Safe for democracy, p.70
Safe for Democracy, page 70
Conversely, when rumblings of discontent arose within the Chilean military, among whom some officers might have opposed a Socialist taking office, the CIA shut them down tight. Rudy Gomez used an intermediary to caution one circle of Chilean officers. When another group asked if the United States might support a coup d’état, Gomez told them to forget it.
In late July the 303 Committee, Johnson’s renamed Special Group, released a further half-million dollars to maintain momentum. The U.S. government also received offers from private corporations of cash to use against Salvador Allende, but 303 rejected those at the time. Before the campaign ended the CIA would spend $2.6 million in direct support of Eduardo Frei’s Christian Democratic Party. The cost per favorable vote cast in the Chilean election came in higher than what the combined Democratic and Republican parties in the United States spent per vote in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. In the September 4 election Frei won 55.7 percent of the vote, outpolling Allende’s 39 percent. The CIA emerged triumphant.
The dust had barely settled when, less than a month after the victory, the secret-war managers argued over whether to use the leverage gained by support of Frei. At a State Department–CIA brainstorming session on October 1, FitzGerald confessed his displeasure with rumors that the departing U.S. ambassador had advised Rusk against any such maneuver.
FitzGerald apparently had no specific skullduggery in mind. “It’s the atmosphere of mistrust that bothers me,” Des declared.
“Don’t worry,” quipped State’s assistant secretary for Latin America, Thomas Mann. “I trust you.”
The CIA investment in Chile, ever growing, had to be protected. With National Assembly elections impending, the 303 Committee bought a fresh proposal, jointly produced by Ralph Dungan and his agency station chief, to help selected candidates. On February 5, 1965, the group allocated another $175,000 (Richard Helms records this at a half-million dollars) for covert assistance in the March elections. Again the results were pleasing. More than a dozen Communists and Socialists succumbed while nine Christian Democratic politicians won their races. The vote gave the CDP more senators than anyone else and an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies.
Too many Chileans knew something about what the CIA had done. Probably no one—Frei’s top people included—knew everything, but so many had been enlisted that plenty held some piece of the puzzle. Inevitably suspicions found expression. Termination of the latest project in the summer of 1965 did not end the danger. The agency shut down lines to Jesuit priests who had been considered useful. But ongoing CIA projects, including both the CDP funding and a separate attempt to induce Socialist deputies toward softer goals instead of Communist ones, continued through the year. The agency also dealt with a cabinet-level official. And CIA, in its persistent effort to blunt Communist organizational advantages, conducted an urban project among the slums of Santiago. Any of these could have broached, blowing Langley’s cover.
Left-wing journalists in Chile speculated on what the Central Intelligence Agency had been up to. By late 1965 Salvador Allende had heard enough that he felt confident, when interviewed by the New York Times, in charging “outside forces,” including the United States, with responsibility for his defeat in the presidential election.
For many months Chilean politics reverberated with charges and counter-charges of electoral meddling. For the spooks this could be dismissed as unimportant, but it threatened to break into major controversy if the right information came into play. Revelation of Project Camelot illustrated the problem. A Pentagon social science research effort, Camelot tried to identify factors that could be exploited in counterinsurgency. It triggered instant dispute when first uncovered in Chile. Events elsewhere in Latin America sharpened the threat. Widespread but unconfirmed charges that the CIA had backed the military coup in Brazil in 1964 caused suspicion, and there were the reports of CIA action against Che Guevara in Bolivia. More concrete charges from Bolivian cabinet minister Antonio Arguedas soon gave form to Chileans’ shadowy fears.
The next CIA project initiated in Chile aimed at countering the threat of exposure. It expanded the agency’s capacity to generate countervailing propaganda. Station chief James B. Nolan merged earlier propaganda units into a new structure in 1967, improving efficiency and security.
Fresh leadership now came to the American embassy in Santiago. In June 1967 Edward M. Korry took over as ambassador. His marching orders, direct from President Johnson—Korry later recalled—were to prevent Salvador Allende from coming to power. But the ambassador had particular ideas on America’s role. He had no desire to play proconsul, telling that directly to Frei. He wanted nothing to do with praetorianism—Korry radically cut back the U.S. military mission, heavily restricted CIA contact with the Chilean military, and at a certain point ordered the station to seek his personal approval for any approach to senior Chilean officers. Later Korry extended that rule to the agency’s dealings with cabinet ministers as well.
Shortly after Korry’s arrival the agency’s Jim Nolan gave way to Henry D. Heckscher, moving over from Tokyo, as station chief. Heckscher, something of a CIA legend, had done it all—Soviet operations from Berlin, covert action in Guatemala, nation building in Laos, working with the Cuban exiles, lately media manipulation in Japan. Santiago, something of a prestige post, would be his last before retirement. Arrogant though resourceful, Heckscher had a difficult time with Ed Korry, himself something of a prima donna. Heckscher, who saw the Frei government as moving to the left, disdained Korry’s view that Frei’s CDP was the best deal the United States could achieve: a non-Communist party with enough of a modernist approach to retain a congressional majority. The station chief also had another, more elemental problem: by the close of 1967 not a single officer remained in Santiago who had worked on the early projects and knew the players and backstory.
As Ambassador Korry took up the reins, the agency began moving again. The 303 Committee laid out another $30,000 to strengthen the right wing of the Radical Party. Keith Wheelock, one of the new CIA officers, became the field man on this initiative. Korry himself instigated another. Looking ahead to congressional elections in 1969, he proposed a classic support operation. The 303 Committee put up $350,000 in July 1968. (Later, in the 1970s, Korry contended that all CIA projects had been pared to the bone just before Richard Nixon entered office. That does not track with this 303 decision, the largest single addition to the CIA Chile budget since the Frei election.)
Heckscher chose the races to play in and the candidates to back, then the CIA did its thing. In eight months of intensive politicking the agency used the methods that had served it so well, but the thread had run out. Chile’s gross national product did not grow at all in 1967, and in the next year, when the cost of living rose almost a quarter—and international aid (both U.S. and multilateral) faltered—the GNP increased less than 1 percent. Incumbent Eduardo Frei had to pay a price, and his CDP paid it. Heckscher’s project became a pyrrhic victory: considered an operational success because the targeted races went CIA’s way, the election yielded a net loss for Christian Democrats. Both the far-right National Party and the left gained seats, leaving the CDP vulnerable, ending its absolute majority. Heckscher no doubt was further alarmed when Frei reopened the terms of trade with American copper companies, settled two years earlier. Frei also canceled a much-anticipated visit by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Thus was the stage set for a new Chilean presidential election, and for the Nixon administration that would confront it.
To some degree what Washington feared from a Socialist victory in Chile became inevitable no matter who won the election. Conversely, among some officials in the new Nixon administration the apprehensions of Allende went farther than the possible. The CIA component responsible for drafting the National Intelligence Estimates captured this conundrum well. In a 1969 NIE the Board of National Estimates considered the prospects for Chile. Abbott E. Smith, chairman at that time, had a reputation as a genial generalist, a former professor who had written American political history. Smith had excellent analysts at his command, plus an office of draftsmen and -women, among whom resided the best expertise. At the time Washington was consumed with a different dispute over estimates, one about Soviet nuclear missiles, so initially there were few with a stake in the Southern Cone. The 1969 NIE on Chile thus emerged with little acrimony. The paper concluded that any new Chilean president would move in the direction of expanding relations with the Socialist and Communist world. The left, the estimators believed, had a fifty-fifty chance of winning. An Allende administration might move faster, but the NIE also found that Salvador Allende specifically, needing to preserve his relationship with the United States as well as Chilean nationalism, would hesitate to move too far toward Havana or Moscow. Ambassador Korry strongly disputed this and protested the NIE conclusions in a series of cables to Washington.
There was more. In another estimate a year earlier, the BNE had surveyed conditions in Latin America. That NIE found that pent-up desire for improvement, the beginnings of development, and the weakening of oligarchies and military regimes had already made trends irreversible. As an assistant to Director Helms put it, “forces for change in the developing Latin nations were so powerful as to be beyond outside manipulation.”
To listen to top analysts, a laid-back approach might have been the best course. But that certainly would not have pleased Korry and Heckscher in Santiago; or the DO at Langley, where branch chief Tom Gilligan had been grinding out papers warning of Allende; not to mention those at the White House. The Helms aide Victor Marchetti notes: “As is so often the case within the government, the most careful advance analysis was either ignored or simply rejected when the time came to make a decision on a specific issue.”
The opportunity for choice arose in the spring of 1969. About six weeks after Chile’s March elections the 303 Committee met to discuss Chilean projects. The group decided to end CIA’s effort in the Santiago slums—the agency simply could not compete with Allende’s Popular Front (literally “Popular Unity,” or Unidad Popular in Spanish, yielding the acronym “UP”), the alliance between Chilean Socialists and Communists, in those neighborhoods. At this 303 session CIA Director Helms asked what the U.S. intended to do about the coming presidential election. The agency carefully noted that political action, if desired, needed to be prepared almost immediately. The 303 Committee ordered a propaganda workshop to sharpen capabilities but deferred any immediate decision. The agency reassigned Tom Gilligan to Portugal.
One reason the 303 Committee came to no decision was opposition from the State Department. Henry Kissinger accuses State’s Latin American bureau of living in a world in which it “could not bring itself to face Chilean political realities.” Kissinger asserts that no Chilean Christian Democrat stood any chance in the upcoming contest. Frei, though personally popular, could not succeed himself under the Chilean constitution. But Kissinger’s account misleads by what it fails to say: far from not facing Chilean realities, the State Department’s reluctance stemmed from a different reality it had very much in mind. Acutely conscious of the Chileans’ sensitivity to U.S. political interference, State worried that any whiff of a CIA operation would make an Allende victory inevitable. They had a reasonable argument. If any skullduggery took place in connection with the Chilean election, far better it be an internal Chilean affair. Kissinger dismisses this view with the comment that “a great college term paper could have been written on that subject.” In fact the differences demonstrate that, when policy came down to the concrete question of which leader in a country a U.S. administration preferred, Washington never was able to resolve the contradiction between its methods and America’s international commitment to democracy.
Henry Kissinger accepts some blame for Chile, but not for reconciling the policy contradiction. Kissinger feels he should have forced action, sooner, from Washington’s Cold War agency, the CIA. He admits to failing to focus on Chile until late in the game, 1970. As usual, Kissinger pleads the press of other events. The truth was, as he had told Chilean diplomats the year before, “I am not interested in, nor do I know anything about, the southern portion of the world from the Pyrenees on down.”
Kissinger indulges in a convoluted disquisition on how items appeared on the 303 (later the 40 Committee) agenda, to buttress a claim that he somehow did not know of suggestions for covert action in Chile. According to Kissinger, the CIA proposed issues but deferred placing them until settling differences with the State Department. It is true that CIA prepared the 303 proposal papers based on conversations with State. But the implication that Latin America bureau foot-dragging at State kept Chile off the agenda is inaccurate. Kissinger admits that agendas were fixed after consultation with him, that the CIA warned more than once that Chile preparations needed to be made in advance, and that, in fact, he put Chile on the agenda. Richard Helms affirms that Langley spoke loudly and often on the need to prepare. Since the subject did come up at 303 within months of Nixon taking office, the question becomes why it did not return for a year.
Attributing the failure to Charles A. Meyer, State’s Latin America assistant secretary, is not sufficient. Kissinger demanded that the department’s outgoing cables get his clearance. Former diplomats and NSC staff have commented, in many contexts, on the awkwardness of this process, under which they spent long hours in Henry’s outer office awaiting approvals. Thus Meyer’s dispatches to Korry, answering the ambassador’s repeated warnings on Allende, came before Kissinger, who must have been aware of the issues.
Another aspect is the hostility between Korry and CIA chief Heckscher, who for a very long time could not agree on a covert action proposal. Heckscher heavily favored Jorge Alessandri but could not get a hearing from the ambassador. He wore Korry down only in December 1969, using the argument that unless they did something they would have no answer later, when people asked what had been done to prevent Allende’s victory. The two then suggested an election project. At this point State’s qualms did figure—the department nixed the proposal because it envisioned support for the CDP, which State believed did not have a practical chance, and because it thought mere money insufficient to help Alessandri, candidate of the rightist National Party. Korry and Hechscher revised their plan, which State and CIA reviewed. They wrote a paper with both agencies’ views. On March 25, 1970, it came before the 40 Committee.
Henry Kissinger suddenly swung into action, startling the group. “I don’t see why the United States should stand by and let Chile go communist merely due to the stupidity of its own people,” Henry declared. He complains in his memoirs that CIA-State private exchanges had kept him in the dark about the proposal for four months, and then that the 40 Committee approved the “grand sum” of $135,000, as if Dr. Kissinger had not been reviewing the cable traffic, had no role in the deliberations, no ability to impose a larger budget, and no capacity to discover what impended—none of which was true. Thus Kissinger’s ultimate objection reeks of hindsight:
Had I believed in the spring and summer of 1970 that there was a significant likelihood of an Allende victory, I would have an obligation to the President to give him an opportunity to consider a covert program of 1964 proportions, including the backing of a single candidate. I was resentful that this option had been foreclosed without even being discussed.
Kissinger’s motives were complex. Richard Nixon exhibited concern and also responded to U.S. corporations, in danger of losing their guaranteed investments and highly agitated. Kissinger was always sensitive to Nixon’s cares. Roger Morris, a sort of handyman on the NSC staff at this time, believes that Kissinger actually saw Allende as a greater threat than Castro: “I don’t think anybody in the government understood how ideological Kissinger was about Chile.” On the other hand, Henry has been quoted at least twice in 1969 essentially telling Chileans that their hemisphere held no importance. Kissinger was also bent on dominating the State Department, concentrating control in his White House office, and Chile could be used to that end. With a failed anti-Allende operation—one ensured by underfunding—Kissinger could argue the dangers of leaving policy in the hands of the State Department.
Whatever the original motive, Washington was soon carried away by polling data that showed Alessandri ahead of Allende, with the supposition he might be defeated. On June 27 the 40 Committee added another $300,000 to the pot. State still argued against Korry’s latest idea, a two-phase proposal which included a contingency plan in case the election went to the Chilean congress, required if no candidate won more than half the votes. State, along with all the other agencies on the Special Group, approved the cash. Langley ordered Heckscher to sharpen his propaganda and aim it more directly at Allende.
The late hour did not prevent the CIA from accomplishing a great deal in Chile. Nor did the 40 Committee’s stance against backing a specific candidate preclude exactly that activity—the International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) Corporation put $350,000 of its own money into the election. John McCone, former CIA director, was now a member of the ITT board, well aware of business offers to help during the 1964 election, and ready to suggest this anew. He knew exactly whom to talk to at Langley. Still an agency consultant, McCone met Helms twice at CIA and another time at home in California. He put ITT board chairman Harold Geneen in touch with CIA Western Hemisphere Division chief William V. Broe. Other corporations matched the funds. In ITT’s case, its representatives in Santiago dealt directly with Heckscher, who furnished contacts. Bill Broe told the other companies where to put their money, which amounted to the same thing as the CIA actually backing candidates. More than $1.1 million went for political action in the 1970 Chilean election, not on a par with the Frei cycle but hardly insignificant, and most of it went to candidates, not for the spoiling operation. Kissinger maintains that he remained ignorant of the corporate funds at play.
