CIA Stonewalls on Involvement With Pinochet

by David Corn

But last Friday, when the U.S. government released the second batch of documents collected under the White House directive, a set of records was missing: those detailing the CIA's underhanded involvement in Chile. The CIA has been making public its reporting on events that occurred in Chile -- such as riots, plots and strikes against Allende -- but not material indicating that the CIA helped stir up these anti-Allende activities. Or that it may have been involved in the murder of an American journalist.

But that hasn't stopped the agency from trying to cover its backside. The agency, citing a 1984 law, has claimed that the CIA does not have to search its files for the documents on the Kornbluh list -- which Kornbluh graciously shared with the CIA. That legislation did give the CIA a big pass. It said the agency, when handling a Freedom of Information Act request, does not have to look through the files of its operations division, the wing that does the stuff -- paramilitary operations, propaganda, espionage, etc. -- that you see in the movies. And the operations division is where the key Chile documents presumably reside.

(The wily lawyers at the CIA were able to slip into Clinton's order a provision stating that the agencies were to retrieve only documents subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.) But the 1984 law did establish exceptions to the no-search clause, such as when the search concerns an operation officially acknowledged by the U.S. government; when that operation is the subject of an investigation for impropriety or illegality; and when documents pertaining to the operation have been taken from the operations division and placed in files elsewhere. The Chile case meets each of these standards. Still, the agency has been misciting the law to avoid even locating the documents identified by Kornbluh and the National Security Archive. In a letter to CIA Chief George Tenet, Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, referred to how the agency, in its first release of Chile-related material, ducked and covered: "Not a single document was released on known [CIA] operations supporting the Pinochet regime after the coup; not a single page on programs designed to bolster the Chilean secret police; not a word of Headquarters' decision memoranda relating to Chile... The CIA released only 2000 pages of records dated between 1973 and 1978. This is but a fraction of what it has in its vast secret archives. Moreover, the documents that were released were heavily redacted. So many pages were removed from so many documents and so many sections deleted that all critical evidence on US activities in Chile appears to have been systematically censored."

She noted that this "constitutes a betrayal of what I and other families of American victims believed would be a good faith effort on the part of the Clinton administration to declassify the record and allow us to lay this painful history to rest. The President's tasker [which ordered the declassification review] explicitly states that a declassification review 'would respond to the expressed wishes of the families of American victims of human rights abuses'... [A] review that exempts the very files most likely to contain evidence relevant to our families will be viewed as little more than an exercise in hypocrisy and fraud."

When the new collection of documents was unveiled Friday, Joyce Horman had far more reason to be outraged. A 1976 State Dept. memo noted there was circumstantial evidence that the CIA "may have played an unfortunate part" in her husband's murder. "At best, [the CIA's role] was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder [by the Chilean military government]," the document said. "At worst, U.S. intelligence was aware [Pinochet's regime] saw Horman in a rather serious light and U.S. officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of [Chilean] paranoia." (Horman worked for a left-leaning news service and may have come across information confirming direct U.S. involvement in the military coup.)

The CIA documents included in Friday's release, however, contained no references to the Horman case. But after the agency began to receive calls from reporters regarding the State Dept. memo, the CIA found and made public a 1978 letter it had sent the Justice Dept. stating that the "CIA had no prior knowledge of and played no role in either the death of Mr. Horman or in the events surrounding the subsequent disposition of his remains." That was hardly a ringing denial of the charges contained in the State Dept. document. Moreover, another State Dept. record noted that the U.S. embassy official in Chile who handled the Horman case was actually a CIA officer posted under State Dept. cover. So where are his reports? Not in any of the material produced so far by the obstructionists of the agency. Having been embarrassed so thoroughly -- and caught in a cover-up -- the CIA said it will review its operations division files. But for all Chile-related records? For only Horman-related documents? For only those documents it can use to its advantage? At this point, the agency is not to be trusted.

The CIA has taken its lumps for standing in the way of the truth. There was a forceful editorial in The New York Times, and The Washington Post last week ran a story headlined "CIA Accused of 'Whitewash' on Pinochet." Both were the result of a marvelous pressure campaign mounted by the National Security Archive, various human rights groups, Joyce Horman and friends and relatives of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt (who were killed in Washington, DC, in 1976 by a car bomb planted by agents of Pinochet's military regime). They all have been urging the Clinton administration to come to terms with this secret past. The question is, will the White House crack the whip against the CIA? (The National Security Agency, the supersecret, mega-eavesdropping outfit, too, needs a boot in the rear to release its own material; it has been systematically withholding documents and may possess the most incriminating records regarding Pinochet's involvement in human rights abuses.)

Now, spies will by spies. You can't expect them to really believe in openness. Ultimately, the call belongs to Clinton, who throughout his presidency has treated the covert operators too gingerly. Clinton, who is obsessed with his own legacy, is not able to control how he will be recorded in history, but it is within his power to set the historical record straight about this shameful period. Joyce Horman and so many others deserve no less.