by Tim Weiner
“The U.S. is spending $6 billion per year on intelligence and deserves to get a lot more than it is getting,” Nixon said. The intelligence board’s minutes record his growing rage. The president said “he could not put up with people lying to him about intelligence. If intelligence is inadequate or if the intelligence depicts a bad situation, he wants to know about it and he will not stand being served warped evaluations.”
“He understands that the intelligence community has been bitten badly a few times and thus tends to make its reports as bland as possible so that it won’t be bitten again,” the minutes say. “He believes that those responsible for the deliberate distortion of an intelligence report should be fired. He suggested that the time may be coming when he would have to read the riot act to the entire intelligence community.”
At this delicate moment, Nixon ordered the CIA to fix the next election in Chile.
29. “USG WANTS A
MILITARY SOLUTION”
By 1970, the CIA’s influence was felt in every nation in the Western Hemisphere, from the Texas border to Tierra del Fuego. In Mexico, the president dealt exclusively with the station chief, not the ambassador, and he received a personal New Year’s Day briefing at his home from the director of central intelligence. In Honduras, two successive station chiefs had privately pledged the support of the United States to the military junta, in defiance of the ambassadors they served.
Few Latin American nations paid more than lip service to the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. One of the few was Chile, where the CIA saw a red threat rising.
The leftist Salvador Allende was the front-runner in the presidential election, set for September 1970. The moderate Radomiro Tomic, backed by the Christian Democrats, traditional CIA favorites, looked like a very long shot. The right-winger Jorge Alessandri had a strong pro-American track record, but he was corrupt; the American ambassador, Edward Korry, found him insupportable. All bets were off.
The CIA had beaten Allende once before. President Kennedy first approved a political-warfare program to subvert him more than two years before the September 1964 Chilean elections. The agency put in the plumbing and pumped roughly $3 million into the political apparatus of Chile. It worked out to about a dollar a vote for the pro-American Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei. Lyndon Johnson, who approved the continuing operation, spent a lot less per voter when he won the American presidency in 1964. Frei’s campaign received get-out-the-vote drives and political consultants along with suitcases full of cash. The CIA financed covert anti-Allende efforts by the Roman Catholic Church and trade unions. The agency pumped up the resistance to Allende in the Chilean military command and the national police. Secretary of State Rusk told President Johnson that Frei’s victory was “a triumph for democracy,” achieved “partly as a result of the good work of the CIA.”
President Frei served for six years; the constitution limited him to one term. Now the question once again was how to stop Allende. For months, Helms had been warning the White House that if it wanted to keep Chile under control, it needed to approve a new covert action quickly. Winning foreign elections took time as well as money. The agency had one of its most durable and dependable men posted as station chief in Santiago—Henry Hecksher, who had spied on the Soviets from Berlin, helped overthrow Guatemala, and maneuvered Laos into the American camp. Now he strongly advised the White House to back Alessandri, the right-winger.
Kissinger was preoccupied. He had a real war in Southeast Asia on his hands. He famously called Chile a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica. But in March 1970, he approved a $135,000 political-warfare program to crush Allende. On June 27, adding another $165,000, he observed: “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.” He backed the defeat of Allende, but the election of no one.
In the spring and summer of 1970, the CIA went to work. At home and abroad, it fed propaganda to prominent reporters who served as the agency’s stenographers. “Particularly noteworthy in this connection was the Time cover story which owed a great deal to written materials and briefings provided by CIA,” an in-house agency report noted. In Europe, senior representatives of the Vatican and Christian Democratic leaders in West Germany and Italy worked at the CIA’s behest to stop Allende. In Chile, “posters were printed, news stories planted, editorial comment encouraged, rumors whispered, leaflets strewn, and pamphlets distributed,” Helms recounted. The goal was to terrify the electorate—“to show that an Allende victory risked the destruction of Chilean democracy,” Helms said. “It was a strenuous effort, but the discernable effect seemed minimal.”
Ambassador Korry found the CIA’s work appallingly unprofessional. “I had never seen such dreadful propaganda in a campaign anywhere in the world,” he said many years later. “I said that the idiots in the CIA who had helped create the ‘campaign of terror’—and I said this to the CIA—should have been sacked immediately for not understanding Chile and Chileans. This was the kind of thing I had seen in 1948 in Italy.”
On September 4, 1970, Allende won the three-way election by a 1.5 percent margin, with less than 37 percent of the vote. Under Chilean law, the Congress had to ratify the result and affirm Allende’s plurality fifty days after the election. It was a mere legal formality.
“YOU ALREADY HAVE YOUR VIETNAM”
The CIA had plenty of experience fixing an election before the ballot. It had never fixed one afterward. It had seven weeks to reverse the outcome.
Kissinger instructed Helms to weigh the chances for a coup. They were slim: Chile had been a democracy since 1932 and the military had not sought political power since. Helms sent station chief Henry Hecksher a cable ordering him to establish direct contacts with Chilean military officers who could take care of Allende. Hecksher had no such connections. But he did know Agustín Edwards, one of the most powerful men in Chile. Edwards owned most of the nation’s copper mines; its biggest newspaper, El Mercurio; and its Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. A week after the election, Edwards flew north to see his good friend Donald Kendall, Pepsi’s chief executive officer and one of President Nixon’s most valued financial supporters.
On September 14, Edwards and Kendall had coffee with Kissinger. Then “Kendall went to Nixon and wanted some help to keep Allende out of office,” Helms recalled. (Kendall later denied that role; Helms scoffed at the disavowal.) Helms met Edwards at midday at the Washington Hilton. They discussed the timing for a military coup against Allende. That afternoon, Kissinger approved $250,000 more for political warfare in Chile. In all, the CIA delivered a total of $1.95 million directly to Edwards, El Mercurio, and their campaign against Allende.
That same morning, Helms had told Tom Polgar, now the station chief in Buenos Aires, to get on the next plane for Washington—and to bring along the chief of the Argentine military junta, General Alejandro Lanusse. The general was an unsentimental man who had spent four years in prison in the 1960s after a failed coup. The next afternoon, September 15, Polgar and Lanusse sat in the director’s suite at CIA headquarters, waiting for Helms to return from a meeting with Nixon and Kissinger.
“Helms was very nervous when he returned,” Polgar remembered, and with good reason: Nixon had ordered him to mount a military coup without telling the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the American ambassador, or the station chief. Helms had scrawled the president’s commands on a notepad:
One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!…
$10,000,000 available….
best men we have….
make the economy scream.
Helms had forty-eight hours to give Kissinger a game plan and forty-nine days to stop Allende.
Tom Polgar had known Richard Helms for twenty-five years. They had started out together in the Berlin base in 1945. Polgar looked his old friend in the eye and saw a flicker of despair. Helms turned to General Lanusse and asked what it would take for his junta to help overthrow Allende.
The Argentine general sta
red at the chief of American intelligence.
“Mr. Helms,” he said, “you already have your Vietnam. Don’t make me have mine.”
“WHAT WE NEED IS A GENERAL WITH BALLS”
On September 16, Helms called an early-morning meeting with his covert-action chief, Tom Karamessines, and seven other senior officers. “The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him,” he announced. Karamessines had overall command as well as the thankless job of keeping Kissinger posted.
The CIA divided the Allende operation into Track One and Track Two. Track One was political warfare, economic pressure, propaganda, and diplomatic hardball. It aimed to buy enough votes in the Chilean Senate to block Allende’s confirmation. If that failed, Ambassador Korry planned to persuade President Frei to create a constitutional coup. As a last resort, the United States would “condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty,” Korry told Kissinger, “forcing Allende to adopt the harsh features of a police state,” and provoking a popular uprising.
Track Two was a military coup. Korry knew nothing about it. But Helms defied the president’s order to exclude Henry Hecksher, and he told Tom Polgar to return to Argentina to bolster him. Hecksher and Polgar—Berlin base boys, the best of friends since World War II—were among the finest officers the CIA had. They both thought Track Two was a fool’s errand.
Helms called in the station chief in Brazil, David Atlee Phillips, to lead the Chile task force. A CIA man since 1950, a veteran of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, he was the best propaganda artist at the agency. He had no hope for Track One.
“Anyone who had lived in Chile, as I had, and knew Chileans, knew that you might get away with bribing one Chilean Senator, but two? Never. And three? Not a chance,” he said. “They would blow the whistle. They were democrats and had been for a long time.” As for Track Two, Phillips said, “the Chilean military was a very model of democratic rectitude.” Their commander, General Rene Schneider, had proclaimed that the army would obey the constitution and refrain from politics.
For Track One, Phillips had twenty-three foreign reporters on his payroll to stir up international opinion. He and his colleagues had dictated the fierce anti-Allende story that ran on the cover of Time. For Track Two, he had a false-flag team of deep-cover CIA men with phony passports. One posed as a Colombian businessman, another as an Argentine smuggler, a third as a Bolivian military intelligence officer.
On September 27, the false-flaggers asked the U.S. Army attaché at the embassy, Colonel Paul Wimert, a longtime friend of the CIA, to help them find Chilean officers who would overthrow Allende. One of the very few generals who had tried to stir up a coup in the recent past, Roberto Viaux, was a candidate. But many of his fellow officers thought Viaux was a dangerous fool; some thought he was insane.
On October 6, one of the false-flaggers had a long talk with Viaux. Within hours, Ambassador Korry learned for the first time that the CIA was plotting a coup behind his back. He had a screaming confrontation with Henry Hecksher. “You have twenty-four hours to either understand that I run you or you leave the country,” the ambassador said.
“I am appalled,” Korry cabled Kissinger. “Any attempt on our part actively to encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.”
An apoplectic Kissinger ordered the ambassador to stop meddling. Then he summoned Helms once more to the White House. The result was a flash cable to the CIA station in Santiago: “CONTACT THE MILITARY AND LET THEM KNOW USG”—the U.S. government—“WANTS A MILITARY SOLUTION, AND THAT WE WILL SUPPORT THEM NOW AND LATER…. CREATE AT LEAST SOME SORT OF COUP CLIMATE…. SPONSOR A MILITARY MOVE.”
On October 7, hours after that order left CIA headquarters, Helms took off on a two-week inspection tour of the stations in Saigon, Bangkok, Vientiane, and Tokyo.
That day, Henry Hecksher tried to knock down the idea of running a coup in concert with General Viaux. The station chief told headquarters that a Viaux regime “would be a tragedy for Chile and for the free world…. A Viaux coup would only produce a massive bloodbath.” That went over poorly in Washington. On October 10, with two weeks left until the installation of Allende, Hecksher tried again to explain the facts to his superiors. “You have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile,” Hecksher wrote. “Thru Viaux solution we provide you with formula for chaos which is unlikely to be bloodless. To dissimulate US involvement will clearly be impossible. Station team, as you know, has given serious consideration to all plans suggested by HQs counterparts. We conclude that none of them stand even a remote chance of achieving objective. Hence, Viaux gamble, despite high risk factors, may commend itself to you.”
Headquarters hesitated.
On October 13, Hecksher cabled the news that Viaux was thinking about kidnapping the commander in chief of the Chilean army, the constitutionally minded General Schneider. Kissinger summoned Karamessines to the White House. On the morning of October 16, Karamessines cabled his orders to Hecksher:
IT IS FIRM AND CONTINUING POLICY THAT ALLENDE BE OVERTHROWN BY A COUP…. IT WAS DETERMINED THAT A VIAUX COUP ATTEMPT CARRIED OUT BY HIM ALONE WITH THE FORCES NOW AT HIS DISPOSAL WOULD FAIL…. ENCOURAGE HIM TO AMPLIFY HIS PLANNING…. ENCOURAGE HIM TO JOIN FORCES WITH OTHER COUP PLANNERS…. GREAT AND CONTINUING INTEREST IN THE ACTIVITIES OF…VALENZUELA ET AL AND WE WISH THEM OPTIMUM GOOD FORTUNE.
General Camilo Valenzuela, chief of the Santiago garrison, had been in touch with the CIA six days before. He had revealed that he was willing, perhaps able, but frightened. On the evening of October 16, one of Valenzuela’s officers approached the CIA looking for money and guidance. “Qué necesitamos es un general con cojones,” the officer said. “What we need is a general with balls.”
The next night, General Valenzuela sent two colonels to meet in secret with Colonel Wimert, the CIA’s uniformed representative. Their plan—virtually identical to one first broached by Viaux—was to kidnap General Schneider, fly him to Argentina, dissolve Congress, and take power in the name of the armed forces. They received $50,000 cash, three submachine guns, and a satchel of tear gas, all approved at headquarters by Tom Karamessines.
On October 19, with five days to go, Hecksher pointed out that Track Two had been “so unprofessional and insecure that, in Chilean setting, it could stand a chance of succeeding.” In other words, so many Chilean military officers knew that the CIA wanted Allende stopped that the odds of a coup were rising. “All interested military parties know our position,” reads a CIA memo dated October 20. Richard Helms returned to the United States from his two-week tour of Asian stations the next day.
On October 22, fifty hours before Congress was to convene to confirm the election results, a gang of armed men ambushed General Schneider on his way to work. He was shot repeatedly and died in surgery shortly after Salvador Allende was affirmed by Congress as the constitutionally elected president of Chile by a vote of 153 to 35.
It took the CIA quite a few days to figure out who had killed General Schneider. At headquarters, Dave Phillips had assumed that the CIA’s machine guns had done the job. To his great relief, it had been Viaux’s men, not Valenzuela’s, who pulled the trigger. The CIA plane once scheduled to smuggle a kidnapped General Schneider out of Santiago carried in his stead the Chilean officer who had received the agency’s guns and money. “He came to Buenos Aires with a pistol in his pocket saying, ‘I’m in big trouble, you got to help me,’” Tom Polgar remembered. The agency had started out buying votes in Chile, and it wound up smuggling automatic weapons to would-be assassins.
“THE CIA ISN’T WORTH A DAMN”
The White House was furious at the agency’s failure to stop Allende. The president and his men believed that a liberal cabal at the CIA had sabotaged covert action in Chile. Alexander Haig, now a general and Kissinger’s indispensable right hand, said the operation failed because the CIA’s officers had let their political feelings “flavor their final assessments and their proposals for remedial action
in the covert area.” It was high time, Haig told his boss, to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots under Helms” and insist on “a major overhauling of the means, the attitude, and the conceptual basis on which CIA’s covert programs should be carried out.”
Nixon decreed that Helms could keep his job only if he cleaned house. The director immediately promised to dismiss four of his six deputies, retaining only Tom Karamessines for covert action and Carl Duckett for science and technology. In a memo to Kissinger, he warned obliquely that a continuing purge would threaten the morale and dedication of his men. The president responded by threatening over and over to cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of the agency’s hide. “Nixon railed against the CIA and their lousy intelligence,” recalled George P. Shultz, then his budget director. “‘I want you to cut the CIA’s budget to one-third its present size,’” the president would say. “‘No, make it one-half its present size.’ It was Nixon’s way of venting his ire, but you didn’t take it too seriously.”
Nixon was not kidding. In December 1970, one of Kissinger’s aides pleaded “that you privately urge the President not to make such a large, arbitrary, across-the-board cut…. A meat-ax approach could be disastrous.” But the president held the knife at the CIA’s throat for the next two years.
It proved simple for the Nixon White House to savage the CIA, but far harder to salvage it. That month, at the president’s direction, Kissinger and Shultz deputized an ambitious ax-wielder at the budget office named James R. Schlesinger to lead a three-month review of the roles and responsibilities held by Richard Helms. Prematurely gray at forty-one, Schlesinger was a Harvard classmate of Kissinger’s, every bit his equal in intellect, though lacking the essential quality of deceit. He had made his reputation at the Nixon White House by crashing into the underbrush of the government and chopping out dead wood.