The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

When first published last year on the thirtieth anniversary of the Chilean coup, Peter Kornbluh’s Pinochet File was hailed on the editorial page of the New York Times—no doubt to the aggravation of Henry Kissinger and all those who would deny the U.S. role in undermining Chilean democracy and supporting the advent of General Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. “Thanks to Peter Kornbluh,” Marc Cooper wrote, “we have the first complete, almost day-to-day and fully documented record of this sordid chapter in Cold War American history.”Peter Kornbluh led the campaign for the declassification of some 24,000 secret CIA, White House, NSC, and Defense Department records on Chile. The paperback edition includes new information and documents released since the hardcover went to press. This material is incorporated into a powerful retelling of the events that Newsweek magazine calls “a remarkable reconstruction of the secret U.S. foreign policy that transformed Chile into a dictatorship.”