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Anxious to heal the rift with Congress, Ford and Kissinger briefed nine senior Congressmen at breakfast the next day on Chile and covert affairs in general. Later, at a previously scheduled hearing on détente, Kissinger reiterated before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the intent of the CIA operation in Chile was merely to keep the Allende opposition alive and "not to destabilize or subvert" his government. Kissinger also conducted two separate briefings at the Senate. Still, Congress was neither convinced nor mollified. As the week progressed, growing numbers of Representatives and Senators called for an all-out review of the CIA.
The affair served to confirm all the worst suspicions about the CIA and its exaggerated image as a vast conspiracy. Reaction abroad ranged from incredulity to dismay. The London Times called the revelations "a bitter draught" for those who regard the U.S. as "sometimes clumsy, often misunderstood, but fundamentally honorable in its conduct of international affairs." West Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung predicted that "the disconcerting naiveté with which President Ford enunciated his secret service philosophy" would have a "provocative" effect.
Grave Decadence. That was the case in the capitals of the so-called Third World. From New Delhi, U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan angrily cabled the State Department that he had assured Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that the CIA had not been involved in the Chilean coup. Now, he said, she wondered whether India might not be next. Many Latin Americans shrugged; the episode seemed to confirm their suspicions that the CIA invariably is behind the continent's frequent upheavals—political and otherwise.
Some cynical foreign reaction was not so much concerned with the CIA activities themselves as with their becoming known. Said a former President of Argentina: "If you ask me as an Argentine, the CIA intervention in Chile was wholly illegal interference in the sovereignty of another state. If you ask me to see it from the point of view of an American, the fact that Senators and Congressmen can interfere with the national security interests of the country for political motives indicates a grave decadence in the system."
The uproar recalled two earlier CIA fiascos: the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 and the revelation in 1967 that the agency for years had partly funded and manipulated the National Student Association and dozens of business, labor, religious and cultural groups. Both flaps overshadowed the positive services that the CIA had rendered before; there were demands for greater restraint by the CIA and closer control by the Executive Branch, but no real changes came.
The Chilean affair, however, potentially has more lasting impact, for the agency has already been badly bruised by the Watergate scandals. Says Michigan Representative Lucien Nedzi, chairman of a House committee that oversees the agency: "I don't believe that the CIA will ever be what it was before."
Agency officials have admitted that despite laws against domestic CIA activity, they supplied one of the White House "plumbers," former