and white-collar workers, largely unsympathetic to the government, walked out, with or without CIA help.

Much of this campaign was aimed at wearing down the patience of the public, convincing them that socialism cant work In Chile . Yet there had been worse shortages for most of the people before the Allende government-shortages of food, housing, health care, and education, for example. At least half the population had suffered from malnutrition. Allende, who was a medical doctor, explained his free milk program by pointing out that Today in Chile there are over 600,000 children mentally retarded because they were not adequately nourished during the first eight months of their lives, because they did not receive the necessary proteins. 46

Financial aid was not the CIAs only input into the strike scene. More than 100 members of Chilean professional associations and employers guilds were graduates of the school run by the American Institute for Free Labor Development in Front Royal, Virginia- The Little Anti-Red Schoolhouse . AIFLD, the CIAs principal Latin America labor organization, also assisted in the formation of a new professional association in May 1971: the Confederation of Chilean Professionals. The labor specialists of AIFLD had more than a decades experience in the art of fomenting economic turmoil (or keeping workers quiescent when the occasion called for it).47

CIA propaganda merchants had a field day with the disorder and the shortages, exacerbating both by instigating panic buying. All the techniques, the whole of the media saturation, the handy organizations created for each and every purpose, so efficiently employed in 1964 and 1970, were facilitated by the virtually unlimited license granted the press: headlines and stories which spread rumors about everything from nationalizations to bad meat and undrinkable water ... Economic Chaos! Chile on Brink of Doom! in the largest type one could ever expect to see in a newspaper ... raising the specter of civil war, when not actually calling for it, literally ... alarmist stories which anywhere else in the world would have been branded seditious ... the worst of Londons daily tabloids or the National Enquirer of the United States appear as staid as a journal of dentistry by comparison.48

In response, on a few occasions, the government briefly closed down a newspaper or magazine, on the left as well as on the right, for endangering security.49

The Agencys routine support of the political opposition was extended to include the extreme rightist organization Patria y Libertad, which the CIA reportedly helped to form, and whose members it trained in guerrilla warfare and bombing techniques at schools in Bolivia and Los Fresnos, Texas. Patria y Libertad marched in rallies in full riot gear, engaged repeatedly in acts of violence and provocation, and its publications openly called for a military coup.50

The CIA was engaged in courting the military for the same end. Providing military equipment meant the normal presence of US advisers and the opportunity for Americans to work closely with the Chileans. Since 1969, the Agency had been establishing intelligence assets in all three branches of the Chilean armed services, and included command-level officers, field- and company-grade officers, retired general staff officers and enlisted men. Employing its usual blend of real and fabricated information, along with forged documents, the CIA endeavored to keep the officers on the alert . One approach was to convince them that, with Allendes approval, the police investigations unit was acting in concert with Cuban intelligence to gather information prejudicial to the army high command.51

Newspapers in Santiago supported by the CIA, particularly El Mercurio, often concentrated on influencing the military. They alleged communist plots to disband or

destroy the armed services, Soviet plans to establish a submarine base in Chile, North Korea setting up a training base, and so forth. The papers stirred up hatred against the government in the ranks, and in some cases entire columns were published which were calculated to change the opinion of a single officer, in one case an officers wife.52

The Agency also subsidized a number of books and other kinds of publications in Chile. One was a short-lived anti-government newsletter directed at the military.53 Later the CIA made use of a weekly humor and political magazine, SEPA, aimed at the same audience. The covet of the 20 March 1973 issue featured the headline: Robert Moss. An English Recipe for Chile-Military Control. Moss was identified by the magazine as a British sociologist. A more relevant description would have been that he was a news specialist associated with known CIA media fronts. One of these. Forum World Features of London (see Western Europe chapter), published Mosss book, Chiles Marxist Experiment, in 1973, which was widely circulated by the junta to justify its coup.54

Moss was associated with a CIA-funded think-tank in Santiago which went by the supremely innocuous name of the Institute of General Studies. The IGS, amongst other activities, conducted seminars for Chilean military officers in which it was explained, in technical, apolitical terms, why Allende was a disaster for the economy and why a laissez-faire system offered a solution to Chiles ills. There is no way of measuring to what extent such lectures influenced future actions of the military, although after the coup the junta did appoint several IGS people to top government posts.55

The CIAs Santiago station was meanwhile collecting the operational intelligence necessary in the event of a coup: arrest lists, key civilian installations and personnel that needed protection, key government installations which need to be taken over, and government contingency plans which would be used in case of a military uprising. 56 The CIA later asserted that this information was never passed to the Chilean military, a claim that does not give one the feeling of having been united with the probable. It should be noted in this context that in the days immediately following the coup the Chilean military went directly to the residences of many Americans and other foreigners living in Santiago who had been sympathetic to the Allende government.57

The government contingency plans were presumably obtained by the Agency through its infiltration of the various parties which made up Allendes Unidad Popular (UP) coalition. CIA agents in the upper echelons of Allendes own Socialist Party were paid to make mistakes in their jobs .58 In Washington, burglary was the Agencys tactic of choice for obtaining documents. Papers were taken from the homes of several employees of the Chilean Embassy; and the embassy itself, which had been bugged for some time, was burgled in May 1972 by some of the same men who the next month staged the Watergate break-in.59

In March 1973, the UP won about 44 percent of the vote in congressional elections, compared to some 36 percent in 1970. It was said to be the largest increase an incumbent party had ever received in Chile after being in power more than two years. The opposition parties had publicly expressed their optimism about capturing two-thirds of the congressional seats and thus being able to impeach Allende. Now they faced three more years under him, with the prospect of being unable, despite their best and most underhanded efforts, to prevent his popularity from increasing even further.

During the spring and summer the destabilization process escalated. There was a whole series of demonstrations and strikes, with an even longer one by the truckers. Time magazine reported: While most of the country survived on short rations, the truckers seemed unusually well equipped for a lengthy holdout. A reporter asked a group of

truckers who were camping and dining on a lavish communal meal of steak, vegetables, wine and empanadas where the money for it came from. From the CIA, they answered laughingly.60

There was as well daily sabotage and violence, including assassination. In June, an abortive attack upon the Presidential Palace was carried out by the military and Patria y Libertad.

In September the military prevailed. It is clear, said the Senate investigating committee, the CIA received intelligence reports on the coup planning of the group which carried out the successful September 11 coup throughout the months of July, August, and September 1.973. 61

The American role on that fateful day was one of substance and shadow. The coup began in the Pacific coast port of Valparaiso with the dispatch of Chilean naval troops to Santiago, while US Navy ships were present offshore, ostensibly to participate in joint maneuvers with the Chilean Navy. The American ships stayed outside of Chilean waters, but remained on the alert. A US WB-575 plane-an airborne communications control system-piloted by US Air Force officers, cruised in the Chilean sky. At the same time, 32 American observation and fighter planes were landing at the US air base in Mendoza, Argentina, not far from the Chilean border.62

In Valparaiso, while US military officers were meeting with their Chilean counterparts, a young American, Charles Horman, who lived in Santiago and was stranded near Valparaiso by the coup, happened to engage in conversation with several Americans, civilian and military. A retired naval engineer told him: We came down to do a job and its done. One or two American military men also gave away clues they shouldnt have. A few days later, Horman was arrested in his Santiago residence. They knew where to find him. He was never seen again.63

Thus it was that they closed the country to the outside world for a week, while the tanks rolled and the soldiers broke down doors; the stadiums rang with the sounds of execution and the bodies piled up along the streets and floated in the river; the torture centers opened for business; the subversive books were thrown to the bonfires; soldiers slit the trouser legs of women, shouting that In Chile women wear dresses! ; the poor returned to their natural state; and the men of the world in Washington and in the halls of international finance opened up their check-books.

One year later, President Gerald Ford was moved to declare that what the United States had done in Chile was in the best interest of the people in Chile and certainly in our own best interest. 64 The remark could have been punctuated with a pinch of snuff.

What the United States had done in Chile, thought Gerald Ford, or so he said, was to help and assist the preservation of opposition newspapers and electronic media and to preserve opposition political parties. 65 The reporters present were kind, or obsequious, enough not to ask Ford what he thought of the juntas Chile where all opposition, of any kind, in any form, in any medium, was forbidden.

It was of course de rigueur for some other officials and congressmen to assert that what the United States had really done in Chile was repel the Soviet threat to the Western hemisphere. But Soviet behavior toward the Allende government simply did not tally with any such hypothesis; the language of US intelligence reports confirms that: Soviet overtures to Allende ... characterized by caution and restraint ; Soviet desire to avoid