CHILE’S COUP at 50
Kissinger Briefed Nixon on Failed 1970 CIA Plot to Block Allende Presidency

Washington, D.C., August 8, 2023 - As the commander in chief of the Chilean army, Gen. René Schneider, lay dying in a hospital after being shot in a CIA-backed coup plot in October 1970, President Nixon placed a phone call to his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, to ask “What is happening in Chile?” according to a transcript of their conversation posted today by the National Security Archive. Kissinger told the President that the CIA-backed plot to block Socialist president-elect Salvador Allende from being inaugurated—an operation ordered by Nixon five weeks earlier—had not succeeded. The Chilean military turned out to be “a pretty incompetent bunch,” according to Kissinger, having failed to seize power after the removal of Gen. Schneider, Chile’s top pro-constitution officer.

“There’s been a turn for the worse,” Kissinger explained, referring to the Schneider assassination, “but it hasn’t triggered anything else. The next move should have been a government takeover, but that hasn’t happened.”

“The [congressional] election is tomorrow and the inauguration is [November] third,” Kissinger informed Nixon. “What they could have done is prevent the Congress from meeting. But that hasn’t been done. It’s close, but it’s probably too late.”

Obtained by the National Security Archive through legal and FOIA efforts, the Kissinger-Nixon “telcon” was published for the first time last week in Pinochet Desclasificado: Los Archivos Secretos de Estados Unidos Sobre Chile, a revised, 50th-anniversary, Chilean edition of Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh’s book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. The updated edition was published as the first of a special series by Un Día en La Vida, a new publishing agency founded by Andrea Insunza and Javier Ortega through one of Chile’s leading publishers, Catalonia Books. As part of the 50th-anniversary commemorations in September, a leading Chilean television channel, Chilevision, plans to broadcast a four-part documentary based on the book and Kornbluh’s efforts to unearth secret documents relating to the U.S. role in the coup and support for the Pinochet dictatorship that followed.

Nixon, Edwards, and The CIA

Pinochet Desclasificado also reveals new U.S. records on the role of Chilean media mogul Agustín Edwards in assisting the initial CIA coup plotting in the days following Salvador Allende’s dramatic election in September 1970. Internal White House scheduling records obtained by Kornbluh for the book provide concrete proof of a secret, September 15, 1970, meeting between Edwards and President Nixon in the Oval Office—an encounter never acknowledged by Edwards, who died in 2017. The scheduling records show that Edwards and Pepsi CEO Donald Kendall had an 8am breakfast meeting with Henry Kissinger and Attorney General John Mitchell. At 9:15, according to the President’s internal schedule, Nixon and Edwards met in the Oval Office. No documentation about the substance of the meeting has been uncovered; but only six hours later, Nixon called Kissinger, Mitchell and CIA director Richard Helms into the Oval Office and ordered Helms to come up with a ”gameplan” within 48 hours to instigate a coup that would prevent Allende’s inauguration.

The new book also reveals how Edwards supported the CIA’s ability to implement Nixon’s orders. It reproduces, for the first time publicly, a top secret CIA report sent from Helms to Kissinger on what the CIA director called “a more exhaustive debriefing” of Edwards on potential coup plotters and requirements for the military to move. The debriefing on September 18 followed an extraordinary meeting between Helms and Edwards at the Hotel Madison on September 14, making Edwards the earliest and most important informant for CIA coup plotting in Chile.

Two of the pro-coup Chilean military officers who Edwards described in detail, retired General Roberto Viaux and Santiago Garrison commander Major General Camilo Valenzuela, soon became key CIA contacts for the plot to remove General Schneider—the first step in a plan for the military to seize power, close Congress, and block Allende’s ratification and inauguration. The CIA provided Viaux with life insurance policies before the operation and was paid “hush money” for his team to flee Chile after Schneider was assassinated. Valenzuela received guns, ammunition, and $50,000 in cash from the agency for supporting the coup plot.

More importantly, Edwards told the CIA what “clear and specific guarantees” the Chilean military would need to undermine the constitutional change of government and block Allende’s inauguration. According to the memorandum of conversation, titled “Conversation with Agustin Edwards, Owner of El Mercurio Chilean Newspaper Chain, 18 September 1970,” Edwards “warned that the armed forces leaders are unlikely to take action without several clear and specifFcic guarantees, primarily from the United States” of “immediate decisive and substantial assistance.” Those guarantees would include: “immediate logistical support consisting of arms, ammunition, transportation, communications equipment and fuel,” “immediate and massive economic support,” and “assurances they would not be abandoned and ostracized.”

Chilean Government Requests Documents from Biden Administration

As the anniversary of the coup approaches on September 11, the Chilean government of Gabriel Boric has publicly called on the Biden Administration to release still secret U.S. records relating to the coup. In an interview with the Spanish news service, EFE, Chile’s ambassador to Washington, Juan Gabriel Valdés, noted that key historical documents, such as the Nixon’s intelligence briefing on the day of the coup, remain classified a half century later. “We still don’t know what President Nixon saw on his desk the morning of the military coup,” Valdés stated. “There are details that remain of interest to [Chileans], that are important for us to reconstruct our own history.”

Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project, called on the Biden Administration to honor Chile’s request for “declassification diplomacy” and release all remaining secret U.S. documents on the coup and its aftermath. “The anniversary of the coup in Chile,” he said, “provides the ultimate opportunity to learn its lessons about the sanctity of democratic processes vs the dangers of authoritarianism—lessons that remain immediately relevant not only to Chileans, but to the global community, including the United States.” 

The purpose of archiving such documents from the past, he pointed out, is to use them to inform the present, and the future. “If not now, on the 50^th anniversary,” Kornbluh asked, “when?”