The consequences of the Chilean adventure were perfectly visible at the time. Indeed the CIA itself pointed them out. In June 1975 the National Intelligence Officer for Latin America issued a fresh NIE on prospects for Chile. The estimate observed: “Allende’s ouster and death and the repression that followed provided fertile ground for an international campaign designed to discredit the military government and embarrass the US.” Russia and Cuba exploited the propaganda issue, but progressive political movements everywhere pointed to Chile as evidence not of America’s commitment to democracy but its drive to imperialism. Said the National Intelligence Estimate: “To many, Chile has replaced Vietnam as a ‘cause celebre.’ ” Chile had become “an international pariah at heavy cost to its international, political, and economic interests.” Nixon and Kissinger gave their enemies this issue on a silver platter. Their actions now embroiled the secret warriors in the political fight of their lives, not on some distant battlefield but in the United States itself.

  Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, chief of naval operations in the first Nixon administration, retired believing that the manner in which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger conducted foreign policy, shrouding their personal motives in secrecy and chicanery, left booby traps everywhere. Chile was a prime example. Almost every aspect of the secret war against Chilean democracy contained seeds for controversy, both over policy writ large and over the tactics of America’s Cold War agency, the CIA. The Nixon people were sitting on a basket of hand grenades with loose safety pins. And they were doing this in a climate in which other political and national security developments—Watergate, Vietnam, the Phoenix Program, Laos, revelations of CIA use of private institutions—had already eroded the credibility of official denials and the faith of the American people.

  The first fissure on Chile operations began with columnist Jack Anderson. The journalist acquired copies of ITT memos and cablegrams, some of them cited earlier, demonstrating that the multinational corporation had intervened with the Nixon White House and acted in concert with the CIA. On March 21, 1972, Anderson published the first of a series of syndicated columns on the CIA, ITT, and Chile. Suddenly the issue of political intervention in democratic elections appeared on the public agenda.

  Some secret warriors, adherents of the cult of secrecy, like to believe that each time revelations like these come before the public, the act is traitorous and the actor someone out to get their organization. The reality is that leaks come from the inside, usually from the top, and are fueled, first, by officials seeking to push policy in a certain direction, or by persons embarrassed by U.S. actions and unwilling to be a party to them. The ITT Chile documents are a case in point. By several accounts they had been floating around Washington for a year and a half. They had been given to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to journalists, Jack Anderson among them, who initially used the documents for articles attacking Salvador Allende. What changed between 1970 and 1972 was the public perception of the Nixon administration as manipulators of information.

  Richard Helms quotes Bill Fulbright as warning him around the time of Tracks I and II that if he learned of that kind of thing, he would blow it wide open. Yet Fulbright did nothing with the ITT documents (or with the Pentagon Papers, which he received during the same period). But Nixon and Kissinger’s cavalier treatment of Foreign Relations Committee inquiries into the U.S. role in Laos, plus their handling of various congressional resolutions designed to limit U.S. activity in Vietnam, consumed all remaining tolerance. In 1972, when Jack Anderson brought the CIA-ITT connection into the open, Fulbright took action. He sanctioned an inquiry into the role of multinational corporations by a subcommittee under Idaho senator Frank Church. That inquiry zeroed in on Chile where Church, chairman of Fulbright’s subcommittee on Latin America, had a particular interest.

  The net result was that the CIA’s destabilization of Chile proceeded in the field while that very initiative came under a public spotlight, the subject of congressional inquiry at home. To say the situation was explosive merely acknowledged the facts.

  After his 1972 reelection, Nixon’s appointment of Helms as ambassador to Iran effectively got the CIA masterspy out of the way. Nevertheless Helms and William Broe were obliged to testify in early 1973 to Church’s subcommittee. Broe, by this time inspector general of the agency, seemed so consumed with the confrontation that his work suffered. Richard Helms came under additional questioning in both public and closed hearings as Fulbright’s committee considered his nomination for ambassador. Always loyal to the chain of command, Helms, in view of Nixon’s instructions about secrecy on Chile, denied in sworn testimony that the CIA had tried to overthrow its government.

  In his memoirs Helms speculates that Fulbright was trying to push his way into an oversight role in intelligence, previously denied by Senator Russell and President Johnson, as shown earlier. (Russell had since died.) Helms is probably right that Fulbright’s desire contributed to his stance in 1972–1973, but more important was the deteriorating relationship between Congress and the Nixon White House. Scott D. Breckinridge of the CIA’s inspector general’s office points out that the senators violated guidelines their staffs had set with Langley for the Hill appearances—a further indication of the breakdown. The Helms testimony became yet another hand grenade threatening to explode, both at Langley and the White House.

  By no means completely ignorant of CIA involvement in Chile, Congress had been told of Chile activities various times. Some were larger-scale briefings that included Chile; sometimes individual members, senators, or staff were informed. In all, the subject had come up about forty times between 1964 and 1973, half of these including talk of money released for Chilean covert action. Congress already had data contrary to Helms’s assertion of innocence, and Church’s subcommittee got more from ITT representatives. They swiftly asked Langley to respond to five specific questions. The agency took the line that the Helms testimony had been accurate. Anticipating that response would be inadequate, Theodore Shackley recommended outflanking the criticisms by a private approach to Senator Henry Jackson to get the Armed Services Committee to intervene, on grounds CIA “sources and methods” needed protection. Agency leaders rejected this course. Instead James Schlesinger and Bill Colby sat together in March, affirming Helms’s original declaration. That begged the question of the agency’s role in the destabilization. Another hand grenade had been put in the basket.

  Through the hot summer of 1973 Washington boiled even as the Chilean truckers’ strike took Allende’s presidency to the edge. Media speculation on CIA backing became a continuing theme, to which Congress responded with more questions. A dozen more CIA briefings on Chile took place between March 1973 and December of the next year. Bill Colby, now DCI in his own right, sat in the hot seat on October 11, 1973, to deny to a House committee that CIA had had any role in the strike or the coup. Another hand grenade.

  Among those dissatisfied with Langley’s descriptions was Massachusetts Representative Michael J. Harrington. The congressman demanded more open discussion. Langley tried to walk a tightrope between the contending demands of Congress and the Nixon White House. In an effort to be able to say that Congress had been properly briefed, CIA director Colby went to a friendly interlocutor, Representative Lucien N. Nedzi, Democrat from Michigan and chairman of the CIA subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, and arranged for an appearance. On April 22, 1974, Colby and Latin America baron David Phillips appeared at a “hearing” of the subcommittee. Director Colby danced around the issues, according to Harrington, spending about a third of his time on Kennedy-Johnson era programs and most of the rest discussing generic tactics, not the substance of the Nixon project, though it is evident Colby gave up some budget figures. At the end of the session Colby privately told Nedzi of Track II, keeping it out of the written record. The CIA would be able to say it had fully informed Congress after the fact. That June Harrington read the proceedings and used them for letters to colleagues and to Senator Fulbright advocating full-scale public hearings on the CIA in Chile, and also for a letter to the editor of the New York Times.

  Agency defenders accuse Harrington, in using Colby’s information, of breaking House rules against publication without prior approval (of material given Congress in closed, executive session). In fact a congressman filed a formal complaint against him for this transgression. When the House of Representatives looked into the matter, however, the charge had to be dismissed. Nedzi had been the sole member present to take Colby’s testimony, had not officially called a hearing, and had had no quorum to close the hearing, hence it had never been “closed” under House rules. Harrington had no obligation to seek approval. Langley had tripped over its own cleverness.

  This became the first Chile hand grenade to explode. Harrington had no success on hearings, but a few months later he put much of the same information into a pair of resolutions of inquiry he tabled in the House of Representatives, that would have obliged the president and the secretary of state to produce data on the economic measures against Allende. The Harrington letters also gave Senator Fulbright an opportunity to press again for a joint oversight committee for Congress to monitor the CIA.

  In the meantime Richard Nixon’s Watergate problems had escalated to fever pitch with a Supreme Court decision that required him to give up Oval Office audiotapes—providing incontrovertible evidence he had conspired to cover up his machinations in the 1972 election. The House of Representatives voted three articles of impeachment. On August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned. Vice President Gerald R. Ford succeeded him.

  By now Langley’s efforts at damage control were rapidly being overtaken by events. Shutting down the Harrington inquiry could not have saved the secret warriors. In June the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf released the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. As a result of legal action by the CIA and the Nixon White House, the book appeared with more than 160 deletions, including roughly a third of its commentary on Chile. Among the deletions alleged to have been necessary on national security grounds was Henry Kissinger’s improvident remark disparaging the sovereign right of the Chilean people to their election results. Knopf and the authors went to court to force release of the material. Legal discovery, court arguments, and the to-ing and fro-ing surrounding the entire affair furnished many new opportunities for leaks. Seymour Hersh, investigative journalist for the New York Times, then transitioning from reporting Watergate to covering intelligence issues, acquired this story and the paper printed it on September 11, including Kissinger’s soon-notorious comment. No doubt the secretary of state hit the ceiling.

  Although Hersh represented only the leading edge of a drumbeat of press coverage on Chile, his stories quickly became more hand grenades. So were those of Laurence Stern of the Washington Post. Both published pieces on September 8 revealing the Harrington letters. On September 12 Hersh wrote that Senator Frank Church intended to press the Chile issue. A week later, when Secretary Kissinger sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify on Russia, Church diverted the discussion to Chile. Kissinger had to work hard to keep the exchange innocuous. On September 16 the Times front-paged a Hersh article portraying Kissinger as chief strategist on Chile and the economic blockade. Four days later the paper carried as second lead a Hersh piece linking the CIA to the strikes. That day Director Colby spoke twice on the telephone to Kissinger, denying the story, later warning him of Hersh’s next article. On September 21 Hersh’s theme would be Kissinger in present tense—that he had omitted CIA involvement with Chilean labor and trade unions in briefings to Congress and to colleagues in the Ford administration in just the past week. Three days later Hersh reported that the Nixon administration had decided in 1971 to escalate actions against Allende.

  To say that Hersh’s reports raised eyebrows in the Ford White House would be understatement. They forced President Ford into an official disclosure. At a September 16 news conference Ford admitted there had been a CIA covert action: “The [CIA] effort was made to help and assist in the preservation of opposition newspapers and electronic media and to preserve opposition political parties.” Ford carefully denied involvement in the coup. He characterized covert actions as necessary “to help implement foreign policy and protect national security,” and justified them on grounds the Communist nations spent more on this kind of activity than the United States. Spy chieftain William Colby followed with a letter to the Times two days later. Referring specifically to Harrington, Colby denied ever using the term “destabilization,” which the congressman had. Scott Breckinridge, Nathaniel Davis, and others seize upon this point to discredit critics, apparently unaware the word had first been used in Nixon’s own cabinet room on November 6, 1970.

  Kissinger’s staff at both Foggy Bottom and the White House went into high gear to counter Chile revelations, in particular the Hersh stories. Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger told Kissinger that Hersh would continue and that Henry himself was “the ultimate target.” Eagleburger got Nathaniel Davis and former Santiago deputy ambassador Harry Shlaudeman to draft a strong denial to be released by the Central Intelligence Agency. Davis would separately put one out from the State Department. Eagleburger argued in another memo to Kissinger that the unusual gambit of bringing out the denial through the CIA would be more effective and would pacify “Hill interests who want a series of hearings on the issue.” Bill Colby volunteered to issue such a denial when talking to deputy national security adviser Brent Scowcroft on September 23. Langley ultimately did not issue the denial. Davis is silent about this episode in his own memoirs. Kissinger also says nothing about the attempt to counter Hersh, aiming his barbs instead at Colby.

  By then Director Colby had his hands full, for the matter of the Helms Chile testimony came to a head. One of Hersh’s articles, on September 17, noted that staff on Fulbright’s committee were pressing for Richard Helms, William V. Broe, and two State officials to be cited for contempt of Congress for their 1973 testimony. What Hersh did not know is that, within the secret world of Langley, this dovetailed with completion of an inquiry by the inspector general begun when the CIA chiefs repeatedly had had to defend the Helms-Broe testimony.

  Broe, briefly the IG, could not be in the position of rejecting an inquiry that involved him personally, and approved the study shortly before leaving the agency. The inquiry droned on for a year and a half. One participant came out of retirement for the task. Another, Thomas C. Lawlor, an analyst from the Office of Current Intelligence who had previously served on detail with the IG, discovered papers from early reviewers that used the word “perjury.” Superiors gave more weight to the view that Helms had been sandbagged when senators went beyond agreed guidelines, but Lawlor did a straight review. After consulting with the general counsel’s office on the legal definition of perjury, he decided the testimony before the multinationals subcommittee had indeed been problematical. On September 5, 1974, a draft paper sent to the IG stated: “There is reason to believe that perjury was committed and that the Agency was aware of that fact,” and that “some of the statements in Mr. Helms’s [confirmation] testimony seem not to be in full accord with the facts. Mr. Helms’s testimony is significant here because it was subsequently cited by the Agency as authoritative.”

  Superiors tried to get the word “perjury” expunged from the paper and did get the analyst to remove passages pertinent to an ITT legal case (attempting to recover its Chilean investments from the U.S. government). But the panel stood on its interpretation. The IG passed the paper to Colby with the comment that General Counsel John Warner should provide a second opinion. Warner asked for further examination by a three-officer panel, two lawyers plus Lawlor. They agreed with the original review. Warner added an analysis refuting that conclusion. According to Colby’s note for the record on September 25, Warner found no clear evidence of perjury in the testimony. Colby decided not to refer the matter to the Justice Department.

  The legal panel insisted on meeting with the CIA director and did so. Regulations required the referral, they maintained, so CIA’s obligation was to let Justice make the final determination. Hiding the issue only increased the chance of later leaks and a bigger explosion. In the climate of September 1974 that seemed a reasonable proposition. Colby nonetheless held the line for two more months, amidst threats of resignation. The last defense was a 1954 CIA-Justice agreement governing what could be withheld from Justice Department scrutiny. Colby sought to discover whether that exempted Helms. On December 21 he met with Acting Attorney General Laurence Silberman, who asserted jurisdiction, making Langley yield up the case files. Helms and a faction of stalwarts never forgave Bill Colby this supposed betrayal. Indicted in 1977 for perjured testimony, Richard Helms pleaded no contest to the charges and got off with a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine. Another Chile hand grenade had exploded.

  In 1974 the atmosphere became superheated. Late in October radio broadcaster Daniel Schorr of CBS reported that State had opposed the Chile intervention, citing Ray Cline, the INR director, who now sang a different tune. Contrary to what he wrote in later memoirs, at the time Henry Kissinger ordered an immediate review of 40 Committee files and then leaked several documents to the media on which Cline’s marginal notes indicated that he had favored stronger, not weaker action. Kissinger himself gave Schorr an interview denying the allegation. Days later Hersh reported, based on 40 Committee documents, that the CIA had still been asking for cash for Chilean rightists in the summer of 1973. Apart from anything else, current covert action data had been deliberately leaked to settle political scores.