Chile: The Secrets the US Government Continues to Hide

[Judi Lynn]

AUGUST 31, 2023

Fifty years after the military coup that brought down Salvador Allende and installed the Pinochet dicatorship, there are still top secret documents on the US role that must be declassified.

PETER KORNBLUH



Photographs of former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger displayed during “Secrets of State: The Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship,” an exhibition at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile in 2017.
(Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty)

On August 25, the Central Intelligence Agency quietly posted on its website two documents on the military coup in Chile that had been kept top secret for half a century: the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) for the morning of the September 11, 1973—the day of the coup—and for September 8, 1973, as the Chilean military finalized its plans to overthrow the democratically elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende. The newly released documents proved almost impossible to find and read on the CIA website, buried among dozens of other previously declassified PDBs. Eventually, the State Department sent out a press advisory providing the links. The release of the PDBs was “in accordance with our commitment to increased transparency,” according to the press release. “We remain committed to working with our Chilean partners to try and identify additional sources of information to increase our awareness of impactful events throughout our shared history.”

As the 50th anniversary of the coup approaches, that commitment will be tested as Chileans, and their government, seek to obtain additional classified documents on the US role in undermining democracy and supporting dictatorship in Chile. This week a delegation of Chilean congressional representatives from the Socialist Party met with US Ambassador Bernadette Meehan to lobby her for release of the remaining secret records on Chile; earlier this month, the Chilean Congress voted almost unanimously to request that the Foreign Ministry solicit still-secret records on US “intervention in Chile’s sovereignty before, during and after the coup of 1973.” And the Chilean government of Gabriel Boric has already appealed to the Biden administration for a special, 50th-anniversary gesture of declassification diplomacy. “We still don’t know what President Nixon saw on his desk the morning of the military coup,” as Chile’s ambassador to Washington, Juan Gabriel Valdés, stated in an interview before the PDBs were released. “There are details that remain of interest to [Chileans], that are important for us to reconstruct our own history.”

Censored History
Among the documents on President Nixon’s desk on the morning of September 11, 1973, was the PDB—a daily CIA intelligence summary that contained three paragraphs on the opening salvos of the military coup in Chile. Fifty years after Nixon read it, we finally know what it says—very little. The intelligence provided to the president on the initiation of the coup was equivocal and erroneous. “Although military officers are increasingly determined to restore political and economic order, they may still lack an effectively coordinated plan that could capitalize on the widespread civilian opposition,” the PDB advised, incorrectly. “President Allende, for his part,” the PDB stated more accurately, “still hopes that temporizing will fend off a showdown.”

But Nixon had access to far more detailed and dramatic intelligence. A special CIA “CRITIC”—Critical Advance Intelligence Cable—that would have been distributed on an urgent basis to the highest levels of the White House on September 10, provided concrete reporting on the date, time, and place of the planned coup; another top secret CIA memo that reached the White House the morning of September 11 contained an urgent request from “a key officer in the military group planning overthrow President Allende” who asked “if the U.S. Government would come to the aid of the Chilean military if the situation became difficult.” How the president of the United States responded to that request is one of the details of the history of the coup that remain unknown.

More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-coup-classified-documents/