Over the past decades, troves of declassified documents have revealed the full extent of U.S. covert action during the Cold War, in places including Afghanistan, Cuba, Guatemala, Iran, and Nicaragua. But among the most infamous cases is that of the 1973 military coup in Chile, involving the overthrow and eventual death of President Salvador Allende and the rise of General Augusto Pinochet. This week, we’re resurfacing Jack Devine’s 2014 article on what he witnessed as a young CIA officer based in Santiago—and his version of the events that led up to the coup and its bloody aftermath.
In his essay, Devine sought to unravel the conventional wisdom that “Washington played a crucial role in the military-led overthrow of the democratically elected Allende.” At the time of the coup, Devine was serving as a clandestine CIA operative in Santiago. Allende, a socialist and self-proclaimed Marxist, had triumphed in the country’s elections three years earlier—much to the chagrin of U.S. President Richard Nixon and his adviser, Henry Kissinger. Admittedly, Devine wrote, the United States had, in 1970, attempted to launch a coup that would have kept Allende “from taking office despite his victory.” But he could “say with conviction that the CIA did not plot with the Chilean military to overthrow Allende in 1973.”
Washington had changed tack after the 1970 effort failed, Devine wrote; the White House’s new goal was simply to “support the political opposition” and stoke domestic turmoil. As a result, he argued, the CIA could not be held responsible when, on September 11, 1973, the Chilean armed forces seized control of the country. Seeking cover in the presidential palace, Allende refused to resign—and as the city “erupted in gunfire,” ultimately took his own life. “Washington hailed Allende’s demise as a major victory,” Devine wrote; Nixon and Kissinger “were pleased.” And the CIA had succeeded in its efforts to “create a climate for the coup without tainting the effort by becoming directly involved.”
But for some, Chile’s coup is not a closed case. Writing in response to Devine, Peter Kornbluh, the Director of the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project, argued that “the declassified record tells a very different story.” Even if Washington didn’t play a direct role in the coup, it nonetheless “developed a longer-term effort to destabilize the Chilean government economically, politically, and militarily and to create a climate conducive to Allende’s demise.” Thousands of civilians would be arrested, tortured, killed, and forcibly disappeared by the Pinochet regime over the 17 years following the coup. “For its role in the overthrow of Allende and the consolidation of the Pinochet regime,” Kornbluh wrote, “the CIA deserves all the blame it has received—and more.”
