Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  But refusing comment didn’t work, either. On March 21, the “Merry-Go-Round” hit newsstands across the country like an exploding mortar. “Secret documents which escaped shredding” by ITT “show that the company maneuvered at the highest levels” to sabotage Allende, Anderson reported. John McCone, a former CIA director who was now on the board of ITT, served as matchmaker in the “bizarre plot” between the intelligence agency and the conglomerate, while ITT also lobbied the White House and State Department to bring down the socialist leader. “Attorney General John Mitchell was even buttonholed at a wedding reception by a zealous ITT man,” Anderson wrote. “These documents portray ITT as a virtual corporate nation in itself” that actually “considered triggering a military coup to head off Allende’s election.”

  The next day, Anderson continued his barrage with a second column quoting directly from his cache of secret documents. “Everything should be done quietly but effectively to see that Allende does not get through the crucial next six months,” one ITT memo advised; to “bring on economic chaos,” the CIA advocated that ITT and other U.S. companies “drag their feet in sending money, in making deliveries, [and] in shipping spare parts” to Chile. “Undercover efforts are being made to bring about the bankruptcy of one or two of [Chile’s] major savings and loan[s],” another confidential document stated. “This is expected to trigger a run on banks and the closure of some factories resulting in more unemployment,” which “might produce enough violence to force the military to move.”

  Anderson’s columns ignited a firestorm, enthusiastically fueled as usual by the muckraker himself, who selectively parceled out advance copies of his secret memos to The New York Times and The Washington Post for prominent play. The columnist fanned his own flames by making himself available for interviews with other journalists; afterward, Time reported, “he flaunted a sheaf of stolen ITT documents” for television cameras, then dribbled out to the rest of the Washington press corps the last remnants of his Chile papers. “Unprecedented in their detail,” one analyst wrote, the Anderson documents “candidly charted the intrigue of covert corporate collaboration” between ITT and the Nixon administration. On the CBS Morning News, the newsman hammered home the “fantastic” story of how the CIA and ITT plotted to “interfere in the domestic affairs of Chile.”

  As journalists jumped on the story, those implicated in the scandal retreated into silence. “Neither I.T.T. nor the Nixon Administration was willing to discuss the Anderson papers even to the extent of saying whether they were authentic,” The New York Times reported. “The White House referred all inquiries to the State Department,” whose spokesman “cut off questioning with the statement that ‘I have nothing on that for you now.’ ” The CIA informed journalists, “We do not comment on anything that has been printed about the Agency.” ITT issued a press release claiming that Anderson’s columns were “without foundation” but refused to elaborate. “As more [Anderson] papers were published,” The New York Times reported, “I.T.T. clammed up” completely. The suspicious evasions seemed to confirm Anderson’s incendiary charges.

  News outlets filled the vacuum with scathing editorials. The Washington Post called the Anderson disclosures “astonishing . . . outrageous . . . dismal . . . [and] grave.” Indeed, “President Nixon stands charged” with “personally approving” covert action “to prevent the democratically elected president of a supposedly friendly country from taking office,” while “ITT is now accused of manipulating not only key aspects of domestic policy but of foreign policy as well.” The New York Times declared that “special interests [should] not be allowed to meddle secretly in this nation’s relations with other countries,” adding that Anderson’s memos demonstrated “a classic example of how a giant international corporation should never behave, particularly in a democratic country with every right to work out its political destiny without outside interference.”

  In Congress, Democrats seized on the Anderson disclosures to condemn the Nixon administration. Senator Frank Church called the columnist’s revelations “very disturbing” and Senator Fred Harris demanded that the Justice Department investigate whether ITT broke any federal laws. Three days after Anderson’s first column, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced that it would conduct a “major,” “detailed,” and “wide-ranging” investigation. White House aide Charles Colson warned the President that congressional Democrats were now trying to expand their probe of ITT’s funding of the Republican Party to “bring in the Chile thing” as well. Secretary of State William Rogers was dispatched to a closed hearing to assure senators that the administration “did not engage in improper activities in Chile.” But Chairman J. William Fulbright told reporters that Anderson’s exposé had disclosed “very bad business” and his committee voted to subpoena ITT’s documents on Allende.

  Meanwhile, in Chile, Anderson’s “revelations set off an explosion of nationalist indignation,” author Peter Kornbluh wrote. “The leaked documents bolstered a long-standing belief among the Chilean left of U.S. economic imperialism, and confirmed widespread suspicions of Washington’s covert efforts to thwart the Chilean socialist experiment.” Facing fierce domestic opposition, Allende’s government viewed the Anderson exposé as a “political windfall.” Leftist publications thunderously denounced the gringos’ “right-wing conspiracy” and declared that ITT stood for “Imperialism, Treason and Terror.” The day after Anderson’s series was published, protesters descended on the Chilean capital; organizers quoted extensively from the Anderson memos in angry speeches, and crowds burned banners on which the letters ITT were written. Chile’s Senate held a special session to authorize an investigation, and diplomatic emissaries cited the “Anderson papers” to accuse the U.S. of violating international law. President Allende told cheering crowds that Anderson’s columns were proof of the “seditious plan” of the Yankees and announced that ITT’s holdings in Chile would be confiscated by his government. In a speech to the United Nations, Allende explained that ITT had “driven its tentacles deep into my country” and was attempting to “bring about civil war.”

  The scandal overwhelmed all other events in Chile. “The Government press and television are now devoting most of their space and time” to the Anderson documents, The New York Times reported. ALL NEWSPAPERS carried STORIES ON JACK ANDERSON EXPOSÉ SECRET DOCUMENTS “DEMONSTRATING THAT ITT AND CIA HAD ENCOURAGED A COUP D’ETAT IN CHILE,” CIA agents cabled headquarters in alarm. Anderson gave a lengthy interview to Chilean television assailing the CIA-ITT “campaign to ruin Chile’s economy, goad the military to act, and to establish a dictatorship.” The columnist “became an instant hero” in Chile, The Washington Post reported, and his memos were rushed by Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier from the U.S. capital to his home country, where a team of government translators helped produce tens of thousands of copies of a ninety-three-page Spanish-language booklet—Documents Secretos de la ITT—that were immediately snapped up on the streets of Santiago. “News vendors declared the government volume an instant best-seller,” the Post added, “competing well against the girlie magazines and screaming-headline newspapers that are the kiosks’ standard fare.”

  Anderson’s latest scoop brought yet another round of publicity to the columnist who had uncovered the scandal. “For a while at least,” Newsweek reported, “ITT’s Chilean imbroglio overshadowed the Dita Beard episode with which the whole ruckus had begun. And once again the man who broke the story was columnist Jack Anderson, whose uncanny access to Washington’s secret filing cabinets has very nearly earned him the status of an independent branch of government.” CBS commentator Nicholas von Hoffman was amused that

  Anderson, the rascal, has more memos! For next we find that in addition to trying to fix its case with the Justice Department, America’s best-known conglomerate has also been passing the time trying to overthrow the government of Chile! Would you believe it? These machinations are too complicated to bear summarizing, but suffice it to say there is pussyfoo
ting with CIA agents, plots to destroy the Chilean economy, and connivances with forlorn plans for coups d’etat, all thumbs, all clumsy, all like a burlesque of a Russian propaganda description of how an American, capitalist, international conglomerate is supposed to operate. And by God, ITT does! It does. It lives up to its Marxist stereotype.

  Clearly, the administration’s silence had failed to quell the international uproar. The President’s men realized that they needed to change tactics, but they were in a difficult spot. For one thing, a top U.S. diplomat confided, “there was not much doubt about the authenticity” of Anderson’s memos, which even White House aides privately admitted were genuine. Worse, the muckraker had uncovered only a fraction of the administration’s much larger conspiracy to subvert Allende. As presidential counsel John Dean warned, exposing the full extent of American culpability in Chile could truly be “explosive.”

  To try to calm the furor, State Department officials privately debated how to word some sort of public denial. An early draft admitted that the U.S. had “weighed various contingencies” for stopping Allende, but the statement was deemed too candid and suppressed. Instead, a State Department spokesman announced—falsely—that the administration “firmly rejected . . . any ideas of thwarting” Allende that might or might not have been suggested and argued that Anderson’s memos were merely “opinion and hearsay.” The administration’s reaction “ranged from evasion, to disinformation, to simply false information,” Kornbluh wrote; this “initial Orwellian response to the CIA-ITT scandal set the stage for a protracted cover-up, made possible by a display of official mendacity virtually unparalleled in the annals of foreign policy. Outright deception—of the public, of Congress, and even other sectors of the U.S. government—permeated the administration’s efforts to contain and conceal the facts.”

  ITT was equally duplicitous. A press release asserted that the conglomerate “has been and continues to be a good corporate citizen in Chile, as well as in all other countries where it has operations.” ITT’s denial was so unpersuasive that New York Times columnist Russell Baker suggested the company would be better off claiming that it was “only joking” about overthrowing Allende and that “nobody [in Washington] has a sense of humor anymore.”

  The administration wasn’t amused. Typically, the President’s first thoughts were about public relations. “Have you said anything, Ron, with regard to ITT and Chile?” Nixon asked Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler. “Well,” the spokesman replied, “the State Department dealt with that.” “What did they do,” the President inquired, “deny it?” “They denied it,” Ziegler said, “but they were cautious” because “they were afraid it might backfire.” “Why?” Nixon asked. Ziegler explained that reporters had learned that the U.S. ambassador “received instructions to do anything short of” military intervention to overthrow Allende. “How the hell did that get out?” the President demanded. “Well,” the White House aide responded, “Anderson got that from some source.” Nixon was angry: the U.S. ambassador to Chile “was instructed to” stop Allende, “but he just failed, the son of a bitch. That was his main problem. He should have kept Allende from getting in.”

  As usual, the President and his advisors wanted to know how Anderson acquired his latest batch of incriminating documents. A right-wing Chilean newspaper, funded by the CIA, stated that the columnist—known for “printing whatever rumor or scandal reaches his ears”—received a bribe to publish the memos. Soon after, Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, received an “urgent” missive from an anti-Allende activist who alleged that Anderson collected a $70,000 payoff from Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier for “aiding [and] abetting a Marxist government.” Nixon’s secretary was rightly skeptical of the charge but nonetheless passed it on to White House lawyer Fred Fielding. Five days later, the unfounded rumor was publicized on the libelproof House floor by Congressman John Rarick, a right-wing segregationist from Louisiana, but the fanciful claim gained little attention, perhaps because even the anti-Allende propagandists who had spread it did not seem to believe the rumor.

  In fact, the ITT memos were leaked to Anderson by a senior aide to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright. The senator’s role in the affair was complicated. A paragon of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, Fulbright had been preoccupied by his opposition to the Vietnam War when he first received the Chile documents seventeen months earlier, courtesy of an ITT whistleblower. Fulbright’s source recognized that the memos were “explosive” and over time became “disgusted” that the senator’s staff did nothing with “all these ITT papers stacked up somewhere in its filing cabinets.” Indeed, Fulbright did worse than nothing: he alerted CIA director Richard Helms that there was a leak and then suppressed the documents. Now, in the wake of Anderson’s publication of the Dita Beard memo, Fulbright’s advisors worried that their complicity might be exposed. The Arkansas Democrat’s solution was to rush the documents to Anderson, whose own, separate pipeline into ITT would help conceal Fulbright’s role in the scandal.

  Days later, Senator Frank Church launched an official probe of CIA-ITT attempts to oust the Allende government. Anderson turned over his files to the Idaho Democrat and began working with his investigators as they embarked upon what would eventually turn into extensive public hearings about foreign assassinations and other crimes by U.S. intelligence agencies. Among those summoned to testify under oath was the man who had implemented the President’s covert operation to sabotage Allende, CIA director Helms.

  “Did you try in the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government of Chile?” Senator Stuart Symington asked.

  “No, sir,” Helms lied.

  “Did you have any money passed to opponents of Allende?”

  “No, sir”—a second lie.

  “So the stories you were in that war are wrong?”

  “Yes, sir”—yet another lie.

  Four years later, Helms’s perjury led to federal court and a nolo contendere plea to deceiving Congress. After Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, Helms became the second high-level Nixon official convicted of a crime as a result of Anderson’s ITT stories. For Helms, the irony was as palpable as it was painful: while his undercover operatives spied on Anderson, the columnist retaliated by exposing Helms’s secret interference in Chile. As a result, Helms became the only CIA director in history forced to admit his crimes in court, thanks to one of the many Anderson sources whose identity Helms was unable to uncover.

  The CIA director blamed his commander in chief. “President Nixon had ordered me to instigate a military coup in Chile,” Helms later explained. Nixon “came down very hard . . . that he wanted something done and he didn’t much care how.” Indeed, once-classified government cables document the American conspiracy to crush Allende in irrefutable detail: ITT director McCone met with Helms and Kissinger to offer $1 million of corporate funds to depose the leftist leader; at least half that amount was channeled by ITT through the CIA to its anti-Allende operation. Records show that on more than three dozen separate occasions, senior CIA and ITT officials secretly conferred on how to bring down the socialist government. Two ITT executives in Chile even turned out to be clandestine CIA assets, given special code names in encrypted intelligence communications.

  The decision to overthrow Allende was made at the very top of the Nixon White House. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger declared. The President’s aides described Nixon as “furious” and “hysterical” at the prospect of Allende’s election and “beside himself” once it happened. Nixon secretly ordered the CIA to “play a direct role in organizing a military coup,” complete with a sabotage campaign to “make the economy scream.” The President and his national security advisor issued instructions to put “pressure on every Allende weak spot in sight” to trigger a “military takeover.” The CIA complied by secretly supplying weapons to dissident Chilean officers and cha
nneling more than $8 million to covert anti-Allende operations. “It is firm and continuing policy,” the administration cabled Santiago, “that Allende be overthrown by a coup.”

  He was. In September 1973, Chile’s military bombed the presidential palace while Allende was inside and then stormed the building. Rather than be taken alive, Allende put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Chile’s new military junta suspended the constitution and dissolved Congress. General Augusto Pinochet assumed dictatorial control for the next sixteen years and rounded up more than a hundred thousand people; thousands were summarily executed and tens of thousands tortured in a program of state-sponsored terror. “Of course, the newspapers [are] bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown,” Kissinger told Nixon a few days after Allende’s violent death. “Isn’t that something,” the President marveled. “I mean, instead of celebrating—in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes,” Kissinger continued. “Well, we didn’t—as you know—our hand doesn’t show on this one,” the President pointed out. “We didn’t do it,” Kissinger replied. “I mean, we helped them—created the conditions as great as possible.” Nixon agreed: “That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.”

  But no matter how it was played in the press, the role of the Nixon White House in trying to destabilize Allende’s government was undeniable. Indeed, Jack Anderson’s well-placed Pentagon source, Yeoman Charles Radford, examined classified U.S. documents that spelled out specific methods for physically eliminating Allende. One options paper “discussed various ways of doing it,” Radford said. “Either we have somebody in the country do it or we do it ourselves . . . I don’t know if they used the word assassinate, but it was to get rid of him, to terminate him.”

  President Nixon also wanted to be rid of Jack Anderson. After all, in just the first three months of 1972, the reporter had exposed many of the administration’s most embarrassing scandals: Nixon’s clandestine tilt toward Pakistan, his secret cash from Howard Hughes, his fixing of ITT’s antitrust case, and his sabotage of Allende. But to date, none of the President’s efforts to stop Anderson had been successful. Not threats to file criminal charges. Not surveillance or wiretapping. Not even the President’s order to smear Anderson as a homosexual. Instead, the columnist only seemed to grow bolder and more dangerous with his every revelation.