Kissinger and the 40 Committee spent $125,000 to sabotage Allende
By Desmond Okafor ·
Kept under a "Secret; Eyes Only" stamp, this record shows how Washington targeted the Popular Unity front to ensure a leftist victory in Chile remained out of reach.
Salvador Allende and the coalition of socialists and communists he led were marked for "spoiling" before they ever reached the ballot box. The cost of this American interference was the deliberate erosion of Chilean democratic agency.
The record is a "Memorandum for the Record" from the State Department, dated March 25, 1970. It captures the minutes of a meeting of the 40 Committee, the high-level group tasked with overseeing the most sensitive covert actions of the Cold War. In a room in Washington, Henry Kissinger, Mr. Packard, Mr. Johnson, and General Cushman sat together to decide how to handle the upcoming Chilean presidential election.
$125,000 for "spoiling"
The committee wasn't interested in the merits of the candidates—Jorge Alessandri, Radomiro Tomic, or Allende. They were interested in the outcome. According to the memo, Mr. Broe briefed the group on the three-way race and delivered the joint consensus of the State Department and the CIA: the United States should avoid the optics of direct support for a single candidate.
Instead, the strategy was to be more insidious. The committee agreed that the "covert effort should be confined to spoiling operations undertaken against the Popular Unity (UP) electoral front." The UP was a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and leftists supporting Allende. To the 40 Committee, a democratic victory for the left was not a political outcome to be accepted, but a problem to be managed through "mechanisms and secure funding methods."
The price tag for this disruption was $125,000, an amount approved by the members to be spent through September 1970. While the sum might seem modest by modern standards of political spending, in the context of a sovereign election, it represents a calculated investment in instability. The memo doesn't specify what "spoiling" meant in practice—whether it took the form of black propaganda, the bribery of political actors, or the funding of opposition strikes—but the intent was clear: the Popular Unity front had to be degraded.
The April Poll
The 40 Committee’s caution about "direct support" was not born of a respect for Chilean sovereignty, but of tactical flexibility. The memorandum notes that the committee took "cognizance of the fact" that an electoral poll scheduled for April might change their calculus.
If the numbers shifted, the Ambassador and the CIA Station Chief in Chile might recommend a more aggressive approach. The record explicitly mentions that this could include "direct support to one candidate." The "spoiling" was merely the first phase. The United States was keeping its options open, waiting for the data to tell them whether they needed to move from sabotaging the left to actively installing the right.
This pattern of escalating interference is a hallmark of Washington's approach to the Global South. The memo proves that the decision to interfere was not a reaction to a crisis, but a pre-emptive strike against a democratic possibility. The 40 Committee wasn't reacting to a coup; they were preparing the soil for one.
Popular Unity
The targets were the members of the Popular Unity coalition. By framing the UP as a target for "spoiling operations," the 40 Committee effectively criminalized a legitimate political alliance in the eyes of the U.S. intelligence community. The memo identifies the UP as a "coalition of Communists, Socialists and leftists," treating these ideological labels as justifications for covert warfare.
The meeting was attended by a cadre of men who viewed the world as a chessboard. Along with Kissinger and General Cushman, the room included Mr. Wymberley Coerr and Mr. Thomas Karamessines. One attendee’s name remains a blacked-out redaction, a ghost in the record who participated in the decision to undermine a foreign election.
The document concludes by noting that the members were "unanimous in approving the proposal." There was no dissent in the room. There was no voice asking whether the "spoiling" of a democratic election violated the very principles the United States claimed to defend.
The memorandum was marked "Secret; Eyes Only" and drafted by someone named Chapin on March 30. Copies were distributed to the inner circle: Mitchell, Packard, Johnson, and Helms. It was a tight loop of secrecy, designed to ensure that the "mechanisms" of interference remained hidden from the Chilean people and the American public.
Public records show that Salvador Allende did eventually win the election on September 4, 1970, through a narrow plurality and a subsequent confirmation by the Christian Democrats. The "spoiling operations" approved in March failed to stop his ascent to the presidency. However, the 40 Committee's appetite for intervention did not vanish with Allende's victory. Related files on the era, including the National Archives' "Classified Salvador Allende Files" and various FRUS volumes on Chile from 1969 to 1973, continue to document the escalating pressure placed on the Chilean government.
The record leaves one question unanswered: what specific "mechanisms" did the CIA deploy with that first $125,000 to try and break the Popular Unity front?