A common joke in Latin America begins, "Why has there never been a coup d'état in the United States?" The punch line: "Because there are no U.S. embassies there."
The mirth stirred in Latin America by this joke owes much to the U.S. role in the military overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende 30 years ago last Thursday, which inaugurated 17 years of brutal rule by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. As Peter Kornbluh documents in The Pinochet File, released recently to anticipate the coup's anniversary, U.S. complicity in Allende's overthrow went well beyond what muckraking congressional investigations of the CIA in the 1970s were able to establish.
Setting the record straight as to what the U.S. role was -- and was not -- in the 1973 Chilean coup matters a great deal, perhaps now more than ever. For one thing, the coup led to decades of enmity between much of Latin America and the United States, an enmity that endures to this day. But perhaps more importantly, the U.S. role in the Pinochet coup has become a worldwide symbol of perceived American disregard for democracy, human rights and the sovereignty of other nations.
In far-flung countries with little relationship to Latin America, the Chilean coup remains a powerful symbol. Consider this quote, from Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which Stephen Kinzer of The New York Times cites in his new book, All the Shah's Men: "We are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the CIA can snuff out." The quote refers both to the Pinochet coup against Allende and the 1953 U.S.-backed coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
Like the Palestinian flag, which is often flown as a generic symbol of oppression by those who have little to do with the Palestinian cause, the U.S. role in Pinochet's coup has become part of a rallying cry for anti-American forces throughout the world. In its mythologized version, the coup has proven significant far beyond the boundaries of Latin American politics.
Perhaps as a result, the Chilean coup continues to leave U.S. officials tongue-tied. When a student asked Secretary of State Colin Powell about the coup in April, Powell replied, "It is not a part of American history that we're proud of." That apparently went too far for Henry Kissinger and his former deputy, William Rogers, who told The Associated Press that the accusation of U.S. responsibility for the coup was a "canard." The State Department then issued a rare disclaimer distancing Powell from the department he runs. The U.S. government "did not instigate the coup that ended Allende's government in 1973," the statement read.
To diminish the symbolism of its involvement in the Chilean coup, the United States needs to further declassify its records and, more importantly, own up to the mistakes it made in Chile, even the reprehensible ones. A year of my own research, during which I interviewed former U.S. and Chilean officials and examined many of the declassified documents Kornbluh relies on, led me to conclude, like Kornbluh, that U.S. efforts to promote a coup in Chile are indeed worthy of retroactive condemnation. (The declassified documents are available here.)
But it would also be a mistake to exaggerate the U.S. role in the 1973 coup. In the final analysis, the coup was a Chilean affair, conceived and executed by Chileans. So there is an additional reason the United States should come clean about its role: Allende's overthrow as a symbol of American tyranny is ultimately hollow, or at least unfaithful to any balanced account.
The most aggressive U.S. efforts to spark a coup came in 1970, after Allende, a Marxist parliamentarian, won a plurality in Chile's September presidential elections. In response, President Nixon ordered the CIA to "save Chile" by preventing Allende from assuming the presidency, according to notes then-CIA Director Richard Helms scribbled during a meeting with Nixon. (The notes were declassified as part of the hearings led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) during the 1970s. Although the notes are now archived online with documents made public in 2000, they were originally released as part of the Church Committee's 1975 report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.) No candidate won a majority of the popular vote, so the election fell to the Chilean Congress to decide.
The U.S. embassy and the CIA quickly realized that a plan to bribe Chilean congressional leaders would be too risky, as Kornbluh recounts, so U.S. officials focused on a single goal in Chile: a coup d'état against Allende's government. Here, again, Chile's democratic traditions obstructed U.S. plans. Chile's constitutionalist army chief, Gen. René Schneider, steadfastly opposed politicizing the armed forces, thereby discouraging anti-Allende military leaders from acting. So the CIA, under intense pressure from the White House, set about encouraging its contacts in the Chilean military to kidnap Schneider as a prelude to a coup.
But the agency also had deep reservations about one plotter, retired Gen. Roberto Viaux, whose leadership of a coup would produce an "autocratic, nationalistic, military government which may not be particularly pro-U.S.," according to an Oct. 9, 1970, CIA memo that has since been declassified. The CIA's Santiago station continued to talk to Viaux, and even to entertain his requests for an airdrop of weapons he could use in a coup attempt, until an Oct. 15 meeting between Kissinger and a top CIA official. Kissinger later wrote and testified that at the meeting, he put a stop to Viaux's plans, fearing an abortive coup.
But U.S. encouragement of Viaux did not end; instead, as the Alleged Assassination report notes, the CIA's Santiago station was instructed to encourage Viaux to "amplify his planning" and "join forces with other coup plotters." And Kornbluh points to Viaux's connections to plotters whom the United States supplied -- according to declassified U.S. documents, some of which Kornbluh references -- with submachine guns, gas grenades and masks, and funding.
Viaux's henchmen assassinated Schneider on Oct. 22, 1970, and the CIA has had Schneider's blood on its hands ever since.
Schneider's death galvanized Chile behind democracy, and Allende was inaugurated. Chilean plotters walked away from the CIA, halting the agency's coup efforts in Chile. But as a top CIA official later testified, with chilling ambiguity, during the Church hearings, U.S. coup efforts "never really ended."
Kornbluh shows concretely what that meant -- mostly, U.S. outreach to potential coup plotters. But outreach can easily extend into encouragement. And in September 1972, when Pinochet visited Panama to try to purchase U.S. tanks, "he felt he was very well treated," the CIA reported, according to a declassified cable that Kornbluh cites. U.S. Army officers also provided the following message to a Chilean military figure visiting Panama, presumably as part of Pinochet's delegation: "U.S. will support coup against Allende 'with whatever means necessary' when time comes."
Pinochet was the last of the military leaders to join the 1973 coup plot, signing on only two days before the actual overthrow, most historians believe. Some accounts suggest that he was vacillating before joining the effort. One coup leader has quoted Pinochet as saying, "This could cost us our lives," according to a book by Chilean journalist Mónica González. The clear signals of U.S. support for a coup may have provided encouragement to the wavering general.
Kornbluh also documents the CIA's broad re-engagement with the Chilean military in May 1973, after Allende's coalition won 43 percent of the vote in the March congressional elections -- a victory that suggested to the CIA that its considerable support for opposition parties and media would not be enough to topple Allende at the polls. Some at the CIA argued in favor of inducing a coup by seeking "to develop the conditions which would be conducive to military action," declassified U.S. documents reveal. But covert action required executive approval, and the State Department and some CIA leaders disagreed as to what should be done, the paper trail shows. So the CIA station in Santiago was ordered to "move ahead against military target in terms of developing additional sources" -- that is, to make contacts with plotters and to listen carefully.
So when the coup plotters bombarded the Chilean presidential palace on Sept. 11, 1973, and removed Allende from power, the United States had foreknowledge of the coup plans, gleaned from the plotters themselves. The moral problem here is not the knowledge but the act of listening -- because, as former National Intelligence Council vice chairman Gregory Treverton has explained, listening without encouraging is very difficult to do. "That problem is pronounced if the information-givers were once supported to act, not report," Treverton wrote in a 1987 book, Covert Action, which discussed CIA interventions in Chile and elsewhere. "Then, they can hardly avoid looking for hints that the United States still may support their political purposes." The coup plotters in 1973 were not the 1970 plotters, but they were no doubt aware of U.S. encouragement of a coup in 1970.
The CIA seems to have been aware that the distinction between listening and encouraging was a spurious one. As the agency cabled its Santiago station in 1971, "There is no reason that station officers, on a 'strictly personal' basis, cannot listen attentively to officers who wish to volunteer information about coup planning or plotting since this is part of the essential collection program. There is of course a rather fine dividing line here between merely 'listening' and 'talking frankly about the mechanics of a coup' which in the long run must be left to the discretion and good judgment of the individual case officer." Given the station's eagerness to promote a coup -- in May 1973, the station cabled, "We believe the orientation, focus, and thrust of our operational effort should be on military intervention" -- it is reasonable to believe that the fine dividing line was crossed, repeatedly.
According to Kornbluh, U.S. efforts to undermine Allende's hold on power may have taken another form as well: He contends that an "invisible blockade" -- as some refer to American efforts to curtail bilateral and multilateral economic aid to Chile -- was part of a larger policy designed to provoke Allende's fall; to make the case, he cites declassified documents that show the U.S. working to shut down aid to Chile "well before Allende had had any opportunity to implement his own economic policies or any question of Chile's creditworthiness had arisen." But this is one of Kornbluh's weaker arguments. In the context of the Cold War, it is understandable why American officials would want to cut off voluntary aid to a socialist president who was promising to nationalize almost the entire Chilean economy. Such actions don't necessarily imply that U.S. officials laid the groundwork for Allende's overthrow -- only that they disliked the economic policies he was pledging to enact.
So what of U.S. responsibility for the 1973 coup? The declassified documents Kornbluh compiled are a damning indictment of opprobrious U.S. policy toward Chile. The United States supported the kidnapping-turned-assassination of Schneider, delivered a message of unambiguous support to Pinochet's underling and became complicit in the 1973 overthrow of Allende by "listening" to its plotters. These are actions the United States has not owned up to.
At the same time, America's direct role in the coup itself was minor. It listened to the 1973 plotters, but without arming, funding or officially encouraging them; nor did it develop, coordinate or critique their strategy. Kornbluh concedes this point, but only grudgingly. And he fails to point out that while U.S. actions surely facilitated the coup, U.S. encouragement was not the coup plotters' main motivation. Allende destructively pursued populist economic policies, received censure from Chile's congress and high court for circumventing the country's democratic institutions, and allowed the country's leftist movement to maintain -- and threateningly exaggerate the strength of -- small guerrilla groups sometimes armed and guided by Cuba.
In the end, the declassified documents that formed the basis of Kornbluh's book leave the United States with a strange combination of guilt and exculpation. And that duality does not merit Kornbluh's calling the Chilean coup "the other 9/11" -- as if Allende's overthrow were directly linked to the terrorist attacks. If the mythology of Sept. 11, 1973 existed for the terrorists of Sept. 11, 2001 and their hateful brethren, it was not as a true reflection of the ugly face America showed the world in Chile -- but rather as a false caricature of it.
Jonathan Goldberg is a graduate student at the London School of Economics. He spent the last year reporting from Latin America.
