Kenneth Maxwell

to declassify more than 25,000 closely
held records on U.S.-Chilean relations
through the National Security Archives,
a nonprofit nongovernmental organization
that he helped establish with the support
of several U.S. foundations. This effort,
he says, is part of an ongoing international
campaign "to hold Pinochet and his mili-
tary responsible for the murder, torture and
terrorism committed during his regime."

These are not, of course, just matters
of historical curiosity. Pinochet, after all,
was held under house arrest in London
in 1998 under just such charges filed by
the Spanish investigating judge Baltasar
Garzón. In fact, the release of the docu-
ments in this book resulted from that
watershed event, a high point in the
campaign by human rights activists and
victims' families to hold repressive leaders
responsible for their actions. Now, law-
suits are pending or threatened against
Kissinger himself for complicity or fore-
knowledge of the plots that led to the
assassination of Schneider in Santiago in
1970 and, closer to home, the shocking car
bombing in 1976 that killed Letelier and
Moffitt 14 blocks from the White House.

Kornbluh's bill of particulars and the
supporting documents he has uncovered
confirm the deep involvement of the U.S.
intelligence services in Chile prior to and
after the coup. In outline, this story has
been known for many years and will be
no surprise to Chileans. The extent of
the involvement was originally hinted at
during the Senate hearings conducted by
the late Frank Church in the mid-1970s.
The scope and nature of these clandestine
activities are significantly amplified by
the documents released in the extensive
declassification ordered by President Bill
Clinton in 1999 and 2000 and reprinted in

Kornbluh's book. These documents in-
clude: transcripts of top-secret discus-
sions among President Nixon, Kissinger,
and other cabinet members on how "to
bring Allende down"; minutes of secret
meetings chaired by Kissinger to plan
covert operations in Chile; new documen-
tation of the notorious case of Charles
Horman, an American murdered by the
Chilean military and subject of the movie
Missing; comprehensive documentation of
the Letelier case and the extensive CIA,
National Security Council, and State
Department reports surrounding it; and
U.S. intelligence reporting on Operation
Condor. All these sources, however, are
extensively redacted—that is, sensitive
parts of them, especially those from the
CIA, have been blacked out.

WHAT THE BOSS WANTED

Kissinger's response to Kornbluh's charges will undoubtedly be twofold. On the general level, he will argue that Chile and its problems were marginal to the larger concerns the Nixon administration was facing in the Middle East and South Vietnam, not to mention Watergate: Nixon and his would-be Metternich were fully engaged elsewhere with "big" events. On the narrow, legalistic level, the claim will be that the dots in the Schneider and Letelier cases cannot be joined because of the undelivered démarche, in the case of Letelier, and Kissinger's counterorder, in the case of Schneider. These are arguments best left to lawyers, not historians. On the question of the impact of "larger" concerns, however, there is one inconvenient detail: chronology. War broke out in the Middle East on October 6, 1973, almost a month after the overthrow of Allende on September 11. As late as October 5, as

[150] FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 82 No. 6

The Other 9/11

Kissinger points out in his new book, *Crisis*, the CIA had reported to Nixon: "The military preparations that have occurred do not indicate that any party intends to initiate hostilities." So it can hardly be argued that Allende's downfall came as a surprise to policymakers in Washington because their attention at that particular moment was focused elsewhere.

On Kornbluh's side, what is lacking in the forensic approach (and it is a weakness of much writing on U.S. diplomatic history) is location in time and space. We see only the U.S. side of a story that is at least two-sided, if not multifaceted. The pursuit of declassified documents tends to exaggerate this tendency, so that intra-mural bureaucratic paperwork takes on a life of its own. Very little of the complex political and social history of Chile in the 1970s enters here; nor do we see the roles of many other actors beyond the Chilean military, U.S. clandestine operatives, and their political masters. Chilean society was at the time highly mobilized on the left as well as the right. All the Chilean political parties—from Communist to Christian Democrat—received and welcomed outside support, much of it clandestine. The Soviets and the Cubans had their own involvements, and the international left held Chile as a potential model. So it was not only Nixon and Kissinger who looked into the Chilean mirror and saw what they wanted to see; others did too, and from different angles.

If anything, both sides were guilty of knee-jerk reactions prompted by Cold War phobias. U.S. methodology in Chile was not that different from the tactics used to remove regimes from Guatemala City to Tehran deemed dangerous to the geo-political status quo. Kissinger defenders

may be right in asserting that this was not high on his agenda. But the outcome might have been better if he had paid greater attention to the details instead of leaving them to "old hands." In the end, what have persisted through the decades to haunt him are the "marginal" cases: Timor, Angola, and Chile; the old triumphs against the Soviet Union are barely remembered by a generation for whom the days of Cold War threats are long gone.

But what is very clear in all of this is that the coup in Chile is exactly what Kissinger's boss wanted. As Nixon put it in his ineffable style, "It's that son of a bitch Allende. We're going to smash him." As early as October of 1970, the CIA had warned of possible consequences: "you have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile. ... We provide you with a formula for chaos which is unlikely to be bloodless. To dissimulate the U.S. involvement will be clearly impossible." The Pinochet dictatorship lasted 17 long and brutal years. According to the Chilean Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, its victims numbered 3,197. Thirty years after its initiation, the coup of 1973 remains deeply etched in collective memory. It is unlikely that this book will be the end of the story.®

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · November / December 2003

[151]

## 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*.

[147]

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 Wash-
ington, 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

[148]

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

> "A comprehensive proposal for addressing one of the most important issues of our day." —George Mitchell, Former Senate Majority Leader

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Available Everywhere Books Are Sold
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[149]

(LC)

Kenneth Maxwell

Kornbluh's book. These documents in-
clude: transcripts of top-secret discus-
sions among President Nixon, Kissinger,
and other cabinet members on how "to
bring Allende down"; minutes of secret
meetings chaired by Kissinger to plan
covert operations in Chile; new documenta-
tion of the notorious case of Charles
Horman, an American murdered by the
Chilean military and subject of the movie
Missing; comprehensive documentation of
the Letelier case and the extensive CIA,
National Security Council, and State
Department reports surrounding it; and
U.S. intelligence reporting on Operation
Condor. All these sources, however, are
extensively redacted—that is, sensitive
parts of them, especially those from the
CIA, have been blacked out.

WHAT THE BOSS WANTED

The Other 9/11

[151]

[LC]

# Kissinger & Chile: The Myth That Will Not Die

## Mark Falcoff

THE 30TH anniversary of the coup d'état that deposed Chile's Marxist president Salvador Allende has come and gone, but not without a burst of accusations of American complicity with—if not responsibility for—that event. Even before the commemorations had gotten under way, Secretary of State Colin Powell took it upon himself to apologize for the U.S. role in Chile, though in terms so vague as to leave many wondering exactly what he was referring to.

The fact that the coup itself took place on the very same date—September 11—that the World Trade Center was destroyed by a sensational terrorist attack in 2001 was a coincidence too fraught to be overlooked. In an editorial titled "The Other September 11," the *New York Times*, with characteristic condescension, reminded its readers that "our nation's hands have not always been clean" and managed to suggest a smoking gun ("the United States . . . laid the groundwork for [the coup] and supported the plotters") without actually producing one. The foreign press was more categorical. In *Le Monde*, the flagship daily of anti-Americans worldwide, a front-page cartoon on September 11 depicted a plane about to hit the World Trade Center. But the roles of villain and

victim had been grotesquely altered: the twin towers were labeled "Chile," the plane "USA."

The name invariably linked to our Chilean involvement is that of Henry Kissinger, today the leading survivor of the Nixon administration and at the time the evident architect of much of its foreign policy, first as National Security Adviser and then as Secretary of State. The case against him has been before the public for several years now, most notably in an article by Christopher Hitchens in *Harper's* that was subsequently reproduced in Hitchens's book *The Trial of Henry Kissinger* and then repeated with a wealth of lurid detail in a BBC "documentary" in which Hitchens appears as prosecutor-in-chief. In addition to his supposed role as the intellectual author of the coup, Kissinger has been accused in both film and book of responsibility for the murder of General René Schneider, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army—that is, of homicide. The sons of the late general, egged on by political sympathizers in Europe and the United States, have even filed suit against Kissinger in hopes of recovering substantial damages for their father's death.

Chilean politics past or present is not a particular specialty of Americans, even Americans normally well informed about world affairs. What people know—or think they know—about that country is often a digest of newspaper headlines and of vague allegations, rather than substantiated facts. But neither is Chilean politics a specialty of

MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Modern Chile 1970-1989: A Critical History. His latest book, Cuba the Morning After, has recently been brought out by AEI Press.

[41]

COMMENTARY NOVEMBER 2003

Christopher Hitchens, the *New York Times*, or Le Monde. As we shall see, their interests would appear lie largely elsewhere.

II

The starting point for the Chilean drama was a presidential election that took place in September 1970, three full years before the military coup whose anniversary was recently marked. There were several candidates. One—Salvador Allende, a socialist and avowed Marxist running in coalition with the Communist party—came in first, with 36.3 percent of the vote. Within a razor's edge behind him was former President Jorge Alessandri, the candidate of the Right, who received 34.9 percent. Radomiro Tomic, of the ruling Christian Democrats, came in third with 27.8 percent.

Such presidential elections, with no candidate receiving an absolute majority, were common in Chile. The constitutional procedures of the day specifically mandated that, instead of a runoff between the two leading candidates, the winner was to be selected by the Chilean congress, scheduled to meet several weeks hence. Although the legislature was not strictly required to opt for the front-runner, firm custom suggested that it would do so. What raised the stakes in the 1970 race was the presence of Allende himself, a man with strong Soviet-bloc and Cuban connections and even more sinister associations within Chile's far Left. Consequently, between the election on September 4 and the congressional vote on October 24, Chile was awash in rumors and plots, most of them related to efforts to block Allende's accession to power.

In Washington, meanwhile, President Richard Nixon was hardly pleased by the prospect of an Allende presidency, and was taking steps to prevent it. This much has been a matter of public record for nearly 30 years. The primary sources are two reports by a committee led by the late Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, one entitled *Alleged Assassination Plots of Foreign Leaders* and the other *Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973* (both published in 1975). The findings of the Church committee exonerate the administration of unlawful activity—a noteworthy fact in light of the circumstances that both the chairman and the majority of the members (and, even more, their staffs) were unremittingly hostile to the Nixon White House and anxious, if possible, to find embarrassing linkages between it and events in Chile.

There is another primary source as well. In

1998, the Clinton administration was moved by the arrest in London of Allende's successor, the dictator Augusto Pinochet, to order the (heavily redacted) declassification of some 17,000 official U.S. documents relating to the period. The most important of these have been placed on the website of the National Security Archive—a left-wing organization not to be confused with the U.S. National Archives. They also form the basis of a new book by the Archive's Peter Kornbluh, *The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability*, released this past September 11.*

Great things have been claimed for the Clinton declassifications. Thanks to them, Christopher Hitchens has been able to boast that in his book "I produce [government] documents that plainly show the orchestration of a plot to murder General René Schneider." Likewise, he remarks, in the suit filed by the general's family, "every paper for the prosecution is a declassified document of the U.S. government." In fact, however, the Clinton declassifications are less rich in information than the findings of the Church committee, which was able to examine the documentary record in its unexpurgated form and also to interrogate the participants under oath. Nor do the Clinton declassifications contribute anything particularly useful to the case against Kissinger. Some of them actually corroborate the findings of the Church committee, and, what is even more ironic, support Kissinger's own version of events as laid out in the relevant volumes of his memoirs.

That version is itself buttressed at points by other information, especially transcripts of Kissinger's conversations with relevant figures in Washington and elsewhere. Some of these conversations took place by telephone. Records of Kissinger's telephone exchanges, covering the entire span of his government service, are now in the process of being released—they form, for instance, the primary basis of his new book, *Crisis*, dealing with the Yom Kippur war and the end of the Vietnam war. All of them have been given by him for inclusion in the Nixon Library. Although the records relating specifically to Chile are not yet in the public domain, they will be before long, and he has kindly let me review them in advance.

First and foremost, these transcripts establish that Chile was not an important part of the then-National Security Adviser's daily diet. This point is crucial, not least because in the BBC film we are continually being told that Kissinger micromanaged every detail of American foreign policy. While that may have been true for subjects of high geo-

* New Press, 551 pp., $29.95.

political in nature during the period, say, between professional versions of Kissinger's East crisis, Cuba, the Nixon's Pinochet, the coup, the reference only slightly until June 1973, military reference with power within the

But then the Allen Moscow, portance the subje- coup, Kissinger's possible role and prep- as Secret

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[42]

KISSINGER & CHILE: THE MYTH THAT WILL NOT DIE

political import, Chile was not one of them. In fact, during September and October 1970—which is to say, between the Chilean election and the congressional vote—the telephone record reveals a Kissinger preoccupied with a full-blown Middle East crisis, Vietnam, a Soviet submarine base in Cuba, the Black September plane hijacking, Nixon's planned visit to Europe and to the Sixth Fleet, the defense budget, and the Pugwash conference on U.S.-Soviet relations, but with Chile only slightly. Thereafter, there is nothing at all until June 1973, when he and Nixon discuss a failed military revolt against Allende, and then no further references until after Pinochet's assumption of power with the September 11 coup.

But this is not really surprising. During much of the Allende presidency, Kissinger was in Paris, Moscow, Beijing, or other locales of far greater importance to the U.S. than Santiago. And even when the subject was again broached at the time of the coup, Kissinger was principally concerned with the possible resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew and preparations for his own confirmation hearings as Secretary of State.

This is hardly to say, however, that the telephone documents are uninformative; far from it. In what follows I shall be drawing freely on them as well as on other pertinent sources to reconstruct the true course of events.

### III

PRESIDENT NIXON was indeed deeply distressed at the prospect of an Allende presidency in Chile, and on September 15, 1970, he summoned Kissinger, Attorney General John Mitchell, and CIA director Richard Helms for a meeting in the Oval Office to discuss the matter. As Helms's notes of the meeting reflect, Nixon was determined to "save Chile" from Allende "even if the chances [were] one in ten." At this meeting there was even loose talk about spending $10 million to provoke a coup, and "more if necessary." Helms remonstrated with the President that Allende would in all likelihood be chosen by the Chilean congress and that only a "slight possibility" existed of a move by senior elements of the country's military to block his confirmation. "Moreover," Helms recalls in his posthumous memoir, *A Look Over My Shoulder* (2003), "I noted that the [CIA] lacked the means of motivating the military to intervene." But the President was unmoved: "Standing mid-track and shouting at an oncoming locomotive," recalls Helms, "might have been more effective."

Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held.

The particular charm of this ploy was that an Alessandri presidency, even if it lasted a mere 24 hours, would render outgoing President Eduardo Frei eligible to run again, this time in a two-headed race against Allende. (Chile's constitution, then as now, prohibited consecutive terms.) Under those circumstances, Frei—a Christian Democrat and still the most popular of modern Chilean presidents—could be reasonably expected to defeat Allende fair and square.

This plot, known colloquially as the "Alessandri" or "Rube Goldberg" gambit, required two things to succeed. Frei had to agree to play the role assigned to him, and he would also have to persuade his own followers in congress to cast their votes for Alessandri. Both obstacles proved insurmountable. As Ambassador Edward Korry's cables from Santiago show, though Frei was deeply troubled by the prospect of an Allende presidency—accurately predicting that it would end in "blood and horror"—he was extremely reluctant to lend himself to a version of Chile's electoral traditions. And even had he been amenable, he would have been unable to persuade most Christian Democrats in Congress to vote for a conservative like Alessandri, no matter how brief his putative rule. For, by 1970, Frei's party was already leaning considerably further to the Left than Frei himself; its official candidate, Radomiro Tomic, had precipitously recognized Allende as president-elect on election night.

In the meantime, even as the U.S. embassy in Santiago was pursuing the "Alessandri gambit," an alternative line of activity was being looked into by the CIA station in Chile. This policy, later labeled Track II (to distinguish it from the constitutional coup), involved finding a general or generals who, if President Frei and the Christian Democrats would not play the role assigned to them, would overthrow the outgoing government, dissolve the congress, and send the president into temporary exile. Then the interim junta would call elections

[43]

COMMENTARY NOVEMBER 2003

(at an unspecified but presumably early date) in
which President Frei could return and run against
Allende.

Or something like that. Nixon's instructions to
the CIA were simply to forestall Allende's inaugu-
ration; he was not interested in the details, or ap-
parently in the kind of government that would
emerge in Allende's place.

IV

THE SEARCH for a military man brought the CIA station into contact with General Roberto Viaux, who had been cashiered from the Chilean army in 1969 for leading a revolt against the Christian Democratic government (ostensibly in protest over military salaries and benefits). Since his dismissal, Viaux had continued to conspire, but with larger ideological and political objectives in mind. In early October, by which time Track I had run out of gas, he informed his CIA contacts that he was planning another coup and asked for a sizable drop of arms and ammunition.

Apart from the fact that (according to Helms)
the CIA thought Viaux a bit "far out," the notion
that a group of senior army officers required for-
eign arms to stage a coup did not inspire confi-
dence. After subsequent discussion, the CIA decid-
ed Viaux was not a good bet, though it kept him on
a long leash, disbursing some cash and even taking
out an insurance policy on his life. Another group
of generals was eventually selected for the task at
hand. Before it could act, however, a roadblock had
to be removed.

The chief obstacle to Track II was General René Schneider, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army. His view, simply stated, was that since the politicians had gotten the country into the mess in which it found itself, the politicians would have to find a way out. This position he maintained sturdily throughout September and October in the face of almost daily representations by retired officers, politicians, and businessmen begging him to "save the country" either by supporting a constitutional coup or by some other means. As General Carlos Prats, his second in command, has reported Schneider's words to him at the time, "the politicians are maneuvering to push the army into an adventure. They should understand that we are not so stupid as to not realize that they want to 'use' us, some to preserve their political unity, others as a 'trampoline' for Viaux." When Schneider proved intransigent, the intermediaries tried to persuade Prats, again to no effect. The architects of Track II

then focused on circumventing Schneider by kid-
napping him and sending him to neighboring Ar-
gentina for a season while the political situation
was adjusted.

As far as Kissinger (and, for that matter, the White House) was concerned, Viaux had been told to stand down, and that was presumably the end of active American coup-plotting. As Kissinger told Nixon by telephone on October 15, reporting on a meeting with Thomas Karamassines of the CIA's Western Hemisphere division, "This looks hope- less. I turned it off. Nothing would be worse than an abortive coup." The President responded, "Just tell him to do nothing." The next day, CIA head- quarters cabled its station in Santiago that although "we are to continue to generate maximum pres- sure" toward a coup, "a Viaux coup . . . would fail" and Viaux should be warned "against precipitate ac- tion." The message was delivered through an in- termediary, leaving the CIA with the pious hope that once its wishes had been made known, Viaux would respect them.

Unfortunately, the cashiered Chilean general was pursuing agendas of his own. The kidnapping itself, which took place early on the morning of October 22, was badly bungled. Schneider resisted by extracting a handgun from his briefcase, pro- voking his abductors—mostly young and inexperi- enced—into shooting first, wounding him in four vital areas. Viaux's people panicked and took flight, some discarding their arms near the scene of the crime. The general was rushed to the capital's mil- itary hospital, where he died three days later.

V

MUCH HAS been made of the fact that between
October 15, when Kissinger ordered the
Viaux coup "turned off," and the death of General
Schneider, the CIA station in Santiago continued
to make preparations for a Track II-type coup.
Thus, at some point in mid-October three subma-
chine guns and some tear-gas canisters and gas
masks were shipped to the Chilean capital through
the U.S. diplomatic pouch and passed to Colonel
Paul Wimert, an American military attaché, who in
turn gave them to officers representing General
Camilo Valenzuela, head of the Santiago garrison.
This was the group that had intended to kidnap
General Schneider. The exchange occurred at two
in the morning of October 22; but before any use
could be made of the weaponry, General Schneider
lay dying in the hospital.

Eventually, the machine guns were returned un-

[44]

used to Wimert, who discarded them in the Pacific Ocean. A Chilean military court subsequently found that Schneider had been killed by handguns, and the Church committee concluded that these weapons "were, in all probability, not those supplied by the CIA to the conspirators." The committee also noted that an unloaded machine gun had been found at the site of the killing, but professed itself "unable to determine whether [it] was one of the three supplied by the CIA." Schneider was therefore killed by conspirators who, although in contact with the CIA, were acting against its direct instruction, and apparently without its logistical assistance.

Just why the Chilean kidnapping plot went forward after Kissinger issued orders that General Viaux be "turned off" is not clear. Possibly it was because Nixon's express desire to prevent Allende's accession was so emphatic that Colonel Wimert and other CIA personnel felt somewhat at liberty to go ahead on their own. Kissinger, at any rate, seems to have been unaware of the second plot—that is, the one for which the three machine guns were sent down. In 1975, after testifying before the Church committee, Karamassines phoned the National Security Adviser and reported that he had been "asked . . . if I cleared everything in advance with you. I said no, you were too busy." In the same conversation, Kissinger remarks that, although he did not know about the second plot, he might have approved it. Then he adds: "I thought that after we turned off that one thing [the Viaux plot], nothing more had happened and in fact that other thing [the Schneider kidnapping] had happened."

In short, deplore as one might the interventionist intentions of Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA, the fact remains that General Schneider was murdered as the result of a botched kidnapping attempt, which—as far as the White House was concerned—had been disavowed and ordered shut down a full week before it happened.

Even more has been made of a CIA cable dated October 16 instructing the Santiago station to tell Viaux that, although he was to stand down, he should "preserve [his] assets" and would "continue to have our support" if he joined forces with others either before or after Allende's inauguration and amplified his political planning for the future. In fact, Viaux played no future role whatsoever in Chilean politics. He was arrested almost immediately after Schneider's murder and sentenced by a military court to a long prison term. In August 1973, he was released and sent to Paraguay; neither

he nor any of the officers involved in his plot was involved in the September 11 coup. When he finally returned to Chile, six or seven years later, the Pinochet government offered him no special consideration.

Neither Hitchens's book nor the film upon which it is based takes note of a crucial fact: namely, that the Schneider debacle had precisely the opposite effect of what was desired by the CIA and the Nixon administration. It transformed its victim into a martyr of the "constitutionalist" traditions of the Chilean army; it encouraged other constitutionalist officers to support an orderly transfer of power to the new Allende administration; it brought General Carlos Prats, another officer of firm constitutionalist leanings, to the head of the army; and it discredited right-wing cabals both inside the army and out.

It is strange that this outcome should go unremarked by critics who profess to care for Chile and who should presumably take comfort from it—but, given their invincible biases, perhaps it is not so strange after all.

VI

KISSINGER HAS been charged with criminal responsibility not just for Schneider's assassination. He has also been charged with criminal responsibility for Allende's overthrow and death three years later.

The CIA's October 16 cable contained another passage that is quoted with much relish in the BBC movie *The Trials of Henry Kissinger*, even though there is no indication that Kissinger ever saw the document. In it, the CIA enunciates its

> firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. . . . [E]fforts in this regard will continue vigorously. . . . We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource.

In the movie, these highlighted words are immediately followed by horrific images of the events of September 11, 1973, which included the bombing of the presidential palace, the arrest and torture of hundreds of dissidents, and the accession to power of an unusually cruel military junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet. As it happens, however, the quotation and the events depicted on the screen collapse two completely different moments in U.S. policy and in the history of Chile.

In the fall of 1970, Nixon certainly talked tough,

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COMMENTARY NOVEMBER 2003

at least in private, telling Kissinger by phone on
October 15 that if Allende were to take office, "I
am not going to do a thing for [Chile]," and that if
he dared to nationalize U.S. property, "then we cut
him off." Not surprisingly, a National Security
Council memorandum (November 9, 1970), draft-
ed several days after Allende's inauguration and re-
leased in the Clinton declassifications, called for a
"correct but cool" public posture toward Chile
while at the same time "maximiz[ing] pressures on
the Allende government to prevent its consolida-
tion and limit its ability to implement policies con-
trary to U.S. and hemispheric interests." Specific-
ally, the memorandum advocated eliminating
financial guarantees for U.S. private investment in
Chile; terminating existing guarantees where possi-
ble; bringing "feasible influence" to bear at multilat-
eral lending institutions; and offering no new com-
mitments of bilateral economic aid. (Humanitarian
aid was to be considered on a case-by-case basis.)

Meanwhile, however, an “options paper” on Chile (November 3, 1970), sketching how these policies were to be implemented, included two provisions not mentioned in the memorandum. The first was “to give articulate support, publicly and privately, to democratic elements in Chile opposed to the Allende regime by all appropriate means.” The second was to “maintain effective relations with the Chilean military, letting them know that we want to cooperate but that our ability to do so depends on Chilean government actions.”

The former provision laid the groundwork for the
transfer of at least $6 million in covert support to
non-Marxist political parties, newspapers, radio
stations, and other groups during the Allende peri-
od. Thanks to these transfers, Allende found it im-
possible to eliminate his political competition by
confiscating the sources of their funding or by in-
tentionally bankrupting independent newspapers
or radio stations through politically inspired
strikes. Without the American subventions, Chile's
pluralistic political system—including an indepen-
dent press and electronic media—would in all
probability have disappeared long before Gene-
ral Pinochet and his associates overthrew the gov-
ernment and installed a dictatorship of their own.
As for the latter provision, it merely outlined a
“business-as-usual” relationship with the Chilean
military while saying and doing nothing to encour-
age the military’s involvement in politics.

THE DOCUMENTARY evidence is thus unam-
biguous: the most serious charge that can be
levied against the Nixon administration is that it

contemplated economic sanctions against Chile at
a time when Allende had yet to lay a hand on
American investments in the country and was still
making payments on Chile's debts. But even that
envisaged policy was never truly implemented. In
spite of Nixon's decision to end all bilateral assis-
tance not already committed, new appropriations—
however token in proportion to the past—were
authorized during every year of the Allende gov-
ernment. Even after the increasingly bankrupt
country defaulted on its debts to the United States
in November 1971, "old" U.S. loans continued to
be disbursed, amounting (according to one U.S.
Treasury estimate) to $200 million for 1971 and
1972; nor was humanitarian aid withdrawn.
Though Chile nationalized American holdings in
the copper industry in 1971 without making a sat-
isfactory arrangement for compensation—pushing
the U.S. government-funded Overseas Private
Investment Corporation to the brink of bankrupt-
cy—the notorious Hickenlooper Amendment (re-
quiring a suspension of aid to any country that ex-
propriates U.S. property without payment) was
never invoked.

Besides, Chile's default constituted a de-facto re-
lief measure for the Allende regime, amounting in
1972 alone to $243 million—an effective transfer
of resources greater by many orders of magnitude
than that tendered to the Frei administration at a
time when the latter was supposedly Washington's
“showcase” in Latin America. In addition, Allende
was able to tap new sources of credit in Western
and Eastern Europe—in 1972, somewhere between
$600 and $950 million. As a key functionary of his
finance ministry would recall, by mid-1973 “Chile
had rebuilt and diversified its system of external fi-
nance” and by June of that year had obtained
short-term credits amounting to $547 million. To
this should be added the fact that between Novem-
ber 1970 and September 1973, Chile was able to
draw slightly more than $100 million from the In-
ternational Monetary Fund, presumably over the
protests of U.S. representatives there.

The one area where U.S. aid increased threefold
during the Allende period was military assistance.
If this sounds sinister, two crucial facts should be
borne in mind. First, the aid relieved pressures on
the Chilean budget, allowing money that would
otherwise have been used for weaponry and train-
ing to be diverted to improved housing allowances
and other amenities for the uniformed services.
Second, Allende himself welcomed this assistance,
which permitted him to boast, truthfully, that
Chile's armed forces were better off under a So-

[46]

cialist-Communist government than under its Christian Democratic predecessor. Indeed, to the end of his regime President Allende saw the armed forces as an element on the chessboard to be used and manipulated for his own political purposes.

## VII

WHAT, THEN, brought about the September 11, 1973 coup? The real causes must be sought in the devastating collapse of the Chilean economy that took place during the Allende presidency, as well as in Chile's increasingly polarized political environment.

On November 4, 1970, Salvador Allende assumed the presidency in an atmosphere of euphoria and even good will almost unimaginable in retrospect. Apart from his own four-party coalition (Popular Unity) headed by the Socialist and Communist parties, the new president could count on the "critical support" of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), which historically had questioned the possibility of social change in Chile through peaceful electoral means. More important still, he took office, as we have seen, at a time when the leading opposition party, the Christian Democrats, was anxious to compete for the labels "progressive" and even "revolutionary." After his inauguration, Allende met with the Christian Democratic leadership in an atmosphere of good humor and camaraderie; the chief of the delegation even urged the president to "help us be good allendistas."

Instead, intoxicated by ideological triumphalism, Allende's people did everything they could to split the Christian Democrats, luring the party's left wing over to the governing coalition while wreaking political vengeance on the rest. As Allende supporters seized factories and farms throughout Chile, Christian Democratic workers were dismissed and their union leaders refused access to the premises. Political discrimination even extended to nonpolitical individuals for family reasons; the son of President Frei, an engineer, found himself in difficulty when his workplace passed into the hands of government "intervenors."

The net effect of these actions was, paradoxically, to discredit the "collaborationist" leadership of the Christian Democrats and bring about its replacement with more conservative figures. By 1973, the party had been pushed into a tactical electoral alliance with the Right, a development that would have been unthinkable three years earlier. In March 1973, in the last parliamentary elec-

tion held under Allende, the combined Christian Democratic-Conservative list won a thumping 56 percent of the vote.

These and other ominous shifts in political allegiance were hugely facilitated by Allende's domestic economic actions—including the harassment of small business, planned dislocations in the country's food supply, and the uninhibited printing of unbacked currency. The constant threat to independent operators led to a major trucker's strike in 1972, which then spread disastrously to other sectors of the economy; tampering with the country's distribution system produced widespread shortages of food; and the flooding of the country with paper money ended in uncontrollable inflation.

One result of the ensuing chaos was that Allende found himself relying heavily on the military just to remain in power. Several times he was compelled to ask flag officers to serve in key ministries; in the final phase of the regime, General Prats was functioning as his minister of interior. These innovations introduced enormous stresses within the armed forces; Prats's growing closeness to Allende—it amounted to a kind of ideological seduction—undermined his own position in the military, and in August 1973 he was forced to go into voluntary exile in neighboring Argentina.

## VIII

BY THAT time, Allende's problems had become so acute as to merit notice once more by the President of the United States. The immediate occasion was a failed military plot against Allende that had been quashed by loyalist troops. Nixon and Kissinger discussed the matter by telephone on July 4, 1973. Not surprisingly, the President expressed regret that the coup failed ("if only the army could get a few people behind them!"). For his part, Kissinger told the President that "we had nothing to do with it." Both agreed that the prospect of flag officers leaving the Chilean cabinet was bound to deepen the crisis and put Allende in an even more disadvantageous position.

For the next two months, no further phone conversations took place between Kissinger and the Nixon White House on the subject of Chile. Not until the events surrounding the September 11 coup did they resume.

Within hours of that event, the prestige American press was circulating rumors to the effect that Washington had had prior word of the plot. On September 13, for example, the *New York Times* carried a headline—"U.S. Had Warning of Coup,

[47]

COMMENTARY NOVEMBER 2003

Aides Say”—leading readers to infer that knowledge possessed by Washington and deliberately withheld from the Allende government had spelled the difference between its survival and its demise. In fact, however, as Ken Rush, a White House aide, said to Kissinger on that same day, “What [Assistant Secretary of State Jack] Kubish told me was that we knew nothing about it; that we had not been told about it and it came as a complete surprise to us.” Rush added: “I didn’t know that a coup was coming at any particular date. We’d been hearing coup rumors for about a year.”

Kissinger was better informed than the White House. A few days before the coup, Ambassador Nathaniel Davis had been recalled to Washington, not to discuss Chile *per se* but to be looked over as a possible candidate for a high State Department post. As he walked into Kissinger's office, he was asked immediately about the possibilities of a coup. The recorded transcript of their conversation was reproduced by Kissinger in his memoir, *Years of Upheaval* (1982). "In Chile you can never count on anything," the ambassador said, "but the odds are in favor of a coup, though I can't give you any time frame." Kissinger: "We are going to stay out of that, I assume." Davis: "Yes. My firm instructions to everybody on the staff are that we are not to involve ourselves in any way. . . . Our biggest problem is to keep from getting caught in the middle."

Davis's "information" was no secret. The truth is that every cat and dog in Chile knew a coup was coming at some point in September 1973, and so did Allende himself. The only questions were who would lead it, who would replace Allende, and what ideological tendency would prevail once the government was dissolved. During a private lunch with the president a few days before his departure into Argentine exile, General Prats himself warned Allende that he would be overthrown within the next ten days. When the president asked whether Prats's ministerial replacement, General Augusto Pinochet, would remain loyal, Prats said he thought so but that the issue was irrelevant. "Even the most constitutionalist of officers," he later recalled telling the president in this most bizarre of exchanges, "will understand that a division within the armed forces would mean civil war." In effect, officers would either respect the decision of the coup-makers or be swept aside.*

Contrary, then, to what the film *The Trials of Henry Kissinger* suggests, there was no straight line between the events of 1970 and the coup of 1973. Rather, conscious choices by Allende and his own people drove the military into action that it would

normally have been disinclined to carry out. This was certainly the impression conveyed, for example, by a U.S. naval attaché who cabled a few days after the coup that the "decision to remove the Allende government was made with extreme reluctance and only after the deepest soul-searching by all concerned."

As for President Nixon, he was evidently pleased—how could he not have been?—but exhibited no sense of complicity with the coup-makers themselves. As he said on the phone to Kissinger on September 16, "Well, we didn't—as you know—our hand doesn't show on this one though." To which Kissinger replied, "We didn't do it."

## IX

THE UNITED States did play a role in Chile, though not precisely the one ascribed to it. It attempted—unsuccessfully—to forestall Allende's confirmation by the Chilean congress. But once he was in office, the thrust of U.S. policy shifted to sustaining a democratic opposition and an independent press until Allende could be defeated in the presidential elections scheduled for 1976. To the extent that this opposition was able to survive under extraordinarily difficult economic circumstances—winning control of the Chilean congress in March 1973—one might even credit the Nixon administration with preventing the consolidation of Allende's "totalitarian project" (to use the apt expression of Eduardo Frei).

What then followed—a right-wing dictatorship that crushed not merely the Allende regime but Chilean democracy itself—was not and could not have been predicted, partly because of the military's own apolitical traditions and partly because, by mid-1973, the opposition to Allende was dominated by forces of proved democratic provenance. To the contrary, Washington's presumption—that in the 1976 elections, if they were allowed to take place, the opposition would win decisively—was amply supported by the facts. It was only the savagery of the subsequent Pinochet dictatorship that in hindsight altered the historical picture.

As the years passed, the contumely into which Allende and his associates had deservedly fallen in

* Prats's memoirs are of particular interest because they were written in exile at a time when he had become, *post hoc*, a virtual participant of the Allende regime and was seen by many as a potential challenger to Pinochet's military government. They were completed just before he and his wife were killed by a car bomb in Buenos Aires planted by Pinochet's secret police, but remained unpublished until 1985 when book censorship was ended in Chile.

[48]

Chile at the time of their overthrow came to be neutralized, then canceled out, by martyrdom. Then, too, the undifferentiated contempt with which the military subsequently treated all political forces except those on the far Right threw together people who in August and September 1973 had been ready to face off in a kind of civil war. In that sense, General Pinochet—in spite of himself—may be considered the unanticipated progenitor of the Socialist-Christian Democratic coalition governments that have governed Chile from 1989 to the present.

The Allende regime also benefited retrospectively from its evident association with the old democratic order; it had, after all, been elected. How much longer it would have remained part of that order, which it was busily undermining, must remain a matter of controversy. But to the day of its demise, it enjoyed a marginal legitimacy that would elude its military successor. In this respect, too, Pinochet and his associates played an unexpected role—rescuing

for Allende and his government a place in Chilean history they did not earn and to which they could not otherwise have looked forward.

Such are a few of the pesky but all-important details that “revisionists” like Hitchens and the makers of *The Trials of Henry Kissinger* are at pains to avoid, if indeed they were ever aware of them in the first place. Those who mourn the loss of a Marxist regime in Chile are free to denounce the adversarial efforts undertaken by Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA, as are the legions of marchers with their placards equating American officials with Nazis and mass murderers. Those, like the editorialists of the *New York Times*, who are indifferent to the uses of anti-Americanism are likewise free to join the chorus. But anyone with a serious concern for historical truth—or for the long-term survival of democracy in Chile—or for the reputation of the United States and the policy it endeavored with honor to implement during the tortuous decades of the cold war—might well be moved to reexamine the record.

[49]

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FAX NO. : 202

Dec. 16 2003 11:49AM

P1

rogersletter.msc* 12/15/03 5:13 PM 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 2003). 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]

FROM:

FAX NO. : 202

Dec. 04 2003 01:24PM P1

William Rogers

12/04/2003 10:54 AM

Location: DC - 913
Phone: 202-942-5915
To: jhoge@cfr.org
cc.

Subject: Rebuttal to the Maxwell piece on Chile

Jim:

1. This is what needs saying in response to Ken's article. Better that the damaging parts not appear at all. But this is the minimum in my view:

## Quote

Ken Maxwell justifies his earlier comments as a "synopsis of the principal accusations made against Kissinger" by others. So much for balance and objectivity.

The bias comes clear in Maxwell's latest references to the Letelier murder. He now cites what he calls the "cruel coincidence" of the Shlaudeman cable, and advances the ominous suggestion that "this is a tragedy that might have been prevented." By whom, one might ask? Kissinger? Me? Shlaudeman? Such is the implication. It is outrageous.

The Shlaudeman cable was not an instruction to the ambassadors in the field. Maxwell has this wrong. It was a message from Shlaudeman then in Costa Rico back to State. The cable had no consequence. State sent no instructions to the field implementing it. Even if State had sent a message, it could have had no effect. The bomb was already in Letelier's car. Shlaudeman counselled 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 orders to warn the Chileans about human rights. And, finally, the notion that a lowly Assistant Secretary would have the temerity to countermand a direct, personal instruction from Kissinger, and do it behind the Secretary's back -- Kissinger and I were then 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 which strike at the heart of character and reputation.

I was Under Secretary of State in late 1976, at the time of Letelier and Operation Condor. Kissinger brought me into the 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 the piece do not give me great comfort in that quarter.

## End Quote

2. Ken is an official of the Council. This, I fear, will give his words in Foreign Affairs added weight. (And more regrettable.) Surely the Council and Foreign Affairs will at least want to make clear that he is speaking for himself and not for either the Council or Foreign Affairs, and that the Council does not endorse and disavows his implication of US complicity in the Chile coup, the two murders and the Pinochet era human rights violations. El, I fear, the article will be seen as giving institutional endorsement to this pernicious myth.

wrogers.pp2* 11/14/03 3:11 PM Page 1

Response

# The Chilean Coup of 1973

## Debating 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 America left and refreshed from time to time by contributions to the literature like Peter

Kornbluh's *The Pinochet File* and Kenneth Maxwell's review essay on 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, 30 years 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 "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

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FROM :

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USA

003

William D. Rogers and Kenneth Maxwell

regime in the region—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 Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Cuba.

What the U.S. did in Chile, from Allende's inauguration in 1970 up 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). Washington tried—and failed—to block the restructuring of Chile's foreign debt. Washington reduced bilateral aid (though Allende found relief by unilaterally shutting down debt service payments and opening lines of credit with other, friendlier nations). And it counseled international financial institutions to reduce their lending (although the World Bank needed no persuading: Chile was bankrupt). That was it.

If $6 million in support for the opposition 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 demonstration of the 'bourgeois' state," as the former Chilean Communist Roberto Ampuero put it recently in *The Washington Post*. "[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."

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, 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, Kissinger, or the CIA.

Such was the reality in Chile. Nathaniel Davis, the U.S. Ambassador in Santiago at the time, later said that

[2] FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 83 No. 1

Nov. 17 2003 06:37PM P4

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L'K

004

The Chilean Coup of 1973

thanks to Allende's inadcap economics,
there was "progressively less Chilean in-
stitutional viability to 'destabilize.'" Nor
was it the United States that did the
"destabilizing," "undermining," or "engi-
neering." According to a document of
undoubted authenticity appended to his
memoirs, Kissinger made clear to Davis
days before the 1973 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— “in
the middle.” For them, U.S. diplomatic is
quite enough to prove that Nixon and
Kissinger, up to their necks in Watergate
and Kissinger’s confirmation as Secretary
of State, were also micromanaging the
turbulence in Chile. There is not one
word in Kornbluh’s chapter on Allende’s
time in office about his disastrous eco-
nomic policies, his attack on Chile’s de-
mocratic institutions, or the wave of pop-
ular resentment that swept the Chilean
military to power. The critics see only the
American text, not the Chilean context.

The mythmakers' case for U.S. re-
sponsibility for the 1973 coup, built as it is
on what U.S. officials were saying to each
other, is circumstantial at best. So they
buttress it with references to events both
before and after Allende's presidency.
Maxwell, echoing Kornbluh, points to
the 1970 murder of General Schneider, as
if to show U.S. responsibility for the
coup three years later. Schneider was
killed by a band of rabid Chilean nation-
alists. Maxwell says that the United
States "approved" and "planned" their
effort. The facts are otherwise. In Sep-
tember of 1970, the Chilean Congress re-
jected a parliamentary maneuver to block

Allende's inauguration. CIA operatives in
Santiago then began to canvass a move
by the Chilean military. But the CIA
quickly backed off. The military, which
three years later had a different view, re-
fused in 1970 to intrude on the constitu-
tional process. The CIA so reported to
Kissinger, then National Security Ad-
viser, and on October 15, 1970, he ended
U.S. involvement in the anti-Allende
plotting. Kissinger later told the Presi-
dent, "This thing looked hopeless. I
turned it off. Nothing could be worse
than an abortive coup." But, according to
the Church Commission's Senate Com-
mittee Report, when CIA operatives re-
layed the turn-off instruction to the
Chilean army, the plotters responded
that they were going ahead anyway.
(Kissinger proved prescient: the result of
the abortive coup was precisely the oppo-
site of what the United States desired.)

Maxwell goes on to say that the
United States "did little to rein in
Pinochet thereafter," implying that this
also confirms U.S. responsibility for 1973.
But the record is otherwise. Maxwell and
Kornbluh give little weight to the stern
human rights warning Kissinger deliv-
ered directly to Pinochet at their only
meeting, in Santiago in June of 1976.
(Full disclosure: I was there, as
Kissinger's Under Secretary for Eco-
nomic Affairs and, as some of Kornbluh's
documents suggest, his human rights
gadfly.) They dismiss Kissinger's state-
ment, made in an address to the region's
foreign ministers, that the regime's
human rights violations '[have] impaired
our relationship with Chile and will con-
tinue to do so." And they skip lightly
over Kissinger's personal order to the
four U.S. ambassadors in the Southern

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William D. Rogers and Kenneth Maxwell!

Cone to tell the heads of their respective governments that political assassination and human rights violations would irreparably damage their relations with the United States and cost them dearly in aid. Despite what Kornbluh and Maxwell claim, Kissinger's warning was delivered in 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 Carter as well.

Finally, Maxwell cites a heavily reduced and 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 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 theress 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 upon 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.

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