Chile, the CIA and the Cold War a Transatlantic Perspective
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Series Editors: Richard J. Aldrich, Rory Cormac, Michael S. Goodman and Hugh Wilford This series explores the full spectrum of spying and secret warfare in a globalised world Intelligence has changed. Secret service is no longer just about spying or passively watching a target. Espionage chiefs now command secret armies and legions of cyber warriors who can quietly shape international relations itself. Intelligence actively supports diplomacy, peacekeeping and warfare: the entire spectrum of security activities. As traditional inter- state wars become more costly, covert action, black propaganda and other forms of secret interventionism become more important. This ranges from proxy warfare to covert action; from targeted killing to disruption activity. Meanwhile, surveillance permeates communications to the point where many feel there is little privacy. Intelligence, and the accelerating technology that surrounds it, have never been more important for the citizen and the state. Titles in the Intelligence, Surveillance and Secret Warfare series include: Published: The Arab World and Western Intelligence: Analysing the Middle East, 1956–1981 Dina Rezk The Twilight of the British Empire: British Intelligence and Counter-Subversion in the Middle East, 1948–63 Chikara Hashimoto Chile, the CIA and the Cold War: A Transatlantic Perspective James Lockhart Forthcoming: Outsourcing US Intelligence: Private Contractors and Government Accountability Damien Van Puyvelde The Snowden Era on Screen: Signals Intelligence and Digital Surveillance James Smith The Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley: Code Name ‘Grin’ Clive Jones The Problem of Secret Intelligence Kjetil Anders Hatlebrekke The CIA and the Pursuit of Security: History, Documents and Contexts Hew Dylan http://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-intelligence-surveillance-and-secret-warfare .html 66037_Lockhart.indd037_Lockhart.indd iiii 117/04/197/04/19 1:151:15 PPMM Chile, the CIA and the Cold War A Transatlantic Perspective James Lockhart 66037_Lockhart.indd037_Lockhart.indd iiiiii 117/04/197/04/19 1:151:15 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © James Lockhart, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/1 3 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (Dataconnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3561 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3562 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3563 5 (epub) The right of James Lockhart to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66037_Lockhart.indd037_Lockhart.indd iivv 117/04/197/04/19 1:151:15 PPMM Contents Introduction 1 1. The England of South America 19 2. Chilean Anticommunism 43 3. Gabriel González Videla and the Transatlantic Origins of the Cold War 73 4. La Ley Maldita: The Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy 98 5. The Frei Administration 126 6. The Viaux Movement 167 7. Plan Alfa 187 8. Cool and Correct 214 9. Jefe de la Plaza: The Rise of Augusto Pinochet 233 Conclusion 258 Select Bibliography 262 Index 271 66037_Lockhart.indd037_Lockhart.indd v 117/04/197/04/19 1:151:15 PPMM Introduction At 8:15 on Thursday morning, 22 October 1970, Gen. René Schneider, chief of staff of the Chilean army, left his residence in Las Condes for the Ministry of Defense in downtown Santiago. At 8:17, fi ve to eight assailants in four cars crashed into the general’s offi - cial Mercedes. They dashed to Schneider’s position with small arms and sledgehammers, intending to abduct him. When the general reached for his sidearm to fi ght back, they panicked, shooting him in his neck, chest, and arm. Then they fl ed in confusion. Schneider’s stunned driver rushed him to the military hospital in Providencia, where he died on the operating table three days later.1 A Chilean military court named retired Brig. Gen. Roberto Viaux responsible for the attack, sentencing him to twenty years in prison and exile. Viaux’s movement included a handful of high-ranking Christian Democratic Party (PDC) offi cials in the outgoing Frei administration (1964–70) and several of the most senior offi cers within the armed forces and the Carabineros, the national police. Members of an anticommunist organization called El Movimiento Cívico Patria y Libertad were almost certainly working with Viaux, although their precise relationship remains, as an American ambas- sador characterized it, “fuzzy.”2 Viaux had intended the kidnapping to serve as a pretext to preempt the Chilean congress’s anticipated election of Salvador Allende (1970–3) as president. As the retired general explained, because Allende’s coalition included the Chilean Communist Party (PCCh), which had long cultivated close relations with the Soviet Union (USSR), and because he saw President Eduardo Frei as an indecisive “Chilean Kerensky,” he believed that Chile was in imminent danger and felt compelled to act. He would never 1 66037_Lockhart.indd037_Lockhart.indd 1 117/04/197/04/19 1:151:15 PPMM Chile, the CIA and the Cold War accept “that my Chile should become dependent on a foreign power and that my people become slaves . to international communism.”3 Viaux had been in contact with the Nixon administration (1969–74) through National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Santiago Station for several weeks. Kissinger and the Agency knew some of his plans. Indeed, they had encouraged him while offering fi nancial support to Patria y Libertad. Viaux called an emergency meeting with his CIA liaison after the assault against Schneider. He asked the chief of station to get the ambassador to tell Frei that the attack had represented a Soviet move against Chile. Members of his movement in the cabinet and armed services would follow this up by advising the president to declare a state of emergency, which would allow them to assume control fi rst of the capital and then the government. The chief of station refused to do this, Frei remained silent, and Allende was inaugurated shortly thereafter.4 For these and other reasons, historians have tended to focus on the Nixon administration and the Agency when reconstructing Chile’s Cold War experience, particularly the coup that overthrew the Allende government on 11 September 1973. Indeed, ques- tions concerning the nature, extent, and effectiveness of American involvement in this coup still infl uence the production of histori- cal knowledge. Journalists, historians and political scientists, law- yers, senators, congressmen, and courts have often assumed that the United States’ intelligence community played the decisive part. Some claim that US offi cials directed the Chilean armed forces, even their tactical communications. Others think that American pilots fl ew the Hawker Hunters that struck the presidential pal- ace. Still others hold Kissinger and intelligence offi cers responsible for Allende’s death, a suicide that they approach as an assassina- tion, execution, or some other malicious act. Chileans even asked President Barack Obama (2009–17) to accept responsibility and apologize for this coup when he visited Santiago in March 2011. Thus, historians and other writers have pored over the declassifi ed record seeking confi rmation of these and other allegations since the 1970s.5 2 66037_Lockhart.indd037_Lockhart.indd 2 117/04/197/04/19 1:151:15 PPMM Introduction Critics have characterized the literature that this produced as “axe-grinding in nature” and “a narrow historiography of blame.” As historian Kenneth Maxwell, while reviewing the National Secu- rity Archive’s Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File: A Declassifi ed Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, wrote, what is lacking in the forensic approach (and is a weakness of much writing on U.S. diplomatic history) is location in time and space. We see only the U.S. side of a story that is at least two-sided, if not multifaceted . Very little of the complex political and social history of Chile in the 1970s enters here; nor do we see the roles of many actors beyond the Chilean military, U.S. clandestine operatives, and their political masters.6 Kornbluh and the others’ shortcomings notwithstanding, they have revealed much of the American role in the coup. They showed how United States intervention exacerbated the human suffering that followed – which included more than 3,000 documented exe- cutions, and a much larger number of disappeared, imprisoned, tortured, and exiled people. Today, no one denies that this interven- tion contributed to, and worsened, Chile’s Cold War history.7 Meanwhile, some historians and political scientists have acknowl- edged Maxwell’s points and responded constructively. They remain attentive to American intervention, but they have also begun to decenter the narrative while exploring Chilean politics and history in an increasingly international context. This has enabled them to start to reframe and rebalance Chile’s Cold War experience. They began in an inter-American context and then gradually moved into a transatlantic one. The literature