From the current issue of Commentary magazine, and reprinted online at Front Page Magazine, here is an excellent article by Mark Falcoff on the role of Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration in the political affairs of Chile, from the election of Salvador Allende in 1970, to his ouster and the assumption of power by Augusto Pinochet in a 1973 coup.
While not denying Nixon's active attempts to involve the CIA in preventing the inauguration of the Marxist Allende following his election, nor minimizing the brutality of the Pinochet regime that followed, Falcoff corrects the perception created by Christopher Hitchens' book and a BBC movie, that the U.S. was complicit in the 1973 coup that ended Allende's government.
Falcoff notes that the Hitchens book and the BBC movie it inspired failed to utilize the primary source material on that era, the findings of the Congressional committee headed by Frank Church, no defender of Nixon to be sure:
The findings of the Church committee exonerate the administration of unlawful activity--a noteworthy fact in light of the circumstances that both the chairman and the majority of the members (and, even more, their staffs) were unremittingly hostile to the Nixon White House and anxious, if possible, to find embarrassing linkages between it and events in Chile.
There were, in fact, a couple of different CIA-hatched plots to assist in a coup in 1970 between the election of Allende and his officially taking power, but they were called off in advance as they were thought to be unworkable. Falcoff was given access to the complete archives of Kissinger's phone records prior to their imminent release to the public, and confirms through them that the administration had ended their efforts to mount a coup, and had instructed their contacts to desist:
As far as Kissinger (and, for that matter, the White House) was concerned, Viaux had been told to stand down, and that was presumably the end of active American coup-plotting. As Kissinger told Nixon by telephone on October 15, reporting on a meeting with Thomas Karamassines of the CIA's Western Hemisphere division, "This looks hopeless. I turned it off. Nothing would be worse than an abortive coup." The President responded, "Just tell him to do nothing." The next day, CIA headquarters cabled its station in Santiago that although "we are to continue to generate maximum pressure" toward a coup, "a Viaux coup . . . would fail" and Viaux should be warned "against precipitate action." The message was delivered through an intermediary, leaving the CIA with the pious hope that once its wishes had been made known, Viaux would respect them.
In fact, Kissinger's phone records during the time period in question shows that he was just slightly busy with a few other items on his plate:
In fact, during September and October 1970--which is to say, between the Chilean election and the congressional vote the telephone record reveals a Kissinger preoccupied with a full-blown Middle East crisis, Vietnam, a Soviet submarine base in Cuba, the Black September plane hijacking, Nixon's planned visit to Europe and to the Sixth Fleet, the defense budget, and the Pugwash conference on U.S.-Soviet relations, but with Chile only slightly. Thereafter, there is nothing at all until June 1973, when he and Nixon discuss a failed military revolt against Allende, and then no further references until after Pinochet's assumption of power with the September 11 coup.
The botched kidnapping of Allende's miltary commander-in-chief, Rene Schneider, which resulted in his murder, was carried out in defiance of U.S. instructions, and has been distorted by Hitchens to serve the "agenda" according to Falcoff:
Neither Hitchens's book nor the film upon which it is based takes note of a crucial fact: namely, that the Schneider debacle had precisely the opposite effect of what was desired by the CIA and the Nixon administration. It transformed its victim into a martyr of the "constitutionalist" traditions of the Chilean army; it encouraged other constitutionalist officers to support an orderly transfer of power to the new Allende administration; it brought General Carlos Prats, another officer of firm constitutionalist leanings, to the head of the army; and it discredited right-wing cabals both inside the army and out.It is strange that this outcome should go unremarked by critics who profess to care for Chile and who should presumably take comfort from it--but, given their invincible biases, perhaps it is not so strange after all.
As to the coup in 1973, the records show, and the Church investigation found, no culpability by the U.S. for what happened, despite the "conventional wisdom" that Nixon and Kissinger ordered and executed the plot;
What, then, brought about the September 11, 1973 coup? The real causes must he sought in the devastating collapse of the Chilean economy that took place during the Allende presidency, as well as in Chile's increasingly polarized political environment.......The truth is that every cat and dog in Chile knew a coup was coming at some point in September 1973, and so did Allende himself. The only questions were who would lead it, who would replace Allende, and what ideological tendency would prevail once the government was dissolved. During a private lunch with the president a few days before his departure into Argentine exile, General Prats himself warned Allende that he would be overthrown within the next ten days. When the president asked whether Prats's ministerial replacement, General Augusto Pinochet, would remain loyal, Prats said he thought so but that the issue was irrelevant. "Even the most constitutionalist of officers," he later recalled telling the president in this most bizarre of exchanges, "will understand that a division within the armed forces would mean civil war." In effect, officers would either respect the decision of the coup-makers or be swept aside.[2]
Contrary, then, to what the film The Trials of Henry Kissinger suggests, there was no straight line between the events of 1970 and the coup of 1973. Rather, conscious choices by Allende and his own people drove the military into action that it would normally have been disinclined to carry out. This was certainly the impression conveyed, for example, by a U.S. naval attache who cabled a few days after the coup that the "decision to remove the Allende government was made with extreme reluctance and only after the deepest soul-searching by all concerned."
As for President Nixon, he was evidently pleased--how could he not have been?--but exhibited no sense of complicity with the coup-makers themselves. As he said on the phone to Kissinger on September 16, "Well, we didn't--as you know--our hand doesn't show on this one though." To which Kissinger replied, "We didn't do it."
Much more detail in the article. Read it all.
Posted by dan at November 10, 2003 09:15 PM