The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

FROM THE PUBLISHER

First published on September 11, 2003 - the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power - The Pinochet File has been hailed as a definitive account of the U.S. role in supporting bloody regime change in Chile. This edition is revised and updated to include the newest declassified information on how Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger launched a preemptive strike against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and helped Pinochet consolidate his rule.

SYNOPSIS

Kornbluh (of the National Security Archive, a non-profit research library) has played a leading role in efforts to get the U.S. government to declassify documents related to its relationship to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in a bloody coup sponsored by the United States. Here he presents the current results of those efforts mixing narrative explanation with reproductions of declassified documents. A number of controversial issues are covered, including Henry Kissinger's involvement in the assassination of a constitutionally-minded Chilean general, the full American involvement in the coup events (including the kidnap and execution of American Charles Horman), US knowledge of the state-terror network called Operation Condor, CIA knowledge of the 1976 car bombing on the streets of Washington that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, and the role of Washington in the end of Pinochet's presidency. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

… ultimately the value of The Pinochet File lies less in any new revelation or unique insight than in the missionary zeal and methodical devotion with which Kornbluh sets out to catalogue the evidence of U.S. guilt -- to dizzying, devastating effect. — Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

The New Yorker

For Chileans, September 11th marks a different tragedy -- the anniversary of the 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. This timely book weaves together thirty years of declassified documents with a gripping narrative of America's involvement in the affair. At a National Security Council meeting in 1970, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird said of Allende, "We want to do everything we can to hurt him and bring him down," and a C.I.A. memo from the same year describes efforts of a key ally "to increase the level of terrorism in Santiago." This terrorism included the assassination of René Schneider, the constitutionalist commander-in-chief of Chile's armed forces, which was carried out with C.I.A.-provided funds and submachine guns. The evidence that Kornbluh has gathered is overwhelming. As Colin Powell recently remarked about the United States' role in the Pinochet coup, "It is not a part of American history that we are proud of."

Publishers Weekly

For years, the United States government maintained top-secret archives detailing its policy in Chile and its role in aiding and securing General Pinochet's rise to dictatorial power in the early 1970s. In this examination of the thousands of records recently declassified by the CIA, White House, NSC, Pentagon and FBI, Kornbluh offers new revelations about America's development of a policy dedicated to overthrowing Chile's existing democratic government and to replacing it with a military leader reviled for his complete disregard for human rights. Throughout the book, Kornbluh-a director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library-buttresses his assertions with excerpts from the relevant documents, and attempts to shed light on some of the outstanding questions of the period that still beg for answers, including what motivated President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to authorize the bloody campaign and how involved the US government actually was in the September 1973 coup itself. (Sept. 7) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

There are two types of what Theodore Draper called "present history." The first is based on documents and testimony accessible to all historians: assertions and interpretations can be checked, verified, and contested on the basis of fact rather than speculation. Both Draper and, in his own way, I. F. Stone were brilliant practitioners of this kind of history and demonstrated that, despite the best (or worst) intentions of bureaucrats to hide or distort the record, much could be found in the public domain if diligently sought after. The second approach to writing about contemporary history is based on anonymous "sources" and self-interested "leaks." Here, much depends on the credibility of the authors; but in the right political climate, such writing can be powerful enough to bring down a president, as it did with Watergate. And over the past two decades, heavily redacted, "secret" government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act have been added to its menu.