DISCUSSION OF CIA ACTIONS IN CHILE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP09T00207R001000020086-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 9, 2011
• Sequence Number: 86
• Publication Date: September 18, 1974
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO-TV MONITORING SERVICE, INC.
3408 WISCONSIN AVENUE, N.W. WASHINGTON. D. C. 20016 244-8682
WTTG TELEVISION
WED., SEPTEMBER 18, 1974
12:00 PM, EDT
STAT
DISCUSSION OF CIA ACTIONS IN CHILE
GUEST: WILLIAM BUCKLEY, JR.
MAURY POVICH: But when you think of--and you had to
deal with Chile a little bit last year--it came up before the
General Assembly--what happens when a story like this, and to
date there's no one to deny the existence of the story that
President Ford himself said, in effect, the CIA was spending
money during the Allende years to destabilize the country, and
that I assume--
WILLIAM BUCKLEY: Well, I don't think--now, wait a
POVICH: --to destabilize the government--
BUCKLEY: I think that's using an enemy vocabulary.
Nothing was more destabilizing than what Allende was trying to
do to Chile. To the extent that we helped the opposition, we
did our best to stabilize, not to destabilize. We destabilized
the destabilizing plans of Allende.
POVICH: Then we have to make a moral judgment, do we
not, on the question of whether the Allende government is good
or bad for Chile? And why should we be making those judgments
in the first place, in that that is messing up the internal
affairs of another sovereign state, and that's not supposed to
be our purpose?
BUCKLEY: Well, in the first place, let's put a little
historical perspective on it. From Wilson through Jack Kennedy
it was very definitely our purpose. Now, Kennedy's most famous
inaugural address was the one in which he said, we will spare no
pains, we will avoid no burden, we will work if necessary alone
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r
to guarantee the survival of liberty everywhere in the world.
This was a pledge for us, the United States, to go out and work
for freedom in every situation. Now we've renounced that. Viet
Nam--you know, Camelot people don't quote the inaugural address
much any more. But from Wilson through him--(BOTH TALK AT ONCE).
POVICH: The roots go much deeper than Dr. Kissinger--
BUCKLEY: Sure. But since then there has been a
retreat from that. It's been a retreat, however, not so total
as to say that we refuse to extend any help of any sort to
people who attempt to resist what looks like the colonization of
their country. Now, Allende's experience in Chile is often
thought of as a purely indigenous matter, and of course wasn't.
The Soviet Union spent many times as much money as we did, and
one has only to survey its overt activities to guess at the size
of the--
POVICH: I thought we were supposed to be out of
those entanglements. Whether the Soviet Union was helping one
side or another, that we were not supposed to be embroiled in
that sort of situation, because that can always blossom into a
Viet Nam type--
BUCKLEY: I can't imagine circumstances under which we
would have sent Marines into Chile, if that's your question.
But short of sending Marines into Chile, it-seems to me that
there are certain things that Congress seems to want to do.
Take Fulbright. Fulbright is considered really the most isolation-
ist of the lot. Here's how he put it as recently as three years
ago, quote, the United States has no proper quarrel with any
country, no matter how obnoxious its domestic doctrines, except
insofar as it attempts to export them. Now, there is no question
there was an effort to export communist revolution by Cuba, for
instance. Castro was Allende's idol, and Castro ran guns into
Chile. We know that he tried to revolutionize Bolivia. Che
Guavero was caught and shot doing it. We know that he tried to
-do it to Venezuela. Venezuela came to the OAS and begged us to
impose a boycott.
Now, to what extent was Chile such an attenuation of
that as to fall within or without the Fulbright doctrine? We
don't necessarily know.
POVICH: You didn't bristle, though, when there seemed
to be approval of that sort of policy?
POVICH: The President the other night, to me, when he
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said in his news conference that that is a fact of life, it is
going to remain so, it was in our natural interest to do that,
I would approve, everything I have seen I would have approved of.
That seems to me that we are still ready and willing to send
money and men, clandestine as the purpose might be, to undermine
governments, no matter whether--indeed, if they are communist or
BUCKLEY: Well, Allende's government was certainly
headed towards communism, and anybody whose hero is Fidel Castro
is--he called himself a Marxist. He had been with the socialist
party, and the socialist party was pretty much dominated by the
communists. Let me ask this. Suppose Allende had hired a bunch
of scientists and said, make me an atom bomb. Would you say
there was anything left for the CIA to do under those circum-
stances?
POVICH: I don't know, because I don't know what we
do when it comes to--obviously that has happened before in other
countries. Most of them come to the United States for aid when
they want to build an atom bomb, like India, or something to
that effect.
BUCKLEY: Yeah, but we now know that the technology is
footloose, and you can coax people to come and build you. an atom
bomb if you just pay enough for it--(BOTH TALK AT ONCE)--
POVICH: Chile had the capabilities, in other words, of
gathering together scientists to make an atom bomb.
BUCKLEY: Right. Now, wouldn't you say under the cir-
cumstances like that it would be useful for the CIA to make it
as hard as possible for them to get fissionable material?
POVICH: Yeah, but I don't think it would run that
course, though.
BUCKLEY: Ah--but then you agree in principle, and
it's a question of whether we run that course.
POVICH: Well, I think you're taking very extreme
possibilities, the question of atom bombs. I think Allende's
main problem was being able to govern without outside inter-
ference.
BUCKLEY: Well, do you--well, obviously--for instance,
Nixon wanted to govern without the outside interference of the
Washington Post. Now, if he had been Allende, he would have
closed it down.
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If
POVICH: At least that's an internal organization.
BUCKLEY: Yeah, but presumably if Nixon had done to
the Washington Post what Allende almost did to El Mercurio, you
would have been very grateful for any government that gave you
enough money to pay your printer's bill, right?
POVICH: It just seemed a long way from the United
States' problems to the support of certain newspapers in Chile.
It just seems more than an ocean apart.
BUCKLEY: Well, exercise your soritical imagination.
The fact of the matter is that the Monroe Doctrine is a very old
part of American history, and a line from Moscow through Cuba
through Chile is not something in the foreshortened days of
travel that is such a long way. And it is true that democratic
resistance in Chile was being strangled, and we gave some help
to the people who were being strangled. Only after a year and
a-half, you know, if we're to believe the testimony of that court.
POVICH: Let me wrap up this topic by asking you that--
many members of the Congress were upset, not because we were in
Chile, but that there was no Congressional overview, or that
maybe what we were being told by the CIA was not in fact the
truth as to what was happening. Do you feel upset about that--
that although there was supposed to be Congressional rejriew,
there wasn't?
BUCKLEY: No. My understanding is that the CIA did
tell the truth, and that it is alleged that the State Department
did not.
POVICH: Ah, true. I'm sorry. It was Dr. Kissinger's--
BUCKLEY: That's right. The CIA told exactly what it
was doing. A committee was set up by Congress, not by the execu-
tive, this co-called Forty Committee, to oversee. Now, inciden-
tally, as a result of the leak of Colby's testimony, the whole
CIA operation is in jeopardy. And this anxiety--
POVICH: Which means that you're opposed to the leak,
not the operation--
BUCKLEY: Absolutely. No, I want Congress to oversee
the CIA, and any way it does it that makes sense to me to use,
okay by me. But to do this, and then to invite testimony which
is then leaked, and exposes operations that oughtn't to be
exposed, strikes me as simply a way of eviscerating the entire
organization.
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POVICH: But if in effect the Congress did not have
a chance to review the policy, it is an illegal operation, to
say the least.
BUCKLEY: Well, Congress confirms the people who sit
on the Forty Committee, or in most cases.
POVICH: With Congressional review. Has that not been
always the policy of that committee?
BUCKLEY: Not in total detail. Most often, when a
Congressional committee asks a particular person what concretely
did the CIA do in Mexico City, they decline on the grounds of
executive privilege to give that information out. But if there
are grounds to suspect that what was done in the City of Mexico
was contrary to the instructions of Congress, or the desires of
Congress, then obviously they have simply the right--I was asked
by a former President of Mexico when I ran into him in Switzer-
land a couple of months ago had I been in Mexico when he was
President, and I said, yeah.
He said, what were you doing? I said, well, I was
working for Howard Hunt and the CIA. He said, what did you do?
I said, I won't tell you. Now that was his country, and there's
a sense in which he's probably annoyed, but of course everybody
does it. Mexico has intelligence operatives in the United States.
Mostly their mission is economic.
POVICH: You were then--you would then acquiesce if
you were asked by the CIA or a government agency to do something?
BUCKLEY: If it didn't violate my conscience, yeah.
POVICH: For some reason, to me the mere fact that that
agency would ask me to do something would shock me to the point
of--I just don't want to get involved in any of your clandestine
activities, whether they be for the good of the country or not.
BUCKLEY: Well, I think you're probably victimized by
the--the CIA is unfashionable. The CIA is unfashionable because
people think of the cold war--
POVICH: Could be unfathomable, too--
BUCKLEY: Well, I know. Maybe we know more about it
than we ought to know, but the fact of the matter is that it is
unfashionable, sort of non-chic right now. It used to be chic,
interestingly enough. This simply is because there has been a
total loss of any sense of spiritual mission in the world. This
resulted from a collapse in Viet Nam, and from our failure to
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keep intact our values. The same kind of thing that happens
in the United Nations. You simply lose any sense of the impor-
tance of human freedom. When we went over to Red China and
came back and rejoiced over what Mao Tse-tung had done for the
people of China, who aren't allowed to practice their religion
or read a newspaper or watch television or join a labor union
or leave the country or go to the city or go from the city--
when we rejoice over that, obviously we communicate, do we not,
that those freedoms that the Central Intelligence Agency and
indeed the American defense establishment is here to protect,
aren't really all that important to us?
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