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Project FUBELT:
āFormula for Chaosā
Carnage could be considerable and prolonged, i.e. civil war. . . . You have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile . . . we provide you with formula for chaos which is unlikely to be bloodless. To dissimulate U.S. involvement will clearly be impossible.
āTOP SECRET CIA Santiago Station cable, October 10, 1970
On September 15, 1970, in a fifteen-minute meeting between 3:25 and 3:40 P.M., President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to initiate a massive covert intervention in Chile. The goal: to block Chilean President-elect Salvador Allende from taking and holding office. Allende was a well-known and popular politician in Chile; the 1970 campaign constituted his fourth run for the presidency. He was āone of the most astute politicians and parliamentarians in a nation whose favorite pastime is kaffeeklatsch politics,ā noted one secret CIA analysis. His victory on September 4, in a free and fairāif narrowāelection, marked the first time in the twentieth century that a āsocialist parliamentarian,ā as Allende referred to himself, had been democratically voted into office in the Western Hemisphere.
During a White House meeting with Henry Kissinger, Attorney General John Mitchell, and CIA Director Richard Helms, Nixon issued explicit instructions to foment a coup that would prevent Allende from being inaugurated on November 4, or subsequently bring down his new administration. Handwritten notes, taken by the CIA director, recorded Nixonās directive:
ā¢ 1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!
ā¢ worth spending
ā¢ not concerned risks involved
ā¢ no involvement of embassy
ā¢ $10,000,000 available, more if necessary
ā¢ full-time jobābest men we have
ā¢ game plan
ā¢ make economy scream
ā¢ 48 hours for plan of action
Helmās summary would become the first record of an American president ordering the overthrow of a democratically elected government. (Doc 1)
The CIA moved quickly to implement the presidentās instructions. In a meeting the next day with top officials of the Agencyās covert operations division, Helms told his aides that āPresident Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was not acceptable to the United Statesā and had āasked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.ā (Doc 2) Under the supervision of CIA deputy director of plans, Thomas Karamessines, and Western Hemisphere division chief, William Broe, a āSpecial Task Forceā with two operational unitsāone focused exclusively on the Chilean military headed by veteran covert operative David Atlee Phillips, and the second devoted to the āpolitical/constitutional routeā to blocking Allendeāwas immediately established and activated. By 8:30 A.M. on September 17, 1970, the new Chile Task Force had produced its first āSituation Reportā complete with an organizational chart and a list of āpossibilitiesā to āstimulate unrest and other occurrences to force military action.ā (Doc 3)
To provide a presidential cachet for the Task Force, later that day Kissinger obtained Nixonās signed authorization to create a āmechanismā to āwork fast and in secrecyā and āmake decisions, send out directives, keep tabs on things . . . coordinate activities, and plan implementing actions.ā1 In an afternoon meeting on September 18, Kissinger received an initial briefing from DCI Helms on the status of what would become one of the CIAās most infamous covert operations. By then, CIA headquarters had dispatched a special covert agent to Santiago to deliver secret instructions to the Station chief on the new operation, code-named Project FUBELT.2 And the CIAās Chile Task Force had already produced āSituation Report #2ā proclaiming: āthere is a coup possibility now in the wind.ā
Genesis of a Coup Policy
Nixonās bald directive on Chile was neither unparalleled nor unprecedented. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of U.S. policy toward Latin America, presidents frequently authorized overt military efforts to remove governments deemed undesirable to U.S. economic and political interests. After the signing of the United Nations charter in 1948, which highlighted nonintervention and respect for national sovereignty, the White House made ever-greater use of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency to assert U.S. hegemonic designs. Under Dwight Eisenhower, the CIA launched a set of covert paramilitary operations to terminate the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz; both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy gave green lights to clandestine action to undermine Fidel Castro in Cuba. It was the Kennedy administration that first initiated covert operations in Chileāto block the election of Salvador Allende.
Allende first attracted Washingtonās attention when his socialist coalition, then known as the Frente de Accion Popular (FRAP), narrowly lost the 1958 election to the right-wing Partido Nacional, led by Jorge Alessandri. The Alessandri government, noted a report prepared by the Agency for International Developmentās (AID) predecessor, the International Cooperation Administration, had āfive years in which to prove to the electorate that their medicine is the best medicine. Failure almost automatically ensures a marked swing to the left.ā
But in the aftermath of the 1959 revolution in Cuba, the Kennedy administration recognized that Washingtonās traditional support for small oligarchic political parties, such as the Partido Nacional, was far more likely to enhance the strength of the Latin American left, rather than weaken it. Fostering reformist, centrist political parties to be what Kennedy called āa viable alternativeā to leftist revolutionary movements became a key goal. āThe problem for U.S. policy is to do what it can to hasten the middle-class revolution,ā Kennedyās aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote to the president in a March 10, 1961, report that would become an argument for the Alliance for Progress. āIf the possessing classes of Latin America made the middle-class revolution impossible, they will make a āworkers-and-peasantsā revolution inevitable.ā
In Chile, the Partido Democrata-Christiano (PDC) led by Eduardo Frei appeared tailor-made as a model for that āmiddle-classā revolution. Overruling aides who wanted to continue support for Alessandri, Kennedy arranged for Frei, and another centrist leader, Radomiro Tomic, to have a secret backdoor visit to the White House in early 1962. The purpose of the visit was to allow the president to evaluate these new Chilean leaders personally, and, as one report noted, ādecide to whom to give covert aid in the coming election.ā3
The CIAās two-volume internal history of clandestine support for the Christian Democrats titled The Chilean Election Operation of 1964āA Case History 1961ā1964 remains highly classified. It is known to contain information, however, on covert operations that started in 1961āthrough the establishment of assets in the small centrist political parties and in key labor, media, student, and peasant organizations, and the creation of pivotal propaganda mechanismsāand escalated into massive secret funding of Freiās 1964 campaign. In April 1962, the 5412 Panel Special Group, as the then high-level interagency team that oversaw covert operations was named, approved CIA proposals to ācarry out a program of covert financial assistanceā to the Christian Democrats.4 Between then and the election, the CIA funneled some $4 million into Chile to help get Frei elected, including $2.6 million in direct funds to underwrite more than half of his campaign budget. In order to enhance Freiās image as a moderate centrist, the CIA also covertly funded a group of center-right political parties.
In addition to direct political funding, the agency conducted fifteen other major operations in Chile, among them the covert creation and support for numerous civic organizations to influence and mobilize key voting sectors. The biggest operation, however, was a massive $3 million anti-Allende propaganda campaign. The Church Committee report, Covert Action in Chile 1963ā1973, described the breadth of these operations:
Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers, and wall paintings. It was a āscare campaignā that relied heavily on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads and was directed especially to women. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the anticommunist pastoral letter of Pope Pius XI were distributed by Christian Democratic organizations. . . . āDisinformationā and āblack propagandaāāmaterial which purported to originate from another source, such as the Chilean Communist Partyāwere used as well.5
In the several months before the September 1964 election, these operations reached a crescendo of activity. One CIA propaganda group, for example, was distributing 3,000 anticommunist political posters and producing twenty-four radio news spots day, as well as twenty-six weekly news commentariesāall directed at turning Chilean voters away from Allende and toward Eduardo Frei. The CIA, as the Church Committee report noted, regarded this propaganda campaign āas the most effective activity undertaken by the U.S. on behalf of the Christian Democratic candidates.ā
āAll polls favor Eduardo Frei over Salvador Allende,ā Secretary of State Dean Rusk reported in a recently declassified āTOP SECRETāEXCLUSIVE DISTRIBUTIONā memorandum for President Lyndon Johnson dated August 14, 1964, three wee...