“The Quiet Americans”: CIA Operations from Cuba to Chile
- Jeff Kellick
- Mar 8
- 27 min read
“There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position, and I feel that we need to correct it.”—President Harry S. Truman, December 22, 1963¹
Introduction: The Secret Government
In 1975, Senator Frank Church convened hearings that exposed what he called a “secret government” operating within the constitutional government—accountable to no one, constrained by nothing, conducting assassinations and coups in the name of the American people without their knowledge or consent.
The Church Committee revealed that the CIA had tried to assassinate Fidel Castro at least eight times. It had helped overthrow governments on multiple continents. It had recruited Nazi war criminals. It had infiltrated American newsrooms. It had conducted drug experiments on unwitting subjects. It had opened the mail of American citizens. It had spied on domestic dissidents.
For a moment, Americans glimpsed what their government had been doing in their name.
Then they forgot.²
This article examines the covert operations that the Church Committee exposed and contextualized—the secret history of American foreign policy from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. These operations share common features: they were justified by Cold War necessity, executed without democratic accountability, produced catastrophic long-term consequences, and were subsequently forgotten or rationalized.
But before examining specific operations, we must understand the foundations. How did the national security state recruit its enemies’ war criminals? How did it infiltrate its own country’s media? The moral compromises were not aberrations. They were foundational.
The CIA was created in 1947 to gather and analyze intelligence. Within a decade, it had become an instrument of covert empire—overthrowing governments, conducting assassinations, and waging secret wars across the globe. The transformation was not accidental. It was chosen, step by step, compromise by compromise, until the agency that emerged bore little resemblance to what Congress had authorized.
Understanding this history is essential to understanding why so much of the world views American power with suspicion. Every country remembers what we have forgotten.
Operation Paperclip: Serving the Enemy of Your Enemy
The Recruitment of Nazi Scientists
As World War II ended, American military and intelligence agencies scrambled to secure German scientific talent before the Soviets could claim it. The result was Operation Paperclip—a secret program to recruit Nazi scientists for American weapons programs.
Between 1945 and 1959, more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Paperclip and related programs. Many had been Nazi Party members. Some had been SS officers. Some had used slave labor. Some had conducted human experiments.³
The most famous was Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist who had developed the V-2 missiles that terrorized London. Von Braun had been an SS officer. His rockets had been built by concentration camp prisoners at the Mittelwerk factory, where an estimated 20,000 laborers died from overwork, starvation, and execution.⁴
After the war, von Braun became a hero of the American space program. He directed the development of the Saturn V rocket that took Americans to the moon. His past was quietly overlooked. When questions arose, they were deflected.
The Nuremberg trials prosecuted some Nazis. Operation Paperclip hired others. The contradiction was noted at the time but suppressed in the interest of national security.
The Moral Compromise
The justification was straightforward: the Soviet Union was recruiting German scientists too. If we did not secure their expertise, our enemies would. We could not afford to lose the scientific race.
To make the recruitment possible, the scientists’ records were “bleached”—Nazi affiliations removed or minimized in official files. Immigration laws prohibiting the entry of war criminals were circumvented through bureaucratic maneuvering. The State Department objected; the military overruled.⁵
The process was systematic. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which administered Paperclip, created new dossiers that omitted incriminating information. Scientists who had been classified as “ardent Nazis” were reclassified as “not ardent.” Party membership was minimized or explained away. War crimes were simply not mentioned.
The scientists themselves understood the arrangement. They were valuable precisely because of what they had learned serving Hitler. Their knowledge of rocketry, aviation medicine, chemical weapons, and other fields had been developed for Nazi military purposes. They brought not just technical expertise but the fruits of research conducted under conditions—including human experimentation—that American scientists could not replicate.
Arthur Rudolph, who directed production at the Mittelwerk factory where thousands of slave laborers died, later received NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. Hubertus Strughold, whose subordinates conducted freezing and decompression experiments on concentration camp prisoners, was honored as the “Father of Space Medicine.”
The precedent established was profound: war criminals were acceptable allies if they served American interests. Ideology was secondary to utility. The ends justified the means.
This principle would guide American intelligence throughout the Cold War.
The Gehlen Organization
The recruitment of scientists was matched by the recruitment of intelligence officers.
Reinhard Gehlen had been Hitler’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front, commanding the Foreign Armies East division that gathered information on Soviet military capabilities. As Germany collapsed, Gehlen buried his files, surrendered to American forces, and offered his services.⁶
The Americans accepted. Gehlen and his entire network—including known war criminals and SS officers—were absorbed into American intelligence operations. The Gehlen Organization became the primary source of American intelligence on the Soviet Union in the early Cold War. It eventually became the nucleus of West Germany’s postwar intelligence service, the BND.⁷
The implications were staggering. The United States was relying on Nazi intelligence networks to understand its new enemy. Men who had served Hitler’s genocidal regime were now serving Washington.
As historian Christopher Simpson documented, some of Gehlen’s recruits had been directly involved in war crimes—including the murder of Jews, prisoners of war, and civilians on the Eastern Front. Their crimes were overlooked in exchange for their expertise.⁸
The Cold War had begun before the hot war ended. And from its first days, the Cold War was built on moral compromise.
Operation Mockingbird: Manufacturing Consent
The Program
While Paperclip recruited foreign scientists and Gehlen recruited foreign spies, another program targeted a different asset: the American press.
Operation Mockingbird was the CIA’s program to influence domestic and foreign media. It began in the late 1940s under Frank Wisner, who directed the Office of Policy Coordination—the CIA’s covert action arm. By 1953, the CIA had relationships with journalists at every major American news organization.⁹
The network included reporters, editors, publishers, and foreign stringers. Some were on the CIA payroll. Others cooperated without formal payment, providing information or publishing stories favorable to agency interests. Still others were witting assets—fully aware of their relationship with intelligence—while some were unwitting, manipulated without understanding who was pulling the strings.
Estimates vary, but investigative journalist Carl Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists cooperated with the CIA over the program’s lifespan.¹⁰
The Methods
The methods were diverse.
Direct employment placed journalists on the CIA payroll. They reported to the agency while maintaining their cover as independent reporters.
Asset relationships cultivated journalists who would cooperate without formal payment—trading information, accepting guidance on stories, or suppressing unfavorable coverage.
Institutional capture established relationships with publishers and network executives. Henry Luce of Time/Life maintained close ties with the agency. William Paley of CBS cooperated on multiple levels. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Newsweek all had staff with CIA connections.¹¹
Foreign media operations were even more extensive. The CIA funded newspapers, radio stations, and publishing houses abroad. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were CIA fronts. Foreign journalists were recruited as assets or placed on payroll.
The result was that the information Americans received about the world was shaped—to an extent that remains disputed—by intelligence interests.
What Mockingbird Accomplished
The program’s effects are difficult to measure precisely, but its purposes are clear from declassified documents.
Coverage of coups in Iran and Guatemala obscured the American role. The media presented these events as indigenous uprisings against unpopular leaders rather than CIA operations against democratic governments. Journalists who might have investigated were discouraged; those who cooperated provided the agency’s preferred narrative.
Propaganda themes were inserted into American discourse. Anti-communist narratives, favorable coverage of American allies, and unfavorable coverage of American enemies reflected agency priorities. Books were published through CIA-funded fronts. Conferences were organized. Intellectual journals were subsidized. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, which promoted anti-communist intellectuals throughout Europe, was revealed as a CIA operation.
The agency also used media relationships for intelligence gathering. Journalists traveling abroad could collect information and make contacts that official operatives could not. The line between reporter and spy blurred.
The “free press” that Americans believed in was not entirely free. The Fourth Estate that was supposed to check government power was, in part, an instrument of that power.
The implications for democratic governance were profound. Citizens cannot make informed decisions if the information they receive has been shaped by intelligence agencies. Elections cannot reflect the popular will if the public discourse has been manipulated. The very foundation of self-government—an informed citizenry—was undermined.
The Church Committee and After
The Church Committee exposed Mockingbird in 1975. The revelations were shocking—the systematic infiltration of independent media by intelligence agencies violated fundamental assumptions about American democracy.
CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced reforms in 1976. The agency would no longer pay journalists or use American news organizations for cover.¹²
Whether these reforms were meaningful or cosmetic remains debated. The policy officially ended, but the relationships, networks, and practices may have continued under different arrangements. The agency’s formal position became: “We do not pay journalists.” Whether that statement was truthful, complete, or merely legalistic is unknown.
The pattern established by Mockingbird connects to the broader theme of this series: media manipulation is constant in American foreign policy. The methods evolve, but the practice persists—from the British press campaigns of the 1850s, through the yellow journalism that produced the Spanish-American War, through the Creel Committee’s propaganda in World War I, through Mockingbird, to arrangements that may continue today.
Cuba: The Obsession
The Revolution
On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces entered Havana. The dictator Fulgencio Batista fled. Cuba—ninety miles from Florida—had escaped American control.
Batista had been an American ally: corrupt, brutal, but reliably anti-communist and hospitable to American business. The casinos, the sugar plantations, the Mafia investments—all had flourished under his protection.
Castro was initially a nationalist rather than a communist. His ideological alignment with the Soviet Union came later, accelerated by American hostility. But from the beginning, he expelled American influence, nationalized American businesses, and defied American power.
The challenge was geographic as well as ideological. A hostile government ninety miles from Florida was intolerable to American policymakers. Cuba became an obsession that would consume three administrations.¹³
The Bay of Pigs
The CIA began planning Castro’s overthrow during the Eisenhower administration. The plan called for an invasion by Cuban exiles, trained and equipped by the agency, who would establish a beachhead, spark a popular uprising, and overthrow the regime.
The plan was inherited by John F. Kennedy when he took office in January 1961. Despite misgivings, Kennedy approved the operation.
On April 17, 1961, approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast. The invasion was a catastrophe.
The Cuban people did not rise up. Castro’s forces were prepared. Kennedy, fearing exposure of American involvement, reduced air support at the last minute. Within three days, the invasion force was destroyed. One hundred fourteen exiles were killed. Nearly 1,200 were captured.¹⁴
The humiliation was total. Castro was strengthened, not weakened. American prestige was damaged. The exile community was embittered. And the CIA learned nothing.
The operation revealed fundamental flaws in covert action that would recur: exile communities consistently overestimate their support in their homelands; CIA operations require deniability that constrains their effectiveness; failed operations strengthen the regimes they target.
Kennedy learned from the disaster. He told advisors he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”¹⁵ The institution did not learn. It doubled down.
Operation Mongoose and the Assassination Attempts
After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy authorized intensified covert action against Cuba under the codename Operation Mongoose. The program included sabotage, propaganda, and assassination planning. Attorney General Robert Kennedy took personal charge, demanding aggressive action.
The Church Committee documented at least eight separate plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. The methods ranged from the deadly to the absurd: exploding cigars, poisoned wetsuits, toxic pens, depilatory chemicals to make his beard fall out, Mafia hitmen hired through intermediaries, a ballpoint pen rigged with a hypodermic needle to inject poison.¹⁶
The CIA’s Technical Services Division devoted significant resources to these efforts. Scientists developed biological agents, poisons disguised as everyday objects, and exotic delivery mechanisms. The creativity invested in murder was remarkable.
None succeeded. Castro’s security services penetrated the plots repeatedly. The Cuban leader survived and eventually outlived ten American presidents.
The collaboration with organized crime was particularly revealing. The Mafia had lost its Cuban casinos to Castro’s revolution—the gambling, prostitution, and drug operations that had flourished under Batista. The CIA recruited mob figures—including Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli—to arrange Castro’s death. The agency was working with criminals to commit murder.¹⁷
Giancana was a Chicago mob boss under investigation by the FBI while simultaneously working for the CIA. Roselli was a Las Vegas fixer with connections across organized crime. The arrangement was kept from the FBI, from the Attorney General, and from normal oversight channels.
The operations were absurd, criminal, and counterproductive. They gave Castro permanent justification for repression: “The Americans are trying to kill me.” They strengthened his position rather than weakening it. They revealed an agency that had lost any sense of proportion or legality.
They also created relationships that may have had consequences beyond Cuba. The intersection of CIA operations, organized crime, and anti-Castro exiles produced a murky underworld whose connections to subsequent events—including the Kennedy assassination—remain disputed and inadequately investigated.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
In October 1962, American reconnaissance discovered Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba. The resulting thirteen-day confrontation brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any moment before or since.
Kennedy rejected military options that would have killed Soviet personnel and likely triggered escalation. He imposed a naval quarantine and demanded the missiles’ removal. Secret negotiations produced a resolution: the Soviets would remove their missiles; the United States would pledge not to invade Cuba and would quietly remove American missiles from Turkey.¹⁸
The crisis demonstrated both the dangers of Cold War confrontation and the possibility of stepping back from the brink. Kennedy and Khrushchev, having stared into the abyss, both sought to reduce tensions. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 followed.
But the Cuba obsession continued. The assassination plots continued. The covert operations continued. The pledge not to invade did not mean acceptance of Castro’s survival.
The Kennedy Assassination: The Unanswered Questions
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
This article cannot resolve the questions surrounding that event. What it can do is establish the context that makes those questions significant—and explain why, six decades later, millions of pages remain classified.
Kennedy and the CIA
Kennedy’s relationship with the CIA was hostile. He blamed the agency for the Bay of Pigs disaster. He fired Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Directors Charles Cabell and Richard Bissell. He threatened to restructure the agency fundamentally.
The hostility was mutual. The CIA’s covert operations directorate viewed Kennedy as having betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs by withdrawing air support. They resented his skepticism of their proposals and his attempts to constrain their autonomy.¹⁹
On Vietnam, Kennedy had sent military advisors but resisted pressure for full combat commitment. National Security Action Memorandum 263, signed in October 1963, ordered the beginning of American withdrawal—1,000 troops by the end of 1963, complete withdrawal by 1965. Whether Kennedy would have escalated or withdrawn remains debated, but what is documented is that he had not committed to combat troops despite sustained pressure from military and intelligence officials.²⁰
The Warren Commission and Its Critics
The Warren Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy. There was no conspiracy.²¹
Oswald’s biography was unusual. He had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, lived there for nearly three years, married a Soviet woman, then returned to the United States in 1962 without apparent difficulty. He engaged in pro-Castro activities in New Orleans. He was employed at the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the motorcade route.
Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby two days after the assassination—before he could testify, be cross-examined, or provide his account of events. Ruby had documented connections to organized crime.²²
The Warren Commission’s conclusions have been challenged on multiple grounds: the “magic bullet” theory requiring a single bullet to cause seven wounds in two men; witness testimony suggesting shots from multiple directions; Oswald’s possible intelligence connections; the destruction of evidence by the FBI; and the CIA’s withholding of relevant information from investigators.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations—a second official investigation—concluded that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”²³
The committee could not identify the conspirators. Its conclusion was based partly on acoustic evidence that has since been disputed. But the finding stands: a congressional investigation determined that the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman conclusion was probably wrong.
The committee recommended further investigation. None occurred.
What We Know
Certain facts are documented:
The CIA withheld information from the Warren Commission—information about assassination plots against Castro, about contacts with Oswald, about operations that might have been relevant.²⁴
The FBI destroyed evidence—specifically, a note Oswald had delivered to the Dallas FBI office before the assassination.²⁵
Key witnesses died under unusual circumstances in the years following the assassination.
Millions of pages of documents remain classified six decades later—despite multiple laws requiring their release. The agencies that hold these documents have successfully resisted full disclosure under every administration.
The Honest Position
We do not know who killed President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s conclusion has been contested by another official investigation. The agencies that might know have withheld information and continue to do so.
The documented history of CIA operations—assassination plots, media manipulation, alliances with organized crime, recruitment of Nazis, overthrow of governments—makes conspiracy theories less implausible than they might otherwise seem. An agency that tried to kill Castro eight times, that collaborated with the Mafia, that infiltrated the American press, that deceived Congress and presidents—such an agency cannot simply be assumed innocent when uncomfortable questions arise.
What we can say with confidence:
Kennedy was in conflict with the CIA. The assassination ended that conflict. Policies Kennedy resisted—Vietnam escalation—were implemented by his successor. The CIA withheld information from investigators. The full truth remains hidden after sixty years.
Whether these facts are connected causally or merely coincidentally is a question history has not resolved. The continued classification of documents suggests that someone believes the full truth would be damaging.
The Congo: Murder in Africa
The Context
The Belgian Congo gained independence on June 30, 1960. Patrice Lumumba, a charismatic nationalist and pan-Africanist, became its first democratically elected prime minister.
Lumumba was not a communist, but he was rhetorically leftist and determined to establish genuine independence—not the neo-colonial arrangements Belgium preferred. He threatened to seek Soviet assistance if the West would not help, and he demanded that Belgium withdraw its remaining military forces.
The Eisenhower administration viewed Lumumba as a potential “African Castro.” The Congo was rich in minerals—including uranium that had supplied the Manhattan Project. A Soviet-aligned Congo was unacceptable.²⁶
The American Role
The CIA was authorized to “remove” Lumumba. The word was chosen deliberately for its ambiguity.
The CIA station chief was sent poison to use against Lumumba—a toxin that would produce a fatal disease appearing natural. The poison was never used; circumstances did not permit.²⁷
Instead, the CIA supported Colonel Joseph Mobutu, who seized power in a coup in September 1960. Lumumba was captured, transferred to the secessionist Katanga province controlled by Belgian interests, and murdered in January 1961.²⁸
The killing was carried out by Congolese and Belgian forces, but the CIA had supported the coup, worked to eliminate Lumumba, and welcomed his death.
The Consequences
Mobutu ruled the Congo—renamed Zaire—for thirty-two years, until 1997. His regime was among the most corrupt in African history. He looted billions while his population starved. He maintained power through brutality, patronage, and American support.²⁹
Throughout the Cold War, Mobutu was “our bastard”—a reliable anti-communist ally whose crimes were overlooked because he served American interests. American presidents received him at the White House. American aid flowed to his regime.
The Congo remains unstable today. The wars that followed Mobutu’s fall have killed millions. The country that might have developed under democratic leadership instead suffered three decades of kleptocracy followed by ongoing conflict.
The pattern was by now familiar: elected leader removed, dictator installed, short-term “win,” long-term catastrophe.
Indonesia: The Forgotten Massacre
The Context
Indonesia in the early 1960s was the world’s largest Muslim country, strategically vital, and home to the third-largest communist party in the world—the PKI.
President Sukarno was a nationalist and founding father of Indonesian independence. He pursued non-alignment in the Cold War, balancing between the superpowers. This was precisely what the Dulles worldview could not accept: neutralism was pro-Soviet.
The CIA had attempted to destabilize Sukarno since the 1950s, including support for regional rebellions. The efforts had failed, but the objective remained: Indonesia must not “go communist.”³⁰
The Coup and Massacres
On September 30, 1965, a murky coup attempt resulted in the deaths of six Indonesian generals. The circumstances remain disputed—whether the PKI was actually responsible, whether the army itself was involved in a false flag operation, whether the entire episode was manufactured to justify the purge that followed. What is clear is that General Suharto seized the opportunity.
What followed was one of the twentieth century’s worst massacres.
Between October 1965 and mid-1966, an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Indonesians were killed. The victims were accused communists, ethnic Chinese, and anyone denounced by neighbors or rivals. The military organized the killings, but civilian militias—often Islamic organizations—carried out much of the slaughter.³¹
The violence was intimate and communal. Neighbors killed neighbors. Teachers were killed by students. Entire families were eliminated. Rivers ran with blood; bodies clogged waterways. The scale was overwhelming, the methods primitive—machetes, knives, clubs.
The American role was documented in cables released decades later.
The CIA provided lists of PKI members to the Indonesian military—names of people to be killed. The American embassy received reports of the massacres as they occurred. The response was approval, not horror.³²
Robert Martens, a political officer at the embassy, later acknowledged providing the lists: “It really was a big help to the army... They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”
A cable from the embassy reported: “The army has already executed many communist functionaries.” The response from Washington expressed satisfaction that the army was “moving relentlessly to crush the PKI.”
The U.S. also provided communications equipment that helped the military coordinate the killings. Material support accompanied the political approval.
Time magazine called the massacres “the West’s best news for years in Asia.”³³
The Consequences
Suharto ruled Indonesia for thirty-two years, until 1998. His regime was authoritarian, corrupt, and brutal—but anti-communist and pro-Western.
In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, a former Portuguese colony seeking independence. An estimated 100,000 to 180,000 Timorese died—proportionally one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century. The United States supported the invasion with weapons and diplomatic cover.³⁴
The Indonesian massacres remain largely unknown in America. They are not taught in schools, not commemorated, not acknowledged. In Indonesia, they are remembered—and the American role is known.
Did the United States participate in genocide? If providing target lists to killers constitutes participation, the answer is yes. This is not ancient history. Survivors are still alive.
Vietnam: The Covert Origins
The Vietnam War receives full treatment in Article 11. But its covert origins belong in this catalog of CIA operations—because the war that killed millions began as the kind of quiet intervention this article examines.
Vietnam was a French colony. During World War II, Ho Chi Minh—communist, nationalist, independence leader—worked with American OSS officers against the Japanese occupation. When Japan surrendered, Ho declared Vietnamese independence, quoting the American Declaration of Independence in his speech.
France sought to reimpose colonial rule. The First Indochina War followed, from 1946 to 1954. The United States initially had little interest, but as the Cold War intensified, Indochina became another domino. By 1954, America was paying 80 percent of France’s war costs.⁴⁴
The French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel—temporarily, pending reunification elections in 1956.
Those elections never occurred. The Eisenhower administration understood that Ho Chi Minh would win a nationwide vote. So the administration installed Ngo Dinh Diem as leader of South Vietnam—Catholic in a Buddhist country, authoritarian, corrupt, but anti-communist.
Diem refused to hold the reunification elections. American advisors, American money, and American weapons sustained his regime. The insurgency that would become the Vietnam War began.⁴⁵
By 1963, Diem had become a liability—brutal repression of Buddhists, nepotism, ineffectiveness. The Kennedy administration signaled approval for a coup. On November 1, 1963, South Vietnamese generals overthrew and murdered Diem.
Three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated.
The war became fully America’s responsibility. What had begun as covert support—advisors, money, encouragement of coups—would become the largest American military intervention since World War II. The pattern established in Iran and Guatemala would produce catastrophe in Vietnam.
Chile: The Laboratory of Intervention
The Context
Salvador Allende was a Socialist physician who had sought the Chilean presidency for decades. In 1970, he won—a plurality of 36 percent in a three-way race, confirmed by the Chilean Congress as the constitution required.
Allende became the first Marxist elected to lead a Latin American country through democratic means.
President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were determined to prevent Allende from governing. The concern was not that Allende would impose totalitarianism—Chile had a robust democratic tradition—but that he might succeed. A democratic socialist success in Latin America would set a dangerous example.
Kissinger articulated the position with characteristic bluntness: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”³⁵
“Make the Economy Scream”
Nixon ordered the CIA to prevent Allende’s inauguration. The agency explored coup options, including kidnapping the Chilean army commander who stood in the way. General René Schneider was shot during a botched kidnapping attempt; he died three days later. The weapons used were provided by the CIA.³⁶
When Allende took office despite these efforts, Nixon ordered economic warfare: “make the economy scream.”
American credit to Chile was cut off. International financial institutions were pressured to deny loans. Copper prices—Chile’s main export—were manipulated downward. American businesses were encouraged to withdraw capital.
The CIA funded opposition media, labor strikes, and demonstrations. Truckers’ strikes disrupted the economy. Middle-class protests filled the streets.
Chile’s economy did suffer—by design.³⁷
The Coup
On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military launched a coup. Fighter jets bombed the presidential palace. Allende died inside—whether by suicide or murder remains disputed.
General Augusto Pinochet emerged as the leader of a military junta. Thousands were arrested in the days that followed. Hundreds were executed in the National Stadium. The democratic tradition Chile had maintained for decades was destroyed.³⁸
American Responsibility
The CIA did not directly execute the coup—Chilean military officers did. But American actions had created the conditions: economic chaos, political destabilization, support for coup plotters.
American officials knew the coup was coming and welcomed it. The day after Allende’s death, Kissinger told Nixon: “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes.”³⁹
The Pinochet Regime
Pinochet ruled Chile until 1990. His regime killed more than 3,000 people and tortured more than 30,000. An estimated 200,000 Chileans fled into exile.
The methods were systematic. The Caravan of Death—a military delegation that traveled the country executing prisoners—killed at least 75 people in the weeks after the coup. The National Stadium in Santiago was converted into a detention center where thousands were held, tortured, and some executed. Victor Jara, the beloved folk singer, had his hands broken before being shot.
DINA, the secret police, conducted surveillance, torture, and assassination. Its methods—electric shock, simulated drowning, sexual assault—were taught by instructors who had learned from American training programs.
Operation Condor coordinated repression across South America. Chilean intelligence, with CIA knowledge, collaborated with Argentine, Uruguayan, Paraguayan, and Brazilian security services to track and kill dissidents across borders. The operation represented a multinational death squad network, enabled by American support and tolerated by American policymakers.
The victims included American citizens. Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were young Americans living in Chile at the time of the coup; both were killed by Chilean security forces. Their cases were covered up by the American embassy. Orlando Letelier, Allende’s former ambassador to Washington, was assassinated by car bomb in Washington, D.C., in 1976—an act of state terrorism on American soil.⁴⁰
The “Chicago Boys”—economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman—implemented free-market reforms under military dictatorship. Privatization, deregulation, cuts to social spending—the neoliberal program was imposed while dissent was crushed. The Chilean model became a template: economic liberalism imposed by political tyranny. The contradiction was apparently acceptable.
Friedman visited Chile in 1975 and met with Pinochet. He later won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The juxtaposition—free markets requiring unfree politics—was never adequately explained.
Pinochet was never fully held accountable. Arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant, he was eventually released on health grounds and returned to Chile. He died in 2006 under indictment but unconvicted, having never faced justice for his crimes.
The Question
The Chilean coup poses the question starkly: if democracy elects someone we oppose, is it acceptable to destroy that democracy?
The American answer in 1973 was yes.
This is the question the Global South has been asking ever since.
The Church Committee: Brief Accountability
The Revelations
In 1975, Senator Frank Church of Idaho chaired the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. For fourteen months, the committee investigated CIA, FBI, and NSA activities with unprecedented access to classified files.
The revelations were staggering.
Assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, Schneider, and others. COINTELPRO—FBI surveillance and disruption of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., and antiwar activists. Operation CHAOS—CIA spying on American citizens, illegal under the agency’s charter. MKUltra—mind control experiments using drugs on unwitting subjects, including American citizens.⁴¹
The “family jewels”—the CIA’s own internal catalog of illegal activities—was exposed. The scale of lawbreaking was massive. The secrecy had been total.
The Reforms
The committee’s reports led to reforms.
Executive Order 11905, signed by President Ford, banned political assassination as an instrument of American policy.⁴²
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978) required judicial warrants for domestic surveillance.
Intelligence oversight committees were created in both houses of Congress—the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The CIA was to be brought under the rule of law.
The Limits of Reform
The reforms constrained but did not transform.
During the Reagan administration, restrictions were loosened. The Iran-Contra affair revealed that covert operators were willing to violate laws, lie to Congress, and circumvent oversight when they deemed it necessary. The participants were pardoned or had convictions overturned.⁴³
After September 11, 2001, most restrictions were abandoned. The surveillance programs documented in The New Leviathan series represented a return to practices the Church Committee had exposed and supposedly ended.
The Church Committee moment was an exception, not a turning point. American democracy briefly glimpsed what its government was doing in its name, expressed shock, enacted reforms—and then moved on. The covert state adapted and continued.
The Interventionist Defense
The Case for Covert Action
The interventionist position deserves fair statement.
The Cold War was an existential struggle. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian power that sought global expansion. It supported communist movements on every continent. It murdered millions of its own citizens. Its victory would have been catastrophic for human freedom.
The other side played dirty. Soviet intelligence conducted assassinations, supported insurgencies, infiltrated Western institutions. If America constrained itself to legal methods while the Soviets used any means necessary, America would lose.
Some targets were genuine threats. Castro sought to export revolution throughout Latin America. Allende would have aligned Chile with Soviet power. Lumumba was unstable and potentially dangerous. These were not innocent democrats but leaders whose success would have harmed American interests.
Open warfare would have been worse. The covert operations that removed Mossadegh, Arbenz, Allende, and Lumumba avoided wars that might have killed far more. The costs were real but limited.
And America won. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Cold War ended. Whatever the means, the end was achieved.
The Response
These arguments contain elements of truth, but they do not justify what was done.
Many targets were nationalists, not communists. Mossadegh sought to control Iranian oil. Arbenz sought land reform in Guatemala. Allende sought democratic socialism in Chile. Lumumba sought genuine independence for the Congo. They were labeled “communist” because the label justified their removal, not because it accurately described their politics.
The dictators America installed committed massive crimes. The Shah’s SAVAK, Mobutu’s kleptocracy, Pinochet’s torture chambers, Suharto’s massacres—these were not unfortunate side effects but predictable consequences of installing authoritarian regimes.
The blowback created enemies who outlasted the Cold War. Iran’s hostility traces to 1953. Latin American resentment of American power traces to Guatemala, Chile, and dozens of other interventions. Indonesia’s massacres are remembered even if America has forgotten them.
We “won” the Cold War, but at what cost to our own character? An agency that recruits Nazis, infiltrates the press, attempts assassination, collaborates with the Mafia, and overthrows democracies—what does such an agency do to the nation it serves?
The Moral Question
Is there any action unjustified if it serves national security?
The Church Committee asked this question. The reforms it produced implied that some limits existed.
The post-September 11 era answered differently: apparently not.
The debate is not settled. It is suppressed. Americans do not discuss whether torture, assassination, and regime change are acceptable instruments of policy. They simply accept that these things are done in their name—or refuse to know.
Conclusion: The Invisible Empire
What the Covert Operations Reveal
The operations examined in this article share common features:
America maintained an empire without calling it one. The covert operations that overthrew governments and installed dictators were imperial actions—but they were conducted in secret, allowing Americans to believe they lived in a republic that respected other nations’ sovereignty.
Democratic rhetoric masked authoritarian practice abroad. The same officials who spoke of freedom and self-determination were overthrowing elected governments and installing dictators. The gap between what America said and what America did was enormous.
Economic interests were consistently served under ideological cover. Oil in Iran. Fruit in Guatemala. Copper in Chile. Minerals in the Congo. The pattern was clear: American corporations’ interests were protected through covert action, while the public was told that communism was being contained.
Long-term consequences were never adequately weighed. Every operation focused on immediate objectives—remove this leader, install that one. What would happen afterward? Would the dictator create conditions for revolution? Would the intervention generate lasting hostility? These questions were not seriously asked.
Accountability was brief and incomplete. The Church Committee exposed the crimes. Reforms were enacted. Then the crimes resumed under new names and new justifications. The covert state proved more durable than its critics.
The Body Count
The human cost of these operations is staggering:
Iran: twenty-six years of dictatorship, followed by revolution, hostage crisis, and ongoing conflict that continues today.
Guatemala: 200,000 dead in civil war, the vast majority indigenous civilians killed by American-supported military governments.
Congo: thirty-two years of kleptocracy under Mobutu, followed by wars that have killed millions.
Indonesia: 500,000 to 1,000,000 massacred in 1965-1966, with American complicity.
Chile: 3,000 killed, 30,000 tortured, 200,000 exiled under Pinochet.
And Vietnam—which would receive full treatment in Article 11—had not yet reached its peak.
The Inheritance
Every one of these operations left legacies we still navigate.
Iranians remember 1953. Guatemalans remember 1954. Indonesians remember 1965. Chileans remember 1973.
Americans have forgotten—or never knew. The “why do they hate us” question has answers. We refuse to examine them.
Understanding this history is prerequisite to understanding present hostility toward American power. The world remembers what we have done. Our forgetting does not erase their memory.
Self-Reflection Prompts
As you consider this history, ask yourself these questions:
The Church Committee exposed assassination plots, illegal surveillance, and covert coups. The reforms that followed have largely been abandoned. What does this suggest about the possibility of constraining secret agencies in a democracy? Can intelligence services be made accountable, or does their nature preclude accountability?
Indonesia’s massacres (500,000-1,000,000 dead) are largely unknown in America. Chile’s coup (3,000+ dead) is better known. Why do you think some covert operations enter public memory while others do not? What determines which crimes are remembered?
Kissinger said the U.S. should not “stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” What does this statement reveal about how American policymakers viewed democracy in other countries? How does this attitude persist today?
The dictators installed by American covert action—Shah, Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto—all eventually fell. Did the operations that installed them serve long-term American interests, or only short-term ones? What would a genuine long-term assessment conclude?
Operation Mockingbird placed CIA assets throughout American media. Do you believe such programs have truly ended? What would make you confident that today’s media is free from intelligence influence?
The Kennedy assassination remains officially unresolved. The HSCA concluded “probable conspiracy.” Millions of pages remain classified. What legitimate reason could exist for continued secrecy sixty years later?
Endnotes
Harry S. Truman, letter to the editor, Washington Post, December 22, 1963.
Church Committee, “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” Books I-VI (1976).
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), pp. 1-15.
Ibid., pp. 209-235; Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Knopf, 2007), pp. 118-145.
Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, pp. 291-320.
Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), pp. 39-53.
James H. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany’s Defense and Intelligence Establishments (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2003), pp. 89-124.
Simpson, Blowback, pp. 44-68.
Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
Ibid.
Church Committee testimony; Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post (New York: Harcourt, 1979).
CIA Director George H.W. Bush, statement on CIA media relationships, February 11, 1976.
Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 1-45.
Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 1-35.
Kennedy’s statement to an administration official, reported in multiple sources; see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 186.
Church Committee, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” Interim Report, November 20, 1975.
Ibid., pp. 74-90.
Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard (New York: Harper, 2015), pp. 425-489.
John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992), pp. 320-356.
President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Warren Commission), Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1964).
House Select Committee on Assassinations, Final Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1979), pp. 149-176.
Ibid., p. 1.
Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), pp. 147-189.
House Select Committee on Assassinations, Final Report, pp. 195-196.
Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 1-35.
Church Committee, “Alleged Assassination Plots,” pp. 13-70.
De Witte, Assassination of Lumumba, pp. 97-140.
Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 1-45.
Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 1-35.
Declassified State Department cables; see Simpson, Economists with Guns, pp. 171-193.
“Indonesia: Vengeance with a Smile,” Time, July 15, 1966.
Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), pp. 145-189.
Kissinger quoted in Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: New Press, 2003), p. 1.
Church Committee, “Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973,” Staff Report (1975), pp. 22-27.
Kornbluh, Pinochet File, pp. 79-115.
Ibid., pp. 151-189.
Kissinger-Nixon telephone conversation, September 16, 1973, transcript in Kornbluh, Pinochet File, p. 199.
John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
Church Committee, Books I-VI; on MKUltra specifically, see Book I, pp. 385-422.
Executive Order 11905, February 18, 1976.
Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014).
George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), pp. 1-45.
Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 600-650.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary Sources
Church Committee Reports (1975-1976) — Available online through the Senate
CIA “Family Jewels” (declassified 2007) — The agency’s internal catalog of illegal activities
House Select Committee on Assassinations Report (1979) — The second official Kennedy investigation
State Department FRUS volumes — Diplomatic records on each country
National Security Archive collections — Declassified documents on Chile, Indonesia, Guatemala, and more
On Operation Paperclip
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip (2014) — The most comprehensive recent account
Christopher Simpson, Blowback (1988) — On Nazi recruitment and its effects
Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door (2014) — On Nazi war criminals in America
On Operation Mockingbird
Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone (1977) — The essential investigative report
Church Committee testimony on media relationships
On the Kennedy Assassination
James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (2008) — On Kennedy’s conflicts with the national security state
David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard (2015) — On Allen Dulles and the CIA
Jefferson Morley, The Ghost (2017) — On James Jesus Angleton
On CIA Operations Generally
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (2007) — Comprehensive CIA history
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow (2006) — America’s century of regime change
Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File (2003) — Declassified dossier on Chile
William Blum, Killing Hope (1995) — Comprehensive catalog of interventions
From the Non-Interventionist Tradition
Scott Horton, Enough Already (2021) — On blowback from CIA operations
Ron Paul, A Foreign Policy of Freedom (2007) — On non-intervention
Patrick Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire (1999) — On Cold War overreach
Comments