CRIMES AGAINST DEMOCRACY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000402830025-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 7, 2012
• Sequence Number: 25
• Publication Date: November 26, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402830025-1
3 I CT_7, A
BOSTON GLOBE
26 NOVEMBER 1982
Crimes against democracy. `
The Atlantic Monthly for December has
published a powerful piece of investigative re-
porting that should be required reading for any
American who cares about the fragility of
democratic government. In an excerpt rom his
forthcoming book on Henry Kissinger,, former
New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh tena-
ciously reconstructs the shameful history of
American crimes against democracy in Chile.
The Hersh article has already produced
headlines for its disclosure, of a Nixon Adminis-
tration plan to assassinate Salvador Allende,
the democratically elected Socialist president of
Chile from, 1970 until his assassination during
the military putsch of September 11, 1973. But
the disgraceful story told to Hersh by former
government officials, diplomats and covert
operatives reveals a pattern of behavior far
more sinister than any single contingency plan
for assassinating a foreign leader.
Hersh and his sources show that the Ameri-
can government used bribery, sabotage and
murder in an effort to thwart the verdict of Chi-
lean voters when they elected Allende presi-
dent, and after Nixon and Kissinger had failed
to prevent Allende from coming to power they
spent tens of millions of dollars to subvert his
government, ruthlessly cutting off aid and
credits, intervening within Chile to "make the
economy scream" - a phrase that CIA director
Richard Helms used in notes of a conversation
with Nixon - and finally preparing the way for
a fascist military dictatorship.
It is to Hersh's credit that he goes beyond
the circumscribed investigative task of simply
collecting testimony to ask a crucial analytical
question. Hersh asks why such Mafia methods
were authorized by Nixon and Kissinger. The
frightening answer is that Kissinger and :his
President were presiding over a government of,
by and for powerful-corporate Interests.
Hersh cites a deep-cover CIA agent who 're- '
turned to duty for one last mission out of sheer
patriotism, "told colleagues that it was -corpo-
rate security and not national security that
was involved in the anti-Allende operation."
In support of this distinction, Hersh also
quotes an Intelligence memorandum from 'CiA
'to the White House affirming that the United
States "had no vital interests within Chile, the
world military balance of power would not be
significantly altered by an Allende regime, and
an Allende victory in Chile would not pose any
likely threat to the peace of the region."
The historical truths Hersh has exhumed
are relevant today not merely because figures
from the Nixon era such as Caspar Weinberger,
George Bush, George Shultz and Alexander
Haig have shaped the policies of the Reagan
Administration, but rather because the policies
themselves, especially in Latin America, seem
to be recapitulating the methods and objectives
of the "aberrant" Nixon epoch. .
Beyond the moral taint of an interventionist
policy based on Mafia methods, there is an in-
herent domestic danger in America's promot-
ing of fascist dictatorships such as that -of Au-
gusto Pinochet in Chile. The ultimate danger is
that those who regard the Pinochet regime as a
necessary requirement for-security abroad may
one day be persuaded that some Yanqui variety
of that polity is equally necessary back home. -
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402830025-1