Tenor Love
Thu, 30 Jan 2003 03:37:49 -0800
-Caveat Lector- This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED] Edward Korry, 81, Who Was Falsely Tied to Chile Coup, Dies January 30, 2003 By DAVID STOUT Edward M. Korry, the United States ambassador to Chile from 1967 to 1971, who was for years wrongly suspected of helping to plot a military coup to prevent a Marxist from becoming president there, died yesterday at his home in Charlotte, N.C. He was 81. The cause was cancer, said a daughter, Alexandra Korry of New York City. Within two years after leaving Santiago, Mr. Korry found himself at the center of a Congressional investigation into whether Washington had made covert attempts to block the accession of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, who was elected in 1970 and who died in a military coup three years later. Some investigators in Washington found it difficult to believe that Mr. Korry, as ambassador, could not have known about efforts by the White House and the C.I.A. - later made public - to compel Allende's ouster. After years of protestations, evidence eventually came to light that Mr. Korry had not been entirely trusted by the Nixon administration, which indeed had worked around him. Mr. Korry was named ambassador to Chile by President Lyndon B. Johnson in October 1967. A former news agency reporter and magazine editor, Mr. Korry had previously served in the State Department as a consultant and as the ambassador to Ethiopia. A fervent anti-Communist, he was dismayed when Allende was narrowly elected president of Chile in 1970. "There is a graveyard smell to Chile, the fumes of democracy in decomposition," he cabled Washington that year. "They stank in my nostrils in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and they are no less sickening today." Mr. Korry never hid his dislike for the Chilean leader, which is one reason he came under suspicion when Allende was toppled in 1973, ushering in more than 16 years of military dictatorship. President Richard M. Nixon, like John F. Kennedy and Johnson before him, feared the spread of communism in Latin America. Like his predecessors, Nixon tried to undermine Allende, who had been a source of anxiety in Washington since the early 1960's, when his presidential aspirations became obvious. Suspicions that the Central Intelligence Agency helped to orchestrate the coup surfaced in part because the columnist Jack Anderson published, in 1972, documents from the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation showing that the company had worked with the C.I.A. to undermine Allende. Later, Senate investigators disclosed that in 1970 President Nixon had ordered Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence, to try to keep Allende from assuming power. Congressional investigators eventually established, after weeks of hearings before the two Senate committees in 1973, that the C.I.A. had used I.T.T. as a conduit to funnel at least $8 million to anti-Allende groups over the years. Mr. Korry told senators and reporters that he had engaged in hardball diplomatic tactics to weaken Allende. But he insisted he had nothing to do with coup-plotting. Had he known of a plot, Mr. Korry maintained, he would have warned the White House to stay out of it, or risk getting mired in another Bay of Pigs. Some found Mr. Korry's account difficult to believe, in part because he repeatedly refused to fully answer some of the lawmakers' questions, insisting that to describe confidential communications and orders would be contrary to "the entire moral contract" he lived by as a diplomat. Some of his questioners could not imagine that he, as ambassador in Santiago, could be unaware of the maneuvering against Allende. Mr. Korry's credibility dissolved with the disclosure of an I.T.T. cablegram in which two company officials in Santiago notified company headquarters that the ambassador had received the "green light to move in the name of Richard Nixon" against the new Chilean leader. Much later, Justice Department investigators determined that the "green light" cable had been seen by the C.I.A. station chief in Santiago, not Mr. Korry. (Richard Helms, who was Director of Central Intelligence in 1973, and an I.T.T. official were eventually convicted of misdemeanor charges for having misled the lawmakers. They were fined and given suspended sentences.) On Feb. 9, 1981, The New York Times published a front-page article reporting that a number of C.I.A. officials involved in the anti-Allende operations backed up Mr. Korry's assertions that he had been kept in the dark because he was not entirely trusted by the Nixon White House or the people at C.I.A. headquarters. "Korry never did know anything," said an intelligence operative who had worked in the American embassy in Chile. After leaving government, Mr. Korry served briefly as president of the Association of American Publishers. He taught international relations at Connecticut College from 1977 to 1979 and was a visiting scholar at Harvard's Center for International Studies from 1980 to 1982. Besides his daughter Alexandra, Mr. Korry is survived by his wife of 52 years, Patricia; a son, Edward, of Warwick, R.I.; two other daughters, Kelly of Mesa, Ariz., and Deborah Simcox of Englewood, N.J.; and six grandchildren. Edward Malcolm Korry was born in New York City on Jan. 17, 1922. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Washington and Lee University in Virginia in 1942. He was briefly a copy boy and junior newsroom writer with the National Broadcasting Company, then worked for United Press from 1943 until 1954 in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, West Germany and at the United Nations. He joined Look magazine as a roving global correspondent in 1954, winning a citation for distinguished reporting from the Overseas Press Club. He studied at Harvard's graduate business school in 1960, then worked for public-service groups in Washington, where he was noticed by President Kennedy, who brought him into government. In the 1981 article in The Times, Mr. Korry said he was bitter after years of telling the truth and not being believed, and bitter at being deceived and used by his superiors. "It finally was apparent to me," he said, "that there was a calculated scheme to lay off the blame for Chile upon me." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/30/obituaries/30KORR.html?ex=1044925706&ei=1&en=a2d99be33a2da05a HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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