The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973

There are two types of what Theodore Draper called "present history." The first is based on documents and testimony accessible to all historians: assertions and interpretations can be checked, verified, and contested on the basis of fact rather than speculation. Both Draper and, in his own way, I. F. Stone were brilliant practitioners of this kind of history and demonstrated that, despite the best (or worst) intentions of bureaucrats to hide or distort the record, much could be found in the public domain if diligently sought after. The second approach to writing about contemporary history is based on anonymous "sources" and self-interested "leaks." Here, much depends on the credibility of the authors; but in the right political climate, such writing can be powerful enough to bring down a president, as it did with Watergate. And over the past two decades, heavily redacted, "secret" government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act have been added to its menu.

Both approaches have their weaknesses, and neither is as new as might first appear. The Draper method -- by abjuring the fragments exhumed from a government's dark places -- risks underestimating the role of the clandestine actions that were often at the center of the ideological and geostrategic struggles of the Cold War. History by self-interested leaking of documents or the use of anonymous sources, however, tends to produce narratives that are self-justifying, on the one hand, or indictments, on the other, and to exaggerate the importance of covert operations. Again, there is a long history of both genres: Winston Churchill the historian was a master over many volumes at preempting the assessment of Winston Churchill the statesman, and Henry Kissinger is doing what Churchill did for his own epoch and his own historical place within it by releasing weighty tomes on his White House years and other topics.

But, as Isaac Newton taught us, actions produce reactions. So it is entirely within the established pattern that 30 years after the Yom Kippur War and the bloody coup in Chile -- at just the moment when Kissinger himself publishes a book about his unquestionable diplomatic skill in confronting grave crises in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, grand stages where issues of war and peace and nuclear confrontation were handled -- Kissinger's critics have revived the case against him over U.S. actions in Chile on his watch, doggedly seeking out forensic linkages to establish his role, as national security adviser, and that of his president, Richard Nixon, in undermining and engineering the overthrow of a democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Peter Kornbluh, in his troubling dossier, sets out to piece together this less elevated story.

THE CASE AGAINST KISSINGER

The crux of the case made against Kissinger rests on three events in particular: the assassination of Chile's chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, in 1970; the extent of U.S. complicity and active involvement in the September 11, 1973, coup against Allende; and the assassination in Washington, D.C., of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean foreign minister, in 1976. The first and last cases, according to the record Kornbluh has uncovered, have odd similarities. Schneider's elimination three years before the coup was regarded as essential by the Nixon administration, since Schneider was a strict constitutionalist and therefore an obstacle to U.S. efforts to promote a military intervention before Allende could take office. The general was killed in a kidnapping attempt that the United States knew about, approved of, and had even assisted in planning. A week before the kidnapping was to take place, however, Kissinger discouraged the plot. As he told Nixon at the time, he had "turned it off."

The killing of Schneider, it seems fair to say, was not what the Americans wanted (although the CIA had warned of such an outcome), but was, as the saying now goes, "collateral damage." The planned assassination of Pinochet's critics living abroad under Operation Condor -- an international state-sponsored terror network set up by the Pinochet regime (in consort with Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and, later, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador) to track and eliminate opponents -- was also known to U.S. intelligence operatives and reported to the White House. Policymakers even knew that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States. Kissinger intervened a month before the killing of Letelier, ordering that the Latin American rulers involved be informed that the "assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad ... would create a most serious moral and political problem." This demarche was apparently not delivered: the U.S. embassy in Santiago demurred on the ground that to deliver such a strong rebuke would upset the dictator. The U.S. ambassador to Chile, David Popper, wrote to Washington, "In my judgement, given Pinochet's sensitivity regarding pressures by the usg [U.S. government], he might well take as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination plots." On September 20, 1976, the State Department instructed the ambassadors "to take no further action" with regard to the Condor scheme. Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, were killed the following morning.