Behind the Other 9/11.(September 11, 1973 murder of Salvador Allende)

Chileans have long mourned Sept. 11. It was on that day in 1973 that a U.S.-backed military junta overthrew the nation's democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende Gossens. With Gen. Augusto Pinochet at the helm, the coup leaders--who benefited from extensive U.S. support--conducted a campaign of terror. Mass graves filled up with disfigured corpses. People disappeared into rivers or the Pacific Ocean. In all, at least 3,197 people died during Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship.

The unrepentant Pinochet--now 87 and living in Chile, immune from prosecution because of failing health--maintains that he saved his country from communism. He has left his surviving victims to go after the regime's minions, and to fight for the excavation of their own history. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the coup, that history is finally coming to light, thanks to Peter Kornbluh's remarkable reconstruction of the secret U.S. foreign policy that transformed Chile into a dictatorship. In "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability" (551 pages. The New Press), Kornbluh draws on hundreds of CIA documents, White House transcripts and internal State Department reports to show definitively that Washington spurred the fall of Allende, destroyed Chilean democracy and bolstered a regime that engaged in state terrorism both at home and abroad.

Readers can learn about President Richard Nixon and his National Security Council discussing how to bring Allende down even before the Chilean leader was inaugurated in 1970. "Our main concern in Chile is the prospect that [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success," Nixon said. In one disturbing scene, Nixon strikes his own palm in front of the U.S. ambassador. "That son of a bitch, that son of a bitch," Nixon said. "Not you, Mr. Ambassador. It's that son of a bitch Allende. We're going to smash him."

The book, which entailed four years of research into 24,000 declassified documents, includes a CIA report sent to Pinochet 48 hours after the coup, noting the agency's intention to continue supporting the regime. Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national-security adviser and the chief architect of U.S. policy in Chile, openly commiserated with the dictator--even though he knew that Pinochet's regime was taking part in a series of international bombings to silence its enemies. "In the United ...