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The U.S. State Department released portions of two formerly classified Nixon-era intelligence reports that offer insight into the information former President Nixon received amid Chile’s 1973 coup. The two documents from September of 1973 include portions of the Central Intelligence Agency’s daily briefs with Nixon on the events occurring in Chile. The documents suggest Nixon may have had intel on the extent of a possible coup. The documents come shortly ahead of the 50th anniversary of the coup against President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. The document from Sept. 8, 1973 indicates Nixon was informed on a number of...

Freedom's Enemies: A collaborator of the Rosenbergs admits his previously unknown Soviet espionage more than 60 years after the fact. It's just the latest revelation that the anti-communists of that era were right. The "innocent victims" of the Red Scare were once legion — like suave U.S. envoy Alger Hiss, who doubled as a Soviet spy chief, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who gave Moscow A-bomb plans. The latest debunking of this myth is Rosenberg fellow spy Morton Sobell, who finally admitted it in 2008. But in a December interview with Ronald Radosh and Steven Usdin, Sobell, 93, added that...

Business and Economics Editor Published 3/13/2002 8:16 PM QUERETARO, Mexico, March 13 (UPI) -- An uneasy calm returns to Venezuela. Beneath it, like water running underground, a host of separate currents are undermining the shaky reign of President Hugo Chávez. A week ago Guaicaipuro Lameda, ex-General, ex-head of the state-run oil company, PdVSA, ex-admirer of Chávez, said that the government's economic policies were condemning the country to worsening poverty and challenged the planning minister, Giordani, to a public debate. In Venezuela the planning ministry, it should be said, is more important than it sounds. The planning minister holds central responsibility...

Chilean poet was long thought to have succumbed to cancer but driver claims he was murdered by Pinochet regimeThe remains of the Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda are to be removed from his grave in Chile as part of an investigation into his death nearly 40 years ago. A team of forensic specialists will remove bones from the casket where he lies near his seaside home on Monday morning. Neruda, who died suddenly 12 days after the 11 September 1973 military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, had suspected prostate cancer and for decades it was assumed that...

History: President Salvador Allende of Chile really did commit suicide in 1973, an inquest concluded on Tuesday. Now will the Left stop saying the U.S. and Chile's army did him in? Except perhaps for Che Guevara, no one has quite been the heroic totem to the global left than the late Marxist president of Chile, whose death in 1973 made him a martyr to socialism. Allende seemingly legitimized socialism as a democratically elected leader, the first Marxist who in 1970 didn't shoot his way to power.That gave the left hope for more. Elected with just 36% of the vote in...

(English-language translation) The remains of former Chilean President Salvador Allende were exhumed on Monday to clarify whether he committed suicide, as the most accepted version affirms, or was executed during the coup that established Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1973. The act, which was ordered by Judge Mario Carroza, took place in the Allende family mausoleum at the General Cemetery in Santiago as part of an investigation that opened in February when, after almost 38 years, the causes of death of the former socialist leader amid the bombardment of the Presidential Palace on September 11, 1973 are being sought. Upon their...

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), then based in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, vigorously lobbied for Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, the Cuban-style Marxist regime that shot its way to power in 1979. Today, WOLA pretends it is concerned about the rule of law in Honduras after the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court supported removing the leftist president for defying its constitution. WOLA and Jim Wallis' publication Sojourners have teamed up to spin Honduras' defense of its democracy as another example of a U.S.-supported, imperialist military coup. The constitutional coup in Honduras was...

<p>Salvador Allende Gossens of Chile was an icon of the American left, the first Marxist to assume office via the ballot box. The CIA has been blamed for his overthrow and death, further enhancing his cult standing in Cambridge, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor. Now, 35 years after his election, a book being published today in the U.K., The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume II: the KGB and the World, reveals that Allende was in fact a KGB asset, on the payroll. The London Sunday Times published a valuable summary yesterday.</p>

The 30th anniversary of the coup d'etat that deposed Chile's Marxist president Salvador Allende has come and gone, but not without a burst of accusations of American complicity with--if not responsibility for--that event. Even before the commemorations had gotten under way, Secretary of State Colin Powell took it upon himself to apologize for the U.S. role in Chile, though in terms so vague as to leave many wondering exactly what he was referring to. The fact that the coup itself took place on the very same date--September 11--that the World Trade Center was destroyed by a sensational terrorist attack in...