Safe for democracy, p.71
Safe for Democracy, page 71
Henry Heckscher aimed a half-dozen covert action projects toward shaping the election. Agency officers like Donald H. Winters were primary operatives. One project, a scare campaign, tried to make Allende out as a Stalinist. Another aimed to neutralize the Radical Party whose voters might go for Allende; this involved actual subsidies to a political group. Projects placing press and radio items were reaching five million people a day. The spooks tried to separate Socialists from Communists in the Unidad Popular, and to split the Communists from the national labor confederation. Sign-painting teams worked the streets by night, scrawling graffiti to suggest that Allende would send people to firing squads (“al paredon” was the slogan), and slapping up posters linking him to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, picturing tanks in the streets of Santiago. Other themes came right out of psywar texts: Allende would end religious freedom in Chile; his victory would undermine the family. Heckscher made such use of his assets that they became dangerously exposed and would later be of limited utility.
Among the most vital resources was the Chilean paper El Mercurio, the country’s biggest daily with a circulation of several hundred thousand. Published by Augustín Edwards, who owned a couple more papers and much else besides, El Mercurio was Chile’s newspaper of record. Long had the agency wooed it. Although details remain shrouded in secrecy, official reports indicate the CIA’s penetration extended through the 1960s, beginning with a single reporter. More joined the CIA payroll, some agents became editors. By the late sixties the agency could plant news in El Mercurio along with an occasional editorial, so in the 1970 campaign this “enabled the Station to generate more than one editorial per day based on CIA guidance.” Material here had a multiplier effect since it influenced other papers as well as radio news broadcasts throughout Chile.
Henry Kissinger convened the 40 Committee on August 7 to review progress. By now the situation did not seem so favorable. Poll data had been skewed. Allende gained ground despite the best the CIA could do. Kissinger asserts that the election now appeared so tight that no new action could make any difference. An official CIA review in September 2000 notes that “High-level concern in the Nixon Administration resulted in the development of a more aggressive covert action initiative.” The issue before the 40 Committee that day, Kissinger writes, was whether to explore preventing Allende from taking office if he won. This measure, considered risky, went on hold. The CIA report suggests otherwise.
Evidence suggests that Chile policy became hostage to Henry Kissinger’s effort to centralize control in the White House. Just before the 40 Committee met, the security adviser complained to Nixon chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that Secretary of State William P. Rogers was out to get him, to sabotage “all our systems and our foreign policy.” Not long afterward, Nixon endured a couple of days of frantic Kissinger phone calls, with Henry incensed the president had invited Rogers to Camp David. Nixon began talking to Bob Haldeman about a “Kissinger problem.” That happened the day before Kissinger convened his senior review group, the most powerful NSC unit (other than the president meeting with the full Council) to debate the results of a pair of government studies, one on Latin America, the other, Chile. The security adviser now hedged the outcome of the Chilean election and asked for a paper for Nixon’s decision on policy toward an Allende Chile.
Meanwhile Langley published a fresh NIE. This estimate predicted that an Allende government would almost certainly recognize Cuba, challenge U.S. interests in the hemisphere, and accelerate measures affecting U.S. multinational corporations. The NIE became fodder for those pushing for a last-ditch anti-Allende maneuver.
As Washington moved ahead, the game in Chile went to the next level. On September 4 Chilean voters gave the plurality to Salvador Allende, though his margin of victory proved so narrow it forced the congressional runoff. Reaction along the Potomac was instantaneous. The election had been on a Friday. Early Saturday morning Helms and top officials gathered in the CIA operations center to follow the results, their mood funerary. Kissinger summoned the 40 Committee for Tuesday. In the interim he demanded State get him Korry’s advice.
America’s man in Santiago replied that there remained little chance to defeat Allende, that to be caught in the act would be disastrous, that Eduardo Frei’s participation was essential (and unlikely) in any blocking scenario, and that Washington should accommodate itself to an Allende government. Then a remote event intruded—on Sunday in the Middle East, Palestinians began hijacking airliners and flying them to Jordan. Not only a major distraction, the crisis suggested a need for U.S. action somewhere else to demonstrate toughness.
What Kissinger heard at the 40 Committee confirmed the judgment of the embassy in Santiago. Latin American baron Bill Broe started by agreeing with Korry’s assessment, highlighting some of his points. The CIA man felt the decision not yet ripe and recommended that Korry and Heckscher “probe all possible aspects of feasible actions” and report back. Discussion became heated. Director Helms expressed his view that the Chilean opposition would evaporate once Allende took office, and the Chilean Marxist would quickly neutralize the police and army, leaving no rallying point. Helms made no policy recommendation but gave his intelligence judgment: “a military golpe against Allende would have little success unless undertaken soon.” The Pentagon agreed: to be effective, action had to be in the “very near future.” Alex Johnson and Charlie Meyer warned that intervening against Allende’s election might result in civil war in Chile.
Henry Kissinger and John Mitchell doubted that “once Allende is in the presidency there will be anyone capable of organizing any real counterforce against him.” Ignoring the State Department’s warning, Kissinger used Chile to further his drive for control and show Nixon’s resolve. He ended the session by directing that Korry report immediately on the pros and cons of a coup with U.S. assistance, and the prospects for a Chilean political opposition.
Edward Korry believes that he lost credibility in the Nixon White House when he advised against adventures in Santiago. There existed an important counterweight to Korry—International Telephone and Telegraph. Within days of the election, ITT began reaching directly into the White House, speaking to Kissinger’s NSC staff aides for Latin America among others. When the 40 Committee met again on September 14, in the face of Korry’s advice the secret war managers voted $250,000 for a campaign to influence the Chilean Congress runoff. Helms recalls the atmosphere as “grouchy.” Its main decision, described as a “Rube Goldberg” gambit—an awkward and patched-together mechanism that achieves an unlikely result—would become known as “Track I.”
Richard Nixon, a friend of Pepsi corporate president Donald M. Kendall, took a telephone call from him. Kendall told Nixon that a friend, Augustín Edwards, publisher of El Mercurio, wanted to talk to people in the White House. Nixon knew Edwards and needed little convincing. To him Allende represented something like what Castro had been for Kennedy. Years afterward, in a celebrated television interview with David Frost, Nixon rationalized that the addition of Chile to Cuba would have made Latin America a “Red Sandwich,” a variant on the domino theory alleged to apply to Southeast Asia.
Nixon told Edwards and Kendall to see Kissinger. Nixon does not recall specifically but concedes it quite possible that he told his people to see the Chilean publisher. The next morning, September 15, Edwards and Kendall breakfasted with Kissinger and John Mitchell. Edwards pleaded for help. Later he saw Richard Helms at a downtown Washington hotel to convey the same message. Nixon ordered Kissinger to get Helms over to the White House. That afternoon, before heading to Kansas City for a speech, Nixon spoke with Helms, Kissinger, and Mitchell.
The president minced no words. As Helms penciled notes, seated to the right of Nixon’s desk, the president told the CIA to take Allende down. Make a golpe, Nixon said. Even if the chances were just one in ten, he wanted to do it. Echoing LBJ to the CIA on Vietnam, Nixon wanted the best men, full time, and he told Helms he could have $10 million, more if necessary. As for Chile, the president said, “Make the economy scream!” Nixon wanted to see a plan within forty-eight hours.
“If I ever carried a marshal’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office,” Helms later commented, “it was that day.” He then told Senate investigators, “My heart sank over this meeting, because . . . the possibility of bringing off something like this seemed to me at that time to be just as remote as anything could be.”
Nixon also told Director Helms to keep the whole project secret from just about everyone.
Secretaries Rogers and Laird, Ambassador Korry, station chief Heckscher—all were to be kept in the dark. Even at Langley knowledge was to be restricted. The 40 Committee, whose writ to approve all covert operations Nixon had recently affirmed, would not be informed of this one. Helms thought it the tightest clamp-down he had experienced since World War II. Tom Karamessines speculated to Senate investigators that the restrictions were designed to avoid State’s objections or reflected a concern over secrecy. In a sworn statement to the same investigating committee, Richard Nixon declared he did not recall ordering secrecy, but he conceded that “It was my opinion that any effort to bring about a political defeat of Mr. Allende could succeed only if the participation of the CIA was not disclosed,” and Nixon admits ordering the embassy in Santiago cut out of the loop.
Within twenty-four hours the White House was swept up in a further distraction as CIA reported signs that the Russians were about to open a naval base in Cuba. For Kissinger, Chile became just part of his “autumn of crisis.” The last-ditch attempt to head off an Allende presidency has come down to history as “Track II,” as Tom Karamessines dubbed it, an effort that led to the death of the de facto commander of the Chilean army. The CIA knew this mission as Project FU/Belt. It would not be Langley’s finest hour.
In his golden years, secret warrior David A. Phillips used to meet his good buddies for lunch or dinner to chew over their exploits. Their watering hole, a good Cuban restaurant called Omega in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, is gone now, its place taken by a supermarket. The atmosphere at those lunches, languid and nostalgic, differed diametrically from Phillips’s reality those days in 1970. Nine months into a tour as station chief in Brazil, Phillips suddenly received orders to take the next available flight to Washington and tell associates that he would be away several weeks for a promotion board. Phillips knew something was up, speculating it might be Chile, but on his long trip he dismissed the thought. Chile had become a crash priority. Phillips would be in charge of the task force for Project Belt.
Returning to Langley after his fateful encounter with the president, Director Helms called together senior people to develop a plan to show Nixon. Early the next morning, Helms gathered the group, including his deputy, Gen. Robert Cushman, and his executive director, Col. “Red” White. From the DO were big guns: Karamessines and his associate DDO, Cord Meyer; the region’s baron, Bill Broe; deputy division chief Jim Flannery; and a few subordinates. Helms told the secret warriors they had ten million to spend, and put Karamessines in command. There would be a task force of the best people, with Colonel White to make all necessary arrangements, and Phillips as lead operations officer.
The CIA director recalls the meeting as “bleak,” with no one holding out any great hope of a successful plan, the only apparent avenue being a military coup. Cord Meyer recalls he and Karamessines were stunned. “We were surprised by what we were being ordered to do,” Meyer writes. “Much as we feared an Allende presidency, the idea of a military overthrow had not occurred to us as a feasible solution.” Little time remained for an operation; the CIA station had been discouraging military action and would suddenly be reversing course; they knew of no Chilean officers ready to act against Allende. Helms had to meet Kissinger again on the 18th to detail CIA’s plan. He could not just tell the security adviser that the risks were great and the action impossible. That day Langley began a march into the valley of death.
When Helms saw Kissinger again their conversation on Track II was perfunctory. Rather, the national security adviser expressed himself as more concerned with economic pressures that could be brought to bear. John McCone had seen Kissinger and Helms and conveyed his corporation’s concern. Kissinger’s staffer Viron Vaky had also talked with ITT executives the day before. The economic pressures would feature in the 40 Committee track, and they would endure long after Allende took power.
The final Chilean runoff, set for October 24, 1970, loomed in Santiago. That gave the agency barely a month. Karamessines would direct the project and liaise with the White House. For Helms this also offered a private channel to the State Department: Karamessines and William P. Rogers had been young lawyers together in racket-busting days on Thomas E. Dewey’s district attorney staff in the 1930s. Karamessines also practiced very strict compartmentation, for example keeping the DI ignorant, thus being a good man to enforce the secrecy instructions.
Dave Phillips found himself pressed into service. Barely had he gotten an ID badge with access to appropriate headquarters areas when deputy chief Flannery pulled Phillips aside to brief him. Phillips relates that he could hardly believe the assignment. He and Flannery agreed that they could not buy the Chilean Congress for $25 million, much less $250,000. Flannery had served with Phillips several times in the past and now led him carefully to the appropriate conclusion—they needed a golpe. Both men saw poor prospects. Phillips recounted, “The odds [were] unacceptable, it [was] something that [was] not going to work, and we were going to be burned if we [got] into it.” Karamessines found his colleagues universally agreed. “Problem is, Helms has marching orders,” Flannery said. Helms, Karamessines, Broe, and Phillips all testified later to intense White House pressure. As Flannery told investigators, “There was just no question we had to make this effort, no matter what the odds were.”
Track II was very closely held at Langley. Except for Broe, Flannery, and the Chile branch chief, no one at WH Division needed to know. Dave Phillips fibbed about his sudden appearance, though the promotion board story must have worn thin when he slept in the building—quite unusual. There was talk of running Phillips’s task force directly out of Karamessines’s office, but that would have been a tip-off. Instead they were put in a mail room. At least it adjoined the WH Division front office. Phillips experienced ethical doubts, partly due to what he knew about Chile and Allende, but also because the secrecy forced him into false positions. His staff mixed experienced people with some young officers, most important among them John J. Devine, called “Jack,” a former high school teacher from Philadelphia on his first DO assignment. Devine converted the overnight cables from Santiago into reports his superiors could fathom in the morning.
Determined not to be completely idiotic, Phillips broke one rule early, bringing in Henry Heckscher. The station chief went on record as early as September 23 noting strong reasons to suppose the Chilean military would acquiesce in Salvador Allende’s presidency. Heckscher warned that the Chilean commander, Gen. Réné Schneider, a strict constitutionalist, had firm control and would permit no intervention in politics. The parameters of action were quite narrow as Heckscher saw them, while options were limited. He was called to Washington and politely read the riot act. Langley instructed its station chief merely to report, not to fill his cables with argumentation.
Santiago military attaché Col. Paul Wimert, used as a go-between with Chilean officers of several factions, had to know too, and Heckscher would control him. Otherwise the twelve-person station would be bypassed. Instead Phillips mounted his emergency effort with agents sent from outside the country. All would act as “false flag” agents—pretending to act for someone other than CIA. One, Tony Sforza, had cover as a professional gambler, an Argentinian with business interests. Among his other agency exploits, Sforza had been the CIA’s debriefer of Fidel Castro’s sister Juanita in Mexico City in the summer of 1964. Another, Bruce MacMaster, masqueraded as a representative of the Ford Foundation and other institutions—a violation of CIA regulations in place since the National Student Association scandal. There were two more of these agents, whose communications to Phillips ran through an undercover officer at a safe house in Santiago, to Buenos Aires, then to Langley. Ambassador Korry, left to believe that Track I amounted to everything the United States did in Chile, would eventually be furious.
As the task force put its network in place, Dave Phillips crafted his operations plan. On September 27 he sent it to Henry Heckscher. The agency intended to create a coup climate, including political, psychological, and economic warfare—ITT had already raised this aspect with Kissinger, and corporate documents mention a possible million-dollar fund for bribes or other purposes—but Phillips believed the key would be psychological warfare within Chile. The intent would be to create a pretext for action, and pressure would be put on President Eduardo Frei to either manage a coup or get out of the way. The seeds of failure are already visible in this dispatch, which began by noting, “WE ACCEPT AS HYPOTHESIS THAT FREI WILL PROBABLY NOT MOVE.”
On September 29 William Broe of WH Division met with ITT executives. Corporate documents revealed in the scandal that later surrounded this business intervention in foreign policy include the executive’s cable recounting the Broe meeting to ITT’s chairman. The CIA baron told the corporate executives that the agency had taken certain steps but wanted “additional help aimed at inducing economic collapse.” Langley’s concept included having banks refuse to renew loans and companies drag their feet on deliveries and payments; savings banks relocate corporate accounts; and the withdrawal of technical help. The CIA even wanted ITT to approach other corporations in its behalf. ITT would do what it could but refused to recruit for Langley’s economic war. As Broe met with ITT executive E. J. Gerrity, Tom Karamessines phoned chairman Harold Geneen and ranged over the same ground. McCone got updates from ITT’s people. In 1970–1971 there would be more than three dozen CIA contacts with ITT.
