Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

The 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, named after its authors, Senator Harold E. Hughes (Democrat from Iowa) and Representative Leo J. Ryan (Democrat from California), for the first time tried to enforce the CIAs accountability to the elected representatives of the people. It states that “No funds ... may be expended by or on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency for operations in foreign countries ... unless and until the President finds that each such operation is important to the national security of the United States.” The verb “finds” is the origin of the odd term “finding,” which is governmental argot for the document that the president now signs approving and setting into motion a covert operation. The law also stipulates that the president must give the appropriate committees of Congress “in a timely fashion” a description of each operation and its scope.

This law has not worked well. In the middle of the Reagan administration, members of Congress first read in the newspapers that, on orders of the president’s national security adviser, Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, CIA operatives were covertly and illegally selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran and using the funds thus obtained to finance a congressionally forbidden insurgency against the elected government of Nicaragua. This disaster led to much stronger demands for intelligence oversight, but the president and his secret army found numerous ways to get around such pressures. For example, in lieu of a specific finding, “worldwide findings” have given the CIA blanket authority to conduct certain types of unspecified covert operations—say, those against terrorists. Operations have also been “privatized” by getting foreign governments and U.S. corporations to pay for them, or kept totally hidden via “off the books” personnel and funds. To illustrate what the CIA does best, let us look briefly at its record in Chile, in Afghanistan, and in carrying out so-called extraordinary renditions.

CIA activities in Chile, ranging from the early 1960s to 1990, occurred in both the pre- and postaccountability eras. Before 1974, they were intended to overthrow the oldest and most stable democracy in Latin America, dating from the country’s independence in 1818, and replace it with “the vilest of Latin American dictators in recent history.”³⁷ Having to report to Congress had little effect on CIA operations in Chile. If findings were ever signed and passed to Capitol Hill, we have no record of them. What we do have is a vast archive of thousands of highly classified reports and cables from the Oval Office, the CIA, the National Security Council, the State Department, the American embassy in Santiago, and the FBI that the U.S. government was forced to declassify because of the blowback that the operations themselves generated, including lawsuits by Chilean torture victims and demands for the arrest and trial of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.³⁸

Chile was certainly not the first instance in which the United States government used its clandestine services to manipulate, undermine, or overthrow a fellow democracy. It had done so in many other places, including Italy in 1947-48, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1957-58, Brazil from 1961 to 1964, Greece from 1964 to 1974, South Korea from 1961 to 1987, and the Philippines in every year since it gained its independence from the United States in 1946. But Chile provides us with the first written record of a U.S. president ordering the overthrow of a democratically elected government—namely, the handwritten notes of CIA director Richard Helms reflecting the orders given to him by President Richard Nixon in the White House on September 15, 1970.³⁹ Even the heavily censored CIA documents released to the Church Committee in 1975 led Senator Church to produce his own definition of “covert action.” It is a “semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”⁴⁰

From the moment the Kennedy administration came to power in 1961 until the overthrow and death of Chile’s president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, the CIA spent some $12 million on a massive “black” propaganda campaign to support Allende’s primary political opponent, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, and to denigrate Allende as a stooge of the Soviet Union. In addition, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (which owned the Chilean telephone system) and other American-owned businesses in Chile gave the CIA an extra $1.5 million to help discredit Allende. ITT properties in Chile, including two Sheraton Hotels, were worth at least $153 million. In July 1970, two months before Allende was elected president, John McCone, director of central intelligence from 1961 to 1965 and in 1970 a member of the board of directors of ITT, set up an appointment with then DCI Richard Helms. He offered money and cooperation from ITT “for the purpose of assisting any [U.S.] government plan ... to stop Allende.” ITT presented a plan “aimed at inducing economic collapse” in Chile.⁴¹

In the 1964 election, the CIA directly underwrote more than half of Frei’s campaign expenses. It spent more than $2.6 million in support of the election of the Christian Democratic candidate. More sinister was the agency’s disinformation campaign, which it later held up as a model of how to do it. The Church Committee reported, “Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers, and wall painting. It was a ‘scare campaign,’ which relied heavily on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads and was directed especially to women.”⁴² The CIA placed radio spots that featured the sound of a machine gun, followed by a woman’s cry: “They have killed my child—the communists.” One poster, printed in the thousands, showed children with a hammer and sickle stamped on their foreheads. Juanita Castro, Fidel’s anticommunist sister, said on the radio, “If the Reds win in Chile, no type of religious activity will be possible.... Chilean mothers, I know you will not allow your children to be taken from you and sent to the Communist bloc, as in the case of Cuba.”⁴³

The CIA boasted that it produced and planted in various media around the world some 726 stories against an Allende presidency. Most of these appeared first in Latin American newspapers and were later reprinted in Chilean ones; some appeared in the CIA’s own secret outlets, which included Der Monat in Germany, Encounter in Britain, the Daily American of Rome, and the South Pacific Mail of Santiago. Some seeped into the New York Times and the Washington Post, including the idea that Allende was a paid agent of the USSR.⁴⁴ In 1964, these “dirty tricks” produced the desired results. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allende’s 39 percent, an unprecedented and almost statistically impossible outcome, given Chile’s multiparty electoral system. The targeted scare tactics worked well. While Chilean men voted for Allende by a plurality of more than 67,000, women gave Frei 469,000 more votes than Allende.⁴⁵ As a reward and an insurance policy, the U.S. government promptly began to pay off Frei. Under the U.S.’s Alliance for Progress, a scheme to prevent the spread of leftist views in Latin America, “Chile received more American aid per capita than just about any other country in the world—Vietnam excepted.”⁴⁶

The next presidential election was scheduled for September 4, 1970. Even though the CIA kept up its blistering disinformation campaign, Chilean voters had become warier of the increasingly preposterous American propaganda and its “false flag” agents who tried to convince Chilean business and military elites that “an Allende victory means violence and Stalinist repression.” As a matter of fact, there was no issue of potential Soviet influence in Chile. Allende was not a communist and, in any case, after he came to power in 1970 the Soviet Union wisely urged him to “put his relations with the United States in order.”⁴⁷ In August 1970, Henry Kissinger had ordered a special national intelligence estimate to answer the question “What would happen in the event of an Allende victory?” It concluded: “An Allende election carried no military, strategic, or regional threat to U.S. interests in security and stability.”⁴⁸

In the September 4 election, Allende finally won a plurality, but not a majority, of the vote. However, he confidently expected that on October 24 the Chilean Congress would choose him to be president—normal parliamentary practice.

In an attempt to prevent this, the Nixon White House and the CIA sprang into action. On October 16, 1970, CIA headquarters dispatched a secret “eyes only” cable to Henry Hecksher, the CIA Santiago station chief. The actual sender, presumably DCI Helms, is blacked out in the text. “It is firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely