Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  We did not know, at that point, that senior officers in the military were seriously rattled by the challenge to their authority in the tancazo and gravely concerned that the breakdown in discipline would spread. They believed, we learned, that the younger officers would press for a coup, and senior officials such as Pinochet worried that if they didn’t join forces with the upstarts, they would be swept away by them. Far from the end of coup plotting, the tancazo was when it began in earnest. In the street, strikes and protests continued apace. After a protest by military wives, in August, General Prats resigned, General Augusto Pinochet became commander in chief, and less than three weeks later, I got my coup alert message while having lunch at the restaurant Da Carla.

  There were people in our own embassy in Santiago who did not believe our information about the impending coup. When I hinted at it to a friend in the political section, he scoffed: “You issue a memo like that every Friday.” It’s true that we had been hearing and reporting coup rumors for weeks, but we had never before had the solid information we now had, and from such reliable sources: information we’d confirmed four times over, with increasing levels of detail, by the morning of September 11, 1973—even more if you count the almost humorous string of calls we’d received the night before.

  A skeleton crew, including the station chief and me, had stayed in the station that Monday night, September 10, so we could be ready to take reports from observation posts set up at key places—including directly across the street from La Moneda—the minute the action began. We were excited, on edge. The phone rang. “The baby will be delivered tomorrow,” a voice said, then hung up. I had no idea what this meant, but I sensed someone was trying to tell us something. Then the phone rang again. “Uncle Jonas will be in town tomorrow” was the message this time. There were more calls through the night. Bemused, I can still only guess that some case officer in the past had given these unknown assets code phrases to use if they ever learned of a coup. In any event, the messages were utterly useless because they didn’t match any known codes.

  As the station chief recalls that night, there was competition between the station and the military attachés, who stayed in the embassy overnight to see who would call the coup first and advise Washington. “I received a call from the attachés near dawn,” the station chief said. “They had a report of gunfire at a military base outside of Santiago. Did we know anything? I didn’t.”

  At 7:00 a.m. on September 11 we were on tenterhooks, waiting to see if our more reliable sources were correct. Time passed with no word. We feared we had another false alarm on our hands and that our credibility might be permanently compromised. Then, at 8:00 a.m., we got the report—exactly as one of our assets had told us. The navy had started the coup with an uprising in Valparaiso. The asset had been just an hour off.

  Some months later I was told in some detail by my primary source how the coup came about. He knew the principals well, but I have never been able to verify his account. Former ambassador Nathaniel Davis, though, has a similar account in his book.20 My source told me that navy vice admiral José Merino had forced the army into action by drafting a note saying he would initiate the coup and asking each of the other military service commanders to sign on to the note confirming that they were prepared to support him. Merino supposedly gave this handwritten note to Rear Admiral Sergio Huidobro and Captain Ariel González to take to the commander of the air force, Gustavo Leigh. Leigh signed up quickly, the story goes, and sent the note on to the director of the Carabineros, who also signed. With the three signatures in place, Pinochet was left with virtually no alternative but to sign it and act. As an aside, the ensign who was delivering the note to the military chiefs was so nervous that he forgot his ID and had to do an about-face and return halfway between Valparaiso and Santiago to retrieve his wallet.

  By 9:00 a.m., September 11, the armed forces were in control of all of Chile except for the center of Santiago. When informed of the coup, Allende had gone directly to the presidential palace and refused to resign. Troops filled the streets downtown. Skirmishes and sporadic firefights erupted. Barricades went up around the U.S. embassy, and traffic ground to a halt. Shortly before noon, Hawker Hunter jets from the Chilean air force screamed across downtown Santiago and began firing rockets into La Moneda. The whole city erupted in gunfire.

  At the station, we dove for cover as stray bullets shattered windows, and we ended up taking refuge in “the vault,” the steel-enclosed chamber where we kept our classified documents.

  Around two o’clock that afternoon, Chilean troops stormed the presidential palace. Allende was protected by a special force—his “group of personal friends,” or Grupo de Amigos Personales, called the GAP. Some were former members of Chilean Special Forces, but some had been imported from Cuba, because Allende never completely trusted the military and wanted bodyguards of whose loyalty he could be assured. They, indeed, defended him to the death that day, as the military, which had found the GAP an insult and an irritant, showed no mercy in getting to Allende. As for the president himself, our intelligence found that the military planned only to capture him, not to execute him. However, he took his own life rather than become a prisoner of the junta. By 2:30 p.m., the seventeen-year rule of Augusto Pinochet had essentially begun.

  That evening, the military imposed an ironclad curfew across Santiago. My colleagues and I were trapped inside the station. We had a limited ability to track what was happening in the streets in the coup’s aftermath but were following sporadic reports of “cleanup operations.”

  One of these reports stopped me cold. The military was about to launch a large raid at a house in my neighborhood—next door to my home, where Pat was trying to maintain a veneer of calm for the sake of our children. What if the soldiers went to the wrong house? I got on a station radio network with Pat and my colleague Jerry, who lived a few blocks away. The military had declared a short break in the curfew so people could take care of basic necessities, and there were about ten minutes left in which Pat could get out safely before the raid. I told her to get the children and stand near the front door to wait for Jerry. Jerry came on the radio and said, “I’m on my way.” He had a very small car and was concerned about how to fit Pat and our five children into it, but somehow he managed, and they sped off to the relative safety of his nearby home, a military helicopter filled with trigger-happy soldiers hovering menacingly overhead.

  Back in Washington, the fall of Allende was greeted as a major victory. President Nixon was pleased, and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was very satisfied. Against all odds, the station had helped create a climate for the coup without taking actions that might taint the effort. We were bathed in the glow of success. That glow, of course, would quickly dim when, during a meeting with a longtime asset, I got a glimpse of what the new Pinochet government was capable of. A high-value penetration of the extremist wing of the Socialist Party, this asset had been arrested in a post-coup military roundup and tortured. When he was finally released, he triggered the emergency meeting with us. Since his former case officer had departed the country, I was selected to meet with him. We were concerned that he might have cracked under pressure and divulged his ties to us, so we approached the meeting with caution. He was a tough guy. Fortunately, the military had no inkling of his affiliation with us and didn’t ask about CIA ties. If he had been compromised, he could have been run against us, blowing our officers’ cover and feeding us false information about the Pinochet government.

  As part of the arrangements, the asset had been instructed to meet his new handler at a predetermined time and place. The site had been well selected so that we could smoke out possible hostile surveillance. To make sure he was clean, a four-person surveillance team monitored his movements approaching the site and then while he waited for us. Today it would be much harder to feel comfortable. The use of drones and satellites and global positioning system devices would have made it easy for the Chileans to stand off and monitor his movements
electronically from the sky without detection by our surveillance. Absent such technology, we were convinced the asset was clean. But before we could approach him, he walked right up to one of our team members and asked in Spanish, “Are you my new case officer?” His move was so sudden that our officer became rattled, and instead of ignoring the inquiry, he blurted out, “Not me, him,” and pointed to me. It wasn’t our finest operational moment, but even well-trained operators can be caught off guard and react inappropriately. This was a point I would repeatedly drive home with surveillance teams: be ready, not only physically, but mentally, for the unexpected.

  We met inside an Agency-controlled car owned by a local asset. He described his torture in graphic detail. He was still very angry about the treatment he had received at the hands of the military, who believed he might be a leftist extremist. Despite the torture and beatings, he stuck to his story and eventually convinced his jailers that he was not affiliated with a far-left element within the Socialist Party. The asset may have detected a bit of suspicion on my part—was his story incomplete? Was he exaggerating his abuse? In order to prove his point, he rolled up his pant legs to reveal the ugly scars and black-and-blue marks from the abuse he’d suffered after being shackled and yanked around by his captors. Whatever reservations I might have had disappeared when I looked at the physical damage to his legs.

  That memory has stayed with me. It has helped to reinforce my belief that torture is an unacceptable policy and inconsistent with our best traditions—the end does not justify the means. Unlike some of the experts, I don’t argue that torture is ineffective or that the same results can be obtained through psychological manipulation and time. It’s just wrong, and not consistent with American values. In the case of our Chilean asset, it didn’t work because his torturers didn’t ask the right question. If they had, it is very likely he would have compromised our relationship.

  Within a year, newspaper reports about CIA actions, including Track II, would lead to the formation of the Church Committee and put our operation in Chile under a cloud. By that time, General Pinochet’s human rights violations and imposition of martial law had cast doubt on the wisdom of U.S. policy in Chile. But in the heady days immediately following the coup, we could take unvarnished pride in how well we had defended the democratic institutions that we believed would soon resume governing Chile. The junta had promised to hold elections in sixty to ninety days, and that is what we expected to happen.

  Still, in my enthusiasm, I almost made a major blunder. Our government contacts were looking for ways to strengthen their case against Allende. One of my sources mentioned that the Chilean foreign minister, Ismael Huerta, was going to the United Nations to give a speech explaining the rationale behind the coup. I suddenly remembered the typewriter and letterhead my Communist Party asset had given me. In a moment of faulty inspiration, I suggested we use them to fake evidence that Allende himself had intended to initiate his own coup just before the military intervened. My source thought it was a great idea and was going to bounce it off Huerta. Fortunately, before I went any further with this, I consulted the station chief, to share my plan with him. He was rightfully livid, pointing out that we had no policy authority for such an initiative. He made it clear that I needed to cap it off immediately. It was instantly obvious that he was right, and I sheepishly returned to tell my asset that the plan was a “no-go.” Never again in my career would I entertain an action initiative without considering the need for appropriate authorization and reflecting on its impact on history. It was an invaluable lesson that would serve me well in the years ahead.

  However, I was not the only one with such a “brilliant” idea. The Pinochet government had its own version. It pushed the line that, days before the coup, the Allende government had developed something called Plan Z (or Plan Zeta), which called for the GAP to assassinate top military commanders and opposition leaders as part of a left-extremist seizure of power, an autogolpe, or “self-coup.”

  Years later I would be reminded of this episode when I ran into former secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. I spotted him across the room and reintroduced myself, noting our mutual experience in Chile. He politely said we should have lunch and talk about it. While I agreed, I didn’t expect to hear from him and was very surprised when I returned to my office to find that there was already a note on my desk setting up a lunch with Kissinger. Over that lunch, it didn’t take him long to get to his real and perhaps only interest: Hadn’t Allende been planning an autogolpe shortly before the military ousted him? Kissinger clearly was disappointed by my response—that while that might eventually have been a possibility, at the time there was no credible reporting supporting the military’s allegation. This was at odds with Kissinger’s long-held views. Not surprisingly, it was the last time we had lunch together.

  The station did try, after the coup, to establish closer ties with the junta, but it was a rocky road. We continued to hear disturbing reports—about mass arrests, torture, and the murder of people regarded as subversives. Many Chileans were not troubled by these actions. They had truly feared the MIR and didn’t fully believe that the military would harm innocent civilians. They were wrong. In a secret memo dated September 24, 1973, less than two weeks after the coup, the station reported that “the deaths of the great majority of persons killed in cleanup operations against extremists … are not recorded. Only the Junta members will have a really clear idea of the correct death figures, which they will probably keep secret.” On October 12, 1973, another memo quoted a source as saying that sixteen hundred civilians had been killed between September 11 and October 10.21 Swept up in the military’s wave of repression were two Americans, Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman, whose kidnapping and murder in the immediate aftermath of the coup inspired the 1982 Jack Lemmon–Sissy Spacek movie Missing. The movie’s unfriendly presentation of the CIA has helped fuel a persistent, and bogus, theory that the CIA was somehow involved in the murders. Agency officer James E. Anderson became involved in the very emotionally disturbing search for the bodies of Horman and Teruggi. After the bodies were found, Anderson was deeply distraught about the murders for years to come.

  Within two weeks of the coup, we also got our first inkling that Pinochet did not plan to hold elections. One of my colleagues had a political source who’d anticipated a role in the new government. This source had relatives in the military who must have given him the bad news; he came to my colleague chagrined. “They’re not handing it back,” he said, meaning the military was not handing power back to the politicians. The military was angry at the political parties we had worked so hard to defend. It felt as if the politicians’ failure to defeat Allende electorally or curb him legislatively had forced the military to act in a way it hadn’t wanted to. But now that it had seized power, it was not going to return it to the politicians to let them muck things up again.

  If we made a mistake in Chile after the coup, it was a policy mistake. According to a longtime Agency colleague and friend who also was in Chile at the time, “We didn’t put enough pressure on Pinochet to move to a civilian government.” That said, no one at the station would ever have imagined that the Pinochet dictatorship would last until 1991. We still felt we’d accomplished the mission we’d been given: we had prevented the establishment of a left-wing regime aligned with Castro that could have become a Soviet asset in our hemisphere. In fact, as we climbed, over the years, to the highest levels at Langley, the case officers involved in that extraordinary operation became known around the CIA as the Chile Mafia.

  We were seriously disillusioned, though, at the unforeseen consequences of the coup: the brutality and repression of the Pinochet regime. Obviously this has troubled me over the years, but it has not shaken my faith in covert action, at least not in “good” covert action. When I arrived in Santiago, every indication we had was that the Allende government had its eyes set on undermining the political opposition and threatening free media. In
that environment, it was fair game to support those parties and the media in resisting. I’m convinced that if the military had not intervened in September 1973, our covert action programs would have sustained the opposition until the next election and that the Allende government would have been defeated at the ballot box. That would have been a far preferable outcome to the Pinochet regime.

  * * *

  As I was preparing to depart Santiago in 1974, I began to turn my assets over to my replacement, a newly arrived case officer. One of these assets was a Chilean politician. I made it a general policy not to use an alias with public figures, because you run a high risk of meeting them in a casual setting in the presence of others. Under these circumstances, it is quite easy to find yourself being referred to by your alias. Still, I asked the new case officer how he wanted to handle the introduction. He had had a few tours abroad, but he nonetheless decided that he wanted to use “good tradecraft” and meet the politician under an alias. Shortly thereafter, the politician invited the two of us and our wives to a dinner. The case officer’s wife sat next to him. I could overhear parts of the discussion and heard her refer to her husband several times by his true name. At one point, the politician paused the discussion and said with a huge smile and for all to hear, “Don’t you know your husband’s name?” Flustered, his wife said she “confuses him all the time with his brother.” We all laughed at her clumsy response. The jig was up.