The Nation: Chile: A Case Study

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The Nixon Administration saw the Allende regime as more of a threat than Cuba to the hemisphere. The White House feared that Chile would serve as a base for South America's revolutionary left as well as a convenient outpost for the Soviet Union. So many Marxist activists were pouring in from Cuba, Czechoslovakia and China that a special team of CIA clerks was dispatched to Chile to start indexing thousands of cards on their activities. Publicly, Henry Kissinger warned of the domino effect in Latin America. If Communism could find a secure berth in Chile, it would be encouraged to spread throughout the continent. Privately, the 40 Committee, the top-level intelligence panel headed by Kissinger, authorized $8 million to be spent to make life even tougher for Allende than he was making it for himself.

The extent of the CIA's involvement was revealed earlier this month by congressional sources who had been privy to earlier testimony by CIA Director William Colby. Further details have been supplied by other agency officials. Precisely how much was spent by foreign Communists—principally Moscow—to get Allende into office and then to keep him there is not known. Most Western intelligence experts figure that the CIA campaign was scarcely comparable in terms of expenditures or intensity. Nonetheless, the agency went further than even many of its critics imagined.

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For a Marxist government, the Allende regime had moved relatively slowly toward suppressing free institutions. But the CIA believed it was only a matter of time before all dissent would be muffled. Approximately half the CIA funds were funneled to the opposition press, notably the nation's leading daily El Mercurio; Allende had steered government advertising to the papers supporting him while encouraging newsprint prices to rise high enough to bankrupt the others. Additional CIA funds went to opposition politicians, private businesses and trade unions. "What we were really doing was supporting a civilian resistance movement against an arbitrary government," argues a CIA official. "Our target was the middle-class groups who were working against Allende."

Covert assistance went beyond help for the democratic opposition. The CIA infiltrated Chilean agents into the upper echelon of the Socialist Party. Provocateurs were paid to make deliberate mistakes in their jobs, thus adding to Allende's gross mismanagement of the economy. CIA agents organized street demonstrations against government policies.

As the economic crisis deepened, the agency supported striking shopkeepers and taxi drivers. Laundered CIA money, reportedly channeled to Santiago by way of Christian Democratic parties in Europe, helped finance the Chilean truckers' 45-day strike, one of the worst blows to the economy. Moreover, the strikers doubtless picked up additional CIA cash that was floating round the country. As an intelligence official notes, "If we give it to A, and then A gives it to B and C and D, in a sense it's true that D got it. But the question is: Did we give it to A knowing D would get it?"