CHILE'S COUP at 50: Countdown Toward a Coup

1973-09-11
U.S. Officials: “Our Policy on Allende Worked Very Well”



Kissinger joked that “the President is worried that we might want to send someone to Allende’s funeral.
I said I did not believe we were considering that.”

The Documented U.S. Role in the Months, Days and Hours Before the Overthrow Of Allende

Published: Sep 8, 2023
Briefing Book #
840
Edited by Peter Kornblu

September 8, 2023, Washington D.C. - “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Henry Kissinger told President Richard Nixon several days after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, lamenting that they would not receive credit in the press for this Cold War accomplishment. Fifty years later, as Chileans and the world commemorate the anniversary of the U.S.-backed military takeover that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, a fierce debate over the extent of the U.S. contribution to the coup continues. On September 6, a leading Chilean television channel, Chilevision, broadcast a major documentary film titled “Operation Chile: Top Secret,” featuring dozens of U.S. declassified records obtained by the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project, including recently obtained documents published in the new Chilean edition of Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh’s book, “Pinochet Desclasificado.”

On the eve of the 50th anniversary, the Archive is posting an edited section of Kornbluh’s book—The Pinochet File—on the “Countdown Toward the Coup.” The essay records U.S. government actions, internal debates and policy deliberations as conditions for the coup evolved between March and September 1973. “This is an intricate, complicated and extraordinarily revealing history,” Kornbluh said, “that holds many lessons on the secret abuses of U.S. power and the danger of dictatorship over democracy for today’s world community.”



COUNTDOWN TOWARD A COUP
On September 12, 1973, a day after the Chilean military violently took power, State Department officials met to discuss press guidelines for Henry Kissinger on “how much advance notice we had on the coup.” Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Jack Kubisch noted that one Chilean military official had told the embassy that the plotters had withheld from their U.S. supporters the exact date they would move against Allende. But Kubisch said he “doubted if Dr. Kissinger would use this information, for it would reveal our close contact with coup leaders.”

In the months leading up to the coup, the CIA and the Pentagon had extensive contacts with Chilean plotters through various assets and agents and at least three days’ advance knowledge of a concrete date for a military takeover. Their communications derived from refocused covert operations targeting the military after the March 1973 congressional elections in Chile. The dismal electoral outcome convinced many CIA officials that the political and propaganda operations had failed to achieve their goals, and that the Chilean military, as Agency documents suggested, was the final solution to the problem posed by Allende’s Popular Unity alliance.

More:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2023-09-08/chiles-coup-50-countdown-toward-coup