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The documents record that Kissinger was the prevailing influence for a sustained effort to destabilize and undermine Allende. As it became clear to him that the CIA's efforts to foment a coup before Allende's November 3 inauguration would likely fail, Kissinger presented Nixon with his initial arguments for a long-term aggressive approach that would be masked in its hostility. "Our capacity to engineer Allende's overthrow quickly has been demonstrated to be sharply limited," he wrote in a secret briefing paper on October 18, 1970:
The question, therefore, is whether we can take actioncreate pressures, exploit weaknesses, magnify obstacleswhich at a minimum will either insure his failure or force him to modify his policies, and at a maximum might lead to situations where his collapse or overthrow later may be more feasible.
Kissinger posed two potential approaches for a hostile strategy:
One would be a frankly overtly hostile policy, utilizing all possible pressures and demonstrating that hostility openly;
The other would be a publicly "correct" but cold posture, with pressure and hostility supplied non-overtly and behind the scenes, and hostile measures demonstrated publicly only in reaction to provocation.
"Both courses" he submitted, "would use essentially the same measurese.g., CIA activity, economic and diplomatic pressures. The differenceand the issuelies in the question of how overt our hostility should be."
As the National Security Council prepared to meet in early November, on October 29, Kissinger chaired a meeting of the Senior Review Group to determine what options on Chile would be presented for President Nixon's final consideration. The Defense Department representatives advocated an overtly hostile approach; the State Department members cautioned against overt aggression, and pressed for a more flexible approach that held out the "option of establishing friendly relations with Allende in the event, now considered unlikely, that he moderates his Marxist and authoritarian objectives," according to minutes of the meeting. The CIA, represented by Director Richard Helms, head of covert operations Thomas Karamessines, and the chief of Western Hemisphere operations, William Broe, supported a hostile approach, through covert operations, to undermine Allende. For security reasons, the covert action plan they drew up to destabilize Chile was classified as a special annex to the options papers and not distributed to the other agencies.
Assuring that the hostile approach prevailed was so important to Kissinger that he arranged for the NSC meeting to be postponed by a full day, so that he could get into the Oval Office for an hour to brief Nixon on how he should push the foreign policy bureaucracy toward a regime change posture. "Henry Kissinger came in this morning to try to see if we could move the NSC Meeting to Friday. He feels this is very important because the subject matter is Chile and Henry says it is imperative that the President study the issue prior to holding the meeting," stated a memo to Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman from Nixon's scheduler, explaining why the meeting was being moved from November 5 to November 6. "According to Henry, Chile could end up being the worst failure in our administration'our Cuba' by 1972."
For his private meeting with Nixon, Kissinger drew up a comprehensive memo outlining "the serious threats to our interests and position in the hemisphere" and beyond that Allende representedas well as the threat of the State Department's position that the U.S. should adopt "a modus vivendi strategy" with an Allende government and focus on defeating him in the next election in 1976. The document, first published in Peter Kornbluh's book, The Pinochet File, on the 40th anniversary of the coup, provides the most comprehensive explanation for U.S. intervention in Chile of any of the thousands of declassified records in the public domain.
"The election of Allende as President of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere," Kissinger wrote in his opening sentence, underlining it for effect. "Your decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year," he dramatically advised Nixon, "for what happens in Chile over the next six to twelve months will have ramifications that will go far beyond just US-Chilean relations."
As reflected in the briefing paper, Kissinger's key concern about Allende was that he had been freely elected, leaving the United States with little latitude to openly oppose his government as illegitimate, and setting a precedent that other nations might follow. Allende's "model effect can be insidious," Kissinger warned: "The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact onand even precedent value forother parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it."
He lobbied Nixon to reject the State Department modus vivendi option, and instruct the National Security Council to implement a hostile policy to undermine Allende, but masked as benign diplomatic coolness toward his government. "The emphasis resulting from today's meeting must be on opposing Allende and preventing his consolidating power and not on minimizing risks," Kissinger advised Nixon.
At the NSC meeting the next day, Nixon parroted Kissinger's talking points on the threat of the "model effect" that Allende represented. "We'll be very cool and very correct, but doing those things which will be a real message to Allende and others," he advised his national security team, according to the SECRET memorandum of conversation of the meeting. According to declassified notes taken CIA Director Helms at the meeting, the president also advised that "If there [is] any way to unseat A [llende], better do it."
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