WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY AND EDWARD KORRY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP09T00207R001000020024-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 24
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 9, 2011
• Sequence Number: 24
• Publication Date: September 29, 1974
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS. INC.
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM Firing Line
STATION WETA TV
PBS Network
DATE September 29, 1974 10:00 PM CITY Washington, D.C.
STAT
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY: The argument rages over the
role of the Central Intelligence Agency in" Chile during
the Allende years. Critics focus on two situations. The
first is the apparent contradiction. On the one hand, CIA
Director William Colby apparently testified in secret to
a congressional committee that the..CIA had been authorized
to spend up to $8 million to prevent Allende from being
inaugurated, and in the event he was inaugurated, to destabilize
his regime.
But meanwhile, two government officials had testified
before another committeeof Congress that the CIA had done
nothing to interfere in Chilean affairs. Now there is talk
of bringing action against these two officials, charging
them at least with contempt of Congress.
The other situation inflamed by the CIA-Chilean
development is the continuing question of the covert responsibilities
of the CIA. There are those who desire to punish the American
State Department officials, but mostly to deny to the CIA
any further license to engage in covert activity.
One of the Americans under fire is Edward Korry.
He was our ambassador to Chile during the critical years,
from 1967 through the election of Allende in 1970 to the
end of the first year of Allende's term in 1971. Mr. Korry
had been ambassador to Ethiopia, appointed there by President
Kennedy. He is, however, in real life a journalist.
A graduate of Washinqton & Lee with advanced training
in Harvard, he was a foreign correspondent with NBC, then
with United Press. Before being discovered by Kennedy,
he was European editor for Cowles Magazine. Since leaving
Chile, he has served as President of the Association of
American Publishers and as President of the United Nations
Association. He is now engaged in writing a book about
Chile.
O,j
I should like to begin by asking Mr. Korry whether
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON. 0. C. ? LOS ANGELES ? NEW YORK ? DETROIT ? NEW ENGLAND ? CHICAGO
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he acknowledges the truth of CIA Director William Colby's
revelations.
EDWARD KORRY: I should, I think, Mr. Buckley,
first cla4fy the point about the time period to which Mr.
Colby is referring. His testimony concerned 1970 to '73,
and in a letter to The New York Times he has also denied
that he ever used the term destabilization in his testimony.
I left Chile in October '71, more-than two years
before the end of this period. Therefore, I'm in no position
to. comment about that time over which the furor is going
on right now.
BUCKLEY: Excuse me, but there's some furor going
on about something that allegedly happened while you were
there.
KORRY: Right. Now as far as to what I testified --
and the Senate subcommittee has now, told the-full Foreign
Relations Committee that I testified truthfully and that
the only thing they accused me --:that is, the staff accuses
hie of having done -- is refusing to testify as to the specific
actions that the CIA took in Chile, or as to the instructions
that I got from the Executive Branch of the government while
ambassador.
I did not deny in my testimony that there was
an anti-Communist CIA program in Chile in 1970. They cited
a specific amount. I said simply that I was under oath
not to speak about the specifics of any CIA program, that
that was the unique obligation of the Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency. And then they called the then-Director,
Mr. Helms, to testify.
Those are the objective facts.
BUCKLEY: Well, there is nothing, so far as I
know, that is grounds for believing that William Colby reported
falsely to this congressional committee. It seems to me
for him to have reported falsely, something of this nature
would be an admission against -- very much against [unintelli-
gible] interests, and therefore one simply proceeds on the
assumption that while you were ambassador, the CIA was spending
money trying to bribe members of the Senate in Chile to
get them to cast their votes against Allende.
?.KORRY: No. Excuse me. I testified under oath,
and I repeat it now, and I call your attention to the fact
that the subcommittee has now concluded that I told the
truth, that there was no attempt at any time to bribe any
member of the Chilean Congress.
Now the reason that I could testify to that effect
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and the reason that I do not challenge anything that Mr.
Colby may have said -- and I have no idea what he actually
said, because Mr. Harrington, the member of the Congress
from Massachusetts, has only referred to what he read from
the transcript but was not allowed to take notes about,
so his errors may be unavoidable due to the complexity of
the testimony by Mr. Colby. But in any event, whatever
may have been authorized by the so-called 40 Committee for
the CIA to do, it was not done insofar as it applied to
any bribery attempt of the Chilean Congress.
Now the reason for this distinction is that the
Chilean Congress was going to meet in the last week of October
of 1971 to decide whether to confirm Mr. Allende...
BUCKLEY: '70.
KORRY: Of '70, I beg your pardon, of 1970 --
to decide whether to confirm Dr. Allende's election as President
or to indulge in the constitutional alternative that they
have to select the runner-up.
In late September of that year, a month before
that vote, I reported to Washington that there was no possibility
of any kind that Dr. Allende would not be confirmed as President,
that I wanted to return to Washington to discuss what policy
we should carry out with Dr. Allende as President of Chile,
and I further warned gratuitously that if anyone in Washington
were to be thinking for any reason of a United States intervention,
direct or indirect, to bar Allende from the presidency,
they should be fully aware that the consequences would be
worse than the Bay of Pigs, both in Chile and in the United
States.
BUCKLEY: Okay. Now what that tells us is that
you were opposed to any attempt to prevent the installation
of Allende. .ghat it doesn't quite tell us is whether your
advice was followed.
KORRY: No. I would say that if that is the impression
I give, I wish to correct it. I was dead set against Dr.
Allende as a candidate and everything that he stood for.
And I must say that the professionals in the embassy, the
foreign service officers, and I were in total unanimous
agreement as to what Allende would do as President of Chile
and what its effects would be on United States interests,
particularly outside of Chile and outside of Latin America.
Our reports of that period looked more like a description
written after the fact, after the death of Allende than
as a forecast, if read today.
And Dr. Allende knew my position. I discussed
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it with him after he became President, as a matter of fact.
I was against an attempt by the United States to get itself
involved in an intervention against Allende to keep him
out of office. I would have welcomed -- and I testified
to this before the Senate subcommittee and I told any American
newspaperman who was there at the time -- I would have gladly
welcomed the Chilean Congress voting to keep him out of
office or the Chilean people doing whatever they wished.
I was against the United States doing it.
BUCKLEY: Mr. Korry, you speak with your renowned
lucidity on all matters, but you haven't yet told me whether
you had personal knowledge that the CIA didn't attempt to
accomplish that which you would not have attempted to accomplish
but which you would have welcomed the happening of.
KORRY: In my time?
BUCKLEY: Yeah.
KORRY: No.
BUCKLEY: Okay. Your answer is no what?
KORRY: Well, I my time I have knowledge that
they did not try.
BUCKLEY: You have knowledge that they did not
try.
KORRY: To the best of my reportorial capacity...
BUCKLEY: Okay. That's very important.
KORRY: ..to find out, I have knowledge that
in my time they did not try.
BUCKLEY: Okay. That leaves three alternative
possibilities: Colby said something which in fact was not
true, not intending it, but because his memory slipped.
Or what he said was misreported by Michael Harrington when
Michael Harrington read the transcript and then relied on
his memory. Or they actually sent down a CIA agent and
said, "For God's sake, don't tell Ambassador Korry what
you're up to, but try slipping a few hundred grand to the
senators."
KORRY: We did not try that. It wasn't tried...
BUCKLEY: You said to the best of your reportorial
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ability...
KORRY: No, no, but the Senate subcommittee has
now, in its wisdom, decided that there is a distinct difference
between authorizing funds and deciding to spend them or
not to spend them. What I am saying is that...
BUCKLEY: That we did authorize them, but didn't
spend them.
KORRY: Did not spend them.
BUCKLEY: Ah. Okay.
KORRY: Never did.
BUCKLEY: Okay.
KORRY: That's the point -- for that purpose.
BUCKLEY: The 40 Committee, as you know, is not
the most widely known outfit in America, but it is an organization,
I take it, that has the authority to do things like that.
It has the authority to say, "Slip this hot American money
into the hands of foreign legislators and see if we can't
get them to do what we want to do." Right?
KORRY: Uh-huh.
BUCKLEY: Now who set up the 40 Committee?
KORRY: Well, the 40 Committee was in existence,
under a different name, when I came into government under
President Kennedy.
BUCKLEY: What was it called then?
KORRY: I am not certain of this, but the last
label that it had before it became the 40 Committee, I think,
was the 303 Committee.
BUCKLEY: Yeah. Now before the 303 Committee
it was called what?
KORRY: I'm not certain.
BUCKLEY: Aha. Now the purpose of the 40 Committee,
I take it, is to remove from the exclusive authority of
the CIA decisions as sensitive as those we're now discussing,
right?
KORRY: That is correct.
BUCKLEY: So who belongs in the 40 Committee?
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KORRY: Well, at the time that I was in Chile,
Dr. Kissinger, as the effective head of the National...
BUCKLEY: Ex officio, or because he was Kissinger?
KORRY: Because he was the National Security Council
BUCKLEY: Ex officio, uh-huh. So Bundy would
have been his predecessor.
KORRY: Bundy would have been his predecessor.
But let me say that prior to my time in Chile and throughout
my 4 1/2-plus, 4 1/2 years in Ethiopia, I didn't know of
the existence of it. So I would not really be in a position
to tell you who was on it or not at that time.
Secondly, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, the Secretary of Defense, through his undersecretary,
the Secretary of State, through his undersecretary, the
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. And Mr. Kennedy
had his brother Robert, as Attorney.. General, attend it.
And Mister...
BUCKLEY: Is it up to the President to decide
who sits in the 40 Committee?
KORRY: I believe he has that...'
BUCKLEY: It's not a statutory committee, then.
KORRY: I do not think so.
BUCKLEY: Aha. Are there any representatives
of the Congress in it?
KORRY: None.
BUCKLEY: Aha. Now do I understand, then, that --
suppose you, surveying the Allende situation, had gone back
to Washington, as in fact you did, and suppose you had said,
"The installation of Allende is so close that there's really
just one or two guys who can make the difference. And since
we all desire that Allende should be frustrated, let's have
a whack at these two guys."
We all know, for instance, that Willy Brandt most
probably bribed the critical member of the legislature in
West Germany, resulting in his becoming Prime Minister.
This seems to be now an accepted story. So that it isn't
all that unusual.
I'm asking you to reflect on the general question
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of-'the ethics of using American money thus to interfere
in the development of the politics of another country.
KORRY: The principle had been well established
and practiced for so many years that it was taken as a matter
of course. One of the difficulties in trying to arrive
at an objective view of the issue today is to try to apply
the values of the period to the event rather than the hindsight
values to that event.
When I was being briefed to go to Chile in 1967
in October, September or October 1967, I was told, not asked,
by well-known reporters of our leading media outlets, by
congressmen, senators and their staffs of the very large
United States role in the elections of 1964 in Chile, that
is, the large effort mounted covertly...
BUCKLEY: In behalf of Frei against Allende.
KORRY: ...against Allende.
All of these people presumably have known all
about this, and indeed the staff of the Senate subcommittee
that is making all these allegations spoke to me gratuitously
about their knowledge of this in private. So they knew,
and presumably Senator Church, who is the chairman of that
subcommittee, is not being kept in the dark. by his own staff.
BUCKLEY: Although that may be.
KORRY: It is possible; it is possible. In any
event, it was an open secret in Washington, but for 10 years,
to this date, nobody has written about that.
It was known, for example, when I testified in
front of the Senate subcommittee in '73 and when I was interrogated
by them privately in '72 that the 40 Committee was in being.
And indeed in public testimony they cited it, asked me about
it, and they knew, for example, that the Attorney General
of the United States, both in the Kennedy period and in
the Nixon period, were participating in those meetings,
and that hasn't been talked about, although privately I've
asked members of the press why it hasn't been talked about.
Those were the policies that Presidents had been
carrying out, to my knowledge, since the end of the war
and had in their deliberative wisdom decided that this was
in the interest of the United States. And no one has suggested
that I carried out any policy that was not approved by this
Executive Branch committee or that we were deviating in
any way from known policy, that is, a policy that was directed
against the Communist Party of Chile, which.happens to be
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the largest -- happened to be. It's been eliminated now,
with the conditions in Chile, as a legal party. But it
was the largest, best led, most influential single Communist
Party in this hemisphere. And it was American policy to
keep it out of power.
BUCKLEY: Well now, how do you account for the
fact that Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan in India, when
he picked up the dispatches and saw the revelations of the
last week or two, should have cabled the State Department
expressing his huge dismay at learning that the CIA was
involved in Chile, because he had just finished assuring
India, or Gandhi, that we weren't involved? And now, says
he, he's lost his credibility and they're going to make
atom bombs and all that kind of stuff.
Now if all these things were an open secret, why
was it a closed secret to an ambassador who, as a matter
of fact, presides over the largest embassy in the world
in New Delhi?
KORRY: It was an open secret in 1967, when Pat
Moynihan was engaged in domestic affairs, and it is possible,
perhaps even likely, that he was not part of this open secret
circle.
Secondly, I assume that rather than ask
the
Indians
or talk to the United States about the Indian role
in,
say,
Bangladesh, in the events that preceded Bangladesh
or
in
the takeover of Sikkim right now and its incorporation
into
India, that it's better to go on record with your own
dismay
so that you retain some credibility.
BUCKLEY: I see. In other words, this simply
may have been a gesture calculated to pacify his critics
in New Delhi.
KORRY: And to keep his credibility as a human --
as an individual representative with the Indian Government
and intellectuals.
BUCKLEY: Uh-huh, uh-huh. Although it's kind
of hard on you, isn't it?
KORRY: Not really.
11 BUCKLEY: No really, uh-huh. Well now, so there
you are;'you've gone back to Chile and we haven't tried
to bribe them and Allende does become President.
KORRY: That's right.
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BUCKLEY: It is now charged that money was authorized,
and perhaps you will tell us whether it was spent, to oppose
Allende. They used the general term destabilize. You reject
it.
KORRY: I didn't reject it. Mr. Colby has in
BUCKLEY: Mr. Colby has in a letter, yeah. But
we all know that Allende came up to the United Nations and
he went all over Europe shortly before he died and said
that the reason Chilean Marxism was running into such special
difficulties was not Marx, but the United States, that we
were always there to prevent Chile from getting that fair
shake it would have gotten, except for the omnipresence
of the American economic gnomes.
What is your comment to that?
KORRY: If I may back up, the United States had
three policy choices that it laid out at the time that we
considered this seriously, just before Allende was confirmed
by the Chilean Congress in October 1970. These three choices
were: To seek to have a modus vivendi with him, get along
with him as best we could and to try to accommodate him.
Two, to have what was called a correct but minimal relationship
with him. And third was to seek to isolate. and to hamper
him.
Now the President of the United States and the
entire foreign policymaking process in the United States
came down on number two -- correct but minimal. But in
point of fact we carried out all three, and to the surprise
of Mr. Nixon and others, we began with number one, that
is, to seek an accommodation.
BUCKLEY: Under your supervision.
KORRY: I did this on my own, and, in a sense,
I was doing what the President did not wish me to do. I
had spoken to him about it in October of 1970. It came
about almost accidentally, and it began to pick up momentum,
and then the Government of the United States began to support
it.
Now people tend to, particularly Americans, to
want these things in nice neat compartments or in nice sharp
colors, black or white. The fact of the matter is that
in foreign policy, as in politics or in love, mechanistic
constancy and consistency do not guide actions. It's a
series of interactions of all kinds.
At one time, in Washington they may be making
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a policy based on a scenario that they believe in, but they
recognize that there are intervening unexpected happenings.
BUCKLEY: And improvisations.
KORRY: Improvisations. And that is why you have
an ambassador in the field and not a computer, because if
you went on the mechanistic constancy line -- that is, set
up as a standard hindsight -- then you would certainly need
no one there. You would only need a machine. In fact,
all you would need is a postman. And many of our embassies
are run, for all practical purposes, as a mailbox.
Now immediately after the inauguration in early
November of Mr. Allende, I decided that even if our analysis
was airtight, even if everything we said that Allende was
going to do would in fact be carried out, that we had an
obligation to the American public and to history to demonstrate
that we did not operate to fulfill our own prophecies, that
we had to test our assumptions.
BUCKLEY: So therefore you tilted in the direction
of helping him.
KORRY: I didn't tilt. I walked in to their foreign
minister, who described himself in that period as an al.1.-
out Maoist, and this was in the period of the Red Guard,
Claudimira Almeida (?), and not only had described himself
to me that way, but to interviewers, later and before.
:And I said, "You know my view of what I think Dr. Allende
and you represent in the way of political forces in this
country, in this hemisphere and in this world. You know
that I was opposed to you. But you are now the representative
of a sovereign power and I am the representative of a sovereign
power, and we are both mature individuals. Our job, therefore,
is to seek to avoid problems if we possibly can, and that
I would suggest that I brief you on where our relationship
was as of the day that Dr. Allende was inaugurated and that
what I view as the unavoidable problems that will arise
between our two countries and a process by which we may
seek to avoid conflict and confrontation."
And I explained the rationale as to why I thought
this would be in their interest and in our interest. I
said that Marx had never said that you had to go to socialism
by tying your legs and your hands and crawl on your belly
to it, that it could be done in a comfortable way, that
the United States was not opposed to socialism. We were
opposed to somebody exercising irrationality or hostility
to everything we stood for.
Now this process began very tentatively, but it
suddenly began to jell in January-February of 1971, and
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it-really started to take off in April and early May. And
suddenly it was stopped.
Now we learned, and it was confirmed to us by
Dr. Allende's closest advisers, that the reason he stopped
was that a veto was interposed by the then-head of the Socialist
Party, Senator Altamirano (?). The Socialist Party, incidentally,
it should be emphasized, is to, in Chile, to the left, far
to the left of the Communists, and there was an unending
war between these. two.parties before and during and I'm
sure after Dr. Allende's election, with the Communists accusing
Altamirano of reckless leftism. That was the term they
used.
And Altamirano wanted to have a violent class
war. He wanted no agreements with the United States. He
wanted to have these dramatic encounters.
BUCKLEY: So what you're saying is that Altamirano
simply rejected the notion of minimal cooperation.
KORRY: That's right.
BUCKLEY: And so you slid from point one to point
KORRY: Well, we were in point two all the time.
BUCKLEY: Well, theoretically.
KORRY: The correct relationship in public.
BUCKLEY: But you were having a flyer with one.
KORRY: That's right.
BUCKLEY: Okay. Now having slipped to point two,
were you still there when it slid over into point three?
KORRY: No. When point two -- when point one
collapsed, that was -- well, I should say that there was
an intervening episode. We had spent five months to get
certain agreements with the Allende government. He had
signed off personally on them. People think that this enormous
effort was made on behalf of the multinational corporations
involved because they had to do with companies. But my
interest,was of a different order.
Firstly, the United States Congress, which presumably
knows what it was doing, had committed to Chile, the Frei
Administration, almost $2 billion to one of the smallest
countries in the world. At the time it started it had barely
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T million people, and by the time I left it was 9 million.
Now, these $2 billion was an investment by the
United States taxpayer, the Congress, their representatives,
in the most stable, tested, freest democracy in South America,
a democracy which was a totally different profile than any
other country in all of Latin America. 90% of all Chileans
are literate, were literate; 85% of those eligible voted
in elections, which is better than in this country; 70%
of them were urban, very few landholders; there were practically
no great fortunes in the sense that you had them in Peru
or Colombia. In Chile one person might have qualified for
being in the $5 million class of assets. In neighboring
Peru you had what? -- 20, 40, 50 of them. You had a huge
middle class in Chile. You had social democracy. It was
already a statist society, overwhelmingly. By the time
Allende was elected, the Frei government had effectively
nationalized the copper industry. It had nationalized just
about every other industry, because at the time -- in the
last budget of Frei's, for the year '69-70, 63% of all invest-
ment was in the public sector. Allende only raised that
amount to 80%, so it was not much-o'f a change in policy,
but the changes had to do with the democracy.
Now democracy in Chile meant exactly what it meant
in the United States, even more. It meant an unfettered
press. It meant a multi-party Congress. It meant an independent
judiciary. It meant an apolitical army, an army that never
participated in politics.
BUCKLEY: And what happened?
KORRY: Allende changed all these things. But
before that, I want to say what it is that -- why I felt
that dealing with those corporations had to do with this
investment.
Part of our investment was to give guarantees
to American investors against expropriation, and that mean
any fresh investment that they would put into Chile, and
the biggest part of this was to double the copper production
of Chile -- if there were expropriation without adequate
and effective compensation, then the U.S. Government, through
the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a government
agency, would have to pay those guarantees. Our exposure
at that time was almost half a billion dollars.
I felt, as the representative of the American
taxpayer, public, that it was incumbent upon me to try to
prevent their paying that -- that is, their...
BUCKLEY: Raving to pay.
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KORRY: ...having to pay a half a billion dollars.
So the first thing I had to do was to try either to eliminate
the immediate call on those resources or postpone them.
And that is why I went in that direction.
But there was a second reason. If we could reach
agreement on these things, and we were also reaching agreement
on much lesser and simpler problems concerning the number
of Peace Corps in the country, the military advisers in
the country, the military aid program, all of these things,
but if we could reach agreement on these others, you would
develop a momentum that proved that the United States, as
a mature power, could get along with any kind of government
in this world, as long as it did not act irrationally.
I mean after all, we were doing that -- or we
were about to change our policy with the Soviet Union.
We had perfectly normal relations with them in the diplomatic
and government-to-government sense. Why couldn't we have
it with Allende in Chile?
BUCKLEY: And so? And so'?
KORRY: And so we tried.
BUCKLEY: And he proceeded to act irrationally
in what way?
KORRY: Well, he broke his word to me, not simply
on the Cerro copper agreement, which had taken five months
to negotiate and really had been an incredible taxing procedure
for me.
Let me say one word about Cerro. Unlike the Anaconda
or Kennecott copper companies, which were larger, Cerro
had not been in Chile before Allende. That is, they were
in the process of developing their mine and it came on stream
after Allende's election. They had -- they were a partner
of the Chilean Government and they were a partner of the
Japanese. It was a three-way deal. They had acted impeccably,
and this mine had been put in high in the Andes underground,
in an earthquake-prone zone. Everybody thought they were
mad to put in that money, so it was an enormous gamble on
their part. And the overrun had been more than 100;'. They
had $14 million in U.S. guarantees, and their own money
,was well over 30 by the time they go through with it.
Well, the Allende government began by Nand-it-
over-or-else ultimatum in writing, "and then we may give
you something, but very little."
The company came to me and said, "What should
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I do about it?" And my reaction was very much like the
Bobby Kennedy reaction to the Khrushchev ultimatum in the
eyeball-to-eyeball. I said, "Ignore the bad part and stick
to the good part." And I asked if they would like me to
try to work out some sort of dialog, and I did.
And the dialog developed. Allende named five
negotiators, two Communists, two leftwing socialists, and
his Minister of Mines. It took five months to negotiate
this thing and I was the middleman, and the agreement was
reached. Allende personally expressed his happiness that
we had done this, to me.
The five Chilean negotiators -- four of them,
in point of fact. The Minister didn't go -- gave a party
for Mr. Gordon Murphy, the chairman of the board of Cerro,
the night before this was to be signed on nationwide television.
They invited me to the party and invited me to the nationwide
TV signing. I refused to go, thinking it was better to
keep the U.S. Government out of this thing.
Well, 30 minutes before it was due to be signed,
Mr. Allende said he was terribly sorry, there'd have to
be a postponement. He explained to me he had, quote, a
little trouble in my chicken coop, unquote. To which I
replied -- and he asked me for two weeks to sort it out
and told me to assure Washington that he would do this..
I said, "Mr. President, it is your country. I
can't give you two minutes, two weeks, two years. It is
entirely your decision. I know the rooster who is loose
in your chicken coop" -- Senator Altamirano. I didn't name
in so as to spare any embarrassment. And I said I would
have to inform Washington in all honesty.
narrative.
BUCKLEY: We're going to have to accelerate this
KORRY: I'm sorry. There's a last sentence.
I would have to inform Washington, in all honesty, that if
Allende could not sign the agreements that he negotiated,
that there was no point in my negotiating with him any further.
And that is when I said we're getting to the end of the
line.
BUCKLEY: Aha. It is then that you started to
slide from point two to point three.
KORRY: No. We then made a further effort. We
came back with a brand-new proposal. I came home, got Dr.
Kissinger's okay separately, and Secretary William Rogers
of the`State Department, to go back and make a whole new
set of proposals concerning the big copper companies, which
was the most unusual the United States has ever put forward
and in brief...
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BUCKLEY: Okay. And they didn't work.
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KORRY: No, they didn't work.
BUCKLEY: All right. So then we did move to point
three, right?
KORRY: And then I left.
BUCKLEY: You left. But you presumably...
KORRY: I was not kept informed after that.
BUCKLEY: You were not kept informed.
KORRY: No.
BUCKLEY: But you presumably have made some deductions.
KORRY: Only what I read.
BUCKLEY: Only what you read. And what you read
persuades you yes or persuades you no.
KORRY: I have no reason to doubt what Mr. Colby
is saying or is alleged to have said. The only thing that
he denied in his letter to The Times is the use of the word
destabilization.
BUCKLEY: So therefore he is denying that part
of the charge, that he went around the world getting in
the way of Chile's requests for economic credit.
KORRY: No, no. I don't think he had anything
to do -- the CIA would not be doing that in any case. I
think what he is denying is that the CIA set out to overthrow
Allende. I think he is making a distinction -- if I understand
what we're both reading in the newspapers, it is that they
did not set out to overthrow Allende; they set out to try
to keep in existence those democratic forces until the 1976
presidential elections.
You have to remember that the head of the Communist
Party before the elections had said that if -- that once
they were in, there would be an irreversible -- I beg your
pardon. He said this after the elections in an interview
with the Rome Communist newspaper Unita. He said that the
political structure would be irreversible. And nobody that
I knew in Chile took that to mean anything other than what
it literally signified, that there would be no way you could
reverse it for many years to come. There might be pro forma
elections, but no way to change the system.
BUCKLEY: Well now, are you saying, then, that
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in your diplomatic experience, it is simply -- it is a commonplace
for the United States to help to maintain democratic practices
in countries in which there are democratic practices? I
don't imagine there was much for the CIA to do in Ethiopia,
was there, when you were there?
KORRY: Nothing.
BUCKLEY: Nothing. But that this is simply consistent
with America's...
KORRY: No.
BUCKLEY: ...implicit obligations to the world.
KORRY: No. I think that there is a confusion,
and I can understand it, and I will not attempt to talk
for the President of the United States -- Mr. Ford has said
what U.S. policy is -- or for Henry Kissinger. I will tell
you, though, what I said to my government, to Dr. Kissinger
at the time, and you may draw your-own conclusions.
I said that the basic -- there were three American
interests that were overriding in Chile. One is that a
time that we were about to leave, whether it was admitted
or not, about to begin the scaledown and the withdrawal
from Vietnam and about to launch new initiatives with Moscow
and Peking, that for the United States to act indifferent
to the disappearance of a democracy, of a unique democracy
in what was viewed throughout the world as its backyard,
could have a significant effect on those who made policy
in the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China.
That's number one. And I will just say parenthetically
that those two governments, in Moscow and Peking, described
the Allende triumph as an enormous defeat for the United
States and for imperialism throughout the world, and a tremendous
victory. Now that's number one.
Number two. At that time there were elections
coming up in both France and Italy, popular front tactics,
which had to do with the whole fundamental structure of
Western defense, Western ideals. So the Chilean model could
have a certain effect.
Number three. The American public was unaware,
because it often tends to give others the benefit of the
doubt and to look at it from a superficial point of view,
that is,-,to look at the mask rather than the reality behind
it, the American public did not realize that we were privy,
chapter and verse, because we had penetrated the Soviet --
the Chilean Communist Party at the highest levels. I was 00635
privy to. everything they did long before Allende's election.
i knew.exactly what they were planning and how. I knew
the Socialists as well -- that how they were going to gradually
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wipe out democracy, as we understood it, and in which the
American public had demonstrated, through an awfully large
per capita investment, its faith in it, wipe out or convert
a democracy into a peoples democracy.
Now I said when I first got to Chile in 1967 that
if the United States was indifferent to the fate of that
kind of extraordinary democracy...
BUCKLEY: It would have international repercussions.
KORRY: Not only that, that Americans -- it would
affect how Americans practiced their own democracy. I'm
not claiming any prescience about Watergate, but I am saying
that if you become indifferent to that caliber of democracy --
and it only exists in four or five places in the world --
that you will then become very coarse in your appreciation
of...
BUCKLEY: Of your own.
KORRY: ...your own democracy.
BUCKLEY: Professor Cliff Thompson is with the
Law School at Southern Methodist University. Professor
Thompson.
PROFESSOR CLIFF THOMPSON: Thank you. I think
it's probably useful to have on record some of what the
ambassador said, but I think we probably strayed from the
Firing Line as you originally established it, Mr. Buckley.
In particular, I wish more time had been spent on some of
the issues that I think concern representatives of our country
and our country in terms of how we think about this kind
of problem.
For example, people in this room may have the
opportunity to become an ambassador, and what is the moral
issue that has to be faced up to in this?
If there are going to be covert acts, on what
kind of standard should they be based, if we should have
them at all?
I want to ask you a question. I also want to
raise the question of whether or not perhaps the standards
that Mr.. Buckley has suggested in his column of this week
are frightening in terms of U.S. domestic policy, in the
Watergate sense that you suggested, Ambassador. But let
me ask the question. I mean they're become an ambassador.
Can they do their job competently if they don't know about
the secret operations that are going on? I would have thought
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not. Therefore, if asked about them, as an ambassador,
what would that person say? Would he have to lie? Would
you advise the person to lie?
KORRY: No. Let me very clear. I told the Senate
subcommittee that I knew and took full responsibility for
what the CIA was doing in my country because President Kennedy
spelled out the obligations that an ambassador had both
to know and to follow. So I would have been dishonest if
I had answered any other way.
The question that I refused to answer was the
specifics of what they did. All right? That's number one.
Number two. I have tried unsuccessfully to get
on the record, and I am delighted to have this opportunity,
that I think it is high time that the Congress stopped brushing
under the rug and acting as if it didn't know what it should
know and the obligations that it has to the American public.
That is, it should determine what the proper function of
the CIA Is, what the oversight responsibilities of the CIA --
of the Congress with regard to the,;-.-CIA are, what an official
secrets act is.
I think it's outrageous that men in the Congress
have eulogized people who have stolen information from the
State Department and profited by it, that is, to sell the
information. I think it is disgraceful.
PROFESSOR THOMPSON: Well, if -- in fact, that's
a phenomenon that's interesting. If things are stolen at
the rate that they are stolen, can you have a secret operation
at all?
KORRY: Well, I think that these are proper matters
to discuss right now, because the United States has gone
through a kind of counterrevolution. Now I'm not in favor
of a porno type approach to -- a porno-flick type of approach
to foreign policy, that is, that you convert everything
into dung, including yourself. I think that's horrible.
I think there is a balance between everything being the
soap opera and everything being pornographic. I think there
is a mature approach.
But I reject in its entirety that civil servants --
not myself, because I was a political appointee. Let me
say I was appointed by three Presidents. I never gave a
vote, a word or a dollar to Mr. Nixon, and he fulfilled
his obligations to me, although he knew that I would never
vote for him.
Now, I think it's outrageous that. civil servants
are being hauled up now for doing what was a superb professional
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jo'b. You can't have it both ways, to ask people to be professional
in carrying out the laws of the United States and at the
same time ruin their careers by this public trial without
benefit of a hearing. I think that's outrageous.
BUCKLEY: Professor Beverly Karl is also of the
Law School at SMU.
PROFESSOR BEVERLY KARL: Thank you. I'd like
to direct a question to Ambassador Korry. I certainly agree
with you, Ambassador, that Chile was one of the exceptional
democracies that one sees on the world scene, and [I] was
formerly a student in Chile and returned to Chile in 1973.
I am a little disturbed by some of the comments
that you made about the Allende government and his party
out to wipe out democracy. I would concede that Allende
and his government were certainly admittedly out to change
the economic system and probably would have ultimately wiped
out the capitalist model as we know it and had gone to a
command model.
On the other hand, when I was in Chile in 1973,
under the Allende government, from what I perceived personally,
there was still free expression, freedom of the press, freedom
of the radio, etcetera.
Now, whatever the role of the U.S. Government
may or may not have been in bringing about the coup and
the change -- I will keep an open mind on that. But if
we had any role in this, then clearly what we have achieved --
according to the OAS statistics there's something between
7,000 and 10,000 political prisoners. The head of the junta
said the other day that their government may be in power
10, 20 or 30 years. Democracy certainly appears to be dead
in Chile at the moment. And certainly what I saw under
Allende seemed to indicate a rather ample preservation of
what we would call freedom of expression.
KORRY: All right. I think the point is well
taken as to what succeeded Allende. But what succeeded
Allende was a consequence of what he did.
The army was apolitical. It was Allende that
brought the army into the government repeatedly to assume
responsibility for the actions that he was taking and to
give him- legitimacy. He politicized an apolitical army,
and that army, when I was there, was overwhelmingly, including
the present dictator in Chile, General Pinochet, overwhelmingly
in favor of Allende. Now that's got to be kept clearly
in mind, that he accomplished that task, nobody else.
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We had just about cut off all relations more than
pro forma with the Chilean armed forces in my time. The
military mission in Chile had gone, in my four years, from
68 down to 13.
So, that was his doing.
Secondly, you cannot have it both ways. If, as
President Ford has said, the United States were to support
Chilean media so that they could stay alive, you cannot
then say that it was Mr. Allende that gave them freedom
of expression.
Let me just, if I have the time, just enumerate
the kinds of things he was doing in my time, '71, not '72-
73.
A. He had just about eliminated all sources of
advertising for the newspapers. He controlled all their
credits and -- that is, through the banks -- and he was
not going to give credits unless they gave him political
support. We knew this for a fact::.:.
3. He, through the Minister of Labor -- and Chile
became the only place, except the Soviet Union, where the
head of the trade union movement was the same person a$..
the Minister of Labor. It's just not done.if you want a
free labor movement. The pressures on the unions to strike...
PROFESSOR KARL: I concede on the economic. I'm
talking about...
KORRY: This is not economic; that's political.
There is no such thing as diversity in society where you
have highly centralized control. Allende said to me and
to others that he did not believe in, say, the Yugoslav
workers' management role. He did not believe in the co-
management model of West Germany or France. He believed
in highly centralized control of the trade union movement.
In my day, and that's when I first had the pleasure
of meeting Mr. Buckley, as a union organizer for the CIO-
AFL, in organizing newspapermen at the United Press, we
fought against a Communist control of the union at that
time, and I am familiar with how their operation works.
And it was no different in Chile in my time than it was
in the '.40s in New York.
Now, he was using the trade unions to try to provoke
strikes artifically, because under the law in Chile, once
there was a strike, the government could intervene and take
over.
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complex.
BUCKLEY: He also closed down an entire publishing
KORRY: He tried to get -- he tried to -- he did
get effective -- well, he tried to get effective control
over the one source of newsprint in Chile. He denied spare
parts to radio. He threw out the elections by the students
of the Catholic University to remove the directors of their
television newsroom and their television programming. And
when they tried to set up an alternative station, to bring
about their decision, to bring it into being, he sent the
police in to break it up.
PROFESSOR THOMPSON: I don't see where your answer
goes, though. I mean if you're saying it's not as good
as it was under Frei, I think most people here agree. But
if you're saying it's better than it was under the military,
I wish you'd say that.
KORRY: No. Oh, Good Lord no.
PROFESSOR THOMPSON: Well., then are you saying
it was a justification for the worst kind of covert activity?
KORRY: No. What I am saying is -- I'm just answering
the specifics. He was seeking, to our knowledge, to eliminate
a free press. That's one.
Two. He politicized the military. The created
7000/,'-a-year inflation. If you were to have 700`-a-year
inflation in this country, you would have a government like
they have in Chile.
BUCKLEY: Mr. David Lambell (?) is a reporter
with the Newsroom of KERA. Mr. Lambel l .
DAVID LAMBELL: One of the few articles in an
American magazine that I could find on Chile that dealt
with the issues to a great degree was written by Gabriel
Garcia Marquez. It was published in [larch of 1974. It's
called "The Death of Salvador Allende." One of the paragraphs
I think is pertinent to what you have said about the Chilean
military having a history of being nonpolitical or apolitical.
"The Chilean armed forces," he says, "contrary
to what we've been led to believe, have intervened in politics
every time their class interests have seemed threatened
and have'done so with an inordinately repressive ferocity.
The two Constitutions which the country has had in the past
100 years were imposed by the force of arms, and the recent
military coup has been the sixth uprising in a period of
50 years." And he goes on to talk about specific instances
where the military intervened in the country, including
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one under President Frei, where a military patrol opened
fire on a demonstration to break it up and killed six people,
among them children and a pregnant woman.
And then he goes on to say, "The myth of legalism
and the gentleness of that brutal army was invented by the
Chilean bourgeoisie in their own interest. Popular Unity,
Allende's party, kept it alive with the hope of changing
the class makeup of the higher cadres."
He goes on also to say that just before the coup,
that officers sympathetic to Allende were systematically
purged and killed and that the military had to go through
a number of changes to bring about the people that they
wanted in power.
How does this set with what you said before about
the army being essentially nonpolitical?
KORRY: I think it's all nonsense, from beginning
to end. He's a Marxist. He's spreading the Marxist mythology.
Almost every word in that article.i.:s untrue.
Now, one. The only Chilean military man that
I know of in the last decade who was killed was General
Schneider (?), who was a Christian Democrat, one of President
Frei's closest friends, a member of this upper bourgeoisie
he's talking about.
Number two. The Chilean Army was lower-middle-
class in most of its origins and with rare exception from
the upper bourgeoisie, rare exception.
Number three. The Chilean military was very unfriendly
to the Frei government and to the United States at the time
of Allende's election for a variety of very good reasons.
We had practically cut off all aid to them, under the legislation
passed by the U.S. Congress which put a ceiling on sales
and grants for all of Latin America, and that meant a few
million dollars for Chile in training and resupplies of
minimal character. The Frei government refused their demands
on the grounds that it would contribute to inflation. The
Chilean military repeatedly appealed to me to intervene
with Frei to get them this kind of hardware or that kind.
We just didn't do it, and instead we deliberately wound
down our presence.
BUCKLEY: And you just finished alleging that
the leaders of the military were demonstrably pro-Allende
until they saw finally the direction in which he was taking
the country.
KORRY: Yes, and that's a very good point. It
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is-the point. And moreover, we had said that the Chilean
military would never lead Chile; it would always follow
the people, that therefore, in my view, it was not worth
paying a lot of attention to them because they would always
be in the vanguard...
BUCKLEY: By the way, it's not all that unusual.
You just go one country north and see on whose side the
military is. Hardly on the side of the capitalist class,
which they've just finished expropriating.
PROFESSOR THOMPSON: Where?
LAMBELL: Well, he also makes the point that he
feels what essentially happened in Chile in the coup that
overthrew Allende was an attempt to duplicate the situation
in Brazil, where the military took over in a very repressive
fashion. And this seems to be exactly what happened.
KORRY: That is a different judgment. That is
something quite different. But between Nay of '71 and late
'73, when Allende was thrown out, Altamirano had carried
out his entire policy. That is, he had radicalized that
situation. He had imposed his veto over the Communist Party
on a number of things. One, the business with the United
States.
But more important, I think that the Communist
Party of Chile and Allende were predisposed to bring in
at least part of the Christian Democratic Party several
times, and that he -- in order to divide and split the --
fragment the largest party of Chile and eliminate it as
a force and to push President Frei into the camp of the
Right. I think that Altamirano vetoed that on a number
occasions.
And he was beginning to pass out arms to a great
number of people in Chile. He was trying to subvert the
navy of Chile. There was never any question as to his guilt
in that. He had...
BUCKLEY: We have only a few seconds. Let me
just ask you to reply briefly and kindly to Professor Thompson's
query. Do you think that diplomats of the future must continue
to understand that their role will include supervision of
or acquiescence in covert activity? You have 10 seconds.
KORRY: Yes, if the Congress so reaffirms.
BUCKLEY: And it is your judgment the Congress
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will reaffirm.
KORRY: Finally, yes.
BUCKLEY: Thank you very much, Ambassador Korry.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen of the panel.
Than you all.
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