Among the documents on President Nixon’s desk on the morning of September 11, 1973, was the PDB—a daily CIA intelligence summary that contained three paragraphs on the opening salvos of the military coup in Chile. Fifty years after Nixon read it, we finally know what it says—very little. The intelligence provided to the president on the initiation of the coup was equivocal and erroneous. “Although military officers are increasingly determined to restore political and economic order, they may still lack an effectively coordinated plan that could capitalize on the widespread civilian opposition,” the PDB advised, incorrectly. “President Allende, for his part,” the PDB stated more accurately, “still hopes that temporizing will fend off a showdown.”
But Nixon had access to far more detailed and dramatic intelligence. A special CIA “CRITIC”—Critical Advance Intelligence Cable—that would have been distributed on an urgent basis to the highest levels of the White House on September 10, provided concrete reporting on the date, time, and place of the planned coup; another top secret CIA memo that reached the White House the morning of September 11 contained an urgent request from “a key officer in the military group planning overthrow President Allende” who asked “if the U.S. Government would come to the aid of the Chilean military if the situation became difficult.” How the president of the United States responded to that request is one of the details of the history of the coup that remain unknown.
Those dramatic CIA documents are among the thousands of secret records on Chile that have already been declassified. Indeed, Chile is one of the best-documented cases of covert US intervention for regime change. After Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998 for human rights violations, hundreds of CIA operational records were finally released under a special “Chile Declassification Project” mandated by President Bill Clinton—along with approximately 24,000 other White House, NSC, FBI, and State Department records on the US role in Chile between 1970 and 1990. In 2016 President Obama ordered a special release of top-secret documents related to General Pinochet’s role as the mastermind of the act of terrorism that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C., in September 1976.
And yet, half a century later, there are still highly classified records that the US government continues to safeguard that would reveal critical details on what it did in, and what it knew about, Chile.