50th Anniversary of U.S. Coup in Chile
The Secrets the U.S. Government Continues to Hide
Pinochet’s troops begin mass detentions, September 11, 1973
The following are excerpts from an article by Peter Kornbluh, published on August 31, 2023, in The Nation.
Fifty years after the military coup that brought down Salvador Allende and installed the Pinochet dictatorship, there are still top-secret documents on the U.S. role that must be declassified.
On August 25, the Central Intelligence Agency quietly posted on its website two documents on the military coup in Chile that had been kept 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. Eventually, the State Department sent out a press advisory, stating “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. […]”
A Critical Advance Intelligence Cable — that 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 that reached the White House the morning of September 11 contained an urgent request from “a key officer in the military coup planning [to] 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 remains 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, DC, in September 1976 […]
And yet, half a century later, there are still highly classified records that the U.S. government continues to safeguard that would reveal critical details on what it did in, and what it knew about, Chile.
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 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 U.S. efforts to undermine the Popular Unity government. No U.S. documents have been released on those early communications; but one revealing memorandum of a December 1971 Oval Office meeting between Nixon and Brazilian military leader Gen. Emílio Garrastazu Médici indicates that a certain degree of collaboration may have developed […]
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 U.S. 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 U.S. documents on this small but important post-coup propaganda operation remain highly classified.
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 […]
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, DC, that took the lives of Letelier and Moffitt — also remain shrouded in secrecy.
Finally, there is the matter of Pinochet’s personal corruption. A special Senate investigation into “Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption” 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 U.S. 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 declassification of U.S. 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.
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