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
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