Congressional Record: October 26, 1999 (Senate)
Page S13160-S13162
FULL DISCLOSURE ON CHILE
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, the National Security Archives recently
released an additional selection of declassified documents from the
State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA on U.S. relations
with Chile between 1970 and 1973, when the democratically-elected
government of President Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet. The
release of these documents is part of the Administration's ongoing
"Chile Declassification Project," an effort begun following the
arrest of General Pinochet last year. According to the President's
directive, U.S. national security agencies are directed to "review for
release * * * all documents that shed light on human rights abuses,
terrorism, and other acts of political violence during and prior to the
Pinochet era in Chile."
On October 24, the Washington Post carried two articles which
emphasized the need for full disclosure by the CIA of its documents
related to its covert operations in Chile during this period. The
release of these documents will facilitate a full understanding of this
period in U.S.-Chile relations. I believe that these articles will be
of interest to all of us in Congress concerned about this issue, and I
ask unanimous consent that they may be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Oct. 24, 1999]
Still Hidden: A Full Record Of What the U.S. Did in Chile
(By Peter Kornbluh)
As Augusto Pinochet continues to fight extradition from
England to face charges of
[[Page S13161]]
crimes against humanity, the historical record of U.S.
support for the former Chilean dictator remains
desaparecido--disappeared--like so many victims of his
violent regime. Unless President Clinton ensures that the
record is brought to light, a singular opportunity to find
answers to unresolved cases of atrocities against Chileans
and Americans, and to fully understand the role U.S.
Government played in this Cold War tragedy, will be lost.
In the wake of Gen. Pinochet's stunning arrest in London
one year ago, the Clinton administration has been conducting
a special "Chile Declassification Project." On Feb. 1, U.S.
national security agencies were directed "on behalf of the
president" to begin searching their archives "and review
for release . . . all documents that shed light on human
rights abuses, terrorism, and other acts of political
violence during and prior to the Pinochet era in Chile."
What began as a precedent-setting exercise in official
openness, however, has devolved into an example of government
censors holding history hostage. The "securocrats" of the
national security bureaucracy are blocking the release of
virtually all documents that chronicle the full extent of the
U.S. role in Chile. The result, so far, is a public record
skewed by omission, open to charges of fraud and a coverup.
Chile holds a special place in the annals of American
foreign policy. During the mid-1970s, the country that poet
Pablo Neruda described as "a long petal of sea, wine, and
snow" became the subject of international scandal. News
reports revealed that the CIA had conducted massive
clandestine operations to undermine the democratically
elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and help
bring the military to power in 1973. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger's embrace of the Pinochet regime, despite its
ongoing atrocities, prompted Congress to pass the very first
laws establishing human rights as a criterion for U.S. policy
abroad.
The CIA's covert operations and the debate over U.S. policy
toward Pinochet generated a slew of secret documents. So,
too, did the 1973 murder in Chile of two U.S. citizens,
freelance writers Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, as well
as the brazen 1976 car bombing in Washington that killed
former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American
associate, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. The Clinton administration's
special review carried the promise of finally declassifying
these records and answering the outstanding questions that
haunt this shameful era.
Such questions include:
What role did the United States play in the violent coup
that brought Pinochet to power?
Why was Horman, whose case was made famous in the Hollywood
movie "Missing," detained and executed? Did U.S.
intelligence somehow finger him, as recently declassified
documents suggest, for the Chilean military?
What support did the CIA provide to Pinochet's notorious
secret police, the DINA?
Could the United States have prevented the assassination of
Letelier and Moffitt on American soil?
Since the White House ordered declassification, the
agencies' review has yielded almost 7,000 documents--a major
feat given the usual snail's pace of the national security
bureaucracy. On June 30, the administration released same
5,800 records, covering the most repressive years of
Pinochet's bloody rule, 1973 to 1978. Significantly,
however, 5,000 of those were from the State Department;
the CIA released only 500 documents--a fraction of its
secret holdings on that period.
On Oct. 8, approximately 1,100 documents were declassified
in a second phase that was supposed to cover the years of
Allende's presidency, 1970 to 1973. Based on the accumulated
evidence of U.S. involvement in Chile during that period,
that figure is a meager percentage of the true record.
To be sure, some of the documents that were declassified
contain extremely detailed information on the Pinochet
regime, and they undoubtedly will prove useful to future
efforts within Chile to hold Pinochet's military officers
accountable for human rights violations.
But while Chileans are learning about their dark history
from the U.S. documents, American citizens are learning
almost nothing about their own government's actions. Among
more than 25,000 pages released to date, there is not a
single page of the thousands of CIA, National Security
Council (NSC) or National Security Agency (NSA) records on
U.S. policy and operations to bring down Allende and help
Pinochet consolidate his rule. This documentation includes
the files of the CIA's covert "Task Force on Chile,"
planning papers from the Nixon White House, records of U.S.
material support for the DINA, and intelligence documents on
the Horman and Letelier-Moffitt cases.
That such records exists is beyond dispute. As the subject
of repeated controversy over the years, the U.S. role in
Chile has generated congressional inquiries, murder
investigations, criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits--not
to mention hundreds of requests under the Freedom of
Information Act. These have yielded extensive information
(which I have spent almost 20 years compiling and analyzing)
about what still is hidden.
A close reading of two detailed Senate reports published in
1975, for example, shows that the CIA station in Santiago
sent a number of cables about its "liaison relations" with
the Chilean DINA after the coup. Justice Department files on
the prosecution of former CIA head Richard Helms for lying to
Congress about covert operations in Chile reveal that the
agency filed daily progress reports on "Track II"--the code
name for U.S. efforts to foment a coup against Allende. An
aborted lawsuit filed by the Horman family against Kissinger
produced references to classified records containing
information about Charles Horman's death. But while President
Clinton clearly intended these cables, files and records to
be released, none of them have been.
The Horman case is a classic example of the cult of
secrecy. As the movie "Missing" suggests, his family has
long suspected that the U.S. intelligence community knew far
more than it admitted about how and why he was singled out by
the Chilean military after the coup. But it took 26 years for
the U.S. government to acknowledge that State Department
officials shared the family's suspicion. "U.S. intelligence
may have played a part in Horman's death. At best, it was
limited to providing or confirming information that helped
motivate his murder. . ." according to a passage in an Aug.
25, 1976, State Department memorandum released this month--a
document that Horman's widow, Joyce calls "close to a
smoking pistol." (When the same document was released to the
family in 1980, this critical paragraph was blacked out.) And
although Clinton's order explicitly directed agencies to
declassify documents on Horman, neither the CIA nor the NSA
has released a single record relating to his case.
Hundreds of documents have also been withheld on the
Letelier and Moffitt assassinations--albeit with the
explanation, wholly unsatisfactory to their families, that
these records are material to an "ongoing" investigation
into Pinochet's possible role.
As coordinator of the Chile Declassification Project, the
NSC bears responsibility for failure to comply with the
president's directive. Under its watch, countless documents
have been blocked from release.
The CIA, which has the most to offer history but also the
most to hide, has refused to conduct a full file search of
its covert action branch, the Directorate of Operations.
After I sent a comprehensive list of documents missing from
the first release to the CIA's declassification center--the
address of which is classified--an official informed me that
the agency was "not legally obliged" to search such file
because it had never "officially acknowledged" covert
operations in Chile. (President Gerald Ford's public
admission in 1974 that the CIA had covertly intervened in
Chile apparently doesn't count.)
Moreover, with the acquiescence of the NSC, the
intelligence community has taken the position that policy and
planning documents are "not responsive" to the president's
directive. Under this narrow interpretation, the
deliberations of Nixon, Kissinger, Helms and others in
plotting and financing political violence in Chile will not
be considered for declassification--severely distorting the
historical record.
Consider one example: The CIA has released one heavily
blacked-out cable reporting on the October 1970 kidnapping
and murder of Chilean Gen. Gene Schneider, who opposed a
military move against Allende. But the agency did not even
submit for review the dozens of secret "memcons"
(memorandums of conversations), meeting minutes and briefing
papers showing that the White House and the CIA covertly
orchestrated this operation in an aborted attempt to
instigate a coup in Chile.
To the surprise of the intelligence community, the National
Archives Records Administration (NARA) found such documents
among Nixon's papers. In compliance with Clinton's order,
these records were submitted to the Chile Declassification
Project, but CIA and NSA officials objected to their release.
Since the documents deal with the Allende era, they should
have been made public on Oct. 8. They weren't.
It is unclear how many, if any, will be included in the
third and final declassification, now scheduled for April.
Under the media spotlight, the CIA recently said it will
review some records related to covert action. But it is
unlikely that the credibility of this important project can
be salvaged unless the president explicitly orders full
cooperation and maximum disclosure.
There are compelling reasons to do so:
Abroad, Washington's reputation as a standard-bearer on
human rights is at stake. It will prove far more difficult to
encourage Chileans to undergo a process of truth and
reconciliation if Washington is unwilling to admit its own
involvement in their history. Indeed, the credibility of U.S.
diplomatic efforts to press other nations, from Germany to
Guatemala, to acknowledge and redress their mistakes of the
past will be undermined by this flagrant attempt to hide our
own.
At home, the American public has the right to know the full
story of U.S. policy toward Chile and Pinochet's brutal
regime. And his victims' families deserve to be able to lay
this painful history to rest. Clinton's directive said the
declassification project responded, in part, "to the
expressed wishes of the families of American victims." But
an incomplete review, as Joyce Horman wrote recently, would
be "little more than an exercise in hypocrisy."
At least rhetorically, Clinton appears to agree: "I think
you're entitled to know what happened back then and how it
happened," he recently told reporters. We are indeed.
[[Page S13162]]
But only if he takes concrete action to support his words
will Americans finally learn what was done in Chile--in our
name, but without our knowledge.
____
[From the Washington Post, Oct. 24, 1999]
The 'Jewels' That Spooked the CIA
(By Vernon Loeb)
President Clinton's order to declassify all U.S. government
documents on human rights abuses and political violence in
Chile has forcefully recalled the most painful period in
agency history.
It is a cautionary tale of secrets and lies, burned deep
into the CIA psyche. It begins on Feb. 7, 1973, with the
question that Sen. Stuart Symington put to former CIA
director Richard Helms before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee:
"Did you try in the Central Intelligence Agency to
overthrow the government of Chile?"
"No, sir," Helms replied.
The facts told a different story, and three months later,
after an order came down asking all CIA employees to report
any evidence they had of any unlawful acts, someone at
Langley questioned the truthfulness of Helm's response.
His prevarication found its way into a 693-page compendium
of CIA misdeeds that was being compiled by the new director
of central intelligence, William Colby--a document that came
to be known as "the Family Jewels."
The Family Jewels told all: of plots to assassinate foreign
leaders, overthrow government, bug journalists, test
psychedelic drugs on unwary subjects. And, of course, of the
agency's efforts to destabilize the socialist regime of
Chilean President Salvador Allende.
Colby shared the Family Jewels with Congress, the White
House and, to a lesser extent, the news media. He hand-
delivered a chapter to the Justice Department that directly
led to Helms facing criminal charges over his Chile
testimony. And Colby's revelations prompted the creation of
the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church
Committee after its chairman, Sen. Frank Church.
Once the committee issued its final report, the CIA's
ability to do pretty much as it pleased without telling
anyone was over: Both houses of Congress created standing
select committees to oversee the CIA as a full-time pursuit.
To this day, Helms--who pleaded no contest in 1977 for
failing to testify fully to Congress, was ordered to pay a
$2,000 fine and was given a two-year suspended sentence--
remains one of the most revered figures in the secrecy-based
CIA culture. (At 86, he is currently working on his memoirs.)
But Colby, who died in 1996, is deeply resented by many for
what is seen as betrayal.
"The first principle of a secret intelligence service is
secrecy." Thomas Powers wrote in his 1979 biography of
Helms, "The Man Who Kept the Secrets."
"It was bad enough this ancient history was being raked up
at all, but to have it raked up in public, with all the
attendant hypocrisy of a political investigation conducted by
political men . . . This, truly, in Richard Helms' view,
threatened to destroy the agency he and a lot of men had
spent their lives trying to build."
Whether a new spirit of openness prevails at the CIA
remains to be seen, at least when it comes to Clinton's
declassification order on Chile. No covert action documents
relating to CIA operations in Chile have yet been made
public. But CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said their release
is only a matter of time.
"We're still very much in the middle of this, and we are
going to be as forthcoming as possible," Mansfield said,
"consistent with protecting legitimate sources and
methods."