Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (12 page)

When Allende won, inertia then turned to panic and recrimination. Kissinger ordered a major postmortem of U.S. policy toward the election, and Robert Hurwitch, a member of the Inter-American Bureau at the State Department (ARA), was called before the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board shortly afterward to explain what had gone wrong. As John Crimmins, deputy assistant secretary for Latin American affairs, recalled years later, Hurwitch “was really shaken up” by the violent reaction he received; the board—and particularly Nelson Rockefeller—apparently
could not understand why the ARA had failed to “arrange the election.”
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While an internal investigation into why the United States had not done more to stop Allende being elected would find the policy-making level of government guilty of neglecting the issue, Kissinger shirked responsibility by characterizing the election result as a “sad record for the ARA” and the fault of “wishy-washy” bureaucrats.
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Indeed, he generally had little respect for those who ran the ARA and would often rant about their failings. In his words, Assistant Secretary of State Charles Meyer was a “weakling” and the others were hopelessly misguided “Alliance for Progress men.”
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Fearing that the ARA did not now want to do anything to overturn Allende’s election, in private Kissinger personally vowed not to let Chile “go down the drain.”
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To ensure it did not, Kissinger first convened the 40 Committee, a group responsible for overseeing U.S. covert operations, to discuss Chile.
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Kissin-ger himself was chairman of this committee, which also comprised a wide selection of administration officials, including the U.S. attorney general, deputy defense secretary, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deputy under secretary of state, and the director of central intelligence. When, on 8 September, this committee first met to discuss Allende’s victory, Charles Meyer, Kissinger’s assistant for Latin American affairs, and members of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division were also present. Meanwhile, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago’s alarmist telegrams—considered “frenetic and somewhat irrational” by Secretary of State William Rogers, but “excellent” by Kissinger—shaped the discussion that ensued.
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Despite blame being heaped back and forth about whether anything could have been done to stop Allende’s victory, the majority of those present at the 8 September meeting managed to agree on two things. First, Washington could not intervene overtly for fear of exacerbating hemispheric hostility, damaging the United States’ credibility as protector of democracy worldwide, and bolstering Chile’s left wing.
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Second, all agreed that Allende would sooner or later abandon constitutional democracy and establish an authoritarian Marxist regime.
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Those in the State Department and the National Security Council (NSC) who argued against significant covert intervention did so not because they believed in Allende’s commitment to democracy but because they worried he might be the “lesser of two evils” in the short term—better than provoking civil war in Chile by forcing the Left to turn to violence and better than the fallout in Latin America that would follow a Dominican Republic–type invasion or Bay of Pigs–style debacle.
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In any event, they were overruled by Kissinger,
U.S. attorney general John Mitchell, and Pentagon officials who insisted the United States had to intervene urgently.
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The two options for overturning Allende’s election that the 40 Committee subsequently examined on 8 September, and henceforth implemented, were political efforts to get the Chilean congress to vote against Allende and the possibility of persuading Chile’s armed forces to intervene.
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Although Track II would take the latter of these two options to the extreme of precipitating Schneider’s murder, both options were also components of Track I. Indeed, the focus on Schneider as an obstacle to military intervention was starkly revealed as a result of broader efforts to persuade him to intervene in the political process.

In all cases, the Nixon administration focused first and foremost on supporting Chilean initiatives rather than inventing its own.
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As Rogers warned Kissinger ten days after Allende’s election, the key was “encouraging the Chileans to do what they should. If it’s our project as distinguished from Chile it’s going to be bad.”
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There was also no lack of anti-Allende Chileans lining up to secure Washington’s support. Augustín Edwards, an influential right-wing Chilean businessman and owner of the newspaper
El Mercurio
, departed from Chile in early September and contacted Kissinger and Nixon through his friend, Donald Kendall, as soon as he arrived in Washington.
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Meanwhile, President Eduardo Frei, who regarded Allende’s election as cataclysmic, approached the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, in the hope of securing “direct private access to the highest levels” of the United States government.
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Once political ploys in Congress to stop Allende’s victory being confirmed appeared to have failed, the 40 Committee then welcomed Chilean politicians’ efforts to involve the armed forces in an “in-house coup.” The idea behind this was simple: claiming that the country faced a threat to stability, Frei would let military leaders take over the government and then call new elections in which he would stand. Ultimately, however, the Chileans on whom these operations relied—specifically Frei and the Chilean military high command—vacillated and refused to act, angering Washington’s policy makers in the process.
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Faced with hesitancy, the 40 Committee thus began sanctioning riskier unilateral action in late September. The CIA ordered its Santiago station to “employ every stratagem, every ploy, however bizarre, to create internal resistance.” And its agents were instructed to use “all resources in terms of human contact, propaganda or denigration” to persuade Frei to move.
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In advocating such operations, the United States thus pursued precisely the
type of U.S.—as opposed to Chilean—operation that Rogers had warned against. As Kissinger explained to the 40 Committee on 6 October, Nixon wanted “no stone unturned.”
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By this date, the president’s acute sense of urgency had also already led him to instigate Track II. Having listened to Edwards’s pleas upon his arrival in Washington in early September, the president had met with the director of central intelligence, Richard Helms, on 15 September and ordered the CIA to “save Chile!” using the “best men we have,” working “full time,” without concern for the “risks involved.” Helms was told he could spend $10 million or more but that he was to avoid embassy involvement.
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The following day, Kissinger incorporated the CIA’s Western Hemisphere division, its deputy director of plans, Thomas Karamessines, and selected Pentagon officials into a Special Task Force to ensure faster, more secretive action. Track II was therefore distinct from Track I in that it sidestepped Washington’s bureaucracy. As Kissinger told Nixon, overturning Allende’s victory was “a long-shot” as it was, without the “handicaps of well-meaning but unprofessional activism, of lack of coordination and of bureaucratic resistance.”
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Track II also avoided depending on the cooperation of Chilean political elites and focused instead on a handful of paramilitaries and on some retired officers who were plotting to instigate a coup. By late September, as already noted, the CIA’s headquarters in Langley was quite simply on guard, in the CIA’s own words, for any “target-of-opportunity situations fraught with promise.”
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Why were the president and his national security adviser so frantic about Chilean events? As noted, Nixon and Kissinger sanctioned Tracks I and II because they feared the regional consequences of an Allende government. Speaking in Chicago in mid-September, Kissinger argued that a communist Chile, adjoining Argentina (“deeply divided”), Peru (“already … heading in directions that have been difficult to deal with”), and Bolivia (“also gone in a more leftist, anti-US direction”), would be hugely detrimental to the Western Hemisphere.
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Or as Nixon later recalled, with Castro in the Caribbean and Allende in the Southern Cone, he had feared that the continent would be squeezed between a “Red Sandwich.”
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Economic concerns were less of a worry to Nixon; as Kissinger explained to the 40 Committee, “if higher authority had a choice of risking expropriation or Allende accession, he would risk the dangers of expropriations.”
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Chile was far away, relatively poor, and tiny compared to the world’s biggest superpower. But its size and location were disproportionate to the impact that
Nixon and Kissinger feared Allende’s democratic road to socialism could have on Latin America. Of secondary importance was also the worry that Chile might serve as a model for left-wing parties in Europe, particularly in France and Italy.

With these fears in mind, and in spite of the State Department’s instructions to assume a position of “painstaking non-involvement” when it came to Chile, Nixon eagerly lobbied other governments about Allende’s threat.
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During his European tour in late September 1970, he agreed with the Italian president, Giuseppe Saragat, that Allende was merely a smokescreen for communist control of Chile.
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In conversation with Pope Paul VI, Nixon also explained the Chilean situation was “serious, but not lost,” promised that the United States was doing its best to stop Allende, and asked the pope to “discreetly influence the situation.” (The pope said he would try.) Then, in Britain, Nixon personally urged Prime Minister Edward Heath to suspend the United Kingdom’s credits to Allende. (Kissinger had also already expressed concern to the Foreign Office that the British ambassador in Chile was not taking Allende’s threat seriously enough.)
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By mid-October, however, it was becoming clear that these international appeals, together with Tracks I and II, might not be enough. The 40 Committee’s efforts to create a “coup climate” were acknowledged to have failed.
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Kissinger was also informed that the chances of Track II succeeding in this context were “one-in-twenty-perhaps less.” But he did not give up. On 16 October, under Kissinger’s instructions, the CIA informed its Santiago station that efforts to provoke a coup should “continue vigorously.”
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Paul Wimert, Washington’s military attaché in Santiago, accordingly delivered $50,000 and three weapons to one group of officers who aimed to kidnap Schneider as a means of provoking a full-scale coup on 20 October. As Wimert later recalled, the money “wasn’t guided. It was like a Xmas party—throwing some here, some there.”
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Then, on 22 October, two days before the Chilean Congress met, another group of plotters the CIA was in contact with mortally wounded Schneider in a botched kidnapping attempt. Kissinger would later claim that the United States should be exonerated from all responsibility for this plot precisely because a different group eventually carried out the deed, obscuring the fact that the United States had been in contact with both, that they were both connected, and that their strategy was the same.
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However, both he and the president were well informed about the plot and its purpose. When Nixon called Kissinger on 23 October to see what was happening in Chile, he heard that, contrary
to plans, it had not “triggered anything else.” “The next step,” Kissinger explained, “should have been a government take-over,” but the Chileans involved were “pretty incompetent.”
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Meanwhile, even before the Schneider assassination, Kissinger had already begun preparing a longer-term strategy to “save” Chile from the Chileans he so clearly disdained.
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Realizing that an effective anti-Allende operation would require unity and direction, he called a National Security Council meeting, which finally took place on 6 November 1970.
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But first, as his assistant for Latin American affairs, Pete Vaky, advised him to do, Kissinger brought the administration together to define Allende’s threat by arranging two meetings of the NSC’s new preparatory Senior Review Group (SRG), which comprised the same individuals as the 40 Committee.
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When the SRG had met on 14 October 1970, its members had all concluded that Allende posed a psychological, ideological, and potentially geostrategic threat to the United States, Latin America, and the world. Doom followed gloom. As the group’s members agreed, Allende would work against the United States in regional affairs, would forge ties with the Soviet Union and Cuba, and would turn Chile into an international sanctuary for subversives. Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard warned that appearing to do nothing would also damage Washington’s prestige in Latin America, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, argued that Allende could threaten hemispheric defense, causing “extreme gas pains” by giving the USSR access to the southern Pacific. As Kissinger argued, concluding that “no vital interests” were at stake, as NSSM 97 had done, depended on how “vital interests” were defined.
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In the overall balance of power in the world, he later recalled that any “subtle change in the psychological balance of power could be decisive,” and it was his priority to ensure that the United States remained a credible world leader.
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When the SRG met for the second time, five days after the Chilean Congress had overwhelmingly confirmed Allende as president by 153 to 42 (partly, it has to be said, as a result of Schneider’s assassination and the shock that this created), its members were in complete agreement about the need to intervene in Chile. Under Secretary of State John Irwin II expressed the whole group’s hope when he said that Allende would not fulfill his six-year mandate. He also spelled out that détente did not apply to Chile because it was in the United States’ backyard, but he conceded that Washington had to be careful that its approach to Latin America did
not contradict its dealings with Eastern Europe too much. As he stated, the State Department “would be happy to see … action, covert or otherwise, that would hasten his [Allende’s] departure.”
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