SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 7.26.2026
Henry Kissinger has been dead nearly three years but his legacy of Machiavellian intrigue will long be remembered. Perhaps no more so than Chile where the Kissinger and Nixon sought to keep socialist Salvador Allende from gaining power.
When that failed and a military coup eliminated President Allende on September 11, 1973 the American government aligned itself at the hip with the free market fascist leaning junta led by Augusto Pinochet.
Excerpted from Foreign Affairs Magazine – 12.3.2023 Timothy Naftali
The Nixon administration continued the policy started by President Kennedy of deploying covert action in Vietnam to prevent the socialist Salvatore Allende from ever becoming president of Chile
Kissinger and Nixon.
Never best friends. Just allies out of necessity
In September 1970, Henry Kissinger supervised the CIA’s efforts to arrange a military coup to prevent Allende, who had just received the largest number of votes in a national election, from becoming president that year. “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist,” Kissinger announced to the board that recommended U.S. covert action to Nixon, “just because its people are irresponsible.” Known as “Track II,” this covert action failed to produce the desired outcome.
Three years later, there were no American puppet masters in the military coup, led by the brutal Augusto Pinochet, that brought down Allende. But Kissinger welcomed the result and refused to apply any pressure on the new, pro-U.S. regime to prevent human rights abuses—indeed, Kissinger did the opposite.
In June 1976, after Pinochet’s junta had detained thousands of innocent Chileans, torturing an estimated 30,000 and executing at least 2,200 of them, Kissinger told Pinochet in a private meeting, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist.”
Top photo: La Moneda the presidential palace in Chile under attack during the September 11th 1973 Coup.
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