Kissinger and the Fall of Allende

9/16/70

The following is the text of Henry A. Kissinger's discussion of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens's imminent election to the Chilean presidency at a background press briefing held at the White House on September 16, 1970.

QUESTION: Dr. Kissinger, one area that you did not talk about before was Latin America. You have Mr. Allende, a Marxist, elected in [Chile]. Could you talk just briefly about our long range view and the present dangers and opportunities and activities?

KISSINGER: The election in Chile brought about a result in which the man backed by the Communists, and probably a Communist himself, had the largest number of votes by 30,000 over the next man, who was a conservative. He had about 36.1 per cent of the votes, so he had a plurality.

The two non-Communist parties between them had, of course, 64 per cent of the votes, so there is a non-Communist majority, but a Communist plurality. I say that just to get the picture straight.

According to the Chilean election law, when nobody gets a majority, the two highest candidates go to the Congress. The Congress then votes in a secret ballot and elects the president. That election is October 24. In Chilean history, there is nothing to prevent it, and it would not be at all illogical for the Congress to say, "Sixty-four per cent of the people did not want a Communist government. A Communist government tends to be irreversible. Therefore we are going to vote for the number two man." This is perfectly within their constitutional prerogatives. However, the constitutional habit has developed that Congress votes for the man that gets the highest number of votes. But then, of course, it has never happened before that the man with the highest number of votes happens to represent a non-democratic party, which tends to make his election pretty irreversible. I have yet to meet somebody who firmly believes that if Allende wins there is likely to be another free election in Chile.

So this is the situation that is now confronted by Chile. By a constitutional habit, the Congress votes for the man with the highest number of votes. The man with the highest number of votes is the candidate backed by the Communists.

There is the additional problem that the Congress is not elected at the same time as the president, so in the Congress, as it now stands, the total number of seats is 200. The group that backs Allende, including the Communists, has 82 seats, so all Allende has to do is pick up 19 seats from the other parties, and he will be in. The conservative candidate, that is, the number two candidate, around whom the rallying would have to take place, has only about 45 seats. So he would have to pick up 57 or something like that to make it.

So both the internal structure of the Congress, plus constitutional habits, would argue that Allende is likely to win the Congressional election, barring something extraordinary. This problem is compounded by the fact that the non-Communist parties in Chile have been very divided among themselves, and you have the unusual phenomenon of people arguing, "Well, maybe Allende won't be so bad. Maybe he will run a democratic system." And it is the usual revolutionary dilemma that, with a revolutionary seeking power, those who represent the non-revolutionary side do not all at the same time clearly understand what is happening. Therefore you have a great deal of confusion in Chile.

Now, it is fairly easy for one to predict that if Allende wins, there is a good chance that he will establish over a period of years some sort of Communist government. In that case you would have one not on an island off the coast which has not a traditional relationship and impact on Latin America, but in a major Latin American country you would have a Communist government, joining for example, Argentina, which is already deeply divided, along a long frontier, joining Peru, which has already been heading in directions that have been difficult to deal with, and joining Bolivia, which has also gone in a more leftist anti-U.S. direction, even without any of these developments.

So I don't think we should delude ourselves that an Allende take-over in Chile would not present massive problems for us, and for democratic forces and for pro-U.S. forces in Latin America, and indeed to the whole Western Hemisphere. What would happen to the Western Hemisphere Defense Board, or to the Organization of American States, and so forth is extremely problematical. So we are taking a close look at the situation. It is not one in which our capacity for influence is very great at this particular moment now that matters have reached this particular point.

But you have asked me about what the situation is. It is one of those situations which is not too happy for American interests.

9/17/73

During his confirmation hearings prior to becoming secretary of state, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned Kissinger on the recent military coup in Chile. The following is the text of a portion of those hearings, held in executive session on September 17, 1973.

SENATOR McGEE: As we pursued the collection of information with the assistant secretary so we might better understand the situation [in Chile], invariably the line of questioning would stop with his suggestion that that is all he knew, that he was not in on the final decisions. So the first questioning that comes to mind obviously is the intimation he made that after the coup was planned that somewhere at the top there was a conscious decision made by somebody to insure non-involvement, neutrality? At what level would that take place?

KISSINGER: First, senator, you have to remember that when a crisis occurs, there is total confusion even in the White House Though most people would expect that intelligence information puts one ahead of the information curve, you can generally assume that in the middle of a crisis the newspaper reports might be slightly ahead of the intelligence information. So the first thing we confronted, whenever it was, Tuesday morning or Wednesday morning...

McGEE: Tuesday morning.

KISSINGER: Tuesday morning was total confusion as to what was really going on down there, and who was doing what to whom.

The decision to maintain neutrality, or whatever its significance is, was taken at a meeting of what is called the Washington Special Actions Group--I will be damned if I can remember how it got that name, it happened four years ago--which meets automatically whenever there is a crisis. It is chaired by me and it has the deputy secretaries from all of the departments. Our decision, frankly, was sort of a holding decision until we could see more clearly. The only complete decision we made was to turn our fleet around and move it north so it would not be within--it was intended to be about 150 miles from the Chilean coast but then came around at the Falkland Islands.

We took the decision that we would not say anything that indicated either support or opposition--that we would avoid what we had done in Brazil in 1963 where we rushed out by recognizing the government. We instructed the ambassador that he could not establish diplomatic contact and that if he were approached he would send his military attaches to maintain the contact.

Now, then, when we make these decisions, they tend to get very literally applied, so everyone was afraid even to express sorrow at the personal fate of Allende, which we rectified the next morning. But that decision would have been taken in the Washington Special Actions Group and approved by the president.

McGEE: Is the Washington Special Actions Group the group of State that works out the concrete that is sometimes, in the press in this case, alluded to as the task force on Chile?

KISSINGER: No; the Washington Special Actions Group generally operates in an emergency. It meets almost automatically in an emergency. Then there would be a task force headed by the Department details. The Washington Special Actions Group might say "we will take a hands-off policy for 24 hours or 48 hours. We have to get an analysis of what sort of proposals have been made."

In this case we had to find out, for example, what supplies were going into Chile, so that it did not look as if we were suddenly pouring in supplies. We had to shop around to various departments to find whether in the routine delivery of existing programs, something might be planned for those two or three days that would create problems. That sort of thing. We would give the instruction and then the task force on Chile would work out the concrete details. We have got them right now working on a study of what the various dimensions of humanitarian and other assistance might be, and at the same time we are having them study what the various expropriation issues are, becuase we do not want to be hit by ten companies suddenly filing claims for expropriated property and making it look at though this whole exercise was designed by us in order to get compensation for expropriation, although that is one of our long-term objectives.

This is just to give you a feel of how we operate.

McGEE: [U.S.] Ambassador [to Chile] Davis was home the weekend before. There are those who jumped to the conclusion that there must be a cause and effect relationship.

KISSINGER: I can explain to you exactly how that happened. In fact, if it proves anything it proves the opposite. When I was nominated I called back--among the first group that is--ambassadors whom I knew well and trusted, like Ambassador Sullivan. I asked each of them to tell me in each area of the world those ambassadors whom they liked, whom they thought most highly of, so that they could advise me (a) about the area, and (b) about personnel in the department that they might have met in the area. Ambassador Davis was on two lists that were given to me. I had only met him fleetingly, and for all practical purposes I did not know him. [Deleted.]

When I mentioned his name I was told there was turmoil in Chile. I then asked the department to instruct Ambassador Davis to come back in whatever 48-hour period he thought was least likely to cause difficulty, and he himself chose that weekend.

We did talk about the situation in Chile for about five minutes. I asked him about coup reports. He said they were endemic, and I said, "Just make sure none of our embassy personnel has anything to do directly or indirectly with any of the plotters, if there are plotters, in response to any approaches." He said he had given those instructions. There was no talk about the coup except the rumor that had been around for weeks and months.

McGEE: As you listen to some of the comments here this morning, there is a suggestion that the CIA has been deeply involved in Chilean affairs over a period of time in one way or another. This came out in the ITT hearings, for example. Was the CIA deeply involved at this time?

KISSINGER: The CIA had nothing to do with the coup to the best of my knowledge and belief, and I only put in that qualification in case some madman appears down there who without instructions talked to somebody. I have absolutely no reason to suppose it. [Deleted.]

McGEE: The intimation has been rather strong from some quarters that our economic policies contributed directly to the collapse of the Allende regime, that is, cutting off credits with the Western Hemisphere Bank and a few other programs like that.

KISSINGER: Well, first of all, it is incorrect to say that we cut off the credit. Most of the credits that were cut off were cut off as the result of the basic policies of the Allende government. Mr. [Robert] McNamara [head of the World Bank and former U.S. secretary of defense] gave a speech or a press statement last summer in which he explained that the World Bank does not extend credit if there is an expropriation without compensation, if the economic policies of the country do not make it a good credit risk, and a third reason which I have now forgotten.

Second, the export-import credits were cut off after Chile defaulted on the loans that it had already had, and the bilateral aid was affected by the Hickenlooper amendment.

It is one of the curious aspects, however, of the way economic aid is given that by defaulting on its debt payments a country can, in effect get its economic aid indefinitely. Rescheduling $250 million worth of Chile's debts over the last two years had the same practical effect as giving it $250 million in economic aid, in addition to the fact that it got $85 million in disbursements from existing multilateral loans that had been approved prior to the shut down of credit. And I think it got about $25 million of humanitarian aid from the United States during the period of the Allende government. Therefore, I think that the judgement of the New York Times editorial yesterday is correct that it was the policies of the Allende government, its insistence on forcing the pace beyond what the traffic woyld bear much more than our policies that contributed to their economic chaos. [Deleted.]

I was going to say, Senator McGee, that the political parties did not know anything about this coup, to our knowledge, and I do not have the impression that there was any organized labor support for it.

McGEE: It was only the protests from the working group types, indcluding the basic political groups that supported Allende as well as those who were opposed to him?

KISSINGER: That is my impression.