so that the USG [United States government] and American hand be well hidden.”49
For months, the CIA had been sounding out senior Chilean military officers on the issue of a coup, promising extensive help to any who agreed to participate. The agency’s operatives soon discovered that the main obstacle was the commander in chief of the army, General Rene Schneider, who represented what the CIA called “the apolitical, constitution-oriented inertia of the Chilean military.”50 Therefore, the CIA set out to find and arm dissident Chilean forces who would assassinate him. One group it approached asked for submachine guns, ammunition, and $50,000 to do the job, and the agency obliged, shipping the weapons from Washington to Santiago in the regular diplomatic pouch.51 Local CIA agents then delivered them to the plotters at 2 a.m. on October 22, 1970; at 8 a.m. the assassins surrounded General Schneider’s chauffeur-driven car, knocked out the rear window, and fatally wounded him. He died in a hospital three days later.
The CIA went to great lengths to cover its tracks, including paying hush money to the conspirators and driving to a general’s home to retrieve the guns they had given him. Colonel Paul Wimert, the military attache in the U.S. embassy in Santiago, had to pistol-whip the general to force him to comply.52 The agency then dumped the machine guns in the ocean to ensure that they could not be traced back to the U.S. government.
But Washington and the CIA had overplayed their hands. “Far from fostering a coup climate,” Peter Kornbluh, the chief Chilean specialist at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., writes, “the Schneider shooting produced an overwhelming public and political repudiation of violence and a clear reaffirmation of Chile’s civil, constitutional tradition.”53 The Chilean Congress voted 153 to 57 to ratify Allende as president, with all seventy-four senators and congressmen from the Christian Democratic Party voting with Allende’s own party. This result did not, however, even begin to slow down Washington’s venomous campaign. For the next three years, the Nixon administration tried in every way to undermine Allende by producing economic chaos in Chile, and the CIA worked tirelessly to find a suitable general to put in power. They finally identified a likely candidate in the summer of 1971—the cruel, ruthless, and corrupt General Augusto Pinochet.
The Chilean military under Pinochet finally moved against Allende on “the other 9/11”—September 11, 1973. During the attack on La Moneda, the presidential palace, Pinochet’s forces offered Allende an airplane to fly him and his family into exile. (Pinochet was taped giving radio instructions to his troops, in which he says, “That plane will never land.”54) Allende apparently took his own life rather than agreeing to any offer or allowing himself to be captured. He was found dead of gunshot wounds in his office around 2 p.m. on September 11.
Thus began Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship and reign of terror—sponsored and paid for by the U.S. government. During this period, the Chilean military was responsible for the murder, disappearance, or death by torture of some 3,197 citizens, according to the postdictatorship
Pinochet’s major instrument of oppression was the army’s Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), headed by Colonel Manuel Contreras. In addition to carrying out fierce repression within Chile, Contreras was the creator of Operation Condor, which a top-secret CIA report describes laconically as “a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.”56 It was, in fact, a conspiracy among the intelligence services of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia, subsequently joined by Brazil, and backed by the Nixon administration, to hunt down and assassinate leftists within these countries and, in particular, those living abroad in exile. Kornbluh describes Condor as “the most sinister state-sponsored terrorist network in the Western hemisphere, if not in the world.”57 John Dinges, a Columbia University professor and author of
Among its trademark atrocities were the car-bomb killings of the exiled general Carlos Prats and his wife—Prats had been General Schneider’s successor—in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974, and of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to Washington and later foreign minister, and his twenty-six-year-old American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, on a street in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1976. Both assassinations were carried out by the most famous member of DINA’s foreign branch, Michael Vernon Townley, an American born in Waterloo, Iowa. The killing of Letelier and an American citizen in the nation’s capital was one of the most flagrant acts of international terrorism carried out in the United States prior to September 11, 2001. It set off a furious FBI investigation that ultimately led Chile to turn over Townley, who confessed to his role in the crime. During this period, the CIA was notoriously passive, lacking all signs of interest in the Letelier case—even though on August 25, 1975, the agency had hosted a luncheon for Colonel Contreras in Washington and that same year put him on its payroll, making a personal payment to him of $5,000.59 The CIA has, to date, never been directly connected to the Letelier murder, but many of the most critical documents about the case remain secret and many questions remain about the full scope of the agency’s role in Chilean politics.
In reaction to the Letelier case, the Carter administration imposed sanctions on Chile, but these were quickly lifted when Ronald Reagan came to power. Pinochet’s regime was a particular favorite of both Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The end of the military dictatorship came only when the passive resistance of the people of Chile forced Pinochet to hold a plebiscite. On October 5, 1988, with 98 percent of eligible Chileans turning out, 54.7 percent voted to end the dictatorship. Pinochet left office and electoral politics were hesitantly restored, but the military thoroughly protected itself through various amnesty laws and other measures.
Pinochet was ultimately discredited by two events. On October 16, 1998, while he was visiting London for medical treatments, a British judge signed a warrant for his arrest after a Spanish judge sought his extradition to face trial for the torture of Spanish citizens in Chile. Held under house arrest near London for 503 days, he was finally returned to Chile, where the international controversy over the arrest of a former head of state for human rights violations made it increasingly impossible for the Chilean courts to continue to honor the immunity he had essentially granted himself.60 Public opinion in Chile finally turned decisively against him when a U.S. Senate committee, investigating money laundering by the Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C., revealed that between 1974 and 1997 various countries around the world had paid Pinochet some $12.3 million. In 1976, the U.S. government alone contributed some $3 million. Pinochet and his wife had siphoned off between $4 million and $8 million of these funds and hired the Riggs Bank to hide the money for them in secret, frequently moved accounts. On December 24, 2004, a Chilean special investigation into Pinochet’s wealth determined that between 1985 and 2002, he had actually hidden $16 million—twice the previously reported amount—at Riggs. The revelation that, with so much money stashed away, he was still receiving a monthly pension of $2,000 utterly destroyed his claim that he had done everything “for the good of Chile.”61
As in Chile, so in Afghanistan, the CIA record was filled with payoffs, murders, corrupt public officials in Washington, and support for local villains. The Afghan operation, according to several CIA partisans, was “the biggest, meanest, and far and away most successful CIA campaign in history.”62 That was the short-term view. As a matter of fact, the CIA’s covert operations in Afghanistan from 1979 to the victory of the Taliban in 1996 produced the worst instance of blowback among all of America’s secret wars—namely, al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Neither the United States nor the world can stand many more “victories” of that sort.
The Carter administration deliberately provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Christmas Eve 1979. In his 1996 memoir, former CIA director Robert Gates acknowledges that the American
