By the time the Chilean military stepped in to remove Salvador Allende’s Marxist government in September 1973, the question most Chileans had was what had taken so long.1 Allende had been an asset of Soviet intelligence since 1961,2 and after taking power in 1970 via an election where KGB interference might well have been decisive,3 he surrounded himself with Soviet “advisers” and troops drawn from the Soviet colony on Cuba administered by Fidel Castro.4 Allende’s socialism brought economic catastrophe and societal chaos, and his totalitarian political project was almost complete: the Supreme Court had declared in May-June 1973 that Allende had demolished the legal order, and in late August the Chilean Parliament passed a resolution noting that there were no constitutional mechanisms left to rein Allende in, concluding with an all-but-open appeal for the military to intervene. A coup was seen as the only way to avoid the civil war most Chileans thought was imminent, which Allende was preparing for by importing more Communist Cuban troops.5
When the moment came, the Cubans were almost the only forces willing to defend Allende, but that does not detract from the morality of his decision to accept that the game was up. Rather than encourage further bloodshed to try to retain power, Allende issued no incitement for his supporters to confront the military, and he bravely refused the offer of safe passage into exile, choosing instead to make a final speech on the radio and kill himself with a rifle Castro had given him. Castro himself quickly claimed Allende had been murdered by soldiers under orders from the coup leader, General Augusto Pinochet, and the rumour spread far and wide, becoming an article of faith for many Leftists. For the Western and international Left, Allende’s status as a martyr quickly transitioned to that of a saint; the Soviet Union skilfully encouraged the development and leveraged it into a secondary cult around Luis Corvalán, the leader of Moscow’s “fraternal” Communist Party in Chile, who had been arrested in the aftermath of the coup.6
Soviet Active Measures After Allende
Chileans had thwarted the Soviet ambitions for a “second Cuba” in the Western Hemisphere. Moscow would have to wait half-a-decade before it achieved this goal via the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, a continental base for the export of Revolution that afflicted El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, among others.7 In the meantime, the Soviets consoled themselves with political warfare capitalising on Allende’s downfall. Active measures cannot create political trends, but the Soviets had no need to. The Allende cult had originated organically; the unexpected ferocity of Pinochet’s regime was a genuine shock; and the anti-Americanism of the global Left was endogenous and perennial. This was quite enough to work with for a vast global propaganda campaign.
The most effective disinformation blends truth (or half-truth) or at least things that are widely believed into the false narrative it is trying to spread.8 It makes simple refutation difficult and serious efforts at debunking may end up reinforcing the disinformation by confirming the factual elements, thereby convincing some people that there is so much smoke there must be fire, or just adding to the confusion by leaving the impression there is epistemological ambiguity about the disinformation claims. Providing fabricated “proof” for narratives that people already believe or find plausible—or want to believe—often works to spread disinformation because it disincentivises fact-checking and even for those who realise the specific evidence is forged, they can rationalise believing the general narrative the forgery purports to substantiate.9
The KGB were experts at dezinformatsiya, and they showed it over Chile. This could be seen contemporaneously. Critical coverage of Pinochet’s Chile would always have been a feature of the Western press, especially regarding the very real human rights abuses: about 2,400 people were extrajudicially killed or “disappeared” over seventeen years. Likewise, America would always have been criticised by extension. Moscow merely had to nudge the system to keep the issue alive and spice it up with the odd lurid fabrication. The Soviet distortion of the Western media ecosystem is betrayed in the disparity of the coverage: the misdeeds of Pinochet’s Western-aligned government became a veritable media obsession in the 1970s, while the Communist Cambodian “Killing Fields” in which a million people perished were virtually ignored.10 And the effect of the KGB’s active measures was not time-limited—neither over Chile nor anything else.
Soviet disinformation has proven remarkably enduring in the West and around the world.11 The themes from the Soviet propaganda campaign targeting Pinochet as a proxy for the “Main Adversary” (America) are still repeated to this day, not only in the output of Left-wing activist groups, but straight news reporting and academic work, often without any felt need for a citation because these themes are so embedded as “facts everyone knows”.
Instantiating the myth that Pinochet’s 1973 coup was “American-backed” is undoubtedly the greatest success of the KGB. The blame in this narrative is usually fixed on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger personally. The element of truth being played with here is that the U.S. did try to prevent Allende taking power in 1970, which went about as well as CIA operations usually do. Misrepresenting declassified U.S. government documents about 1970 as dating from 1973 is easily done, and, of course, the facts about 1970 make the claims about 1973 more plausible.
The KGB’s Operation TOUCAN, initiated in August 1976, sought to disseminate a narrative that the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA),12 Pinochet’s secret police, was engaged in rampant “terrorism” against the exiled opposition, and Moscow Centre used forged documents to link the CIA to DINA’s criminality more generally, with considerable success: most Western outlets accepted the documents as genuine.13 As so often, Pinochet played into Soviet hands. The next month, DINA used a car bomb in Washington, D.C., to assassinate Orlando Letelier, a member of the Marxist-Leninist Socialist Party (PS) Allende had led and a minister when Allende fell. The awkward U.S. government response was portrayed as evidence of complicity.
Another major theme of Soviet disinformation with a long afterlife is the idea Pinochet ran a “fascist” regime, whose military and secret police were stuffed with fugitive Nazi war criminals.
It was habitual for the Soviet Revolution to describe its enemies—heretical Communists, internal dissidents, adversarial foreign governments—as “fascists” and “Nazis”.14 There was a peculiar intensity and scale to the propaganda of this kind aimed at Pinochet’s government, though, and this was partly due to the strategic-political imperatives of the moment. The “massive [Soviet] campaign … present[ing] Augusto Pinochet as an exponent of modern fascism supported by the US” was, among other things, intended to divert attention from the then-recent full-scale Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and broader gruesome state of human rights in the Soviet Empire,15 this being during negotiations over what would become the Helsinki Final Act and 1973 being the year Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago, which had an impact so profound even sections of the French Left were shaken out of their instinctive identification with Moscow.16 The campaign was “extremely successful” in creating a global information environment, at elite and popular levels, wherein “Pinochet was often regarded as the most brutal dictator of Latin America, despite the fact that this reputation was to a great extent unjustified and exaggerated”.17
Radio Moscow’s Spanish-language edition broadcast relentlessly into Chile right through the 1980s, trying to stir opposition to what was always called the “fascist dictatorship” and crediting Communists with any signs of dissent, from the circulation of pamphlets to riots. The Centre was not wholly exaggerating its influence. As late as 1987, under the “reformist” Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviets deputised the East German Stasi to smuggle Clodomiro Almeyda back into Chile.18 Almeyda was Allende’s Foreign Minister at the end and the party ideologist who had yearned for civil war as the road to socialism even before Allende took power.19 Of course, Soviet operations were always holistic: what assisted subversion in Chile also assisted political warfare about Chile. For example, the famous Escucha, Chile (“Listen, Chile”) on Radio Moscow, which even supporters called a “propaganda program”, was “a key source of information” in Western Europe about what was happening inside Chile into the late 1980s, colouring in various ways the coverage in Western newspapers and the contents of human rights reports.20 Replica broadcasts, fronted by Allendists and other Marxists, emanated from various cities behind the Iron Curtain and Havana.
Soviet visual propaganda consistently depicted Pinochet as a Nazi. Castro’s Cuba obviously did as it was told in supporting Soviet active measures on this front. It should be said, since it continues to elude so many materialists, that this propaganda was not solely for public consumption. Behind closed doors, Soviet officials spoke as they did in public. The theoretical journal of the Soviet Central Committee, Kommunist, described pro-Pinochet Chilean newspapers as “fascist”, the Chilean school curriculum as based on the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and Pinochet personally as drawing his ideology directly from Nazism.21
Nazis in the Pinochet Government?
The flight of German Nazis, Croatian Ustaše, and other collaborators to South America after 1945 is a topic of its own. The phenomenon centred on the Argentina of Juan Perón, a self-conscious inheritor of the fascist tradition. From Argentina, the Nazi refugees spread to half-a-dozen other countries in the Western Hemisphere, enabled by lax border-enforcement, local corruption, sympathetic German communities, and security policies that in the late 1940s-50s reasonably prioritised the Communist threat. The natural intrigue around the Nazi fugitives—Did any of them feel remorse? Were they really planning for a “Fourth Reich”?—and the dearth of solid information made them excellent source material for novelists and frustrated novelists like diplomats, intelligence officers, and journalists. The Nazis were also useful to the opponents of the military governments that arose from the 1950s to 1970s in the Latin American States where the Nazis resided.
The presence of the Nazis would be presented as in itself damning—as evidence the Latin American government was wilfully harbouring them—and it was persistently claimed by oppositionists that the regimes had put the old Nazis to use in industry or administration or as trainers and torturers in the secret police. These reports reached, and were often regurgitated by, Western journalists and human rights activists. When one of these cases intermittently went viral, as we would now say, Western courts and governments often got involved. This pattern started right at the beginning with Perón, albeit he was the exception since his opponents were on firm factual footing. What was also intrinsic to this story from the get-go was the Soviets using the wanted Nazis for political warfare purposes.22 The Soviets fury with the acquittals at Nuremberg translated into active measures claiming “imperialist” Western States “remained” allied to Nazism, as they secretly had been throughout the Second World War (reality was no impediment to the Centre’s worldview). Versions of this narrative continued to be directed at American and British allies throughout the Cold War.23
The claim that Pinochet’s DINA employed Nazis centres on Walther Rauff, an early official in the Party intelligence agency (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) and SS officer, the principal architect of the mobile gas vans in 1941, which were used to murder disabled people and Jews in the early phases of the Holocaust. Rauff went on to oversee the persecution and enslavement of Jews in Tunisia in 1942-43, and participated in the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz after Germany conquered Italy in 1943. All told, the murder of tens of thousands Jews, and well-over 100,000 by some estimates, can be charged to Rauff’s account.
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What is uncontroversial about Rauff’s activities after the Third Reich was no more is that he fled to Syria in 1948 and was recruited by the State to build-out its secret service during the Arab attempt to finish in Palestine what the Nazis had started in Europe. After the March 1949 military coup in Syria, Rauff became disfavoured, and months later moved to Italy and then sailed to Ecuador, not a major Nazi sanctuary, but not an unknown one either, even if it was generally more of a transit point.24 Rauff stayed for nine years, then moved to Chile in 1958 and died in Santiago in 1984.
An obvious point here is that Rauff was in Chile for fifteen years before Pinochet’s coup; he was not invited to Chile by El Tata. And there was no change in Chile’s official position concerning Rauff after 1973. Many in the Spanish-speaking world did not share the West’s idealised view of the Nuremberg trials in the decades after 1945, seeing the proceedings, basically correctly, as “victor’s justice”,25 and there was a strong tendency in Latin America, spanning from the nationalist Right to the “anti-imperialist” Left, to regard Western attempts to prosecute the Nazis who escaped as hypocritical and vindictive, and as a threat to their country’s sovereignty.26 This framework underlay the Chilean authorities’ essential view of Rauff, whose presence in Chile was known early, as a harmless exile who should be left alone.
A CIA report in the early 1970s reported that Rauff’s son, Alf, had “entered [the] Chilean Naval Academy in 1955, sponsored by General Carlos Prats”, Allende’s Chief of Staff who resigned before the coup everyone knew was coming because he was unwilling to participate. Prats also sponsored Alf’s citizenship application in 1960. Of Walther Rauff himself, the Agency reported he “has no known history of political activities”, had shown no interest in Nazi émigré networks, and was regarded as a hard-working, “highly respected member of the community who is living out his old age quietly, concentrating on his personal business activities”.27
The rejection of Israeli and West German extradition requests for Rauff is often taken as evidence he had Pinochet’s protection; this was certainly a view propounded by Soviet media. The problem, to repeat, is that this defies the timeline. As the CIA report documents, those requests were filed in the early 1960s. Rauff was arrested in Chile in December 1962 as part of extradition proceedings, but released in April 1963 because of a ruling by Chile’s Supreme Court—which was independent of politicians before Allende—that the statute of limitations had expired. Chile’s intransigence when West Germany renewed interest in Rauff in the early 1980s was, therefore, a continuation of existing policy, upheld under prior democratic governments and the Allende regime.28
Against this background, it seems doubtful Rauff would suddenly have wanted re-enter the life of a secret policemen at 66-years-of-age. The fear that spread in the Nazi émigré community after Israel apprehended Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, put him on trial, and executed him decreases the likelihood that Rauff would have wanted to step that far out of the shadows. Indeed, there is every indication Rauff moved to southern Chile in the mid-1960s precisely so he was more “underground” after being spooked by Eichmann’s demise. From the other side, it would be astonishingly reckless in PR terms for Pinochet to employ Rauff, and it hardly seems likely Pinochet lacked for talent in even the darkest arts. Still, this is all conjecture and can be reasoned other ways. Perhaps it will be said the CIA was wrong about Rauff’s pre-1973 life, and I am the last person to recommend taking the Agency’s word on anything. So let us look beyond the contextual and inferential evidence.
Here, the first thing we find is that the allegation Rauff was connected to DINA, from scholars and activists alike, is in itself nebulous: no serious person says Rauff was an employee; his role is portrayed as that of an informal “adviser”. The next intrusive fact is that when one tries to track down the original source for the claims of a Rauff-Pinochet relationship, one is led into a wilderness of mirrors.
Since everyone knew Rauff was in Chile after the legal procedures in the early 1960s, and the Soviets had a well-established practice of utilising such people for political warfare, it was to be expected that the Chilean exiled opposition, especially the Marxists of the fallen regime, many of whom were physically based in the Soviet Empire,29 would try to tie the “former” Nazi to the Pinochet government. A Moscow edition of Izvestia had claimed Rauff had an office at Londres 38, a DINA detention facility that became notorious. Panorama DDR, a magazine of the Soviets’ East German colony, wrote that Rauff was a “most important adviser” to DINA and DINA was described as modelled on the Gestapo.30 From content such as this, a cascade got going.
An incarnation of the “Russell Tribunal”, a fellow-travelling agitprop outfit originally set up by British philosopher Bertrand Russell in the late 1960s to advocate for the Sovietization of Vietnam,31 met in Rome, starting in March-April 1974, and declared it had been given information that Rauff worked for the Chilean military; neither this information nor its source was made public, but the claim made the rounds, especially in Left-wing circles.32 The International League Against Racism and Antisemitism (LICRA),33 the Jewish advocacy group, said in this period Rauff had been assigned “new tasks” for the Pinochet government, and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal said that even without evidence Rauff must be presumed to be a DINA “adviser”. American poet and activist Rose Styron went to Chile in February 1974 and came away sceptical that Rauff was employed by Pinochet, but Styron travelled with Amnesty International, which produced several widely-read reports naming Rauff as the embodiment of “Nazi influence” over DINA.34 In June-July 1974, West European newspapers began reporting on the story, specifically Le Monde and the French media, and the claim had escalated to Rauff being appointed head of DINA.35 The Western media articles made Rauff and his presence in Chile an internationally-known fact of life, and there were recurrent bouts of stories about him in the Western press over the next decade.
It was in response to the summer 1974 media furore that the CIA was asked to look into the Rauff-Pinochet issue. The CIA quickly concluded in early July 1974 that the stories were “not accurate”. The DINA director was verifiably Manuel Contreras, who served until 1977 when the political police were reorganised and rebranded as the National Information Centre (CNI),36 and the records at Agency headquarters in Santiago were clear: “Rauff is not connected [to the] Chilean security services”. A subsequent Agency report, a week later, reiterated that the stories were “completely untrue; Rauff has no connection [to the] Chilean gov[ernmen]t”.
Again, one is free to dismiss the CIA as a source, but it does create a problem for those arguing there was a Rauff connection to the Pinochet regime because a crucial piece of evidence they almost invariably cite is a CIA report from 1977, which says Rauff “may have some close connection with DINA”.37 Later, the report says: “While DINA has denied that Rauff works with the Chilean government, he may well have been in the position of ‘unofficial advisor’.” Let us skip over the CIA’s review of the Rauff-DINA issue in 1984, when it was concluded, “there is nothing in our files to substantiate this”, and examine the 1977 document, where at least four interrelated things stand out.
First, taken on its own, “may” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Second, unlike the 1974 reports that render their judgments on the basis of intelligence collected by the Agency—however flawed that might be—there is no pretence the CIA has its own evidence here; the only citations are to a Mexican newspaper article and the statements of exiled Chilean oppositionists, none of whom could know what they claim and some of whom were Soviet loyalists. Which leads to the third aspect: this is after the Letelier assassination, when sentiment within the CIA about Pinochet had darkened, making it more willing to include negative speculation and hearsay in its outputs about his government. Fourth, the 1977 report was produced after three years of the Soviet-derived information war outlined above proposing a Rauff-Pinochet connection, which had influenced not only popular opinion but elite opinion, especially among American liberals who dominated the mainstream press, and the CIA analytical shop has always had a strong liberal bias and a tendency to “confidently repackag[e] establishment biases” as assessments, in the words of a former Agency officer.38
That Soviet active measures had contaminated CIA products about Chile is attested by none other than the CIA. In the 1977 document, the Agency repeats its earlier findings about Rauff’s pre-1973 life, then adds: “This portrait does not coincide with the Rauff who was investigated by an Izvestia correspondent who went to Chile”. No qualification is added to this; no hint of scepticism. The reader is left to assume that as between the reporting of the CIA “station in late 1974” and the reporting of Izvestia, the reader can take their pick. Izvestia was the official organ of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., i.e., the mouthpiece of the Soviet government. (Pravda was the voice of the Party.) Anything in Izvestia was meant to advance the official propaganda line of the Soviet Union, and its “journalists” abroad were either under tight KGB control—their actual “reporting” was effectively espionage, since it went to the Centre, which then made a decision on whether the information was useful as messaging to appear in the pages of the newspaper—or they were simply KGB officers posing as journalists.39
Spy Games
Grant the CIA this much, though, when the 1977 document discusses getting some of its information about Rauff from the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND),40 it did not go unnoticed at the Agency that the BND had been cagey and inconsistent in describing its sources. In assessing the explanations, the CIA noted: “If Rauff, his son, or [former Luftwaffe pilot Enrique Pschold] Reschenback are BND’s sources of information then many of the questions on BND’s handling of the case would be answered.”
In 2011, archival releases showed the CIA had been correct: Rauff was a BND agent from 1958 to 1962, i.e., during his first years in Chile. Rauff was recruited as a spy for West German intelligence with the hope of using him against Castro’s Cuba, and when West Germany was publicly requesting Rauff’s extradition in the early 1960s it was privately helping him fight it. The question of who was doing what for whom and why at any one moment is always very messy in the intelligence world, and the Rauff case was no exception. Bonn remained in contact with Rauff after he was formally cut as an agent. The frequency and nature of West Germany’s communications with Rauff after 1962 is very uncertain. Similarly unclear is whether, and if so when, contact ceased. What is known is that contact continued until at least mid-1974: during the Western media feeding frenzy about Rauff working for Pinochet, the BND still had the ability to ask Rauff directly. Rauff said he was not working at DINA and “has not received any offer to work for DINA”.41
The most shocking claim, derived from some contemporaneous CIA memos that were circulated in the media sixty years after they were written, is that Rauff had some kind of relationship with Israeli intelligence circa 1948-50. The documents are confused about the time-frame—and much else. It is unclear what the CIA is actually claiming vis-à-vis the Israel-Rauff relationship. There is a lot of conjecture, some of it internally incoherent. The Agency premise is that Israel wanted to use Rauff against Egypt during the first existential war, but on the CIA’s own account nothing came of this, and yet the CIA implies the Israelis facilitated Rauff’s later move from Syria to Ecuador anyway. There is little that can be called evidence in these CIA files. In the March 1950 document where the CIA is most bold in stating that “the Israeli Service with all probability … had engaged [Rauff]”, the text in the ellipsis concedes: “this has not yet been confirmed”. It never would be confirmed in any subsequent CIA reporting. When the CIA referred to these files in a 1984, it called them “spotty” and “unconfirmed”. Non-CIA evidence casts further doubt upon the original claims.
The idea that Israeli intelligence would establish relations with a Nazi fugitive to thwart a perceived existential threat is not on-its-face implausible because it happened. In 1964, facing the extreme danger of the Egyptian missile program and aware that Nazi scientists were helping Cairo, MOSSAD recruited Otto Skorzeny, an SS officer who had no role in implementing the Holocaust, being known instead for his involvement in special operations, the raid to spring Mussolini above all, and engineering the Arrow Cross takeover of Hungary.42 However, what we know from Ronen Bergman’s comprehensive history of Israeli covert action, Rise and Kill First, is that dealing with a “former” Nazi in the 1960s was immensely controversial within MOSSAD—there was a ferocious argument about whether to countenance such a thing, regardless of the potential benefits, which turned out to be considerable—and it was personally traumatic for MOSSAD case officers.43 Bergman found no hint anything like this had happened before, or would happen again. Thus, while it cannot be ruled out that in desperation during the war for Israel’s rebirth MOSSAD tried something with Rauff, the available evidence strongly suggests they did not.
Rauff died in Chile on 14 May 1984. British intelligence had judged that “Rauff remained an unrepentant Nazi”, and his very public funeral at a Lutheran church in Santiago the next day confirmed it. In front of the international media, mourners at the grave side, some of whom had never met Rauff but admired him as a symbol, gave the Nazi salute and shouted, “Heil Hitler!”
REFERENCES
José Piñera (2005), ‘How Salvador Allende Destroyed Democracy in Chile’, Society. Available here.
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (2005), The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for The Third World, pp. 69-70.
The World Was Going Our Way, p. 72.
The World Was Going Our Way, p. 74.
Piñera, ‘How Salvador Allende Destroyed Democracy in Chile’.
The World Was Going Our Way, pp. 85-86.
The World Was Going Our Way, pp. 116-125.
Under the cover of détente, the Western unilateral ceasefire in the Cold War overseen by Henry Kissinger, whose ideological befuddlement and personal pride kept him stubbornly wedded to the policy long after it had flagrantly and catastrophically failed, the Soviets had brought the West to its nadir by 1979. The Soviet Third World Campaign that had begun in the mid-1950s, first with tentative experiments like Guatemala and then more systematically, especially once the Cuban bridgehead was in place after 1959, was succeeding on all fronts.
Somalia fell to the Communists in 1969, the first year of détente, and from there the contagion spread to Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, Vietnam, the other Indochinese dominos, and Afghanistan. In 1979 alone, Nicaragua and Grenada were lost. Earlier in the year, Iran had fallen to a Revolution that looked for a time as if it would go Communist, and though it ultimately went Islamist, the reverberations from that led the Soviets to directly conquer Afghanistan at the end of 1979. Before the Soviet tide could be arrested in the Reagan years, Rhodesia was also communized. Surveying this picture in June 1979, a month before the Soviets colonised Nicaragua, the CIA assessed frankly that the Soviet Union “can view their position in the world with considerable satisfaction” and the “momentum” in the Third World was all going Moscow’s way. See: Robert Gates (1996), From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, p. 116.
Ladislav Bittman (1985), The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View, pp. 49-50.
Thomas Rid (2020), Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, p. 189.
The World Was Going Our Way, p. 88.
In the mid-1980s, the KGB initiated a disinformation campaign (Operation DENVER) claiming that the U.S. government had manufactured HIV/AIDS as a biological weapon against black Americans. Forged documents “proving” this were spread in the global media, starting on U.S. Independence Day (4 July) 1984 in an Indian newspaper. Despite the AIDS story having the distinction of being the first active measure formally repudiated by the Soviet Revolution, in August 1987, it has endured. See: The World Was Going Our Way, p. 340.
KGB-origin conspiracy theories about Operation GLADIO are as rampant as ever. And the contents of the Soviet “anti-Zionist” active measures campaign—which portrayed Israel as a colonialist enterprise, and a racist, apartheid State that behaves worse than the Nazis—are convulsing Western societies and world politics at this very moment.
Spanish: Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional.
Jack Anderson at The New York Times was an important “unwitting agent” (in Soviet parlance) for Operation TOUCAN. See: The World Was Going Our Way, p. 87.
E. A. Fedosov (2017), ‘The Fascization of the Enemy Image in Soviet Visual Propaganda at the Beginning of the Cold War Period (1946–1964)’, Bulletin of Tomsk State University. Available here.
And: Harold D. Lasswell (1951), ‘The Strategy of Soviet Propaganda’, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science. Available here.
The issue is also discussed in: Rósa Magnúsdóttir (2019), Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959.
Michal Zourek (2013), ‘Political and Economic Relations between Czechoslovakia and the Military Regimes of the Southern Cone in the 1970s and 1980s’, Central European Journal of International and Security Studies. Available here (p. 121).
For a deeper look at this dynamic, see: Michael Scott Christofferson (2004), French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s.
Zourek, ‘Political and Economic Relations between Czechoslovakia and the Military Regimes of the Southern Cone in the 1970s and 1980s’.
Kim Christiaens (2014), ‘European Reconfigurations of Transnational Activism: Solidarity and Human Rights Campaigns on Behalf of Chile during the 1970s and 1980s’, European Review of History. Available here.
The Soviet-loyal “Chilean opposition” repaid the DDR’s assistance by helping Erich Honecker escape justice after History turned against him in 1989.
Piñera, ‘How Salvador Allende Destroyed Democracy in Chile’.
Christiaens, ‘European Reconfigurations of Transnational Activism’.
Joint Publications Research Service (1977, Aug. 31), Translations From Kommunist No. 10, p. 135. Available here.
Daniel Stahl (2013), Hunt for Nazis: South America’s Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes, pp. 52-53.
The perennial victim of Soviet “anti-Nazi” active measures was West Germany, presented as a State where a democratic façade concealed its nature as a continuation of the Third Reich. The Soviet colony hived off Germany and hilariously named the “German Democratic Republic” (DDR) was the antithesis, in the KGB’s telling, a workers’ paradise that had embraced “people’s democracy” once it was freed from the shackles of capitalist fascism. That the DDR was as infested with Nazi remnants as the FRG was neither here nor there. This narrative would prove intoxicating to the Sixties generation, most infamously with the Baader-Meinhof Group, an “urban guerrilla” creature of Moscow Centre, managed locally by the Stasi.
For an idea of the scale and type of propaganda directed at West Germany, see: Fedosov, ‘The Fascization of the Enemy Image in Soviet Visual Propaganda at the Beginning of the Cold War Period (1946–1964)’. For a broader (and deeper) look at the whole issue, see: Jeffrey Herf (1997), Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys.
Gustavo Guzmán, ‘A Veil of Silence: the Life and Networks of Walther Rauff in Chile’, in: Linda Erker and Raanan Rein [eds.] (2024), Nazis and Nazi Sympathizers in Latin America after 1945, p. 140.
Uki Goñi (2002), The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, p. 100.
Raanan Rein (2001), ‘The Eichmann Kidnapping: Its Effects on Argentine-Israeli Relations and the Local Jewish Community’, Jewish Social Studies. Available here.
When first arriving in Chile, from 1958 to 1962, Rauff ostensibly worked as an export manager for the Importadora Goldmann company in Santiago. As we shall see, this was a cover for his real employment. The CIA thought Rauff had worked as a rancher or farmer after that, and he might well have done. A recent quasi-biography of Rauff by Philippe Sands said Rauff worked as a manager of a king crab cannery in Punta Arenas, southern Chile. Again, it could be true, but the novel evidence Sands adduces boils down to Rauff apparently referring to “my cannery” in a couple written and spoken exchanges with family in the early 1970s (pp. 135-136) and reminiscences of former factory workers.
The problem is not just that Sands is relying on memory about events half-a-century earlier. The detail about Rauff managing a king crab canning factory was first floated in the press after Rauff died in 1984, and it has since then been elaborated into an element of the narratives tying Rauff to the Pinochet government. In short, this claim is part of popular received wisdom about Rauff’s activities in Chile, and there are strong political reasons why many want it to be true—as Sands himself demonstrates, pairing Rauff’s purported connection with the crab factory, for which he has weak evidence, with the claim DINA was connected to the crab factory, for which he has better evidence, and blurring the distinction between the two to construct a Rauff-Pinochet connection (see footnote 37). Overall, we just do not know very much about Rauff’s employment history during his quarter-century in Chile.
In late 1972, after Salvador Allende made a speech condemning racism and (uncharacteristically) antisemitism, Simon Wiesenthal thought he saw a chance to re-open the issue of Chile handing over Rauff. Allende personally wrote to Wiesenthal explaining that the Supreme Court had ruled on the matter and for once Allende was happy to abide by the ruling.
Christiaens, ‘European Reconfigurations of Transnational Activism’.
Philippe Sands (2025), 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia, pp. 145-146.
The World Was Going Our Way, pp. 13-14.
38 Londres Street, p. 145.
French: Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme.
38 Londres Street, pp. 145-146.
The Pinochet junta responded that it was “absolutely untrue” it had any relationship with Rauff and blamed the rumour on a Marxist agitator “try[ing] to make the Chilean government appear as fascists”—but so it would.
Spanish: Central Nacional de Informaciones.
The most recent example is Philippe Sands, an “international law” activist, who cited this CIA document in his book, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia (p. 146). In fairness to Sands, in this part of the book, he handles the claims by Chilean oppositionists and the Soviets that Rauff was an “adviser” to DINA with caution, which makes it the more telling that as he shifts gear in the narrative to argue that more credible evidence of a connection was accumulating, this 1977 CIA document is the key citation.
(By later in the book, Sands gets a little less cautious, relaying claims that Rauff oversaw DINA operations where oppositionists were “thrown into the machines” at his king crab cannery and “added to the fishmeal [as] feed for chickens” (p. 327), though Sands does give another interviewee space to say she is “suspicious about the fish food story” (p. 373), so Sands does not technically endorse this sensationalist detail and the discerning reader can recognise that, even in the text, it is admitted hearsay.
The whole book is like this, with Sands maintaining a tone of objectivity, and when it comes to the specifics sometimes overtly interjecting scepticism and often tacitly conceding he cannot prove there’s a “there” there, while in general pushing the reader towards believing Rauff worked for Pinochet, and that this nexus led to heinous crimes. Colin Shindler summarised things well in The Jerusalem Post: “[Sands] tries his hardest to strongly link Pinochet and Rauff but concludes that in many instances the factual evidence was simply not there.”)
Reuel Marc Gerecht (2022, May 5), ‘Can The Intelligence Community Tell What’s Brewing In Afghanistan?’, Hoover Institution. Available here. Another former U.S. intelligence officer concurs that “CIA analysts … usually follow mainstream opinion”.
For example, the public presentation of Boris Pavlovich Fetisov travelling as an “Izvestia correspondent” to Mozambique in November 1974 was cover for this KGB officer assessing the condition of FRELIMO, the Soviet-run “national liberation movement”, in preparation for FRELIMO’s takeover of the country in mid-1975. The Centre was, as always in such circumstances, most immediately focused on helping FRELIMO create a KGB replica to terrorise its “opponents, real and imagined”. See: The World Was Going Our Way, p. 455. The Novosti and TASS covers were probably used more often than Izvestia, but this is a matter of degrees.
German: Bundesnachrichtendienst.
38 Londres Street, p. 145.
Skorzeny played a prominent role in Operation PANZERFAUST in October 1944, which removed Miklós Horthy from power in Hungary and installed the Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross (NYKP). There were massacres of Jews and a steady toll of more random atrocities over the six or so months the NYKP was in power, amounting to around 20,000 murders, and Skorzeny can certainly be held responsible, at least indirectly, for these crimes. However, the Nazi genocide that destroyed two-thirds of Hungary’s Jews had already been completed before PANZERFAUST. Germany had invaded Hungary in March 1944 and captured the critical infrastructure, while stopping short of a full occupation. This gave Berlin sufficient power over the Hungarian government to begin deportations of Hungarian Jews on 15 May 1944, and in eight weeks the Nazis had transported approximately 440,000 people—most of them murdered on arrival at Auschwitz. It was the Nazis running into the limitations of this form of control that led to the decision to conquer Hungary via the NYKP.
The nominal Hungarian ruler, Admiral Horthy, had realised that when he had been pressured into accepting the deportations, he had really signed-off on extermination, and his personal disgust was reinforced by appeals to halt the transports from foreign Sovereigns, notably Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), and public Allied warnings that those complicit in crimes against humanity would be held personally accountable. While Horthy was unable to seriously impede the trains from the rest of Hungary, he made a forceful stand to protect the 200,000 Jews of Budapest—“in effect, the last Jews of Europe”—from Adolf Eichmann.
Prevailing in a power-struggle with the Nazi-loyal elements within the State by early July 1944, Horthy was in a position to give an order that “all measures necessary [be taken] to prevent the deportation of the Budapest Jews” and have the army enforce it. “One train bound for Auschwitz was even turned around and sent back, on Horthy’s orders”, Jonathan Freedland notes. Eichmann fumed, “In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me before”. Nazi patience with Horthy was exhausted once he announced an armistice in mid-October 1944. Horthy was removed in the German-orchestrated coup and the NYKP began working to complete the Nazi plan for a Judenrein Europe with mass-killings and death marches, but by then it was too late to reactivate the machinery of industrial genocide. In February 1945, Budapest was occupied by the Red Army.
See: Jonathan Freedland (2022), The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, pp. 238-248.
Important as this history is—and has become in the contemporary politics of Hungary—it did not feature heavily in the press coverage about Skorzeny after 1945. The somewhat hyperbolic media description of Skorzeny as “the most dangerous man in Europe” was not a reference to the questions about his role in, or responsibility for, the crimes against Hungarian Jewry, but to his apparent proficiency in “spectacular” military operations as demonstrated in the September 1943 Gran Sasso raid in Italy.
Ronen Bergman (2018), Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, pp. 108-119.