Notes

1: Project FUBELT: “Formula for Chaos”

  1.  Establishing an “action task force,” Kissinger informed Nixon, was a top priority to overcome the handicap of “bureaucratic resistance,” particularly from a timid State Department. See Memorandum for the President, “Chile,” September 17, 1970.

  2.  FU was the CIA’s designated cryptonym for Chile; BELT appeared to infer the political and economic strangulation operations the CIA intended to conduct to assure Allende never reached Chile’s presidential office. In 1975, when this document was shown to the Church Committee, the code name remained classified.

  3.  Abigail McCarthy describes arrangements for this secret meeting in her book, Private Faces, Public Places (New York: Doubleday, 1972).

  4.  CIA Activities in Chile, p. 3.

  5.  See the U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963–1973, G.P.O. December 4, 1975, p. 15.

  6.  House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Development, Report of the Special Study Mission to Latin America. Washington, D.C, 1970, p. 31.

  7.  Korry’s letter is reprinted in the U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, p. 118.

  8.  Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, Alleged Assassination Plots involving Foreign Leaders, GPO, November 20, 1975. p. 228.

  9.  This cable has not been declassified. Ambassador Korry provided the text to me in 1978.

10.  Korry’s cable is dated August 11, 1970 and was sent to John Crimmins.

11.  The conclusions of NSSM 97 are quoted in Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, p. 229.

12.  This Secret Annex is undated, but was drafted around August 9 or 10, 1970.

13.  Citing the “grave” disadvantages of this “extreme option,” Bureau of Inter-American Affairs officials recommended to Assistant Secretary U. Alexis Johnson that he “opposed adoption [deleted] on the ground that its prospects of success are poor and its risks prohibitively high.” See Charles Meyer to U. Alexis Johnson, “NSSM 97: Extreme Option—Overthrow Allende,” August 17, 1970.

14.  Hecksher was soon told to keep his opinions on coup plotting to himself; in late September, he was recalled to CIA headquarters and told to cease any objections. On October 7, he received a notice from Task Force chief David Atlee Phillips stating that the Santiago Station cables “should not contain analysis and argumentation but simply report on action taken.”

15.  This memorandum, sent to William Broe, demonstrates that at least one CIA analyst understood the nuances of the political realities in Chile and Latin America, and made those views known to high-ranking officials. See “Chilean Crisis,” September 29, 1970.

16.  Vaky to Kissinger, NSC Action Memo [Non Log], “Chile—40 Committee Meeting, Monday—September 14,” September 14, 1970.

17.  The Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, John Crimmins, opposed this idea as risky and unnecessary, according to a CIA chronology of “Policy Decisions Related to Our Covert Action Involvement in the September 1970 Chilean Presidential Election.” Korry insisted, cabling the State Department on June 22 that “If (Allende) were to gain power, what would be our response to those who asked what we did?”

18.  Korry saw grave diplomatic risks for the U.S. in directly fomenting a coup. If the military was going to move, he preferred the U.S. “to be surprised.” But keeping him out of the loop on Track II plotting created its own set of problems. When Hecksher sought Korry’s help in passing a message to Frei about a military solution, headquarters admonished him that such action “would be tantamount to having Korry act as unwitting agent in implementing Track II of which he is not aware and is not to be made aware.”

19.  The Task Force logs and “Sitreps” remained classified for thirty years. A number of them were finally released as part of the Chile Declassification Project in November 2000, albeit in heavily redacted form.

20.  CIA Cable, September 29, 1970.

21.  See the CIA’s “Special Military Situation/Analysis Report,” October 7, 1970.

22.  See State Department memorandum, “Suggestions that require action. Made by Ambassador Korry on September 24.” Undated.

23.  See the Report of the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, The International Telephone and Telegraph Company in Chile, 1970–1971, p. 9.

24.  This document is one of dozens that were leaked to columnist Jack Anderson in 1972, records that first revealed CIA covert operations against Allende, in collaboration with ITT. The revelations generated the first U.S. Congressional investigation into covert U.S. intervention in Chile, conducted by Senator Frank Church’s Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations. The subcommittee produced a comprehensive staff report, The International Telephone and Telegraph Company and Chile, in 1973. The ITT papers were published in full in The ITT Memos, Subversion in Chile: A Case Study of U.S. Corporate Intrigue in the Third World (London: Spokesman Books, 1972).

25.  See “Memcons of Meetings between the President and Heath, Brosio,” a memorandum from Winston Lord to Henry Kissinger. Lord’s memo makes it clear that the transcript of this conversation is “taken from your tapes”—a reference to Dictaphone recordings Kissinger would make following meetings he and the president held.

26.  These steps were reported in an “eyes only” October 10, 1970 cable from U. Alexis Johnson to Ambassador Korry.

27.  This directive sparked an incredulous response from the chief of Station. “We find it impossible to agree with Hqs reasoning that public climate in any way approximating pre-coup situation can be engineered in press [deleted], or by rumors, whatever their method of propagation.” Despite these protests, Phillips ordered Hecksher to proceed.

28.  Hecksher to Headquarters, “[Viaux Solution],” October 10, 1970. In a long meeting with a high-ranking member of Chile’s national police force on October 8, Hecksher was told that once the military abandoned its constitutionalist stand, “all hell would break loose, with soldiers fighting soldiers.” “Was that desirable?” the officer asked the CIA chief of Station. Hecksher responded that “the U.S.G. [U.S. government] did not really care as long as resulting chaos denied Allende the presidency.”

29.  CIA cable 628, October 8, 1970, as cited in the Senate report on Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 241.

30.  CIA cable from Broe to Hecksher, October 10, 1970.

31.  Philips and Broe to Station, October 13, 1970.

32.  Until now, the date of this meeting was not publicly known. When the Church Committee report was written in 1975, Senate investigators were denied access to Nixon’s Oval Office logs and Karamessines did not remember, and could not produce documentation on the date when he met the president. For the purposes of this book, I was able to obtain President Nixon’s daily diary and office logs.

33.  Ambassador Korry first told me this story of his dramatic meeting with President Nixon in May 1978, when I interviewed him for a college honors thesis. He also told the story to Seymour Hersh who published it in The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983). More recently, in August 2001, he repeated a version of the story in a lengthy interview for 60 Minutes and with German documentary filmmaker Willi Huisman.

34.  Kissinger had a secretary listen in and take notes on—and then transcribe—each of his telephone conversations. When he left office in early 1977, he took all the “telcons” recording his work as national security adviser and secretary of state with him, claiming they were his private papers. In 2001, my organization, the National Security Archive, threatened to sue the State Department and the National Archives for breach of responsibility for failing to recover executive branch records in Kissinger’s personal possession. The lawsuit threat forced the State Department to seek the return of these records to the government. As of June 2003, Kissinger’s “telcons” had not yet been declassified. But a source with access to them described to me the content of Kissinger’s October 15 conversation with Nixon, and Kissinger quoted this language in his memoirs.

35.  This document, which became the initial paperwork for U.S. strategy to destabilize Allende’s Popular Unity government, is further described in Chapter Two.

36.  At headquarters, the CIA clearly believed a coup was imminent. On October 19, Broe and Phillips cabled Hecksher with orders not, “repeat not,” to advise Wimert or Ambassador Korry of “impending coup.” “Should it occur,” they instructed, “COS Hecksher should appear surprised and stonewall any and all queries.”

37.  The description of Schneider’s shooting is based on Chilean police reports, and was first published by Seymour Hersh in The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, p. 290.

38.  “With this incident the die has been cast,” the first special CIA report on the Schneider shooting proclaimed. “For their own personal safety Valenzuela’s group will have to go ahead with their plan even if Frei resists their efforts.” The second report, written the next day, noted that the plotters could not now allow Allende to become president because that would ultimately lead to their arrest. “Thus far, assassination [of Allende] has not been a serious consideration, but the shooting of Schneider has raised the stakes. The plotters are now desperate and may attempt such a move even though they do not have the expertise.” See “Machine Gun Assault on General Schneider,” October 22, 1970 and “A Miscellaneous Thought,” October 23, 1970.

39.  The existence of these lists was unknown before their declassification on November 13, 2000. They remain heavily redacted, with the names of virtually all American agents and Chilean military officials blacked out. Should they ever be declassified in full, they will provide the complete record of CIA contacts with Chilean coup plotters in the fall of 1970.

40.  Wimert told Seymour Hersh that he went to General Valenzuela’s house to recover the $50,000 he had provided for the kidnapping. When the general refused to return the funds, according to an extraordinary scene that Hersh revealed in his book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Wimert pulled out his pistol and “just hit him once and he went and got it.” See The Price of Power, pp. 289 and 293.

41.  Korry did, in fact, ask Hecksher if the CIA had been “engaged in activities of any kind” which would support “charges that [Wimert] was involved in Schneider assassination.” Pursuant to his instructions to deceive the U.S. ambassador, Hecksher, according to his October 26 report to Langley, replied that “charges could obviously be made. Since Station not involved, COS doubted that charges could be substantiated.”

42.  As he reviewed documents after the Track II scandal broke, Kissinger seemed well-aware that his mandate to the CIA had been specific to shutting down the Viaux plot, rather than all of Track II. According to a recently declassified SECRET/NODIS White House memorandum of conversation dated July 9, 1975, Kissinger privately assured President Gerald Ford that “We are okay on this Chile thing. There is a document which shows that I turned off contact with the group which was tied to the kidnapping.”

43.  Kissinger’s still secret deposition is quoted in Alleged Assassination Plots, pp. 247, 252.

44.  White House, Memorandum of Conversation between President Ford and Kissinger, June 5, 1975. On assassination, Kissinger pointed out, “This is sort of a phenomenon of the Kennedys.”

45.  During his secret deposition before the Church Committee on August 15, 1975, Haig made it clear that he was obliged to share all CIA information on Track II with Kissinger. “At that time,” he told the Committee, “I would consider I had no degree of latitude, other than to convey to him what had been given to me.” See Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 250.

46.  An early Track II log entry, dated October 7, 1970 noted that Viaux “has been in contact with and has allegedly received support from a number of officers in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Carabineros.”

47.  The actual CIA documents recording this payoff—requests, authorizations, financial transfer records, and identities of the assassins who were paid—continue to be classified.

2: Destabilizing Democracy: The United States and the Allende Government.

  1.  “HAK Talking Points on Chile, NSC Meeting—Thursday, November 6,” p. 5.

  2.  Kissinger actually arranged for the NSC meeting to be postponed from November 5, when it was originally scheduled, to November 6 so he would have time to lobby the president. The original draft of Kissinger’s briefing paper for Nixon, written by Viron Vaky, did not include the language pressing Nixon to make sure the National Security Council understood that coexistence was unacceptable. In a rewrite, Kissinger had Vaky add the emphatic passages on the importance of the decision Nixon faced, and the need to prevent a “drift” toward a modus vivendi. See Vaky’s original transmission of the “text of memo for the President’s book for the NSC Meeting” to Kissinger, November 3, 1970.

  3.  “HAK Talking Points on Chile, NSC Meeting—Thursday, November 6,” p. 4.

  4.  See Briefing Memorandum, for the NSC Meeting on Chile, Thursday, November 5, 1970, written by ARA acting director Robert Hurwitch and Arthur Hartman of the Policy Coordination Office.

  5.  The Director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness, Gen. George Lincoln, pointed out to the president that it would be against the law to dump stockpiled U.S. copper unless it was to stabilize, as opposed to destabilize, the market price.

  6.  Memorandum from Haig to Tom Huston, October 22, 1970.

  7.  See Kissinger’s Secret/Sensitive Memorandum for the President, “Status Report on Chile” that transmitted NSDM 93 as an attachment. The document is undated, but written shortly after November 9, when NSDM was finalized.

  8.  See Covert Action in Chile, 1963–1973, p. 35.

  9.  Economic statistics on the drop in loans and assistance to Chile are provided in Covert Action in Chile, 1963–1973, pp. 33, 34.

10.  “Status Report on Chile,” ca. November 9, 1970, p. 4.

11.  CIA, “Covert Action Program in Chile,” November 17, 1970.

12.  This two-page analysis from the covert division of the CIA is dated October 21, the day before the Schneider shooting. It made two other key points: first, Allende would not seek “to make Chile a Soviet vassal . . . or submit to Soviet domination.” Second, Allende’s election would have a salient and arguably positive impact on revolutionary insurrection in Latin America, undercutting the feared influence of Castro’s Cuba. “Allende’s election will probably repudiate the Cuban and Chinese revolutionary approach to gaining power,” the analyst observed.

13.  See “Minutes of the Meeting of the 40 Committee, 13 November 1970,” dated November 17, 1970. Broe responded that “such acquisition has commenced.”

14.  In the CIA’s version of these 40 Committee meeting minutes, the majority of section d. is deleted. But in an identical State Department version, this passage was left uncensored except for the amount of escudos in the contingency fund.

15.  See Korry’s special cable, designated for the CIA’s Western Hemisphere chief, William Broe, and Assistant Secretary Meyer, based on talks with “key officers” of the PDC, dated December 4, 1970.

16.  The dates and descriptions of 40 Committee approvals can be found in “Chronology of 40 Committee Action on Chile,” undated, that was declassified as part of the NARA papers on November 13, 2000.

17.  Covert Action in Chile, 1963–1973, p. 31.

18.  The discussion on El Mercurio funding is contained in Chronology of 40 Committee Action on Chile, under the entry for September 9, 1971.

19.  A close reading of declassified White House records shows that a second 40 Committee appropriation for El Mercurio was made in October 1971. For unexplained reasons, the amount and details of this allotment have been completely censored. It is possible that covert funding for the paper reached closer to $2 million.

20.  See Shackley’s memo to Helms, “Request for Additional Funds for El Mercurio,” April 10, 1972. Shackley replaced William Broe who was promoted to, of all posts, CIA inspector general. For a comprehensive biography of Shackley’s legendary CIA career, including his involvement in this period of covert operations in Chile, see David Corn’s Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

21.  The budget breakdown of what $965,000 would pay for is entirely blacked out from CIA records and one NSC memo to Kissinger dated April 10, 1972; but in a second Top Secret memo from aide Peter Jessup dated the same day, “Chile—Request for Additional Funds for El Mercurio,” describes how the funds would be allocated.

22.  NSC Action Memorandum, “40 Committee Meeting—Chile,” April 10, 1972. This secret/sensitive/eyes only memo from Jorden to Kissinger is marked “outside system” to prevent it from being distributed to files other than Kissinger’s.

23.  See Document X, in Chapter 4.

24.  See Chief of Station Cable to Chief, Western Hemisphere Division, “Limitations in Military Effort,” November 12, 1971. Headquarters made it clear that, given the Schneider debacle, the Station did not have yet have the green light to attempt to directly stimulate a military coup.

25.  See “Foreign Political Matters—Chile” from the FBI director, attn. Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, March 29, 1972.

26.  One of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research officials who attended this meeting, James Gardner, wrote a detailed memorandum for the record that reveals the information censored from this section. U.S. officials, he noted, considered it unlikely that the United States would be “asked to help in preparing or delivering a coup.” But “it is more likely that we would be asked for assurances in advance of a planned coup that the United States would provide assistance to the new regime after it came to power.” During the meeting, as Gardner recorded, CIA officials argued that “the anticipated degree and quality of U.S. support would be so important to [the Chilean military] that it would regard as essential generous and specific promises of U.S. support.” See “U.S. Reaction to Possible Approach by Chilean Coup Plotters,” October 30, 1972.

27.  See Jack Anderson, “Memos Bare ITT Try for Chile Coup,” in the Washington Post, March 21, 1972, p. B13.

28.  A former staff member of the committee provided internal documents from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to me.

29.  See the U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, The International Telephone and Telegraph Company and Chile, 1970–71, Committee Print, Washington D.C.: GPO, 1973.

30.  The fourteen-page transcript of the March 23 State Department press conference was circulated as a cable titled “Noon Briefing Session re Chile-ITT Allegations.”

31.  This exchange was discovered on the declassified Nixon tapes at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and provided to me by archivist John Powers. By the time of the ITT revelations, Kissinger’s staff had become extremely concerned about keeping Korry from spilling the beans after he left the Santiago embassy in mid-1971. In a secret memo for Kissinger, Haig advised that Secretary of State William Rogers was considering firing Korry and forcing him to retire from the foreign service. This might create a problem, Haig warned. “He holds a great many secrets, including the fact that the President both directly and through you communicated to him some extremely sensitive guidance. I can think of nothing more embarrassing to the Administration than thrusting a former columnist who is totally alienated from the President and yourself . . . out into the world without a means of livelihood. This can only lead to revelations which could be exploited by a hungry Democratic opposition to a degree that we might not have heretofore imagined.” Haig advised Kissinger to intercede to assure that Korry was offered another post to “insure” Korry’s loyalty. See Haig to Kissinger, “Ambassador Korry,” March 10, 1971.

32.  In April 1972, OPIC president Bradford Mills asked the CIA whether ITT activities had been carried out in Chile at the behest of the CIA and whether the CIA knew what ITT had done in Chile “to prevent the Allende government from taking office or from coming into being in 1970.” These questions were discussed with CIA director Richard Helms who authorized a set of blatantly false answers: “ITT did nothing at our request. We do not know what activities ITT has [undertaken to block Allende].” This deception is recorded in a declassified memorandum for CIA general counsel titled “CIA’s Replies to Queries from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation in Connection with the International Telephone and Telegraph Insurance Claim,” October 31, 1974.

33.  See Hanke’s Memorandum of Conversation, “Meeting with Hal Hendrix,” 11 May 1972. David Corn discovered this document and first revealed it in his book, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades, p. 245.

34.  The Justice Department would later indict both Gerrity and Berellez on charges of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of government proceedings. Prior to trial, however, both resorted to “graymail”—threatening to reveal covert secrets about CIA operations in Chile if they were prosecuted. The Carter administration’s Attorney General Griffin Bell then decided to drop all charges.

35.  At the end of his appearance before the committee, Senator Church suspected that Meyer had not been truthful. “I don’t want you to take personal offense,” the chairman told Meyer to his face. “But it is obvious, based upon the sworn testimony that we have received to date, that somebody is lying. We must take a very serious view of perjury under oath.” For Meyer’s complete testimony see the U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, Multinational Corporations and United States Foreign Policy, Part 1, 93rd Congress, March 20–April 4, 1973, (GPO: Washington D.C., 1973), pp. 398–428.

36.  Helms understood that the Anderson columns would create serious problems for the CIA. When he learned their publication was imminent, he arranged for a secret meeting with Jack Anderson on March 17, “to try to dissuade Mr. Anderson from publishing certain classified information,” according to an overview of the perjury case against Helms written by Justice Department lawyer Robert Andary.

37.  Helms apparently incurred Nixon’s wrath by not being sufficiently cooperative in using the CIA to obstruct the Watergate investigation.

38.  Levison to Fulbright, “Helms Executive Session, 2/7/73.”

39.  For a comprehensive story on Helms and the perjury case against him see Richard Harris, “Secrets,” in The New Yorker, April 10, 1978.

40.  See minutes of ARA-CIA Meeting, 14 September 1973, 11:00.

41.  Station to Headquarters, cable on Election Results and Aftermath, March 14, 1973.

42.  See CIA memorandum, “Policy Objectives for Chile,” April 17, 1973.

43.  At a CIA-ARA meeting on May 30, 1973, State Department officials raised this question: “do we want to continue to involve ourselves in this kind of business, especially in view of the domestic atmosphere in the US and the alertness of the Chilean Government to the possibility that we were engaged in activities of this sort.” Referring to the Church Committee hearings on ITT, Deputy Assistant Secretary John Crimmins advocated continued covert support for Chile’s political parties but “said that we must however admit that there were now more vulnerabilities affecting our assistance then there had been, especially in the US and Chile. It was necessary that we be clear about the risk we are taking.” The new Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, Jack Kubisch, voiced his “inclination” to “let the [CIA] program come to an end, and not to recommend its continuation.”

44.  CIA cable, May 2, 1973.

45.  See the Station’s “[Deleted] Progress Report—1 April–30 June 1973.”

46.  On September 16, 1973, a source high in the Chilean military supplied the CIA with a detailed account of how the takeover plan evolved. On Pinochet’s role, the account is at odds with other histories that suggest that one of the leading coup plotters, Col. Arellano Stark, briefed Pinochet for the first time on coup plotting on September 8.

47.  Winters was interviewed by Vernon Loeb of the Washington Post for a profile on Jack Devine, “Spook Story,” which appeared in the Style section on September 17, 2000.

48.  See minutes of the ARA/CIA Meeting, 7 September 1973, 11:00 dated September 11, 1973.

49.  For years, the circumstances of Allende’s death remained a point of political and historical contention. In his situation report, Lt. Col. Patrick Ryan claimed “he had killed himself by placing a submachine gun under his chin and pulling the trigger. Messy, but efficient.” Michael Townley, the fugitive Patria y Libertad operative, told State Department official David Stebbing after the coup that “Allende did not commit suicide,” but suffered “fatal wounds” to the chest and stomach that might have come from the shelling of the Moneda. The Chilean military attaché to Venezuela told the Defense Intelligence Agency that Allende had agreed to surrender, only to be executed by his own guards for being a coward. For years, conventional wisdom among those who opposed the coup was that Allende had been shot by troops storming his office. After civilian governance was reinstated in 1990, Allende’s family agreed to resolve the controversy by allowing a forensic examination of his remains. The scientific conclusion was that, rather than surrender, he had indeed committed suicide as Chilean military forces surrounded his office.

50.  See Karamessines testimony quoted in U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, D.C.: 1975), p. 254.

51.  Kissinger Telcon transcript, September 16, 1973. Nixon remained convinced that the “people” would not be persuaded by “this crap from the Liberals” about the immorality of U.S. support for Allende’s overthrow. “They know it is a pro-Communist government and that is the way it is,” he told Kissinger. “Exactly. And pro-Castro,” Kissinger agreed. “Let’s forget the pro-Communist,” Nixon suggested, citing Allende’s ultimate sin. “It was an anti-American government all the way.”

3: Pinochet in Power: Building a Regime of Repression.

  1.  There was no complete tally of post-coup victims until after Pinochet stepped down in 1990 and the new civilian government appointed a National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (known as the Rettig Commission) to record the names and circumstances of all victims of his regime.

  2.  Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai prompted this report. In a private meeting in Peking on November 13, 1973, according to a TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE/EXCLUSIVELY EYES ONLY memcon, Zhou protested to Kissinger about Pinochet’s ongoing bloodshed. “Could you exercise some influence on Chile?” Zhou asked. “They shouldn’t go in for slaughtering that way. It was terrible . . . hundreds of bodies were thrown out of the stadium.” Kissinger responded that: “We have exercised considerable influence, and we believe that after the first phase when they seized power there have been no executions with which we are familiar going on now. I will look into the matter again when we return [to Washington] and I will inform you.” Kissinger then ordered his deputy, Winston Lord to “get [assistant secretary Jack] Kubisch to check on this.”

  3.  CIA cable, October 27, 1973.

  4.  Ibid. The CIA noted that the regime had decided to clear the stadium camp of prisoners “to allow time for preparations for the World Cup soccer match between Chile and the USSR to be held there in late November.”

  5.  See the Report of the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, known as the Rettig Commission Report, p. 140. (English Ed.: Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

  6.  For a full discussion of the Horman and Teruggi cases, see Chapter 5, “American Casualties.”

  7.  The Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation provided a detailed tally and analysis of human rights atrocities committed during the dictatorship.

  8.  Quoted in Genaro Arriagada, Pinochet: the Politics of Power (Boston: Unwin Hyman), p. 9.

  9.  In a March 21, 1974 secret analysis, “Aspects of the Situation in Chile,” the CIA reported on how Pinochet and his army decided not to share the leadership of the Junta with the other services.

10.  During the Chile Declassification Project, the CIA pointedly refused to declassify Pinochet’s “201” file, where the highest-level intelligence reporting on his personality and actions, as well as the U.S. relationship with him, would be found.

11.  Davis left Chile shortly after this meeting. He was replaced as ambassador by David Popper.

12.  The members of General Arellano’s squad involved in the executions were: Lt. Col. Sergio Arredondo; Maj. Pedro Espinoza; Capt. Marcelo Moren Brito; Lt. Armando Fernández Larios; and Lt. Juan Chiminelli Fullerton. The Puma helicopter was piloted by Capt. Sergio de la Mahotier.

13.  A chapter on each massacre is provided by Chilean investigative reporter Patricia Verdugo in her book Chile, Pinochet and the Caravan of Death, (Miami, North-South Center Press, 2001).

14.  Lagos kept the original report he had written, and thirteen years later emerged as a principal witness in the Caravan of Death cases. He provided an affidavit in July 1986 in the first legal efforts to hold Pinochet accountable for these atrocities. He also provided a deposition to the Spanish investigation into these crimes in 1998. Because fourteen of the victims of the Caravan were never found, their families were able to file suit against General Stark and Pinochet, drawing on evidence that Lagos provided, on the grounds that disappearances were not covered by the amnesty laws Pinochet had decreed for the military to provide immunity for human rights crimes committed between 1973–1978. Rather they should be treated as unresolved kidnappings and ongoing crimes. Under this reinterpretation of the amnesty decree, Stark became the first prominent Chilean general to be indicted and arrested for human rights crimes in Chile.

15.  Report of the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, p. 146.

16.  This information is contained in Stark’s DIA biographic data report dated January 5, 1975.

17.  DIA, Official Decree on the Creation of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), July 2, 1974.

18.  For an insider’s description of the initial reaction to Contreras’s proposal, see Mary Helen Spooner, Soldiers in a Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) p. 115.

19.  SENDET was officially established at the end of December 1973; the DIA reported on it a several weeks later. See DIA report, “National Executive Secretariat for Detainees, Establishment of,” January 21, 1974.

20.  See Hon’s report to DIA, “DINA and CECIFA, Internal and the Treatment of Detainees,” February 5, 1974.

21.  See Hon’s DIA report, “DINA, Its Operations and Power,” February 8, 1974.

22.  Ibid.

23.  See Chapter 4 for a full discussion of the CIA’s relations with DINA.

24.  This assessment was written after Contreras was removed as DINA chieftain. See Department of Defense Intelligence Information Report, “Brigadier General Juan Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Chilean Army—Biographic Report,” February 28, 1978.

25.  The gruesome, ruthless procedures at Tejas Verdes became a model for other detention-torture camps created by DINA. Prisoners were transported, and often left in locked refrigerated trucks that the military had expropriated from the fish industry. Hooded doctors supervised torture sessions to assure that the prisoner would not expire before his or her interrogation was completed. “Many people died there,” the Rettig Commission noted, “or were taken from there to meet their death.” For an extensive description of the Tejas Verdes camp, see the Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, p. 134.

26.  Descriptions of these facilities are drawn from ibid, pp. 483–490.

27.  The Villa Grimaldi property was transformed into a “park for peace” after Pinochet stepped down. Its buildings were torn down; pieces of them were used to create monuments to the atrocities committed there. In April 1999, the author was given a private tour of the facility by a former political prisoner held there, Pedro Alejandro Matta. In an effort to “transform history into memory” and assure that what happened at Villa Grimaldi will not be forgotten, Matta has written and published a visitors’ guide, Villa Grimaldi: A Walk Through a 20th Century Torture Center.

28.  See Pedro Matta’s description of this technique in ibid, p. 14.

29.  Disappearances became a grotesque form of repression in every military regime in the Southern Cone during the mid and late 1970s. One Argentine woman, whose husband, four daughters, and two son-in-laws were all disappeared, captured the unique suffering such methods inflicted. “The disappearance of a person leaves those who loved him [or her] with a sensation of permanent and irreversible anguish,” Elsa Oesterheld told the New York Times. “Even though you have the conviction that they are dead, they’re not really dead to you because you have no proof. To this day, I do not have any death certificates.” See “Argentine Default Reopens ‘Dirty War’ Wounds,” New York Times, March 12, 2002.

30.  See the CIA’s Top Secret “Latin American Trends, Annex, Staff Notes,” February 11, 1976, p. 2.

31.  Rogers made this remark after a briefing on Contreras’s visit to the CIA. See ARA/CIA Weekly Meeting, July 11, 1975, Memorandum for the Record, July 14, 1975.

32.  See London’s Sunday Telegraph, July 18, 1999.

33.  When Col. Hon, the Defense Attaché, asked his source why DINA reported only to Pinochet when it originally was supposed to answer to the entire Junta, the informant replied: “That’s too sensitive to discuss, even with you.” See DIA Information Report, “DINA & CECIFA,” February 5, 1974.

34.  See the Embassy report, “Chile’s Government After Two Years: Political Appraisal,” October 14, 1975.

35.  On September 30, 1975, the CIA Station filed a comprehensive report on the meetings and decisions that led to Pinochet’s decrees to expand DINA’s powers.

36.  In 1979, the CIA briefed a special Senate Subcommittee on International Operations on DINA’s activities and shared intelligence on Chile’s efforts to establish bases abroad, and in Miami. The SECRET/SENSITIVE report of the Subcommittee, titled “Staff Report on Activities of Certain Intelligence Agencies in the United States,” remains classified, but I was able to obtain a typed transcript of the section on Chile.

37.  For an extraordinarily detailed overview of Townley’s life leading up to his enrollment in the DINA, see Chapter 4, “Condor’s Jackal,” of John Dinges and Saul Landau’s book, Assassination on Embassy Row.

38.  The director of the CIA’s Office of Security, Robert Gambino, provided a sworn affidavit in the Letelier-Moffitt case relating to the history of the CIA’s interest in Townley. See his Affidavit, November 9, 1978.

39.  See Embassy cable, “DINA, Human Rights in Chile, and Chile’s Image Abroad,” April 7, 1976.

40.  See Dinges and Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row, p. 132.

41.  John Dinges and Saul Landau obtained Ines Callejas’s 60-page handwritten manuscript and used it extensively in Chapters 4 and 5 of their book, Assassination on Embassy Row. For this quote see page 130.

42.  In his prison letters, Townley referred to “Andrea” and voiced fears that investigators would come to “know of a bacteriological lab.” In one letter, dated September 2, 1979, Townley wrote to his DINA contact that an investigator had “asked me if I knew of a girl named Andrea.” “I shrugged my shoulders,” Townley reported. “It was going to happen; I always knew. Since so much time had passed I thought maybe [Andrea] would have passed without notice. But it seems there was not that level of luck.” See Labyrinth, pp. 317, 318.

43.  Townley told the FBI that he turned down this request because of the “unstable nature” of the CNM representatives, Guillermo Novo and Virgilio Paz.

44.  The shipment of this deadly nerve gas aboard two LANCHILE flights put hundreds of passengers at risk. In 1982 the FAA launched an investigation into DINA’s use of the airline to transport hazardous materials in violation of international aviation regulations. No penalties were ever levied against the carrier, even though LANCHILE pilots knowingly facilitated DINA’s overseas operations by ferrying bomb components abroad.

45.  See the DIA report, “Covert Countersubversive Activities in Chile,” November 29, 1977.

46.  CIA, [deleted title], November 9, 1977.

47.  See the Commission’s detailed assessment of the CNI, pp. 635–645.

4: Consolidating Dictatorship: The United States and the Pinochet Regime.

  1.  Pinochet’s request for this meeting was conveyed to Washington by the CIA on the morning of September 12 as part of a “situation report” on the progress of the coup. For Davis’s memcon on the Pinochet-Urrutia meeting, see “Gen. Pinochet’s Request for Meeting with MILGP Officer,” September 12, 1973.

  2.  Secret cable to the White House Situation Room, “FMS Sales to FACH,” September 15, 1973.

  3.  Ibid.

  4.  “Chilean Request for Detention Center Advisor and Equipment,” September 28, 1973.

  5.  See “Secretary’s Staff Meeting,” October 1, 1973. The next day, according to the transcript for October 2, Kissinger and his staff joked about how other Latin American diplomats would perceive the presence of the Junta’s new foreign minister, Admiral Ismael Huerta, at a Washington lunch Kissinger was hosting for Latin American diplomats. Assistant Secretary Kubisch warned Kissinger that “your behavior with him will be watched very closely by the others to see whether or not you are blessing the new regime in Chile, or whether it is just protocol.” The conversation then continued: Kissinger: “What will be the test? How will they judge?” Kubisch: “I suppose if you give him warm abrazos [hugs], sitting next to you, and huddling in the corner, that will all be reported back to their governments.” [Laughter] Kissinger: “What the secretary of state has to do for the national interest!”

  6.  See the secret memorandum of conversation on “Secretary’s Meeting with Foreign Minister Carvajal,” September 29, 1975, p. 8.

  7.  Analysis of U.S. economic support for Pinochet can be found in the seminal work by Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 185, 186.

  8.  “Secretary’s Meeting with Foreign Minister Carvajal,” p. 5.

  9.  Popper’s twenty-six-page policy review is titled “The Situation in Chile and the Prospects for US Policy.” See pp. 19, 20.

10.  The Chilean military requests for lethal weapons are described in a memorandum from ARA Assistant Secretary Jack Kubisch, “Supply of Lethal Military Items to Chile,” December 5, 1973.

11.  See Schoultz, p. 186. See also the New York Times, October 16, 1977.

12.  CIA cable from headquarters, September 18, 1973.

13.  The addresses of CIA officials posing as embassy officers were obtained from the telephone directory, Embassy of United States of America, Santiago, Chile; October 1971 edition.

14.  CIA cable, October 3, 1973. Phillips advised Warren to “concoct some plausible story why materials not available” at this time.

15.  The purchase of these media outlets, probably a chain of radio Stations, is discussed in several declassified CIA and State Department documents dated October 1973.

16.  The Church Committee report, p. 40.

17.  See the memo for the chief, Western Hemisphere Division, “[Deleted] Project,” January 9, 1974.

18.  Enrique Krauss, a congressman at the time of the coup, later became the first Interior Minister under the first post-Pinochet president, Patricio Aylwin. Hamilton was a senator from Valparaiso; Pedro Jesus Rodriguez was Frei’s former minister of justice.

19.  CIA memorandum, “Project [Deleted] Amendment No. 1 for FY 1973 and Renewal for FY 1974,” November 29, 1973.

20.  See “Request for [$160,000] for Chilean Christian Democratic Party (PDC).” Undated.

21.  Gardner’s memo, classified SECRET/SENSITIVE., is titled “Covert Assistance to the PDC in Chile,” and shows a handwritten date of February 1974.

22.  “Request for [$160,000] for Chilean Christian Democratic Party, January 7, 1974, p. 6.

23.  See Popper’s cable, “Assistance to the Christian Democratic Party,” February 27, 1974. Popper did stress, however, that if a breach developed between the PDC and Pinochet, the U.S. would stand on Pinochet’s side. “The chance exists that the relationship may become openly antagonistic at some point in the future. In these circumstances we would not want to be linked to the PDC, even as to past actions, at any point in the post-coup period.” (Emphasis added)

24.  Davis to Kubisch via CIA channel, May 3, 1974.

25.  According to a “termination” memorandum from David Atlee Phillips to the CIA’s associate deputy director for operations, the final payment to the Christian Democrats was not actually made until August 20, 1974. See “Project [deleted] Amendment No. 1 for FY 1974 and Termination,” April 25, 1975.

26.  Author interview.

27.  See John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row, p. 126. A former DINA official told Dinges that he had seen CIA manuals of instruction and procedure being used for operations. “I thought he [Contreras] was some kind of genius to have built up such a large, complicated apparatus in such a short time,” this source said. “Then I found out how much help he got from the CIA in organizing it.”

28.  Covert Operations in Chile, 1963–1973, p. 40.

29.  See Lucy Komisar, “Into the Murky Depths of Operation Condor,” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1998.

30.  The CIA briefer to the ARA meetings provided State Department officials with a lengthy description of the Contreras-Walters meeting at the ARA-CIA weekly meeting on July 11, 1975.

31.  The CIA continues to hide details of this meeting. A one-page attachment to this memo was withheld from declassification in its entirety.

32.  Fimbres recorded the meeting in a comprehensive memorandum of conversation, titled after all the subjects they discussed, “UNGA, Economic Situation; the Disappeared 119; the GOC’s Image Abroad; Willoughby,” August 24, 1975.

33.  State Department memo, “Contreras-Salzberg Conversation,” August 26, 1975. Contreras told Salzberg that DINA “now makes only a few arrests each day, and is the sole agency arresting and interrogating political prisoners,” as if that represented an achievement in improving human rights abuses in Chile.

34.  In a 1979 FBI interview, Walters shared little information about the purpose of the meetings. He said that “part of his function as deputy director of the CIA was to coordinate and conduct foreign liaison for the CIA and within that framework he had received General Contreras in 1975.” In an interview given while in prison in 1999 to Chilean journalist Rodrigo Frey, Contreras was far more verbose. He claimed that Walters had proposed placing CIA agents within DINA, similar to the deployment of CIA Cuban-American agents working in DISIP, the Venezuelan intelligence service. This, according to Contreras, explained why he traveled from Washington to Caracas at the end of August 1975. He also claimed that Walters had recommended recruiting five presumably retired senators as lobbyists for Chile in the Congress, at the cost of $2 million a year. Until the meeting memcons are declassified there is no way to fully evaluate these seemingly dubious claims.

35.  Author interviews. Over the course of several meetings, this source repeated that Burton had one particular project in which Contreras’s collaboration was deemed critical.

36.  Townley letter to Gustavo Echavere, June 29, 1979. Townley wrote this letter to his DINA handler from a U.S. prison after being turned over to the FBI by Chilean authorities for his role in the Letelier-Moffitt assassination. All of his letters were copied by the secretary of his lawyer before being sent, and eventually were obtained by authors Taylor Branch and Eugene Propper for the book on the Letelier case, Labyrinth.

37.  Author interviews.

38.  The timing of this deposit makes it likely that it was, in fact, the CIA payment to Contreras. The July 21, 1975 deposit was the only substantive transaction to the account in almost ten years. After the U.S. identified Contreras in the Letelier assassination, and arrested the Cuban exile terrorists who collaborated with DINA, however, he transferred $20,000 from a mysterious Panamanian brokerage account in the name of Sudhi S.A. in New York to his private account in Washington. Two months later, in December 1978, he arranged for the husband of a Lan-Chile employee based in Florida to withdraw $25,000 in cash from the account. FBI investigators later told John Dinges and Saul Landau that they believed the money was used to pay the defense lawyers for the Cuban coconspirators.

39.  Author interview. The source for this account did not reveal Warren’s identity, which was obtained independently. The CIA has refused to declassify any of the cable traffic, or administrative records relating to putting Contreras on the payroll, taking him off the payroll, and making the one payment to him in the summer of 1975.

40.  See the Washington Post, “CIA had Covert Tie to Letelier Plotter; Contreras Masterminded Bombing,” September 20, 2000.

41.  Memorandum for the Record, July 29, 1975. “ARA/CIA Weekly Meeting, 25 July 1975.”

42.  Colby’s actual testimony has never been declassified. See U.S. Congress, House, Special Subcommittee on Intelligence, Inquiry into Matters Regarding Classified Testimony taken on April 22, 1974 Regarding the CIA and Chile, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess., September 25, 1974, pp. 31–37.

43.  The memorandum on official perjury, titled “Subcommittee Hearings—ITT & Chile and Report of Colby Testimony before the Nedzi House Subcommittee,” was written early September 1974. It circulated through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was subsequently leaked to Lawrence Stern of the Washington Post, causing a huge public uproar, and behind-the-scenes controversy on Capitol Hill. In a phone call to Levinson, Senator Church told him that Secretary Kissinger had contacted the Senate minority leader, Hugh Scott, and demanded Levinson be fired. Until the publication of the Hersh article, “nobody wanted to touch it. Nobody!,” Levinson recalls. “I never understood why Congress appeared to be more concerned over leaks than lying,” he said, “just as they are today.”

44.  See Years of Renewal, pp. 313, 320.

45.  In an October 31, 1975, memo titled “Background on Covert Operations in Chile,” Marsh attached a transcript of Ford’s September 16 press conference, highlighting his denial of any U.S. involvement in the coup and directing him to review Tab A. But when the Gerald Ford Library submitted Tab A to the CIA for review as part of the Chile Declassification Project in 1999, the document was withheld in its entirety from release.

46.  The report Kissinger refers to was the CIA’s “family jewels” report—a seventy-page compilation of 693 episodes of covert illegal and illicit operations—put together at the request of Colby’s predecessor, James Schlesinger. This report was leaked to Hersh and served as the basis for much of his extraordinary reporting on CIA domestic spying and assassination operations. The Schneider plot was not in the family jewels report, although one CIA official in Mexico had submitted several memos regarding CIA ties to that plot to headquarters in response to Schlesinger’s request.

47.  Years of Renewal, p. 313.

48.  “What counts is official acknowledgement,” Rogers wrote Kissinger. “We can live, although uncomfortably, with unsubstantiated revelations. . . . Latin Americans have had a full dose of such stories from the Marxists in any case. But when past intervention is confirmed by Congressional expose or Executive admission the Latins can do no less than respond with shock and suspicion.” See Rogers to Kissinger, “CIA Investigations and Latin America,” February 28, 1975.

49.  See “The Secretary’s Principals’ and Regionals’ Staff Meeting, Monday, July 14, 1975, 8:00 A.M..” p. 36. During the meeting Kissinger was adamant that “We cannot turn over all cables on a subject to any Congressional committee” because “it’s going to set the most awful precedent.”

50.  See Johnson’s comprehensive account, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985), pp. 46, 47.

51.  White House Decision Memorandum, “Senate Select Committee Plans for Open Hearing on Covert Actions in Chile,” November 1, 1975.

52.  See Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Cong., 1st sess; Covert Action, December 4, 5, 1975, pp. 1, 2.

53.  See Years of Upheaval, p. 411.

54.  Conversation with President Pinochet, January 3, 1975.

55.  The first of these publications, “Chile: Key Target of Soviet Diplomacy,” was written by James Theberge, whom Ronald Reagan would name U.S. Ambassador to Chile in 1982.

56.  Information on the history and illegal practices of the ACC is drawn from the submission of evidence seized by Justice Department agents from Liebman’s office and submitted in court proceedings on December 18, 1978. See also the Washington Post, “Justice Department Says Group Illegally Lobbies for Chile Dictator,” December 19, 1978.

57.  Lars Schoultz attributes this attitude to Kissinger in his detailed discussion of the Ford administration’s resistance to limits on military aid to Chile. See his Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America, p. 255.

58.  The Gerald Ford presidential library declassified the notes of this meeting, written by Scowcroft, on February 20, 2002 pursuant to a request by the author. The notes bear the heading, P/K—reference to President and Kissinger. In the margins, Scowcroft recorded a question “Can we do anything on Chile,” and then the answer, presumably from Kissinger: “Do all we can.” (Emphasis in original)

59.  “The Secretary’s Principals’ and Regionals’ Staff Meeting,” Friday, December 20, 1974, 8:00 A.M.., p. 31.

60.  “The Secretary’s Principals’ and Regionals’ Staff Meeting,” Monday, December 23, 1974, 8:00 A.M.., p. 30, 31.

61.  Ibid.

62.  See Popper’s cable, “Conversation with President Pinochet,” January 3, 1975.

63.  See the memcon of “Secretary’s Meeting with Foreign Minister Carvajal,” September 29, 1975, p. 1.

64.  See the transcript of Kissinger’s breakfast meeting with Carvajal, May 8, 1975.

65.  See the embassy’s “Country Analysis and Strategy Paper, Chile 1976, 77,” May 18, 1975, p. 5.

66.  NSC action memorandum, “Disarray in Chile Policy,” July 1, 1975.

67.  See Boyatt’s cable, “Secretary’s Travel to OASGA,” April 21, 1976.

68.  See Popper’s SECRET, EXDIS Cable, Biographic Sketch—General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, May 27, 1976.

69.  Rogers to Kissinger, “Overall Objectives for Your Visit to Santiago,” May 26, 1976.

70.  Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 758.

5: American Casualties.

  1.  CBS News reporter Frank Manitzas, accompanied by the Washington Post’s Southern Cone correspondent, Joanne Omang, taped their interviews with Gonzalez; in August, Manitzas provided the tape to the State Department where it was transcribed as “The Second Interview, Tuesday, June 8, 1976, in the Italian Embassy.” Omang’s story on the interview appeared in the Washington Post on June 10, 1976; a follow-up Post story titled “The Man who Knew too Much,” appeared on June 20. Gonzalez’s taped comments were also cited by Thomas Hauser in his comprehensive book on the Horman case, The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich in 1978, reissued in paperback under the title Missing.

  2.  Missing, based on the Hauser book and directed by Costa-Gavras, premiered in February 1982. The movie received an Academy Award nomination for best picture and won the Oscar for best screenplay. In January 1983, former ambassador Nathaniel Davis, U.S. consul Fred Purdy and U.S. naval attaché Ray Davis sued Hauser, Costa-Gavras and Universal Pictures for $150 million for defamation of character. In July 1987 the libel claim was dropped after the judge in the case ruled that there were no legal grounds to bring it, and Universal and Costa-Gavras agreed to a joint statement saying that Missing was “not intended to suggest that Nathaniel Davis, Ray Davis or Frederick Purdy ordered or approved the order for the murder of Charles Horman—and would not wish viewers of the film to interpret it this way.”

  3.  “He was shot in the stadium. I’m sorry. Things like this should not happen,” a Chilean officer told Ed Horman on October 19. See “Victim’s Father is Bitter at U.S. Handling of Case,” New York Times, November 19, 1973. Pinochet’s Defense and Foreign Ministries later denied they had ever admitted murdering Charles Horman.

  4.  Rudy Fimbres to Harry Shlaudeman, “The Charles Horman Case,” July 15, 1976.

  5.  An October 26, 1978, memorandum from McNeil to Assistant Secretary Viron Vaky indicates that State Department lawyers wanted to keep secret the conclusion that the Chilean military had executed Horman to assist the legal defense of former U.S. officials being sued by the Horman family for wrongful death. McNeil forcefully recommended that the U.S. government “discharge our responsibility to be more responsive to these American citizens” and issue an official statement that “there is evidence to suggest that they died while in custody” of the Chilean military. Such a statement was never issued. The lawyers also objected to declassifying the suggestion that CIA and/or DOD intelligence agents might have played a role in Horman’s death on the grounds that it was speculative opinion. In a December 28, 1978 memorandum, McNeil suggested “the Department of State is better off releasing everything it possibly can now, rather than be forced to release later and so appear to be ‘covering up.’ Lastly, the material in question is natural speculation that has occurred to almost everyone who has contact with the case,” he added. “It may indeed anger some in the CIA and the military, but the speculation exists and is very much in public print. (Moreover, keeping the CIA and DOD happy is not grounds for FOI [Freedom of Information Act] refusals).” McNeil was overruled and the passage was deleted and kept hidden from the families for another twenty-one years.

  6.  See Washington Special Action Group Meeting, Subject: Chile, September 20, 1973.

  7.  Father Doherty’s journal, which he later provided to State Department officials, recording the graphic details of abuse and torture inside the stadium, for Chileans and numerous foreigners from at least twenty-five different nations jailed with him. Soldiers, he wrote, formed a gauntlet outside his cell. “Men were made to run this gauntlet and as they did so they were beaten by soldiers with rifle butts. One man fell down from a blow he received and was shot in the chest by a soldier . . . he died five minutes later. The soldier who shot the man blew off the end of his rifle and laughed.” He also recorded hearing an hour of machine-gun and pistol fire at the far end of the stadium between 4:00 and 5:00 A.M. on the morning of September 20. “I guessed that people were being executed and that those who had not died were being [given] the coup d’ grace.”

  8.  Horman interpreted Creter’s comment as an admission of U.S. involvement in the coup. Terry Simon recalled that he told her that night that “We’ve stumbled upon something very important.” But the U.S. embassy and Creter insisted he was referring to his naval engineering assignment in Chile, which, if real, was far more mundane. A cable from the commander of the U.S. military group in Chile, Captain Ray Davis, dated August 21, 1973 to Fort Amador in the Panana Canal Zone, requested the Creter be prepared to “assist Chilean Navy in following areas” among them: “producing their own CO2 for recharging shipboard fire extinguishers” and “recommendations concerning installation of fluorescent lighting in living spaces aboard all Chilean ships.” In an interview with author Thomas Hauser several years later Creter conceded that those jobs had not been accomplished when he met Charles and Terry in Vina del Mar. Hauser also obtained through a FOIA request a consulate file card on Charles Horman that indicated that Creter had sought and provided intelligence to the embassy on Horman’s visit to Vina. The card noted: “Art Creeter—15 ND [Naval Division]/ 2 checked into Miramar Hotel, Rm. 315, 2300 on 10 Sept./ used 425 Paul Harris address/ said ‘escritor’ left 15 Sept.” Hauser interviewed Creter about this strange document and noted: “One would not normally expect to find a ‘naval engineer’ leafing through hotel records, and Creter has no explanation for his conduct.” See The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 234.

  9.  See “Resume of Naval Mission Contacts with Charles Horman and Terry Simon during the Period 11 September–15 September 1973 Valparaiso, Chile” signed by Patrick J. Ryan, LTCOL, USMC.

10.  Simon recounted this episode to author Thomas Hauser as well as wrote about it in a short memoir in the magazine Senior Scholastic. See The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 94; and Senior Scholastic, “American Girl in Chile’s Revolution,” December 6, 1973.

11.  One of the peculiar aspects of the Horman case is the fact that Joyce and Charles had moved to this home on September 7, only four days before the coup—too recently for their new address to be available to Chilean or U.S. authorities. (For reasons that are unclear, Charles used his prior address when registering at the Hotel Miramar in Vina.) None of their old neighbors reported anyone looking for them prior to September 17. It is possible, as in the case of other Americans arrested, that their move on September 7 attracted the attention of coup supporters in the neighborhood who denounced them as foreigners to the new military authorities and resulted in the house being targeted for a military raid.

12.  The daughter of one of Horman’s neighbors happened to be leaving after visiting her mother at the time he was taken by the military. Her car followed the truck all the way to the National Stadium and she later told Joyce Horman that she saw the truck go through the stadium gates.

13.  Frederick Smith, Jr., “Death in Chile of Charles Horman,” p. 3. The former neighbor was a courageous woman named Isabella Carvajal. In a Spanish-language statement her husband, Mario Carvajal, stated that the military official had referred to Horman as a Norteamericano. According to the statement, the SIM officer ended the telephone conversation by threatening her with death if what she had told him on the phone about Horman turned out not to be true.

14.  Carlotta Manosa, a close friend of the Hormans at whose home Joyce stayed on September 18 after she found her own house ransacked and Charles missing, asked a relative who worked at the embassy to inform Purdy about the SIM phone call.

15.  See “Victim’s Father is Bitter at U.S. Handling of Case,” New York Times, November 29, 1973.

16.  Hall was one of several vice-consuls at the embassy. His meeting with Joyce is recorded in Hauser’s The Execution of Charles Horman, pp. 117, 118. When she asked to stay at the consulate he told her, “we have no accommodations.”

17.  Captain Ray Davis, head of the MilGroup, took notes on the meeting and included them in a six-page draft chronology of his contacts with Charles and Terry, and his ostensible efforts to help Joyce

18.  The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 133. Joyce told Hauser that the ambassador had asked: “Just what do you want us to do—look under all the bleachers?” She recalls responding, “That’s exactly what I want you to do, and I see nothing wrong with it.”

19.  See Kessler’s memorandum to Rudy Fimbres, “Diuguid Article on Horman Case,” July 19, 1976, and his undated letter to Frederick Purdy, written soon after.

20.  The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 217.

21.  After Horman’s body was found on October 18, and the regime concocted the story that he had been shot in the street on September 18, the Foreign Ministry withdrew its October 3 statement as “an error.”

22.  In a rebuttal cable to Washington, Davis wrote that Purdy, and the U.S. military attaché, Colonel Hon, had a different recollection of his remarks. “According to their recollection, the Ambassador certainly never said ‘that the Embassy feeling was that Charles probably was in hiding.’ He may have mentioned this as a possibility.” Davis himself did not offer an opinion on what he said.

23.  Anderson wrote this “memorandum to the files” on October 17.

24.  Dolguin lived next door to the Ford Foundation’s Lowell Jarvis. Jarvis identified him to Horman only as an official from an English-speaking embassy with whom Jarvis played tennis.

25.  Purdy made this statement in an unvarnished draft response to the letter Edmund Horman wrote to Congress in late October, complaining about how the embassy handled his son’s case. The draft, dated November 17, 1973, was subsequently rewritten and sent as a rebuttal to the Horman letter signed by deputy chief of mission Herbert Thompson. See “Senator Javits’ Interest in Horman Case,” November 18, 1973.

26.  State Department cable, confidential, “Approach to Foreign Office on Missing American Citizens Horman and Teruggi,” October 3, 1973.

27.  Ambassador Davis cabled a summary of this conversation to Washington. See “Kubisch Meeting with Minister Huerta,” February 24, 1974.

28.  Quoted from Horman’s letter to Charles Anderson at the Office of Special Consular Services, March 27, 1974.

29.  In an October 27, 1973, cable on “Disposition of Remains,” the embassy reported that Sanitation officials “advises embassy that it cannot authorize shipment in present state, and that alternatives are cremation (and shipment of ashes) or reduction to skeleton (and shipment of bones). Sanitation says there is no possibility of exemptions.” After two months of that argument, the minister of interior, General Bonilla, told the embassy he had “delayed authorization to ship Horman remains out of concern that release be so timed as to minimize use of event to detriment of Chile in U.S. media and public opinion.”

30.  “Death in Chile of Charles Horman,” p. 6.

31.  Quoted from Ed Horman’s letter to Charles Anderson at the Office of Special Consular Services, March 27, 1974. In a follow-up letter to Charles Horman’s widow on April 4, the chief of the State Department’s Division of Property Claims, Estates and Legal Documents, Larry Lane, advised her that “Congress has not appropriated funds for payment of these expenses for private American citizens who die abroad and they must necessarily be met by the estate or relatives of the deceased.”

32.  State Department, “Chronology of Information Relevant to Frank Randall Teruggi,” October 5, 1973. The Chilean medical examiner was apparently able to match fingerprints from Teruggi’s application for Chilean identification card to the fingers on the body.

33.  Hathaway called Volk as he was leaving Chile to ask him to look again at the body at the morgue and see if he could identify it. When Volk, now a history professor at Oberlin College, went to the consulate, he spoke with James Anderson. “I don’t care what Hathaway told Volk. He told me that it wasn’t Teruggi and that’s the end of it,” Puddy yelled. Anderson returned to tell Volk that they would not visit the morgue again because “we don’t want to pressure the new government by asking for too many favors.” The next day Purdy changed his mind.

34.  Defense Department, Memorandum for the Records, from Colonel W.M. Hon, Defense Attaché, October 16, 1973.

35.  Ibid.

36.  The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 244. Sandoval presumed, as he told Hauser, that this file “came from your CIA or Department of State.”

37.  CIA letter to Edna Selan Epstein, “Re: Freedom of Information Act Request of Frank F. Teruggi for Information Concerning his Son Frank Randall Teruggi,” May 7, 1976.

38.  FBI memorandum from Legat Bonn to Acting Director, [deleted] SM-Subversive, November 28, 1972.

39.  Quoted in The Execution of Charles Horman, pp. 192, 195.

40.  Rudy Fimbres to Harry Shlaudeman, “The Charles Horman Case,” July 15, 1976.

41.  See Document 3. When the August 25, 1976, Fimbres, Driscoll, and Robertson memo was released to the Horman family in 1979, this paragraph on the CIA’s lack of candor was also censored.

42.  I interviewed Smith in October 1999 and arranged for him to meet Joyce Horman for the first time. He made it clear that he did not consider his report to be a substantive investigation of the Horman case. His report is undated but was prepared in November-December 1976 and given to Shlaudeman near the end of the year.

43.  This paragraph was deleted when the Smith report was first released to the Horman family in early 1980 on the grounds that it contained “thoughts intended for internal State Department deliberations,” according to court records.

44.  Years later, when Joyce Horman told Sandoval about the State Department’s conclusions, he claimed that he didn’t have a brother. Col. Sandoval Velasquez, who was tracked down by a researcher for U.S. television network in 2000, also denied he was Sandoval’s brother—or his source. In 2003, Sandoval finally admitted that his source was his brother, a former military attorney.

45.  Fimbres letter to Ambassador David Popper, August 4, 1976.

46.  Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman, p. 217.

47.  See Smith’s cover memo of his report to Shlaudeman, “Further Steps in the Case of Charles Horman,” ca. December 26, 1976.

48.  See Popper’s letter to Fimbres on further investigation of the Horman case, August 17, 1976.

49.  David Dreher, “Subject: Charles Horman case,” March 11, 1987.

50.  See Dreher’s memo to the DCM, subject [deleted], April 20, 1987

51.  Col. Pedro Espinoza, convicted as a DINA co-conspirator in the Letelier-Moffitt assassination, has never been linked to the atrocities at the National Stadium. While it is possible he played a role, it is also possible his name has been confused with that of the top military commander at the Stadium, Jorge Espinosa Ulloa. It is possible that the informant confused the two in his comments or that Dreher himself simply assumed the Espinosa he referred to was Pedro and put that in his memorandum of conversation.

52.  See Dreher’s memo to the DCM, subject [deleted], April 20, 1987.

53.  See Dreher’s memo to the DCM, subject [deleted], April 24, 1987.

54.  This information is reported in a secret Embassy cable, “Horman Case: Embassy Views on Credibility of Source,” June 15, 1987. The cable also reports that during a trip to the Embassy the informant left “a written document” with the Consul General, Jayne Kobliska, a typed four-page overview of events in September-October 1973 detailing his knowledge of Horman’s fate. This important record was not included in the declassified files on the Horman case.

55.  At that point the Department decided to inform Joyce Horman of this new development. In a brief phone call, an official named Peter DeShazo told her that the validity of the information the informant had shared “was difficult to ascertain,” and “the informant was seeking certain monetary favors from the USG, a fact which also colors his motives for providing more information if not the story itself.”

56.  The Sociedad Benefactora y Educacional Dignidad, popularly known as Colonia Dignidad, was founded in 1962 by a fugitive named Paul Schafer. In 1961, Schafer left Germany to evade multiple charges of child sexual abuse. The enclave has been characterized as a German Jonestown with allegations of mistreatment of its residents—especially children—for years. “Rumors of forced labor, torture, murder and complicity in these acts with elements of the Chilean armed forces have circulated with tantalizing frequency,” according to declassified documents. For the most recent coverage of the Colony and its power to evade legal scrutiny see “Chile Sect Thrives Despite Criminal Charges,” New York Times, December 30, 2002.

57.  Embassy cable, “Case of Boris Weisfeiler, Colonia Dignidad—New Information,” July 23, 1987.

58.  Interview with Jayne Kobliska, April 30, 2002. Kobliska remembered that her predecessor in the Consulate, Fred Purdy, had been accused of mishandling the Horman case and believed it had ruined his career. “It had an impact on everyone,” she recalled. “No one wanted to get hung out to dry.”

59.  Embassy report, “Review of w/w case of Boris Weisfeiler,” June 30, 1987.

60.  The Carabineros told the Embassy that Lopez had committed suicide. He was despondent, they said, over being abandoned by his girlfriend for another man.

61.  One of Kobliska’s preoccupations was that the lawyer hired by Penn State to handle Weisfeiler’s estate had filed a FOIA request for documents in the case. Her fear regarding declassification was twofold: “we will lose control of the case and in all probability be accused of inaction if we don’t do something now.”

62.  Embassy report, “Review of w/w case of Boris Weisfeiler,” June 30, 1987.

63.  “Daniel” refused to give his real name or any identification. He had gone first to the Church-run human rights agency, the Vicariate of Solidaridad, with his story; social workers there had introduced him to a leading human rights official, Max Pacheco, who taped his confession and brought it to the U.S. Embassy. Eventually, “Daniel” allowed U.S. embassy officials to interview him several times at Pacheco’s office. His last meeting, with Consular official Larry Huffman, took place on August 19, 1987, in a car and a public plaza. At that point, the informant provided a list of the names of the Carabinero unit that had, along with his patrol, searched for and found Weisfeiler on January 5, 1985. He also claimed to have access to CNI’s Weisfeiler “case file” and that the file indicated that Boris had been hired by a Nazi hunter in Israel to track Nazi fugitives using the Colonia as a safehaven.

64.  As in the case of the Horman informant, the Embassy considered the possibility that Daniel was a plant, “some kind of elaborate, extremely detailed set-up to entrap and embarrass the Embassy.” Unlike the Horman case, in this one the Embassy personnel noted, “we can [not] imagine what the Chilean government, or anyone else, might hope to gain.” See Embassy cable, “Case of Boris Weisfeiler, Colonia Dignidad—New Information,” July 23, 1987.

65.  State Department Action cable, “Case of Missing American in Chile,” July 31, 1987.

66.  See Diplomatic Note No. 250, dated August 5, 1988.

67.  Bill Barkell to George Jones, “Recommendation to Request Court to Re-open Weisfeiler Case,” January 3, 1989.

6: Operation Condor: State Sponsored International Terrorism.

  1.  See CIA Information Report, November 27, 1973.

  2.  See CIA, Weekly Situation Report on International Terrorism, “Assassination of Former Chilean General Carlos Prats,” October 2, 1974.

  3.  After the assassination, the CIA reported, Prats’s daughters took the manuscript of the memoirs back to Chile. Eleven years after his murder, the book was published under the title Memorias: Testimonio de Un Soldado (Santiago, Chile: Pehuen Editores LTDA, 1985.)

  4.  Through a petition to the U.S. Justice Department in 1998, Argentine judge Servini de Cubria obtained permission to come to Washington and secretly interview Townley in the Prats case. His full deposition, which remains under seal in Buenos Aires, was selectively quoted in open court proceedings during the trial of Arancibia.

  5.  See “Testimonio Secreto de Michael Townley,” La Tercera Web site.

  6.  According to Townley’s secret testimony, he and his wife, Mariana Callejas—also a DINA agent—detonated the bomb using a remote-control device as they sat in a car near the driveway of the Prats apartment building.

  7.  See State Department cable, “Assassination of General Prats,” October 24, 1974.

  8.  CIA, Weekly Situation Report on International Terrorism, “Assassination of Former Chilean General Carlos Prats,” October 2, 1974.

  9.  Arancibia’s cables to DINA, written under the name of Luis Felipe Alemparte are summarized in a lengthy Argentine court document called “Poder Judicial de la Nacion.”

10.  A well-to-do British-born stockbroker, Beausire was uninvolved in politics. DINA sought him for the sole purpose forcing his sister, Mary Ann who was married to MIR leader Andres Pascale Allende, to turn herself in. When Beausire learned that his mother and other relatives had been detained, he decided to leave Chile and return to Britain. At DINA’s request, Argentine officials paged Beausire at the airport claiming he had a phone call. They then threw him in a wooden box and put it on the next plane to Santiago. Beausire was believed to have been brutally tortured at Villa Grimaldi about his sister’s whereabouts, of which he was unaware, and subsequently disappeared.

11.  Arancibia’s cables, dated April 11 and August 27, are drawn from the summary Argentine court document, “Poder Judicial de la Nacion.”

12.  Silberman was disappeared in Chile on October 4, 1974. The former general manager of the Cobre-Chuqui copper company had been incarcerated by the Pinochet regime. DINA agents actually abducted him from prison and tortured him to death in an apparent effort to find copper company funds it falsely believed he had taken after the coup. When DINA agents were accused of kidnapping him from prison, they concocted an elaborate story that the MIR, impersonating military officers, had taken him.

13.  The corpses, who have never been identified, were presumed to be victims of Argentine paramilitary death squads, particularly the AAA.

14.  DINA agents seized Guendelman at his home in Santiago on September 2, 1974. Fellow prisoners reported that he was last seen alive at a DINA camp known as Cuatro Alamos.

15.  See New York Times, “Chile’s Version of Leftists’ Fate Doubted,” August 3, 1975.

16.  El Mercurio’s editorial ran on July 25, 1975.

17.  Dinges was the first foreign journalist to break the Operation Colombo story, providing the details of the list of 119 to Time magazine. He wrote about the human rights scandal for the National Catholic Reporter under a pseudonym, Ramon Marsano. See National Catholic Reporter, “Anatomy of a Cover-up,” October 3, 10, 1975.

18.  The actual Luis Alberto Guendelman had had one hip removed in a childhood operation; the corpse had both hips intact. The body identified as Jaime Robotham was two and one half inches shorter than the real Robotham. Moreover, the photo on the identification card found with the body was one of him as an adolescent that his mother had provided to a supposed military investigator after he was abducted by armed agents on New Year’s eve, 1974.

19.  Department of State, Cable, “Chilean Extremists Reported Killed or Disappeared Abroad,” July 26, 1975.

20.  After providing him with safe haven for months, in early 1976 DINA would sent Bosch on a mission to Costa Rica to attempt to kill socialist leader Pascal Allende. He failed. Eventually Bosch went to Venezuela and masterminded the October 6, 1976, terrorist attack on the Cubana airliner, killing seventy-three people, including Cuba’s twenty-four-member Olympic fencing team.

21.  See Branch and Propper, p. 243.

22.  Ibid, p. 244. According to Taylor Branch and Eugene Propper, the explosives were hidden in waffle containers and kept in the freezer in the camper.

23.  This intelligence report, dated August 30, 1974, represents the earliest evidence of CIA awareness of Chile’s international assassination efforts.

24.  See Branch and Propper, Labyrinth, p. 310.

25.  After his arrest for the Letelier-Moffitt assassination, Townley wrote a series of typed and handwritten letters to a DINA intermediary, Gustavo, from prison. These letters were copied by his lawyer’s secretary and then obtained by former prosecutor Eugene Propper and Taylor Branch for their book, Labyrinth.

26.  State Department, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, “South America: Southern Cone Security Practices,” July 19, 1976, p. 3.

27.  See Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, Vol 2; p. 614.

28.  Dinges discovered the Fuentes connection to the creation of Condor in documents at the Paraguayan “Archives of Terror.” See his comprehensive book, The Condor Years (New York: The New Press, 2004).

29.  Rivas Vasquez related the details of Contreras’s visit to a U.S. federal grand jury on June 29, 1978 as part of the investigation into the Letelier-Moffitt assassination. This scene is described in Dinges and Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row, pp. 156,157.

30.  A comprehensive agenda for the “Primera Reunion de Trabajo de Inteligencia Nacional” dated October 29, 1975, was discovered in military archives in Paraguay.

31.  The Subcommittee, chaired by George McGovern, issued a still top-secret-sensitive 1979 report titled “Staff Report on Activities of Certain Intelligence Agencies in the United States” that contained a section on the operations of the Chilean DINA. Parts of the report were leaked to columnist Jack Anderson in August 1979, who published the first article on Condor activities, “Condor: South American Assassins,” Washington Post, August 2, 1979.

32.  Townley’s participation in this operation is revealed in Labyrinth, p. 324. The targets of the mission were two Chilean journalists, one with possible ties to Carlos the Jackal, who were setting up a pan-European newspaper for a leftist coalition. Condor’s intent appeared to be to disrupt a Socialist Party congress being held in Portugal, and undermine any effort to establish a broad unified front in Europe that could bring further international pressure against the Southern Cone regimes. As Townley related this story, the mission took place in late November. But the U.S. intelligence community dated the warning to France on Condor in September, suggesting that the mission took place earlier in the fall.

33.  Department of State, INR Afternoon Summary, November 23, 1976.

34.  A number of major luminaries, including Chancellor Willy Brandt from West Germany, and French socialist leader François Mitterrand attended the Congress. Townley’s mission is detailed in Labyrinth, pp. 324,325.

35.  See, CIA intelligence cable, April 17, 1977.

36.  This memo, written by a high CNI officer, Col. Jeronimo Pantoja to the deputy foreign minister, reviews the communications with Peruvian officials over the Stationing of a Chilean intelligence officer in Lima. It is dated April 14, 1978 and was obtained from Chilean sources.

37.  In an interview with the author, White said he never received a reply from the State Department about this stunning information. See his cable on his meeting with one of General Stroessner’s top aides, chief of staff Gen. Alejandro Fretes Davalos, “Second Meeting with Chief of Staff re: Letelier Case,” October 13, 1978.

38.  See U.S. State Department, “Aftermath of Kidnapping of Refugees in Buenos Aires,” June 15, 1976.

39.  See Stella Calloni, Los Anos Del Lobo: Operacion Condor (Argentina: Ediciones Continente, 1999), Chapter 10. Calloni was the first analyst to sift through the Paraguayan documents for evidence of Operation Condor activities.

40.  See a memcon filed by James Blystone, “Meeting with Argentine Intelligence Service,” June 19, 1980. The memo represents the only known documentation of advance U.S. knowledge of a planned disappearance.

41.  One biographic sketch, prepared by the CIA’s Central Reference Service in coordination with the Office of Current Intelligence, Office of Economic Research and Clandestine Service reported on Letelier after he was named to be Chile’s ambassador to Washington. The document noted that “the family has an English sheepdog, Alfie, which they will give up upon moving to the embassy residence.” The CIA’s source for this critical information remains a historical mystery.

42.  CIA Intelligence Information Report, “Subject: Plans of Chilean Leftists in Exile to Hold another Joint Meeting to Discuss Anti-Junta Strategy,” November 18, 1975. The last CIA report in Letelier’s 201 intelligence file is dated September 16, 1976, only four days before the assassination. Released to the Letelier and Moffitt families in 1980, the document is too heavily redacted to determine why the CIA was reporting on Letelier’s activity at that time.

43.  Kissinger did not respond to Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier. The transcript of the conversation is reproduced in Chapter 4.

44.  See the State Department’s January 1989 history, “The Letelier Case: Background and Factual Summary,” p. 3. This twenty-four-page memorandum was prepared in anticipation of pursuing the perpetrators of the Letelier-Moffitt assassination after Pinochet turned power over to a civilian government.

45.  Ibid.

46.  Shlaudeman acted on Landau’s recommendation immediately. He sent a memo to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, with attached photocopies of the passport pages, asking that Romeral and Williams be stopped and questioned if they attempted to enter the country. Nevertheless, on August 22, two Chilean officers using the names Romeral and Williams, traveling on official Chilean passports, did enter the country through Miami. Although their names were on the watch list, they were not stopped. The two were decoys, sent by DINA to confuse U.S. officials who, Contreras believed, were looking for Townley and Fernandez. At the time of the assassination the decoys were detailed to the Chilean military mission in Washington.

47.  Abourezk is quoted from the Congressional Record, September 21, 1976, p. 31464.

48.  Luers prepared a briefing summary of the meeting for Kissinger, who was out of town. See “Briefing Memorandum: Ambassador Trucco and Orlando Letelier,” September 22, 1976.

49.  Fernández related this conversation with his superior officer in a proffer of evidence made to the U.S. Justice Department when he fled Chile and pleaded guilty in 1987. It is cited in the State Department’s January 1989 history, “The Letelier Case: Background and Factual Summary,” p. 7.

50.  The Scherrer cable was attached to a Letters Rogatory request for information that the U.S. Justice Department sent to Chile in 1978. It was first obtained and cited by Dinges and Landau in their book Assassination on Embassy Row. Subsequently it was declassified and remained the only available document on U.S. knowledge of Condor until 1999. Doc 2, the DIA cable from Buenos Aires, is drawn virtually word-for-word from Scherrer’s cable.

51.  Embassy cable, “Possible International Implications of Violent Deaths of Political Figures Abroad,” June 7, 1976.

52.  Beyond their compatible military ideologies, Shlaudeman reported to Kissinger, the Southern Cone regimes shared a “suspicion that even the U.S. has lost its will to stand firm against communism because of Viet-Nam, détente, and social decay.” They also held a common “resentment of human-rights criticism,” Shlaudeman noted, “which is often taken as just one more sign of the commie encirclement.” See ARA Monthly Report (July) “The ‘Third World War’ and South America,” p. 10.

53.  This explosive document was declassified in 1991, but lay unnoticed for a decade in a batch of microfiched documents on Argentina at the State Department FOIA reading room. It was discovered by National Security Archive analyst Carlos Osorio.

54.  See INR Afternoon Summary, September 21, 1976, “Latin America: Political and Economic Cooperation in the Southern Cone.”

55.  “Ninety-nine percent of Roger Channels weren’t like this one,” McAfee said in an interview with the author. Shlaudeman’s language, he said, “meant that the top command of State was behind this.” Since INR was responsible for transmitting all Roger Channel cables, the only clearance shown was that of McAfee himself. Per Shlaudeman’s request, copies of the cable were restricted to a handful of offices—Kissinger’s, Habib’s, Shlaudeman’s, McAfee’s, and administration. Interview with William McAfee, December 15, 2001.

56.  When this document was first declassified and given to the Letelier and Moffitt families in 1980 pursuant to FOIA suit they had filed, all references to Pinochet and the informant’s belief that he was responsible for the crime were blacked out. The document was declassified again in November 2000, but remains heavily excised.

57.  This summary of the Station’s reporting on the meeting is cited in the Hinchey report, CIA Activities in Chile, section on “Relationship with Contreras.”

58.  At issue was the information in the records that indicated the two DINA agents intended to travel to Washington to meet CIA deputy director Gen. Vernon Walters. “The General is an old hand. He can take care of himself,” Robert Driscoll wrote. See “The Paraguayan Caper,” October 15, 1976.

59.  These articles are cited in Dinges and Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row, p. 243, 244.

60.  Hewson Ryan was interviewed on April 27, 1988, by Richard Nethercut for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.

7: Denouement of the Dictator: From Terrorism to Transition.

  1.  See Jeremiah O’Leary’s banner headline story, “U.S. Threatening to Sever Chilean Relations,” Washington Star, March 3, 1978.

  2.  The Chilean military repeatedly faked searches for Townley. They would alert him in advance before arriving at his home; usually he hid in an empty water tank on the roof. See Labyrinth, p. 464.

  3.  This accord, signed on April 7, 1978, is known as the Silbert-Montero accord, because it was signed by Earl Silbert, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. and Chilean Interior Ministry official Enrique Montero.

  4.  The five Cubans were Guillermo Novo, his brother Ignacio Novo, Alvin Ross, Virgilio Paz, and Dionesio Suarez, who is believed to have pressed the pager button that actually triggered the bomb. The Novos and Ross were quickly arrested. Paz and Suarez escaped and remained fugitives for more than a decade before they were finally arrested.

  5.  After meeting with Landau, NSC Latin America specialist Robert Pastor reported to Zbigniew Brzezinski on the conversation in a memo titled “Conversation with our Ambassador to Chile, George Landau—June 28, 1978.” The memorandum demonstrates that the highest U.S. officials were aware that if Contreras was responsible for the terrorist bombing, Pinochet would likely have authorized it.

  6.  CIA intelligence report, untitled, May 24, 1978.

  7.  DIA Information Report, “Contreras Tentacles,” ca. January 1, 1989.

  8.  This CIA cable document is cited in a long list of documents the Agency compiled for the Chile Declassification Project. Next to the entry of the subject title are the words FBI Requests Withhold. The document, which contains evidence of Pinochet’s personal involvement in obstructing justice in the Letelier case, was one of hundreds pulled by FBI and Justice Department officials for their investigation into Pinochet’s role in the assassination. See the Epilogue for a full discussion of these records.

  9.  In 1987, eleven years after the assassination, Fernández Larios fled Chile with the secret help of the FBI. He was interrogated for more then ten hours and revealed Pinochet’s efforts to block his testimony after the murders. See the State Department’s secret report on the Letelier case, January 26, 1987.

10.  CIA Intelligence cable, “Government Sponsored Propaganda Campaign Re US Interference in Chile,” May 26, 1978.

11.  See Chapter 6 for a description of Contreras’s effort to obtain U.S. visas in Asuncion to disguise Chile’s role in the assassination mission, and Ambassador Landau’s role in copying the passports and the photos.

12.  In a telephone interview with the author from his office in Florida, Ambassador Landau said that he and the State Department had not connected the effort by the Chilean agents to obtain visas from Paraguay to the Letelier-Moffitt assassination before early 1978. “If we had,” he said, “I never would have been transferred to Chile after my posting in Paraguay.”

13.  Untitled CIA memorandum, August 24, 1978.

14.  See CIA Memorandum for the Record, Meeting with State Department and Justice Department Officials Regarding Letelier Case, 21 August, 1978.

15.  This CIA report, perhaps the most comprehensive summary of the Agency’s connections to Contreras, has been withheld in its entirety from declassification. Even its title remains secret.

16.  Author interview.

17.  Author interview. See also an untitled September 22, 1978 confidential memorandum of conversation written by embassy officer Felix Vargas, based on a conversation with the reporter who spoke to Miranda.

18.  Author interview. See also Labyrinth, p. 584. Branch and Propper’s account places the date of this episode between August 28 and September 1, 1978. But it is clear from the declassified cables that Contreras made his blackmail bid on August 23, using Puga as an emissary with CIA officials in Santiago.

19.  See McNeil’s memo to Michael Armacost, “Possible Approach by Chilean representatives of General Contreras to DOD Officials,” Aug. 29, 1978.

20.  See McNeil’s memorandum, “Letelier Case,” October 30, 1978.

21.  Pastor to Brzezinski, “U.S. Policy to Chile—Reaching the Crunch Point on Letelier,” May 25, 1979.

22.  This exchange is described in Labyrinth, p. 594.

23.  Landau’s démarche is recorded in the State Department cable, “Instructions re U.S. Reaction to Outcome of Letelier Case,” June 1, 1978.

24.  Derian to Christopher, SECRET, “Letelier Case,” September 21, 1979.

25.  Derian to Vance, SECRET, “Letelier-Moffitt—ARA Memorandum of October 12, 1979,” October 12, 1979.

26.  Former State and Justice Department officials interviewed for this book acknowledged that the White House in general, and Pastor in particular, were kept in the dark about the investigation into the assassinations. The reluctance to share information derived from Assistant U.S. Attorney Eugene Propper’s concern about keeping the criminal case free from any taint of politicization, and the potential for leaks. “Over his dead body would the White House be informed,” one State Department officer recalled Propper’s position. Nevertheless, Pastor’s own memoranda record that he was informed in May 1979 that “there is strong evidence of tampering with the court by Pinochet.” In his May 25, 1979 memorandum to Brzezinski, Pastor noted, “I have not been following this case closely but [deputy secretary of state] Christopher has, and I am surprised at how strongly he and others in State feel about this case and about how illegitimate is the Chilean decision.” By October 11, however, he felt that three fundamental questions had to be addressed and answered before the U.S. could proceed with sanctions: (1) “By what justification can we be displeased with the Chilean Supreme Court decision?”; (2) “By what right can the U.S. State Department judge another government’s laws and court?”; and (3) “What are our objectives in the Letelier case, in U.S. Chilean relations, and overall?” See Pastor to Brzezinski, “Reaction to Chile’s Decision on Letelier,” October 11, 1979.

27.  To address both Pastor’s and Vaky’s skepticism, the Department of Justice drafted a memo on October 15 reviewing the overwhelming evidence of Chile’s guilt in the assassination. “The United States Department of Justice persuasively maintains that any future course of action should not be based upon any suggestion that the evidence presented by the United States is anything less than conclusive.”

28.  Barcella described to me how appalled he was by this question, and the whole direction of this meeting when he realized that the sanctions would not be commensurate with the crime. For quotations, see Labyrinth, p. 598.

29.  Carter overruled recommendation number 5—“Deny validated Licenses for Exports to the Chilean Armed Forces.” This would have meant employing export controls to deny millions of dollars of purchases by the Pinochet regime from U.S. businesses. A seventh option focused not on the sanctions, but on the official statement that would announce them.

30.  Secretary of Defense Harold Brown lobbied hard to keep the MilGroup from being withdrawn. In a confidential memo to Vance and Brzezinski dated October 9, 1979, he argued that the situation in Nicaragua and El Salvador, poor relations with Argentina, and the possibility that the Soviets would be given “new opportunities in Chile” mitigated against closing the U.S. military liaison office in Chile. Pastor rejected Brown’s concerns as “bureaucratically self-serving” and “nonsense,” but Brzezinski compromised by reducing but not closing the MilGroup office.

31.  It took only two months for the bureaucracy to initiate an effort to rescind or limit the sanctions, starting with the UNITAS exercises. In February 1980, one of Brzezinski’s aides, Thomas Thorton, wrote to him about the sanctions. “The question arises as to whether we want to continue punishment of the Chileans on this issue. Do we want this to be a time-limited action or is it supposed to remain a semi-permanent factor in U.S.-Chilean relations? My preference is to put the issue behind us—the UNITAS decision would be our last one under its influence—and judge future issues in U.S.-Chilean relations on the basis of their merits and overall Chilean behavior.” To his credit, Robert Pastor forcefully argued against this position. In a February 20, 1980 memo to Brzezinski commenting on Thorton’s points, Pastor stated that it would “be a terrible embarrassment to the president if we proceeded with ‘business as usual,’ such as suggested by the UNITAS exercise, four months after he announces a strong and firm policy.” Pastor also noted that Patricia Derian’s former deputy, Mark Schneider, was now running Edward Kennedy’s presidential primary campaign against Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party nomination. “Kennedy is hungry for issues,” he observed. “You can be absolutely certain that a decision to put the ‘Letelier phase’ behind us and proceed with UNITAS will be noticed.”

32.  Undated radio broadcast transcript. Reagan based his comments on a report by the extreme right-wing Council for Inter-American Security. He appeared to discount evidence compiled by the FBI of the Pinochet regime’s responsibility, blaming “the efforts of leftist groups to get our government to pin it on the current government of Chile.”

33.  Walters made this statement at a March 10, 1981 hearing on lifting the Chile sanctions before the House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, and Subcommittee on International Economic Policy.

34.  Kirkpatrick’s article provided the theoretical basis for Ronald Reagan’s campaign denunciations of the Carter administration’s approach to human rights. Once president, Reagan promptly appointed her ambassador to the United Nations. See Commentary, Vol. 68, No. 5, November 1979. For a rebuttal of Kirkpatrick’s article as it applied to Pinochet’s Chile, see Robert Kaufman and Arturo Valenzuela, “Authoritarian Chile: Implications for American Foreign Policy,” in Richard Newhouse, ed., Gunboats and Diplomacy (Washington, D.C.: Democratic Policy Committee, 1982).

35.  Under the law, the Carter administration voted against MDB loans to Chile eight consecutive times. The Reagan administration simply asserted that the Pinochet regime did not engage in a pattern of rights violations and therefore, “did not now fall within the standard that would require a ‘no’ vote.”

36.  Walters “eyes only” cable to Haig, “Chile/El Salvador,” February 27, 1981.

37.  Helms made these remarks during the Senate debate over lifting the Kennedy amendment on October 22, 1981. The author was sitting in the Senate gallery listening. For a full record of the debate see Congressional Record, October 22, 1982, pp. 11894–11917.

38.  Abrams to Eagleburger, March 13, 1982.

39.  Efforts to obtain secret arms from Chile continued until the Iran-Contra scandal broke in November 1986 and North was removed from his position. For the complete story of Chile’s role in the Iran-Contra operations, see Peter Kornbluh, “The Chilean Missile Caper,” The Nation, May 18, 1988.

40.  For a comprehensive treatment of the opposition’s efforts to organize against the regime see Mark Ensalaco, Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), chapters 6, 7.

41.  See the CIA’s “Chile: How Authoritarian is Pinochet’s Constitution?,” May 17, 1988.

42.  Quoted in Mary Helen Spooner, Soldiers in a Narrow Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 202. See also the New York Times, May 16, 1986.

43.  Motley to Shultz, “Chile and My Visit,” February 21, 1985. Abrams opposed Motley’s “no public criticism” position, which was shared by the NSC. In a December 27, 1984 memo to Deputy Secretary Kenneth Dam, he argued that “if we desist from public criticism of Chilean repression . . . we are virtually begging for congressional initiatives which will tie our hands and destroy our policy. I do not believe the NSC’s proposal of ‘no public criticism’ is wise, because I think we must make our position on human rights clear to the people of Chile and, even more important, the people of the United States.”

44.  I knew Rodrigo and his family and spent considerable time with him while he was growing up in Washington. At one point, Rodrigo arranged for me to come speak to his civics class at Wilson High School about the U.S. role in the Chilean coup and human rights abuses by the Pinochet regime. But he also spent considerable time playing hooky and hanging out in my office. Several months before his senior graduation, he decided to drop out and return to Chile. With my then wife, Eliana Loveluck, we took him out to lunch and tried to convince him that just a few more weeks of school would benefit him for the rest of his life; and he could then return to Chile with a high school diploma. A stubborn, rebellious teenager, he listened to us but decided to leave nonetheless. If we had managed to convince him to finish school and delay returning until the summer of 1986, I’ve often wondered, perhaps he might not have made it to that particular street protest in Santiago on that truly tragic day in July.

45.  State Department cable, “W/W: Case of Rodrigo Rojas De Negri,” July 8, 1986.

46.  Carmen Quintana miraculously survived. The forceful complaints of inadequate care by an American doctor from Massachusetts General Hospital, John Constable, and Rojas’s mother, Veronica De Negri, who had both flown to Santiago, resulted in Quintana’s transfer to the burn unit of the Workers Hospital within a few hours of Rodrigo’s death. Eventually she was flown to Canada where she underwent multiple skin graft and facial reconstruction surgeries over the course of several years. She eventually returned to Chile after civilian rule was restored.

47.  Reagan was also informed that Senator Jesse Helms, who was in Santiago at the time, was assisting the regime’s effort to smear the victims and exonerate the regime. Helms met privately with Pinochet for two hours and then became a American shill for the regime’s cover-up of the crime. “You have screwed it up—you and the people in Washington,” Helms told Barnes during a private meeting at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Santiago. According to a declassified memcon, the senator “said he wasn’t a complete apologist for Pinochet; but Pinochet, warts and all, was a lot better than what was likely to come after.” Publicly, the senator denounced Rojas as “a communist terrorist” and accused Barnes of “planting the American flag in the midst of a communist activity” and urged Reagan to recall him. For the comprehensive story of Helms’s effort to assist those responsible for this crime, see Jon Elliston, “Deadly Alliance,” The Independent Weekly, May 23, 2001.

48.  A reliable source reported to the Embassy that on July 10, the head of the Carabineros—and member of the Junta—Gen. Rodolfo Strange wrote a one-page report identifying the Army personnel involved in burning Rojas and Quintana and dumping their bodies and provided it to President Pinochet. “President Pinochet told General Strange that he did not believe the report, and he refused to receive the report,” according to the source. See the Embassy’s cable, “Information Regarding the Rodrigo Rojas Investigation,” July 22, 1986.

49.  Lagos helped energize the campaign by appearing on television in April 1988 and boldly addressing Pinochet: “You promise the country eight more years of torture, assassination, and human rights violations.” See Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, p. 306.

50.  For Assistant Secretary Abrams from Barnes, October 1, 1988.

51.  State Department cable to Santiago, “Chile—Trying to Deter Possible Government Action to Suspend or Nullify Plebiscite,” October 1, 1988.

52.  The informant’s name is blacked out but DIA records indicate it was Air Force General and Junta member Fernando Mattei who took the strongest position against Pinochet’s overturning the plebiscite.

53.  Gen. Zincke is, perhaps, the unsung hero of efforts to blow the whistle on Pinochet’s plans. On September 30, during a meeting with the head of the Civitas Civic Education Crusade, one of the voter education groups receiving U.S. support for the plebiscite, Zincke began describing a Communist plot to foment violence to disrupt the election. “The persons with whom Zincke spoke,” Amb. Barnes cabled Assistant Secretary Abrams at the State Department that day, “are convinced he, for unknown reasons, was warning them of what the Army, not the Communists, were planning to do to disrupt the plebiscite.” It is not known whether Gen. Zincke later provided key details of this plot to U.S. intelligence agents, but, at minimum, he set in motion U.S. intelligence gathering efforts to ascertain the nature of Pinochet’s plan to keep power.

54.  This CIA intelligence report is dated November 18, 1988.

55.  The Embassy officer reported that the first song of the ten hour-long concert, “Por Que No Se Van”—Why Don’t They Go—was dedicated to Pinochet with tremendous approval from the crowd. The highlight of the concert for the diplomat-turned rock critic was Sting and Peter Gabriel singing a song called “La Cueca Sola”—Dancing Alone—with women from Chile and Argentina who had lost loved ones. Among the women who danced with Sting on stage was Veronica de Negri, the mother of Rodrigo Rojas. In an obvious but important conclusion, the cable noted, “The reaction at the rock concert in Mendoza indicates that the human rights situation in Chile remains an emotional issue which will persist despite political openings.” (I am grateful to Sarah Anderson and Stacie Jonas of the Institute for Policy Studies for bringing this document to my attention.)

56.  See Scope Paper, “Vice President Trip to Barbados, Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, March 9-16, 1990.” In a confidential briefing paper prepared for Quayle to use in his meeting with Pinochet, Quayle was warned that Pinochet has “vowed to confront the civilian government if it attempts to prosecute military officers accused of human rights violations or change the status of the military.” Quayle’s talking points included urging Pinochet “to support our efforts to seek justice for those responsible for . . . an act of terrorism committed on the streets of the capital of the United States.” “The United States insists on the resolution of this case,” Quayle was to say. “We will not normalize relations until this is done.”

Atrocity and Accountability: The Long Epilogue of the Pinochet Case.

  1.  Author interview.

  2.  In particular, Garces used the case of Spanish citizen Carmelo Soria to trigger Madrid’s quest to bring Pinochet to justice. A Spanish economist working in Chile for the U.N. on a diplomatic passport, Soria was picked up by agents of the DINA, on July 15, 1976. According to human rights investigators, his captors dragged Soria into the basement of a DINA safe house and, during a torture session, broke his neck. Then Pinochet’s agents doused him with liquor and forged a suicide note. The next day his car and body were discovered in an irrigation canal.

  3.  Pinochet’s daughter had talked him into doing an unprecedented interview with a U.S. magazine because, wrote author Jon Lee Anderson, “if people understand her father better he will be maligned less.”

  4.  See “Spanish Request to Question General Pinochet,” October 14, 1998, reprinted in Reed Brody and Michael Ratner, The Pinochet Papers: The Case of Augusto Pinochet in Spain and Britain (The Hague: Kluwar Law International, 2000), p. 55.

  5.  Quoted in Peter Kornbluh, “Prisoner Pinochet,” The Nation, November 29, 1998.

  6.  I attended these hearings in the House of Lords between November 3 and 13, 1998. Quotes can be found in the article, “Prisoner Pinochet.”

  7.  Pinochet’s lawyers successfully argued that the swing vote on the five-member panel, Lord Hoffmann, had failed to disclose that he was a fund-raiser for Amnesty International and had a bias in the case. A second set of legal hearings was held in mid-January 1999.

  8.  For a detailed discussion of how the civilian government handled the human rights issue in Chile, see Marc Ensalaco, Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), chapter 8.

  9.  See Zalaquett’s introduction to the English edition of the Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Notre Dame, In.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. xxxii.

10.  See Wilde’s provocative article, “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 31, Part 2, May 1999.

11.  When Chile refused the request for compensation, the new Bush administration invoked a treaty from 1914 known as the Treaty for the Settlement of Disputes that May Occur Between the U.S. and Chile, also known as the Bryan Accord. The treaty provided a foundation for bilateral negotiations to settle the compensation issue. For a comprehensive chronology of the evolution of the case in the late 1980s, see the State Department’s twenty-four-page report, “The Letelier Case: Background and Factual Summary,” January 1989.

12.  Kozak recommended going to Pinochet’s foreign minister and stating that the U.S. would hold the government responsible for anything Contreras did. His handwritten memo is undated but clearly is a response to the February 10 embassy cable.

13.  See Embassy Cable “Letelier-Moffitt Case: Pursuing it with the Armed Forces,” May 30 1989.

14.  The concern of the families, as voiced by Moffitt and Buffone at this meeting, and members of the Letelier family in Santiago, was that the Bush administration would prematurely certify that the Chilean government was cooperating in the Letelier-Moffitt case before legal proceedings had been initiated or an agreement on compensation reached. According to a memorandum of conversation, both Moffitt and Buffone wanted to see a timetable for Chilean government action; as pressure they believed the U.S. government should once again initiate extradition proceedings against the DINA officers. Although the families were repeatedly assured that justice in the case remained a precondition for lifting the Kennedy amendment, secret State Department documents show that U.S. officials had concluded the president could certify Chile if Aylwin moved to transfer of the case from a military to a civilian court and planned to have President Bush announce the certification during his December 1990 trip to Santiago.

15.  The pursuit of justice also advanced in the Letelier case in the U.S. In 1990 and 1991, the two Cuban exile fugitives, Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz were captured and imprisoned. Suarez was arrested in April and convicted in July; Paz, who pushed the button on the car bomb, was captured on the day after America’s Most Wanted aired a segment on his role in the assassinations. On July 30, 1991 he plea-bargained to a charge of conspiracy to murder a foreign official and was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

16.  See Peter Kornbluh, “Prisoner Pinochet,” The Nation, December 11, 1998.

17.  Author interview.

18.  For Rubin’s announcement, see the Washington Post, December 2, 1998.

19.  The official I interviewed recalled the argument advanced by the Chile desk officer: “If it was just the Pinochet years it would look unbalanced to the Chileans. It would look like we were just going after the right. So it should cover Allende also.”

20.  Tranche 1 was delayed several days because Henry Kissinger learned of the scheduled release and had his office call National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and request an entire set of documents to review prior to publication.

21.  The NSC repeatedly promised Joyce Horman that the final declassification would take place in April, and that all remaining records, among them CIA and Pentagon documents long sought by the family, would be released. In April the date was postponed to June. After they informed her that the final release would be postponed again until the fall, she petitioned the chairman of the IWG, William Leary, to release the records relating to her case as scheduled. “The Horman family, and many others have waited patiently for these records. The CIA, NSC, NSA and Pentagon all should have released records on our case last June or last October. That they did not comply with the president’s request at that time is most unfortunate,” she wrote in May 2000. The White House agreed, and released the documents on the Teruggi and Weisfeiler case at the same time.

22.  The CIA counted on a 1984 modification to the FOIA law known as the CIA Information Act, which exempted operational files from being searched in response to FOIA requests. But the Chile Information Act explicitly stated that operational files that had previously been searched subject to law-enforcement proceedings or Congressional inquiries were eligible under the FOIA. Since the Agency had been forced to share almost all of its Chile files with the Department of Justice for legal proceedings in the Helms case and the Horman case, and show many of its Directorate of Operations records to the Senate Select Committee in the mid-1970s, the law offered no shield from search and review during the Chile declassification project.

23.  I reported this conversation in the Washington Post Outlook section, “Still Hidden: A Full Record of What the U.S. did in Chile,” October 24, 1999.

24.  Interview with a member of the Inter-Agency Working Group.

25.  The National Security Agency continues to keep secret six documents on the Horman case. In a December 1, 1999, letter to the author, the agency stated, “the documents date from September 1973 through February 1974 and do not contain information which identifies who may have been responsible for Mr. Horman’s death or the circumstances surrounding his death. The documents suggest that Mr. Horman was detained and released on or about 20 September 1973, but that his whereabouts were unknown.”

26.  In one of his first internal memos on the declassification process, “IWG on Chile Documents,” William Leary wrote to the CIA, DOJ, DOD, FBI, and State Department that the “NSC would chair joint declassification sessions to facilitate such review by 3rd agencies.” The idea was to quickly, and jointly evaluate documents that involved more than one agency—presidential records generated by the CIA for example—to determine what portions needed to be censored.

27.  The Archive’s letter is dated September 16, 1999. It noted that “as the U.S. presses countries like Germany, Switzerland, and Guatemala among others, to acknowledge and rectify their mistakes of the past, the CIA’s position that we must hide our own can only undermine the credibility of our policy.” In a response to Blanton dated November 30, 1999, Berger wrote: “I have received assurances that CIA material reviewed and released in the final phase . . . will include relevant operational records, such as documents related to covert action, documents associated with the Church Committee hearings in 1975, and operational files disseminated outside the Directorate of Operations.”

28.  New York Times editorial, “Exposing America’s Role in Chile,” October 6, 1999.

29.  Tenet made this statement in a lengthy letter to Congressman George Miller, responding to a call from Miller protesting the withholding of documents on Chile. The letter is dated August 11, 2000.

30.  At the NSC, William Leary reviewed the CIA records, Adolf “Hal” Eisner read them at the State Department. The CIA records were heavily redacted leading to complaints that it was impossible to ascertain the actual sensitivity of the documentation.

31.  See Hinchey’s press release, “CIA Finally Responds to Hinchey Legislation, Report on U.S. Involvement in Pinochet Coup Due,” September 14, 2000.

32.  On September 7, the CIA provided a classified version of the report to the House Intelligence Committee. According to sources who have read both versions, the main difference is that the classified version cited the actual amount of CIA funding for DINA chieftain Manuel Contreras, and named the two NIC officers who authored the report.

33.  “CIA Activities in Chile,” September 18, 2000, p. 15. The Hinchey amendment clearly intended the CIA to address its broader actions in support of the military regime’s consolidation of power. But the CIA chose to interpret the question as whether the agency had assisted Pinochet in outmaneuvering other members of the military to become head of the Junta and “President” of Chile.

34.  Ibid, p. 5.

35.  See Chapter 4 for a comprehensive discussion of the CIA’s interaction with Contreras and DINA.

36.  In early 2000 I filed a FOIA with NARA for administrative records on what the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidential libraries had submitted to the Chile Declassification Project, and what had been denied declassification. The lists I received of denied documents contained over three hundred documents.

37.  The National Security Archive successfully threatened to sue the U.S. government to recover the Telcons; the first set, from Kissinger’s tenure as National Security Advisor, were scheduled for declassification in mid-2004. State Department historians also gained access to these papers for their work on the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series.

38.  Author interview. One aspect that investigators focused on was evidence of Pinochet’s motivation to assassinate Letelier. Top-secret CIA and DIA documents seen by the FBI recorded his involvement in a decision to strip Letelier of his Chilean citizenship ten days before the murders took place. U.S. investigators pursued several witnesses in Chile on this aspect of events leading up to the car bombing and concluded that Pinochet was “obsessed” with Letelier. See the Washington Post, May 28, 2000.

39.  This source spoke to a Chilean journalist, Pascale Bonnefoy. See her story “FBI Requests Prosecution of Pinochet, But No One Lifts a Finger,” in the Chilean newspaper El Periodista, April 15, 2002. I also interviewed, on background, a source who had been a member of the investigation team that traveled to Santiago and participated in the drafting of the recommendation to indict. He told the same story. The report went to the criminal division for review and stayed there, despite multiple efforts to get it cleared and submitted to the attorney general. According to my source, the report was never actually sent up to Janet Reno’s office. But it appears she was briefed before the Clinton administration left office.

40.  The letter to Marcus Raskin, who had written to the Justice Department on behalf of Murray Karpen, was signed by Ashcroft’s deputy, Bruce Swartz. It was reprinted in the IPS electronic newsletter, Pinochet Watch 35, April 11, 2001.

41.  The author appreciates the contribution of Joshua Frenz-String and Carly Ackerman for research, crafting, and drafting support on this section.

42.  La Tercera, “La Carta de Pinochet al Senado, July 4, 2002.

43.  Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, 109th Cong., 2nd sess., S. HRG. 108-633. Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption: Enforcement and Effectiveness of the Patriot Act, July 15, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004), p. 21 (hereafter referred to as Senate Report 2004). While the first report focused on Riggs Bank’s noncompliance with anti–money laundering laws, a second May 16, 2005, study by the subcommittee examined all U.S. accounts used by Augusto Pinochet specifically—a network spread across ten financial institutions, of which Riggs was the most extensive (hereafter referred to as Senate Report 2005).

44.  See Riggs memorandum, “RE: Business Meetings During Trip to Chile and Ecuador,” Senate Report 2005, p. 20.

45.  Senate Report 2005, p. 21.

46.  Ibid., p. 22. Pinochet received further praise in additional letters sent from Riggs personnel. For example, in a letter dated November 10, 1997, Timothy Coughlin wrote, “Of the books that you have given me, I am just finishing my reading of ‘The Crucial Day.’ The factual objectivity with which you tell the story of Chile in the early 1970s is both fascinating and instructive. History provides for fair and proper judgment only when the true facts are known.” Also, a November 14, 1997, letter from Joseph Allbritton glowingly remarks “you [Pinochet] have rid Chile from the threat of totalitarian government and an archaic economic system based on state-owned property and centralized planning. We in the United States and the rest of the Western hemisphere owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude and I am confident your legacy will have been to provide a more prosperous and safer world for your children and grandchildren.” (See Senate Report 2005, pp. 23–25.)

47.  Ibid., p. 25.

48.  Senate Report 2004, p. 21.

49.  Senate Report 2005, p. 28.

50.  For its misconduct, Riggs was fined $16 million by the U.S. Justice Department in January 2005. In February 2005, Riggs settled a complaint brought by Spanish lawyer Joan Garces to recover the funds given to Pinochet by providing $8 million to Garces’s Allende Foundation in Madrid; Albritton paid an additional $1 million out of his personal funds. Garces pledged to redistribute the $9 million to Chilean victims of Pinochet’s repression.

51.  Shortly thereafter, on September 16, 2004, Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón followed suit, adding to the charges of genocide, terrorism, and torture against Pinochet the offenses of concealment of assets and money laundering in connection with the Pinochet accounts at Riggs Bank.

52.  Quoted in “Pinochet Daughter Is in Custody in Chile,” New York Times, January 29, 2006, sec. 1, Foreign Desk, p. 4.

53.  “New Spotlight on Pinochet: Probe Renews Push to Prosecute Ex-Dictator,” Washington Post, August 25, 2004.

54.  “Entrevista de Pinochet a canal de Miami desata pugna en familia del general (R),” La Tercera, November 25, 2003, available at www.icarito.cl/medio/articulo/0,0,3255_5664_44959735,00.html (accessed March 12, 2009).

55.  Interview with Judge Guzmán, December 10, 2004.

56.  Carolina Valenzuela, “Caso Cóndor: Juez Guzmán procesa a Pinochet,” El Mercurio Electrónica, December 13, 2004.

57.  “Pinochet Takes Responsibility for His Regime’s Actions,” EFE News Services, November 26, 2006.

58.  Ibid.

59.  “Former Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet Dies—News Sparks Violent Clashes Between Opponents, Police,” Guelph Mercury (Ontario, Canada), December 11, 2006.

60.  “Pinochet to Be Buried Without State Funeral, Mourning,” Agence France-Presse, December 11, 2006.

61.  “Bachelet Calls on Army to Punish Pinochet Grandson for Remarks,” Agence France-Presse, December 13, 2006.

62.  Associated Press, “Army Ousts Pinochet’s Kin,” New York Times, December 14, 2006, sec. A, p. 27, col. 6.

63.  “Pinochet Grandson Kicked Out of Military over Funeral,” Deutsche Press-Agentur, December 14, 2006.

64.  “Pinochet’s Plea from the Grave,” Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), December 26, 2006.

65.  “Pinochet’s Posthumous Letter Fails to Impress,” EFE News Service, December 26, 2006.

66.  “Pinochet Justifies Coup from Grave,” Yorkshire Post (UK), December 26, 2006.

67.  These statistics are taken from the Web site of the leading database on legal accountability in Chile, Observatorio Derechos Humanos, in March 2013. See www.icso.cl/observatorio-derechos-humanos/cifras-causas-case-statistics.

68.  Alexei Barrionuevo, “6 Accused in 1982 Poisoning Death of Chilean Leader,” New York Times, December 7, 2009.

69.  After more than a year, in October 2002, the State Department finally submitted a lengthy diplomatic note that answered the questions Guzmán had posed to Kissinger.

70.  U.S. Embassy, cable, “Consul General’s Meeting with Judge Investigating Weisfeiler Case,” December 5, 2005.

71.  For comprehensive information on the Weisfeiler case, see the Web site created by Olga Weisfeiler: www.boris.weisfeiler.com.

72.  In November 2002, Helms died at the age of eighty-nine. The suit was amended and refiled by the attorney for the Schneider family, Michael Tigar Esq., on November 12, 2002, as Civil Action No. 1: 01-CV-01902. Quotes are drawn from the second filing.

73.  This suit was brought by ten Chilean survivors and families of victims of torture, disappearance, and murder, as well as the family of Spanish economist Carmelo Soria, tortured to death by DINA agents in the house of Michael Townley. Along with Kissinger, Townley was named as a defendant. See U.S. District Court for the District of Colombia, case number 1:02CV02240, p.3. This legal action was also filed by Michael Tigar Esq.

74.  See CIA general counsel John Warner’s memo to the CIA assistant director, “Discussions with Phil Buchen and James Wilderotter and Resulting Requests,” June 25, 1975.

75.  Sarah Anderson, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, deserves credit for coining this new verb as part of the language of the human rights movement.

76.  See the article “Barrado no Brasil” in the April 2002 issue of the Brazilian magazine Revista Epoca.

77.  Bill Press, then cohost of Crossfire, with Robert Novak, posed this question to Kissinger. He responded by declaring that “it never happened” and then proceeded to blame the idea to block Allende’s inauguration on former ambassador Edward Korry. As Kissinger knew, both in cables and in a personal meeting between Korry, Kissinger, and Nixon, the ambassador had adamantly opposed U.S. support for military coup plotting and had been kept in the dark about Track II, which Kissinger oversaw. See Chapter 1.

78.  See The News Hour with Jim Lehrer transcript, “Pursuing the Past,” February 20, 2001.

79.  Valdes spoke on a Latin American Studies Association panel, hosted by this author, on the Clinton administration’s Chile Declassification project.

80.  Tyson’s remarks were reported in a State Department cable, “Human Rights Commission: Agenda Item 5, Chile,” March 9, 1977.

81.  Interview with Theodore Piccone, June 9, 2002.

82.  “Gabriella” was interviewed by Patricio Guzmán for his movie The Pinochet Case. In the final moment of the film, she states: “I believe that the strength of memory will help us heal. That’s why it is so important to establish a collective memory, in order to live now and build the future.”