by Oliver Stone
The Export-Import Bank, the Agency for International Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the McNamara-led World Bank cut off economic assistance and loans to Chile. U.S. business interests in Chile helped Washington destabilize the government. The CIA jumped in, funding opposition parties and organizations, running propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and initiating demonstrations and violent actions against the government. The Chilean National Congress responded in July 1971 by nationalizing Kennecott, Anaconda, and Cerro Mining and assuming management control of ITT. Chilean authorities calculated that in light of the exorbitant profits that Kennecott and Anaconda had accrued over the years, they were entitled to no compensation. One of Anaconda’s lawyers complained, “We used to be the fucker. Now we’re the fuckee.”76 Nor was ITT in line for compensation after columnist Jack Anderson exposed the company’s efforts to block Allende’s election and destabilize Chile afterward.
On December 4, 1972, Allende took his case against the United States and the multinational corporations to the United Nations. In a powerful ninety-minute indictment that left listeners in the packed General Assembly hall cheering wildly and yelling “Viva Allende!” the Chilean president detailed the concerted attempt “to prevent the inauguration of a Government freely elected by the people and . . . to bring it down ever since.” “It is action,” he charged, “that has tried to cut us off from the world, to strangle our economy and to paralyze trade in our principal export, copper, and to deprive us of access to sources of international financing.” He spoke of the plight of all underdeveloped countries being ruthlessly exploited by multinational corporations when he said:
Our economy could no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies that have always put their interests ahead of those of the countries where they make their profits. . . . These same firms exploited Chilean copper for many years, made more than four billion dollars in profit in the last forty-two years alone, while their initial investments were less than thirty million. . . . We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons, from positions of great influence. . . . We are potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital. It is a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system.77
Because of Chile’s “decision to recover its own basic resources,” Allende contended, international banks had colluded to cut off its access to credit. “In a word,” he declared, “it is what we call imperialist insolence.” He singled out the outrageous behavior of ITT, “whose capital is larger than the national budgets of several Latin American countries put together,” and Kennecott Copper, which, he alleged, had averaged 52.8 percent annual profit on its investment between 1955 and 1970. He decried the fact that huge, totally unaccountable “transnational” corporations were waging war against sovereign nations. “The entire political structure of the world,” he warned, “is being undermined.”78
Allende spoke on behalf of millions of Latin Americans who had been ruthlessly exploited for decades by U.S. corporations backed by U.S. diplomatic, military, and intelligence forces. It was the same indictment that General Smedley Butler and Henry Wallace had made so eloquently decades earlier.
U.S. UN Ambassador George H. W. Bush, who, according to the Chicago Tribune, had joined in the standing ovation, feebly replied, “We don’t think of ourselves as imperialists.” “The charge that private enterprise abroad is imperialistic bothers me. It’s one of the things that makes us great and strong.” Nor, he claimed, was the United States participating in any boycott of Chile. All the United States wanted to see was that the nationalized firms received just compensation.
ITT’s response was equally disingenuous. A company spokesman said, “I.T.T. never intervened or interfered in the internal affairs of Chile in any way. . . . I.T.T. has always respected a host’s [sic] country’s desire to nationalize an I.T.T. property.”79
In delivering his courageous speech to the United Nations, Allende may have been signing his own death warrant. In early 1973, the CIA urged its Chilean agents to “induce as much of the military as possible, if not all, to take over and displace the Allende govt.”80 Strikes and antigovernment protests escalated. Chilean military leaders, directed by General Augusto Pinochet, the army commander, set the coup for September 11, 1973. When Allende heard that military uprisings had begun across the country, he made a final radio address from the presidential palace: “I will not resign. . . . Foreign capital—imperialism united with reaction—created the climate for the army to break with their tradition. . . . Long live Chile! Long live the people! These are my last words. I am sure that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am sure it will be at least a moral lesson, and a rebuke to crime, cowardice and treason.”81 Allende took his own life with a rifle he had been given as a gift. A gold-medal plate embedded in the stock was inscribed, “To my good friend Salvador Allende from Fidel Castro.”82
Pinochet seized power. After the coup, Nixon and Kissinger assessed the possible damage. Speaking by phone, Kissinger, who was getting ready to attend the Redskins’ season opener, complained that the newspapers were “bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.” Nixon muttered, “Isn’t that something. Isn’t that something.” Kissinger replied, “I mean instead of celebrating—in the Eisenhower period we would have been heroes.” Nixon said, “Well we didn’t—as you know—our hand doesn’t show on this one though.” Kissinger amended that statement: “We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them. _____ created the conditions as great as possible.” To which Nixon responded, “That is right . . . as far as people are concerned . . . they aren’t going to buy this crap from the Liberals on this one. . . . it is a pro-Communist government and that is the way it is.” “Exactly. And pro-Castro,” Kissinger agreed. “Well the main thing was. Let’s forget the pro-Communist. It was an anti-American government all the way,” Nixon added. “Oh wildly,” Kissinger concurred. He assured Nixon that he was just reporting the criticism. But it wasn’t bothering him. Nixon reflected, “Yes, you are reporting it because it is just typical of the crap we are up against.” “And the unbelievable filthy hypocrisy,” Kissinger averred.83
Pinochet murdered more than 3,200 of his opponents and jailed and tortured tens of thousands more in a reign of terror that began with the actions of the Chilean Army death squad known as Caravan of Death. Kissinger saw to it that the United States quickly recognized and provided aid to the murderous regime. In June 1976, he visited the Chilean dictator and assured him, “We are sympathetic to what you are trying to do here.”84
Pinochet didn’t limit his killing to Chile. Three months after Kissinger’s visit, Pinochet’s assassins killed Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Moffitt, Letelier’s colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies. The car bombing, which occurred fourteen blocks from the White House, had been carried out under Operation Condor, an assassination ring run by a network of Latin American intelligence agencies based in Chile. Members included the right-wing governments of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil. At a minimum, the United States facilitated communications among the intelligence chiefs. The operation was masterminded by Colonel Manuel Contreras, the head of Chilean intelligence, who served as a CIA asset and received at least one payment for his services. Many of those assassinated were left-wing guerrilla leaders. But Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Harry Shlaudeman informed Kissinger that the targets actually included “nearly anyone who opposes government policy.”85
Kissinger could have disrupted the Condor operations, including the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations. On August 30, 1976, Shlaudeman sent him a memo, stating, “what we are trying to head off is a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation
of the countries involved.”86 Kissinger had already approved sending a diplomatic protest to the heads of state of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, expressing “our deep concern” over “plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians, and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad.” But the démarche was never delivered because, on September 16, Kissinger canceled the warning, cabling Shlaudeman that he had “instructed that no further action be taken on this matter.”87
Under Condor, assassination squads tracked down and killed more than 13,000 dissidents outside their home countries. Hundreds of thousands more were thrown into concentration camps.88
Although Nixon and Kissinger have been rightly condemned for the viciousness of their policies in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Chile, they have also garnered praise for easing tensions in other areas. Normalizing relations with China was the most obvious case in point.
Augusto Pinochet greeting Kissinger, June 1976. After overthrowing Allende in a CIA-aided coup ordered by Nixon himself, Pinochet seized power and proceeded to murder more than 3,200 opponents and jail and torture tens of thousands more. Kissinger saw to it that the United States quickly recognized and provided aid to the murderous regime.
Nixon followed up his triumphal February 1972 visit to China with a May visit to the Soviet Union. Wary of the United States’ new friendship with China, the Soviets greeted him warmly. In Moscow, Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), the first strategic arms agreement, which restricted each side to two defensive antiballistic missile systems and placed limits on the number of offensive ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The treaty failed to slow the growth of nuclear warheads because it placed no restraints on multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs)—missiles that could carry several bombs aimed at separate targets. Nor did it do anything to roll back the massive existing arsenals that gave each side the ability to destroy the other several times over. But as a first step, the agreement was of great symbolic importance. Brezhnev and Nixon also initiated the process that resulted in recognition of Eastern Europe’s borders in return for pledges to respect human rights in the Helsinki Accords of 1975. They issued a joint communiqué and a statement of “Basic Principles.” The first of those principles stated that both countries “will proceed from the common determination that in the nuclear age there is no alternative to conducting their mutual relations on the basis of peaceful coexistence.”89 Nixon addressed a joint session of Congress upon his return, saying:
Everywhere new hopes are rising for a world no longer shadowed by fear and want and war. . . . To millions of Americans for the past quarter century the Kremlin has stood for implacable hostility toward all we cherish, and to millions of Russians the American flag has long been held up as a symbol of evil. No one would have believed even a short time ago that these two apparently irreconcilable symbols would be seen together as we saw them for those few days. . . . Three-fifths of all the people alive in the world today have spent their whole lifetimes under the shadow of a nuclear war. . . . Last Friday in Moscow we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era.90
Nikita Khrushchev, who had helped pave the way for this monumental change, was not around to see it; he had died of heart failure the previous September. Living in a log cabin, he had become a critic of the Soviet government and its heavy-handed suppression of dissent. He infuriated Soviet leaders by smuggling his memoirs out of the country. Published in the West under the title Khrushchev Remembers, it became a best seller. In it, he mused sadly about the peaceful world he and Kennedy had wanted to achieve. The Soviet Central Committee decided to downplay his funeral, burying him in a corner of a Moscow cemetery. No monument was erected for four years.
On June 17, 1971, the United States and Japan signed a treaty that allowed Okinawa to revert to Japan in May 1972. The Japanese had recoiled at the United States’ use of Okinawa as a base for operations in Vietnam and a storage site for nuclear weapons. Okinawans concurred. According to the new treaty, the United States would sell Okinawa back to Japan but would retain its bases on the island and use them for combat in the region. Japan not only paid the United States an exorbitant sum to “buy back” the island, it agreed to make large annual payments toward the costs of retaining the bases. Elsewhere, the United States paid host countries for the privilege of putting bases on their land or at least shared the cost. To make matters worse, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato subverted the agreement by secretly allowing the United States to reintroduce nuclear weapons into Okinawa.
The conflict over Okinawa went back more than a decade. In 1960, the United States and Japan had concluded the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, widely known by the Japanese abbreviation AMPO, which sanctioned continued U.S. occupation of Okinawa and retention of U.S. military bases elsewhere in Japan. Opposition had been so widespread and protests so massive that the government of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, Sato’s older brother, had been forced to resign. Kishi had also blundered by telling the Diet that the Japanese Constitution did not ban the development of nuclear weapons, a view that was anathema to most Japanese. U.S. Ambassador Douglas MacArthur had complained that “latent neutralism is fed on anti-militarist sentiments, pacifism, fuzzy-mindedness, nuclear neuroses and Marxist bent of intellectuals and educators.” The previous year, MacArthur had pressured the chief justice of the Japanese Supreme Court to overturn a Tokyo District Court ruling that U.S. forces in Japan represented “war potential” and therefore infringed upon the antimilitarist Article 9 of the Japanese Peace Constitution that General Douglas MacArthur, the ambassador’s uncle, had helped fashion during the occupation. Article 9 states, “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation” and that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” During that time the Japanese government had also concluded the first of a series of “secret agreements” with the United States in which the government supported U.S. nuclear strategy and military preparations. The most egregious offense had come in the “tacit agreement” that “no prior consultation is required for US military vessels carrying nuclear weapons to enter Japanese ports or sail in Japanese territorial waters.”91
Nixon and Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. A willing partner in the United States’ push for the remilitarization of Japan, Sato subverted the June 1971 treaty returning Okinawa to Japan by secretly allowing the United States to reintroduce nuclear weapons onto the island.
But the smoldering tension between the United States and Japan flared under Nixon. Japan’s consternation and surprise over the United States’ opening to China only exacerbated the two countries’ long-standing military and economic differences. U.S. leaders had continuously pressured Japan to revoke Article 9 and play a greater role in regional defense. The United States also threatened to impose import quotas against Japanese textiles, forcing Japan to cut its textile exports, allow in more U.S. imports, and open its markets to U.S. investors. Nixon privately complained about the “Jap betrayal” and expressed his eagerness to “stick it to Japan.”92
Sato had been a willing partner in the United States’ push for the remilitarization of Japan—perhaps too willing. He had taken office in November 1964, just one month after the Chinese atomic bomb test. He had met with President Johnson in January 1965 and declared that “if Chicoms [Chinese Communists] had nuclear weapons, the Japanese also should have them.” He had added that “Japanese public opinion will not permit this at present, but I believe that the public, especially the younger generation, can be ‘educated.’ ” Such a view had widespread support among Japanese leaders in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yasuhiro Nakasone, the director of the Japanese Defense Agency and a future prime minister, commissioned a report by the agency that concluded, “it would be possible in a legal sense to possess small-yield, tactical, purely defensive nuclear weapons without viola
ting the Constitution.” But the agency recommended against doing so at that point, a stance that Johnson welcomed.93
It was Sato who tried to hoodwink the Japanese people into believing the sincerity of his antinuclear statements when he articulated the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles” before the Diet in December 1967. According to those principles, Japan would not manufacture, possess, or permit the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan, a commitment that Sato was regularly breaking and that he described to U.S. Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson as “nonsense.” When Japan had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970, it had extracted a promise from the United States that it would not “interfere with Tokyo’s pursuit of independent reprocessing capabilities in its civilian nuclear power program.”94 Given Japan’s technological capability and stockpile of spent fuel, it would always remain one “screwdriver twist” away from having nuclear bombs.
Not everyone applauded Nixon’s rapprochement with China and the Soviet Union. The North Vietnamese feared that they were being hung out to dry. As a New York Times editorial noted, “Chairman Mao received President Nixon shortly after heavy bombing of North Vietnam had resumed; Secretary General Brezhnev received the President shortly after North Vietnam’s harbors were mined. No words are needed for Hanoi to understand that the Chinese and Soviet leaders put their own interests first.”95
