President Ford Calculated the Cost of Exposing CIA's Chile Campaign
By Desmond Okafor ·
Chilean collaborators and coup plotters faced public exposure in 1975 as Gerald Ford weighed whether to shield the CIA from a Senate probe into its million-dollar shadow war.
Former President Eduardo Frei and a network of "willing" collaborators in Chile faced the sudden threat of public exposure in late 1975. For these men, the risk was not merely political embarrassment, but "harassment or even threat of physical violence."
In a memorandum dated November 1, 1975, the President’s Counselor, Marsh, laid out the stakes for President Gerald Ford. The Senate Select Committee—known as the Church Committee—was planning an open hearing on CIA covert activities in Chile spanning from 1964 to the present. The committee viewed Chile as a "case study on covert activities," and they wanted more than just rumors; they wanted a public record built on declassified documents and the testimony of former officials.
Official Verification
The White House was not concerned with the facts themselves, as many had already leaked into the press. Instead, the fear was the transition from "unofficial reporting" to "official verification." Marsh warned that the confirmation of these activities would strip away the plausible deniability that protected the U.S. government’s assets on the ground.
According to the memorandum, the confirmation of these operations would "doubtless lead to the identification of highly placed political leaders of Chile" who had been assisted by the Agency over the years. Specifically, the memo names former President Eduardo Frei. The document explicitly notes that the U.S. had contributed to Frei's election in 1964 and that his "tacit participation in coup plotting in 1970 may be divulged."
For the administration, the danger was not that the democratic process in Chile had been subverted, but that the subversion would be officially documented. Marsh argued that such a revelation would have a "shattering effect" on the willingness of future foreign political parties and individuals to cooperate with the United States in similar operations.
$6 Million and a Terrorist Group
The scale of the intervention was documented in an attachment to the memo, though the attachment itself was not printed in the final release. The file's footnotes record that between the inauguration of Salvador Allende in November 1970 and his overthrow and death in September 1973, the CIA spent over $6,000,000 to support opposition political parties and media.
While the Agency claimed to have rejected proposals to support private sector organizations involved in strikes, the record tells a darker story of proximity. The footnotes state that the CIA "remained in contact through third parties with a right-wing terrorist organization," though the name of that organization remains redacted. Furthermore, the Agency passed "considerable money" to conservative elements whose members were known to have links to other redacted entities.
This was the reality the administration sought to manage: a million-dollar campaign of destabilization and alliances with terrorists, framed in official correspondence as a necessary shield for the "democratic process."
The Decision
The internal debate at the White House centered on whether to "gag" the witnesses or lean into the hearing to control the narrative. Marsh noted that if the administration opposed the hearings, they would have to warn David Phillips, a former CIA head of the Latin America Division, and Ambassador Edward Korry that their secrecy agreements were still in effect. Such a move, the memo warns, would be seen by the press as an attempt to silence the truth.
There was also the matter of Director Bill Colby. Marsh suggested that an open hearing could actually be an advantage, giving Colby an opportunity to "categorically deny any CIA participation in the 1973 coup and the death of Allende."
Despite the warnings from Buchen, Colby, Levi, Marsh, and Scowcroft—who all initially favored opposing open hearings in favor of an executive session—President Ford ultimately initialed the "Approve" option. He agreed to the open hearings, hoping to structure the proceedings in a way that would limit the damage.
On November 13, the Church Committee voted to proceed. On December 4, Ambassador Edward Korry testified before the Committee, followed by David Phillips on December 5.