Newly published classified documents confirm Australian intelligence ASIS operatives set up a station in Santiago before General Augusto Pinochet's military coup that lead to a brutal dictatorship that spanned two decades. This is the first-ever official substantiation of Australian intelligence officers in Chile at the time, when the CIA was undermining the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende.
The heavily redacted memos published by the the same day Chileans prepare to mark the 48th anniversary of the coup, indicate then Liberal Party Foreign Minister William McMahon approved the decision for ASIS to open the station in December 1970, following a formal request from the United States. The documents refer to ASIS under its old code name, M09.
They also suggest the station operated for about 18 months, until then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam decided to close the outpost, in an ‘agonising’ decision, in which Whitlam seemingly weighed up Australian versus American interests against that of public opinion if word of the Australian presence in Chile were to be publicly exposed.
An excerpt from one of the documents. Source: National Security Archive
The memos are part of a slew of hundreds of documents released to Dr Clinton Fernandes, following hearings at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) in June, where
Fernandes says the Tribunal is still evaluating whether to re-release the heavily redacted records on Chile, with fewer omissions.
Despite mostly providing an insight about the daily administration of the ASIS station in Santiago, the highly-censored documents, also seen by SBS Spanish, do reveal "never-before-seen" details about the setting up and closing down of the operation, according to Fernandes.
One memo indicates ASIS sent agents and equipment to Chile in 1971.
“[Redacted] advises that our Station safe and typewriter will arrive in Valparaiso approximately 11th September, and be delivered to the [redacted] within a week,” noted a .
Other progress reports and documents related to the operation also shed light on some of the issues officers experienced whilst settling in, detailing problems with accommodation and Spanish-language proficiency.
The memos also delve into the stations’ office equipment needs, with frequently repeated references to vehicles, cameras, camera lenses, shredders, and copiers.
But the more revealing information pertains to circumstances regarding its closure.
“This will confirm the Director’s verbal advice (to some addressees) that the Prime Minister has decided that the [Redacted] Station is to close. In giving this instruction the Prime Minister told the Director that he, himself, would have wished for the Station to continue in existence but was afraid that should it become known, publicly that M09 [Redacted] he would find himself in an extremely difficult political situation as, quite clearly, it would be impossible for him to present the M09 presence in Santiago as being in the direct Australian national interest”, it says.
The Prime Minister described his decision as being an ‘agonising’ one.
According to this memo, Whitlam reportedly said he did not disapprove of "what the Americans were doing in Chile". Source: Supplied
A to officers in Santiago informing them of the decision to shut down down their operations, further explains Whitlam wrestled over making the decision to close the station, given his concerns about how the decision would be received by the American intelligence.
“He was most concerned that CIA should not interpret his decision as being an unfriendly gesture towards the U.S. in general, or towards CIA in particular. He said that personally he would have wished to approve the proposal.”
The telegram finishes with Robertson expressing his disappointment regarding the decision to cease operations.
Most concerned that the Americans should not believe that he personally necessarily disapproved of what they were doing in Chile nor did he support Allende [Redacted].
“The Prime Minister said that the last thing he wanted to do was to take precipitate action in this matter that would embarrass CIA (sic),” the same memo from April 1973 reads.
Since the 1970s,
Australian intelligence officers have long been believed to have assisted the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in undermining Chilean President Salvador Allende’s elected government, but the documents surrounding Pinochet’s coup have never been publicly released.
During Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship (1973-1990), dissidence was cruelly punished and stamped out. Anyone perceived to oppose the regime could be denounced, arrested, disappeared, and executed.
According to reports from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation, and the National Commission on Political Prison and Torture, the total number of Pinochet-era victims exceeds 40,000 people, at least 28,000 of them were tortured.
More than 3,000 were killed or "disappeared" and at least 200,000 people fled to exile.
Dr Fernandes, a former Australian military intelligence officer, labels the publication of these documents as “an important moment”.
“A threshold has been crossed: this is the first official confirmation of Australia’s involvement in the overthrow of Chilean democracy”.
Although he didn’t find the revelations regarding Whitlam’s decision-making entirely surprising, Dr Fernandes found them startling “in the context of opinion”.
“It contradicts the public image that Whitlam himself engineered”.
“It shows that his claims were, in fact, an exercise in opinion management, because … he had more concern for the priorities of the United States than for the democracy, the political system of another social-democratic country, like Chile,” Fernandes explains.
“I realised that his earlier claims to shut down the operation as soon as he heard about it, were just an elaborate exercise in opinion management,” he adds.
The very idea that Australia was involved in destroying a fellow social democratic country is offensive.
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What we know about Australia’s secret involvement in the Chilean military coup
Australia’s involvement in Chile became public in 1977 after former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam set up a royal commission to investigate Australia’s security services.
Mr Whitlam himself told the Parliament he had knowledge that "Australian intelligence personnel were working as proxies of the CIA in destabilising the government of Chile".
Despite the ASIS Station shutting down in 1973, that wasn’t the end of Australia’s spy presence in Chile.
Other accounts suggest Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) agents, which normally focus on domestic security, were in Santiago well into Pinochet’s reign, working out of the Australian Embassy.
Former Minister for Immigration Clyde Cameron told Allies, a feature documentary broadcast by the ABC’s Four Corners program in 1983:
I was staggered when I first became minister for immigration to discover that there were something like 21 or 24 postings around the world of ASIO agents who were posing as immigration officials.
“In fact, they were part of the immigration department’s establishment overseas and when I discovered the role which Australian intelligence had played in the overthrow of the Allende Government in Chile in 1973 I was appalled to think that my own department was involved in this sort of work and that our intelligence agents in Chile were acting as the hyphen, if you like, between the CIA which weren’t able to operate in Chile at that time, with the CIA and the Pinochet junta.”
ASIS is Australia's overseas secret intelligence collection agency, while ASIO is Australia's Security Intelligence Organisation. They are two separate agencies, focusing on gathering different types of intelligence.
