BOOKS IN REVIEW: The United States and Salvador Allende: A Special Report on a Perennial Big Lie
Whelan, James R.
BOOKS IN REVIEW The United States and Salvador Allende A Special Report on a Perennial Big Lie Santiago, Chile ~ NE OUGHT NOT, IT IS SAID, judge a book by i t s cover. Author Jonathan Haslam...
...Two days after his overthrow, the Brazilians were the first to extend help--a $200 million loan to Chile...
...New fighting was breaking out in the Middle East...
...I t is pernicious, and might easily lure the unwary--foremost among them, students required to read this bilge...
...Haslam, a professor of history at the University of Cambridge, presents not a scrap of credible evidence to dispute the extremely well-documented fact that, for all the outside forces at work, Allende brought September 11,1973, on himself, The Ni• Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide by Jonathan Haslam (VERSO BOOKS, 255 PAGES, $23) and when the end came, it was in response to the clamor of the overwhelming majority of Chileans--a revolution of Chileans, for Chileans...
...Leigh loomed large for five years, until his sharp differences with Pinochet (and Merino) boiled over...
...Nixon was then fighting to save his embattled presidency (which collapsed eleven months later...
...MARCH 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...
...as a bit player...
...A RE WE TO CONCLUDE that Professor Haslam excels at fitting facts to his theories, excluding those that don't fit...
...acted in Chile, it did so exclusively within the framework of helping an embattled people to preserve their way of life and stave offthe imposition of a totalitarian dictatorship...
...The man who headed all of the CIA's clandestine operations in Latin America at that time, David Phillips, was equally blunt: "Of one thing I am moral72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW ty certain...
...Haslam professes shock that free trade unionists-mainly from the AFL-CIO--were given CIA funds to help their counterparts in Chile offset the power of the Communist-controlled trade federation that dominated the politics of labor in the country...
...I cite these light-shedding words because none of them appear in Haslam's book...
...Official Washington surek,_~ly hankered for Allende's collapse--that Allende posed a threat to U.S...
...And we were party to none...
...But then, he also speaks of those $6.5 million as "vast sums," and repeatedly confuses the amount authorized ($8 million) with the amount actually disbursed ($6.5 million...
...The Nixon administration...
...He presently lives in Santiago...
...There was more, much more, to reinforce the reality of the U.S...
...Finally, Haslam chooses to ignore altogether the very detailed reports in both the Kissinger and Phillips books of Washington's reaction to the coup...
...art" as gifts for Allende...
...By contrast, the Cuban Embassy rapidly ballooned to 200 persons, including the number two man in Castro's intelligence service (who consolidated the relationship by marryingAllende's daughter...
...See also my second sidebar, "In the Name of AntiAmericanism," p. 76) When Allende came to power in 1970, the U.S...
...I t runs all the wayto the end of the book...
...Ambassador during the last two Allende years, Nathaniel Davis, was a career diplomat who in his candid book, The Last Two Years of Allende, makes no bones of his admiration for Allende...
...The next day, September 12, Pinochet contacted the head of the U.S...
...Others sawit differently...
...And so, Washington earmarked $8 million in clandestine dollars--but actually disbursed only $6.5 million-to keep alive democratic opposition to Allende, almost all of it to political parties, but also to a much-threatened free press (confronting a massive and massively subsidized regime press...
...send any special forces or similar troops to train Chilean soldiers...
...Nor do any of the commanders or their aides communicating for five hours that day Official Washington surely hankered for Allende's collapse-that Atlende posed a threat to U.S...
...Ariel Gonzalez Cornejo, chief of Naval Intelligence...
...funds flowed libidinously, every which way, Davis makes plain that he rode herd-hard-on what was spent, when and where...
...Nor did the U.S...
...Castro's Cuba, the Chilean economic crisis, Russian apathy, and the Nixon administration all played a part...
...No one sent word to them...
...One such group brought with it "works of How could the U.S, have been other than a bit player...
...Second, he was not chief of Naval Intelligence, but an intelligence officer assigned to the Defense Ministry--in those days, an agency of marginal importance...
...In all of his book, he has only two references to the KGB--dozens to the CIA...
...A civil war was being prepared by the Marxists...
...Jos6 Toribio Merino Castro, told a "very angry" Salvador Allende: "Yes, sir.., we are at war with you...
...Understanding their own dilemma...
...For more on the huge gaps in Haslam's research, see the sidebar "Haslam's Missing Sources," below...
...Relations with the Soviet Union were deteriorating...
...Former President Frei, a few months before the coup: "Chile is in the throes of an economic disaster--not a crisis, but a veritable catastrophe no one could foresee would happen so swiftly nor so totally.., the hatred is worse than the inflation, the shortages.., the economic disaster...
...working] in tandem with Allende's policies in the run up to the coup d'fitat...
...fleet just entering Chilean waters more than 1,000 miles to the north of Santiago, steaming to rendezvous with the Chilean fleet for the 12th annual "Unitas" maneuvers...
...Allende was, after all, implanting a second Soviet satellite state in the hemisphere, and national security was a legitimate concern for the one nation able to contain Soviet expansionism...
...it had far more in common with the slaughterhouse tactics of Mao Tse-tung, responsible for the murder of an estimated 80 million Chinese...
...have been other than a bit player...
...And, to what end...
...To the extent the United States James R. Whelan's books include Out of the Ashes: Life, Death and Transfiguration of Democracy in Chile, 1833-1988...
...The Vietnam peace process was unraveling in what Kissinger described as "the ruins of North Vietnamese treachery...
...Haslarn either did not know-though he should have--or he chose not to reveal that Argentina was then ruled by Juan Domingo Peron, viscerally anti-American...
...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW Almost no one ever bothers, either, to observe that the official death count during the 17-year military government that ousted Allende was 2,279...
...Why not, when he hangs his whole "hidden hand" buncombe on a cockamamie story about Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters allegedly setting up a secret shop in an office back of the Hotel Carrera, so as "to observe the coup at close quarters...
...companies, apparently chief among them ITT...
...Under military rule themselves, they were 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2006 "pro-active" in support of would-be revolutionaries against Allende...
...Nor would anyone who had the privilege of knowing the brilliant and widely experienced General Waiters (and I did have that privilege) ever imagine him defying the orders of his Commander-in-Chief-and Nixon had issued "stay-out" orders through Kissinger--playing voyeur at a revolution he could in no wise direct, even if he were so stupid as to try...
...Better, by far, if the book had ended with its lurid cover...
...And, howbloodywould it have been...
...The Brazilians, for example...
...Haslam is clearly of that school of modern "intellectuals" who think of Communism not as what it was--the largest mass killer of any political movement humanity has ever known--but as a bunch of altruists gone astray...
...How could the U.S...
...Author Jonathan Haslam is, then, a lucky man, because if one were to judge this bookby its cover, one would need go no further...
...We did not promote or assist that coup and we did everything we could possibly do to avoid any inference of involvement, short of closing down the [CIA] station and leaving Chile...
...With the exception of a few small arms sent to Chile for an aborted scheme in 1970 to block Allende from gaining power, the United States sent no arms of any kind to Chile during the Allende years (although it did promise two destroyers, an offer later rescindedwhen the military government came to power...
...At page 158, Haslam goes right off the cliff, in a chapter entitled "The Hidden Hand Moves...
...Henry Kissinger, echoing congressional testimony and numerous public ~tatements, said the U.S...
...What he actually was was Secretary-General of the Socialist Party, a party far more radical and far more violence-committed than its major partner in the Allende coalition, the Communists...
...He has reported on the country since 1958, and served 1992-1995 as visiting professor at the University of Chile...
...So, Haslam had the flow of events upside down and backward--not surprising, I suppose, since his source is an obscure Italian Communist journalist...
...After the coup, the military discovered far greater Cuban armaments, including heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, antitank weapons, bazookas, and field artillery pieces up to 106 millimeters, as well as a great horde of explosives and munitions...
...Indeed, he entertains us with a morsel or two unearthed in recent times, or found as he rooted around mainly Communist archives, or preMARCH 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 BOOKS IN REVIEW sented by obscure Communist commentators...
...Alas, Haslam is not a man intimidated by mere facts...
...The words are those of the greatly lionized (and U.S...
...By contrast with Haslam, who intimates when he doesn't flat-out claim that clandestine U.S...
...That very morning a meeting of the top-level Washington Special Action Group was convened, presided over by Kissinger...
...C HILEANS FELT STRONGLY, very strongly, about getting rid of Allende...
...A WOB_D ON PERSPECTIVE, since there is very little either of that or of context in this book...
...Indeed, he reached the presidency in 1970 with a scant 36.2percent of the vote, not quite 40,000 votes ahead of his closest rival...
...Haslam tries to pooh-pooh both the pressures on the free press, and the power and magnitude of the puppet press...
...But, he knows evil when he sees it: The U.S...
...The key decision: Turn around--now!--the U.S...
...That wouldn't stop Haslam from asserting--without citing a single instance or example--that U.S...
...Doctrinaire ideology blinds the author to the facts before his very eyes...
...A few weeks later, July 6, 1973, a delegation of top business leaders went to Frei's Senate office, imploring his help in rescuing them from the cataclysm...
...Nobody, and surely not Professor Haslam, bothers to take note of how utterly prepared for and cynical the radical left was about the spilling of Chilean blood on a colossal level...
...I t was not in fact a matter of Soviet apathy towards Allende--Haslam's version--but cynicism about his chances of survival...
...Back to the cover: "Assisted suicide...
...funds also supported "outright terrorism...
...on the llth...
...Cubans were given carte-blanche.to enter and leave the country as they pleased...
...national security was, Henry Kissinger tells us, "conventional wisdom...
...S CHIZOPHRENIC: FOR ROUGHLY THE FIRST HALF of this book, I was tempted to say, ah well, let's give this chap the benefit of the doubt...
...March 1,1973...
...To begin with, Chile did not belong to Salvador Allende Gossens...
...A few days after the coup, 12 Soviet officers were picked up at a training camp 20 miles from Santiago and thrown out of the country...
...As the "perspicacious" (Haslam's term) Argentine ambassador "correctly forecast" early in Allende's rule, Altamirano's brand of Cuban-style socialism "signaled the end of traditional Chilean socialism and is judged by many old leaders as the birth of a monster that will provoke with its behavior the ruin and annihilation of President Allende...
...In more than 30 years of investigating the events of September 11 (and beyond), I have never heard mention of such an "observation post" from anyone, and I have interviewed at least 40 persons who were MARCH 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 BOOKS IN REVIEW in action that day-from the doctor (Patricio Guij6n Klein) who was the only actual eyewitness to Allende's suicide, to the young lieutenant, Hernan Ramirez Jald, who was the first into the Salon Independencia where he found the dead Allende slumped on a red sofa, to women and ministers of Allende's government, to soldiers and civilians trapped in the maelstrom, as well as all of the highestranking commanders...
...government--in common with every other government, including the Cubans, the Soviets, and the East Germans--learned of the coup after the fact...
...There is anguish in Chile...
...I f one were to judge by the cover, on the other hand, it would seem to mean the suicide of Allende himself, because the text "A Case of Assisted Suicide" appears beneath a tint block photograph of Allende-who, despite the propaganda barrage of Communists and their ilk over many years, did blow offthe top one-third of his head with an AK-47 given him by Fidel Castro...
...Chileans, mind you...
...In either event, we are left with ambiguity...
...military credits to Chile in the period 1953-1975...
...In a publicity flyer for the book, we are told that "diverse components led to Allende's downfall...
...Socialists were then in power in virtually every European country, and where they weren't, they still equated Chileali "socialism" with European socialism...
...Chile was a small blip on the American screen, yet Haslam would have us believe the fairy tale that prevailing in Chile was vital to the image of the Nixon administration...
...To that point, Haslam had the makings of a decent, if not altogether honest, book...
...For that reason, it deserves to be despoiled, as despoil it would...
...He told them, "You shouldn't be here, you should talk to the commanders-in-chief, because this mess now can only be cured with rifles...
...At bottom, it centered on Allende's inability--or unwillingness-to curb the dangerous extremism of firebrand radicals around him...
...but blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night...
...We will defend it to the BOOKS IN REVIEW last, it is our life and the life of our Chile...
...From such a location, one would have observed nothing of that part of the coup centered on the presidential palace...
...Chief among them was Carlos Altamirano, "something [Haslam confides] of the son Allende never had...
...Firstofall, itwas"comandante" Gonzalez--equivalent to a lieutenant colonel, and not a full colonel ("Capitan'-in the military, a vast distance separates those two ranks...
...Thirdly, he was not the man who arrived in Valparaiso on Sunday morning, September 9, to give the top mutineer admirals the precise timing of the coup...
...But, once in power, Allende behaved as though he did own the country, to the extreme of trying to ram down the throats of a reluctant majority a Marxist-Leninist revolution...
...Haslam does not cite that statement either, though he does include Phillips's book in his bibliography...
...Haslam notwithstanding, only a pittance went to the striking truck drivers...
...The Vietnam peace process was unraveling...
...Cubans under General Patricio de la Guardia also set up an elaborate terrorism training camp, as did both the East Germans and Soviets...
...Chilean expert that he is (not), he claims that "Pinochet ruthlessly snatched power for himself alone...
...In her remarkable book, Chile: The Crime of Resistance (which also didn't make it into Haslam's bibliography), the French writer Suzanne Labin reports that Chilean military MARCH 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 BOOKS IN REVIEW intelligence had identified 20,000 foreign military instructors in their country, including Soviets, Cubans, Czechoslovaks, and East Germans...
...That is one of the major reasons why Haslam's book might have been so much, but became so little...
...Highlights: The first word confirming the coup was flashed to Washington at 4 A...
...Haslam tells us Waiters was "operating through Capt...
...It is anti-climatic to remark that Haslam admits he has no factual basis for his story--unless one were willing to count "Source (A)," a phantom figure cited as a source for several important incidents in this book, along with his fellow ghost, "Source (B)'--neither of them identified...
...The poet foretold Haslam's dilemma: "He saw...
...Haslam chose not to draw upon any of Kissinger's books...
...And the Communists were-mirabile dictu!--the moderates in the Allende coalition...
...He was not very gifted about foretelling the future, either...
...It has so few redeeming qualities, and I can say that confidently as one who has read and annotated at least 300 books on modern Chile an history, books written by people on the right, people on the left, and those few striving to be somewhere in between, as well as foreigners of many stripes and persuasions...
...Henry Kissinger, in his vital book Years of Upheaval (not included either in Haslam's research), spells out in elaborate detail how tightly Davis did control those funds...
...they sent word to Santiago, to Generals Pinochet (Army) and Leigh (Air Force), and did so with one of those mutineer Admirals (Huidobro)--and Gonzalez...
...Both Merino and [Air Force commandant Gustav] Leigh, who preferred a constitutionalist outcome, were increasingly sidelined and rendered ineffective...
...Most of the money supporting them came from private U.S...
...There were other bit players...
...Nothing to change the essentials of the drama as it was known and understood a good 25 years ago, but nuggets, all the same...
...The U.S...
...The fact is that the September 11 revolution was conceived, planned, and executed by Chileans, in great secrecy...
...Far too much of value is left out...
...So why, then, bother v(i'th a book like this...
...Declaring their own intentions...
...As for the Soviets, Allende was in office only a few months when they offered a staggering $300 million in military credits--five times the total of all U.S...
...q O, WHAT CAN WE SAY about Washington's role in the Allende debacle...
...The Junta could not have fared as well as it did if Pinochet and Merino had not, in fact, worked hand-in-glove all 17 years of military rule...
...74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW II I[ Still, at mid-May 1973, CIA headquarters gave orders to its Santiago station to end all contacts with the Chilean military and/or coup plotters...
...According to the cut-throat Communist leader, Voloidia Teitelboim: "A civil war in Chile probably would mean immense loss of life, half a million to one million...
...He frequently carries that obsession to ludicrous extremes, as when he quotes an extreme-leftist Argentine publication as quoting, in turn, "reliable sources," that a few days before the coup, 32 American planes landed in Mendoza, Argentina, on the other side of the Andes from Santiago...
...I exaggerate...
...Halfa million would have been the equivalent ofroughlyl5 times the total of U.S...
...I t is a mish-mash of innuendo and unsourced scuttlebutt--and an embarrassing display of catty petulance...
...Military Assistance Advisory Group in Santiago and told him that "he and his colleagues had not even hinted to us beforehand of their planned action and said he thought it had been better that way...
...At congressional insistence, it was later learned that those 13 crates contained 472 small arms and submachine guns, and 40,000 cartridges...
...Take this example: In a latenight shouting-match meeting with Allende on September 5, the man who more than any other triggered the revolt, Adm...
...When Allende turned up in Moscow in December of 1972, tin cup in hand, pleading for $80 million, they (reluctantly) gave him $45 million in loans...
...Far from recognizing that frailty, Haslam attempts to make a theoretical mountain out of that quirky molehill...
...Kissinger around the same time reinforced the order to apply to all Americans in the country...
...Another former president, Gabriel Gonzalez Videla: "...the Armed Forces have saved us from the Marxist claws.., the totalitarian apparatus which had been prepared to destroy us has itself been destroyed...
...The U.S...
...dead in World War II...
...And, Haslam doesn't tell us that just a few short years later, when the military was in power, that same AFL-CIO conglomerate fought hard against the Pinochet government...
...Nixon was then fighting to save his embattled presidency (which collapsed eleven months later...
...The quote is not in Haslam...
...between January 1 and July 31, 1973, 633 Cubans waltzed in and out of the country, most without submitting to customs and immigration formalities...
...Chile's total population in 1970 was 9.3 million...
...Holy cow...
...Military advisors totaled 13...
...I t had nothing in common with that...
...It did...
...was aware "of what was well known to every Chilean, including Allende...
...that the military was seriously considering the takeover.., but we were unaware of any specific plan or date...
...Besides, since the military commanders had agreed to stage the coup only 35 hours before, which of their various plans would he be observing...
...over a secret shortwave radio network--set up for them the night before by a group of civilians--make mention of foreigners of any kind working with them (though they do of the Cubans shooting at them from their embassy [hat day...
...Those civilians gave me the very first outsider access to the entire tape of those communications a few months later...
...It might have better been called, "Coming up empty-handed...
...Because, this book comes to us in the finery of academic rigor and respectability, yet it is neither...
...The Navy is at war because it is not communist and will never be communist, neither the admirals nor the Navy Council, nor any sailor, since we were raised in another school...
...Allende had left the country without bread, and without money...
...Authors frequently are not responsible for the title of their books...
...Since nowhere in the pages of this book does one find an explanation of what the author had in mind with this inflammatory phrase, I am left to suppose he means the "suicide" of the Allende regime...
...Why, then, bother...
...As indicated above, over those first 157 pages, Haslam was mainly busy piling up evidence of why and how Allende himself--more than all other factors combined-was paving the road to his own hell...
...Instead, over the 230 pages of text inside, we wander through an intellectual swamp that is at once schizophrenic, uncontrollably leftist, and-how shall I put it?--less than honest...
...Nixon's role was confined almost entirely to bluff and bluster--for which Reviewed by James R. Whelan he was famous...
...Embassy numbered 120 persons--of whom, a Communist source claimed, 42 were CIA agents...
...national security was, Henry Kissinger tells us, "conventional wisdom" going back to the Kennedy administration...
...Haslam demonstrates a touchinginnocence as to just how complex a revolution really is, above all when it sprawls over a country 2,625 miles long, and which involved the fleet, air force jets, as well as soldiers...
...In ousting Allende, "the military have saved Chile...
...True, in those first 157 pages, Haslam endeavored gamely to explain away or rationalize Allende's foibles and worsening failures...
...Instead, he clings tenaciously to his obsession that somehow, some way, Nixon, Kissinger, the CIA, the American Navy, Popeye the Sailor Man--someone, anyone in Washington--must be the agents of Chile's tragedy...
...antagonist) Eduardo Frei Montalva, who precededAllende as president of Chile...
...Another: The Professor did not do well his homework...
...And that the world does not know, refuses to know...
Vol. 39 • March 2006 • No. 2
