Declassified documents show Australia assisted CIA in coup against Chile's Salvador Allende

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Declassified documents show Australia assisted CIA in coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende

Former Liberal PM Billy McMahon approved spy agency request to conduct covert operations in Chile, a move later overturned by Gough Whitlam

Paul Daley
@ppdaley
Fri 10 Sep 2021 15.02 BST

Australia’s covert overseas spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, opened a base in Santiago to assist in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s destabilisation of the Chilean government ahead of the bloody military coup against Salvador Allende’s socialist government 48 years ago today.

Declassified Australian government documents prove that in December 1970 Liberal foreign minister and later prime minister, Billy McMahon, approved an Asis request to open the base. For 18 months from 1971, according to the US-based National Security Archive, Asis apparently conducted covert operations in Chile – including handling CIA-recruited Chilean assets in Santiago and filing intelligence reports to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The documents disclose how McMahon’s successor, Labor’s Gough Whitlam elected in December 1972, less than a year later ordered the then Asis director, William Robertson, to disband the service’s Chilean operations.

But the documents, released in June to former Australian army intelligence officer and academic Clinton Fernandes, indicate Whitlam was torn between any real politik embarrassing revelations about Asis involvement in undermining fellow progressive left-winger Allende might cause, and concern Washington might view the spy agency’s retreat as anti-American or “embarrass (the) CIA”.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/11/declassified-documents-show-australia-assisted-cia-in-coup-against-chiles-salvador-allende

[Judi Lynn]

1. This a total first time I've heard this information. They kept it buried a long time!

Of course, people in the US weren't really aware Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, along with the CIA were completely involved in Allende's short turn as an elected President, either. They were hard at work trying to destroy him well BEFORE he was even elected.

To have involved Australia in this dirty business is unforgivable. What a shame Australia went along with this right-wing murderous, malicious attack on Chile's democracy.