Killing Hope: U.S. and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II

by William Blum

Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy

“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

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 Christian Democratic Party, as the one most likely to block Allende’s rise to power. The CIA underwrote more than half the party’s total campaign costs,4 one of the reasons that the Agency’s 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.

“Disinformation” and “black propaganda”—material which purported to originate from another source, such as the Chilean Communist Party—were used as well.6

The operation worked. It worked beyond expectations. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allende’s 39 percent. The CIA regarded “the anti-communist scare campaign as the most effective activity undertaken”, noted the Senate committee.18

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”23

…$10,000,000 available, more if necessary … make the economy scream …”26

Nixon and Kissinger made it clear to the CIA that an assassination of Allende would not be unwelcome. One White House options-paper discussed various ways this could be carried out.29

“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 1973.”61

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

There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power—an elected Marxist in power.