An American telephone company offered the CIA a million dollars to stop an election from taking effect.

The election was in Chile. The company was ITT.

ITT owned seventy percent of Chile's phone system. When Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970 and promised to nationalize foreign-owned industry, ITT chairman Harold Geneen took an offer to Washington: a million dollars, quietly delivered, to keep Allende from being sworn in. The CIA turned down the cash. It did not turn down the idea.

What came next was not a war. It was a squeeze.

American credit to Chile collapsed. Private bank lines fell from roughly $220 million to under $35 million. Development loans stopped. American copper companies went into European courts to seize Chilean shipments, so Chile could not be paid for its own metal.

One stream of American money moved the other way. Aid to the Chilean military rose, funding the one institution capable of removing Allende by force.

The man sent to Washington to plead for credit was Orlando Letelier, Allende's ambassador. He met the bankers. He was refused. Three years later, on September 11, 1973, warplanes hit the presidential palace, Allende died inside it, and Letelier was arrested and shipped to a prison camp near the Strait of Magellan.

He survived, and returned to Washington as an exile. On September 21, 1976, a bomb planted under his car by Pinochet's secret police killed him on Sheridan Circle, fourteen blocks from the White House. It also killed Ronni Moffitt, a 25-year-old American riding beside him.

 

Some argue the pressure was justified. A Soviet-aligned government in the hemisphere was a genuine strategic threat, and financial leverage costs fewer lives than an invasion. Others argue Chile's only offense was voting the wrong way, and that starving an elected government of money is not defending democracy, it is deciding which elections are allowed to count.

So where does the line fall? Was Geneen's million-dollar offer and the credit squeeze behind it a hard necessity of the Cold War, or did Washington quietly strangle an elected government and let Pinochet's tanks finish the job?