Executive Times
		2007 Book Reviews
		Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
Rating:			****
		(Highly Recommended)
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	Bunglers Chances are that reading Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, will make you angry. This amply footnoted volume drew on Weiner’s review of over 50,000 documents, many of which had not previously been made public. The result of this effort presents a perspective on the Central Intelligence Agency that is at once comprehensive and consistent. From day one, they’ve been packed with bunglers and liars, spending huge sums of money and producing little timely or useful intelligence. Weiner’s presentation of this history breaks the material into readable anecdotes, and strongly formed author opinions. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 29, “USG Wants a Military Solution,” pp. 304-309: By 1970, the CIA’s influence was felt in every nation in the Western Hemisphere, from the Texas border to Tierra del Fuego. In Mexico, the president dealt exclusively with the station chief, not the ambassador, and he received a personal New Year’s Day briefing at his home from the director of central intelligence. In Honduras, two successive station chiefs had privately pledged the support of the United States to the military junta, in defiance of the ambassadors they served. Few Latin American nations paid more than lip service to the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. One of the few was Chile, where the CIA saw a red threat rising. The leftist Salvador Allende was the front-runner in the presidential election, set for September 1970. The moderate Radomiro Tomic, backed by the Christian Democrats, traditional CIA favorites, looked like a very long shot. The right-winger Jorge Alessandri had a strong pro-American track record, but he was corrupt; the American ambassador, Edward Korry, found him insupportable. All bets were off. The CIA had beaten Allende once before. President Kennedy first approved a political-warfare program to subvert him more than two years before the September 1964 Chilean elections. The agency put in the plumbing and pumped roughly $3 million into the political apparatus Of Chile. It worked out to about a dollar a vote for the pro-American Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei. Lyndon Johnson, who approved the continuing operation, spent a lot less per voter when he won the America-presidency in 1964. Frei’s campaign received get-out-the-vote drives and political consultants along with suitcases full of cash. The CIA financed covert anti-Allende efforts by the Roman Catholic Church and trade unions. The agency pumped up the resistance to Allende in the Chilean military command and the national police. Secretary of State Rusk told president Johnson that Frei’s victory was “a triumph for democracy,” achieved “partly as a result of the good work of the CIA.” President Frei served for six years; the constitution limited him to one term. Now the question once again was how to stop Allende. For months, Helms had been warning the White House that if it wanted to keep Chile under control, it needed to approve a new covert action quickly. Winning foreign elections took time as well as money. The agency had one of its most durable and dependable men posted as station chief in Santiago— Henry Hecksher, who had spied on the Soviets from Berlin, helped overthrow Guatemala, and maneuvered Laos into the American camp. Now he strongly advised the White House to back Alessandri, the rightwinger. Kissinger was preoccupied. He had a real war in Southeast Asia on his hands. He famously called Chile a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica. But in March 1970, he approved a $135,000 political-warfare program to crush Allende. On June 27, adding another $165,000, he observed: “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.” He backed the defeat of Allende, but the election of no one. In the spring and summer of 1970, the CIA went to work. At home and abroad, it fed propaganda to prominent reporters who served as the agency’s stenographers. “Particularly noteworthy in this connection was the Time cover story which owed a great deal to written materials and briefings provided by CIA,” an in-house agency report noted. In Europe, Senior representatives of the Vatican and Christian Democratic leaders in West Germany and Italy worked at the CIA’s behest to stop Allende. In Chile, “posters were printed, news stories planted, editorial comment encouraged, rumors whispered, leaflets strewn, and pamphlets distributed,” Helms recounted. The goal was to terrify the electorate—”to show that an Allende victory risked the destruction of Chilean democracy,” Helms said. “It Was a strenuous effort, but the discernable effect seemed minimal.” Ambassador Korry found the CIA’s work appallingly unprofessional. “I had never seen such dreadful propaganda in a campaign anywhere in the world,” he said many years later. “I said that the idiots in the CIA who had helped create the ‘campaign of terror’—and I said this to the CIA—should have been sacked immediately for not understanding Chile and Chileans. This was the kind of thing I had seen in 1948 in Italy.” On September 4, 1970, Allende won the three-way election by a 1.5 percent margin, with less than 37 percent of the vote. Under Chilean law, the Congress had to ratify the result and affirm Allende’s plurality fifty days after the election. It was a mere legal formality. “YOU ALREADY HAVE YOUR VIETNAM” The CIA had plenty of experience fixing an election before the ballot. It had never fixed one afterward. It had seven weeks to reverse the outcome. Kissinger instructed Helms to weigh the chances for a coup. They were slim: Chile had been a democracy since 1932 and the military had not sought political power since. Helms sent station chief Henry Hecksher a cable ordering him to establish direct contacts with Chilean military officers who could take care of Allende. Hecksher had no such connections. But he did know Agustin Edwards, one of the most powerful men in Chile. Edwards owned most of the nation’s copper mines; its biggest newspaper, El Mercurio; and its Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. A week after the election, Edwards flew north to see his good friend Donald Kendall, Pepsi’s chief executive officer and one of President Nixon’s most valued financial supporters. On September 14, Edwards and Kendall had coffee with Kissinger. Then “Kendall went to Nixon and wanted some help to keep Allende out of office,” Helms recalled. (Kendall later denied that role; Helms scoffed at the disavowal.) Helms met Edwards at midday at the Washington Hilton. They discussed the timing for a military coup against Allende. That afternoon, Kissinger approved $250,000 more for political warfare in Chile. In all, the CIA delivered a total of $1.95 million directly to Edwards, El Mercurio, and their campaign against Allende. That same morning, Helms had told Tom Polgar, now the station chief in Buenos Aires, to get on the next plane for Washington—and to bring along the chief of the Argentine military junta, General Alejandro Lanusse. The general was an unsentimental man who had spent four years in prison in the 1960s after a failed coup. The next afternoon, September 15, Polgar and Lanusse sat in the director’s suite at CIA headquarters, waiting for Helms to return from a meeting with Nixon and Kissinger. “Helms was very nervous when he returned,” Polgar remembered, and with good reason: Nixon had ordered him to mount a military coup without telling the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the American ambassador, or the station chief. Helms had scrawled the president’s commands on a notepad: One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!... $10,000,000 available…. best men we have.... make the economy scream. Helms had forty-eight hours to give Kissinger a game plan and forty-nine days to stop Allende. Tom Polgar had known Richard Helms for twenty-five years. They had started out together in the Berlin base in 1945. Polgar looked his old friend in the eye and saw a flicker of despair. Helms turned to General Lanusse and asked what it would take for his junta to help overthrow Allende. The Argentine general stared at the chief of American intelligence. “Mr. Helms,” he said, “you already have your Vietnam. Don’t make me have mine.” Page after page of Legacy of Ashes contains a trail of lies to U.S. Presidents, stories of bungled operations, and the persistent failure to develop human intelligence sources in the right places at the right time. Steve Hopkins, November 20, 2007
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