Track II and Chile, 1970

On 4 September 1970 Salvador Allende, a Socialist senator running for the fourth time at the head of the Popular Unity coalition, won Chile's presidential election with 36.3 percent of the vote, about 39,000 votes ahead of the conservative Jorge Alessandri. With no absolute majority, the choice passed to a joint session of Congress, due on 24 October. By long custom Congress confirmed the front-runner⁵.

The Nixon administration had funded "spoiling operations" against Allende before the vote. After it, the effort split in two. "Track I," handled through the 40 Committee and the embassy, tried political maneuvers to keep Allende out through Congress. "Track II" was a CIA effort to provoke a military coup, kept from the State Department, the Defense Department, the 40 Committee and the US ambassador^5,7.

"Make the economy scream"

Track II began at a twenty-minute White House meeting on 15 September 1970. President Nixon met his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, Attorney General John Mitchell and the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms. Helms's handwritten notes survive¹:

1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! worth spending not concerned risks involved no involvement of embassy $10,000,000 available, more if necessary full-time job—best men we have game plan make the economy scream 48 hours for plan of action

Helms told the Church Committee he came away with the impression that the President "wanted something done, and he didn't much care how." The CIA was to report on Track II to Kissinger or his deputy, Alexander Haig⁵.

Looking for officers

The army's commander-in-chief, General René Schneider, held that the constitution required the army to accept whoever Congress chose. Every group of plotters the CIA found therefore treated Schneider's removal as the first step^5,7. Between 5 and 20 October the CIA made 21 contacts with Chilean military and police officers and assured those inclined to a coup of support "at the highest levels of the U.S. Government"⁵. The US Army attaché was placed under the station's direction and told, in a message on 14 October, to offer "material support short of armed intervention"².

The CIA dealt with three groups. One was dropped early for its extremism. Another centered on a retired general, Roberto Viaux, whom the CIA first contacted on 9 October and who asked for weapons, tear gas and a life insurance policy. A third was led by serving officers, including General Camilo Valenzuela, commander of the Santiago garrison^5,7.

15 October: "Preserve your assets"

At a meeting on 15 October, Kissinger, Haig and the CIA's Deputy Director for Plans, Thomas Karamessines, agreed that Viaux had no more than "one chance in twenty" and that the CIA should warn him off: "Preserve your assets. We will stay in touch. The time will come when you together with all your other friends can do something"³. The next day CIA headquarters cabled the station that "it is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup," that efforts would continue "vigorously beyond" 24 October, and that the station should wish the other plotters "optimum good fortune"⁴.

22 October

A group of officers the CIA was actively supporting tried to seize Schneider on 19 October and failed; a second attempt on 20 October also failed. In the early hours of 22 October, knowing of both failures, the CIA passed three submachine guns, ammunition and tear gas grenades to the group that had failed on 19 October, which still planned a kidnapping^5,7. Later that day Schneider was shot in a kidnap attempt on his way to work. He died on 25 October^5,8.

The Church Committee found that the shooting was "apparently conducted by conspirators other than those to whom the CIA had provided weapons." A Chilean military court convicted associates of Viaux of the attack and sentenced Viaux to twenty years as its "intellectual author"; Valenzuela received three years' exile for the wider conspiracy. The court found Schneider was killed with handguns⁵. In 2000 the US intelligence community reported that the Viaux group had acted "independently of the CIA at that time," that the guns given to Valenzuela's group were later returned unused, and that in November 1970 the CIA paid $35,000 to a member of the Viaux group, to keep the earlier contact secret and "for humanitarian reasons"⁷.

Aftermath

The killing turned Chilean opinion against the plotters. On 24 October Congress confirmed Allende by 153 votes to 35⁷. The Church Committee concluded that US officials "offered encouragement to the Chilean dissidents who plotted the kidnapping," knew that kidnapping was planned, and did not desire or encourage Schneider's death, though it called his death a "foreseeable risk" of the kidnapping⁶. The CIA went on funding Allende's opponents until the military coup of 11 September 1973, which the Hinchey Report says the agency did not instigate⁷.

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