The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

government, he says, “helped this regime consolidate its power through every mechanism, overt and covert, of support despite full knowledge of its atrocities.” And he contends that emergency U.S. assistance was expe- dited to Chile immediately after the coup. The administration turned on “all faucets of support” that had been turned off during the early Allende presidency, he says. But the Hinchey Report does not support these allegations, insofar as the CIA is concerned. The agency concedes only that, “Many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses following Allende’s ouster,” and it acknowledges that “some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or U.S. military.” But it insists that, “The intelligence community followed then-current guidance for reporting such abuses and admonished its Chilean agents against such behavior.” Nonetheless, one declassified State Department document indi- cates U.S. intelligence may have played a role in the death of American free-lance journalist Charles Horman at the hands of Chilean security forces in the days after the coup. (A 1982 movie, “Missing,” strongly suggested American complicity in Horman’s murder.) The document, made pub- lic in 1999, says Horman was appre- 70 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 The Nixon administration did not exactly mourn Allende’s demise, but denied U.S. involvement in his overthrow.