Starting at breakfast and ending before dinner on September 15, 1970, a handful of business executives and government officials in Washington did something no Americans had ever done before. In a rapid-fire series of meetings, amid grave warnings about threats to national security, they resolved to overthrow a government that had not yet even taken power. Their victim was to be Salvador Allende Gossens, the incoming president of Chile.
By some standards Chile would seem an odd place for the United States to launch such a risky and violent plot. It is a small country, far from American shores, and has never posed the slightest military threat to the United States. Henry Kissinger once famously dismissed Chile as “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.” Yet when Allende won the presidential election there on September 4, 1970, he set off panic in the corridors of American power. He was a lifelong anti-imperialist and admirer of Fidel Castro who had vowed to nationalize the American-owned companies that dominated his country’s economy.
Because Allende did not win a majority of votes cast in the presidential election—36.3 percent in a three-way race—his victory had to be confirmed by the Chilean Congress. In past cases like this, Congress had chosen the first-place finisher, and it seemed certain to do so again. Agustín Edwards, one of Chile’s richest men and owner of its largest newspaper, El Mecurio, could not abide that possibility. He went to the American embassy in Santiago, the Chilean capital, and put a blunt question to Ambassador Edward Korry.
“Will the U.S. do anything militarily, directly or indirectly?” he asked.
“No,” Korry told him simply.
That was not the answer Edwards wanted to hear. He decided to appeal over Korry’s head, to more powerful officials in Washington. Their interests, he could sense, coincided with his own.
Edwards was personally, professionally, and ideologically close to most of the leading American executives with interests in Chile. Through them, he had access to the highest circles of the Nixon administration. President Nixon had repeatedly declared his determination to protect American business interests abroad, fight Communism, and suppress challenges to United States hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Edwards flew to Washington to tell the president that he could do all three in Chile.
On September 9, as Edwards was packing his bags in Santiago, directors of the International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation held their monthly meeting in New York. ITT was one of the world’s largest conglomerates. It had large holdings in Chile and faced the same threat that hung over Edwards’s business empire. Its prized asset, the Chilean telephone system, was high on Allende’s list for nationalization.
During that ITT board meeting, Harold Geneen, the company’s chief operating officer and one of the best-known businessmen in the world, took one of the board members aside to make an audacious proposition. “What he told me,” the board member later testified, “was that he was prepared to put as much as a million dollars in support of any plan that was adopted by the government for the purpose of bringing about a coalition of the opposition to Allende.”
That board member was none other than John McCone, the former CIA director. McCone had joined ITT less than a year after leaving the CIA but remained a consultant to the agency, meaning that he was simultaneously on both payrolls. This unique arrangement made him the ideal link between ITT and the top levels of the United States government.
McCone was able to see Kissinger, the president’s national security adviser, immediately to convey Geneen’s million-dollar offer. Although Kissinger did not accept it, he was impressed with how seriously ITT was taking the Chile problem. Later McCone also presented his case to his successor and former deputy at the CIA, Richard Helms.
A covert campaign in Chile could not be launched without an order from the president. Edwards undertook to secure that order. As his intermediary, he chose his old friend and business partner Donald Kendall, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Pepsi-Cola. He stayed at Kendall’s house in Connecticut and told him that Chile was about to fall under Communist rule.
Pepsi-Cola lubricated these relationships. Kendall had hired Nixon to be the company’s international legal counsel in the mid-1960s, when Nixon was in the political wilderness, and later became one of his biggest campaign contributors. Edwards, among his many other business ventures, was the principal Pepsi distributor in Chile. All three thrived where international business overlapped with geopolitics.
On September 14, Kendall brought his father to the White House to meet President Nixon. During a break in the socializing, he took Nixon aside and repeated what Edwards had told him about Chile. Nixon focused intensely on his warnings. From that moment, he never wavered in his determination to bring Allende down.
“He had been triggered into action,” Kissinger later wrote.
Immediately after hearing from Kendall, Nixon sent him to meet with Kissinger and Attorney General John Mitchell. Kendall urged them to hear what Edwards had to say, and they agreed to meet with him the next morning. Their breakfast conversation would prove to be among the more farreaching in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations. Edwards painted a dark picture of what was happening in his homeland. He predicted that if Allende was allowed to take office, he would nationalize the Chilean economy, force American businesses out, and steer Chile into the Soviet-Cuban orbit.
Kissinger listened attentively. As soon as the meeting was over, he called Helms and asked him to meet with Edwards to glean “whatever insight he might have” on ways of stopping Allende. Later in the morning, Kissinger met with another powerful figure eager to protect large interests in Chile, his friend and patron David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Kissinger, Mitchell, and Helms came to the Oval Office to receive Nixon’s marching orders. Their meeting lasted only thirteen minutes. Nixon was so explicit that no more time was needed. Under Chilean law, Congress had to certify Allende’s election within fifty days after the election. Nixon wanted that somehow to be prevented.
No tape or transcript of this meeting is known to exist. One official who was present, however, later told the New York Times that Nixon gave the impression of being “extremely anxious” for quick results. Another described him as “frantic.” As the president spoke, Helms scribbled a page of notes that has become a classic document in the history of diplomacy and covert action.
• 1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!
• worth spending
• not concerned risks involved
• no involvement of embassy
• $10,000,000 available, more if necessary
• full-time job—best men we have
• game plan
• make economy scream
• 48 hours for plan of action
CHILEANS LIKE TO SAY THAT THEIRS IS “NOT ONE OF THOSE TROPICAL countries.” It is part of South America, but its history is proof that geography does not always determine destiny. It has suffered through less anarchy, civil war, and repression than almost any other country in the hemisphere. In the 139 years after its first constitution took effect in 1833, its democratic order was interrupted only three times. Two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century, Chile was well on its way to modernity, with a high literacy rate, a relatively large middle class, and a strong civil society. The democratic approach to life and politics was as deeply woven into the national psyche as anywhere in Latin America.
Most countries whose governments Americans have overthrown possess a valuable resource. Chile is no exception. It is the world’s leading producer of copper, which for thousands of years has been one of the world’s most prized commodities. Copper shaped the development of the human race, and with the dawn of the electrical age, it became more important than ever because of its excellent conductivity. It is a vital material in motors, generators, dynamos, cables, and wires, and is in everyday use in objects from lamps to doorknobs to teakettles.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, American businesses became interested in Chilean copper. In 1905 the Braden Copper Company, which would later be absorbed into Kennecott Copper Corporation, began mining at El Teniente, a mountain of ore set in the Andes about one hundred miles southeast of Santiago. Seven years later a forerunner of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company began operations at Chuquicamata, in the northern desert.
These two American-owned companies, Kennecott and Anaconda, grew into the twin titans of the world copper business. By midcentury, El Teniente was the largest underground copper mine in the world, and Chuquicamata was the largest open-pit mine. Kennecott’s operations in Chile earned an after-tax profit of about $20 million per year. Anaconda’s brought in $30 million. Together these two companies accounted for most of Chile’s export earnings and a third of its tax revenues. That gave them overwhelming influence over Chilean political as well as economic life.
Besides mining companies and consumer-products companies like Pepsi-Cola, one other American firm, International Telephone and Telegraph, played a major role in Chile. In 1930, when ITT was a cuttingedge telecommunications firm, it bought a majority share of the British-owned Chile Telephone Company, and with it control over the country’s burgeoning telephone and telegraph systems. That proved to be one of the best investments it ever made, producing a steady stream of profit that by the early 1960s exceeded $10 million annually.
By that time, change was sweeping across Latin America. Cuban guerrillas overthrew the Batista dictatorship and imposed a radical social and political program. Other dictators fell in Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina. A restive young generation cast about for new political ideas.
In 1961, seeking to respond to this challenge, President Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress, a hemispheric organization committed to “comprehensive” social and political change. He asked his aides to look for a country that could be the first Alliance for Progress showcase. It had to be one where a basic political and physical infrastructure was already in place and where people had demonstrated a desire for peaceful change. Chile, with its strong private sector and democratic tradition, was the obvious choice. Kennedy hoped that there, he could show the world that the capitalist model of third-world development worked better than the Marxist one. During the 1960s, Chile received more than $1.2 billion in aid from the Alliance for Progress and directly from the United States, more per capita than any other country in the hemisphere.
At first this attention from Washington brought Chile nothing more than money. Beginning in 1964, it brought something else. That was the year the CIA set out on a decadelong campaign of intervention and destabilization that ultimately tore Chile away from its democratic roots.
The CIA began sending money and other forms of support to Chilean newspapers, student groups, trade unions, and political parties in the early 1960s. It concentrated its support on the center-left Christian Democratic Party, whose leader, Eduardo Frei, was an ebullient reformer in exactly the right mold to fit Washington’s fancy. His good looks and media-conscious style even led reporters and columnists to call him the “Chilean Kennedy.” When he ran for president in 1964, his American friends rallied to his side. They did so not just because they liked him but also because they fervently wished to block the Socialist candidate, Allende, who was becoming a nightmare figure for some in Washington.
Allende was the classic bourgeois revolutionary. Although born into privilege, he was a passionate advocate of radical social change. His militancy grew from a combination of Marxist gospel and the realities of life he saw around him. Despite Chile’s relatively prosperous position among South American nations, millions of its people lived in desperate poverty, and this genuinely moved Allende. Equally outrageous to him was the fact that foreign companies controlled his country’s all-important copper industry.
Horn-rimmed eyeglasses, tweedy jackets, and a slightly raffish mustache gave Allende the air of a college professor or Left Bank intellectual. He was a sophisticate and something of a dandy, a connoisseur of art, wine, and female beauty. His socialist convictions had not prevented him from becoming a pillar of the political establishment. He was also a third-generation Mason—not common for Marxists—and mixed easily with the Chilean elite. In private he could be world-weary, cynical, and even depressive.
The CIA covertly spent $3 million to ensure that Frei would defeat Allende in the 1964 election, paying more than half the cost of his campaign. He won easily. Over the next four years the CIA spent $2 million on covert projects aimed at supporting Frei, along with $175,000 in covert aid to twenty-two candidates who ran for Congress in 1965, nine of whom were elected. It also subsidized an anti-Communist women’s group, supported a breakaway faction of the Socialist Party, paid for political organizing campaigns in slums outside Santiago, sponsored dissident groups within the Communist-dominated labor movement, endowed a news wire service and a right-wing weekly newspaper, and regularly placed editorials in El Mercurio.
The United States also intensified its long effort to cultivate friends in the Chilean military. Between 1950 and 1969, nearly four thousand Chilean officers were trained at American military bases, most at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, where students learned a rigorous counterinsurgency doctrine that equated Marxism with treason. Chile also received $163 million in American military aid during this period, more than any other country in the hemisphere except Brazil.
All of this overt and covert aid gave the United States a deep stake in Chile. It led some officials to believe that, as in Vietnam, they had purchased the right to guide the course of Chilean politics. Edward Korry, who became the ambassador in 1967, went so far as to assert that the United States had assumed a “fiduciary responsibility” for this country, whose capital was five thousand miles from Washington.
United States policy toward Chile, and indeed toward all of Latin America, changed dramatically after Richard Nixon assumed the presidency in January 1969. Nixon disdained the Alliance for Progress, partly because of its association with Kennedy and partly because he considered it a dangerous triumph of idealism over reality. He feared that by promoting reform, especially land redistribution, it would undermine right-wing governments that were friendly to the United States. Rather than encourage Latin America’s “democratic left,” as Kennedy and Johnson had tried to do, he would support its business elite and military.
“I will never agree with the policy of downgrading the military in Latin America,” Nixon told one meeting of the National Security Council. “They are power centers subject to our influence. The others, the intellectuals, are not subject to our influence.”
In 1970, Allende ran for president not as the candidate of his own Socialist Party, which was too weak to win on its own, but at the head of a leftist coalition called Popular Unity. The challenge of keeping him out of power came to obsess the American embassy in Santiago. Early in 1970, Ambassador Korry and his CIA station chief, Henry Hecksher, asked the Nixon administration for permission to embark on a covert “spoiling” campaign to block him. They addressed their request to the “40 Committee,” named after the number of the presidential directive that created it, which was composed of the country’s top national security officials. Kissinger effectively ran the committee; when he proposed an action, the others approved. His old friend David Rockefeller, whose Chase Manhattan Bank had multibillion-dollar interests in South America, urged him to press ahead with the “spoiling” campaign.
As the Chilean election approached, Rockefeller recalled in his memoir, he made a telephone call that helped push the Nixon administration onto its anti-Allende course.
In March 1970, well before the election, my friend Agustín (Doonie) Edwards, publisher of El Mercurio, Chile’s leading newspaper, told me Allende was a Soviet dupe who would destroy Chile’s fragile economy and extend Communist influence in the region. If Allende won, Doonie warned, Chile would become another Cuba, a satellite of the Soviet Union. He insisted that the United States must prevent Allende’s election. Doonie’s concerns were so intense that I put him in touch with Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger would be more directly responsible for what happened in Chile than any other American, with the possible exception of Nixon himself. For three years, during which he dealt with a host of crises around the world, he never lost interest in Chile. That was because Nixon pressed him relentlessly, and also because the anti-Allende project fit perfectly with his view of the world and of America’s place in it.
From his background as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Kissinger took the lesson that a statesman’s transcendent goal must always be to establish and maintain stability among nations. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Prince Metternich, the nineteenth-century Austrian diplomat who was one of the modern world’s master practitioners of big-power diplomacy. Once in office, he applied some of Metternich’s ideas. He projected American power through regional allies like Iran, Zaire, and Indonesia, and turned a blind eye as dictators in those countries oppressed and looted with abandon. One of his longtime associates, Lawrence Eagleburger, concluded that he was guided by principles that “are antithetical to the American experience.”
“Americans tend to want to pursue a set of moral principles,” Eagleburger asserted. “Henry does not have an intrinsic feel for the American political system, and he does not start with the same values and assumptions.”
During his long career, Kissinger, like many statesmen of his generation, had paid almost no attention to Latin America. In the spring of 1969, he visited the Chilean embassy in Washington and bluntly told the ambassador, “I am not interested in, nor do I know anything about, the southern portion of the world from the Pyrenees on down.” A year later, he heard from Edwards and everything changed.
On March 25, 1970, the “40 Committee” approved the “spoiling” campaign against Allende with a budget of $135,000, later increased to $390,000. It was a smaller-scale version of the multimillion-dollar effort the CIA had launched to prevent Allende from winning in 1964. Agents dusted off many of the same tactics, from planting propaganda in the press to supporting anti-Communist “civic action” groups. Some printed and distributed posters showing Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague. Others opened tendentious news agencies, sowed discord within Popular Unity, and produced anti-Allende books, pamphlets, and leaflets.
As the presidential campaign intensified in Chile, Harold Geneen, the ITT chairman, decided to try to influence its outcome. He asked McCone to arrange for him to meet William Broe, the CIA’s chief of covert operations in the Western Hemisphere. They met in the ITT suite at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel in Washington on July 16. Geneen said his company wanted to use the CIA as a conduit to pass money to the campaign of Jorge Alessandri, the rightist presidential candidate. Broe suggested that the company make its contribution directly, and with help from CIA officers in Santiago, it did. ITT covertly donated $350,000 to the Alessandri campaign and arranged for other American businesses to donate another $350,000.
Although the CIA’s “spoiling” campaign and the large contributions that American companies made to Alessandri may have had some effect, it was not enough. On September 4, 1970, Chilean voters went to the polls and gave Allende his victory by plurality. Such outcomes were not unusual in Chile’s multiparty political system, and Congress had a long-established tradition of choosing the first-place finisher as president. That was what President Nixon, on the afternoon of September 15, ordered Kissinger and Helms to prevent.
“The president came down very hard that he wanted something done, and he didn’t much care how, and that he was prepared to make money available,” Helms later testified. “This was a pretty all-inclusive order. . . . If I ever carried a marshal’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day.”
NIXON ORDERED THE CIA TO PRODUCE AN ANTI-ALLENDE PLAN WITHIN forty-eight hours, so Helms had no time to waste. Early the next morning, September 16, 1970, he met with his covert action specialists. He told them, according to one participant, “that President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was unacceptable to the United States”; that Nixon had “asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him”; and that, in a break from normal practice, “the Agency is to carry out this mission without coordination from the Department of State or Defense.”
The next day, while Helms and his operatives were working to design this covert operation, Kissinger told a group of newspaper editors in Chicago that if Allende was allowed to take power, he would establish “some sort of Communist government” that would cause “massive problems” for the United States. He returned to Washington that afternoon and at eight-thirty the next morning convened a meeting of the 40 Committee to hear the CIA’s proposal. As Helms outlined it, the anti-Allende operation would have two parts. The first, called Track I, was aimed at blocking Allende by “legal” means. It was immediately implemented, and led to the placement of dozens of articles in the Chilean press warning of disaster if Allende became president. Its principal focus was the outgoing president, Eduardo Frei. The CIA hoped that its press campaign, together with private mailings to Frei and orchestrated pressure on him from political confidants, would lead him to call on Congress to break with Chilean tradition and deny the presidency to the candidate who had won the most popular votes.
This approach failed, largely because President Frei was, as one CIA cable put it, a “too gentle soul” and unwilling to support the disruption of his country’s political system. Within a few weeks, Track I became subsumed in a far more ambitious project the CIA called Track II, which aimed explicitly at fomenting a military coup. Plotters at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, directed their agents in Santiago to begin “probing for military possibilities to thwart Allende” and to look for ways of “strengthening the resolve of the Chilean military to act against Allende.”
“Contact the military and let them know USG [the United States government] wants a military solution and that we will support them now and later,” one cable said. “In sum, we want you to sponsor a military move which can take place, to the extent possible, in a climate of economic and political uncertainty.”
To create that climate, the Americans needed to push Chile toward chaos. Kissinger set out to do so, using all of the considerable resources at his command. He justified this effort with what became one of his most-quoted maxims. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” he told his fellow plotters.
As this project was taking shape, several diplomats and CIA officers who learned of it expressed serious doubts. A National Security Study Memorandum produced at Kissinger’s direction concluded that “the U.S. has no vital national interests within Chile” and “the world military balance of power would not be significantly altered by an Allende government.” Henry Hecksher, chief of the CIA station in Santiago, who had worked on the covert campaign to deny the election to Allende, reported that with the election now over, he would “not consider any kind of intervention in the constitutional processes desirable.” Another CIA officer wrote in a memo that Allende was not likely to take orders from Moscow or Havana and that plotting against him would be “repeating the errors we made in 1959 and 1960 when we drove Fidel Castro into the Soviet camp.” Assistant Secretary of State Charles Meyer predicted that covert action against Allende would “further tarnish America’s image in Latin America.” Kissinger’s chief adviser on Latin America, Viron Vaky, warned him that the consequences of striking against Allende “could be disastrous.”
What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets. Moralism aside, this has practical operational consequences. . . . If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us, e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.? It is hard to argue this.
These doubters did not realize how fiercely determined Nixon and Kissinger were to block Allende. Their warnings had no effect on the coup plotters in Washington. One of them, David Atlee Phillips, was out to overthrow his second Latin American government.
Phillips, who had run the highly successful “Voice of Liberation” radio campaign during the 1954 coup against President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, became codirector of the CIA’s newly formed Chile Task Force. His partner was William Broe. The two of them were in almost hourly contact with the CIA station in Santiago, under what one official later called “constant, constant pressure” from the White House.
As the American plot against Allende began to take shape, Phillips and Broe sent a lengthy cable to their agents in Santiago. It directed them to use three tools—“economic warfare,” “political warfare/’ and “psychological warfare”—to create a “coup climate” and a “pretext or flash point for action.”
The first foreign leader to be overthrown with the collaboration of American officials was Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii.
A few dozen sugar planters and descendants of missionaries, led by the firebrand lawyer Lorrin Thurston (left), staged Hawaii’s modest “revolution” in 1893. The queen’s forces could not suppress it because the American minister in Honolulu, John L. Stevens (right), immediately recognized the insurgent regime and called American soldiers ashore to defend it.
President William McKinley (left) and his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, presided over the first burst of American expansionism. Roosevelt called his critics “futile sentimentalists of the international arbitration type” who exhibited “a flabby type of character which eats away at the great fighting features of our race.”
More than 250 American soldiers and sailors were killed when the warship Maine exploded in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. Most Americans, inflamed by a wave of sensationalist newspaper reports, blamed Spain for the explosion. President McKinley seized on this passion to declare the war against Spain that turned Cuba into an American protectorate. Historians now believe the Maine was destroyed not by hostile action, but by an accident inside the ship.
American soldiers won the Spanish-American War in a single day of heavy combat, July 1, 1898. One of the decisive battles was for the town of El Caney, near the Cuban port of Santiago.
In Puerto Rico, Americans crushed the elected government of Luis Munoz Rivera. He later condemned the American takeover because none of the promises were kept, and because our present condition is that of serfs attached to conquered territory.”
The Cuban nationalist leader Jose Marti inspired his country’s revolution against Spain, but also wished “to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon other lands of our America.”
After the United States seized the Philippines in 1898, Emilio Aguinaldo led thousands of poorly armed rebels in a resistance war.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge defended the use of harsh tactics, including torture, against Filipinos and other “semicivilized people.”
American troops fought rebels in the Philippines for three and a half years. More than 4,000 Americans and 35,000 Filipinos were killed.
President Jose Santos Zelaya was the most formidable leader Nicaragua ever had. His attempts to regulate American mining and lumber companies, and his insistence on seeking loans from European rather than American banks, led the United States to overthrow him in 1909.
The American commander who directed this operation, Major Smedley Butler, later wrote that he “helped pacify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers.” HP
Soon after Zelaya was overthrown, the United States helped place Adolfo Diaz, chief accountant for the American-owned La Luz Mining Company, in the Nicaraguan presidency. He allowed American advisers, like the two standing behind him in this photo, to guide his government.
In 1911 President Miguel Davila of Honduras (above), was overthrown in an operation staged jointly by the United States Navy and a band of rebels led by the flamboyant American mercenary Lee Christmas (right).
Central America’s most powerful banana planter, Sam Zemurray, financed the Honduran revolution and was rewarded with vast tracts of the country’s most fertile land.
During the Cold War, American leaders used the CIA to depose elected governments. The first two of these operations, in Iran and Guatemala, were carried out on orders from President Dwight Eisenhower (left) and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.
Allen Dulles, the secretary of state’s younger brother, was director of the CIA.
The CIA staged its first coup in Iran, where Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh had nationalized his country’s oil industry. Mobs paid by the CIA rampaged through Tehran in the summer of 1953.
After the coup, Mossadegh was arrested, placed on trial, and found guilty of treason. He spent three years in prison and the rest of his life under house arrest.
The CIA placed Mohammed Reza Shah back on the Peacock Throne. His repressive rule set off the Islamic revolution of 1979.
President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala promoted a land reform program that benefited thousands of impoverished peasants. It outraged the United Fruit Company, which Secretary of State Dulles had represented during his years as a corporate lawyer.
American officials portrayed Arbenz as a tool of the Soviets. In 1954 CIA pilots bombed targets in Guatemala, among them Fort Matamoros, an important military base in the capital.
CIA pilots also dropped leaflets like this one, which says: “Fight for God, Fatherland, Freedom, Work, Truth, Justice. Fight against Communist atheism, Communist interventionism, Communist oppression, Communist poverty, Communist lies, Communist police.”
American officials played a key role in making Ngo Dinh Diem president of South Vietnam. In September 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (left) and United States Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge (right) assured Diem of continued American support. Lodge was named after his grandfather, who had strongly promoted the extension of United States power overseas.
Diem refused to promise the Americans that he would not negotiate with communist-led insurgents. Six weeks after his meeting with McNamara and Lodge, he was overthrown and killed.
On December 4, 1972, President Salvador Allende of Chile told the United Nations General Assembly that his country would “no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies.”
Nine months after his appearance at the U.N., Allende was overthrown in a coup. He spent his final hours at La Moneda, the presidential palace, which was bombed by rebel planes.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who played an important role in promoting the Chilean coup, met afterward with the country’s new leader, General Augusto Pinochet.
President Ronald Reagan was playing golf in Augusta, Georgia, when political violence broke out on the Caribbean island of Grenada. His national security adviser, Robert McFarlane (left), and Secretary of State George Shultz awoke him before dawn on October 22, 1983, to discuss the crisis. He quickly decided to send troops to depose the new regime.
The upheaval in Grenada began when a militant faction ordered the imprisonment and execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop.
American soldiers found little resistance on the tiny island, and quickly arrested members of the clique that had ordered Bishop’s death.
General Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama was on the CIA payroll for nearly thirty years. Despite his deep involvement in the drug trade, many American leaders considered him a valuable ally. Vice President George H. W. Bush met with him in 1983.
Noriega’s nemesis was a crusading doctor, Hugo Spadafora. Soon after Spadafora began denouncing Noriega as a corrupt and violent drug trafficker, he was captured, brought to a Panamanian military base, and tortured to death.
In 1989, after Bush became president, he turned against Noriega and ordered American troops to invade Panama and overthrow him. During the invasion, large areas of the capital were devastated.
The guerrilla commander Abdul Haq (right) was among the few secular, pro-Western warlords in Afghanistan, but he was also fiercely independent. Because he told Americans that he would never “be your puppet,” the CIA refused to support him.
After terrorists directed from Afghanistan attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush resolved to overthrow the Taliban regime there. Rather than send American troops, he subcontracted this war to fighters from an Afghan militia, the Northern Alliance.
American troops who invaded Iraq in 2003 met almost no resistance as they sped across the desert toward
Iraq soon erupted in violence. Insurgents killed thousands of American soldiers, and drew them into a bitter campaign that cost tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and left towns like Fallujah in ruins.
Sensitize feeling within and without Chile that election of Allende is a nefarious development for Chile, Latin America, and the world. . . . Surface ineluctable conclusion that military coup is the only answer. . . . Key is psych war within Chile. The station should employ every stratagem, every ploy, however bizarre, to create this internal resistance. Prop war should become sharper and more provocative. . . . Public and provocative rallies should be held, growing in size and intensity until the Communists must react. . . . If we are successful in heightening tension through the three main lines noted above, the pretext will, in all probability, present itself.
Agents in Santiago understood this message perfectly well. “You have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile,” Hecksher cabled back to headquarters. “We provide you with formula for chaos, which is unlikely to be bloodless.”
Over the next several weeks, the political climate in Chile became increasingly tense. Newspapers and radio stations, including several that the CIA was subsidizing, denounced Allende and warned graphically of the horrors his government would surely bring. A fascist-oriented group, Fatherland and Liberty, which had received $38,500 from the CIA, staged a rally in Santiago. CIA agents quietly contacted nearly two dozen Chilean military officers, and those who seemed open to the idea of staging a coup, according to a later report of the United States Congress, “were given assurances of strong support at the highest levels of the U.S. government both before and after the coup.”
A centerpiece of this operation, which bore the CIA cryptonym FUBELT, apparently a reference to the tightening of a belt around Chile, was the disruption of Chile’s economy. Helms wrote in a memo to Kissinger that since “a suddenly disastrous economic situation would be the most logical pretext for a military move,” the United States should work to create “at least a mini-crisis.” It had many ways to do so. In cables to Washington, Ambassador Korry suggested that American banks be pressured to stop granting short-term credits to Chilean businesses; that agents spread rumors of impending food rationing, bank collapses, and nonexistent plans by Allende to seize private homes and forbid technicians from leaving the country; and that American companies in Chile “foot-drag to the maximum extent possible” in filling orders for spare parts.
“Not a nut or a bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende,” Korry warned Minister of Defense Sergio Ossa in a meeting shortly after the election. “We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chilean people to utmost deprivation and poverty.”
It is a tribute to the Chilean political system that despite all the CIA’s efforts, FUBELT failed. Neither President Frei nor members of Congress from anti-Allende parties could be persuaded that the threat Allende posed was great enough to require a break with Chile’s democratic tradition. As for the idea of promoting a military coup, only a few officers were sympathetic, and they had no realistic hope of success because General Rene Schneider, the army commander, was fiercely opposed to military interference in politics. For a coup to succeed, Ambassador Korry cabled his superiors in Washington, “General Schneider would have to be neutralized, by displacement if necessary.”
In late September the Americans began to focus on Schneider as a key obstacle to their plan. “Anything we or Station can do to effect the removal of Schneider?” CIA planners asked in a cable to Henry Hecksher. “We know this [is a] rhetorical question, but want to inspire thoughts on both ends on this matter.”
After receiving that message, American agents in Santiago began meeting with disgruntled Chilean officers. The most enthusiastic was a retired general named Roberto Viaux, an extreme anti-Communist who had been cashiered from the army after leading an abortive uprising against President Frei. During mid-October, CIA agents in Santiago passed Viaux $20,000 in cash to keep him “financially lubricated” with enough money “to buy arms, bribe arsenal commanders to provide arms, or to acquire them in any fashion he can.”
On October 13, with less than two weeks remaining before the Chilean Congress was scheduled to install Allende, President Nixon summoned his national security team to the White House and demanded action. According to one participant in the meeting, Nixon “went out of his way to impress all of those there with his conviction that it was absolutely essential that the election of Mr. Allende to the presidency be thwarted.” He was frustrated that Korry seemed unable to arrange this, and summoned the ambassador to the White House on October 15.
“That son of a bitch, that son of a bitch!” Nixon was saying to himself, pounding one of his fists into a palm, as Korry entered the Oval Office. When he looked up and saw Korry’s startled expression, he composed himself.
“Not you, Mr. Ambassador,” he said. “It’s that son of a bitch Allende. We’re going to smash him.”
That afternoon at four-thirty, Kissinger met with Tom Karamessines, the CIA’s director of covert operations, to discuss their Chile project. What happened at this meeting has been the subject of considerable debate. Kissinger later claimed that he “turned off” the plot against General Schneider and “called off Track II before it was ever implemented.” Minutes of the meeting, however, record no such action. They say that Kissinger approved a decision “to de-fuse the Viaux plot, at least temporarily,” but also mention that he authorized a remarkably encouraging message to the general.
“Preserve your assets,” the message said. “The time will come when you with all your friends can do something. You will continue to have our support.”
After that meeting, Karamessines sent a cable to the CIA station in Santiago reiterating the administration’s “firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown in a coup.” To implement that policy, the cable said, agents in Santiago should use “propaganda, black operations, surfacing of intelligence or disinformation, personal contacts, or anything else your imagination can conjure.” The cable also directed agents to wish General Viaux and another group of rebellious officers, headed by General Camilo Valenzuela, “maximum good fortune.”
Soon the CIA sent these officers more than good wishes. The bounty came inside a diplomatic pouch that arrived at Arturo Merino Airport, in Santiago, on October 21. It was a package containing three submachine guns, several boxes of ammunition, and six tear gas grenades.
The plot reached its climax two days later. At two o’clock in the morning, on a dead-silent street, Colonel Paul Wimert, the United States military attache in Santiago, delivered the weapons to Chilean conspirators aligned with Viaux. Six hours later, while General Schneider was on his way to work, a jeep struck his chauffeur-driven car. Five men surrounded it. One smashed the rear window with a sledgehammer. Accounts differ on whether or not Schneider drew his pistol to defend himself, but his assailants opened fire, using weapons of their own rather than those the CIA had supplied. They hit Schneider with three shots. He died at a hospital soon afterward.
“Station has done an excellent job of guiding Chileans to a point where a military solution is at least an option for them,” CIA planners in Washington cabled their Santiago agents after hearing of the assassination. “[Station Chief and others involved] are commended for accomplishing this under extremely difficult and delicate circumstances.”
The idea behind this murder was that it would set off a wave of instability that would allow anti-Allende officers to stage a coup. It had the opposite effect. This was the first murder of an important Chilean political figure in more than a century, and instead of throwing Chileans into panic and inducing them to call for authoritarian rule, it outraged them. It strengthened the conviction of soldiers and civilians alike that democracy must be allowed to take its course, meaning that Allende should become president. Responding to this consensus, the Chilean Congress met on October 24 and, by a vote of 153 to 24, certified his election. He was inaugurated on November 4.
“We know as much about U.S. policy making toward Chile for the period from September to November 1970 as we do about policy making in any period in recent American history,” the political scientist Paul Sigmund has written. “It is a controversial period and one that does not do credit to American ideals, since it includes an effort to prevent a freely elected president from taking office by fomenting a military coup; the assassination of a Chilean general, for which the United States was indirectly responsible; authorization, though not execution, of efforts to bribe the Chilean Congress; subsidization of a quasi-fascist extreme rightist group; and improperly close relationships between the U.S. government and a major corporation.”
AT NINE-FORTY ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 6, 1970, JUST TWO DAYS after Allende donned the presidential sash in Santiago, President Nixon convened the National Security Council to discuss ways of deposing him. No one questioned the assumption that this was a wise and necessary thing to do. In fact, there was remarkable unanimity.
“We want to do it right, and bring him down,” Secretary of State William Rogers began. “We can put an economic squeeze on him.”
“I agree with Bill Rogers,” said Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. “We have to do everything we can to hurt him and bring him down.”
After listening to his aides agree with him, Nixon delivered a trenchant monologue explaining why he considered Allende such a threat. It hardly tells the whole story of why he was so intent on carrying out this coup but offers clear insight into his thinking. It is as close as Nixon ever came to explaining why he did it, and an impressive example of the classic realpolitik that was one of his diplomatic hallmarks.
The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success. . . . If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble. I want to work on this. And on military relations, put in more money. On the economic side we want to give him cold turkey. . . . We’ll be very cool and very correct, but doing those things which will be a real message to Allende and others. . . .
Latin America is not gone, and we want to keep it. . . . No impression should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this, that it’s safe to go this way.
With this declaration, Nixon made clear that there would be no letup in the campaign against Allende. The CIA had already drawn up a plan, headed “Allende After the Inauguration,” that proposed the campaign’s thesis. It said that if Chile was to suffer “continued economic decline,” the country might fall into chaos and “the military would have justification for intervening.” Within days of the inauguration, Americans set out to create that justification.
The first blows they struck were economic. Two principal American foreign aid agencies, the Export-Import Bank and the Agency for International Development, acting under classified instructions from the National Security Council, announced that they would no longer approve “any new commitments of U.S. bilateral assistance to Chile.” Then the United States representative at the Inter-American Development Bank was instructed to block all proposals for loans to Chile. When the bank’s president protested, the administration forced his resignation. The new president reduced Chile’s credit rating from B to D. Private banks followed suit, and the Export-Import Bank, citing the reduction, canceled a scheduled $21 million loan intended to pay for new Boeing jets for Chile’s national airline. At the World Bank, the American representative arranged for the suspension of a $21 million livestock-improvement loan to Chile, and then announced that the United States would oppose all new World Bank lending to that country.
The cutting of aid, loans, and credits to Chile became known as an “invisible blockade,” but it was relatively straightforward. It certainly fell within the right of the United States, or any country, to apportion its aid as it sees fit. Not all of the American campaign against Allende, however, was as straightforward. Between 1970 and 1973, the CIA carried out a wide-ranging series of covert operations in Chile. The historian and archivist Peter Kornbluh has catalogued them.
More than $3.5 million was funneled into opposition parties and allied organizations. . . . Station operatives conducted a $2 million propaganda campaign, concentrating on Chile’s largest newspaper, El Mercurio. More than $1.5 million was passed to business, labor, civic and paramilitary organizations organizing protests, demonstrations and violent actions against Allende’s administration.
Soon after Allende’s inauguration, most of the leading American companies active in Chile, including ITT, Kennecott, Anaconda, Firestone Tire & Rubber, Bethlehem Steel, Charles Pfizer, W. R. Grace, Bank of America, Ralston Purina, and Dow Chemical, joined to form a Chile Ad Hoc Committee. It was dedicated, according to a memorandum prepared after its first meeting, to working with officials in Washington who were “handling the Chile problem.” Over the next few months, its members set out on a quiet destabilization campaign of their own that included office closings, delayed payments, slow deliveries, and credit denial. It was so effective that within two years, one-third of Chile’s buses and 20 percent of its taxis were out of service due to lack of spare parts.
On July 11, 1971, the Chilean Congress, meeting in joint session, unanimously approved a constitutional amendment authorizing the nationalization of Kennecott, Anaconda, and the smaller Cerro Mining Corporation. Allende proclaimed that the date would henceforth be “National Dignity Day,” and to celebrate the first one, he came to El Teniente. In a triumphant speech to a throng of cheering miners, he accused Kennecott and Anaconda of having made immorally high profits in Chile while masses of Chileans lived in poverty. He did not encourage the companies to hope for much in the way of compensation.
“We will pay it if it is just,” he promised. “We will not pay what is not just.”
Allende later announced that he considered an annual profit of 12 percent per year to be “rightful,” and anything higher to be “excessive.” By that standard, Cerro, which had been mining in Chile for barely a year and had yet to turn a profit, was guiltless; Chile’s comptroller awarded it compensation of $14 million. For Kennecott and Anaconda, though, the situation was quite different. According to Allende’s formula, they had made $774 million in excess profit over the past fifteen years. He asked the comptroller to deduct that sum from their due compensation. The comptroller agreed, and since $774 million was more than the book value of their mines, Kennecott and Anaconda were not awarded a cent.
“We used to be the fucker,” one of Anaconda’s lawyers lamented. “Now we’re the fuckee.”
Soon after taking this momentous step, the Allende government took another one, assuming management control of the ITT-owned Compania de Teléfonos de Chile. Two days later, ITT’s vice president for Washington relations, William Merriam, sent the White House an eighteen-point list of steps it could take to ensure that Allende would not “get through the crucial next six months.” Merriam confidently predicted that if these measures were adopted, they would push Chile to “economic chaos.”
As Allende was trying to withstand the American campaign, he also faced intense pressure from groups of workers and peasants whose revolutionary passion he had helped to awaken. His rhetoric led many of them to dream of a new social order in which they would enjoy higher wages, better housing, and other amenities of the good life. They pushed him relentlessly toward radicalism, as did militant Chilean leftists who took up their cause. Among them were radicals who embraced Che Guevara’s theory that the only way to bring social justice to Latin America was to repress traditional ruling classes, using violence if necessary. Some carried out armed actions, often clashing with police or rightist paramilitary bands. Others led illegal invasions of farms and factories. Allende repeatedly condemned these radicals, ridiculing their “infantile revolutionary ideas” and urging them to devote their energy not to revolution but to “changing Chile’s institutions.” Yet because they were fellow leftists, he was not willing to crack down on them, and some Chileans blamed him for their excesses.
Although Allende could never move quickly enough to satisfy his most radical supporters, his march toward socialism horrified other Chileans and helped polarize the country. At the same time, the United States was engaged in a multilayered campaign against him. These two forms of pressure—internal and external—reinforced each other and pulled Chile into a downward spiral.
The anti-Allende project had been under way for more than a year when the secrecy surrounding it was spectacularly breached. A muckraking Washington newspaper columnist, Jack Anderson, obtained twenty-four internal ITT memos that graphically detailed what Anderson called the company’s “bizarre plot to stop the 1970 election of leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende.” They told of ITT’s offer of $1 million to help the CIA prevent Allende from coming to power; its regular contacts with the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department; and its many efforts to “exert pressure on Allende,” push Chile to “economic collapse,” and bring about “an internal crisis requiring military intervention.”
“No one can dream that we are going to pay even half a cent to this multi-national company that was on the verge of plunging Chile into civil war,” President Allende declared after the memos were published. Many Americans were equally outraged. “How could it be so—if it is so—that in 1970 an American President could consider the possibility of acting to prevent a democratically elected president of a supposedly friendly country from taking office?” the Washington Post asked in an editorial.
Nixon and his aides sought to play down the importance of the “ITT Papers,” but the scandal did not fade away. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee established a subcommittee to hold hearings. In its final report, the subcommittee condemned Allende for his nationalization policies but was even harsher on ITT.
ITT sought to engage the CIA in a plan covertly to manipulate the outcome of the Chilean presidential election. In so doing, the company overstepped the line of acceptable corporate behavior. If ITT’s actions in seeking to enlist the CIA for its purposes with respect to Chile were to be sanctioned as normal and acceptable, no country would welcome the presence of multinational corporations.
By the end of 1972, Allende’s divisive policies and the American destabilization campaign had combined to throw Chile into grave crisis. Street disturbances became so regular that Allende was forced to replace his police chief and his interior minister. Shopkeepers and truckers staged crippling strikes. Food became scarce. Several cities were put under temporary states of emergency. Against this backdrop, Allende arrived in New York to address the United Nations.
Twenty-one years earlier, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran had come to the United Nations to present his case against a foreign corporation that controlled his country’s basic resource. Allende was in a similar position. His country was a victim of the resource curse, just as Iran had been. The riches that lay beneath their soil came under the control of foreign corporations, and when they tried to reclaim those riches, great powers came down upon them.
At eleven o’clock on the morning of December 4, 1972, after a brief meeting with George H. W. Bush, the American ambassador to the United Nations, Allende strode to the General Assembly podium. His speech eerily echoed Mossadegh’s, showing how little the relationships between large corporations and small countries had changed over the course of two decades. Both leaders had come to the UN to fire a volley in what Allende called “the battle in defense of natural resources.”
Our economy could no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies that have always put their interests ahead of those of the countries where they make their profits. . . .
These same firms exploited Chilean copper for many years, made more than four billion dollars in profit in the last forty-two years alone, while their initial investments were less than thirty million. . . . My country, Chile, would have been totally transformed by that four billion dollars. . . .
We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons, from positions of great influence. . . . We are potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital. It is a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system.
In Washington, Nixon was overhauling his Chile team. He had already replaced Ambassador Korry with another career diplomat, Nathaniel Davis, who had been serving in Guatemala. After Allende’s United Nations speech, he decided to replace Richard Helms, the CIA director. According to some accounts, he was displeased that Helms had failed to bring Allende down.
To smooth Helms’s fall, Nixon named him ambassador to Iran. At his confirmation hearing he blithely replied “No, sir” when asked if the CIA had tried to block the election of Allende in 1970. That two-word statement later led a federal court to convict him of perjury. He called his conviction “a badge of honor.”
When Nixon was sworn in for a second term as president, on January 20, 1973, his campaign against Allende was reaching its crescendo. Chilean military commanders prepared to step in and strike the final blow. At every step, their CIA friends urged them on.
“We should attempt [to] induce as much of the military as possible, if not all, to take over and displace the Allende govt,” CIA plotters in Langley directed the Santiago station. “The creation of a renewed atmosphere of political unrest and controlled crisis must be achieved in order to stimulate serious consideration for intervention on part of the military.”
On April 10, the CIA directed its Santiago station to begin “accelerated efforts against the military target.” Three weeks later, the chief of the agency’s Western Hemisphere division, Theodore Shackley, told the station to “bring our influence to bear on key military commanders so that they might play a decisive role on the side of the coup forces.” These efforts came to premature fruition on June 29, when a handful of officers staged a confused coup that involved tanks stopping for traffic lights as they made their way through Santiago. It was the first time in forty-two years that Chilean soldiers had struck against an elected government. No senior officer supported the uprising, and General Carlos Prats, the army commander, suppressed it easily. Still, it set nerves on edge.
As military conspirators prepared to strike against Allende, they faced the same problem that had confronted them three years before. The army commander, General Prats, successor to the murdered Schneider, was a strict constitutionalist, dedicated to supporting the elected government. That made him a serious obstacle to the plot.
“Only way to remove Prats would appear to be by abduction or assassination,” CIA agents in Santiago reported in a cable to Langley.
Allende, in a desperate attempt to head off the inevitable, had begun naming military commanders to his cabinet, and by midsummer of 1973 General Prats was minister of the interior. After Prats crushed the tank revolt in June, El Mercurio began a campaign depicting him as treasonably pro-Communist. One day, several hundred wives of Chilean officers, encouraged by CIA operatives, convened in front of his home, supposedly to give his wife a letter protesting his support for Allende.
The gathering erupted into violence, and the national police (called Carabineros) used tear gas to break it up. General Prats was shaken. He asked his fellow generals for a vote of confidence. When they refused, he had no alternative but to resign. He recommended that President Allende name his deputy to replace him, and Allende followed his advice. The new man was General Augusto Pinochet, whom the CIA, according to one of its reports, knew to be a friend.
Pinochet, previously the strict constitutionalist, reluctantly admitted he now harboring second thoughts: that Allende must be forced to step down or be eliminated (“only alternatives”). . . . Pinochet was in Panama [and] while in Panama, talked with more junior U.S. officers he knew from days at School of the Americas, and was told U.S. will support coup against Allende “with whatever means necessary” when time comes.
Although the CIA had noticed Pinochet’s growing willingness to consider the idea of a coup, his colleagues in Chile had not. President Allende and General Prats considered him to be supremely apolitical and not especially ambitious. Both would pay dearly for their miscalculation.
While CIA operatives in Santiago were helping to orchestrate the removal of General Prats, the “40 Committee” was at work in Washington. On August 20 it approved another $1 million for the destabilization campaign in Chile, to be used specifically as subsidies to opposition political parties. That, by the CIA’s own reckoning, brought to $6.5 million the total it had spent on covert action against Allende during his presidency. An investigation by the United States Senate later put the figure at $8 million, “with over three million dollars expended in fiscal year 1972 alone.”
As the Southern Hemisphere winter drew to an end, the final act in Allende’s drama began to unfold. The departure of General Prats, as a Defense Intelligence Agency memo put it, “removed the main mitigating factor against a coup.” CIA agents reported to Langley that “the army is united behind a coup, and key Santiago regimental commanders have pledged their support.” Truckers staged another nationwide strike, supported in part by CIA funds, and, as a result, basic foodstuffs had to be rationed while produce and grain rotted in warehouses. Bus drivers, taxi drivers, and employees of the Santiago waterworks also struck. Meat became unavailable in Santiago. Basic products like coffee, tea, and sugar were ever harder to find. Allende’s naval aide-de-camp was assassinated. Prices raged out of control. Electric power became unreliable. Antigovernment gangs in the countryside dynamited roads, tunnels, and bridges. Finally, on September 9, 1973, a CIA agent named Jack Devine sent his superiors the news they had been awaiting for nearly three years.
“A coup attempt will be initiated on September 11,” Devine wrote in a cable. “All three branches of the armed forces, and the Caribineros, are involved in this action. A declaration will be read on Radio Agricultura at 7 A.M. on 11 September. The Carabineros will have the responsibility of seizing President Allende.”
AT A BIRTHDAY PARTY FOR GENERAL PINOCHET’S YOUNGER DAUGHTER, ON September 9, Chilean officers made their final decision to strike against President Allende. While the celebrants were playing, Pinochet took one of the guests, General Gustavo Leigh, commander of the Chilean air force, to another part of the house. Waiting for them were two admirals bearing a letter from a senior navy commander, Admiral José Merino. The letter said the navy was ready. So were the army and the air force.
The officers considered several possible dates for the coup. Pinochet said it didn’t matter to him, since he had prepared his plan so carefully that all he needed to do was “push a button” and it would be carried out. They chose Tuesday, September 11. Leigh wrote the word “Agreed” on the back of Admiral Merino’s letter and signed his name. Then Pinochet signed his name and affixed his seal.
“In this way,” Ambassador Davis later wrote, “the decision was made final that the military services would overthrow the government of Chile.”
Allende spent these frantic days working on a last-gasp proposal to call a national plebiscite on his rule. Late on the night of September 10, his supporters at the port of Valparaiso noticed unusual naval maneuvers. Then, at one-thirty in the morning, he himself received a message about infantry movements north of Santiago. The night editor of the Communist newspaper El Sigh heard enough to rip up his front page. He replaced the planned banner headline, “Plebiscite Will Take Place,” with a more urgent one.
“Everyone to Their Combat Posts!” the new headline screamed.
The coup proceeded methodically, just as Pinochet had predicted. Soldiers across the country had been called to duty at four o’clock that morning, and soon afterward they began securing radio stations, town halls, police stations, and other centers of power. Valparaiso came into rebel hands at seven o’clock, and Concepción, the country’s third largest city, followed at eight-fifteen. No shot was fired in either place.
Allende learned of these developments by telephone at his official residence. His bodyguards had made elaborate plans to defend the residence in such an emergency, but he decided not to stay there. He wanted to make his last stand at La Moneda, the presidential palace and traditional seat of Chilean democracy.
A convoy of four blue Fiats and a pickup truck screeched to a halt in front of La Moneda at seven-thirty on the morning of September 11. President Allende was among the first to emerge. Around him were twenty-three bodyguards, each carrying an automatic rifle. The squad also shared two .30 caliber machine guns and three bazookas. Allende carried a Kalashnikov that Fidel Castro had given him. It bore the inscription “To My Friend and Comrade in Arms, Salvador.”
The men raced inside. Allende called them briefly together and told them he had resolved to die in La Moneda if necessary. As he was deploying them around the building, Radio Agricultura, a voice of the opposition, interrupted its programming to read a proclamation announcing the coup.
Bearing in mind first the very grave economic, social and moral crisis that is destroying the country; second, the inability of the government to adopt measures to stop the spread of chaos; and third, the constant increase of armed paramilitary groups . . . the Chilean armed forces and Carabineros are united in the historic mission of fighting to liberate the fatherland from the Marxist yoke, and to restore order and constitutional rule.
Soon afterward, Allende took a telephone call from one of the rebel commanders. They had decided to offer him free passage out of the country if he would resign. Allende refused. He probably could not have escaped in any case, since according to tape recordings that surfaced years later, Pinochet was planning to shoot his plane down before it left Chilean airspace. At around nine o’clock he stepped onto the balcony for a final, forlorn look over Constitution Square. Half an hour later, through a makeshift radio hookup, he addressed his last words to his people.
I will not resign. I will not do it. I am ready to resist by all means, even at the cost of my own life. . . . Foreign capital—imperialism united with reaction—created the climate for the army to break with their tradition. . . . Long live Chile! Long live the people! These are my last words. I am sure that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am sure it will be at least a moral lesson, and a rebuke to crime, cowardice and treason.
Soon after Allende delivered his impassioned farewell, infantry units began advancing on the palace under cover of artillery fire. Defenders fired back, and men on both sides fell. Shortly before noon, two British-made Hawker Hunter fighters roared out of the sky. They swooped down and fired at the palace, striking so accurately—one missile flew right through the palace’s main door—that some theorists later suggested that the pilots must have been Americans. Eighteen rockets hit the old building, which burst into flames. Inside, the air filled with smoke and fumes.
Soon after 1:30, as infantrymen finally reached the flaming palace, a group of politicians and doctors who had been inside edged out under a white flag. The infantrymen crashed past them onto the ground floor of La Moneda. By one account, their commander shouted upstairs for Allende to surrender. According to another, Pinochet himself made the final demand, by telephone. What is certain is that Allende refused. By midafternoon, the shooting was over.
“Mission accomplished,” General Javier Palacios, who led the assault, reported to his superiors by radio at 2:45. “Moneda taken. President dead.”