Plot to kidnap General Rene Schneider (Chile)

Active: 1970

Declassified

Editorial summary

On September 4, 1970, Salvador Allende, a Marxist physician, won a plurality in Chile's three-way presidential election. The result was final but the inauguration was not. In Chile, the Congress had to confirm the winner. Allende was expected to be confirmed in late October. The Nixon administration spent the seven weeks in between trying to prevent it.

The CIA effort was code-named FUBELT, also called Track II. Its goal was to encourage a military coup that would block Allende from taking office. The single obstacle to a coup was Chilean Army Commander-in-Chief Rene Schneider, a constitutionalist who had publicly committed his service to respecting the election.

CIA officers in Santiago supplied machine guns, ammunition, and tear gas to a group of Chilean officers willing to act. On the morning of October 22, 1970, three days before the congressional vote, the plotters attempted to kidnap Schneider from his car. He drew a sidearm and was shot at close range. He died of his wounds on October 25.

Allende was confirmed by the Chilean Congress on October 24, the day before Schneider died. He was inaugurated on November 3. The coup the agency had hoped to provoke did not come for another three years; General Augusto Pinochet seized power in a different operation on September 11, 1973.

The Church Committee, in its 1975 report on alleged CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, found that the agency had passed three submachine guns and ammunition to one of the plotting groups within forty-eight hours of the attempt on Schneider. The committee concluded that the killing was not the United States plan but that the U.S. had armed and encouraged the men who carried it out. The Family Jewels memorandum documents the case as a foreign assassination-related action.

Editorial summary by govweird, grounded in the declassified record and the Church Committee public hearings.

Originating agency

Central Intelligence Agency

Activity period

1970

Source document

CIA Family Jewels (702 pp.)

Public release

June 25, 2007

Originating directive

Schlesinger memo, May 1973

Source page range

p. 474

Topics

Government Conspiracies Assassination Plots

Original document, embedded

The full 702-page Family Jewels document is hosted by govweird. The embedded viewer above is anchored to the relevant pages (p. 474); scroll within the frame to browse adjacent material. Mirror copies are at the National Security Archive and the CIA reading room.

Transcript (OCR)

Show the OCR-extracted text from the source pages

--- PAGE 474 --- MORI DocID: 1451843 BALTIMORE NEWS AMERICAN 12 APR 1973 JOHN P. ROCHE The CIA and Allende The current imbroglio over the role that the Central Intelligence Agency aid the International Telephone and Telegraph played (or considered playing) in trying to block the election of Chilean President Allende has its tantalizing and perplexing aspects: Was the CIA's cash balance so low it needed a million dollars from ITT? Did the CIA and ITT really think they could pull off some of the stunts contemplated without this word getting out and working massively in favor of Allende? But underlying this obvious is a series of very difficult question of principle, to say nothing of definition. First of all, what constitutes "American (public or private) intervention in the internal affairs of another nation? Obviously, sponsoring a revolution (as Teddy Roosevelt did to break Panama loose from Colombia) is at one pole. But between sponsoring revolutions and covertly planning any American activity outside of the United States, there is a long line on the spectrum, a line that gets fuzzier and fuzzier the further you go. However, even doing nothing can be construed as intervention. Egypt's President Nasser brought that Secretary Dulles' refusal to help finance the Aswan Dam was a form of intervention, and some years ago six coffee-producing nations in Latin America protested to the Organization of American States that our refusal to the coffee prices in their internal affairs. I would argue that the very existence of the United States as the most powerful nation in the world automatically intervenes in the affairs of every other state. Nasser and the coffee producers were right: Inaction on our part can have a vital impact as action. To take a vivid instance, if we had not shipped military equipment to Britain before Pearl Harbor, the war for Europe could have been lost. If we accept that proposition, the futile argument over whether or not we should intervene automatically rises by the boards. Then we turn to the hard ones: To what ends should we (publicly and privately) intervene? Should we protect democratic (or even undemocratic) nations from totalitarian invasion or subversion? Should we utilize our foreign aid to nourish democratic political development — as is proceeding in the Faser Amendment to the foreign aid bill — or approach? It is at this point that the ITT fracas comes back into focus, and as ideological shambles Let us suppose for a moment that the Chase Manhattan Bank, influential black militants, decided to provide a coachload to black liberation movements in South Africa, using its business connections to provide arms and other aid to the revolutionaries. Would this be a "bad" thing? Was it a "bad" thing when the CIA, using a business cover, shipped into Santo Domingo the weapons used to kill the brutal dictator Trujillo? (I don't know how he feels about it today, but in his day, the Dominican statesman Juan Bosch thought that intervention was his greatest thing since the discovery of America.) What this comes down to is that intervention is a "good" thing when you happen to favor the cause involved, but it is wicked and immoral if you disapprove of the goals. A perfectly human response, but hardly one on which sound public policy can be predicated. The thought of ITT loaning its Chilean assets does not bring tears to my eyes over our pirates in stock. Capitalism, I'm told, involves taking risks, and the corporation that invests money in it and be reimbursed by a federal agency set up to provide insurance for such contingencies. No, what bothers me is the wholly ad hoc reaction of the Senate committee investigating the matter. We would be far better served by Sen. Church and his colleagues if they spent less time being outraged and a little more trying to formulate general guidelines, guidelines which would apply to South America and South Africa, to the just and the unjust alike, however defined. 00465 [vision-ocr]

Extracted by haiku-vision. Carbon-copy typewriter text from 1973 is imperfect; words may be misread. Always cross-check against the embedded image above.