Patterns, Assumptions, and Suspicions: A Review of Chile in their Hearts, by John Dinges

“…the Embassy investigation consisted almost exclusively of asking questions of Chilean officials. That might have been a reasonable approach in some countries, but it made little sense when the government that was being asked for help was in the midst of a campaign of mass killing and likely to be the guilty party.”[1] After the disappearance and execution of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, US citizens, in the wake of Chile’s brutal coup d’etat in 1973, reasonable suspicions led journalists, activists, and family members to conclude that these two young men had been selected for detention and execution with the complicity and participation of US diplomats and CIA operatives. They were in Chile to witness the social experiment under democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende. One Chilean military intelligence source even offered eyewitness confirmation of that suspicion. Thomas Hauser published a plausible version of events, entitledThe Execution of Charles Horman,in 1978. Human rights activists and naïve students like myself, on our way to witness the still-dangerous Chilean dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, devoured it with passion and growing commitment. Internationally acclaimed film director Costa-Gavras turned Hauser’s account into the suspense-filled 1982 blockbuster,Missing,starring Cissy Spacek, John Shea, and Jack Lemmon.[2]That cinematic phenomenon transformed a signature repressive strategy of the Pinochet regime—secretive extrajudicial abduction, torture, and execution—into an internationally recognizable atrocity with diplomatic repercussions. But in his new bookChile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup,renowned investigative journalist John Dinges, no stranger to human rights issues, has uncovered an uncomfortable glitch in the narrative. It made cinematic sense that US officials would select Horman, the man who seemed to know too much about US participation in the coup, for summary execution. But the dissenting Chilean military intelligence official, Rafael González, who claimed in 1976 to have witnessed a crucial meeting in 1973, recanted his testimony in 2001.[3]The author develops the legal complexity of the case in abundant detail. Suffice it to say that, as a dissenter seeking asylum in the Italian embassy, Colonel González needed to show clearly why he and his family could not safely remain in Chile. As Chilean courts addressed human rights abuses in 2001, that same eyewitness account of CIA presence at the meeting that determined Horman’s fate would have made González liable as an accomplice in Horman’s execution and temporary disappearance. González changed his story, and no other evidence ever surfaced to confirm the earlier version. Oddly, as the dramatic lynchpin ofMissingdissolves into a haze of pseudo-historical myth, the house of cards does not collapse. There are still reasons why the Pinochet regime killed Horman and Teruggi, and there are reasons why the US Consulate and the US Embassy in Chile failed to seriously investigate the murders. With attention to reliable documentation, Dinges makes the case that this specific failure to protect American citizens abroad, a top priority for any diplomatic team, reveals something far darker than the devious real-life spy thriller that human rights watchers have assimilated into our worldview over the last five decades. Dinges reveals the inner workings of an international system at odds with itself. As such, human rights watchers can no longer consider these executions exceptional, some devious plot for which some deviant individual should have to answer. We must understand it as the predictable outcome of a deeply rooted pattern of conflicting objectives and contradictory orders. Chilean soldiers burn Marxist literature following the 1973 coup. CIA Freedom of Information Act release. Source:Wikimedia Commons In the oppositional tradition of Neil Sheehan’sBright Shining Lie(1988), about the Vietnam War, Dinges shows how the US diplomatic team in Chile found itself forced into a series of impossible choices that tended to maximize injustice and collateral damage. Sheehan relates the experience of John Paul Vann, a patriotic service member turned civilian contractor, who came to understand why the Pentagon refused to accept honest reports of how American military strategy on the ground in Vietnam only served to strengthen the cause of the Viet Cong. Military intelligence officers obeyed orders by changing reports, by confirming that the US was in fact winning a war of attrition, thus promoting massacres of innocent civilians that would amplify the body count, which had become the official scoreboard, stateside.[4] The Chilean coup occurred in the same Cold War context, when many assumed that marching into hell for heavenly causes was not a fool’s errand, but a moral obligation. To stop the global enemy of truth and the American way, the cost would include extrajudicial murders and hurtful lies. The Embassy and the Consulate in Chile had orders from Kissinger’s State Department to support the military regime. Therefore, when General Pinochet’s Ministry of Foreign Relations reported first that Chilean officials knew nothing about the missing Americans, and then that they had most likely become the victims of leftists posing as Chilean military to discredit the regime, the US diplomats accepted that as the official version without rebuttal.[5]Absurd as it seemed, they reported that story back to the State Department and to the Horman and Teruggi families. “The Embassy posture during the Nixon and Ford administrations, sympathetic to the junta, was that it could not be known who killed Horman and Teruggi because the junta, the most obvious suspect, said their people did not do it.”[6] No hard evidence links any rogue CIA agents to the selection of Horman and Teruggi for execution. But in the context of military rule, their murders obeyed a standard pattern. Soldiers encouraged patriotic Chileans to denounce their neighbors and acquaintances for having the wrong friends, for singing the wrong songs, or for wearing their hair in the wrong way.[7]It happened to thousands of Chileans, too. As late as 1980, the Ministry of the Interior revoked my residence because they had “received reports” that I “had the wrong friends.” Dictatorships make no distinction between dissent and outright terrorism. Secret police agents opened all of my mail and stole the address book off my desk. I suspect that they did not murder me because the Horman-Teruggi case had already caused a stir. But Dinges’ research shows that the Horman-Teruggi case fits a recognizable pattern. The pattern itself led to countless cases of torture and disappearance in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay over the next decade. Two deaths are a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths are just a statistic. We can count that as one more bright shining lie. Moreover, the number of disappearances in South America is far more than ten thousand. CIA declassified documents about Charles Horman “Missing” Case, Santiago, Chile, 1976. Source:Wikimedia Commons The top secret CIA report, “Restless Youth,” that Director Richard Helms presented to President Johnson in 1968, did show a deep concern for the elusive connections between rebellious university students and young intellectuals worldwide. Helms even encouraged surveillance of Americans with suspicious connections.[8]Dinges makes no mention of that report, but he does point out that, even if the FBI or the CIA kept files on people like Horman and Teruggi—they obviously qualified as what the Agency would have called “fellow travelers”—no evidence exists for any shared information on Horman or Teruggi. And yet, the assumptions behind “Restless Youth” might account, at least in part, for a diplomatic culture that allowed officials to conclude that most dead activists had it coming, that there was no need to sully rel