Chile coup documents resonate in different ways today, with the U.S. facing foreign interference.
Fifty years ago this week, President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to
meddle in Chile, to stop the likely election of a socialist, Salvador
Allende. If that failed, Nixon told CIA Director Richard Helms, he
wanted the spy agency to make Chile’s economy “scream” until conditions
were right for a military coup. It didn’t matter that the agency
assessed the chance of success at 1 to 10.
On September 4,
1970, Allende won, but Nixon never relented. Four days after the
election, White House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger
assembled a top-secret group of officials and asked for “a cold blooded
assessment” of the pros and cons of supporting a military coup against
the democratically elected government, according to documents assembled
by the National Security Archive, a private research organization affiliated with the George Washington University.
As
superpower playbooks go, the result was a masterpiece: The violent coup
that eventually replaced Allende with General Augusto Pinochet
installed a reliably pro-U.S., pro-business regime.
What these
documents show is the unrelenting determination of the U.S., one of the
world’s two superpowers, to overthrow a weak government. The first time
around in 1970, Washington failed to fix the election, and it failed to
engineer a military coup. But three years later, with the Chilean
economy indeed screaming from American pressure, the Chilean generals
were able to act—and received the U.S. government’s applause.
A
half century later, the U.S. economy is the one screaming. Staggering
under the weight of a pandemic-driven health emergency, mass
unemployment, racial strife and a loss of faith in American
institutions, including the guarantee of free and fair elections, the
government seems ripe for a takeover. But it’s a U.S. president, backed
by a foreign power, and some of his cronies who are threatening election
violence and even a refusal to leave office if defeated.
It’s not
hard to imagine how, back in 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin,
like Nixon and Kissinger 50 years ago, summoned his own advisers to the
Kremlin for a “cold blooded assessment” of his chances for putting his
own guy in power in America. Buoyed by that success, he’s now helping
paralyzing the U.S. by secretly fostering violent chaos.
The Mueller report concluded
Russia “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and
systematic fashion.” The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan report in
August saying the Kremlin has waged a campaign to discredit the Mueller
investigation and is using social media today to stir up cultural and
racial discord.
The Russians call it active measures. In 1970, and still today, we call it covert action.
The shoe, as they say, is on the other foot.
Under
Kissinger’s direction, the CIA didn’t overthrow the Chilean government,
but it stirred up enough economic and political chaos to make the
generals’ job easy. Their regime quickly turned murderous: During its
16-year reign of terror, Pinochet’s army and secret police not only
killed and “disappeared” more than 3,000 of its own citizens, it
launched a global program to hunt down and assassinate its dissidents
abroad, including, most notably, Orlando Letelier, the Allende
government’s former defense minister and ambassador to the U.S., who had
taken refuge in Washington, D.C. On the night of September 18, 1976, a
Chilean agent crawled under Letelier’s car in his Bethesda, Maryland
driveway and attached a bomb, which was activated remotely three days
later as he drove to work in the city. Letelier died almost instantly.
Ronni Karpen Moffitt, the wife of Letelier’s young assistant Michael
Moffit, was also killed in the blast.
The “cold blooded”
Kissinger memo was just one of hundreds on the Chilean coup that the
Obama administration declassified and the National Security Archive has
published. Since its founding in 1985 “by journalists and
scholars to check rising government secrecy,” the organization has been
unearthing formerly classified documents on not just on Chile but many other chapters of the Cold War, such as once-secret papers pertaining to U.S. relations with Russia and China.
Kissinger’s
team eventually produced National Security Study Memorandum 97, which
“contained a TOP SECRET annex titled ‘Extreme Option: Overthrow
Allende,’ which addressed the assumptions, advantages, and disadvantages
of a military coup if Allende was elected,” according to Peter
Kornbluth, who directs the archive’s Cuba and Chile documentation
projects.
John Dinges, a Washington Post correspondent in Chile during the coup and author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, calls the trove invaluable.
“The Chile documents have exposed the dark secrets of U.S, support for enemies of democracy abroad,” he told SpyTalk.
“They give us an amazingly complete and incontrovertible record of a
sordid chapter in our history, when military dictatorship was preferred
to democracy to avert the specter of a successful socialist model for
poor countries.”
“What happened in Chile has echoes today,” added Dinges, a SpyTalk contributing editor who is updating his Condor book
with significant new information. “The U.S. government was trying to
reverse a legitimate election result in a peaceful democratic country.
The top Chilean military leadership was firmly opposed to the election
meddling and the CIA knew it.”
“The plot,” he says, “was a tragic failure.”
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