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In an interview last week with the New York Times, President Ford seemed to suggest that Nixon was ultimately responsible for what happened in Chile. Recommendations on Chile from the 40 Committee of elite intelligence officers, said Ford, "were submitted to the then President and of course were in the final analysis decided by him." The rough stuff that the agency got involved in included a scheme to kidnap General René Schneider Chereau, commander in chief of the Chilean army. A group of Chilean officers, originally supported by the CIA, believed the abduction of the general would give the military an excuse for staging a coup by arguing that law and order had broken down. The CIA later tried to stop the plan, fearing that it would not work, but the hired kidnapers went ahead anyway. In the struggle, General Schneider was killed, apparently inadvertently. After several CIA attempts to stop Allende by subsidizing his opponents, the Chilean President was overthrown and killed by a military coup in 1973.
PROSECUTION. The CIA's actions in Chile also interest the Department of Justice, which is considering bringing perjury charges against none other than Richard Helms, the director of the CIA during the Allende years and now Ambassador to Iran. During his Senate confirmation hearings in 1973, Helms minimized the CIA's efforts in Chile, saying that there had been no attempt to overthrow Allende and that indeed no money had ever been given to the President's opponents.
There were persistent reports, un-denied by any of the interested parties, that the man who had authoritatively pointed out Helms' misstatement to the Justice Department last Dec. 19 was none other than William Colby, the present director of the CIA. Intelligence sources suggest two possible background factors for such a step. First, Colby was already under considerable pressure to reform the CIA and knew the Times was about to break the story of the agency's domestic spying. Second, Dec. 19 was the date on which Justice abrogated its 20-year-old gentlemen's agreement with the CIA by which the CIA could decide whether any of its employees should be prosecuted for any illegal acts (none ever were). Now that Justice is responsible for any and all CIA illegalities, it is also weighing the assorted questions of law that would be involved in prosecuting CIA officials for the break-ins and opening of mail in the U.S., which were reported by the Rockefeller Commission.
Senator Church's committee has heard a lot of testimony that Presidents routinely used the CIA to perform dirty tricks abroad, but so far, it has found no definite proof of any complicity in assassination plots. On this key issue, the Senator has even suggested that his committee might portray the agency as a "rogue elephant rampaging out of control." If so, that judgment would even further damage the morale and effectiveness of the CIA, whose top officials believe that either implicitly or explicitly, it was the White House that ordered the controversial operations for which the agency is now being denounced.