly generous to the institution--contributing, Maxwell notes, "more than $34 million between them directly in personal donations and indirectly, via the privately-held Blackstone Group in the case of Peterson, and, in the case of Greenberg, via the Starr

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· Kissinger's Shadow Over the Council on Foreign Relations

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Foundation, of which he is chairman." Signs of Greenberg's largesse are evident at the council's 68th Street headquarters: there is a Greenberg Reception Room, a Greenberg Chair and a Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies.

Greenberg and Peterson also have influence at *Foreign Affairs* magazine. Maxwell notes that both men have contributed to the endowment of the chair that Hoge holds as editor, which is named for...Peter Peterson.

On May 13 Maxwell submitted his letter of resignation to Hoge and to Richard Haass, the president of the council. The next day Hoge replied by e-mail and made this astonishing claim: "Your May 13 letter contains speculation about supposed pressures from Mr. Kissinger. As I have previously told you, Mr. Rogers is the only person involved with whom I have discussed this matter." Repeated efforts by *The Nation* to reach Hoge were unsuccessful: He did not return phone calls. Likewise, Kissinger, Peterson, Greenberg and Haass all declined to discuss Maxwell's allegations. Only William Rogers made himself available. Asked if Kissinger applied direct pressure on Hoge--or indirect pressure through Peterson and Greenberg--Rogers replied: "Not that I know of. I'm sure not. He would never be so tactless. I believe that he told me that he washed his hands of the whole thing."

Maxwell believes that an "official line" on the affair was soon hammered out by Hoge and Haass. At an all-staff meeting on June 15, in front of 200 people, Haass declared that the press accounts about Maxwell's departure were false; that Hoge, an "extraordinary editor," had made an "editorial judgment" to stop the exchange; and that a "church-state separation" existed between the council and *Foreign Affairs*. Less than an hour before the meeting, Maxwell was confidentially warned that Haass planned to address the controversy. Speaking in his own defense at the meeting, Maxwell, who left the council on July 1, told the staff, "I have had fifteen very happy years at the council. It seems obvious that I would not have resigned at this stage of my career unless I had very good reasons for doing so."

The departure of Maxwell, *The Nation* wrote in June, "raises questions about intellectual freedom at the council; about editorial independence at *Foreign Affairs*...and about Kissinger's and Rogers's influence" on the institution. Haass, who became president in 2003, has thus far neglected his responsibility to address these matters publicly. But privately he seems to possess a keen understanding of the emotionally charged issues that continue to swirl around Kissinger's Chile policy in the early 1970s. The morning after the holiday party, December 19, 2003, Maxwell ran into Haass at 8 am, when both men were arriving for work. As Maxwell soon confided to his diary: "Haass said: 'this is [an] issue that still gets under everyone's skin 30 years later!'"

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DEC 08 2003

Jesee Incao

From: William_Rogers@aporter.com
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 12:26 PM
To: jincao@kmaglobal.com
Subject: Message for Dr. Kissinger

Re: Council on Foreign Relations / Foreign Affairs

I promised you the names of top libel lawyers in New York. Here they
are:

Martin London, Partner, Paul Weiss 212 373 3000

John J. Walsh, Senior Counsel, Carter Ledyard 212 732 3200.

This communication may contain information that is legally privileged, confidential or exempt from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, please note that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Anyone who receives this message in error should notify the sender immediately by telephone or by return e-mail and delete it from his or her computer.

William Rogers
Arnold & Porter
555 Twelfth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20004-1202

William_Rogers@aporter.com

Telephone: 202-942-5915
Fax: 202-942-5999

For more information about Arnold & Porter, click here:

http://www.arnoldporter.com

Jessee Incao

OCT 21 2003

From: William_Rogers@aporter.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 3:14 PM
To: jincao@kmaglobal.com
Subject: Kornbluh -- Foreign Affairs

Jim Hoge called. He had seen my view of Kornbluh and asked me to write a reponse to the Maxwell piece in the current Foreign Affairs.

PINOCHET'S COUP
MYTHMAKING AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

[A review of Peter Kornbluh, "The Pinochet File, A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability", New Press, New York, N.Y. (2003) by William D. Rogers, Former Under Secretary of State, Senior Partner [Ret.], Arnold & Porter, Vice Chair, Kissinger Associates.]

When Colin Powell was asked at a recent student seminar about Nixon's policy toward Chile in the early 1970's, he responded that "It is not part of American history that we are proud of." Thus did the present Republican endorse the myth that this country was responsible for the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 and for the human rights offenses of the successor Pinochet government. The irony was inescapable, not least because the accusation is false.

The myth has had a long and vigorous life, beginning within days of the Chilean military coup on September 11, 1973, that installed General Gustavo Pinochet. For three decades since, it has been an article of faith for the Left in Europe, the US and in Latin America. The legend of American culpability in Chile is Verse 1 in the liturgy of anti-Americanism in Latin America. A cottage industry of academics and writers here have perpetuated it. And it has done untold damage to this country's democratic image in the Hemisphere.

* * *

Peter Kornbluh's, "The Pinochet File", is the latest contribution to the library of Chile studies. It is not the most lurid. More excited critics claim that senior echelons of American foreign policy establishment are international criminals for what they did in Chile. Kornbluh concludes that the Chilean military was acting on its own when it overthrew Allende. The United States did not "participate" in the coup; rather, in his

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view, America subsidized Allende's opponents, "destabilized" Chile and thus engineered
what he calls a "coup climate".

Kornbluh focuses on the American side of the story and, more particularly, on the
official US paper trail. He reprints a selection of memos and cables, largely those
exchanged between the CIA's station in Santiago and its headquarters in Langley.
Kornbluh presents these as new and sensational. In fact, he has selected 107 from some
14,000 such heavily redacted U.S. documents the State Department put on its Chile
Archive website relating to U.S. policy in Chile for 1968 to 1991.

The problem, however, is not the documents. It is Kornbluh's commentary from
which he derives the accusation of indirect, "climate-changing" responsibility for the
1973 regime change.

The sample selected paints a picture of the what a handful of CIA agents in
Santiago were doing with themselves some thirty years ago, and the attenuated
understanding that their lords and masters in Washington had of their derring-do. It is not
an encouraging story of Agency competence in covert operations. But Kornbluh
embroiders the documentary record. His interpretive commentary does not exactly
breathe objectivity and balance. It makes up in drama what it lacks in precision.
Maintaining secrecy of CIA covert operations becomes in his eyes an effort to "obfuscate
U.S. intervention." News and information distributed by the media subsidized by the
CIA is not news; it is "covert black propaganda" Most tellingly, $6 million secretly
provided over three years by the US to the independent political parties and media in
Chile becomes "massive support" for Allende's opposition.

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Kornbluh also inflates the newsworthy nature of the documents. In fact, there is not much new here. That Nixon did not welcome Allende's inauguration as Chile's President in October 1970 has been no secret for thirty years. Indeed, the Nixon policy on Chile was thoroughly aired by the Democrat-dominated Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee headed by Frank Church while the Republicans held the White House. Its reports have been in the public domain for over a quarter of a century.

* * *

But the important failing is not what is included. It is what is left out. Chapter 3, dealing with the period of the Allende presidency is the hinge. US responsibility for Pinochet's crimes turns on what happened between Allende's inauguration in 1970 and the coup by the Chilean army three years later. But Kornbluh's Chapter 3 is all American text -- and no Chilean context.

There is no effort, for openers, to see Chile in a global framework. The Cold War was at its height thirty years ago. Castro was firmly in place, and had, with substantial Soviet moral and financial support, laughed off U.S. efforts to change his regime, or even to contain it within Cuba. The consolidation of a brotherly Marxist government on the southern flank of Latin America was not an irrelevant geopolitical consideration.

Kornbluh says nothing of this.

Nor is there any consideration of the other foreign crises absorbing the time and attention of the senior U.S. officials. Reading Kornbluh, the reader might be forgiven the impression from the Kornbluh account that Chile was the only thing that mattered to the senior echelons of government in Washington.

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But most importantly, there is not a word in the crucial chapter 3 of the Chilean side of the story. Kornbluh, and the other critics, do not see the people and leaders of Chile as actors in their own national drama. For the mythmakers, Chile is not the subject, it is the object, a kind of passive, inert target of external forces. Chile's fate is determined in Washington, not Santiago. One searches in vain for any indication that Chileans bore responsibility for their own history.

This is not because the realities on the ground are absent from the official U.S. documents in the Chile Archive on which the book is based. The now declassified reports from the US Embassy tell the fateful story of 1970-1973 quite well. Allende took office at the head of a mixed band of Marxists and Socialists. They came quickly to demonstrate that internecine conflict among the factions of the Left was no Moscow monopoly. He began in 1970 with crowd-pleasing, populist measures, nationalizing the foreign owned copper industry, mandating sharp wage increases and price restraints and triggering a consumption binge which, within a few months, ate up Chile's seed corn of capital. Inflation took over. Imports and consumption collapsed. Unemployment, destitution and anger followed quickly.

Thus, within a year, as a January 28, 1972 CIA Office of National Estimates -- included in the Chile Archive but not in his book -- reported, "the honeymoon is over."

"The opposition is now fighting back more effectively, much of the public is disgruntled over both political and bread-and-butter issues; the military are becoming aware of a breakdown in public order. These problems exacerbate divisions among Allende's supporters." By 1973 the economy was "screaming", as Nixon three years earlier had told Richard Helms, CIA chief, he wanted it to. But not because of Nixon or the CIA.

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The reason for the collapse was Allende's economic and political program. The Allende government blamed the opposition and turned on it. Newspapers which did not support the regime found themselves without financing, blackballed for government advertising -- the most important source of advertising revenue in Chile at the time -- and subject to backbreaking taxes and fees. The Christian Democrats, the major opposition party, was harassed and threatened. The very electoral system by which Allende had gained office was crumbling. The government, by late 1973, was disastrously on its way to destroying both Chile's democracy and its economy.

And itself. A former Chilean Communist and an admirer of Allende personally, Roberto Ampuero, (Washington Post Outlook, Sunday September 7, 2003) is the latest Chilean to address the real reasons for Allende's fall. For him the Chilean left bears the lion's share of responsibility. It had "cast aside our democratic system in order to try to replace it with a system which, by any reasonable measure, had already failed in Eastern Europe, Asia and in Fidel Castro's Cuba." The Left had "declared Chilean democracy defunct." It was "proposing the Leninist demolition of the 'bourgeois' state and its replacement by a 'proletarian' one, either by peaceful means or through armed struggle."
And in the process, the Left thus "deprived the UP [Allende's coalition] of the majority support it required to approve and consolidate change in a democratic way." This was an "anti-Allende conspiracy" of "Leftist leaders." For Ampuero, "we all killed Allende."

There is not a word of this in Kornblu's account.

Nor is there anything about the disastrous three-week sojourn by Fidel Castro in Chile early in Allende's term, who was, even in the eyes of a Marxist like Ampuero,

"as inopportune as he was interventionist. Heedless of the political damage he was causing the Popular Unity

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government, Castro traveled through Chile boasting of the
most radical measures his own regime had taken, attacking
parliamentary democracy, teaching how to make Marxist
revolution, and generally causing the hair of the Chilean
right, the military, and the U.S. government to stand on
end."

Castro refused to leave. By staying, he demonstrated to Chileans and the world that the program the radical Left was urging on Allende would eventually Cubanize Chile. The point was not lost on the Christian Democrats, the press -- or the Chilean army. (Nor, in view of the increasingly repression in Cuba since then, should it be lost on contemporary analysts.)

How, in this light, should one objectively calibrate the US government's
responsibility for the coup? Just how important was the United States?

From the time Allende was inaugurated in October of 1973 until his overthrow three years later, the U.S. anti-Allende effort, as Kornbluh admits, pretty much boiled down to $6 million of subsidies to the press and the opposition parties, restraints on international bank lending to Chile (though the World Bank, painfully aware of that Allende had already defaulted on Chile's outstanding international debt, needed no persuading), and an American effort (unsuccessful, as it turned out) to block the restructuring of Chile's international debt. This is the inventory of what the United States did for the three years of the Allende administration. Kornbluh repeats the mantra of the critics. The United States he says, by these limited measures, was able to "destabilize" Chile.

But can such modest measures -- whatever their justification, and many would argue that any American President would have done much the same to keep the opposition parties and press alive-- be said to be a but-for explanation for Allende's fall?

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The accumulated experience with other U.S.-regime-changing strategies suggests otherwise (though here again the Kornbluh account is bare of such a perspective).

Comparatively, what the US did in Chile was a pinprick. The United States, often in cooperation with other nations through the United Nations or the OAS, has mounted truly "massive" efforts -- Kornbluh's word for the Chilean program -- to damage the economies of regimes it dislikes. It has hit Libya, Cuba, Iran, Iraq and Vietnam with measures far more drastic than the anti-Allende steps -- trade embargoes, assassination, invasions, bombings and full-throated propaganda. None were employed in Chile.

And it has seen these measures fail to dislodge the target. Qaddafi survives.

Castro remains in power. (Indeed, the unilateral US embargo has helped Castro maintain his grip, thus demonstrating that overt opposition by the United States can ricochet and actually strengthen a radical political leader in Latin America). The Ayatohlahs remain in power in Iran. It took the U.S. two wars to remove Saddam Hussein. The Vietnamese Communists are still in Saigon.

All these regime-change efforts failed. Kornbluh says Chile was a US success.

One can only conclude that, if so, the Allende regime was unusually fragile, if it fell under circumstances measurably less threatening than those which a host of other leaders detested by the U.S. have resisted.

The Church Committee understood the difference. Its conclusion in 1975:

"The United States cut off economic aid, denied credits, and made efforts -- partially successful -- to enlist the cooperation of international financial institutions and private firms in tightening the economic 'squeeze' on Chile. That international 'squeeze' intensified the effect of the economic measures taken by the opposition groups in Chile, particularly the crippling strikes in the mining and transportation sectors."

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Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973 at 28 (1973).

But, at bottom, according to Church: "There is no real evidence of direct U.S. assistance to coup, despite frequent allegations of such aid.""

* * *

The 1970 to 1973 evidence that the United States "destabilized" Chile is not there.
So, in his search for American responsibility for the 1973 coup, Kornbluh, like other
Chile addicts, turns back to pre-inauguration 1970.

The critical moment that year was the killing of General Renee Schneider, the Chilean Army Chief of Staff, by a handful of right-wing Chilean officers. This is the traditional Exhibit 1 for the advocates of US responsibility. In essence, on September 15, 1970, Nixon ordered the State Department and the U.S. Embassy, in one track, and the CIA, in a separate track, to block Allende's inauguration. When it became clear that the Chilean legislature could not be persuaded to use its parliamentary power to do so, the CIA agents in Santiago fixed on a military coup. But the Chilean army was unwilling to move as long as Schneider, a committed constitutionalist, remained. Chilean Army officers with whom covert CIA agents had contact tried to kidnap Schneider a few days before the inauguration ceremony. They bungled the effort. Schneider was killed. The critics invoke this as proof that the United States was implicated in the coup against Allende three years later.

But, like the others, Kornbluh fails to mention that this 1970 incident was also investigated by the Church Committee. Church's inquiry was conducted only five years after the event. His committee talked to living witnesses. (Almost all are gone and so were unavailable to Kornbluh). In its report, it found damning evidence that the United

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States was responsible for the deaths of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Diem in South Vietnam and Trujillo in the Dominion Republic and that Washington had tried its best to do Castro in. But as to Schneider it said:

"Although the CIA continued to support coup plotters up to Schneider's shooting, the record indicates that the CIA had withdrawn support of the group which carried out the actual kidnap attempt on October 22, which resulted in Schneider's death. Further it does not appear that any of the equipment supplied by the CIA was used in the kidnapping. There is no evidence of a plan to kill Schneider or that the United States officials specifically anticipated that Schneider would be shot during the abduction."

Senate Report No. 94-465. "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders at 4 (1975).

The Church conclusion is supported by the evidence. In fact, although the CIA agents in Santiago had established contact with the army dissidents in Chile following the September 15 Nixon order to stop the Allende inauguration, Nixon's National Security Assistant Henry Kissinger pulled the United States out of the coup plotting a month later. On October 15, 1970, he met with the CIA's Chile point man for a report on the anti-Allende project. Hearing the Agency's view that a coup had no serious chance of success, he ordered the CIA to stand down. Kissinger reported to Nixon that he had pulled the US out of the Chilean coup business. "I turned it off," he told the President. Nixon accepted his decision. So far as the record, including the Chile Archives from which Kornbluh extracts his account, indicates, the White House was unaware of what happened thereafter in Santiago until it got news of the bungled kidnapping attempt by the Chilean army faction.

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The Schneider killing occurred in spite of, not because of, the United States.

Church said, as to the Kissinger order to the CIA that the coup attempt be turned off:

"The decision to 'de-fuse' General Viaux was passed to a Viaux associate on October 17. The Associate responded that it did not matter because they had decided to proceed with the coup in any case."

Senate Report No. 94-465. Ibid at 243.

In point of fact, Chile did not loom large on the White House radar screen just then. September-October of 1973 was a time of raging crises elsewhere. Nixon and Kissinger were absorbed with an invasion of Lebanon by Syria, the appearance of Soviet troops in Egypt, the abduction of two commercial aircraft by Black September and a consequent massive hostage taking, and the emergence of a Soviet submarine base in Cuba. That the attention of senior policymakers was not focussed on the comings and goings a few agents in a compartmented covert operation in Chile, that the White House was ignorant of the contacts with Chilean coup plotters, that Nixon and Kissinger knew nothing of the madcap delivery by the CIA of four machine guns to the Chilean army group - all this is clear from the historic record.

* * *

The critics, Kornbluh included, also try to make something of the American documents from the Pinochet era which followed the 1973 coup. They imply Washington responsibility for it from what happened thereafter. In this, the critics come close to arguing that United States blame for "destabilizing" Allende is implied by the fact that it did not "destabilize" Allende's successor.

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In fact, Pinochet accepted leadership of the coup-minded army faction only a few
days before the actual event; he had had no serious relationship with the United States.
He was not Washington's puppet.

Kornbluh and the other myth-makers highlight a meeting then Secretary of State Kissinger had with Pinochet three years after the coup, in June of 1976, as showing a bit too much sympathy for the Chilean regime. As to this, I can testify directly. I was there. I took the notes of the meeting from which the critics' argument is derived. They interpret the conversation as sympathetic. Kissinger assured Pinochet that he was not trying overthrow Chile -- usually a precondition to diplomatic intercourse between two sovereign nations. Kissinger went on to say, however, that the human rights behavior of Chile was doing grave harm to its relationship with the United States. He made clear to Pinochet that the Chilean government could not look to him, Henry Kissinger, to save them from the consequences of their acts. If they kept it up, there could be no normal relations with the United States.

Pinochet did not take this at all well. His reaction was frigid. He got the message.
He did not like it.

Furthermore, within hours Kissinger reinforced the message with a highly
publicized statement on human rights to the foreign ministers of the Hemisphere at the
General Assembly of the Organization of American States then meeting in Santiago.
After emphasizing the fundamental democratic principle of respect for human rights and
individual freedoms, he singled out Chile as the Hemisphere's prime offender. The U.S.
Congress, he pointed out, had already mandated a limit on U.S. aid to Chile. The

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condition of human rights "as assessed by the OAS commission has impaired our
relationship with Chile and will continue to do so...."

This was strong and pointed. Pinochet could not have failed to get the point. The Kissinger appearance in Santiago in mid-1976 was no contribution to the "consolidation" of Pinochet's regime, as Kornbluh claims. Quite to the contrary.

* * *

The logical implication of US responsibility for the 1973 coup, as cultivated by Kornbluh and others, is that the United States is guilty of the crimes committed by the Pinochet government, since that government would never have existed but for Washington. That accusation has moved out of the academy and into the courts. Suits have been filed in the D.C. District Court against the United States (and Kissinger) by Schneider's son, by the widow of an American killed by Chilean military in the overthrow and by a number of victims of the Pinochet regime. Each seeks reparations from the United States Government.

Each ignores the reality of American policy in the region following the Chilean coup. The United States did not endorse and embrace the human rights violations in the Southern Cone in the mid 1970's. It did all in its power to stop them.

By 1974 and 1975 the evidence of Chilean military conduct begun to accumulate. In 1975, a no less vicious military government took over in Argentina, from the hapless widow of Juan Person, easily Allende's peer in the failed-state league. The U.S. response was to put human rights at the top of the Latin American policy agenda.

Intelligence from the field came to hand in Washington to the effect that the two countries, along with Paraguay and Uruguay, were cooperating to target their respective

DC_1091258_1.DOC

12

opponents abroad in what came to be known as Operation Condor. On August 23, 1976, Kissinger sent a personal order to his Ambassadors in all four capitals ordering each to meet with his chief of state to say that Condor was intolerable and would ruin any hope of normal relations with, or foreign assistance from, the United States. This became bedrock policy of the State Department. The four countries were already on notice through Kissinger's address in June to the OAS. For the rest of the Ford Administration, relations with the four Condor countries were frigid, as I, as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, can testify. And so they remained for the rest of the Ford Administration -- Pinochet, even in spite of the vigorous human rights efforts of the Carter Administration that followed.

* * *

There may be useful lessons for present policymakers in the history of U.S.-Chilean relations in the decades of the 1970's and 1980. If so, Kornbluh, the other Chile academics and the lawyers for the Chilean claimants, draw the wrong ones.

The lesson is not that the CIA could change a regime elsewhere with a few million dollars. The lesson is not that a history-altering event in another country is a function of what Washington wants, or that the unique circumstances of the moment, the place, the economics and the politics of that other country are irrelevant and may be ignored by American decisionmakers. The lesson is not that the United States controls.

These are dangerous myths, for this nation and for all others too. For the United States, they suggest that America's undoubted power can be bent to accomplish more in other countries than in fact it can. For others abroad, these myths are but a step to either

DC_1091258_1.DOC

13

irresponsibility or passivity, the consequence of a sense that whatever comes, the United
States will decide.

The full Chilean story -- the context as well as the text -- should instead be read
for lessons about regime change, about the decisive influence, not of foreign power, but
of domestic circumstance, and of the difficulty of knowing precisely where that local
circumstance will lead in the future. Power invoked can go awry. Predictions how others
will behave can be wide of the mark, as recent events in the Middle East have shown. In
Chile in 1920, the United States toyed with regime change in 1970, then changed its mind
because the Chilean Army refused, ordered the effort stopped, and turned to other things -
- only to discover to its surprise that Chileans had pressed forward on their own. The
consequences where precisely opposite to what Washington had sought - Allende's
presidency.

He was ousted by the Chilean Army three years later, though this time the US effort was
far less vigorous than they had been in 1970. The reason Allende fell was not the $6
million of U.S. subsidy to the political parties and the press but the fact that the Chilean
government had so mismanaged the economy and gone so far toward subverting the
democratic institutions of the country as to vaporize the domestic support Allende had
enjoyed when he was installed three years earlier.

In short, Chile should remind, and other historic efforts in Libya, Cuba, and
elsewhere confirm, that regime change is a leap in the dark. It can fail. And even when it
succeeds, the iron law of unanticipated consequences takes over.

DC_1091258_1.DOC

14

Re: Draft Letter to the Wash Post Editor

The Editor
The Washington Post
Washington, D.C.

Dear Sir:

The Sunday Outlook article, "An Assassination, A Failure to Act, A Painful Parallel" by John Denges and Peter Kornbluh describes an episode of diplomatic history in late 1976 which I, as Secretary of State at the time, find impossible to recognize. It is a mélange of half-fact inflated by unsubstantiated assumptions. The article is generous enough toward me. Its criticisms are directed at others: that the CIA blundered. that four of our Ambassadors refused to carry out my explicit instruction on human rights in Latin America and that Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlaudeman contributed to the assassination of Orlando Letelier when he "rescinded Kissinger's instruction entirely." None of these conclusions is supported by the facts as I know them.

The subject of the article is the appalling record of human rights violations committed by the military and intelligence services of Chile, Argentina and other countries in the Southern Cone of the Hemisphere in the last half of 1976 in their efforts to stop the terrorism then sweeping across that region.

On occasion, the countries worked in dark coordination with each other to track down and eliminate political opposition beyond their own borders in what was code-named Operation Condor. On occasion their intelligence services operated alone, as in the case (vice the article) of Letelier's killing by Chilean agents in Washington in late September of that year.

As to the first charge, I know of no failure of our intelligence. The record, as I read it and recall, does not suggest that the CIA was lax in any way in bringing the matter to my attention.

The authors say, rightly, that "Quickly, Kissinger moved to head off the killings" when information on Condor came to hand, and refer to my instructions "to warn the countries that Washington was aware of the conspiracy and would impose economic sanctions if it continued. (These instructions went out to our Embassies in the Southern Cone on August 23; what the authors fail to note was that our strong human rights policy had already been announced publicly through three addresses which I made to the Generals Assembly of the OAS in Santiago the month before, stressing the fundamental importance of human rights to democratic government in the region and to good relations with the United States, and that I had said the same thing privately to Chilean dictator Pinochet). But the authors claim -- solely because they seem not to have found any evidence in the recently released partial record of State Department documents, that none of the four

Ambassadors so instructed carried out my instructions, as a result of which inaction the killings continued.

They have overlooked or failed to cite three cables recently released by State from our Ambassador in Argentina, in which he reports his extensive meetings with both the President and the Foreign Minister of that country during which he made clear that wholesale human rights violations were unacceptable to the United States even in response to vicious terrorism, that we wished to see the terrorism afflicting that country ended quickly but that it must be done within the law. Ambassador Hill in Argentina carried out my instructions to the letter.

As to Chile, I know of nothing to sustain the conclusion that our embassy failed to "deliver any warning about Condor." The fact that the State Department has not released any cable reflecting a similar demarche in Santiago is no ground for contending that Ambassador Popper failed in his duty. This is no way to write a first draft of history. Our policy was clear to the Chileans. My June OAS address on human rights had made its mark in Santiago. It is impossible for me to believe that our Embassy failed to follow up on the warning. It was not often that my explicit instructions as Secretary of State were ignored.

Finally, the article claims that Assistant Secretary of State Shlaudeman "rescinded Kissinger's instruction entirely" by a cable he sent from Central

America to the State Department on September 20. The notion that an
Assistant Secretary would overrule a standing order of the Secretary is not
credible. I know of no support for the charge in this instance. The authors
hint darkly that Shlaudeman's action, which was allegedly directed at my
Condor instructions, had some link to Letelier's killing in Washington.
Letelier was killed not by a multilateral Condor action. It was entirely
Chilean. Shlaudeman's cable was irrelevant to Letelier plot. The bomb that
killed Letelier had already been strapped to the underside of his car by the
Chilean agent and was ready for detonation when Shlaudeman wrote. His
message had nothing to do with Letelier's murder. To suggest otherwise is
not only captious. It is profoundly unjust to one of the most distinguished
Foreign Service officers of our era.

Sincerely yours,

FROM BILL ROGERS:

Re: Here is what I was putting together as a draft of a letter from me to the editor of the Washington Post. I will come up with another version more suitable for your signature.

Dear Sir:

I refer to the Sunday Outlook article by John Denges and Peter Kornbluh, "An Assassination, A Failure to Act, A Painful Parallel". I do so

As Under Secretary of State at the time (and business associates of Henry Kissinger since), I must say that comparing the September 1976 Letelier murder in Washington by the Chilean military to September 11 of 2001 is a real stretch.

True enough; the United States learned in mid-1976 that the Latin American military governments of the day had joined in Operation Condor to track and eliminate their terrorists. But there is not a scrap of evidence hinting that the United States was targeted.

The authors rightly note that Secretary of State Kissinger moved quickly to stop the killing. They point out that he instructed the US Ambassadors in Chile and Argentina on August 23 to warn their hosts that human rights violations could have no legitimate role in their anti-terrorism efforts and would lead to economic sanctions by the US. The article fails, however, to mention that two months earlier in June of that year the Secretary delivered

three remarkably candid addresses to the assembled foreign ministers of the
Hemisphere on the fundamental importance of human rights to democracy
in the Hemisphere, and that he said much the same thing to President
Pinochet of Chile in his private meeting in which he warned the dictator that
he would report to the OAS that "the human rights issue has impaired
relations between the US. and Chile." and requested that Chile "let us know
the measures you are taking in the human rights field.. [in order to ] retain
the possibility of aid." Stern stuff, indeed. Chile could not have failed to get
the message.

The authors say that the Ambassadors failed to carry out Kissinger's
instructions: "As far as can be ascertained from available documents and
interviews, none of the ambassadors delivered any warning about Condor,"
This ignores a series of messages from US. Ambassador Hill within weeks
after the August 23 instructions reporting his stern warnings to both the
President and Foreign Minister of Argentina about the Condor human rights
violations and the serious damage to US. relations. Secretary Kissinger's
instructions were carried out to the letter in Buenos Aires; Santiago was
already on notice as a result of Kissinger's blunt public OAS addresses and
his private message to Pinochet.

Finally, the article claims that Assistant Secretary of State Shlaudeman
"rescinded Kissinger's instruction [the August 23 cable] entirely." on
September 20. The notion that an Assistant Secretary would overrule Henry
Kissinger is risible to anyone who served in the State Department during that

era.. But, more importantly, what Shlaudeman's cable of September 20 is
doing in an article about Letelier's assassination is not very clear. The bomb
that killed Letelier was already strapped to the underside of his car when
Shlaudeman wrote.. Shlaudeman's message of September 10, however one
reads it, had nothing to do with Letelier's murder. To suggest otherwise is
captious and unjust to a distinguished Foreign Service Officer.

washingtonpost.com: An Assassination, A Failure to Act, A Painful Parallel

[LC]

washingtonpost.com

# An Assassination, A Failure to Act, A Painful Parallel

By John Dinges and Peter Kornbluh

Sunday, September 22, 2002; Page B01

Could it have been prevented? That's the key question as a special congressional committee investigates evidence of ignored warnings, intelligence lapses and bureaucratic miscommunication that compromised America's ability to detect al Qaeda's preparations for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

That same question has haunted the families of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt for the past 26 years. On Sept. 21, 1976, as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, Letelier, a former Chilean foreign minister and leading critic of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military regime, and Moffitt, his 26-year-old American aide, were killed by a car bomb planted by agents of the Chilean secret police. Until last Sept. 11, their assassination was considered by some to be the most egregious act of international terrorism ever committed in the nation's capital.

Now we have obtained a series of State Department and CIA records that cast a disturbing new light on the Letelier assassination, revealing that the United States had extensive awareness of a secret assassination operation and suggesting that U.S. officials called off actions that might have stopped it.

Letelier and Moffitt were the most famous victims of Operation Condor, a covert program to murder political opponents that was carried out by a network of six South American secret police agencies -- from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. For the past 20 years, an FBI field report filed after the killings has been the only known U.S. government document on Condor, leaving the impression that U.S. officials uncovered evidence of these operations only after the murders took place.

Newly obtained materials, however, show that almost four months before the Letelier bombing, State Department officials became concerned that the six military regimes in Latin America had organized an "international 'Murder Inc.'" aimed at eliminating leftist political exiles. In late July 1976, the CIA confirmed to State Department officers that these South American military governments, led by Pinochet, had initiated such an effort, code-named Operation Condor. In early August, then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger was informed by his top aide for Latin America, Harry Shlaudeman, that the South American military regimes were planning to use Condor "to find and kill terrorists . . . in their own countries and in Europe."

Quickly, Kissinger moved to head off the killings. He instructed U.S. ambassadors to warn the countries that Washington was aware of planned Condor assassinations and they were of "deep concern" to the United States. Yet for a month, none of the ambassadors carried out that order, according to the available documents. Then, one day before the car bombing in the heart of Washington's embassy district, Shlaudeman rescinded Kissinger's instructions.

"We were remiss," Shlaudeman's chief deputy, Hewson Ryan, recalled in a recently discovered oral history recorded in 1988, a few years before his death, by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976," he said. "Whether we might have prevented this, I don't know. But we didn't."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47356-2002Sep21?language=printer

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Page 2 of 4

The Pinochet regime created Operation Condor in November 1975. CIA documents acknowledge an awareness of its existence in March 1976, describing it in favorable terms as a "cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion."

At the same time, a spate of political killings began in Argentina: In April 1976, Edgardo Enriquez, the exiled leader of a Chilean radical group, was detained and later disappeared; in May, two exiled Uruguayan congressmen were murdered; on June 4, a former president of Bolivia, Juan Jose Torres, who was living in Buenos Aires, was found slain.

CIA and State Department cables, recently released under the Freedom of Information Act and in Argentina, reported that Chilean and Uruguayan intelligence officials were operating inside Argentina, conducting detentions, interrogations and torture. On June 4, over Kissinger's signature, a query went out to the Southern Cone embassies asking for any "evidence to support or deny allegations of international arrangements among governments to carry out such assassinations or executions." The U.S. embassy in Santiago responded that it had no evidence of formal collaboration but said "we believe these arrangements are possible, and that it is also possible Chilean agents have been involved in killings abroad, possibly in cooperation with foreign governments."

By early June, as the newly obtained documents make clear, the CIA had concrete intelligence confirming a scheme to commit assassinations as far away as France and Portugal. Yet the CIA waited almost two months to inform State Department officials. In a July 30 briefing on "disturbing developments in [Condor's] operational attitudes," an agency official reported that Chile and the other Condor nations were "identifying, locating, and 'hitting' guerrilla leaders" wherever they could be found.

This information was conveyed to Kissinger in a 14-page report a few days later. The report, classified "Secret" and titled "The 'Third World War' and South America," was found among 4,700 documents on Argentina declassified last month. In the report, Shlaudeman informed Kissinger that through the newly formed Operation Condor, the Southern Cone military regimes were "joining forces to eradicate 'subversion,' a word that increasingly translates into nonviolent dissent from the left and center left."

What to do? Too much U.S. pressure on Chile and the other Condor countries might lead them to unite "into formation of a political bloc," less responsive to U.S. influence, Shlaudeman warned. But the United States had an image problem. "Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys. We are especially identified with Chile," Shlaudeman noted. "It cannot do us any good."

Shlaudeman's report to Kissinger was dated Aug. 3, 1976. About that time, he and other U.S. officials unwittingly received an important clue that the plot to kill Letelier was already underway. Pinochet's secret police had sent two agents to Asuncion, Paraguay, to obtain false passports and visas for a trip to the United States. U.S. officials were told the agents' mission was to travel to Washington to meet with CIA deputy director Vernon Walters and spy on Chilean dissidents.

Ambassador George Landau issued the visas but photocopied the passports -- which included photographs of the two agents -- and pouched them to the CIA on July 28; the CIA forwarded them to Shlaudeman's office on Aug. 6. Walters, told of the agents' claim that they were going to meet with him, replied that he knew nothing of these two agents, bolstering suspicions by Landau and Shlaudeman about the agents' true mission in the United States.

"If there is still time, and if there is a possibility of turning off this harebrained scheme," Shlaudeman stated in an urgent cable, "you are authorized . . . to urge that the Chileans be persuaded not repeat not to travel." By that time, however, the two agents had abandoned their effort to travel on the Paraguayan

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[LC]

passports. Subsequently, using false Chilean passports, the same two agents flew to Washington to plant the bomb that would kill Letelier and Moffitt.

Meanwhile, without connecting the activity in Paraguay to the Condor information, Shlaudeman and his deputies, Ryan and William Luers, worked on a cable warning the Southern Cone regimes to stop any planned assassinations. Some "20 drafts" were written, Luers remembers. A top Kissinger aide, Philip Habib, served as liaison with the CIA to obtain its support for the démarche.

On Aug. 23, Kissinger sent a Roger Channel (urgent consideration, very limited distribution) cable -- "Subject: Operation Condor" -- to U.S. ambassadors in all Condor nations. "You are aware of a series of CIA reports on 'Operation Condor,' " the cable began. The cable instructed the U.S. ambassadors in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay to approach "the highest appropriate official, preferably the chief of state" and issue a carefully worded démarche along the following lines: The United States is aware of "information exchange and coordination . . . with regard to subversive activities. This we consider useful. There are in addition, however, rumors that this cooperation may extend beyond information exchange to include plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad. While we cannot substantiate the assassination rumors, we feel impelled to bring to your attention our deep concern. If these rumors were to have any shred of truth, they would create a most serious moral and political problem."

Chile was known to be Condor's command center of these plots. Therefore, Kissinger's cable stressed the diplomatic démarche to Pinochet. Kissinger instructed the ambassador to Chile, David Popper, to "discuss [with CIA station chief Stewart Burton] the possibility of a parallel approach by him" to his counterpart in the Chilean secret police, DINA.

Popper, Burton and Deputy Chief of Mission Thomas Boyatt met and came up with an alternative course of action. On Aug. 24, Popper cabled the State Department: "In my judgment, given Pinochet's sensitivity regard- ing pressures by the [U.S. government], he might well take as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination plots."

Instead, Popper's cable recommended that the CIA station chief meet with DINA's head, Col. Manuel Contreras. "Has department received any word that would indicate that assassination activities are imminent?" Popper asked, unaware that Contreras had already set the Letelier plot in motion. His cable concluded, "please advise."

On Aug. 27, at the weekly meeting of CIA and State officials on Latin America, Shlaudeman declared that approaching Pinochet "would be futile." But, despite Popper's urgency, over the next four weeks no additional instructions were recorded. As far as can be ascertained from available documents and interviews, none of the ambassadors delivered any warning about Condor.

On Sept. 20, 1976, one day before the assassination, Shlaudeman rescinded Kissinger's instructions entirely. According to a newly discovered cable, Shlaudeman ordered his deputy, Luers, to "simply instruct the Ambassadors to take no further action, noting that there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme."

In fact, the "Condor scheme" had been active for weeks. On Aug. 26, a DINA agent flew to the United States to do surveillance on Letelier's movements. On Sept. 9, DINA's veteran assassin, American expatriate Michael Townley, arrived in New York City. On Sept. 18, Townley taped the remote control bomb under Letelier's car as it sat in the driveway of his suburban Maryland home. Less than 18 hours after Shlaudeman's "no further action" order, Letelier's car exploded as he, Ronni Moffitt and her

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husband, Michael, drove to work along Embassy Row. Only Michael Moffitt survived.

This tragic story does not end there. Washington's actions following the assassination were just as bewildering. Instructions to finally reinstate the démarche to the Chileans came 12 days after the murders. "We agree that our purpose can best be served through [the CIA station] approach to Contreras, and that the issue should not repeat not be raised with Pinochet," a cable from Shlaudeman read.

Despite what officials knew about Condor and the Paraguay scheme, the U.S. government's initial reaction was to echo the Chilean contention that leftists had killed Letelier to create a martyr. It took more than a year for the Justice Department to examine the Paraguay passport photos, which quickly identified the assassination team.

The Letelier-Moffitt bombing provides a case study of forfeited opportunities to prevent terrorism from reaching U.S. shores. Official actions that could -- and should -- have deterred this murderous attack were not taken. As in the Sept. 11 terrorism, an official congressional inquiry is warranted to fully explain this failure. After 26 years, the Letelier and Moffitt families deserve to know what exactly the U.S. government knew -- and why it failed to act on that knowledge. We hope the families of Sept. 11's victims won't have to wait so long.

John Dinges is the author of the forthcoming "The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents" (The New Press). Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, is author of the forthcoming "The Pinochet File" (The New Press). Archive analyst Carlos Osorio contributed to this article.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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before the bomb went off.

Yet the implication is created that Shlaudeman was responsible for
Letelier's death. He doesn't deserve it, in my view, and the record does
not justify it.

If, on the other hand, when you referred to "this" and "this thing" you meant the
broader program of political abductions and assassinations by the Chileans during the
Pinochet dictatorship, then the conclusion is no less far-fetched. To say that the United
States through one more demarche by Ambassador Popper in the closing months of 1976 "could
have stopped" -- your words -- the wholesale human rights violations in Chile does not hold
water. It is contrary to the facts:

-- that Bill Simon, the Secretary of Treasury, had already told Pinochet to his face
that continued human rights misbehavior would hurt relations with the US;

-- that Henry met with Pinochet and said human rights would damage our relationship

-- that Henry made his speech in Santiago, under Pinochet's very nose at a meeting
Pinochet had hoped would legitimate his regime, to the Foreign Ministers of all the
Hemisphere, proclaiming human rights respect as the very cornerstone of democracy in the
Hemisphere. a pointed reference only the most obtuse could pretend to have missed; and;

-- that Congress was raising unshirted hell and had already lowered the sanctions boom
on Chile, to the excruciating discomfort of its military who wanted their spare parts and
toys.

To suggest that one more Popper demarche in these circlustncs would have caused the
light to go on in Pinochet's dim brain about the consquences of his depredations is --
well -- not good historic analysis, to be polite.

And later experience proves the point. One may well second guess our diplomatic
efforts in the closing months of the Ford Administration. We
tried. We failed. People were killed. It is every historians' right to
argue that the United States could have been even more outspoken. And it is fair game to
say that we we did not succeed in stopping the killing. But to argue that if he had made
a further effort the US "could have stopped" that killing is -- well -- stretching it.
The proof: -- that the consistently outspoken efforts and protests of the Carter
Administration over the next four years and the US efforts thereafter were unavailing.
Even Carter and Chrisopher could not dissuade Pinochet from his course.

The Pinochet killing went on until -- what was it?-- 1983. The body count continued to
mount right up to the very end. If the Carter team' importunings "could [not] have
stopped" it, how can one claim that the Ford Administration in the few months it had left
in office in 1976 "could have"?

In short, that the US "could have stopped" something -- whatever it was we could have
stopped, whether the single Letelier killing, or the overall human rights violations --
just does not stand up.

Forgive me for going on like this. But I take accusations of criminal complicity
seriously.

1.

2

Theresa Cimino

From: Jessee Incao [jincao@kmaglobal.com]
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 12:27 PM
To: 'Theresa Cimino'
Subject: FW: Message for Theresa re Jim Hoge fax of 24 October -- Comment on Kornbluh book

DC_1113490_1.DO
C (33 KB)

Theresa:

Thanks for your call. I finally finished my edits and sent the
draft of the Kornbluh-Maxwell essay to Foreign Affairs last evening. Herewith.
It is scheduled for the next edition. Yesterday was the deadline. I
have not heard from Hoge with respect to this text.

Bill

----------------- Forwarded by William
Rogers/Atty/DC/ArnoldAndPorter
on 11/07/2003 12:23 PM -----------------

William Rogers

11/06/2003 02:50 PM

Location: DC - 913
Phone: 202-942-5915

To: jhoge@cfr.org, rhartman@cfr.org
cc:
Subject: Jim Hoge fax of 24 October -- Comment on Kornbluh book

Attention: Rosemary Hartman

Herewith the text, as promised. My count is just a tad over the 1,600
words Jim suggested.

My phone, if need be: 202 942 5915. Fax is 202 942 5690.

(See attached file: DC_1113490_1.DOC)

# Mythmaking and American Foreign Policy

## The Chilean Coup of 1973

### William D. Rogers

William D. Rogers, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs from 1974 to 1976, is a retired Senior Partner of a Washington law firm and Vice Chair of Kissinger Associates, Inc.

The myth that the United States toppled President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 lives. Even as early as 1975, a Senate subcommittee headed by Frank Church — a stalwart Democrat and no friend of the Nixon Administration — determined that there was "no real evidence" of US support for the Chilean army coup. Church similarly concluded that this country had had no hand in the earlier but unsuccessful 1970 putsch by a faction of the Chilean military to block Allende's inauguration, a botched kidnapping which ended in the death of the Army Chief of Staff Schneider. A more recent CIA study is to the same effect. Nothing emerged to the contrary in the 17,000 Chile documents released by the Clinton Administration. There is, in short, no smoking gun. Yet the myth persists. It is lovingly nurtured by the left in Latin America and refreshed from time to time by contributions to the literature like Peter Kornbluh's "Pinochet File" and Kenneth Maxwell's essay on that book in the November-December edition of this journal.

Both Kornbluh and Maxwell recognize that it was the Chilean military that stormed Allende's presidential palace on that September 11 thirty years ago.

Neither alleges anything by way of direct American participation. But though
neither goes as far as some excitable critics who fire off wild charges of
international criminal intent, they both purport to perceive what Maxwell calls
"The Case Against Kissinger".

They echo the traditional claim that the United State" destabilized" Chile.
Kornbluh puts it that the United States created a "coup climate". Maxwell says
this country "engineered" the overthrow; as "for the coup itself," he writes, "there
is no doubt that the United States did all that it could" to bring Allende down.

Hardly. It was no secret that Nixon opposed Allende and was unenthusiastic
about the prospect of another Marxist regime bracketing the region – not a very
extraordinary view, considering that this was the midst of the Cold War. But to
claim that the Nixon Administration “did all it could” is an injustice to regime-
changers in the US Government, past and present. The most cursory review of
history suggests that "all that it could" in Chile would have meant assassination
(e.g. Castro and Qaddaffi -- unsuccessful -- and Lumumba and Diem --
successful), bombing (Iraq and Libya), invasion (Panama and Grenada), armed
attack by mercenaries (Iran and Guatemala) or by the US military (Iraq).
Nothing close to such measures were deployed against Allende..

Even in the more gentlemanly arena of economic pressures, the Chile effort
paled in comparison with the no-holds-barred sanctions the US has aimed at
Iraq, Iran, Libya and Cuba. What the US did in Chile from Allende's inauguration
in 1970 to his violent downfall at the hands of the Chilean military three years

later was a pinprick by comparison. Washington funneled $6 million of secret subsidies to the opposition press and parties which Allende was trying his best to shut down. Washington tried and failed to block the restructuring of Chile's foreign debt. It pared its own bilateral aid (though Allende gained substantial balance of payments relief by unilaterally shutting down Chile's debt service payments and opening lines of credit in other, more friendly nations). And the US counseled international financial institutions to reduce their lending (the World Bank needed no persuading; Chile was bankrupt). This was it.

If $6 million of support for the opposition and a reduction of bilateral aid brought Allende down, while other, far more robust regime change efforts failed, one might conclude that Allende's was a remarkably fragile regime.

Indeed it was. Allende made it so. Kornbluh, Maxwell and others inflate his martyrdom by saying he was democratically elected. This is a stretch. Allende won with a less than resounding 36 percent of the popular vote in 1970; two-thirds of those who went to the polls voted against him. What is even clearer, though, is that he was no democrat when he got into office. Indeed, Allende set out to destroy his country's democratic tradition. By 1973, he had frittered away even his minority of support. His government was set on "the Leninist demolition of the 'bourgeois' state", as the former Chilean Communist Roberto Ampuero put it recently in the Washington Post (Outlook, September 7, 2003). Allende "cast aside our democratic system in order to try to replace it with a system.... that had already failed in Eastern Europe, Asia and in Fidel Castro's Cuba." (Ibid)

Allende ruined the Chilean economy as well. His term opened in 1970 with crowd-pleasing, budget-busting welfare payouts. He nationalized the foreign- owned copper industry, ordered sharp wage increases and imposed price controls. These measures triggered a consumption binge. Within months, Chile had eaten its seed corn of capital. Inflation took over. Imports and consumption collapsed. Unemployment, destitution and anger followed. By 1973, the economy was "screaming", as Nixon in 1970 had hoped it would. But not because of Nixon, Kissinger or the CIA.

Such was Chilean reality. The American Ambassador in Santiago at the time of the coup, Nathaniel Davis, later said that Allende's madcap economics meant that there was " progressively less Chilean institutional viability to 'destabilize' ." Nor was it the United States that did the "destabilizing, "undermning or "engineering".. Indeed, in a document of undoubted authenticity appended to his Memoirs, Kissinger made clear to Davis days before the1973 coup that "we are not to involve ourselves in any way... Our biggest problem is to keep from getting caught in the middle."

The guardians of the myth prefer to see the United States as just that -- "caught in the middle." For them, the American diplomatic documentation tells the full story. There is not one word in Kornbluh's chapter on the Allende era about his disastrous economic policies, about his attack on Chile's democratic institutions -- or about the wave of demonstrations and popular resentment which

swept the Chilean military to power. The critics see only the American text, not
the Chilean context.

Their case for US responsibility for the 1973 coup, built as it is on what US
officials were saying to each other, is circumstantial at best. The mythmakers
buttress it by reference to events both before and after Allende presidency.
Maxwell, for instance, echoing Kornbluh, points to the 1970 murder of General
Schneider, as if to show US responsibility for the coup three years later.
Schneider was killed by a band of rabid Chilean nationalists. Maxwell says that
the United States "approved" and "planned" their effort. The facts are otherwise.
In September of 1970, the Chilean Congress refused a parliamentary maneuver
to block Allende's swearing in. CIA operatives in Santiago then began to
canvass a move by the Chilean military. But the Agency quickly backed off.
The military, which three years later had a different view, refused in 1970 to
intrude on the constitutional process. The CIA so reported to Kissinger, then
National Security Assistant. On October 15, he stopped US involvement in the
block-Allende plotting. Kissinger later told the President: "This thing looked
hopeless. I turned it off. Nothing could be worse than an abortive coup."
In 1975, Senator Church confirmed that the United States did not author the
Schneider affair. Indeed, according to the Senate Committee Report, when CIA
operatives relayed the turn-off instruction to the Chilean army plotters, they
responded that they were going ahead anyway.

Kissinger was prescient. The iron law of unintended consequences kicked in. The result of the abortive coup was precisely the opposite of what the United States desired.

Maxwell goes on to say, implying that this also confirms US responsibility for 1973, that the US "did little to rein in Pinochet thereafter...". The record is otherwise. Maxwell and Kornbluh give little weight to the stern human rights warning Kissinger delivered directly to Pinochet at their only meeting, in Santiago in June of 1976. They dismiss Kissinger's address to the region's foreign ministers within hours of seeing Pinochet to the effect that the Pinochet government's human rights violations have "impaired our relationship with Chile and will continue to do so". And they skip lightly over Kissinger's 1976 personal order to the four US ambassadors in the Southern Cone to tell the heads of the governments to which they were accredited that political assassination and human rights violations would irreparably damage their relations with this country and cost them dearly in US aid. The relationship with Chile (and the other southern cone countries) went into a deep freeze in the remaining months of Kissinger's term in office – and for the four years of President Carter's, as well.

In short, the evidence of American responsibility for Allende's downfall is thin indeed. Yet the myth lives on, with unfortunate consequences. The mythmakers teach that the United States wanted Allende out and succeeded in removing him. This is not an innocent amble through history. It says to contemporary interventionists that regime change works, and that the United States has for

thirty years embraced the view that it has the right to intervene unilaterally in
other countries to that purpose. .

This does no service to American diplomacy. It eats at the good name and
image of this country in "that vast external realm", an image which needs no
additional blemishes right now. It perpetuates the tradition that this nation can
decide and has decided the fate of others. In doing so the Chile myth reinforces
the instinct, so marked so in Latin America, to blame Washington, and to seek
the redress of grievances there rather than at home. The myth reinforces the
view that other countries are objects, not subjects, blank slates upon which this
country can write as it wishes. This is not a helpful lesson, either abroad or for this
country, when American power is so overwhelming and the instinct to alter regimes in
other countries so strong. .

10/31/03 10:38 FAX 202 942 5209

ARNOLD & PORTER

001

ARNOLD & PORTER

202.942.5000
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OCT 3 1 2003

Fax Transmittal

October 31, 2003

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MESSAGE

Sir.

1. Herewith an Amicus Curiae Brief to the Supreme Court I wrote on behalf of the several distinguished former diplomats listed on the cover. This is but one of a dozen briefs filed by various groups concerned at the Guanotamo process.

2. My Kornbluh article is to be submitted to Foreign Affairs late next week. I will send you a draft early in the week, if I may.

3. Viets and I are putting together our inventory of phone notes to be excluded from the National Archives release. From the Archives: only silence. I am not pushing them.

Bill

PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL

Information intended only for the use of the addressee named above. If the reader of this message is not the Intended recipient or the employee or agent responsible for delivering the message to the intended recipient, please note that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Anyone who receives this communication in error should notify us Immediately by telephone and return the original message to us at the above address via the U.S. Mail.

ARNOLD & PORTER

☑002

Case Nos. 03-334; 03-343

In the Supreme Court of the United States

SHAFIQ RASUL, ET AL.

Petitioners,

v.

GEORGE W. BUSH, ET AL.,

Respondents.

FAWZI KHALID ABDULLAH FAHAD AL ODAH, ET AL.,

Petitioners,

v.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ET AL.

Respondents.

On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari To the United States
Court of Appeals For the District of Columbia Circuit

BRIEF OF DIEGO C. ASENARIO, A. PETER BURLEIGH, LINCOLN GORDON, ALLEN HOLMES, R. JWOZNIAK, ROBERT V. KEELEY, SAMUEL W. LEWIS, ROBERT A. MARTIN, ARTHUR MUDGE, R. H. NOLTE, HERBERT S. OKUN, ANTHONY QUAINTON, WILLIAM D. ROGERS, MONTEAGLE STEARNS, VIRON P. VAKY, RICHARD N. VIETS, ALEXANDER F. WATSON, AND WILLIAM WATTS AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF THE PETITIONERS

WILLIAM M. HANNAY
KATHRYN D. ZALEWSKI
ARON L. BORNSTEIN
SCHIFF HARDIN & WAITE
6600 Sears Tower
Chicago, Illinois 60606
(312) 258-5500
Counsel for Amici Curiae

ARNOLD & PORTER

☑ 004

TABLE OF AUTHORITIES

Executive Branch Documents

National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Sept. 2002), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html 9

Statement on Signing the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, 28 WEEKLY COMP. PRES. DOC. 465 (March 12, 1992).................. 8

International Cases

Abbasi v. Secretary of State, 2002 EWCA Civ 1598, 2002 All ER
(D) (Nov) (U.K. Ct. App. 2002) .................................................. 6

Boudellaa et al. v. Bosnia and Herzegovina et al, Decision on
Admissibility and Merits, Cases nos. CH/02/8679 et seq., Human
Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina (Oct. 11, 2002),
available at www.hrc.ba................................................................ 6

Decision on Request for Precautionary Measures (Detainees at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba), Inter-Am. C.H.R. (March 12, 2002)
reprinted in 41 I.L.M. 532 (2002) .................................................. 5

Miscellaneous

Praful Bidwai, *Iraq: Doubts Grow on Quick Coalition Victory*, INT'L PRESS SERV., March 24, 2003 ................................................................ 8

Jamie Fellner, *Prisoners of War in Iraq and at Guantanamo; Double Standards*, INT'L HERALD TRIB., March 31, 2003 ........................ 8

Operational Update, *Guantanamo Bay: Overview of the ICRC's work for detainees*, Int'l Comm. of the Red Cross (Aug. 25, 2003),
*available at www.icrc.org................................................................ 6*

Press Release, Statement of High Commissioner for Human Rights on Detention of Taliban and Al Qaida Prisoners at US Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, (Jan. 16, 2002), available at www.unhchr.ch................................................................................ 6

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Press Release, US Court Decision on Guantanamo Detainees Has Serious Implications for Rule of Law, says UN Rights Expert, (March 12, 2003), available at www.unhchr.ch.................... 6

Ivan Roman, Critics: Guantanamo Example May Hurt POWs, ORLANDO SENTINEL, March 30, 2003................................................ 8

Shehu Sani, U.S. actions send a bad signal to Africa: Inspiring intolerance, INT'L HERALD TRIB., Sept. 15, 2003................................. 9

Sean Yoong, Malaysia slams criticism of security law allowing detention without trial, Assoc. Press, Sept. 17, 2003 .................... 9

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INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE

All of the *amici curiae* have served as diplomats in the United States government and believe that these cases present issues of profound importance to the United States’ role as a world leader. Through their experience, *amici curiae* have come to understand that — in order to maintain its ability to influence the policies of other nations with respect to human rights, civil liberties, and other issues — the United States must abide by the “checks and balances” system that protect its values against corruption by its own government. That ability, however, has been seriously undermined by the rulings in these cases which hold that the judiciary branch has no ability to review the conduct of the executive branch of the United States government with respect to foreign citizens detained outside the ultimate sovereignty of the United States. These rulings have already earned worldwide criticism, as well as undesirable imitation by unscrupulous nations. If allowed to stand, they will continue to do so. Accordingly, *amici curiae* submit this brief in support of the petitioners, Shafiq Rasul, et al. and Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah, et al.¹

The names and diplomatic posts of the *amici curiae* are as
follows:

Diego C. Asencio served as Ambassador to Colombia from 1977 to 1980, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs from 1980 to 1983, Ambassador to Brazil from 1983 to 1986, and Chairman of the Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development from 1987 to 1989.

A. Peter Burleigh served as Ambassador and Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism from 1991 to 1992, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1997 to 1999, and Ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives from 1995 to 1997.

¹ This brief was not written in whole or in part by counsel for a party, and no person or entity other than the *amici curiae* and their counsel has made any monetary contribution to the brief's preparation or submission. The parties have consented to the filing of this brief.

ARNOLD & PORTER

☑007

[L]

Lincoln Gordon served as Ambassador to Brazil from 1961 to 1966 and Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs from 1966 to 1967.

Allen Holmes served as Ambassador to Portugal from 1982 to 1985, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs from 1985 to 1989, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict from 1993 to 1999.

R. Jwozniak served in the U.S. Information Agency in the embassies in Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Morocco and NATO from 1962 to 1996.

Robert V. Keeley served as Ambassador to Mauritius from 1976 to 1978, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1978 to 1980, and Ambassador to Zimbabwe 1980-1984, Ambassador to Greece from 1985 to 1989.

Samuel W. Lewis served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs from 1975 to 1977, Ambassador to Israel from 1997 to 1985, and Director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff from 1993 to 1994.

Robert A. Martin served as a Foreign Service Officer from 1961 to 1994.

Arthur Mudge served USAID Assistant General Counsel from 1967 to 1969, USAID Mission Director in Guyana from 1974 to 1976, USAID Mission Director in Nicaragua from 1976 to 1978, and USAID Mission Director in Sudan from 1980 to 1983.

David Newsom served as Ambassador to Libya from 1965 to 1969, Ambassador to Indonesia from 1973 to 1977, Ambassador to the Philippines from 1977 to 1978, and Undersecretary for Political Affairs from 1978 to 1981.

R.H. Nolte served as Ambassador to Egypt in 1967.

Herbert S. Okun served as Ambassador to the German Democratic Republic from 1980 to 1983, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1985 to 1989, and United States Member of the Group of International Advisors to the International Commission of the Red Cross from 1996 to 2000.

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Anthony Quainton served as Ambassador to Central African Republic from 1976 to 1978, Ambassador to Nicaragua from 1982 to 1984, Ambassador to Kuwait from 1984 to 1987, and Ambassador to Peru from 1989 to 1992.

William D. Rogers served as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, U.S. Coordinator, Alliance for Progress, from 1974 to 1976 and Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs from 1976 to 1977.

Monteagle Stearns served as Ambassador to Ivory Coast from 1976 to 1979, Vice President of the National Defense University from 1979 to 1981, and Ambassador to Greece from 1981 to 1985.

Viron P. Vaky served as Ambassador to Costa Rica from 1972 to 1974, Ambassador to Colombia from 1974 to 1976, Ambassador to Venezuela from 1976 to 1978, and Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs from 1978 to 1980.

Richard N. Viets served as Ambassador to Jordan from 1981 to 1984.

Alexander F. Watson served as Ambassador to Peru from 1986 to 1989, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1989 to 1993, and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs from 1993 to 1996.

William Watts served as a Foreign Service Officer from 1956 to 1965 and Staff Secretary and Senior Staff Member of the National Security Council in the White House from 1969 to 1970.

3

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SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT

The courts below have denied review of the incarceration of the Petitioners by the executive branch of the United States government, effectively holding that, when the executive branch acts against foreign citizens on foreign soil, it may do so with impunity and without even the minimum judicial review that traditionally serves as a "check" of one branch by another. These rulings undermine the United States' most important diplomatic asset, its values, and threaten the government's ability to influence the policies of other nations, particularly on issues that this country has always held dear, such as human rights and civil liberties.

The impact of these rulings is already being felt: numerous governments and international organizations have soundly criticized them. Equally troubling is that some nations have interpreted the rulings for their own corrupt purposes, namely, as a license to abuse citizens of their own and other nations. Absent review by this Court, the negative impact of the cases will only worsen.

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ARGUMENT

We, the *amici curiae* lending our names in support of this brief, have all been in the diplomatic service of the United States. Some have been ambassadors or foreign service officers, others have had appointments at senior levels in the Department of State or in the other agencies of the United States Government, dealing with "that vast external realm." All are retired from public service.

It is not our purpose to address the legal issues. They are for
the parties. We hope rather to enlarge their presentation by setting
before the Court our collective professional experience as to the
significance for American diplomacy and international affairs of the
holdings of the court below.

We understand that the D.C. Circuit Court held that the detention by the United States Government of twelve Kuwaiti nationals, two British nationals, and two Australian nationals in Guantanamo is beyond judicial review. These sixteen Guantanamo prisoners undeniably are incarcerated. They are kept in small cells. Their every activity is controlled by officers of the Executive Branch of the Government of the United States. They have had no hearing. They have no access to independent counsel. They may, for all that appears, be held in Guantanamo forever, yet no tribunal, military or civilian, has found that they committed a crime. Nor, for so long as the lower court's determination stands, can a court inquire into their custody. These sixteen have been unfairly deprived of their liberty, but the issue is not whether the detention is legally valid. The issue before this Court is whether the detention is subject to any judicial review whatsoever.

This is, from our foreign policy experience, a case of vast
public import. Indeed, it has already become notorious abroad. The
world has taken due note of the fact that the United States has
incarcerated these foreign nationals in Guantanamo and that there
has been no effort to charge, try or judge them under the law. This
has produced wide protest. The Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights has undertaken precautionary measures.² The UN

² Decision on Request for Precautionary Measures (Detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba), Inter-Am. C.H.R. (March 12, 2002) *reprinted in*

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High Commissioner for Human Rights has spoken out.³ The International Committee of the Red Cross has gone on record.⁴ The British Court of Appeal in the Abbasi case has expressed its concerns.⁵ The Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a court that the United States helped create, has issued its own protest.⁶

41 I.L.M. 532 (2002) (requesting that prisoners be granted hearings on their status before a "competent tribunal").

³ Press Release, Statement of High Commissioner for Human Rights on Detention of Taliban and Al Qaida Prisoners at US Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, (Jan. 16, 2002), available at www.unhchr.ch under "news room, statements/messages" (last visited Sept. 30, 2003) (recalling that legal status of detainees, if disputed, must be determined by a "competent tribunal"); see also Press Release, US Court Decision on Guantanamo Detainees Has Serious Implications for Rule of Law, says UN Rights Expert, (March 12, 2003), available at www.unhchr.ch under "news room, press releases" (last visited Sept. 30, 2003) (ruling below "offends the first principle of the rule of law" and "can set a dangerous precedent").

⁴ Operational Update, *Guantanamo Bay: Overview of the ICRC's work for detainees*, Int'l Comm. of the Red Cross (Aug. 25, 2003), available at www.icrc.org (last visited Sept. 30, 2003) ("The ICRC's main concern today is that the US authorities have placed the internees in Guantanamo beyond the law . . . ").

⁵ Abbasi v. Secretary of State, 2002 EWCA Civ 1598, 2002 All ER (D) (Nov) (U.K. Ct. App. 2002), par. 107 ("We have made clear our deep concern that, in apparent contravention of fundamental principles of law, Mr. Abbasi may be subject to indefinite detention in territory over which the United States has exclusive control with no opportunity to challenge the legitimacy of his detention before any court or tribunal.")

⁶ Boudellaa et al. v. Bosnia and Herzegovina et al, Decision on Admissibility and Merits, Cases nos. CH/02/8679 et seq., Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina (Oct. 11, 2002), available at www.hrc.ba (visited Sept. 30, 2003), pars. 233 (hand-over of prisoners to U.S., before their transfer to Guantanamo, violated "obligations to protect the applicants against arbitrary detention by foreign forces") & 333 (Bosnia and Herzegovina must retain lawyers "to take all necessary action in order to protect the applicants' rights while in US custody . . . ").

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The world understands that there is debate in this country
over the extent to which our criminal justice system must be
amended to take account of the realities of terrorism. That is a
domestic matter. The Guantanamo prisoners case has become a
matter of unusual concern abroad because it presents the issue of
how American power may be applied to people in other countries.
Citizens of foreign countries cannot assume that what happened to
the Guantanamo prisoners cannot happen to them. It will not be
evident why, if the Executive Branch can detain prisoners in
Guantanamo free of judicial inquiry, it cannot expand the practice to
establish a global criminal justice system with a series of prison
camps like Guantanamo which would be similarly subject to no legal
oversight and in which any foreigner might be detained.

The lower court's decision turned on the fact that the
prisoners are in Guantanamo, Cuba. The use by the American
military of its famous base in Cuba has a particular resonance
abroad. As this Court well knows, Guantanamo is an artifact of
America's imperial era in this Hemisphere. The "nice" distinction in
the Court of Appeals' opinion — that the executive branch of the
United States government can act at will in Cuba, but the hand of the
judiciary cannot reach that conduct — will be lost on others.

It has been the experience of each of us that our most
important diplomatic asset has been this nation's values. Power
counts. But this nation's respect for the rule of law — and in
particular the nation's reverence for the fundamental Constitutional
guarantee of individual freedom from arbitrary government authority
— have gone far to earn us the respect and trust which lie at the heart
of all cordial relations between nations. Thus the perception of this
case abroad — that the power of the United States can be exercised
outside the law and even, it is presumed, in conflict with the law —
will diminish our stature and repute in the wider world.

We have come to believe, in our representation of this
country to other nations, that those nations are more willing to accept
American leadership and counsel to the extent that they see us as
true to the principle of freedom under the law. Indeed, the matter
has rarely been better put than President Bush put it in signing the
Torture Victims Protection Act on March 12, 1992:

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013

In this new era, in which countries throughout the world are
turning to democratic institutions and the rule of law, we
must maintain and strengthen our commitment to ensuring
that they are respected everywhere.⁷

The teaching of the courts below, however, is that those
"democratic institutions and the rule of law" need not be respected in
Guantanamo. This negative example puts United States citizens
abroad - as well as those of other nations - at risk because it
provides justification for other countries to ignore international law
and follow the United States' practice of unlawful detention. When
the second Gulf War began, many predicted that the United States'
practices at Guantanamo Bay signaled a "double standard" that Iraq
and others would use to justify mistreatment of American and
coalition POWs.⁸ Unfortunately, that message appears to have been
received loud and clear by other foreign governments which have
since sought to use the United States' example to justify abuses. For
example, seeking to justify the detention of militants without trial,
Malaysia's law minister said that its practice was "just like the
process in Guantanamo Bay." He emphasized that he "put the

⁷ Statement on Signing the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, 28 WEEKLY COMP. PRES. DOC. 465 (March 12, 1992).

⁸ See, e.g., Jamie Fellner, *Prisoners of War in Iraq and at Guantanamo; Double Standards*, INT'L HERALD TRIB., March 31, 2003 ("At risk are not only the rights of the individuals who are detained today: by ignoring the clear mandates of international law, the United States invites every other country, including Iraq, to do the same."); Ivan Roman, *Critics: Guantanamo Example May Hurt POWs*, ORLANDO SENTINEL, March 30, 2003 ("Months before the first bomb was dropped on Baghdad on March 19, concerns arose about the Pentagon's position regarding the Guantanamo detainees and the implications it could have on its own troops heading to the Middle East."); Praful Bidwai, *Iraq: Doubts Grow on Quick Coalition Victory*, INT'L PRESS SERV., March 24, 2003 ("The United States' double standards on POWs are starkly revealed in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where over 500 al-Qaeda suspects are detained, often in chains and inside cages. . . . Equally deplorable is the U.S. threat to treat Iraq's army officers as 'war criminals' merely because they are defending their country, while insisting that the U.S. prisoner-invaders be treated as POWs.").

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We have taken it as our duty to so state to this court. Power counts, and there is no doubting America's power at this juncture. But values count too. And, for this nation, there is no benefit in the exercise of our undoubted power unless it is deployed in the service of fundamental values: democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and due process. To the extent that we are perceived as compromising those values, to that extent will our efforts to promote our interests in the wider world be prejudiced. Such at least is our collective experience.

CONCLUSION

The international impact of this dispute - including the likelihood of its hampering our diplomatic efforts on behalf of human rights and directly affecting the treatment of our soldiers and citizens abroad - emphasizes the importance of these concerns. Taken together, they serve as a strong basis for this Court to grant a writ of *certiorari* to resolve this critically important issue pursuant to its authority under Supreme Court Rule 10(c).

Dated: October 3, 2003

Respectfully submitted,

10

rogersletter.mss* 12/16/03 10:45 AM Page 1

Letters to the Editor

To The Editor:

Kenneth Maxwell's bias comes clear in his reply to my criticism of his review of *The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability* (January/February 2004). He finds a "cruel coincidence" between a September 20, 1976, State Department cable and Orlando Letelier's murder at the hands of Chilean intelligence agents the very next day. This "cruel coincidence" leads Maxwell to conclude that "this was a tragedy that might have been prevented."

By whom, one might ask? Who does he think could have "prevented" Letelier's killing? The Secretary of State? Shlaudeman? Me? The implication is outrageous. And the facts are otherwise. Maxwell misreads the cable. It was not an instruction to ambassadors in the field. It was a cable from Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman, then in Costa Rica, to the State Department in Washington. It had no consequence. State sent no instruction to the field implementing it. Even if State had passed the Shlaudeman message on to Santiago, it could not conceivably have "prevented" the murder. The bomb was already strapped to Letelier's car.

Furthermore, Shlaudeman counseled "no further action," thus suggesting—the message to which he was responding is

nowhere to be found—that the embassy in Santiago had already carried out Kissinger's order to warn the Chileans about political assassinations. And finally, the notion that an Assistant Secretary—particularly one as distinguished and responsible as Shlaudeman—would have had the temerity to countermand a direct, personal instruction from Kissinger, and to do it behind his back—Kissinger and I were in Africa trying to end the white regime in Rhodesia—bespeaks no sense of Henry Kissinger's stewardship at State. Such are the absurdities of this myth—but they are absurdities that strike at the heart of character and reputation.

I was Assistant Secretary of State from 1974 to 1976. Late 1976 was the time of the Letelier murder and Operation Condor. Kissinger brought me into the State Department aware of my background in human rights and civil liberties causes. So I found Maxwell's reference to the existence of Operation Condor "on my watch" gratuitous. I would like to assume that he did not mean to imply that I was therefore somehow responsible for Condor or that the United States was complicit in that appalling program. But the bias and distortions in Maxwell's reply to my cri-

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · March/April 2004

[1]

Letters to the Editor

KENNETH MAXWELL

To the Editor:

We members of the Council on Foreign Relations have devoted much of our professional lives to the study of Latin America and the relations between the United States and this region. We read Kenneth Maxwell's balanced and thoughtful review (November/December 2003) of the recent collection of official documents edited by Peter Kornbluh and published by the National Security Archive under the title *The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability*.

We were thus dismayed by the tone and content of the two letters from former Undersecretary of State William D. Rogers (January/February 2004 and March/April 2004), and appalled by the journal's decision not to publish a response by Maxwell to the second of the Rogers letters, which sought to impugn the motives and integrity of Maxwell, a scholar of impeccable rigor and honesty. This decision denied readers an opportunity to weigh competing views, contrary to the journal's policies and traditions.

JOHN COATSWORTH, ALBERT FISHLOW, ROBERT KAUFMAN, MARTHA MUSE, RENATE RENNIE, RIORDAN ROETT, THOMAS SKIDMORE, PAUL SIGMUND, CLINT SMITH, ALFRED STEPAN, AND NANCY TRUITT

The Editor Replies:

*Foreign Affairs* believes Maxwell and Rogers were given ample opportunity to have their competing views weighed in the exchange of correspondence that was published in the January/February issue. Subsequently, Rogers complained that Maxwell's reply to his response contained a new and damaging implication. Maxwell confirmed that he was implying that Rogers and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had contributed to the creation of a permissive environment for political violence by Chile's government under Augusto Pinochet. Rogers was given the opportunity to reply to that specific issue in a second letter. An early draft was read over the telephone to Maxwell and he agreed that it should end the exchange. That agreement was then conveyed to Rogers. Later, Maxwell reconsidered and sought a reply on the premise that Rogers went beyond addressing the issue in question and impugned Maxwell's professional integrity. *Foreign Affairs* felt there was not sufficient cause or fresh information to warrant a change in the agreed-upon ground rule.

John

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*Foreign Affairs* (ISSN 00157120), September/October 2004, Volume 83, Number 5. Published six times annually (January, March, May, July, September, November) at 58 East 68th Street, New York, NY 10021. Subscriptions: U.S., $44.00; Canada, $54.00; other countries via air, $79.00 per year. Canadian Publication Mail-Mail # 1572121. Periodicals postage paid in New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to *Foreign Affairs*, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. From time to time, we permit certain carefully screened companies to send our subscribers information about products or services that we believe will be of interest. If you prefer not to receive such information, please contact us at the Palm Coast, FL, address indicated above.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · September / October 2004

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Letters to the Editor

As Evan S. Medeiros and M. Taylor Fravel elucidate in the same issue of *Foreign Affairs* (“China’s New Diplomacy”), China is developing a more sophisticated foreign policy. Beijing may, in fact, recognize that Tokyo’s approach to its modern security interests makes sense, given Japan’s global stature and the growing threat to the region posed by North Korea. China may also realize that, although Japan appears to be slightly more comfortable with a greater military role, its electorate is unlikely to allow the fiercely nationalistic Japanese soldier to reappear any time soon.

RICHARD MARSHALL

Honolulu, Hawaii

ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT

To the Editor:

In "Clinton's Strong Defense Legacy" (November/December 2003), Michael O'Hanlon acknowledges that U.S. military morale suffered during the Clinton presidency, but he does not fully explain why.

Perhaps it was because of fundamental opposition to nation-building and peacekeeping among the Pentagon leadership. These criticisms harked back to the Vietnam War and to the "Weinberger Doctrine," outlined in 1984, which argued against nonessential military intervention. Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, carried the anti-intervention argument forward in the early 1990s, even getting into a public spat with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over whether to intervene in the Balkans. In the late 1990s, General Wesley Clark was fired by the Pentagon leadership for arguing too passionately for U.S. involvement in Kosovo.

Such attitudes had a direct effect on military morale, because soldiers were

told by their leaders that peacekeeping missions such as Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans were wrongheaded and would erode the military's war-fighting capabilities. Given this explanation, it is no wonder that troops in the Balkans felt misused and overworked.

The Pentagon's recent attempt to close the Peacekeeping Institute at Carlisle Barracks suggests that the Army is not getting any more serious about low-intensity missions, such as counterinsurgency and peacekeeping. In Iraq, meanwhile, we are again witnessing the negative effects on morale when soldiers do not support an operation. A change of attitude is desperately needed.

ALFRED R. BARR

Washington, D.C.

CRISIS PREVENTION

To the Editor:

Kenneth Maxwell's bias is clear in his reply to my criticism of his review of *The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability* ("Fleeing the Chilean Coup," January/February 2004). He finds a "cruel coincidence" between a September 20, 1976, State Department cable and Orlando Letelier's murder at the hands of Chilean intelligence agents the very next day. This "cruel coincidence" leads Maxwell to conclude that "this was a tragedy that might have been prevented."

By whom, one might ask? Who does he think could have "prevented" Letelier's killing? Secretary of State Henry Kissinger? Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman? Me? The implication is outrageous, and the facts are otherwise. Maxwell misreads the cable: it was not an instruction to ambassadors in the field, but a cable from Shlaudeman, then in Costa Rica,

Richard Castro's power. Public world are a lasting party and for all of them, and the public, really

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Gene A. to temper profile of other China. Yet countries has occasional new have recent military decision declared on a shield. Difference military rise?

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Response

# Fleeing the Chilean Coup

## The Debate over U.S. Complicity

## Mythmaking and Foreign Policy

WILLIAM D. ROGERS

The myth that the United States toppled President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 lives. In 1975, a Senate subcommittee headed by Frank Church—a stalwart Democrat and no friend of the Nixon administration—determined that there was "no real evidence" of U.S. support for the military coup or for an earlier botched kidnapping by Chileans that ended in the death of Army Chief of Staff René Schneider. A more recent CIA study confirmed these conclusions. No evidence to the contrary emerged from the 24,000 Chile-related documents declassified by the Clinton administration.

There is, in short, no smoking gun. Yet the myth persists. It is lovingly nurtured by the Latin American left and refreshed from time to time by contributions to the literature like Peter Kornbluh's The

Pinochet File and Kenneth Maxwell's review of that book, "The Other 9/11" (November/December 2003).

Both Kornbluh and Maxwell recognize that it was the Chilean military that stormed Allende's presidential palace on that September 11 three decades ago; neither alleges direct U.S. participation in the coup. Still, although they do not go as far as the excitable critics who fire off wild charges of international criminal intent, both purport to make what Maxwell calls "The Case Against Kissinger."

Kornbluh and Maxwell echo the traditional claim that the United States "destabilized" Chile. Kornbluh says that the United States created a "coup climate." Maxwell asserts that Washington "engi- neered" the overthrow; as "for the coup itself," he writes, "there is no doubt that the United States did all that it could" to bring Allende down.

Hardly. It was no secret that President Richard Nixon opposed Allende and was unenthusiastic about the prospect of another Marxist regime in the region—

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not surprising given that this was during
the Cold War. But to claim that the
Nixon administration "did all it could" to
topple Allende is an injustice to regime-
changers in the U.S. government, past
and present. A cursory review of history
suggests that had Washington done "all
it could" in Chile, it would have attempted
an assassination (Castro and Qaddafi:
unsuccessful; Lumumba and Diem:
successful), an invasion (Panama and
Grenada), an armed attack by mercenaries
(Iran and Guatemala), or an attack by the
U.S. military (Iraq). Nothing close to such
measures was deployed against Allende.

Even in the more gentlemanly arena
of economic pressures, the U.S. effort
against Chile pales in comparison with
its no-holds-barred sanctions against Cuba,
Iran, Iraq, and Libya. What the U.S. did
in Chile, from Allende's inauguration in
1970 until his violent downfall at the hands
of the Chilean military three years later,
was a pinprick by comparison. Washington
funneled $6 million, in secret subsidies
to the opposition press and parties (which
Allende was trying to shut down). Wash-
ington tried—and failed—to block the
restructuring of Chile's foreign debt.
Washington reduced bilateral aid (although
Allende found relief by unilaterally shutting
down debt-service payments and open-
ing lines of credit with other, friendlier
nations). And it counseled international
financial institutions to reduce their lend-
ing (although the World Bank needed
no persuading: Chile was bankrupt).
That was it.

If $6 million in support for the oppo-
sition and a reduction of bilateral aid
brought Allende down, while other, far more
robust attempts at regime change have failed,
one might conclude that Allende's was a

remarkably fragile regime. And indeed
it was: Allende made it so. Kornbluh,
Maxwell, and others inflate his martyrdom
by saying he was democratically elected.
This is a stretch. Allende won with a less
than resounding 36 percent of the popular
vote in 1970; nearly two-thirds of those
who went to the polls voted against him.
By 1973, he had frittered away even this
flimsy base of support. What is even
clearer, though, is that he was no democrat
once in office. Indeed, Allende set out to
destroy his country's democratic tradition.
His government was set on "the Leninist
demolition of the 'bourgeois' state," as the
former Chilean Communist Roberto Am-
puero put it recently in *The Washington Post*.
"[Allende] cast aside our democratic sys-
tem in order to try to replace it with a
system ... that had already failed in Eastern
Europe, Asia, and in Fidel Castro's Cuba."

Allende ruined the Chilean economy
as well. His term opened in 1970 with
crowd-pleasing, budget-busting welfare
payouts. He nationalized the foreign-
owned copper industry, ordered sharp
wage increases, and imposed price controls.
These measures triggered a consumption
tinge, and within months Chile had eaten
its seed corn of capital. Inflation took over.
Imports and consumption collapsed.
Unemployment, destitution, and anger
followed. By 1973, the economy was
"screaming," as Nixon had hoped it would,
but not because of Nixon, Henry Kissinger,
or the CIA.

Such was the reality in Chile. Nathaniel
Davis, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago
at the time, later said that thanks to
Allende's madcap economics, there was
"progressively less Chilean institutional
viability to 'destabilize.'" Nor was it the
United States that did the "destabilizing,"

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · January/February 2004

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éloge, 1939; éloge, 1940; éloge, 1941; éloge, 1942; éloge, 1943; éloge, 1944; éloge, 1945; éloge, 1946; éloge, 1947; éloge, 1948; éloge, 1949; éloge, 1950; éloge, 1951; éloge, 1952; éloge, 1953; éloge, 1954; éloge, 1955; éloge, 1956; éloge, 1957; éloge, 1958; éloge, 1959; éloge, 1960; éloge, 1961; éloge, 1962; éloge, 1963; éloge, 1964; éloge, 1965; éloge, 1966; éloge, 1967; éloge, 1968; éloge, 1969; éloge, 1970; éloge, 1971; éloge, 1972; éloge, 1973; éloge, 1974; éloge, 1975; éloge, 1976; éloge, 1977; éloge, 1978; éloge, 1979; éloge, 1980; éloge, 1981; éloge, 1982; éloge, 1983; éloge, 1984; éloge, 1985; éloge, 1986; éloge, 1987; éloge, 1988; éloge, 1989; éloge, 1990; éloge, 1991; éloge, 1992; éloge, 1993; éloge, 1994; éloge, 1995; éloge, 1996; éloge, 1997; éloge, 1998; éloge, 1999; éloge, 2000; éloge, 2001; éloge, 2002; éloge, 2003; éloge, 2004; éloge, 2005; éloge, 2006; éloge, 2007; éloge, 2008; éloge, 2009; éloge, 2010; éloge, 2011; éloge, 2012; éloge, 2013; éloge, 2014; éloge, 2015; éloge, 2016; éloge, 2017; éloge, 2018; éloge, 2019; éloge, 2020; éloge, 2021; éloge, 2022; éloge, 2023; éloge, 2024; éloge, 2025; éloge, 2026; éloge, 2027; éloge, 2028; éloge, 2029; éloge, 2030; éloge, 2031; éloge, 2032; éloge, 2033; éloge, 2034; éloge, 2035; éloge, 2036; éloge, 2037; éloge, 2038; éloge, 2039; éloge, 2040; éloge, 2041; éloge, 2042; éloge, 2043; éloge, 2044; éloge, 2045; éloge, 2046; éloge, 2047; éloge, 2048; éloge, 2049; éloge, 2050; éloge, 2051; éloge, 2052; éloge, 2053; éloge, 2054; éloge, 2055; éloge, 2056; éloge, 2057; éloge, 2058; éloge, 2059; éloge, 2060; éloge, 2061; éloge, 2062; éloge, 2063; éloge, 2064; éloge, 2065; éloge, 2066; éloge, 2067; éloge, 2068; éloge, 2069; éloge, 2070; éloge, 2071; éloge, 2072; éloge, 2073; éloge, 2074; éloge, 2075; éloge, 2076; éloge, 2077; éloge, 2078; éloge, 2079; éloge, 2080; éloge, 2081; éloge, 2082; éloge, 2083; éloge, 2084; éloge, 2085; éloge, 2086; éloge, 2087; éloge, 2088; éloge, 2089; éloge, 2090; éloge, 2091; éloge, 2092; éloge, 2093; éloge, 2094; éloge, 2095; éloge, 2096; éloge, 2097; éloge, 2098; éloge, 2099; éloge, 2100; éloge, 2101; éloge, 2102; éloge, 2103; éloge, 2104; éloge, 2105; éloge, 2106; éloge, 2107; éloge, 2108; éloge, 2109; éloge, 2110; éloge, 2111; éloge, 2112; éloge, 2113; éloge, 2114; éloge, 2115; éloge, 2116; éloge, 2117; éloge, 2118; éloge, 2119; éloge, 2120; éloge, 2121; éloge, 2122; éloge, 2123; éloge, 2124; éloge, 2125; éloge, 2126; éloge, 2127; éloge, 2128; éloge, 2129; éloge, 2130; éloge, 2131; éloge, 2132; éloge, 2133; éloge, 2134; éloge, 2135; éloge, 2136; éloge, 2137; éloge, 2138; éloge, 2139; éloge, 2140; éloge, 2141; éloge, 2142; éloge, 2143; éloge, 2144; éloge, 2145; éloge, 2146; éloge, 2147; éloge, 2148; éloge, 2149; éloge, 2150; éloge, 2151; éloge, 2152; éloge, 2153; éloge, 2154; éloge, 2155; éloge, 2156; éloge, 2157; éloge, 2158; éloge, 2159; éloge, 2160; éloge, 2161; éloge, 2162; éloge, 2163; éloge, 2164; éloge, 2165; éloge, 2166; éloge, 2167; éloge, 2168; éloge, 2169; 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## Fleeing the Chilean Coup

robust fashion to the Argentine president— there are cables to prove it, although Kornbluh does not reprint them—and probably to Pinochet's underlings in Santiago. In any event, after Kissinger's meeting with Pinochet there could have been no misunderstanding as to Washington's views on state-sponsored political assassination. The relationship with Chile (and the other Southern Cone countries) went into a deep freeze in the remaining months of Kissinger's term as secretary of state—and under President Jimmy Carter as well.

Finally, Maxwell cites a maddeningly ambiguous cable from Kornbluh's collection as somehow relevant to an ominous "third event" in "the case against Kissinger": the June 1976 assassination of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier by Chilean agents in Washington, D.C. This is mischievous nonsense. Kissinger had nothing to do with the cable. So far as the record shows, he never saw it. The cable was not a Washington instruction to the field. It was not sent to Santiago. The bomb had already been strapped to the underside of Letelier's car when the cable, whatever it meant, was sent. It could not conceivably have been a link in the chain of causation leading to Letelier's death.

But it is of such stuff that myths are made. The evidence of U.S. responsibility for Allende's downfall is thin indeed, but the myth lives on, with unfortunate consequences. It eats at the good name and image of the United States in "that vast external realm," an image that needs no additional blemishes right now. In Latin America, it reinforces the instinct to blame Washington and to seek the redress of grievances there rather than at home.

And in the United States, the Chile myth teaches contemporary interventionists that regime change works. It affirms the view that other countries are objects, blank slates on which Washington can write as it wishes. With U.S. power so overwhelming and the instinct to alter foreign regimes so strong, this is a dangerous message indeed.

WILLIAM D. ROGERS, retired Senior Partner of a Washington, D.C., law firm and Vice Chair of Kissinger Associates, Inc., was Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs from 1974 to 1976.

## Maxwell replies

William Rogers overreaches. His comments do not help his cause, and his assertion that my review is "mythmaking" that is "lovingly nurtured" by the left revives the innuendo characteristic of an epoch one hoped was long past in public debate. Its employment here, however, has the merit of demonstrating that Kornbluh's dossier of declassified documents cuts very close to home. I was not, in any case, seeking a "smoking gun." What I did do was provide a fair summary of the evidence Kornbluh presented. It is for readers to decide how effectively the argument for complicity is made (or a jury, if the suits brought by the families of Schneider and Letelier ever reach court).

It is certainly true that the Chilean Communists were no Thomas Jeffersons; that Allende bears much of the blame for the Chilean economy's tailspin; that Chilean society was bitterly divided; that the Chilean armed forces, not those of the United States, overthrew Allende; and that this story cannot be told only in terms of U.S. involvement. I said so very

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pointedly in my review. But to claim that the United States was not actively involved in promoting Allende's downfall in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary verges on incredulity.

Rogers has had a long and distinguished career that includes a substantial engagement with Latin American affairs, and I have the utmost respect for him. I regret that, in his evident irritation, he often conflates the opinion of the book's reviewer with that of the book's author and attributes implicit meanings that exist in his mind but not in my text. The "case against Henry Kissinger" is not of my invention. What I provide is a synopsis of the principal accusations made against Kissinger, since they form the core of the book I was reviewing. I could hardly have ignored them. Many of Rogers' assertions and specific rebuttals (which form, in effect, a counter-reading of Kornbluh's book) are best answered by Kornbluh himself. I would be happy to avoid a homets' nest, but since Rogers also attributes opinion to me—and in very overheated language—let me deal directly with specifics.

First, here again we see the tired claim that Allende's having received only 36 percent of the vote somehow diminished his democratic credibility and justified the coup. Even Mark Falcoff, a friendly historian recently granted privileged access to Kissinger's telephone transcripts from the 1970s, argues that this was a result of how the Chilean political system worked. In 1975, following the first democratic elections in Portugal after the left-wing military coup there, Kissinger and company belatedly designated Mário Soares as the Western anticommunist hope; his political party received 38 percent of the vote. In both cases, evidently, the interpretation

of statistics has far more to do with ideology than with democracy.

As for Kissinger's June 1976 speech to the Organization of American States (OAS) in Santiago and his August 1976 démarche on Operation Condor, the evidence is clear. Yes, Kissinger made his human rights speech, but he had personally assured Pinochet that he was giving it for U.S. domestic consumption. Let me quote directly from a "document of undoubted authenticity" as to what Kissinger said privately to Pinochet on that occasion: "The speech is not aimed at Chile. I wanted to tell you about this. My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist." (The record shows that Assistant Secretary of State Rogers was present during this conversation.)

The central point regarding Kissinger's démarche, meanwhile, is that it was not delivered, out of concern that it would upset Pinochet. In the 27 days between the sending of Kissinger's cable and the assassination of Letelier, Kissinger's instructions (to warn Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina not to follow through with planned international assassination) were not carried out in the most critical case—Chile. It is a cruel coincidence that on the day before a car bomb killed Letelier, the ambassadors were told "to take no further action." This declassified cable is reproduced in full in Kornbluh's collection (Chapter 6, Document 17). It is specifically headed "Operation Condor" and is addressed to "sestate washdc." These are facts, not questions of opinion, much less of mythology.

The point is that this was a tragedy that might have been prevented. Other

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assassinations of opposition figures planned by Condor in Europe were in fact prevented because the United States tipped off the governments in question (France and Portugal) in advance. And George H.W. Bush, then director of the CIA, personally warned a Democratic U.S. member of Congress that he was a target. But by then, even Kissinger had recognized that a monster had arisen and needed to be contained. It was this that led to the change in U.S. policy.

Finally, it is very odd to claim that discussion of these questions is intended to encourage U.S. interventionism. Precisely the opposite is true. The explicit intention of Kornbluh and others who diligently research these cases is to point out the dangers of a Manichaean world view, how it leads to the use of allies with very bloody fingers.

Kornbluh's dossier also shows how agonizing Kissinger's policy decisions often were for those professionals who had to carry them out—and how well aware these professionals were of the moral dilemmas they faced. Among them, notably and honorably, was William Rogers. In anticipation of the 1976 OAS meeting in Santiago, Rogers, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, had written in his briefing paper for Secretary Kissinger that Chile had become "a symbol of right-wing tyranny." He advised, "Like it or not, we are identified with the regime's origins and hence charged with some responsibility for its action. This accents our strong interest in getting the GOC [Government of Chile] to pursue acceptable human rights practices." We know that Rogers took this position thanks to the very declassified documents that Kornbluh

publishes in his dossier and that Rogers now seeks to discredit.

Rogers' loyalty to his former boss and current business associate is commendable, but it was not reciprocated at the time. In closed meetings with Patricio Carvajal, Pinochet's foreign minister, Kissinger said, "The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State." (With respect to human rights, he told Carvajal that he "did not intend to harass Chile on this matter.") Rogers has said that when he was invited by Kissinger, soon after Nixon's resignation, to run the Latin America bureau, "I also told him I'd heard rumors that the U.S. government had destabilized Chile through the CIA. I said that if there were any covert operations going on during my watch I would resign and denounce the operation." But Condor did go on during his watch.

There is a way to clear the air. Some countries have established "truth commissions" to look into such matters. In the United States, however, the record has been extracted painfully, like rotten teeth. Accusations of "mischievous nonsense" do not help. Whether or not these difficult legacies should be buried or debated is, of course, a matter of judgment. Rogers evidently believes they are best left undisturbed. My own belief is that we should seek to learn from the past if we have the wisdom to do so.●

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## Review Essay

# The Other 9/11

## The United States and Chile, 1973

Kenneth Maxwell

*The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.* EDITED BY PETER KORNBLUH. New York: New Press, 2003, 528 pp. $29.95.

There are two types of what Theodore Draper called “present history.” The first is based on documents and testimony accessible to all historians: assertions and interpretations can be checked, verified, and contested on the basis of fact rather than speculation. Both Draper and, in his own way, I. F. Stone were brilliant practitioners of this kind of history and demonstrated that, despite the best (or worst) intentions of bureaucrats to hide or distort the record, much could be found in the public domain if diligently sought after. The second approach to writing about contemporary history is based on anonymous “sources” and self-interested

“leaks.” Here, much depends on the credibility of the authors; but in the right political climate, such writing can be powerful enough to bring down a president, as it did with Watergate. And over the past two decades, heavily redacted, “secret” government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act have been added to its menu.

Both approaches have their weaknesses, and neither is as new as might first appear. The Draper method—by abjuring the fragments exhumed from a government's dark places—risks underestimating the role of the clandestine actions that were often at the center of the ideological and geostrategic struggles of the Cold War. History by self-interested leaking of documents or the use of anonymous sources, however, tends to produce narratives that are self-justifying, on the one hand, or

KENNETH MAXWELL is Director of Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His most recent book is *Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues*.

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Kenneth Maxwell

indictments, on the other, and to exag-
erate the importance of covert operations.
Again, there is a long history of both
genres: Winston Churchill the historian
was a master over many volumes at
preempting the assessment of Winston
Churchill the statesman, and Henry
Kissinger is doing what Churchill did
for his own epoch and his own historical
place within it by releasing weighty tomes
on his White House years and other topics.

But, as Isaac Newton taught us, actions
produce reactions. So it is entirely within
the established pattern that 30 years
after the Yom Kippur War and the bloody
coup in Chile—at just the moment when
Kissinger himself publishes a book about
his unquestionable diplomatic skill in
confronting grave crises in Southeast
Asia and the Middle East, grand stages
where issues of war and peace and nuclear
confrontation were handled—Kissinger's
critics have revived the case against him
over U.S. actions in Chile on his watch,
doggedly seeking out forensic linkages
to establish his role, as national security
adviser, and that of his president, Richard
Nixon, in undermining and engineering
the overthrow of a democratically elected
socialist president, Salvador Allende. Peter
Kornbluh, in his troubling dossier, sets out
to piece together this less elevated story.

THE CASE AGAINST KISSINGER

The crux of the case made against Kissinger rests on three events in particular: the assassination of Chile's chief of staff, General René Schneider, in 1970; the extent of U.S. complicity and active involvement in the September 11, 1973, coup against Allende; and the assassination in Washington, D.C., of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean foreign minister, in 1976.

The first and last cases, according to the record Kornbluh has uncovered, have odd similarities. Schneider's elimination three years before the coup was regarded as essential by the Nixon administration, since Schneider was a strict constitutionalist and therefore an obstacle to U.S. efforts to promote a military intervention before Allende could take office. The general was killed in a kidnapping attempt that the United States knew about, approved of, and had even assisted in planning. A week before the kidnapping was to take place, however, Kissinger discouraged the plot. As he told Nixon at the time, he had "turned it off."

The killing of Schneider, it seems fair to say, was not what the Americans wanted (although the CIA had warned of such an outcome), but was, as the saying now goes, "collateral damage." The planned assassination of Pinochet's critics living abroad under Operation Condor—an international state-sponsored terror network set up by the Pinochet regime (in consort with Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and, later, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador) to track and eliminate opponents—was also known to U.S. intelligence operatives and reported to the White House. Policymakers even knew that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States. Kissinger intervened a month before the killing of Letelier, ordering that the Latin American rulers involved be informed that the "assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad ... would create a most serious moral and political problem." This démarche was apparently not delivered: the U.S. embassy

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in Santiago demurred on the ground that to deliver such a strong rebuke would upset the dictator. The U.S. ambassador to Chile, David Popper, wrote to Washington, "In my judgement, given Pinochet's sensitivity regarding pressures by the USG [U.S. government], he might well take as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination plots." On September 20, 1976, the State Department instructed the ambassadors "to take no further action" with regard to the Condor scheme. Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, were killed the following morning.

As for the coup itself, there is no doubt that the United States did all that it could to create the conditions for the failure of Allende and his government. But, as in most such cases, it was the locals who made the coup itself. And although the United States did little to reign in Pinochet thereafter and certainly, as these documents make clear, knew much more about the atrocities committed in Chile than was admitted to at the time or later, the causes of the violence in Chilean society are to be found more in Chilean circumstances than in the intent of manipulators in Washington. What is truly remarkable is the effort—the resources committed, the risks taken, and the skullduggery employed—to bring a Latin American democracy down, and the meager efforts since to build democracy back up. Left to their own devices, the Chileans might just have found the good sense to resolve their own deep-seated problems. Allende might have fallen by his own weight, victim of his own incompetence, and not become a tragic martyr to a lost cause.

Kornbluh, who has put together several collections of declassified documents on key U.S. foreign policy crises, led the campaign

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