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An ex-Canadian Army officer now historian, Kristian Gustafson, jumps into a fray that has been paved by Peter Kornbluth's The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York & London: The New Press, 2003) and John Dinges in The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York & London: The New Press, 2005). Gustafson uses much of the same recently released declassified CIA and State Department sources as Kornbluth, who with colleagues at the National Security Archive facilitated the release of much of this evidence. That particular endeavour took years of work.
In staking his approach, Gustafson opens with a series of questions: Did the Nixon administration ... try to have Allende assassinated? Did the CIA ... engineer the coup that resulted in Allende's death? Did the CIA choose and groom General Augusto Pinochet ...? Controversial stuff to take on, and Gustafson engages the questions to a profound decree. In turn, he strives to stake out a vastly different argument than Dinges and Kornbluth. Moreover, Gustafson's focus remains on the...