Pinochet and the 'Extremely Difficult' Cost of Stability
By Desmond Okafor ·
Kept secret for decades, a memorandum shows how the Reagan administration treated a political assassination on US soil as a mere diplomatic friction point to be managed
Orlando Letelier was blown up by a car bomb in the heart of Washington, D.C., a hit ordered by the man who held Chile in a grip of terror for over a decade. For the people of Chile, the cost of that regime was thousands of disappeared souls and a shattered democracy; for the American government, the cost was a "complicated" diplomatic calendar.
This account is reconstructed from the archive's description of the record, as the full pages remain withheld. The record is a Secret memorandum from circa 1987, in which Frank Carlucci, the National Security Adviser who would later oversee the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense, transmits a CIA assessment to President Reagan. The memo is not a plan for justice or a roadmap for democratic restoration. It is a weather report on the stability of a murderer.
"Extremely Difficult"
Carlucci’s memo serves as a conduit for a warning from George Shultz, the Secretary of State tasked with managing the Reagan administration's volatile Cold War alliances. The record shows that Shultz had already written to the president, noting that he believes "our relationship with Chile will be 'extremely difficult' over the next 12-18 months."
To a casual reader, the phrasing suggests a diplomatic headache—a matter of mismatched protocols or trade disputes. But the record specifies the source of this difficulty. Shultz points to "two negative developments." The first is the behavior of Augusto Pinochet, the army officer who overthrew President Salvador Allende in 1973 and ruled Chile as a dictator until 1990. Specifically, Pinochet was making apparent plans to "succeed himself as President by manipulating Chile's constitutional system."
The irony here is sharp. The administration was not troubled by the fact that Pinochet had spent years torturing and executing his political opponents to maintain power; it was troubled by the method of his latest power grab. The "difficulty" Shultz describes is not the moral failure of a dictatorship, but the logistical awkwardness of a dictator who rigs his own system so blatantly that it threatens the diplomatic veneer the United States required to keep him in place.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
A Negative Development
The second "negative development" cited by Shultz is the assassination of Orlando Letelier, the Chilean diplomat whose 1976 murder in Washington D.C. brought Pinochet's terror to American soil.
By 1987, the Letelier bombing was an old wound, but in this memo, it is treated as a current variable in a bilateral equation. The record does not frame the murder as a violation of U.S. sovereignty or a heinous crime requiring the extradition of its architects. Instead, it is listed alongside constitutional manipulation as a factor making the relationship "extremely difficult."
This is where the lines of the Reagan administration's priorities become visible. The Letelier assassination is not a legal or moral imperative; it is a diplomatic friction point. By grouping a state-sponsored assassination on U.S. soil with a domestic constitutional dispute in Santiago, the administration reduced a mass murderer's trail of blood to a line item in a strategic assessment.
Asset and Liability
Carlucci closes the memo with his own personal judgment: "The situation in regard to Chile is as complicated as we face anywhere."
This "complexity" is the shield behind which the administration hid its complicity. The record shows the CIA monitoring the political state of Chile and feeding that intelligence upward to the White House, yet there is no mention of policy options to pressure Pinochet toward a democratic transition. There are no recommendations to sanction the regime for the Letelier hit or to condemn the rigging of the constitutional system.
The pattern suggests that the "complexity" Carlucci refers to is the tension between Pinochet's utility as an anti-communist asset and the political liability of his crimes. The administration needed Pinochet to keep Chile firmly in the American orbit and hostile to the left, but they found it tedious to manage the optics of his brutality. The memo is not designed to change the outcome in Chile; it is designed to shield the presidency from future fallout by establishing a paper trail of "warnings" that the relationship was difficult.
The Desk's Reading
The desk's reading is that this memorandum functions as a diplomatic insurance policy rather than a policy document. By documenting Shultz's concerns about the "extremely difficult" nature of the relationship, the administration created a record of perceived caution. This allowed them to maintain the operational benefits of the Pinochet regime—stability, anti-communism, and a compliant Southern Cone—while pretending to be troubled by the dictator's lack of finesse.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the operational relationship between the CIA and the Chilean intelligence services is intentionally omitted to maintain a firewall between the intelligence gathering and the diplomatic posture. The CIA provided the assessment, but the memo avoids any mention of the liaison details or the covert support that had historically sustained the junta. The gap in the record is the shape of a partnership: the US provided the cover, and Pinochet provided the iron fist.
The pattern established here is one of regional containment where the internal legitimacy of a nation is sacrificed for the stability of an asset. The Letelier assassination was never treated as a criminal matter of U.S. sovereignty because the regime that ordered it was too useful to truly alienate.
A full release of the surrounding files would likely show that the "difficulty" Shultz felt was not a desire to see Pinochet gone, but a frustration that he was becoming too loud a liability to manage quietly. The people who paid for this "complexity" were the thousands of Chileans who disappeared into the basements of the DINA, and Orlando Letelier, who died in a fireball on a Washington street, only to be remembered in the White House as a "negative development."