Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?
This is True Spies. They were releasing their rockets. We had no idea whether they were any good flying right over the embassy with these rockets. There were some tense moments there. A lot of the folks were pushed into a vault because there was concern that if a bomb misses, you know, it wasn't meant for the Americans, but we were vulnerable. Episode 56, The Boiling Frog.
I'm Jack Devine and I was the acting and associate deputy director of CIA. I joined the CIA in the late 60s and spent over 32 years in the CIA. Jack Devine built a career being in the right place at exactly the right time. He ran the Counter Narcotics Center and oversaw the capture of drug lord Pablo Escobar.
He went to dinner parties at the home of Aldrich Ames, before Ames became one of the KGB's most notorious double agents. Ever heard of a little operation called "Charlie Wilson's War"? More like "Jack Devine's War". Jack ran the largest covert action campaign of the Cold War. He equipped the Afghan Mujahideen with Stinger missiles, a game-changing move in the war with the Soviets.
He made his way up the ranks of the CIA to become the second in command in the clandestine service, and later to lead its worldwide operations. In short, he was at the peak of his career, the world's top spymaster. His career in the agency spanned over three decades and seven foreign assignments. But this story takes place on his first overseas assignment, in 1970s Chile.
when President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup and Jack, then a junior officer, was trapped in his station in the embassy in Santiago, wondering how history would be written. They spent a lot of time looking out the window, which, by the way, you shouldn't do a lot of that when you're expecting a crisis, but you're in the intelligence business, at least you can give an eyewitness report. But I think we sent a note saying, so far, nothing. So...
I don't think there was a lot of chatting. I think the chief sat in his office thinking, you know, what is about to happen and how that is going to play out. And I was there, likewise sitting there thinking, what's the next move here? What are we doing? We didn't know. He didn't know the answer. I mean, what happened was not foreseen. What happened was the rise of Augusto Pinochet, who reversed Allende's leftist policies and led a brutal dictatorship that lasted for nearly two decades.
Under the Pinochet regime, tens of thousands of Chileans were tortured and thousands more were killed or disappeared. Contrary to popular belief, the CIA was not responsible for the coup that brought Pinochet to power. Or at least, so says Jack, who wants to get the record straight. It's just not true. Trust me, I was right in the embassy. Of course, the agency did attempt one coup in Chile, three years earlier.
In 1970, socialist politician Salvador Allende won the country's presidential election with less than 37% of the vote. He squeaked out his victory in spite of a highly secretive effort on the part of the CIA, a strategy they called "Track One". At the time, there was widespread fear that Allende would install Cuban-style socialism in Chile.
Under Track 1, the agency gave its covert backing to media and political parties that could undermine his support. Obviously, things didn't quite go according to Plan A. So after Allende won the election, Richard Nixon devised a Plan B. Track 2, when in 1970 the CIA was instructed to try and organize a coup which failed terribly.
When the election came and they realized that it was made up that Allende actually won, they were surprised.
They felt that Chile could become communist. If it became communist, it could march up the continent. And people have forgotten all the struggles with Che Guevara in Bolivia and the Tupomaras. There were real problems with the Cuban exportation of the revolution. So when you're trying to get this in the context today, it's hard. You have to understand the world's view at that time. Richard Nixon believed that a communist takeover of Chile...
would create what he called a red sandwich in Latin America. When they talk about the red sandwich, it's on one end you have Cuba, you have all Latin America and South America, and then you get the Chilean. They were anticipating that there would be a squeeze to bring communism to Latin America. This is a young person in Chile. I thought this struggle is going to go on
for the rest of my life, but we're going to hold the line everywhere and we're not going to see Latin American or Latin American friends under a communist system. And this was the core reason why there was an effort to try and block Allende. Could Chile be the domino that toppled the democratic world? U.S. leadership was determined not to find out. But in 1970, the Chilean military had no interest in thwarting Allende. And the Chilean people?
Well, they had elected him fair and square. The conditions just weren't right for staging a coup. Even the Santiago station chief at the time believed that fomenting a coup was a bad idea. Nevertheless, in October 1970, and with the backing of the CIA, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army was shot during an attempted kidnapping. General René Schneider had opposed military intervention in presidential politics.
So a group led by current and former military officials had conceived a plan. They would kidnap Schneider, clearing the way for a coup that would prevent Chile from falling under the Soviet sphere of influence. But in the midst of the abduction, the conspirators shot the general, who later died in hospital. Rather than paving the way for a coup, Schneider's killing only amplified the popularity of the president-elect. Within days, Allende was inaugurated.
Jack claims that there's confusion between the failed coup of 1970 and the events of 1973. That's why so many people think the CIA was behind the fall of Allende.
What people don't realize, but they should understand by these comments that I'm making, we were not wired into the military in the way that fake news would lead you to believe, which is the CIA had no interaction with the military in 73 and preparing a coup.
And only found out about it on the 7th of September. The coup was on 11th September. In fact, the report I sent in was the first report advising Washington that there was a coup. Got it? Good. So the CIA may not have worked directly with the Chileans to overthrow Allende, but it did help to create the right conditions for a coup to take place by actively supporting the opposition.
And that's what brought a young Jack Devine to Santiago in the summer of 1971. His role? To support the political parties, media and labor organizations that would keep democracy alive under Allende's leadership until he could be defeated in the next election. Santiago, the nation's capital, sits at the feet of the Andes Mountains and is dotted with impressive neoclassical architecture. On its face, it was a vibrant city,
Picturesque, charming, full of culture and ideas. But under Allende, Jack says, the nation was in crisis. It's a beautiful country and the people are amazingly friendly, talented, intellectually curious, a great nation, great history. But the country was in turmoil. So many people had left. Food supplies shouldn't have wasted your time in those days going to a supermarket. There literally was virtually nothing to buy in the supermarket and inflation was rampant.
In fact, when you would go to the store, the prices would change during the day. The inflation was so horrendous by '71. One has to visualize a country where there's no media, no CNN, no Western newspapers were not coming in. The only way I could get outside reporting was with the BBC. The country was much more isolated than people realized. Travel was greatly reduced. U.S. government officials were not allowed in Chile without special permission.
Chile was considered a hostile operating environment. When officials came and went, they were potentially more likely to be put under surveillance. So it was a really tight environment because they considered the risk too high to have non-essential travel. And that stayed in place for years. So there was a tremendous amount of personal tension, national tension, which only grew
As the years passed under Allende, every month the situation became increasingly tense. Jack arrived in Chile with his wife, Pat, and five children between the ages of two and seven. You must remember, for a junior officer, Santiago was the place to be. Chile was one of the most important locations for covert action at the time, second only to Vietnam. Jack was so excited by the job that he didn't give much notice to the danger that surrounded his family.
Like the proverbial frog in the pot, he hardly noticed that he was in hot water, even as things slowly came to a boil. There is a naivete that exists in people, and I'll step up and say, you know, you're young, you think everything is manageable, nothing bad is going to happen to you. But I remember one of the most personal mistakes I think I made was to sit down with my wife in the living room
and pull out a shotgun and say, "Look, we could have riots. People could be coming through the door, and if they come through the door, aim at the chest." And she said, "Well, how do you reload?" Being married to a spy is not for the faint of heart, but Jack's wife Pat took a keen interest in helping her husband succeed. In their early days in Chile, Divine was tasked with recruiting agents, typically foreigners, who would share secrets with the agency.
And Pat got in on the effort. She was very gregarious, and I was more what I would call a wallflower. We would go to the cocktail parties, and the next thing I know, she'd be over and say, look, Jack, meet this guy. He'd give him a card.
I got better at it. I needed a little push there. And it isn't the movies where you go in and you throw some blackmail documents in front of someone, particularly in the American intelligence business. It was often finding the right person that wanted to work with you. But how do you make someone want to work with you? Pat had an instinct. Invite them over for a party. Loosen up your prospective foreign targets with a few cocktails, a bit of disco and dancing, and who knows...
Maybe that Soviet doing the hustle would become your next key asset. One asset in particular would prove instrumental in building up the opposition. She was a grandmotherly middle-class woman and a member of a civil activist group.
Maybe not the first person you'd expect to be involved in covert action. She surely would blend in in a way in which you would not say, well, who was that person? So the beauty of it, she looked very average. What she had, though, which I probably underappreciated, was there was a lot of enthusiasm and energy in this woman and real desire to make a difference in an environment that she saw changing in a way that threatened her middle-class existence.
In other words, an asset who could fly under the radar. She even flew under Jack's radar. I didn't see where the intelligence was coming from. The country was moving in bigger ways than your local social club. But she seemed enthusiastic and said, well, I'm organizing our group to do a march because of the shortage of food.
You know, it'd help if we had a little money, we could get out more people. And so I gave her the equivalent of $800. And that was the end of it. I walked out the room and said, well, that was an interesting lady. I'll keep her in mind for future things. I didn't think about it for a month. And then I was leaving the embassy one afternoon and I could hear a little noise and I was walking down the street and there were thousands of women marching with pots and pans. Masses of women and students.
beating their kitchenware, protesting nationwide shortages of food and household goods. And there, at the very front of the parade, was Jack's asset. Turns out, $800 can go a long way. There was another face in the crowd he recognized too, the woman who cleaned his house.
And I thought, no, this is not just the middle class. This is more pervasive. It was an eye-opening for me. It opened my eyes to the depth of the problems that the government was facing. And if I were in the Allende government, I would have tried to take notice of that because maybe they had crossed the Rubicon. There was no way back economically at a certain point. He left the scene of the march with his chest out and head high, proud that he'd made a smart investment in a highly effective asset.
Mission accomplished, or so he thought. Well, I wasn't anticipating that there was going to be a problem or I would have stayed on the street, for sure. I would have followed it all the way to its ultimate conclusion. But it seemed to me it'd be a nice march that would terminate with a nice speech and that'd be the end of it. Oh, Jack, haven't you noticed? The pot has started to simmer.
That night, Jack dined at the elegant rooftop restaurant of the Carrera Hotel, situated on the plaza in front of La Moneda, the presidential palace. In the middle of his meal, people began to gather at the windows to get a look at the crowds protesting below. It got bigger and bigger, and there were thousands and thousands of women beating pots and pans. Five thousand of them, to be exact.
- It still would not have turned into a determining event except the far left socialists, which were far more leftist than the Communist Party, young people they called maristas, and they started throwing things at the women. The next thing you know, you had a riot. And that was a picture that was shot around the world. - From the hotel window, Jack witnessed the Chilean women being attacked by the left-wing maristas.
Dozens of people were injured. At least one was shot. Imagine, you're sitting in one of the poshest restaurants in the city, looking down at a violent scene you unknowingly helped orchestrate. How does it feel to see one small decision create a ripple effect across thousands of lives? To place countless numbers of women in danger? Is it worth it if it's to your benefit? What about the benefit of global democracy?
For our young spy, the march of empty pots and pans taught him an invaluable lesson. Make sure you evaluate. Some of your assets may have a lot more potential than you give them credit for, so make sure you take a good hard look at it. The march in December 1971 was a galvanizing event for the opposition. Other marches followed, mobilizing ever greater numbers of people against Allende and his policies. And as the numbers grew, so did the sense of unease.
People began to realize the depth of the tension between large segments of the population and the government. It started, I think, also to sink into the military that there might be an unhappy ending to this. By the autumn of 1972, the atmosphere in Santiago had grown feverish. The second anniversary of Allende's election was marked by violent protests.
which the police dispersed with the use of tear gas. By October, workers all across the country began to go on strike. After his election, Allende had begun to nationalize various industries. And like the students and homemakers before them, business people started to push back. Shopkeepers, civil engineers, even doctors and dentists began to strike in response to the economic hardship they faced.
One of the most decisive groups were the truckers. You know, you've got a truck and you've got an asset and buying gas was a problem and not being able to deliver the food or get the food delivered. So the truckers were very alienated. Many of these truckers were small, independent businesses. Under the socialist government, it became increasingly difficult for them to get their hands on spare parts thanks to high import prices.
Everything rolls on trucks, so if you have a national strike of truckers, you better get ready for a really rough time. But how much rougher could things get? As it turns out, the answer was just around the corner.
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school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. Within months, rumors were swirling of an imminent coup, but it was hard to sort out the credible news from the empty threats.
Jack says that one of the worst ideas proliferating in the intelligence business is to rely on buffling code language to deliver information. Many people do this in the intelligence business and I would tell them for good reason, please don't do this. If it's a coup, call the embassy at this line and say Uncle Harry's here or the baby's about to be delivered. One particular headache came in early 1973 when an asset placed a phone call saying...
My aunt is sick and may not live to recover. But the code language to indicate a coup was in fact, my aunt has died. So when you get a message like that, you really have to say when, where, who, how, are you sure, double sure, triple sure. So the message went and nothing happened and everybody was chagrined, I'll put it mildly. No coup. Worse, station management had begun to seem like the boy who cried wolf.
Jack made it a policy not to use ambiguously coded phrases from then on out. I still didn't see the coup coming when it did. I thought that the Democratic forces would win in the next national election and that our efforts were going to keep them afloat until we got there. But in the summer of 73, there was an event called the Tenkaso.
The Tancuso, the tank putsch, when a group of seditionist soldiers, allegedly licked up from the night before, drove a column of tanks to downtown Santiago and surrounded La Moneda. Imagine that happening in Washington, D.C., 18 tanks in front of 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue. You're going to have a tense moment. But the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Carlos Prats, came out and talked them back. He said, look, you're soldiers, you've got to follow my command, so...
They left. And I thought, you know, Allende's safe. I know we're getting tense and it's a crisis and people are feeling it very, very strongly. But here you had a crisis and the military stayed behind the president. Remember, this is a country with 150 years of democratic history where the military adhered to the Constitution. So I think by our collective judgment, there was no coup was coming. It might have felt like a crisis averted, but in fact, it was only the start of one.
Military leadership was spooked. According to Jack, Augusto Pinochet believed that if he didn't join forces with the soldiers, he'd lose control to them. Pinochet was then a military officer. Allende would soon name him commander-in-chief of the Chilean army.
What I didn't know until a few years later is that's the day that the military went back and started planning coup plotting. Not because of the marches and the strikes and the food. They went back because the military institution was starting to get cracks in it and they were losing control over their own institution. And that is the trigger.
By September, the country was still rocking and rolling. And we were getting more and more of the view that it might not last until the end. It might not last for Allende. Jack received word of the final event one afternoon a few weeks later. It came from his number one asset, his wife, Pat.
I was in a great Italian restaurant, it's called La Carla. I was there having lunch with a colleague and one of the officers from the station came in and said, "Jack, your wife really needs to talk to you." Why would Pat need to speak with Jack so urgently that she would try to reach him at a restaurant? Jack had a hunch. He quickly made his way back to the station to get on a secure phone line. Pat told him in no uncertain terms
Your friend called from the airport. He's leaving the country. He told me to tell you the military has decided to move. It's going to happen on September 11th. The warning was soon confirmed by a second source, who added the time that the coup was to take place. 7 a.m. Jack sent the information to the White House in a critic, a top-secret cable delivered straight to the president and to the top of every relevant governmental agency. He kept his message short and sweet.
On September 11th, the military will start a coup in Valparaiso. It'll kick off at 7:00 in the morning and it will include the Army, Navy, Air Force and Carabineros. And it'll be announced on Radio Agricultura. I only sent one critic in my life and that was it. But the baby had been born. Uncle Harry had arrived. The aunt had died. And the station had cried wolf one too many times.
When the message that I sent in reached the analysts, sadly they committed the mistake that happens in the analytical world. In the analytical world, this mistake is often conventional wisdom. It never happens here. It'll never happen here.
Convention wisdom overrides. So the analytical world, it was far away from the streets of Santiago, said there isn't going to be a military coup. And they didn't dissent it or at least didn't move on it. But because it was a critic message, it got to the White House nonetheless. The night before the coup was set to unfold, Jack remained in the station with a few of his colleagues. As the hours went by, they received a series of bizarre phone calls.
Presumably assets warning about the coup in unintelligible codes. Finally, it was 7 a.m. on the morning of September 11th, precisely the time the coup was scheduled to take place. As the minutes passed, Jack grew uneasy. I looked out the window and I thought, well, this is the second big embarrassment. We just sent a message in and it's not going to pan out. And then you started to literally see the tank rolling down the street alongside the embassy.
8:00 AM. The asset had been off by an hour. By 9:00, armed forces had seized the entire country. But downtown Santiago was in chaos. Chilean Air Force jets blazed overhead. They were releasing their rockets. We had no idea whether they were any good flying right over the embassy with these rockets. So there were some tense moments there. A lot of the folks were pushed into a vault.
you know, lead walls or steel walls. And because there was concern that if a bomb misses, you know, it wasn't meant for the Americans, but we were vulnerable. Firefights, skirmishes and gunfire persisted for hours. At 11 a.m., Allende delivered a live radio address, effectively his suicide note. "Long live Chile," he said. "Long live the people. Long live the workers. These are my last words.
I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain." Sometime around two o'clock, Salvador Allende placed a gun under his chin and fired.
The long and painful Pinochet regime had begun. There was an immediate but not long-lasting sense that an international national security crisis has been averted. We're not going to have another Cuba. So in that context, when they collapsed, it was that the red menace, this red sandwich had dissipated and now, you know, we'll have to fight them in other places. So there was...
Indeed, a sense of, "Okay, you know, Allende was stopped." But what was not factored in is what came behind it. The atmosphere was hardly jubilant. Having worked through the night, Jack was now trapped in the station.
A couple of hours later, there was a total lockdown that lasts for several days and you couldn't leave. So we had to break into the embassy commissary and get food, along with the defense attache. So we were stuck in there. And that is when the Pinochet forces rounded up people. We didn't see it. You couldn't see it. You didn't know what was happening. We were stuck in there. They did receive occasional reports, however. One was particularly rattling.
There was a very brief window where I received notice that there was going to be an attack by the military against the house adjacent to me that Cubans had lived in. Remember, he hadn't seen his family since the coup began. Amidst all the turmoil, Pat has been holding down the fort on her own. Jack began to worry. What if they raided the wrong house? The military had lifted the curfew for a small window of time so that people could go out and procure supplies.
Jack checked. There were just ten minutes left. Put yourself in Jack's shoes. You moved your beloved wife and family to a country in political turmoil. You worked to bolster the opposition, setting the scene for upheaval and violence. Now, the capital city is effectively a war zone. Clean-up operations are taking place on the streets. And next door to the site of a scheduled raid, your family is hiding out without you. If something happened to them, well, who's to blame?
Could you live with the consequences? Jack immediately got in touch with a colleague, Jerry, who lived just a few blocks from the divines. Jerry agreed to race to the house, squeeze all six of them into his car and shuttle them to safety. And that's exactly what he did as a military helicopter hovered overhead.
That's when that naivete wears off really fast. Never again did I feel so relaxed about a crisis and the need to be totally prepared for all contingencies. Not so much in the job because I think you do that by training. You got to make sure your personal life is in order as well. After three days, he emerged from the station feeling victorious.
Without orchestrating the coup, he and the other Santiago station members had created precisely the right environment for one to take place. Soon he would be on his way out of Chile, off to his next assignment. Of course, in hindsight, it all looks a little less rosy. Chile had traded one dark chapter of its history for another, even darker one.
A couple years later, I ran into a Russian intelligence officer. We both pretended we didn't know what each other did, but Pinochet came up and said, "Oh no, he'll be in for 20 years." And I thought, "Eh, no way." But he was right. When you look at Pinochet, it wasn't the CIA's dream of how this was going to come out. It was a deep tragedy for the country, very painful. The Allende period was extremely painful, and so was the Pinochet period, extremely painful.
In the aftermath of the coup, Jack met with an asset who had been held captive by the Pinochet regime, who believed that he was a member of the far left. When he said that he'd been tortured, Jack suspected he might have been exaggerating. So the asset rolled up his trouser leg, displaying the evidence. His scars and bruises confirmed that he'd been shackled by his jailers. You don't do that for theater. In other words, the story you're telling is probably accurate. So, Jack, was it all worth it in the end?
Do I have any regrets about my career in the agency and particularly on any of the covert action operations? I do not have any regrets. I consider myself to be fortunate to have been in CIA. I would have thought, along with the chief of station in 1970, the idea of the coup was a bad idea. I believe the track one effort
supporting the media when it was being suppressed, when access to print was being denied deliberately, the censor, the political parties to give them the wherewithal and give people that have a voice the wherewithal to challenge a government that was heavy influenced by the Communist Party and the leftists in the context of the Cold War. I have no trouble with that whatsoever. And I think that was appropriate. I remember
When I got back to the United States in '74, I pulled into Miami airport and got in a taxi. Never forget it. He started immediately criticizing the President of the United States and attacking him. I thought, wow, you know, America is a great place. Here you are a cab driver. You can say whatever you want without waiting for the next light to be drug out and thrown in jail or disappear. So we don't understand very well, those that haven't experienced it,
Jack Devine.
He's still at work today as the president of his own intelligence firm headquartered in New York City. You can read more about his life and work in his new book, The Spy Master's Prism. I'm Vanessa Kirby. Join us next week for another encounter with true spies.