Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  Our involvement in El Mercurio was this: we gave the paper roughly $2 million, but our purpose was the opposite of co-opting it. What we wanted was to ensure continued press freedom. True, there was no official censorship by the Allende government; half a dozen dailies in Santiago represented the full spectrum of political opinion, and each operated independently. However, shortly after my arrival, the government blocked El Mercurio’s access to newsprint. This, along with cutbacks in advertising and labor unrest, threatened to shut it down, and that would have been a tremendous loss.

  One of my first cables from the field was a request for $1 million to keep the paper afloat. A declassified memorandum10 shows that the request was the subject of a lively discussion in the 40 Committee, the covert action subcommittee of the National Security Council. I knew nothing of this at the time. I knew only that I received an okay to provide El Mercurio with an initial sum of $700,000, but it had to be orchestrated through a very complex funding mechanism. It was a valuable education for me in high finance and clandestine funding mechanisms.

  We also had sources inside the Chilean military. But the Church Committee overestimated our military ties, which were not nearly as numerous or important as our assets in the media and political parties. We weren’t getting regular information from flag-rank officers, and we didn’t have close ties to any of the decision makers—though not for lack of trying. Fred Latrash had, as his top priority, making friends and recruiting sources in the military. To help with this effort, he joined the military riding club, which was an important social milieu, and even bought an “operational horse” with headquarters’ approval. The horse was named Bismarck. One afternoon, I could hear the normally soft-spoken station chief vigorously dressing down Fred. Though his voice was raised, I couldn’t tell what the issue was, but I noticed on the table outside Ray’s office, where the day’s cables were displayed, a memo explaining that Bismarck had died from lack of use and requesting that headquarters write the animal off as a loss on our books. I surmised the absurdity of writing off an “ops horse” must have driven Ray up the wall.

  Fred, nonetheless, was very effective in meeting a wide range of army officers. But, to the best of my knowledge, none of them ended up in the recruitment column. One of his most memorable contacts was General Augusto Pinochet, who would also become one of Fred’s most memorable misjudgments. Fred was unimpressed with him, feeling he was too weak ever to lead a coup. In the end, we had no meaningful relationship with Pinochet before the coup. We did, however, have good insight into the Allende government through our contacts in the Communist Party. Its members turned out to be keen analysts and worthy assets. At one point, they secured for me a typewriter and blank Communist Party letterhead. I never did make use of these things. As it turns out, that was for the best.

  * * *

  When we arrived in Santiago, Pat located a lovely house for us three blocks from the Russian embassy. After we moved in, I was struck by how many cats there were in the neighborhood. I mentioned this to one of the old-timers in the office. He laughed and told me an operational secret: several months earlier one of our officers decided to tweak the Russians by placing an ad in the local press that said that anyone who delivered a cat to the front door of their embassy would receive a handful of escudos, the local currency. Dozens of people showed up with stray cats, demanding payment. When the embassy refused to compensate them for the cats, the visitors left the cats and walked away, thus infesting the neighborhood with strays.

  The Russians were mightily annoyed and reciprocated with a similar operation. Unfortunately, this type of tit-for-tat harassment was carried on throughout the Cold War. It was humorous but mindless—the wrong way to approach psychological operations. Covert operations should be based on solid objective evidence with important national security benefits. They never should be used for amusement.

  Pat soon felt at home in Santiago but realized she needed to learn how to drive to get around town on her own. Being a city girl, she had no license and had never really driven a car. I gave her a quick driving lesson, which left her feeling confident—and me uneasy. An embassy employee helped her get a license, which was secured, after all the paperwork was completed, with a bottle of scotch. Pat’s first test was to drive to an embassy function at the ambassador’s residence. When it came time to leave, Pat graciously offered to give a close friend, Terry Svat, a lift without revealing that she had just learned to drive. I heard from several sources that the trip was not uneventful. Apparently, approaching the entrance gate, Pat went for the brake but hit the gas pedal instead, jumping the curb and proceeding at a relatively high speed in the direction of the guardhouse, barely missing it and the armed guards. Today, any car jumping a curb in front of an embassy or ambassador’s residence should expect to be fired upon. Fortunately, this took place long before our embassies became modern-day fortresses.

  While I was out meeting contacts and supporting the opposition media, Pat was coping with running a household for a family of seven in a country that was slowly falling apart. It is, in part, her experience in Santiago that convinces me still that Allende would not have lasted long whether the CIA had been there or not. Too many people were being hurt by his economic policies—not just the moneyed but the middle and working classes, too. Allende, perhaps fearing that his narrow margin of victory gave him a short time line to pursue his vision of a Socialist Chile, rushed into a multipronged program of land reform, nationalizing industry, and government spending to stimulate the economy. Initially, his program seemed to be working. In the government’s first year, GDP grew by 7.7 percent, production increased by 13.7 percent, and consumption levels rose by 11.6 percent.11 But by the time I arrived with my family, those economic policies had come back to bite him. Inflation was over 45 percent and climbing.12 Landlords were reluctant to spend money to maintain property that might be seized at any moment; business owners who could were leaving, taking their capital and entrepreneurial know-how with them; and there were massive consumer shortages.

  Pat spent a good portion of her day hunting for basic household items on the black market. Flour could be obtained at one location, soap at another. She had a network of contacts and secret codes to rival my own. Hers were aimed at locating particularly scarce products. She would be told, for example, to go to a garage or building and “knock on the green door” to find black-market oil and toilet paper, which were in very scarce supply in Santiago. Butter was so scarce that some of the embassy wives made their own. Pat was raised in a row house in Philadelphia; she had no desire to learn how to churn butter. So we did without a lot of things. Beef was one of the things we gave up; it was nearly impossible to find. We switched to fish, chicken, and pork. One day, a colleague told me that he had found a black-market butcher who could provide steak. I got him to take me there, and I felt like a hero coming home with a bagful of supposed “quality” beef. It did look odd, with a yellowish tint to its fat. Pat was a little skeptical, but she prepared it. One taste and we knew we’d been had. It was horsemeat! We fed it to our dogs, who seemed to enjoy it well enough.

  These deprivations were much worse for Chileans—who, after all, were not on temporary assignment—and contributed to growing unrest. Allende had his political problems as well domestic ones. The moderate Christian Democrats, alarmed by the brisk pace at which they thought he was nationalizing industries, moved to oppose him legislatively,13 while the left in his own coalition thought he should be moving faster. Their impatience gave rise to the Revolutionary Left Movement, known as MIR, which sponsored ad hoc seizures of land in the countryside, often by violent means, creating a climate of fear and worsening food shortages.

  Far from being humbled by this turmoil, Allende took the provocative step of inviting Fidel Castro to Chile in November 1971, further inflaming fears that he intended to take Chile down the same road as Cuba. My colleagues and I were kept busy following the Cuban president’s travels through the country. We were eager to stay on to
p of what formal or informal cooperation the leaders might be agreeing to, but we soon concluded that, rather than an official state visit, Castro was enjoying a wonderful vacation. He waded in streams; took day trips to remote areas such as Caletones, where he toured the recently nationalized El Teniente copper mine; and did a lot of public speaking. His one-week visit turned into two weeks, then three; then December came, and he was still there. We found that moderate and conservative Chileans resented having Castro around. The high times he was enjoying seemed an insulting contrast to the shortages and inflation making their lives so difficult.

  This is when I learned, almost by accident, that a little bit of money can go a long way in covert action, and sometimes your greatest successes come from your most unexpected assets. Among my pool of assets was an elderly middle-class woman—a grandmotherly type. She was a civil activist but had not proved a valuable source of intelligence, and because every meeting posed a risk, we met with her infrequently. She suggested raising the voice of the opposition with a march of women, who would carry pots and pans along with banners protesting the scarcity of basic food supplies and household goods. It sounded like a good idea and worth a small investment to help her get it organized. I gave her several hundred dollars but had low expectations, and after days passed with no march materializing, I wrote it off as a bad call on my part.

  So I was stunned a few weeks later when I was walking near a park not far from the embassy and heard the thunder of thousands of women parading enthusiastically and boldly down the street, pounding pots and pans. And there was my asset, among those directing the marchers toward La Moneda, the presidential palace. I watched with pride, feeling that the mission had been completed—but it was only just beginning. Early that evening, I went to the Carerra Hotel for dinner. It had a very plush, upscale rooftop restaurant overlooking La Moneda. Halfway through dinner, the restaurant patrons pressed against the wide windows to watch what was taking place below. Buses had pulled up in front of the presidential palace, where the women were still demonstrating. Suddenly, students with bandanas pulled up over their faces surged out, clashing violently with the women. Images of Chilean housewives being set upon by leftist youths flashed around the world, creating a publicity nightmare for the government and a rallying point for the opposition.

  Watching this unfold from the luxury of the Hotel Carrera rooftop was surreal for me. I felt I should be in the fray with my asset, but of course that would have been impossible. Such marches became known as cacerolas, and this particular one as the “March of the Empty Pots,” an emblem of popular opposition to Allende. It emboldened other segments of the Chilean middle class as it galvanized women to speak out against the president’s economic policies. As former ambassador Davis put it, “Together with Castro’s visit, the march … brought a change in Chilean politics, from the relative normality and social accommodation that had prevailed in preceding weeks to a greater spirit of confrontation.”14

  Allende tried to mitigate the damage by suggesting the United States was behind the cacerolas.15 After the failed coup attempt, blaming the United States was usually a good strategy, but it brought him limited success this time. From that small initial investment, a movement grew that would have a profound impact on the events that followed. More marches took place, under the banner of poder femenino, “woman power.”16 Consumer shortages were no longer people’s only complaint; they feared the instability in the countryside and the threat of violence from the left. They increasingly aimed their protests at the military, asking it to act against Allende. In one particularly memorable protest, the women threw chicken feed at soldiers, suggesting they were too timid to oppose the president. As events would show, the military was not immune to this kind of persuasion.

  Women were not the only ones putting pressure on the government. In October of 1972, the truckers’ federation went on strike, touching off a wave of shutdowns. Truckers were the lifeblood of Chile. There were limited railroads and air transport; most things were carried by trucks owned by small mom-and-pop companies operating close to the bone with just one or two trucks. The truckers’ grievances had been building. Spare parts to make repairs had to be imported and were difficult, if not impossible, to get. The truckers felt squeezed and worried that theirs was another industry Allende was planning to nationalize. When the president announced plans for a mixed government-private transport operation in Aisén, the truckers walked off the job. Shop owners closed their doors, partly in sympathy, partly because there were no goods without the truckers working. Within two weeks, bus and taxi drivers had joined in, and the next thing we knew, professionals—engineers, health care workers, pilots—joined in as well. A Time article from October 30 describes a “pall of tear gas” hanging over Santiago, with half the city seemingly out on strike.17

  Another part of the mythology of U.S. involvement in Chile is that the United States paid the truckers to go on strike. This is not true. They did ask us for support, and the station chief thought it was a good idea, but Ambassador Davis was against it. Davis did not dismiss it out of hand, however. He tried to maintain an open relationship with Ray Warren because he always feared the station might take drastic action behind his back, as it had done to his predecessor during Track II. So he sent the truckers’ request to Washington, and it was the White House that rejected it.18

  As the economy spiraled downward and street demonstrations became routine, rumors of an imminent coup were pervasive. Indiscriminate bombings started to rock the town. Late one night we were awakened by a loud noise that shook the house. We thought it was an earthquake—a regular occurrence in Chile—and went back to sleep. The next morning, I was surprised to see a huge crater in our yard and much of the plaster siding blown off part of our house. The tremor we’d felt had been a bomb. It was at this point that I began to consider the physical risks to my family if the internal strife grew. I had been given a shotgun by a friend as he was departing Santiago, and one afternoon shortly after the bombing, I showed Pat how to use it if the house were raided while I wasn’t home. We slid the table about ten feet from the front door, and she practiced crouching behind it and aiming the shotgun at imaginary intruders.

  She stowed the gun, along with some nonperishable food, in our tiny attic, in a “special basket.” The plan was that, should worst come to worst, she would boost the children into the attic, then climb in herself and wait out any trouble. Both of us treated the plan as perfectly natural, but in retrospect, it seems exceedingly foolhardy. When you need to instruct your wife on how to gun down intruders, it’s time to send your family to a safe haven. What was I thinking? Living in a dangerous environment is like exposing yourself to the cold. It does its damage as you adjust to it. I had grown numb to the risks we faced. I have always considered it one of my worst judgment calls, and the family’s well-being became a terrifying distraction when the coup finally came.

  The station dutifully reported to Langley the coup talk we were hearing. The Directorate of Intelligence analysts were skeptical. They did not believe the military would subvert the constitution, but we were not immune to false alarms. Early in 1973, an asset called his case officer and reported, “My aunt is sick and may not live to recover.” The authentic agreed-upon phase between the asset and the case officer to indicate that a coup was under way was somewhat different—“My aunt has died.” This communication technique was to be used in an emergency, when the asset could not meet his case officer. This somewhat ambiguous call, coupled with collateral chatter about a possible coup and the Argentine military mobilization exercises along with the border with Chile, led the station management to believe that a coup had indeed started. Consequently, a CRITIC cable was sent to Washington indicating that a coup was imminent. The next morning, when nothing happened, the station ended up with egg on its face. This false alarm lowered the headquarters analysts’ willingness in the future to act on coup reporting from the field.

  These incidents of garbled CRITIC communication
s became part of the Santiago station folklore, and after that I made it a policy never to have officers working with me use code phrases as indicators for action. The message has to be unambiguous, or a meeting must be made to confirm its meaning before it can be reported.

  This misstep notwithstanding, an actual coup attempt did come, in June of 1973. A small group of about eighty soldiers, who had been drinking heavily the night before, decided it was time to act to free an officer who had been arrested for making seditious statements calling for a coup against Allende. They obtained his release from the Ministry of Defense and drove a column of sixteen armored vehicles from the Second Armored Battalion in Santiago to La Moneda and the Ministry of Defense, convinced that they would provide the spark that would ignite the entire armed forces. But the army’s commander in chief, Carlos Prats, determined to secure the military’s nonintervention tradition, personally went to La Moneda to stop them. One of our embassy’s political officers, Jeff Davidow, was on the street watching events unfold. Davidow, who went on to become ambassador in several countries and one of the most senior diplomats at the Department of State in the 1990s, recalls the scene: “Prats and the High Command strolled right out to the tanks and told the soldiers inside to turn them around and take them back to their barracks. ‘We’re in charge,’ he told them. It was extraordinarily dramatic … Of course, as events unfolded it was clear that the events of the day stimulated the generals to take action themselves rather than leaving it in the hands of their subordinates.”19 The soldiers returned to their base with little resistance. This attempt, known as the tancazo, or “tank putsch,” was over by 11:30 a.m. After that, we believed there never would be a military coup against Allende, and we directed all our activity to the next election, to help the moderate Christian Democrats, the strongest opposition party, mount a credible challenge in 1976.