The next ten weeks were a period of continuous political, economic and military crisis. Since Allende’s election in 1970, Chile’s currency had been devalued on the open market by the staggering figure of 10,000 per cent. David Holden headlined a report from Santiago, ‘Chile: Black Market Road to Socialism’, and reported that, ‘Anyone who can afford the time to queue for petrol legally can become a rich man by selling his daily intake at 30 times the official price . . . To an outsider, it seems a mighty peculiar road to Socialism - or to anywhere else for that matter.’
112
In his unsuccessful appeal to Chilean workers on 29 July to come to the defence of the regime, Allende had declared, ‘If the hour comes, the people will have arms’ - his first public statement that he would mobilize left-wing paramilitary groups if faced with military revolt. During August the armed forces mounted an increasingly intensive search for illegal arms dumps - predictably concentrating on those held by the left.
113
The KGB later complained that Allende paid too little attention to its warnings of an impending coup.
114
When Pinochet and a military junta launched the coup in the early hours of 11 September,
115
Corvalán and the Communist leadership, who had also been kept informed by the KGB,
116
were better prepared than Allende. The Communist Party newspaper that morning carried the banner headline, ‘Everyone To His Combat Post!’ ‘Workers of city and countryside’ were summoned to combat ‘to repel the rash attempt of the reactionaries who are determined to bring down the constitutional government’. While Corvalán and the leadership moved underground, Communist factory managers began to mobilize workers in the industrial belt.
Allende, however, failed to live up to his promise six weeks earlier to summon the people to arms to defend his regime. When the coup began on 11 September, instead of seeking support in the working-class areas of Santiago, he based himself in the presidential offices in La Moneda, where he was defended by only fifty to sixty of his Cuban-trained GAP and half a dozen officers from the Servicio de Investigaciones. Allende’s lack of preparation to deal with the coup partly derived from his preference for improvisation over advance planning. His French confidant, Régis Debray, later claimed that he ‘never planned anything more than forty-eight hours in advance’. But Allende was also anxious to avoid bloodshed. Convinced that popular resistance would be mown down by Pinochet’s troops, he bravely chose to sacrifice himself rather than his followers. Castro and many of Allende’s supporters later claimed that he was gunned down by Pinochet’s forces as they occupied La Moneda. In reality, it seems almost certain that, faced with inevitable defeat, Allende sat on a sofa in the Independence Salon of La Moneda, placed the muzzle of an automatic rifle (a present from Castro) beneath his chin and blew his brains out.
117
Allende, wrote David Holden, was ‘instantly canonized as the western world’s newest left-wing martyr’, becoming overnight ‘the most potent cult figure since his old friend, Che Guevara’. Devotees of the Allende cult quickly accepted as an article of faith Castro’s insistence that, instead of committing suicide, Allende had been murdered in cold blood by Pinochet’s troops. The
Guardian
declared on 17 September, ‘For Socialists of this generation, Chile is our Spain . . . This is the most vicious Fascism we have seen in generations.’ Pinochet’s regime was as loathed in the 1970s as Franco’s had been in the 1930s.
118
As well as doing what it could to promote the Allende cult, KGB active measures also sought to establish a secondary cult around the heroic figure of the Communist leader Luis Corvalán, who had been captured after the coup and, together with some of Allende’s former ministers, imprisoned in harsh conditions on Dawson Island in the Magellan Straits. As well as seeking to promote international appeals for Corvalán’s release, the KGB also tried to devise a method of rescuing him and other prisoners from Dawson Island by a commando raid organized by the FCD Special Actions Directorate V, which was approved in principle by Andropov on 27 March 1974.
119
Satellite photographs were taken of Dawson Island and used by Directorate V to construct a model of the prison. The rescue plan eventually devised was for a large commercial cargo vessel to enter the Magellan Straits with three or four helicopters concealed beneath its hatches. When the vessel was fifteen kilometres from Dawson Island, the helicopters would take off carrying commandos who would kill the relatively small number of prison guards, rescue Corvalán and other prisoners, and transfer them to a submarine waiting nearby. The helicopters would then be destroyed and sunk in deep water, thus leaving no incriminating evidence to prevent the Soviet cargo vessel continuing on its way. The rescue plan, however, was never implemented. According to Leonov: ‘When this plan was presented to the leadership, they looked at us as if we were half-crazy, and all our attempts to persuade them to study it in greater detail proved fruitless, although the military did agree to provide the means to carry it out.’
120
Schemes were also devised to kidnap a leading member of the Chilean military government, or one of Pinochet’s relatives, who could then be exchanged for Corvalán.
121
These schemes too were abandoned and Corvalán was eventually exchanged for the far more harshly persecuted Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.
For the KGB, Pinochet represented an almost perfect villain, an ideal counterpoint to the martyred Allende. Pinochet himself played into the hands of hostile propagandists. Marxist books were burnt on bonfires in Santiago as Pinochet spoke menacingly of cutting out the ‘malignant tumour’ of Marxism from Chilean life. The Dirección de Investigaciones Nacionales (DINA) set out to turn Pinochet’s rhetoric into reality. From 1973 to 1977 its Director, General Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, reported directly to Pinochet. Official commissions established by Chile’s civilian governments after the end of military rule in 1990 documented a total of 3,197 extra-judicial executions, deaths under torture and ‘disappearances’ during the Pinochet era. Since not all could be documented, the true figure was undoubtedly higher.
122
A Chilean government report in 2004 concluded that 27,000 people had been tortured or illegally imprisoned.
123
KGB active measures successfully blackened still further DINA’s deservedly dreadful reputation. Operation TOUCAN, approved by Andropov on 10 August 1976, was particularly successful in publicizing and exaggerating DINA’s foreign operations against left-wing Chilean exiles. DINA was certainly implicated in the assassination of Allende’s former Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier, who was killed by a car bomb in the United States in 1976, and may also have been involved in the murder of other former Allende supporters living in exile. Operation TOUCAN thus had a plausible basis in actual DINA operations. TOUCAN was based on a forged letter from Contreras to Pinochet, dated 16 September 1975, which referred to expenditure involved in the expansion of DINA’s foreign operations, chief among them plans to ‘neutralize’ (assassinate) opponents of the Pinochet regime in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, the United States, France and Italy. Service A’s forgers carefully imitated authentic DINA documents in their possession and the signature of its Director. The letter was accepted as genuine by some major newspapers and broadcasters in western Europe as well as the Americas (see appendix, p. 88). The Western media comment which caused most pleasure in the Centre was probably speculation on links between DINA and the CIA. The leading American journalist Jack Anderson, who quoted from the KGB forgery, claimed that DINA operated freely in the United States with the full knowledge of the CIA. The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, he reported, was investigating DINA’s activities.
124
Pinochet’s military government was far more frequently denounced by Western media than other regimes with even more horrendous human-rights records. KGB active measures probably deserve some of the credit. While operation TOUCAN was at the height of its success, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were in the midst of a reign of terror in Cambodia which in only three years killed 1.5 million of Cambodia’s 7.5 million people. Yet in 1976, the
New York Times
published sixty-six articles on the abuse of human rights in Chile, as compared with only four on Cambodia.
125
The difficulty of obtaining information from Cambodia does not provide a remotely adequate explanation for this extraordinary discrepancy.
APPENDIX: THE SERVICE A FORGERY USED IN OPERATION TOUCAN
126
Secret to the Intelligence Service of Chile
To the Secretariat of the President of the Republic Copy 1 DINA /R/ No.1795/107
Explanation of the request for an increase in estimated expenditure
DINA Santiago 16 September 1975
From the Director of National Intelligence to the President of the Republic
In accordance with our agreement with you, I am giving the reasons for the request for the expenditure of DINA to be increased by 600,000 American dollars in the current financial year.
1. An additional ten members of DINA are to be sent to our missions abroad: two to Peru, two to Brazil, two to Argentina, one to Venezuela, one to Costa Rica, one to Belgium and one to Italy.
2. Additional expenditure is required to neutralize the active opponents to the Junta abroad, especially in Mexico, Argentine, Costa Rica, the USA, France and Italy.
3. The expense of our operations in Peru supporting our allies in the armed forces and the press (
Equise
and
Opinion Libre
).
4. Maintenance costs for our workers taking a course for anti-partisan groups at the SNI centre at Manaus in Brazil.
Yours sincerely,
Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepulveda
Director of National Intelligence
Official stamp of DINA
5
Intelligence Priorities after Allende
In February 1974 the Politburo carried out what appears to have been its first general review of Latin American policy since the Chilean coup. It defined as the three main goals of Soviet policy: ‘to steadily broaden and strengthen the USSR’s position on the continent; to provide support to the progressive, anti-American elements struggling for political and economic independence; and to provide active opposition to Chinese penetration’. Significantly, there was no mention either of encouragement to revolutionary movements in Latin America or of any prospect, outside Cuba, of a new Marxist-led government on the Allende model. The KGB’s main priorities were ‘to expose the plans of the US and its allies against the progressive, patriotic forces and the USSR’; to provide ‘full and timely intelligence coverage’ of the whole of Latin America (including what the Centre called ‘white [blank] spots’ in those countries which had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union); to expand the number of confidential contacts in Latin American regimes without resorting to the more risky process of agent recruitment; and to maintain clandestine contact with nineteen Communist parties, two-thirds of which were still illegal or semi-illegal.
1
The five main targets for KGB operations identified in 1974 were Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Mexico. Significantly, neither Nicaragua nor Chile any longer ranked as a priority target. In Nicaragua, the prospects for a Sandinista revolution were no longer taken seriously in the Centre. In Chile the firm grip established by the Pinochet military regime seemed to exclude any further experience of ‘Socialism with red wine’ for the foreseeable future.
As the only surviving Marxist regime in Latin America after the overthrow of the Allende regime, Cuba ranked clearly first in the KGB’s order of priorities. In the view of both the Centre and the Politburo: ‘Cuba is taking on an important role as a proponent of socialist ideas. F. Castro’s reorientation in important political issues (disclaiming the policy of exporting the revolution, accepting a single form of socialism based on Marxist-Leninist doctrine) is of great importance.’
2
At the Twenty-fourth Congress of the CPSU, held in the great palace of the Kremlin in 1971, Fidel Castro had received louder applause than any of the other fraternal delegates - to the deep, though private, irritation of some of them.
3
To many foreign Party bureaucrats in their sober business suits, it must have seemed very unfair that, after many years of never straying from the Moscow line, they should arouse less enthusiasm than the flamboyant Castro who had so recently dabbled in revisionism.