HOW HOT WAS CHILE?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000201460001-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: August 26, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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ARTICLE APPEARED tED NEW REPUBLIC
ON PAGE 26 August 1985
IOW HOT WAS CHILE?
The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende
by Nathaniel Davis
(Cornell University Press, 480 pp., $24.95)
Nathaniel Davis became United States
ambassador to Chile in October 1971.
He was still ambassador there at the
time of the Pinochet coup, almost two
years later, on September 11, 1973. On
Friday, September 7, Ambassador Da-
vis, who was visiting Washington, told
Henry Kissinger that "the odds are
in favor of a coup." Kissinger, in what
he calls a "transcript" of this discus-
sion, records the ambassador's state-
ment as having been part of his answer
to a question from Kissinger: "Will
there be a coup?" The ambassador's
recollection, however, is significantly
different. "As I entered the room, Kis-
singer said: 'So there's going to be a
coup in Chile!' " I have no difficulty in
believing the ambassador's version. It
would be characteristic of Kissinger to
want to show that he knew what was
going on, in that remote place, before
the "man on the spot" could start tell-
ing him. And also Kissinger probably
did know more about the impending
coup than his ambassador knew, or
wanted to know, or was expected to
know.
The timing of the ambassador's visit
to Washington, just at the moment
when the Chilean commanders were
reaching their decision to overthrow
Allende, has been interpreted by left-
wing writers as evidence of U.S. com-
plicity in the coup, or even of Washing-
ton's role in the masterminding of the
coup. Davis's thoughtful, well-written,
and valuable book rejects that interpre-
tation. His account carries conviction,
as far as his own personal role as am-
bassador was concerned. But that last is
a drastically limited perspective, which
skirts the general question of the many
possible forms of American involve-
ment, whether beneath the umbrella of
the U.S. Embassy or outside that
cover.
D AVIS convincingly shows that the
Allende government was in deep
trouble anyway, for economic and in-
ternal reasons, whether or not the Unit-
ed States had intervened. The sharp de-
cline in the world price of copper in
1971 would have been bad news for
whatever government was in office at
that time in Chile. Davis rightly rejects
the left-wing theory that the American
administration, with Chile in mind,
caused the copper slump. There were
too many other interests to be taken
into account for such a move to be prac-
tical, capitalist politics. Allende simply
had the bad luck of being the man who
had to answer for it when a matter
absolutely beyond his control went
wrong.
But his own policies and his own
rhetoric, and those of his party, made
things worse. There was popular sup-
port for "antiforeign" left-wing meas-
ures, such as nationalizing copper. But
the attempt to socialize what had been a
free economy provoked vigorous inter-
nal opposition, and rallied no support
outside the left wing of Allende's party,
Unidad Popular. Even in his last year,
Allende retained the electoral support
of the working class and over 40 per-
cent of the electorate, but that did
nothing to avert a series of damaging
strikes: a truckers' strike, a miners'
strike, a sailors' strike, and so on.
And the workers' paramilitary groups
that formed in the barrios seemed less
interested in defending or protecting
their elected government than in pro-
moting a Castro-type revolution, re-
placing Allende's democratic vision of
socialism. The rise of the paramilitaries,
and their impunity under Allende, did
much to prompt the army commanders
to think about a coup. And the coup,
when it came, was probably welcomed
by a majority of the population. It was
certainly welcomed by Eduardo Frei,
the leader of the Christian Democrats,
who won 56 percent of the popular
vote-as against 44 percent for Allen-
de's Unidad Popular-in the elections
for the Chamber of Deputies in March
1973, Chile's last free elections.
The attempt to carry out a major
social-democratic revolution on the ba-
sis of a little less than half the popular
vote was probably doomed in any case,
even without any form of American in-
tervention or encouragement. But was
there, in fact, American intervention or
encouragement? Davis accepts that-
before his ti me in Chile, and therefore
before the actual coup-there had been
a CIA plan encouraged bK Nixon,
known as -Trackk II," "to investigate a
coup d'etat before Allende could be
confirmed by the Chilean Con eKr ss in
Oc__tober j1970]." The plans went wrong
at that point, and Track II either was
abandoned or went underground. Da-
vis-a former assistant secretary of state
under President Johnson, and dovish
rather than hawkish by temperament-
likes to believe that Track II ideas had
been abandoned before he became am-
bassador in Santiago. "In Chile, to con-
clude," he writes, "I am reasonably
confident that nothing was done to me
like the Track II deception of [Davis's
predecessor] Ambassador [Edward M.1
Korry."
I don't know how much confidence
might be "reasonable" in such circum-
stances. After all, when Richard Helms
o t e IA, on Septem-
ber 15, 1970, took
down the instructions
from Nixon that were
developed into rack
II, one of Helms's nota-
tions read: "no involve-
ment of embassy."
That is not the kind yof
instruction that alters
with a change of am-
bassador. And Davis
acknowledges that, in
intelligence operations,
it is exceedingly hard to
know where intelli-
gence gathering ends,
and where incitement
begins. Davis acknowl-
edggs_that "the acquisi-
tion, of-information may
become consultation or
encouragement," but
goes on: "As the U.S.
Ambassador in Chile, I
was in no position to
tell the C.I.A. station to
stop_ collecting intelli-
encefor _fear of trans-
mitting encouragement
toplotters;__Ihad to
STAT
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04.0
trust the C.I.A.'s ability
to walk the line be-
tween intelligence col-
lecting and covert ac-
tion." Davis is a
humorous man, as well
as an intelligent one. I
doubt he could read
out that last sentence of
his in company and
keep a straight face.
Having read and
considered Davis's ac-
count, and that of the Church Commit-
tee and others, I am inclined to believe
that the involvement of the U.S. gov-
ernment in the development of the
events that led to the coup of 1973 ran
more or less as follows:
IN OCTOBER 1970 the CIA, impelled
by President Nixon, tried to instigate
an instant coup against Allende. This
attempt failed, because of the "wait and
see" attitude of the Chilean generals.
After that, the U.S. administration,
faute de mieux, adopted a policy
of leaving Allende enough rope to
hang himself. Money from American
sources-both private and official-was
available to the many varieties of Chil-
ean malcontents. As for the generals,
they knew, from October 1970 on, that
an anti-Allende coup would be wel-
come in Washington. The "intelligence-
gathering" CIA officers who were in
touch with the generals did not have
to keep on inciting their interlocutors
explicitly in the direction of a coup.
All they had to do was to refrain
from dissipating the impression that a
coup, undertaken in the generals' own
good time, would still be welcome in
Washington.
The generals did not carry out the
coup because it would be welcome in
Washington, and they might well have
carried it out even if it had been unwel-
come in Washington. But the knowl-
edge that it would be welcome encour-
aged the more cautious among the
generals. It suggested that the path of
the postcoup regime could be made a
lot smoother than Allende's had been.
That the CIA officials, in quietly keep-
ing coup-mindedness on the simmer
among the generals, had the appro_v_al
of Washington is hardly open to serious
doubt. Even Davis, concerned as he is
to maintain the "clean hands" of his
own ambassadorial term, occasionally
allows the Machiavellian realities to
come through. At one point he briefly
considers whether, realizing as he did
the imminent probability of a coup, he
ought to have warned President Allen-
de of what was afoot. Davis goes on:
"Nobody ever contacted me about the
possibility of warning Allende; in fact,
I received no instructions at all
on the subject. Had I proposed such an
initiative, my Washington superiors
would no doubt have concluded that I
had gone around the bend."
Davis suggests that he himself, with
his dovish inclinations and record, was
?a slightly incongruous 'chosen instru-
ment' for Richard Nixon's Chilean poli-
cy" Not really. The ambassador and
the embassy were only a part of Nixon's
Chilean policy-the respectable part,
Nixon wanted a coup in Chile. He had
conveyed the message, and the gener-
als had filed it for reference and for pos-
sible action. Once the message had
been conveyed, however, what Nixon
most wanted from the embassy was
"noninvolvement" and avoidance of
"compromising acts." Ambassador Da-
vis was an entirely appropriate instru-
ment for that aspect of Nixon's policy.
American covert intervention was, 1be-
lieve, significantly stronger and more
sustained than Davis seeks to suggest,
or wishes to believe. Still, I don't be-
lieve the ultimate result in Chile would
have been different if the United States
had never engaged in covert interven-
tion at all.
CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN
Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Siege: An
Outsider Looks at Zionism will be pub-
lished by Simon and Schuster next
spring.
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