[Fifty years after the military coup that brought down Salvador
Allende and installed the Pinochet dicatorship, there are still top
secret documents on the US role that must be declassified.]
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CHILE: THE SECRETS THE US GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO HIDE  
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Peter Kornbluh
August 31, 2023
The Nation
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_ Fifty years after the military coup that brought down Salvador
Allende and installed the Pinochet dicatorship, there are still top
secret documents on the US role that must be declassified. _

Photographs of former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger displayed during “Secrets of State: The
Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship,” an exhibition at
the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Martin Bernetti /
AFP via Getty

 

On August 25, the Central Intelligence Agency quietly posted on its
website two documents
[[link removed]] on
the military coup in Chile that had been kept top secret for half a
century: the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) for the morning of the
September 11, 1973—the day of the coup—and for September 8, 1973,
as the Chilean military finalized its plans to overthrow the
democratically elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende. The
newly released documents proved almost impossible to find and read on
the CIA website, buried among dozens of other previously declassified
PDBs. Eventually, the State Department sent out a press advisory
providing the links. The release of the PDBs was “in accordance with
our commitment to increased transparency,” according to the press
release. “We remain committed to working with our Chilean partners
to try and identify additional sources of information to increase our
awareness of impactful events throughout our shared history.”

Censored History

Among the documents on President Nixon’s desk on the morning of
September 11, 1973, was the PDB—a daily CIA intelligence summary
that contained three paragraphs on the opening salvos of the military
coup in Chile. Fifty years after Nixon read it, we finally know what
it says—very little. The intelligence provided to the president on
the initiation of the coup was equivocal and erroneous. “Although
military officers are increasingly determined to restore political and
economic order, they may still lack an effectively coordinated plan
that could capitalize on the widespread civilian opposition,” the
PDB advised [[link removed]],
incorrectly. “President Allende, for his part,” the PDB stated
more accurately, “still hopes that temporizing will fend off a
showdown.”

But Nixon had access to far more detailed and dramatic intelligence. A
special CIA “CRITIC”—Critical Advance Intelligence Cable
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would have been distributed on an urgent basis to the highest levels
of the White House on September 10, provided concrete reporting on the
date, time, and place of the planned coup; another top secret CIA
memo
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reached the White House the morning of September 11 contained an
urgent request from “a key officer in the military group planning
overthrow President Allende” who asked “if the U.S. Government
would come to the aid of the Chilean military if the situation became
difficult.” How the president of the United States responded to that
request is one of the details of the history of the coup that remain
unknown.

Those dramatic CIA documents are among the thousands of secret records
on Chile that have already been declassified. Indeed, Chile is one of
the best-documented cases of covert US intervention for regime change.
After Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998 for human rights
violations, hundreds of CIA operational records were finally released
under a special “Chile Declassification Project” mandated by
President Bill Clinton—along with approximately 24,000 other White
House, NSC, FBI, and State Department records on the US role in Chile
between 1970 and 1990. In 2016 President Obama ordered a special
release of top-secret documents related to General Pinochet’s role
as the mastermind of the act of terrorism that killed former Chilean
ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen
Moffitt in Washington, D.C., in September 1976.

And yet, half a century later, there are still highly classified
records that the US government continues to safeguard that would
reveal critical details on what it did in, and what it knew about,
Chile.

Third-Country Covert Collaboration

Among those secrets is how the CIA approached the Australian
intelligence service, the ASIS, in late 1970 and asked for covert
support in Santiago to help manage its Chilean agents. The CIA has not
declassified a single document on this unique clandestine
collaboration; we only know about it from the efforts of a tenacious
Australian professor named Clinton Fernandes who, several years ago,
filed a transparency lawsuit against the ASIS in Canberra. His legal
petition resulted in the release of administrative
records—documents on the more mundane side
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setting up an espionage “station” in Santiago, such as rental
agreements and the purchase of office equipment and vehicles for two
agents. Both the CIA and the ASIS continue to hide operational records
that include numerous intelligence reports from the Australian covert
operatives to their CIA counterparts on meetings with Chilean assets
embedded within the armed forces, the newspaper _El Mercurio_—a
recipient of CIA funding—and the Christian Democratic party, among
other key CIA-connected organizations in Chile.

Similarly, the United States government continues to withhold records
on Brazil’s pivotal role in undermining the Allende government and
abetting the installation of the Pinochet regime—the subject of a
new book, _El Brasil de Pinochet_, by Brazilian reporter Roberto
Simon. After Allende’s inauguration, President Nixon specifically
ordered a secret approach to the Brazilian military regime for support
of US efforts to undermine the Popular Unity government. No US
documents have been released on those early communications; but one
revealing memorandum
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1971 Oval Office meeting between Nixon and Brazilian military leader
Gen. Emílio Garrastazu Médici indicates that a certain degree of
collaboration may have developed.

During the meeting, Médici told Nixon that Allende would be
overthrown “for very much the same reasons that Goulart had been
overthrown in Brazil,” and “made it clear that Brazil was working
towards this end,” according to a declassified summary of the
meeting. Nixon responded “that it was very important that Brazil and
the United States work closely in this field” and offered
“discreet aid” and money for Brazilian operations against the
Allende government. The two leaders agreed to set up a secret back
channel for communications on the anti-Allende operations, but if that
channel was ever used, neither the US nor Brazilian governments have
released the messages that passed through it.

Brazil became the very first nation to officially recognize the
military junta in Chile—a diplomatic orchestration coordinated with
the Nixon administration, which wanted to avoid immediately embracing
the new regime it had secretly helped to power. But Washington soon
turned on the spigot of US economic, military, and political
assistance, some of which was covert, to help Pinochet consolidate his
violent rule. The CIA, for example, secretly financed a special
delegation of Christian Democrats to tour Europe to publicly justify
the coup to the international community. The US documents on this
small but important post-coup propaganda operation remain highly
classified.

CIA and DINA

Nor have a multitude of secret files on the CIA’s covert assistance
to the development of the Chilean intelligence agency DINA into the
repressive apparatus it became ever been released. In February 1974,
Nixon and Kissinger dispatched a special emissary, CIA Deputy Director
Vernon Walters, to meet secretly with Pinochet in Santiago and convey
“our friendship and support” as well as “our wish to be helpful
in a discreet way.” According to a secret report to Kissinger on
their conversation, Pinochet directly asked Walters and the CIA to
assist DINA’s “formative period” and identified Col. Manuel
Contreras as “his key man.” “I told him that we would be glad to
have Contreras or anyone else come up to see us,” Walters informed
Kissinger, “to see what we could do to be of assistance to them.”

Yet the CIA files on Contreras’s first visit to Langley headquarters
in 1974 and what the CIA agreed to do to assist the organizational
formation and operations of DINA remain locked in agency vaults. Nor
has the CIA ever declassified a single page of the personnel file it
opened on Contreras in mid-1975, when high-ranking CIA officials
decided to actually put the DINA chieftain on the covert payroll as an
informant/collaborator. The intelligence information and collaboration
Contreras provided to the CIA remains top secret. So, too, do the
memorandums on the internal pushback inside the agency against putting
Latin America’s most notorious torturer on the secret US payroll.
Those still-classified arguments prevailed; after only a couple of
months, the CIA station chief in Santiago informed Contreras that he
was, essentially, fired! The classified records on this dramatic
episode would be extraordinarily revealing, for Chileans and US
citizens alike.

Contreras and the DINA were the driving force behind the creation of
Operation Condor—a transnational effort by the military regimes in
Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, among others, to coordinate
efforts to track down and eliminate civilian and militant opposition.
Because foreign intelligence services were involved, the CIA has
withheld key historical records including those relating to how it
learned of Condor, and what actions it took in response to death squad
missions undertaken by the Condor secret police agencies. What steps
the CIA took in the aftermath of Condor’s most infamous terrorist
operation—the September 21, 1976, car-bombing in Washington, D.C.,
that took the lives of Letelier and Moffitt—also remain shrouded in
secrecy.

To its credit, on the 40th anniversary of the Letelier-Moffitt
assassination in September 2016, the CIA finally declassified a
comprehensive review
[[link removed]],
done in 1987, of its early intelligence on the case, which cited
“convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his
intelligence chief to carry out the murder[s].” But most of the raw
intelligence records that assessment is based on remain secret 47
years later. Perhaps more importantly, the evidentiary files of a
major Department of Justice investigation, conducted during the last
year of the Clinton administration, identifying Pinochet as the
intellectual author of an act of international terrorism in
Washington, D.C., also remain off-limits to public scrutiny. Those
files include more than 40 depositions taken in Chile from Pinochet
henchmen, as well as a draft indictment that summarizes the evidence
of his role as a mastermind of international terrorism. This
documentation is not only relevant in Chile, where the ultra right
continues its attempts to whitewash Pinochet’s criminality; it could
contribute to the efforts of our country and others to protect
themselves from future threats of state-sponsored international
terrorism.

Finally, there is the matter of Pinochet’s personal corruption. A
special Senate investigation into “Money Laundering and Foreign
Corruption
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in 2005 identified financial records that revealed over 100 offshore
bank accounts, created with false Pinochet passports under such names
as Augusto Ugarte and Jose Ramon Ugarte, among other fabricated
identities, to hide over $28 million in ill-gotten funds. The evidence
of illicit gains is already overwhelming. But the US Commerce
Department continues to withhold even more banking records that could
remind Chileans, and the world, of the corruption that accompanied
Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship.

The Verdict of History

The declassification of US files “promotes the search for truth and
reinforces our nations’ commitment to democratic values,” Chilean
Foreign Ministry official Gloria de la Fuente stated in thanking the
Biden administration for its efforts to respond to Chile’s request
for documents. Indeed, at a time when prominent and powerful Chileans
continue to insist that Pinochet was “a statesman” and to deny the
realities of his barbaric regime, these documents have an immediate
role to play in the divisive ongoing debate over the legacy of the
coup and its meaning for Chile’s modern society—in the present and
the future. As Chile evaluates its past on this powerful 50th
anniversary, its citizens have a right to a full accounting—and the
accountability that an airing of this dark history can bring. Not only
should the United States commit to releasing its remaining records,
but so too should the Brazilians, the Australians, and the other
countries who played a role in Chile’s violent past.

But Chileans are not the only constituency for this important history.
At a time when numerous nations, including the United States, are
confronting the dire threat posed by authoritarianism to the survival
of democratic institutions, access to the complete historical record
on what happened in Chile remains critical to us all.

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_PETER KORNBLUH, a longtime contributor to The Nation on Cuba, is
co-author, with William M. LeoGrande, of Back Channel to Cuba: The
Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and
Havana. Kornbluh is also the author of The Pinochet File: A
Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability._

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* Chile
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* Henry Kissinger
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* Richard Nixon
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* Augusto Pinochet
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* CIA
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* state secrets
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