The unrepentant Pinochet–now 87 and living in Chile, immune from prosecution because of failing health–maintains that he saved his country from communism. He has left his surviving victims to go after the regime’s minions, and to fight for the excavation of their own history. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the coup, that history is finally coming to light, thanks to Peter Kornbluh’s remarkable reconstruction of the secret U.S. foreign policy that transformed Chile into a dictatorship. In “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability” (551 pages. The New Press), Kornbluh draws on hundreds of CIA documents, White House transcripts and internal State Department reports to show definitively that Washington spurred the fall of Allende, destroyed Chilean democracy and bolstered a regime that engaged in state terrorism both at home and abroad.
Readers can learn about President Richard Nixon and his National Security Council discussing how to bring Allende down even before the Chilean leader was inaugurated in 1970. “Our main concern in Chile is the prospect that [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success,” Nixon said. In one disturbing scene, Nixon strikes his own palm in front of the U.S. ambassador. “That son of a bitch, that son of a bitch,” Nixon said. “Not you, Mr. Ambassador. It’s that son of a bitch Allende. We’re going to smash him.”
The book, which entailed four years of research into 24,000 declassified documents, includes a CIA report sent to Pinochet 48 hours after the coup, noting the agency’s intention to continue supporting the regime. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national-security adviser and the chief architect of U.S. policy in Chile, openly commiserated with the dictator–even though he knew that Pinochet’s regime was taking part in a series of international bombings to silence its enemies. “In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here,” Kissinger said, according to a State Department transcript. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.” The highest-profile crime committed by the Pinochet regime was the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier by a car bomb in Washington in 1976. Kornbluh shows that the U.S. government not only knew an assassination squad had been dispatched to the United States, but also labored to deflect suspicions away from Pinochet’s regime after the fact. Still, the writer–the director of the National Security Archive and an expert on declassified information about Iran, Cuba and elsewhere– says that key documents implicating Pinochet as the author of the Letelier assassination are among those that remain classified. “There are still many secrets,” he says. “But there are far fewer of them today.”
“The Pinochet File” is actually two distinct but intersecting books. The first is a narrative account of the Nixon administration’s involvement in Chile. Its mission was to make sure that Allende’s election didn’t serve as a model for leftist candidates elsewhere. The second consists of the reproduction of hundreds of salient intelligence documents released in 1999 and 2000 in response to requests by President Bill Clinton. Reading between the blackout lines, they provide a glimpse of the inner workings of a government engaged in dubious activities.
To some, it all sounds a little too familiar: Washington engaging in high-risk regime change, assassinations and unilateral aggression. “In the wake of Chile, there was a debate and a sense that we should put restrictions on this sort of thing,” says Kornbluh. As the United States seeks to extricate itself from Iraq, Americans would do well to bring Washington’s actions to light now. “The abuses of secrecy are as much a risk today as during the Nixon-Kissinger era,” he says.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged in February that the U.S. role in Chile “is not a part of American history that we are proud of.” It was as close as the government has come to acknowledging that Washington forsook more than its principles in Chile 30 years ago; soon afterward, others in the Bush administration backtracked on Powell’s behalf. On this sad anniversary, Kornbluh’s persuasive book goes a long way toward restaking those claims.
