Who Mourned the Victims of US Covert War on Chile?
On Memorial Day, I read the following in a Chilean magazine: “In November 1977, ‘Mamo’ [General Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA, Chile’s Secret Police and Intelligence] asked him to cook up a bacteria soup to ‘incapacitate’ Mena [General Odlanier Mena, head of CNIA, the secret police-Intelligence agency that would replace DINA]. ‘I spoke with Eugenio Berrios [DINA’s chemist] . he told me he would make a tetanus or botulism poison. and give the concoction to Major Vianel Valdivieso – who could drop it in his tea.'” These are Michael Townley’s words from a 2005 deposition about how Contreras planned to kill Mena. (Jorge Molina Sanhueza, La NaciÑn, May 23, 2006)
To understand what lay behind such a Macbethian act of murder, described by Townley, one of DINA’s assassins, one must remember a scene in the Oval Office, in September 1970, 36 years earlier. Dr. Salvador Allende had just won the presidential election. President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger ordered the CIA Director into the Oval Office.
According to Kissinger, Nixon told CIA director Richard Helms “that he wanted a major effort to see what could be done to prevent Allende’s accession to power. If there were one chance in ten of getting rid of Allende we should try it; if Helms needed $10 million he would approve it.”
Helms later boasted to a Senate committee: “If I ever carried the marshal’s baton out of the Oval Office it was that day.” The Senate report published Helms’ notes of the meeting with Nixon.
One in ten chance perhaps, but save Chile
worth spending
not concerned risks involved
no involvement of embassy
$10,000,000 available, more if necessary
full-time job -best men we have
game plan
make the economy scream
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