Pinochet File -Op/056

For years, the United States government maintained top-secret archives detailing its policy in Chile and its role in aiding and securing General Pinochet's rise to dictatorial power in the early 1970s. In this examination of the thousands of records recently declassified by the CIA, White House, NSC, Pentagon and FBI, Kornbluh offers new revelations about America's development of a policy dedicated to overthrowing Chile's existing democratic government and to replacing it with a military leader reviled for his complete disregard for human rights. Throughout the book, Kornbluh--a director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library--buttresses his assertions with excerpts from the relevant documents, and attempts to shed light on some of the outstanding questions of the period that still beg for answers, including what motivated President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to authorize the bloody campaign and how involved the US government actually was in the September 1973 coup itself.