40 Years After CIA and ITT's 1973 Coup In Chile: A Look At `Democracy Now!''s ITT-Lannan Foundation Connection--Part 8

Lubea Qureshi’s 2009 book "Nixon, Kissinger and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile" observed that when the CIA funded and organized strikes by right-wing Chilean truck industry owners in the fall of 1972 and the summer of 1973 in order to attempt to create economic chaos in Chile prior to the September 1973 military coup, “ITT extended $400,000” to the right-wing anti-Allende regime strikers. The same book also noted that “Henry Hecksher, “ the CIA’s “chief of station in Santiago” in 1970, “directed ITT operatives to a Chilean who could serve as a secret channel for” ITT “funds” in the early 1970s; and $1 million traveled from ITT coffers to Chilean recipients,” with right-wing presidential candidate “Jorge Alessandri and his National party” receiving “at least $400,000 of this enormous corporate investment” by ITT.

"The Pinochet File" also recalled that “by the fall of 1971, the CIA Station” in Chile “was conducting a `deception operation’…in order to `arouse the” Chilean `military’ to `move against’ Allende `if necessary’;” and “by early 1972” the CIA’s “Santiago Station began compiling arrest lists, installation targets, and other operational data necessary for coup contingency planning.” Then, according to the same book:

“…On September 27, 1972…a CIA informant, inside Pinochet’s camp reported that…Pinochet now believes `that Allende must be forced to step down or be eliminated;’ these were, in his words, the `only alternatives.’ When Pinochet traveled to Panama that month to negotiate the transfer of U.S. tanks to the Chilean army,…a member of his entourage reported back to a CIA handler. And U.S. army officers at the Southern Command, according to this source, passed an important message along to Pinochet’s delegation: the `U.S. will support coup against Allende’ with whatever means necessary `when the time comes.’”

So, not surprisingly, “in October 1972, a team of `appropriate CIA elements’—officials and analysts” then “gathered at Langley headquarters and `brainstormed the current Chilean situation from every conceivable angle,’ weighing `various courses of action…to accelerate current Chilean events leading toward a coup’ as [then-CIA Western Hemisphere Division Chief Theodore] Shackley reported to the Senior Review Group (SRG) on October 17 [1972],” according to "The Pinochet File."
(end of part 8)