Charles Horman

Charles Horman (May 15, 1942 – September 20, 1973), an American journalist, was one of the victims of the coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile on September 11, 1973 which deposed the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Horman's case was made famous by Costa-Gavras's 1982 film Missing.

State department memo

For many years thereafter, the US government steadfastly maintained its ignorance of the affair. However, in October 1999, Washington finally released a document admitting that US intelligence agents played a role in his death.

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The State Department memo, dated August 25, 1976, was declassified on October 8,

Related Topics:
State Department - August 25 - 1976 - October 8

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1999, together with 1,100 other documents released by various US agencies which dealt primarily with the years leading up to the military coup.

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Written by three State Department functionaries — Rudy Fimbres, R.S. Driscoll and W.V. Robertson and addressed to Harry Schlaudeman, a high-ranking official in the department's Latin American division — the August document described the Horman case as "bothersome", given reports in the press and Congressional investigations charging that the affair involved "negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman's death".

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The memo was written while Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State.

Related Topics:
Henry Kissinger - Secretary of State

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The State Department, the memo declared, had the responsibility to "categorically refute such innuendoes in defense of US officials". It went on, however, to acknowledge that these "innuendoes" were well founded.

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The three State Department officials said they had evidence that "The GOC sought Horman and felt threatened enough to order his immediate execution. The GOC might have believed this American could be killed without negative fall-out from the USG ."

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The report went on to declare that circumstantial evidence indicated "US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death. At best it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the GOC. At worst, US intelligence was aware the GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia."

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After the release of the State Department memo, Horman's widow, Joyce, described it as "close to a smoking pistol". The same memo had been released to the Horman family more than twenty years earlier, but the above-mentioned paragraphs had been blacked out by the State Department. The latest version still has blacked-out passages, for reasons of "national security", but reveals more.

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