The CIA’s continued secrecy, of course, brings to mind the agency’s equally steadfast insistence on keeping its JFK-assassination related records secret into perpetuity.

The CIA, needless to say, cites the two magic words — “national security” — to justify its continued secrecy in both events.

I suggest that two other words are the real reason for the CIA’s continued secrecy in both events: “criminal cover-up.”

After all, the JFK assassination took place 60 years ago and the Chilean coup took place 50 years ago. The notion that the release of CIA assassination-related and coup-related records would threaten “national security,” no matter what definition is used for that ridiculous, meaningless term, is laughable to the extreme.

Actually, the Chilean coup bears a relationship to the JFK assassination. That’s because the national-security establishment’s mindset toward its regime-change operation in Chile reflected its mindset toward its regime-change operation in Dallas. My hunch is that those still-secret records relating to Chile would provide further circumstantial evidence pointing toward the reasons for the operation in Dallas.

In 1970, Chilean voters delivered a plurality of vote to Salvador Allende in the presidential election. Since Allende had not received a majority of votes, the election was thrown into the hands of the Chilean congress.

U.S. officials deemed Allende a grave threat to U.S. national security, on two grounds: that he was a socialist but, more important, that he was befriending the communist world, including Cuba and the Soviet Union, something that Kennedy had done as well in his famous Peace Speech at American University a few months before he was assassinated.

The CIA embarked on a campaign of bribing the members of the Chilean congress to vote against Allende (which, of course, is somewhat ironic given the fierce U.S. reaction to supposed Russian involvement in U.S. elections).

At the same time, the U.S. national-security establishment made plans for a Chilean military takeover. What’s interesting is that the CIA did not assassinate Allende. Instead, it convinced the Chilean national-security establishment that Allende posed a grave threat to Chilean national security and, therefore, that the Chilean national-security establishment had a moral duty to violently prevent Allende from assuming the presidency.

That’s a very important and very revealing point, one that undoubtedly comes across loud and clear in those still-secret CIA records relating to the Chile coup. The point reveals the U.S. national-security establishment’s conviction that it had the moral duty to violently remove JFK from power in order to protect America from a president whose policies, they concluded, posed a grave risk to “national security.” (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.)

Much to the chagrin of the U.S. national-security establishment, however, the commanding general of Chile’s armed forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, opposed the idea of a coup. His position was that the Chilean constitution did not permit a coup as a way to remove a democratically elected president from office. He said that Chileans would have to wait until the next election.

Therefore, the CIA simply orchestrated a violent kidnapping of Schneider which left him dead from gunshot wounds on the streets of Santiago. Ironically, the CIA’s kidnapping and assassination of this innocent man boomeranged because the Chilean congress, faced with tremendous anger over Schneider’s murder among the Chilean citizenry, rejected the CIA’s bribes and installed Allende into power.

Three years later, however, the U.S. national-security establishment prevailed in its efforts and helped military strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet violently take over the reins of power. By the end of the war between the executive and national-security branches of the government, Allende was dead, just as Kennedy was ten years before.

With the full support of the Pentagon and the CIA, Pinochet’s henchmen rounded up some 60,000 innocent people and proceeded to torture and/or rape most of them. They also killed or disappeared around 3,000 of them.

Among those rounded up was Orlando Letelier, a highly respected man who had served in the Allende administration as ambassador to the United States, minister of foreign affairs, minister of the interior, and minister of defense. After being tortured in captivity, world pressure forced Pinochet to release him.

Letelier moved to Washington, D.C., where he joined a leftist think tank and began lobbying against the Pinochet regime. Pinochet and his national-security establishment deemed Letelier to be a grave threat to Chilean “national security.”

On September 21, 1976, Letelier was killed by a car bomb on the streets of Washington, D.C., along with his young assistant Ronni Moffitt.

It was determined that Pinochet’s secret Gestapo-like internal police force, which was called DINA and which worked with the CIA, had orchestrated and carried out the Letelier assassination. Among those convicted of the crime was a DINA agent named Michael Townley, who was a U.S. citizen.

As part of what was clearly a sweetheart deal, Townley pled guilty in U.S. District Court as part of a plea bargain with U.S. officials. Get this: He was sentenced to only ten years in jail for what amounted to the cold-blooded murder of two innocent people. To put that in perspective, compare it to the 22-year jail sentence that a U.S. District Judge recently meted out to a man convicted of simply participating in the January 6 protests. Townley was also given immunity from prosecution in Chile for another national-security assassination in which he had allegedly been involved.

But that’s not all. After serving only 62 months in jail, get this: He was admitted into the federal witness protection program! That meant that the feds gave him a secret identity and let him live a normal life somewhere in the world.

The Letelier assassination has always been blamed on Pinochet. Is it possible that the CIA, working with DINA, was also embroiled in that assassination, on grounds of “national security”? My hunch is that those records relating to Chile that the CIA steadfastly continues to keep secret would help provide an answer to that question, which, needless to say, would be a good reason for wanting them to kept secret.

For more, see the following Wikipedia entries:

• Michael Townley
• Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional
• Orlando Letelier

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

1. After embroiling America in forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and other parts of the world, the Pentagon has succeeded in getting us closer to nuclear war since 1962, when it did the same in the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

2. America’s socialist system of immigration controls has brought nothing but death, destruction of liberty, perpetual crisis and chaos along the border, and an immigration police state to the borderlands.

3. Social Security has destroyed traditional family values and has inculcated a sense of helpless dependency on the government among seniors.

4. Medicare succeeded in destroying the finest healthcare system in history and is the root cause of America’s ongoing, perpetual healthcare crisis.

5. Governmental measures to combat Covid-19 threw countless American businesses into bankruptcy and fundamentally altered life in America.

6. The Federal Reserve has destroyed what was once the finest monetary system in history, one that was based on gold coins and silver coins, as required by the Constitution.

7. The war on drugs has brought nothing but death, violence, corruption, and destruction of civil liberties and privacy, not to mention the fact that it is the most racially bigoted government program since segregation.

8. The war on poverty has ended up putting more people into poverty, especially with its massive confiscation of income, savings, and productive capital and its inflationary debauchery.

9. The regulated economy, including minimum-wage laws and occupational-licensure laws, has harmed people at all levels of society, but especially the poor.

10. Governmental control of education has destroyed people’s natural love of learning and produced a nation of deferential citizens who swallow whatever propaganda the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA dole out.

11. The national-security establishment has inculcated a mindset of patriotic deference to its omnipotent power and wisdom, especially with respect to foreign affairs.

12. The “war on terrorism” racket has destroyed our rights, liberties, and privacy, in the name of keeping us “safe” from the terrorists that the federal government’s interventionist foreign policy produces.

13. Governmental embargoes, sanctions, and trade wars have not only engendered enmity abroad for Americans, they also have destroyed the economic liberty of the American people here at home, not to mention that they have also reduced our standard of living.

14. Americans have been inculcated with the false notion that welfare-state programs, enforced by the IRS and faceless welfare bureaucrats, show how compassionate and generous Americans are.

15. Americans have been inculcated with the false notion that the more people the Pentagon and the CIA kill abroad, the safer American are here at home.

16. The welfare state has produced out-of-control spending, debt, and monetary debauchery, which now threaten the nation with bankruptcy.

17. The welfare-warfare state has brought into existence an aberrant, dysfunctional society, one characterized by daily mass killings.

There are those who still believe that the welfare-warfare state way of life can be reformed and fixed. They are deluded. The welfare-warfare state is an inherently defective governmental system. It can never be fixed or reformed. It will continue to bring us death, impoverishment, moral decay, and the destruction of our rights, liberties, and privacy.

It is time for the American people to do some serious soul-searching, especially before the Pentagon succeeds in getting us into a nuclear war with Russia, China, or both. It is time to acknowledge that it was a horrific mistake to adopt the welfare-warfare state way of life. It is time to restore the good, sound founding principles of our nation and get America back on the right track — toward liberty, peace, prosperity, charity, and harmony with the people of the world.

Article cross-posted from The Future of Freedom Foundation.