Ending the CIA’s Extended Chile Silence

The ghost of Charles Horman continues to haunt the CIA. The American expatriate, killed during the 1973 coup led by Chilean general Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, was immortalized in the Oscar-winning 1982 movie "Missing." His death and revelations of agency support for Pinochet helped lead to congressional oversight of CIA activities. In the wake of Pinochet’s arrest last year in Britain, Clinton asked the agency and four other branches of government to review for release "all documents that shed light on human rights abuses, terrorism and political violence" from 1968 to 1991. The CIA has released only a fraction of the documents it should have and, despite a high priority in Clinton’s directive, not one on the Horman case. "They didn’t comply," says a State Department official. Asked for an explanation, the CIA told TIME it would release some Horman documents in the future.

Later this month, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York will team up with Florida congressman Porter Goss to introduce a bill increasing congressional control over declassification, with particular attention to cases like Horman’s. The law will create an independent board to review documents for declassification. The first head of that board, Goss hopes, will be Moynihan.