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

As for the coup itself, there is no doubt that the United States did all that it could to create the conditions for the failure of Allende and his government. But, as in most such cases, it was the locals who made the coup itself. And although the United States did little to reign in Pinochet thereafter and certainly, as these documents make clear, knew much more about the atrocities committed in Chile than was admitted to at the time or later, the causes of the violence in Chilean society are to be found more in Chilean circumstances than in the intent of manipulators in Washington. What is truly remarkable is the effort -- the resources committed, the risks taken, and the skullduggery employed -- to bring a Latin American democracy down, and the meager efforts since to build democracy back up. Left to their own devices, the Chileans might just have found the good sense to resolve their own deep-seated problems. Allende might have fallen by his own weight, victim of his own incompetence, and not become a tragic martyr to a lost cause.

Kornbluh, who has put together several collections of declassified documents on key U.S. foreign policy crises, led the campaign to declassify more than 25,000 closely held records on U.S.-Chilean relations through the National Security Archives, a nonprofit nongovernmental organization that he helped establish with the support of several U.S. foundations. This effort, he says, is part of an ongoing international campaign "to hold Pinochet and his military responsible for the murder, torture and terrorism committed during his regime."

These are not, of course, just matters of historical curiosity. Pinochet, after all, was held under house arrest in London in 1998 under just such charges filed by the Spanish investigating judge Baltasar Garzón. In fact, the release of the documents in this book resulted from that watershed event, a high point in the campaign by human rights activists and victims' families to hold repressive leaders responsible for their actions. Now, lawsuits are pending or threatened against Kissinger himself for complicity or foreknowledge of the plots that led to the assassination of Schneider in Santiago in 1970 and, closer to home, the shocking car bombing in 1976 that killed Letelier and Moffitt 14 blocks from the White House.

Kornbluh's bill of particulars and the supporting documents he has uncovered confirm the deep involvement of the U.S. intelligence services in Chile prior to and after the coup. In outline, this story has been known for many years and will be no surprise to Chileans. The extent of the involvement was originally hinted at during the Senate hearings conducted by the late Frank Church in the mid-1970s. The scope and nature of these clandestine activities are significantly amplified by the documents released in the extensive declassification ordered by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and 2000 and reprinted in Kornbluh's book. These documents include: transcripts of top-secret discussions among President Nixon, Kissinger, and other cabinet members on how "to bring Allende down"; minutes of secret meetings chaired by Kissinger to plan covert operations in Chile; new documentation of the notorious case of Charles Horman, an American murdered by the Chilean military and subject of the movie Missing; comprehensive documentation of the Letelier case and the extensive CIA, National Security Council, and State Department reports surrounding it; and U.S. intelligence reporting on Operation Condor. All these sources, however, are extensively redacted -- that is, sensitive parts of them, especially those from the CIA, have been blacked out.

WHAT THE BOSS WANTED

Kissinger's response to Kornbluh's charges will undoubtedly be twofold. On the general level, he will argue that Chile and its problems were marginal to the larger concerns the Nixon administration was facing in the Middle East and South Vietnam, not to mention Watergate: Nixon and his would-be Metternich were fully engaged elsewhere with "big" events. On the narrow, legalistic level, the claim will be that the dots in the Schneider and Letelier cases cannot be joined because of the undelivered demarche, in the case of Letelier, and Kissinger's counterorder, in the case of Schneider. These are arguments best left to lawyers, not historians. On the question of the impact of "larger" concerns, however, there is one inconvenient detail: chronology. War broke out in the Middle East on October 6, 1973, almost a month after the overthrow of Allende on September 11. As late as October 5, as Kissinger points out in his new book, Crisis, the CIA had reported to Nixon: "The military preparations that have occurred do not indicate that any party intends to initiate hostilities." So it can hardly be argued that Allende's downfall came as a surprise to policymakers in Washington because their attention at that particular moment was focused elsewhere.