On September 12, 1973, Henry Kissinger convened a special committee at the White House—the Washington Special Actions Group—to speed U.S. assistance to the new military regime in Chile. Known for his wit, Kissinger opened the meeting with a cruel joke about the death of Chile’s constitutional president during the violent coup: President Richard Nixon, he said in jest, “is worried we might want to send someone to [Salvador] Allende’s funeral. I said I didn’t believe we were considering that,” he told his aides. “No, not unless you want to go,” one of them joked in response.
Now, the world is preparing for Kissinger’s own funeral. Tributes have poured in for the legendary former national security advisor and Secretary of State who died on November 29 at the age of 100. When his memorial service is held, Kissinger will be hailed as a “great statesman” and a master geopolitical strategist whose diplomatic skills brought détente with the Soviet Union, an opening of relations with China, and a partial, temporary peace in the Middle East.
The whitewashing of the dark side of his controversial legacy will exclude the paper trail of his proven role in prolonging the war in Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, and his utter disdain for human rights. He gave the green light to massacres in East Timor and Pakistan, and to the “dirty war” of torture, murder, and disappearance waged by the military in Argentina.
And, of course, he played a pivotal role in the denouement of democracy and the advent of dictatorship in Chile.
For all the crimes against humanity for which Kissinger stands accused, Chile will always be the Achilles’ Heel of his legacy. That is because the voluminous historical record—formerly classified memoranda, meeting summaries, and telephone transcripts that capture Kissinger’s own words, arguments, and policies for posterity—leaves no doubt that he was the architect of U.S. efforts to destabilize Chilean democracy and the enabler-in-chief of the barbaric military regime led by General Augusto Pinochet.
Consider Kissinger’s activities even before Chilean President Salvador Allende was inaugurated:
Following Allende’s narrow election on September 4, 1970, declassified telephone transcripts show that Kissinger mobilized the Central Intelligence Agency to be ready to block the Socialist leader’s ascension to the presidency. “We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger told CIA Director Richard Helms on September 12, 1970, only eight days after the election.
Kissinger personally welcomed Chilean media mogul Agustín Edwards to the White House. He made sure Edwards met personally with CIA director Helms to provide a detailed briefing on potential allies for a preemptive coup in Chile before Allende’s November 3, 1970, inauguration. On September 15, 1970, Kissinger held a private breakfast with Edwards at 8 a.m., and then ushering him into the Oval Office for a face-to-face meeting with Nixon, at 9:15 a.m. At 3:45 p.m. that afternoon, with Kissinger at his side, Nixon ordered Helms to “save Chile” by fomenting a coup to block Allende’s inauguration.
Acting on Nixon’s orders, the CIA launched “Project FUBELT” to create a “coup climate” in Chile. Agency officials reported directly to Kissinger’s office on the progress of that covert program which resulted in the CIA-assisted assassination of the pro-constitution commander of Chile’s armed forces, General Rene Schneider, as the catalyst for a coup.
As General Schneider lay dying from gunshots fired by the coup plotters, Kissinger briefed Nixon on the failure of the operation. “There’s been a turn for the worse,” Kissinger explained, referring to the Schneider assassination, “but it hasn’t triggered anything else. The next move should have been a government takeover, but that hasn’t happened.” The plotters’ failure to follow through with the coup, Kissinger told the President, was because the Chilean military was “a pretty incompetent bunch.”
And that was only the beginning of Kissinger’s modern-day Machiavellianism in Chile.
Courtesy of the National Security Archive
Declassified CIA memo from September 1970.
After Allende’s inauguration, Kissinger led the effort to destabilize the new Chilean government. He concocted a novel “domino theory” of electoral socialism: A successful Allende government, Kissinger lobbied Nixon in a top secret options memo, would create an “insidious model effect” on other nations in Latin America and Europe. Therefore, the United States had to aggressively assure that Chile’s experiment in the peaceful path to socialism ended in failure.
Indeed, Kissinger personally convinced the President to reject the State Department’s position that Washington could establish a modus vivendi with Allende, and to authorize clandestine intervention to “intensify Allende’s problems so that at a minimum he may fail or be forced to limit his aims, and at a maximum might create conditions in which collapse or overthrow might be feasible,” as Kissinger’s talking points called for him to tell the National Security Council, three days after Allende’s inauguration.
After Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military on September 11, 1973, Kissinger told Nixon that the United States had, in fact, “created the conditions as great as possible” for the coup. The two then commiserated that they were not getting due credit for this Cold War accomplishment. The press should be “celebrating,” Kissinger noted. “[I]n the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes.”
History records that Kissinger successfully designed a U.S. policy to destabilize Chile’s constitutional government. But once General Augusto Pinochet’s forces violently took power, as the declassified documents demonstrate conclusively, Kissinger went further by helping to consolidate the regime. “I think we should understand our policy—that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was,” he told his deputies as they reported to him on the human rights atrocities being committed in the weeks following the coup.
“A documented case can be made for the proposition that the current regime in Chile is militaristic, fascistic, tyrannical, and murderous,” one State Department memo bluntly argued in dissent of Kissinger’s policies of embracing the dictatorship. Kissinger brushed those realities aside.
Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger in June 1976 in Santiago, Chile.
In February 1974, he dispatched CIA deputy director Vernon Walters on a secret mission to meet Pinochet in Santiago, and offer him “our friendship and support,” as well as assistance “in a discreet way.” In a top secret cable, Walters reported back to Kissinger that Pinochet “was very happy to hear this,” and used the opportunity to request CIA support for the new Chilean secret police agency known as DINA.
The CIA granted that request. A team of CIA intelligence instructors spent several months in Chile in the spring of 1974 aiding DINA’s development into a ruthless and repressive intelligence agency. DINA director Colonel Manuel Contreras was invited to visit CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia; the CIA even briefly put him on their clandestine payroll in mid-1975.
A year later, Kissinger traveled to Santiago and met with Pinochet. He ignored forceful advice from his top aides on Latin America to directly pressure the dictator to end human rights violations and return Chile to civilian rule. “We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger said as he complimented Pinochet. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all leftwing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist.” (As if to validate Kissinger’s willingness to disregard his real sins, three months later Pinochet would dispatch a death squad of secret police agents to Washington, D.C., to assassinate his leading international critic, Orlando Letelier, with a car bomb.)
“A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his profound moral misery,” Chile’s ambassador to Washington, Juan Gabriel Valdes, tweeted last week.
Indeed, if there is one individual who is most accountable for the assault by the United States on Chile’s right to self-determination, the sabotage of Chile’s constitutional order, and support for a debased, ruthless regime of repression, the finger of history points toward Henry Kissinger. With his death, Kissinger has evaded any legal reckoning for his many crimes against humanity. But in Chile, the judgment of history will render his final condemnation.