The monitoring and harassment of Communist diplomatic missions by the CIA, as described above, was standard Agency practice throughout the world. This rarely stemmed from anything more than a juvenile cold-war reflex: making life hard for the commies.

Postscript: In 1998, Eladio Moll, a retired Uruguayan navy rear admiral and former intelligence chief, testifying before a commission of the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies, stated that during Uruguays dirty war (1972-1983), orders came from the United States to kill captive members of the Tupamaros after interrogating them. The guidance that was sent from the US, said Moll, was that what had to be done with the captured guerrillas was to get information, and that afterwards they didnt deserve to live. 29

34. Chile 1964-1973

A hammer and sickle stamped on your childs forehead

When Salvador Allende, a committed Marxist, came within three percent of winning the Chilean presidency in 1958, the United States decided that the next election, in 1964, could not be left in the hands of providence, or democracy.

Washington took it all very gravely. At the outset of the Kennedy administration in 1961, an electoral committee was established, composed of top-level officials from the State Department, the CIA and the White House. In Santiago, a parallel committee of embassy and CIA people was set up.1

U.S. government intervention in Chile in 1964 was blatant and almost obscene, said one intelligence officer strategically placed at the time. We were shipping people off right and left, mainly State Dept. but also CIA, with all sorts of covers. All in all, as many as 100 American operatives were dedicated to the operation.2

They began laying the groundwork for the election years ahead, a Senate investigating committee has disclosed, by establishing operational relationships with key political parties and by creating propaganda and organizational mechanisms capable of influencing key sectors of the population. Projects were undertaken to help train and organize anti-comrnunists among peasants, slum dwellers, organized labor, students, the media, etc.3

After channeling funds to several non-leftist parties, the electoral team eventually settled on a man of the center, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Chtistian Democratic Party, as the one most likely to block Allendes rise to power. The CIA underwrote more than half the partys total campaign costs,4 one of the reasons that the Agencys overall electoral operation reduced the U.S. Treasury by an estimated $20 million5-much more per voter than that spent by the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns combined in the same year in the United States. The bulk of the expenditures went toward propaganda. As the Senate committee described it:

In addition to support for political parties, the CIA mounted a massive anti-communist propaganda campaign. Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers, and wall painting. It was a scare campaign , which relied heavily on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads and was directed especially to women. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the anti-communist pastoral letter of Pope Pius XI were distributed by Christian Democratic organizations. They carried the designation, printed privately by citizens without political affiliation, in order more broadly to disseminate its con-

tent. Disinformation and black propaganda -material which purported to originate from another source, such as the Chilean Communist Party-were used as well.

The scare campaign played up to the fact that women in Chile, as elsewhere in Latin America, are traditionally more religious than men, more susceptible to being alarmed by the specter of godless, atheist communism . One radio spot featured the sound of a machine gun, followed by a womans cry: They have killed my child-the communists. The announcer then added in impassioned tones: Communism offers only blood and pain. For this not to happen in Chile, we must elect Eduardo Frei president. 7

Other scare tactics centered around warnings of Russian control, and that the left would confiscate everything near, dear and holy. The committee report continued:

The propaganda campaign was enormous. During the first week of intensive propaganda activity (the third week of June 1964), a CIA-funded propaganda group produced twenty radio spots per day in Santiago and on 44 provincial stations; twelve-minute news broadcasts five times daily on three Santiago stations and 24 provincial outlets; thousands of cartoons, and much paid press advertising. By the end of June, the group produced 24 daily newscasts in Santiago and the provinces, 26 weekly commentary programs, and distributed 3,000 posters daily.8

One poster which appeared in the thousands showed children with a hammer and sickle stamped on their foreheads.9

Newspaper articles from elsewhere in Latin America which supported the political lines of the CIA campaign were collected and reprinted in Chile. Undoubtedly, many of these articles had been written in the first place by CIA stations in the particular countries. There were also endorsements of Frei solicited from famous personages abroad, advertisements such as a message from the women of Venezuela ,10 and a vitriolic anti-communist radio broadcast by Juanita Castro, sister of Fidel, who was on a CIA-organized speaking tour of South America: If the Reds win in Chile, she said, no type of religious activity will be possible ... Chilean mother, I know you will not allow your children to be taken from you and sent to the Communist bloc, as in the case of Cuba. 11 The Senate committee also revealed that:

In addition to buying propaganda piecemeal, the [CIA] Station often purchased it wholesale by subsidizing Chilean media organizations friendly to the United States. Doing so was propaganda writ large. Instead of placing individual items, the CIA supported-or even founded-friendly media outlets which might not have existed in the absence of Agency support. From 1953 through 1970 in Chile, the Station subsidized wire services, magazines written for intellectual circles, and a right-wing weekly newspaper.12

Of one subsidized newspaper, a State Department veteran of the campaign recalls that The layout was magnificent. The photographs were superb. It was a Madison Avenue product far above the standards of Chilean publications. 13

The same could be said about the electioneering itself. Besides tunning political action projects on its own in a number of important voting blocks, the CIA directed the Christian Democrats campaign along American-style lines, with voter registration, get-out-the-vote drives, and professional management firms to carry out public opinion surveys.14 To top it all off, they sent for a ringer-an election specialist from the staff of that eminent connoisseur and guardian of free elections, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago.15 What the function of Daleys man in Chile was, can only be guessed at.

Several of the grassroots programs funded by the CIA were those run by Roger Vekemans, a Belgian Jesuit priest who arrived in Chile in 1957 and founded a network of social-action organizations, one of which grew to have 100 employees and a $30 million annual budget. By his own declaration in 1963, Vekemans received $5 million

from the CIA as well as a like amount from AID to guide his organizations resources in support of the

Christian Democrats and Eduardo Frei, with whom Vekemans had close relations.16 The Jesuits programs served the classic function of channeling revolutionary zeal along safe reformist paths. Church people working for the CIA in the Third World have typically been involved in gathering information about the activities and attitudes of individual peasants and workers, spotting the troublemakers, recruiting likely agents, preaching the gospel of anti-communism, acting as funding conduits, and serving as a religious cover for various Agency operations. An extreme anti-communist, Vekemans was a front-line soldier in the struggle of the Christian Democrats and the Catholic Church against the liberation theology then gaining momentum amongst the mote liberal clergy in Latin America and which would lead to the historic dialogue between Christianity and Marxism.17

The operation worked. It worked beyond expectations. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allendes 39 percent. The CIA regarded the anti-communist scare campaign as the most effective activity undertaken , noted the Senate committee.18 This was the tactic directed toward Chilean women in particular. As things turned out, Allende won the mens vote by 67,000 over Frei (in Chile men and women vote separately), but amongst the women Frei came out ahead by 469,000 ... testimony, once again, to the remarkable ease with which the minds of the masses of people can be manipulated, in any and all societies.

What was there about Salvador Allende that warranted all this feverish activity? What threat did he represent, this man against whom the great technical and economic resources of the worlds most powerful nation were brought to bear? Allende was a man whose political program, as described by the Senate committee report, was to redistribute income (two percent of the population received 46 percent of the income] and reshape the Chilean economy, beginning with the nationalization of major industries, especially the copper companies; greatly expanded agrarian reform; and expanded relations with socialist and communist countries. 19

A man committed to such a program could be expected by American policy makers to lead his country along a path independent of the priorities of US foreign policy and the multinationals. (As his later term as president confirmed, he was independent of any other country as well.)

The CIA is an ongoing organization. Its covert activities are ongoing, each day, in each country. Between the 1964 and 1970 presidential elections many of the programs designed to foster an anti-leftist mentality indifferent sections of the population continued; much of the propaganda and electioneering mechanisms remained in place to support candidates of the 1965 and 1969 congressional elections; in the latter election, financial support was given to a splinter socialist party in order to attract votes away from Allendes Socialist Party; this reportedly deprived the party of a minimum of seven congressional seats.20

The Senate committee described some of the other individual covert projects undertaken by the CIA during this period:

Wresting control of Chilean university student organizations from the communists;

Supporting a womens group active in Chilean political and intellectual life;

Combatting the communist-dominated Central Unica de Trabajadores Cbilenos (CUTCh) and supporting democratic [i.e., anti-communist] labor groups; and,