Fleeing the Chilean Coup: The Debate Over U.S. Complicity

The guardians of the myth prefer to see the United States as just that -- "in the middle." For them, the U.S. diplomatic record is quite enough to prove that Nixon and Kissinger, up to their necks in Watergate and Kissinger's confirmation as secretary of state, were also manipulating the turbulence in Chile. There is not one word in Kornbluh's chapter on Allende's time in office about his disastrous economic policies, his attack on Chile's democratic institutions, or the wave of popular resentment that swept the Chilean military to power. The critics see only the American text, not the Chilean context.

The mythmakers' case for U.S. responsibility for the 1973 coup, built as it is on what U.S. officials were saying to each other, is circumstantial at best. So they buttress it with references to events both before and after Allende's presidency. Maxwell, echoing Kornbluh, points to the 1970 murder of Schneider, as if to show U.S. responsibility for the coup three years later. Schneider was killed by a band of rabid Chilean nationalists. Maxwell says that the United States "approved" and "planned" their effort. The facts are otherwise. In September of 1970, the Chilean Congress rejected a parliamentary maneuver to block Allende's inauguration. Cia operatives in Santiago then began to canvass a move by the Chilean military. But the CIA quickly backed off. The military, which three years later had a different view, refused in 1970 to intrude on the constitutional process. The CIA so reported to Kissinger, then national security adviser, and on October 15, 1970, he ended U.S. involvement in the anti-Allende plotting. Kissinger later told the president, "This thing looked hopeless. I turned it off. Nothing could be worse than an abortive coup." But, according to the Church Commission's report, when CIA operatives relayed the turn-off instruction to the Chilean army, the plotters responded that they were going ahead anyway. (Kissinger proved prescient: the result of the abortive coup was precisely the opposite of what the United States desired.)

Maxwell goes on to say that the United States "did little to rein in Pinochet thereafter," implying that this also confirms U.S. responsibility for 1973. But the record is otherwise. Maxwell and Kornbluh give little weight to the stern human rights warning Kissinger delivered directly to Pinochet at their only meeting, in Santiago in June of 1976. (Full disclosure: I was there, as Kissinger's undersecretary for economic affairs and, as some of Kornbluh's documents suggest, his human rights gadfly.) They dismiss Kissinger's statement, made in an address to the region's foreign ministers, that the regime's human rights violations "[had] impaired our relationship with Chile and [would] continue to do so." And they skip lightly over Kissinger's personal order to the four U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone to tell the heads of their respective governments that political assassination and human rights violations would irreparably damage their relations with the United States and cost them dearly in aid. Despite what Kornbluh and Maxwell claim, Kissinger's warning was delivered in robust fashion to the Argentine president -- there are cables to prove it, although Kornbluh does not reprint them -- and probably to Pinochet's underlings in Santiago. In any event, after Kissinger's meeting with Pinochet there could have been no misunderstanding as to Washington's views on state-sponsored political assassination. The relationship with Chile (and the other Southern Cone countries) went into a deep freeze in the remaining months of Kissinger's term as secretary of state -- and under President Jimmy Carter as well.

Finally, Maxwell cites a maddeningly ambiguous cable from Kornbluh's collection as somehow relevant to an ominous "third event" in "the case against Kissinger": the June 1976 assassination of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier by Chilean agents in Washington, D.C. This is mischievous nonsense. Kissinger had nothing to do with the cable. So far as the record shows, he never saw it. The cable was not a Washington instruction to the field. It was not sent to Santiago. The bomb had already been strapped to the underside of Letelier's car when the cable, whatever it meant, was sent. It could not conceivably have been a link in the chain of causation leading to Letelier's death.

But it is of such stuff that myths are made. The evidence of U.S. responsibility for Allende's downfall is thin indeed, but the myth lives on, with unfortunate consequences. It eats at the good name and image of the United States in "that vast external realm," an image that needs no additional blemishes right now. In Latin America, it reinforces the instinct to blame Washington and to seek the redress of grievances there rather than at home. And in the United States, the Chile myth teaches contemporary interventionists that regime change works. It affirms the view that other countries are objects, blank slates on which Washington can write as it wishes. With U.S. power so overwhelming and the instinct to alter foreign regimes so strong, this is a dangerous message indeed.

MAXWELL REPLIES

William Rogers overreaches. His comments do not help his cause, and his assertion that my review is "mythmaking" that is "lovingly nurtured" by the left revives the innuendo characteristic of an epoch one hoped was long past in public debate. Its employment here, however, has the merit of demonstrating that Kornbluh's dossier of declassified documents cuts very close to home. I was not, in any case, seeking a "smoking gun." What I did do was provide a fair summary of the evidence Kornbluh presented. It is for readers to decide how effectively the argument for complicity is made (or a jury, if the suits brought by the families of Schneider and Letelier ever reach court).