The Pinochet File

A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

Peter Kornbluh

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781595589125
• eBook ISBN: 9781595589958
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Revised and updated: the definitive primary-source history of US involvement in General Pinochet’s Chilean coup—“the evidence is overwhelming” (The New Yorker).
 
Published to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet’s infamous September 11, 1973, military coup in Chile, this updated edition of The Pinochet File reveals the shocking, formerly secret record of the US government’s complicity with atrocity in a foreign country. The book now completes the file on Pinochet’s story, detailing his multiple indictments between 2004 and his death on December 10, 2006, including the Riggs Bank scandal that revealed how the dictator had illegally squirreled away over $26 million in ill-begotten wealth in secret American bank accounts.
 
When it was first released in hardcover, The Pinochet File contributed to the international campaign to hold Pinochet accountable for murder, torture, and terrorism. A new afterword tells the extraordinary story of Henry Kissinger’s attempt to undercut the book’s reception—efforts that generated a major scandal that led to a high-level resignation at the Council on Foreign Relations, illustrating the continued ability of the book to speak truth to power.
 
“The Pinochet File should be considered the long awaited book of record on U.S. intervention in Chile . . . A crisp compelling narrative, almost a political thriller.” —Los Angeles Times

1

Project FUBELT:

“Formula for Chaos”

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.

—TOP 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 “one of the most astute politicians and parliamentarians in a nation whose favorite pastime is kaffeeklatsch politics,” noted one secret CIA analysis. His victory on September 4, in a free and fair—if narrow—election, marked the first time in the twentieth century that a “socialist parliamentarian,” 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 Nixon’s directive:

• 1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!

• worth spending

• not concerned risks involved

• no involvement of embassy

• $10,000,000 available, more if necessary

• full-time job—best men we have

• game plan

• make economy scream

• 48 hours for plan of action

Helm’s 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 president’s instructions. In a meeting the next day with top officials of the Agency’s covert operations division, Helms told his aides that “President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was not acceptable to the United States” and had “asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.” (Doc 2) Under the supervision of CIA deputy director of plans, Thomas Karamessines, and Western Hemisphere division chief, William Broe, a “Special Task Force” with two operational units—one focused exclusively on the Chilean military headed by veteran covert operative David Atlee Phillips, and the second devoted to the “political/constitutional route” to blocking Allende—was immediately established and activated. By 8:30 A.M. on September 17, 1970, the new Chile Task Force had produced its first “Situation Report” complete with an organizational chart and a list of “possibilities” to “stimulate unrest and other occurrences to force military action.” (Doc 3)

To provide a presidential cachet for the Task Force, later that day Kissinger obtained Nixon’s signed authorization to create a “mechanism” to “work fast and in secrecy” and “make decisions, send out directives, keep tabs on things . . . coordinate activities, and plan implementing actions.”¹ 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 CIA’s 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 CIA’s Chile Task Force had already produced “Situation Report #2” proclaiming: “there is a coup possibility now in the wind.”

Genesis of a Coup Policy

Nixon’s 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 Chile—to block the election of Salvador Allende.

Allende first attracted Washington’s 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 Development’s (AID) predecessor, the International Cooperation Administration, had “five 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.”

But in the aftermath of the 1959 revolution in Cuba, the Kennedy administration recognized that Washington’s 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 “a viable alternative” to leftist revolutionary movements became a key goal. “The problem for U.S. policy is to do what it can to hasten the middle-class revolution,” Kennedy’s aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote to the president in a March 10, 1961, report that would become an argument for the Alliance for Progress. “If the possessing classes of Latin America made the middle-class revolution impossible, they will make a ‘workers-and-peasants’ revolution inevitable.”

In Chile, the Partido Democrata-Christiano (PDC) led by Eduardo Frei appeared tailor-made as a model for that “middle-class” 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, “decide to whom to give covert aid in the coming election.”³

The CIA’s two-volume internal history of clandestine support for the Christian Democrats titled The Chilean Election Operation of 1964—A Case History 1961–1964 remains highly classified. It is known to contain information, however, on covert operations that started in 1961—through 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 mechanisms—and escalated into massive secret funding of Frei’s 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 “carry out a program of covert financial assistance” 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 Frei’s 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 1963–1973, 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 “scare campaign” 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. . . . “Disinformation” and “black propaganda”—material which purported to originate from another source, such as the Chilean Communist Party—were 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 commentaries—all directed at turning Chilean voters away from Allende and toward Eduardo Frei. The CIA, as the Church Committee report noted, regarded this propaganda campaign “as the most effective activity undertaken by the U.S. on behalf of the Christian Democratic candidates.”

“All polls favor Eduardo Frei over Salvador Allende,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk reported in a recently declassified “TOP SECRET—EXCLUSIVE DISTRIBUTION” memorandum for President Lyndon Johnson dated August 14, 1964, three wee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: Project FUBELT: “Formula for Chaos”
• CHAPTER 2: Destabilizing Democracy: The United States and the Allende Government
• CHAPTER 3: Pinochet in Power: Building a Regime of Repression
• CHAPTER 4: Consolidating Dictatorship: The United States and the Pinochet Regime
• CHAPTER 5: American Casualties
• CHAPTER 6: Operation Condor: State-Sponsored International Terrorism
• CHAPTER 7: Denouement of the Dictator: From Terrorism to Transition
• EPILOGUE: Atrocity and Accountability: The Long Epilogue of the Pinochet Case
• AFTERWORD: Kissinger’s Response
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX