Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (7 page)

THREE

“Your Friend Called from the Airport”

Chile, 1971–74

As I look back on it now, Santiago was an indescribably exotic first foreign assignment. It was September 1973, and rumors of a military coup against President Salvador Allende had been swirling for months. There had already been one attempt. Street protests by Allende opponents made Santiago chaotic. Strikes and economic disarray made basic necessities difficult to find. Occasional bomb explosions rocked the capital. The whole country seemed exhausted, waiting.

I was at Da Carla, a noisy Italian restaurant in downtown Santiago, for lunch on September 9, when a colleague joined my table and whispered in my ear: “Call home immediately; it’s urgent.” I ducked out as discreetly as I could, to get back to the station to call from a secure line. I thought I knew what my wife would tell me. Amid all the chaos, Pat, who had never been outside the United States and Bermuda before we came to Chile, was raising five young children. She could have been calling me about any number of urgent matters. But my instincts were right. “Your friend called from the airport,” she told me. “He’s leaving the country. He told me to tell you, ‘The military has decided to move. It’s going to happen on September eleventh. The navy will lead it off.’”

It was the first indication received by any member of the CIA station in Santiago that the coup had been set in motion. A second source later called the station; we agreed to meet at his house just after dark. He confirmed the earlier report and added one key detail, the time the coup would begin: 7:00 a.m. With two sources, I sent CIA headquarters in Langley a top secret cable—a CRITIC, which overrides all other traffic worldwide and goes to the highest levels of government. Markings on the document, declassified in redacted form in 2000, indicate that it was distributed to President Nixon and other top U.S. policy makers the following day.
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The source’s name has been blacked out—and I am not at liberty to divulge it now—but his message bears an unadorned sense of urgency: “
A COUP ATTEMPT WILL BE INITIATED ON 11 SEPTEMBER. ALL THREE BRANCHES OF THE ARMED FORCES AND THE CARABINEROS ARE INVOLVED IN THIS ACTION. A DECLARATION WILL BE READ ON RADIO AGRICULTURA AT 7 A.M. ON SEPT. 11 … THE CARABINEROS HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR SEIZING PRESIDENT SALVADOR ALLENDE
.”
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This is how the U.S. government learned of the coup. That may be hard for many Americans to believe, given a central conclusion reached in 1975 by the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Frank Church: “There is no doubt that the U.S. government sought a military coup in Chile” in 1970.
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But I can say with conviction, flat out: the CIA did not plot with the military to overthrow Allende in 1973. It’s important to get this straight for the sake of history: the CIA should not be blamed for things it did not do.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the Agency has been involved in misguided covert actions, driven by presidential authorization, most of which are well-known by now. But the 1973 overthrow of Allende wasn’t one of them.

“We helped to keep the opposition in Chile alive, but we did not promote the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende in 1973,” said Ed Boring, a longtime Latin America hand and colleague who was in Chile with me at the time.

A highly respected former State Department official and later an ambassador, Jeffrey Davidow, who was a junior political officer with the State Department in Chile in 1973, noted that the work the U.S. government did was designed to bolster the opposition against Allende so the opposition could hang on until the next elections, but those efforts also, to some degree, had “the effect of roiling the waters” and contributed to the military stepping in. This is a far cry from orchestrating a military coup.

Even the Church Committee reported, “There is no hard evidence of direct U.S. assistance to the coup, despite frequent allegations of such aid.”
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Nevertheless, the impression persists that the CIA sponsored the coup that toppled Allende. The confusion arises, I believe, because of one of those misguided covert actions I spoke of. In September 1970, after Allende finished first in a three-way presidential election, President Nixon summoned CIA director Richard Helms to the White House and told him in no uncertain terms to foment a coup.
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Despite the Agency’s assessment that it could not be done, especially with such a short time line, Nixon believed it was essential to U.S. interests in all of Central and South America to keep Allende from taking office. This coup attempt, which Nixon ordered the CIA to conceal from the U.S. ambassador and other American officials in Chile, came to be known as the highly secretive Track II—a secret complement to Track I, the political and propaganda efforts that had been mounted to keep Allende from being elected in the first place.

Track II meets my definition of “bad covert action,” for a number of reasons. Conditions were simply not ripe for military action. The Chilean military was standing behind the constitution and wanted no part of a coup after the election. Likewise, the Chilean people were not supportive of blocking Allende. He had been democratically elected, even if his margin of victory was small. Later, his government’s mishandling of the economy would galvanize the people and the military, but as Allende had not yet taken office, there was not even a pretext for action. Not only were the conditions not conducive to lethal action, the cost of military intervention—as Augusto Pinochet’s actions demonstrated years later—was excessive in terms of loss of life and the violation of human rights and democratic freedom. From a policy perspective, and with the advantage of hindsight, I see that the Nixon administration should have heeded the CIA’s advice and limited its efforts to supporting the political opposition and letting the democratic process play out until it was clearer that Allende was in fact pulling Chile into the Soviet orbit.

Before being assigned to Chile, I had worked the night shift for the Chile Task Force at Langley, synthesizing cables from Santiago into a morning intelligence report for the bosses. It was my first assignment after covert training at the Farm. The station chief in Santiago did not hide his doubts about a coup: “
PARAMETER OF ACTION IS EXCEEDINGLY NARROW AND AVAILABLE OPTIONS ARE QUITE LIMITED,
” read one cable.
“[DO] NOT CONVEY IMPRESSION THAT STATION HAS SUREFIRE METHOD FOR HALTING, LET ALONE TRIGGERING COUP ATTEMPTS
,” read another.
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His concerns proved to be well-founded. However, the chief of Latin American covert action at the time recalls that there was a great deal of pressure on him to push hard for a coup. In fact, the headquarter’s covert action chief was sent by DCI Richard Helms to Santiago to explicitly tell the station chief that if he wasn’t prepared to press for a coup, he could return to Washington that day and the covert action chief would take command of the station. The station chief said he would do the best he could, but he remained pessimistic about the likelihood of success.

On October 22, 1970, a small group of bungling retired military officers and members of the right-wing Patria y Libertad organization attempted to initiate a coup by kidnapping General René Schneider, the commander in chief, who was a staunch opponent of military intervention in Chilean politics.
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Schneider was killed, and the event had the effect of rallying the country around Allende, who was inaugurated two days later. At that point, all coup plotting ended. In fact, Nixon drastically altered his policy. The new goal was to avoid giving Allende any excuse to use the United States as a target to rally domestic loyalty and international support.
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Nixon appointed an ambassador, Nathaniel Davis, who liked Allende personally and who had an intellectual curiosity to see whether the transformation from a capitalist to a Marxist economy could be accomplished peacefully—what Allende called “the Chilean path to socialism.”

There are many reasons that CIA officers have rocky relationships with ambassadors. Most have to do with the conflicting cultures and power struggles between the CIA and the State Department. This is a tension that dates back to the creation of the Agency, and became so bad by the mid-1970s in many stations (including Chile) that the two sides agreed to formal ground rules establishing the ambassador as the head of the country team at any foreign post, though the CIA worked some strong footnotes into the rules about protecting methods and sources.

On the ground, relations between ambassadors and station chiefs often became strained over the high level of political access a chief can enjoy as a result of our covert actions and the substantial support the host country’s intelligence service received. Being plugged into a host nation’s intelligence service gave us special access to the country’s governmental system, access the State Department did not always have. In politically turbulent countries, the embassy could deal only with the party in power or else risk the wrath of the government, whereas the CIA could operate below the radar across the entire political spectrum. We could support an array of political, media, military, police, and intelligence leaders, some of whom would eventually become heads of state or cabinet-level officials. This gave the CIA a significant leg up when the opposition returned to power. People don’t forget the support they got on their way up.

Our ability to pay sources for information and access was also always a bone of contention with State, which thought it gave us an unfair advantage in gaining political access and influence. CIA recruitment is based largely on the American capitalist system: namely, buying sources’ cooperation. It has been my experience that the taking of money, often because of an urgent financial need, makes sources more reliable and responsive. Once on the payroll, they are compromised and cannot divulge the relationship without hurting themselves. This is a very important factor in controlling an asset’s potential negative behavior. Still, money doesn’t guarantee reliability, and all information has to be vetted independently. Wherever possible, the Agency tries to get confirmatory sources and independent data, and it tracks agents over a long period of time to determine their reliability, accuracy, and consistency. (To the CIA, “agents” are not employees but individuals—typically foreigners—who are paid to steal secrets, provide intelligence, and broker access. The CIA equivalent of an FBI agent is called a “case officer.”)

I do not believe that paying agents and other sources of information corrupts the intelligence-gathering process. As a general operating principle, we select targets who have known access to information we want. Hence, we start from a very strong position, because the source does not have to invent information to get paid. He or she already has the access. Furthermore, a high percentage of our recruitments begin with ideological identification with the United States. Many of them either don’t identify with the political systems in their countries or have been harmed by them. The money is a reinforcing inducement, not the be-all and end-all in a source’s productivity. Plus, there is a work ethic among most agents. They respond to financial incentives and try to collect good information to continue earning them.

The issue of false or corrupted information comes into play when you have a walk-in (someone who appears at an embassy and volunteers his services) or a double agent. Nearly as troubling is the fabricator who tends to be creative and substantively smart, albeit without real access. Guarding against these impostors is where tradecraft kicks in. Beyond polygraphs, background checks, and surveillance, the most effective way to evaluate sources’ reliability is to vet their information. Even with very good fabricators, their information doesn’t hold up under routine professional questioning in a debriefing, which is what most asset meetings are. Over time, a phony source will show himself to be inconsistent when his or her information is compared to that from other, reliable reporting.

During my first tour, the CIA resumed its strategy of opposing Allende by supporting his political opponents in Chile and making sure he did not dismantle the institutions of democracy—the media, political parties, and labor organizations—that kept the opposition robust. We were under strict orders that all military contacts we made should be for the purposes of gathering intelligence, not fomenting coups. But we also understood that Allende did not represent the majority of Chileans. Under the terms of the Chilean constitution, his Unity Party had been elected with just over 36 percent of the vote. The opposition was, in fact, the majority.

At this point, readers who are wondering why the CIA continued to act against Allende at all are surely too young to remember the proxy war between the democratic West and the Communist Eastern Bloc waged by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. We believed that the fate of the democratic world was at stake. When a country went Communist, it was a victory for the Soviet Union. Dictatorship inevitably replaced democracy, and U.S. interests were defeated. That’s what had happened in Cuba, and the United States was bound and determined to keep communism from spreading in our own hemisphere, even as the Soviets were working hard to promote it in the region. To the United States, Allende represented a dangerous new front for the Soviets in the Cold War. In his 1977 interview with David Frost, Richard Nixon recalled being warned that, with Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile, Latin America was a “red sandwich” that would eventually be all red in between.
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We were no longer under orders to topple Allende, but we certainly wanted, and were willing to assist in, his political defeat.

It was into this atmosphere that I arrived in Santiago in August of 1971, with my wife and five children between the ages of two and seven. There were no direct flights, so we had flown first to Buenos Aires—after an emergency layover in Paraguay for a repair—and then to Santiago, an eighteen-hour trip that frazzled all of us. We got to our temporary quarters—a rather drab three-bedroom apartment—around dinnertime and discovered that the only thing available to eat was a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. Our six-year-old son burst into tears. Perhaps I should have been overwhelmed at that moment—at the audacity of our mission, the odds against success, and the sheer culture shock I was putting my family through—but I was not. Quite the opposite. I was supremely confident in the correctness of our cause, the power of our tools, and the resilience of my family. I was also elated at my good fortune: a junior officer on his first foreign assignment landing in Chile, the focal point, at that moment, of the Agency’s Western Hemisphere Division. I was exactly where I wanted to be.