Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability by Peter Kornbluh, Peter Kornbluh (Editor)

From the Publisher

Published on the 30th anniversary of General Pinochet's military coup, declassified documents that reveal the startling facts behind US collusion with the notorious Chilean dictator.In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here....We want to help, not undermine you.—Henry Kissinger speaking confidentially to General Augusto Pinochet The 1998 arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in Britain brought renewed attention to the dark days of his dictatorship and raised questions about America's role in bringing the General and his henchmen to power. As a result of the efforts of Peter Kornbluh and the National Security Archive, thousands of the government records that spell out US government support of Pinochet have recently been declassified. The Pinochet File makes public many of the key and formerly secret records of the atrocity and complicity that are at the heart of the international campaign to hold this Chilean general legally accountable for murder, torture, and terrorism. Peter Kornbluh's investigative narrative puts the documents in their historical context—exposing the efforts of Henry Kissinger, the White House and the CIA to conceal this history—and fills in the gaps of one of the most infamous chapters in the history of American foreign policy. Among the formerly top-secret records in The Pinochet File are:
• Top-secret transcripts of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and other cabinet members discussing how to "bring Allende down."
• Minutes of top secret meetings, chaired by Kissinger, to determine covert operations in Chile.
• CIA Chile Task Force organizational and strategy documents.
• White House Situation Room cables welcoming General Pinochet to power.
• Defense Intelligence Agency organizational diagrams of Chile's repressive secret police, DINA.
• Chilean secret police records on Operation Condor.
• Intelligence reporting to Henry Kissinger on Condor.
• Comprehensive CIA, NSC and State Department reports on the September 1976 car bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt.

About the Author:
: Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project, led the campaign to declassify official documentation of the secret history of US government support for the Pinochet dictatorship, and is the editor most recently of Bay of Pigs Declassified (The New Press). He lives in Maryland. The National Security Archive is a nonprofit research library of declassified US government documentation in Washington, DC.

The Washington Post

… ultimately the value of The Pinochet File lies less in any new revelation or unique insight than in the missionary zeal and methodical devotion with which Kornbluh sets out to catalogue the evidence of U.S. guilt -- to dizzying, devastating effect. — Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

The New Yorker

For Chileans, September 11th marks a different tragedy -- the anniversary of the 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. This timely book weaves together thirty years of declassified documents with a gripping narrative of America's involvement in the affair. At a National Security Council meeting in 1970, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird said of Allende, "We want to do everything we can to hurt him and bring him down," and a C.I.A. memo from the same year describes efforts of a key ally "to increase the level of terrorism in Santiago." This terrorism included the assassination of René Schneider, the constitutionalist commander-in-chief of Chile's armed forces, which was carried out with C.I.A.-provided funds and submachine guns. The evidence that Kornbluh has gathered is overwhelming. As Colin Powell recently remarked about the United States' role in the Pinochet coup, "It is not a part of American history that we are proud of."

Publishers Weekly

For years, the United States government maintained top-secret archives detailing its policy in Chile and its role in aiding and securing General Pinochet's rise to dictatorial power in the early 1970s. In this examination of the thousands of records recently declassified by the CIA, White House, NSC, Pentagon and FBI, Kornbluh offers new revelations about America's development of a policy dedicated to overthrowing Chile's existing democratic government and to replacing it with a military leader reviled for his complete disregard for human rights. Throughout the book, Kornbluh-a director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library-buttresses his assertions with excerpts from the relevant documents, and attempts to shed light on some of the outstanding questions of the period that still beg for answers, including what motivated President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to authorize the bloody campaign and how involved the US government actually was in the September 1973 coup itself. (Sept. 7) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

There are two types of what Theodore Draper called "present history." The first is based on documents and testimony accessible to all historians: assertions and interpretations can be checked, verified, and contested on the basis of fact rather than speculation. Both Draper and, in his own way, I. F. Stone were brilliant practitioners of this kind of history and demonstrated that, despite the best (or worst) intentions of bureaucrats to hide or distort the record, much could be found in the public domain if diligently sought after. The second approach to writing about contemporary history is based on anonymous "sources" and self-interested "leaks." Here, much depends on the credibility of the authors; but in the right political climate, such writing can be powerful enough to bring down a president, as it did with Watergate. And over the past two decades, heavily redacted, "secret" government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act have been added to its menu.

Both approaches have their weaknesses, and neither is as new as might first appear. The Draper method — by abjuring the fragments exhumed from a government's dark places — risks underestimating the role of the clandestine actions that were often at the center of the ideological and geostrategic struggles of the Cold War. History by self-interested leaking of documents or the use of anonymous sources, however, tends to produce narratives that are self-justifying, on the one hand, or indictments, on the other, and to exaggerate the importance of covert operations. Again, there is a long history of both genres: Winston Churchill the historian was a master over many volumes at preempting the assessment ofWinston Churchill the statesman, and Henry Kissinger is doing what Churchill did for his own epoch and his own historical place within it by releasing weighty tomes on his White House years and other topics.

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