“There are three sources of power in Chile: Pinochet, God and DINA.” (Chilean intelligence officer, remarks to a US military attaché, 1974).

Decree 521 of the Chilean government of June 18, 1974, was a chilling moment in the country’s convulsed history. With the state now in the pathologically disturbed hands of a military dictatorship steered by coup leader and usurper General Augusto Pinochet, the measure saw the creation of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the clandestine agency responsible for a good share of the mutilations and murders that came to typify the Cold War atrocities of the period.

DINA was, according to the decree, created for “the purpose of producing intelligence collection requirements for the formulation of policies, plans and adoption of measures required for the security and development of the country.” The initial impression is a military wing bureaucratically inclined, dedicated to the mundane task of producing “intelligence collection requirements; for the formulation of policies, plans and adoption of measures required for the security and development of the country.”

Three secret articles supplied the bloody spears to what reads like a superficially benign enterprise, a fact revealed in 1975 by José “Pepe” Zalaquett, a lawyer and member of the human rights organisation known as the Committee for Peace. DINA would run as a clandestine police force empowered to conduct surveillance, initiate arrests, torture detainees and liquidate individuals deemed hostile to the regime both within and outside its borders.

On August 8, 1975, the US Ambassador to Chile, David Popper, drinks the usual Cold War draught: the country positively teams with dangerous left-wing types who, while being necessarily done away with for reasons of security, are being done so in circumstances of dissimulation and deception. The cable to........

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