The New York Times

February 7, 1982

Section 2; Page 1, Column 6; Arts and Leisure Desk

NEW FILM BY COSTA-GRAVAS EXAMINES THE CHILEAN COUP

By Flora Lewis

PARIS

Fact: A young American freelance writer named Charles Horman was killed during the 1973 coup that brought the Pinochet regime to power in Chile.

Fact: His father, a New York industrial designer, was told that his son was missing and went to Chile in what became a desperate search to find Charles. Edmund C. Horman, the father, gradually became convinced that the American Embassy in Santiago not only knew about the murder from the start but was intent on concealing it because it shared responsibility. He later sued 11 high United States officials for $4 million, but after a year and a half the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Fact: A lawyer named Thomas Hauser was drawn into the Horman family's crusade and wrote a book about the incident called "The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice," published in 1979.

Fact: Costa-Gavras, the Paris-based Greek director who made powerful political films about cases in Greece, Czechoslovakia and Uruguay, accepted an offer from Universal to make a movie from the Hauser book. It is called "Missing," stars Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek and it opens in New York on Friday at the Beekman theater. It is tautly well-made and cinematically convincing.

Fiction: "This film is based on a true story. The incidents and facts are documented. Some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent and also to protect the film."

This message is shown at the start of the film. In many cases real names are used, real events are evoked, real encounters portrayed. These devices and the director's art are combined to persuade the audience that the whole story and its charge that the United States helped plan the coup in Chile and sanctioned the murder of Charles Horman are literally true, in general and in detail.

But it isn't a documentary, and in the course of an interview Mr. Costa-Gavras didn't pretend that it is. "Don't ask a film director to be a political technician," he said after a showing here. "Either you give two points of view, or you say, 'Here's what I think. I draw my own conclusion.'"

That is the problem. The film gives only one point of view, essentially Ed Horman's, but its claim to present a basic historical truth puts it in a different category from other dramatizations and political thrillers. It is a technique which raises serious ethical, moral and political as well as artistic questions.

Mr. Costa-Gavras says he collaborated closely with the author of the book and spent a good deal of time with the Horman family "so I could reproduce them." But he made no effort to speak with the Government officials he portrays nor to consult the records, particularly of the Senate Intelligence Committee headed by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which made extensive investigations and issued a report on "Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973."

"The director can't do everything," he said. "Hauser did the research and saw all those people, and I went through all his notes."

The difficulty is that the role of the United States in Chile remains an extremely controversial, emotional subject.A good deal has been made public and it documents some nasty episodes. When Salvador Allende's regime was overturned by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in a vast, murderous rampage, many people, particularly French Socialists, felt it showed the United States would go to any length to prevent the survival of another leftist government besides Cuba in the Western Hemisphere. The French left identified their own aims with Allende. The coup became a kind of litmus test for the Paris intelligentsia, a sequel to the Vietnam War.

Newspaper reports, especially those of Seymour M. Hersh in The New York Times, and lengthy records of the Church Committee in 1975 and 1976 showed that the United Stated had indeed been involved in Chilean politics. The most damaging evidence related to C.I.A. activity attempting to prevent Allende's election in 1970. At that time, it was revealed, an infamous operation called "Track II" linked American agents with violent rightwing groups.

Edward M. Korry, the United States Ambassador to Chile from 1967 to 1971, was named by Mr. Hersh and others as being involved in White House efforts to prevent Allende's accession to power by a Chilean military coup. Last February, Mr. Hersh published a lengthy article in The Times retracting his charge that Mr. Korry knew of the "Track II" operation, and admitting that after long conversations with Mr. Korry in 1975, he had wrongly concluded the "account was too self-serving to be credible."

But the record showed that President Nixon had called the then C.I.A. director Richard Helms to the White House in 1970 to order plan for a military coup, and also ordered Mr. Helms to withhold all information of the plans from Ambassador Korry, the Secretary of State (then William Rogers) and the Secretary of Defense (then Melvin Laird). It was an extraordinary meeting.

Nonetheless, Allende was elected. After that, according to the Church Committee and statements by Nathaniel Davis, who was Ambassador in Santiago from 1971 until shortly after the 1973 coup, the United States channeled funds to political parties, press and radio stations in Chile but stayed away from violent right wingers and military plots.

The thesis, Mr. Davis wrote in the Foreign Service Journal in 1978, was that the Allende Government was putting such intense pressure on the oppostion's capacity to survive that it might be unable to contest the next election scheduled for 1976. The secret subsidies, he said, were to enable opposition parties and distributors of information to compete with Government-supported parties and press. "We still have not, as a society, thought through the practical and ethical implications of covert action," Mr. Davis said. He pointed out, and the record confirms, that he successfully opposed C.I.A. suggestions to support strikes and demonstrations to undermine Allende.

However, Richard Helms and Hal Hendrix, an I.T.T. official, were convicted of perjury for their testimony before a 1973 Senate committee on what happened in 1970. And there was the extraordinary Nixon order to Helms not to inform Ambassador Korry and two top cabinet members of that plot. Credibility became a serious issue in disentangling the Chile story.

Ambassador Davis's own personality, the meticulous care he took in separating his own first hand knowledge from hearsay when he finally wrote in his own defense in 1978, make him believable. He said recently that he was convinced he had not been treated like Ambassador Korry and that activity he opposed or did not know about was not conducted behind his back.

William Colby, the C.I.A. director at the time of the 1973 coup, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Davis was indeed kept fully informed, and supports the rest of Mr. Davis's stand. Mr. Colby acknowledged that the United States put economic pressure on Allende's regime - documented by accounts of Robert McNamara as president of the World Bank trying to resist Government insistence on cutting loans to Chile. But Mr. Colby said that in May 1973, when the situation was getting tense and rumors of an impending coup began to multiply, "we sent a message to our people to stay away from the (Chilean) military and their activities. They followed what was going on, collected intelligence, but they were not involved in any planning. They reported on the military trying to get all four services (Army, Navy, Air Force and National Police) together. There were several false alarms, but finally the four joined forces."

Seymour Hersh himself, who made many investigations of the events in Chile and was the first reporter to publish stories about the C.I.A.'s mili-million dollar activites in Chile in 1970 to prevent Allende's coming to power, said he investigated Mr. Horman's diappearance and found no evidence of involvement by the United States in Horman's fate or in the actual Pinochet coup. The Hauser book, and the film, suggest that United States officials in Chile knew about Charles Horman's murder and perhaps even instigated it because "he knew too much" about involvement by the United States in arranging the coup. This is the centerpiece of the story. Not all the charges are made directly, but the implications are clear and insistent.

The drama is built on the evolution of Ed Horman's convictions. He arrives in Santiago to look for his son and seeks the help of the embassy, harshly accusing his distraught daughter-in-law of holding willfully unfounded suspicions about the officials. Played by Jack Lemmon, the father is shown as a successful, confident, warmly patriotic American who firmly disapproves of what he considers a feckless younger generation.He is shocked by the slaughter in the streets of Santiago, shown with buckets of gore, but at first he feels uninvolved and only wants to find his missing son. Step by step, he comes to share his daughter-in-law's views. When he learns that his son was murdered well before he launched his search, he concludes that the embassy was engaged in an elaborate cover-up for a crime it had arranged.

"They (the Chileans) wouldn't dare (execute a United States citizen) unless an American official co-signed a kill order," he tells the Ambassador at the end.

The Ambassador replies: "We 're not involved. Our position has been completely neutral. There are over 3,000 U.S. firms doing business down here and these are American interests. You can't have it both ways. I'm concerned with a way of life."

"They're not my interests," says the enraged father.

The naval attache, portrayed as a sinister tough who is the villain of the piece, says: "Your son was a bit of a snoop. He poked his nose into a lot of places he didn't belong. If you keep on playing with fire, you get burned . . ." Mr. Davis not only denies the specifics, but said, "There wasn't remotely anything like 3,000 U.S. firms."

The film does have him saying, as he says now, that the embassy was seriously trying to find Charles Horman and didn't know that he was dead. But all the Embassy people's denials in the film are presented in a way to make the viewer share Ed Horman's belief that they were lying.

Mr. Costa-Gavras believes they were lying. "I would be astonished if they hadn't found out," he said. His reasoning is wide-ranging, deductive from a general sense of American policy and methods, based on sentiment instead of specifics.

Horman and Frank Teruggi, a friend who was also murdered, "were the first young Americans killed in a putsch in a western country with which the U.S. army has close links. Since then, there's been Salvador. So it's not a custom of the military to execute Americans. Is it conceivable that they could do this, without worrying about the consequences?" he said.

The director cited United Stated intervention in the Dominican Republic which President Lyndon Johnson said was "to protect American lives," Henry Kissinger saying the United States can't let a country turn to Communism by the irresponsibility of its people, the war in Cambodia.

"Everything suggests the U.S. participated in the Chilean coup. A film reflects your personality, your own philosophy. You manipulate the elements and try to translate as honestly as possible. I don't say objectively, that doesn't exist. I'm not trying to stain Ambassador Davis or make him say what he didn't.

"But with a Nixon or a Kissinger, who could destroy Cambodia trying to win the Vietnam War, they were also capable of helping a putsch in Chile. There's no contradiction. Kissinger speaks lightly of Chile in his book, accepting the thousands of deaths. The U.S. helps the Pinochet Government now."

He brushes aside the distinction between fact and verisimilitude, proof and suspicion. "A film is not a court," Mr. Costa-Gavras said. "I can't go into secondary details." "There is a difference between the journalist and the artist. The journalist has a distant, cold relation with the reader. Film, theater, has to have a different approach."

Far from being bothered that his film's charges are not proven, he says he made an effort to understand the Ambassador and his aides, to portray them as people who were just doing their jobs. He feels he treated them with relative sympathy, though of course he concedes he used "poetic license," "condensation," "synthesizing" of Mr. Hauser's book for dramatic purpose.

A key incident involves a Chilean policeman who, Ambassador Davis says, was named Gonzalez but is called Perez in the film. He took refuge in the Italian Embassy and told Ed Horman that a few days after the coup he saw Charles Horman in a genera's anteroom at the Ministry of Defense. In the general's office, he said, there was an American.

Ambassador Davis, who has gone painstakingly through all details of the case, says Mr. Gonzalez identified the stranger as an American offical "by his shoes, he said they were American shoes." The film simply takes Mr. Gonzalez's word at face value, without questioning how he knew what he alleged, and takes it to mean that an American official endorsed Mr. Horman's murder.

"Either you accept all Gonzalez said or reject it," Mr. Costa-Gavras says about the incident. Why would he say Horman was there if it wasn't true about the official too? You have to take all or none." He saw no reason even to ask for Mr. Davis's version. He wouldn't have believed it. "All these elements produce conviction," he said. "In Warsaw today, they say the Poles are in charge. Who believes it? There's no proof that the Soviets gave an order, but I have no doubt of it."

That is the essence of the problem. Is an artist's conviction a reality? Literary convention has accepted it as perhaps a higher reality, but not as documented fact, as Mr. Costa-Gavras asserts. He does not see any irresponsibility in his approach. On the contrary, he is proud of it and well aware that the claim to fact instead of fiction enormously enhances the suspense and excitement of the drama.

"I'm trying to go more to the truth, to reality, to understand what happens. So long as a film or novel invents a story, it's easy because it challenges no interest, puts a finger directly on on problem. Cinema will go more and more in the direction of touching very close to us, with stories that touch moral and economic interests, and that approach is more difficult. Each has his truth."

Mr. Costa-Gavras is anti-Communist but believes that United States pressures force people in little countries to see their only hope in the East. "That's the great political fault of our century. There's no possibility of a third way." He is so sure of his suspicions, seems to feel so little need of specific evidence to support his deductions from his sense of the general iniquity of power, that one is driven to ask whether his attitudes derive from the fact that he is Greek.

It is, rather, he said, the fact of his passage from Greece to France. He is 48, an important fact because he was a happy child living quietly in a village during World War II, and became aware of the world during the terrible Greek civil war just afterwards. Then, in 1954, he came to Paris and it was an intoxicating revelation for him. "I found another kind of society, culture, and liberty - liberty to think, act, read, be."

There seems, in the end, to be the ultimate of the television age in Mr. Costa-Gavras's outlook. News is a show. Performance is the event. The line between fact and fancy is the line of passion. The image is the reality. The definition of truth has always been difficult, but he doesn't concede the distortion of art. In that way, he winds up distorting fact without even noticing.

The New York Times

February 10, 1982

Section C; Page 22, Column 3; Cultural Desk

U.S. TAKES ISSUE WITH COSTA-GAVRAS FILM ON CHILE

Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9

In a highly unusual move, the State Department released today a three-page statement taking issue with a movie. The film is Costa-Gavras's ''Missing,'' based on the story of Charles Horman, a young American who was killed during a right-wing coup in Chile in 1973. The State Department is objecting to the impression left by the film that the United States had contrived in the death, or had at least covered up events surrounding the case. Although the film will not open until Friday, crowds - including an array of foreign-policy establishment figures - have been flocking to private viewings here all week. On Capitol Hill, the film was mentioned in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Monday.

Cover-Up Accusation

The film, based on Thomas Hauser's book ''The Execution of Charles Horman,'' has raised at least three extremely sensitive issues for the State Department:

First, there is the accusation that United States diplomats in Chile, portrayed as heartless in the film, did nothing to locate the missing Mr . Horman, a freelance writer, or help his distraught wife and father in their search for the man - and the truth.

More serious is the implication that the United States had somehow conspired in his death, or possibly ordered him executed because of what he knew of the alleged involvement of the United States in the overthrow of the left-wing government of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens.

Finally, audiences are left with the clear impression that the United States played a large role in the coup. ''The Department of State undertook intensive and comprehensive efforts to locate Charles Horman from the moment it was learned that he was missing, to assist his relatives in their efforts to locate him and also to learn the circumstances of his disappearance and death,'' the department said today.

''These efforts continued for eight years,'' the statement said, ''and involved many special investigations, cooperation with other agencies and included an internal investigation of the possibility that U.S. Government officials might have initiated, condoned or failed to act effectively in Horman's disappearance and death.''

Family Sues U.S. Officials

The statement said that both the United States investigations and those conducted in cooperation with Chilean authorities had shed no light on the disappearance, nor provided any evidence for charges made against United States officials by the Horman family. In 1977, the Hormans sued Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and a number of other State Department officials down to the consul level. The film says in an epilogue that the case was ''thrown out.'' The State Department statement today said it was withdrawn voluntarily by the plaintiffs on March 20, 1981.

The State Department statement did not deal with the allegations of United States complicity in the overthrow of the Allende Government. Records of 1975 Congressional investigations into the role of the United States indicated that there had been political involvement in Chile, particularly in attempting to prevent the election of Dr. Allende in 1970. But those reports - and an investigation by The New York Times - found no American involvement in the death of Mr. Horman or in the 1973 coup.

Mr. Costa-Gavras, a Greek director based in Paris who made such movies as ''Z'' and ''State of Siege,'' said in an interview recently in Paris with The Times that he didn't pretend that the film was a documentary. ''Don't ask a film director to be a political technician,'' he said. ''Either you give two points of view or you say: 'Here is what I think. I draw my own conclusion.' ''

The New York Times

February 14, 1982

Section 2; Page 19, Column 4; Arts and Leisure Desk

COSTA-GAVRAS'S STRIKING CINEMATIC ACHIEVMENT

By VINCENT CANBY

In Jerry Bruck's fine documentary, ''I.F. Stone's Weekly'' (1973), Mr. Stone, the gadfly of American journalism, is seen addressing a graduating class at Amherst College. He recalls his early days as a cub reporter and the excitement he felt at his first big fire. ''Wow!'' he remembers saying to himself. ''Here I am! I'm a reporter! I'm covering this fire!'' or words to that effect. Sometimes, Mr. Stone goes on, the reporter is so carried away by the spectacle that he forgets there may be people being burned.

Mr. Stone's journalism is nothing if not personal. He is forever connecting the general to the specific, in remembering the people inside the burning building, to such an extent that after reading one of his pieces one often wants to go out and do something about the terrible state of the world.

The political melodramas of Constantine Costa-Gavras, the Greekborn, French filmmaker who goes only by his last name, have something of the same effect. They also inspire impatience, skepticism and expressions of moral and ethical outrage through their manipulation of evidence to reach conclusions that are not so easily verified, as was convincingly argued in these pages last week in connection with his latest film, ''Missing,'' the director's most striking cinematic achievement to date. ''Missing'' is based on the true story of the 1973 kidnap and murder in Chile of Charles Horman, a young American, Harvard educated, counterculture journalist, shortly after the right-wing

overthrow of the democratically elected, Marxist government of President Salvador Allende. Using reports that cannot be substantiated, Mr. Costa-Gavras and Charles Horman's family share a terrible conviction. That is, that United States Government representatives, who were in Chile at the time of the coup and sympathetic to it, directly or indirectly approved the execution of Charles Horman who, with one other American, became a victim of the post-coup bloodbath in which hundreds of Chilean leftists were murdered.

In the manner in which ''Missing'' helps itself to the particulars of recent history, and in which it swears to us in a title card that what we are about to see is a ''true story'' whose ''incidents and facts are documented,'' the new film is very much a suc cessor to earlier Costa-Gavras films:

''Z'' (1969), about political terrorism in Greece; ''The Confession'' (1970), based on Artur London's book about the 1951 Slansky trials in Czechoslovakia, and ''State of Siege'' (1973), the story of the 1970 kidnap and murder in Uruguay of an American official reportedly associated with Uruguayan government efforts to wipe out the group of urban guerrillas calling themselves the Tupamaros.

The arguments now being used against ''Missing'' were earlier used against ''State of Siege'' - which Mr. Costa-Gavras actually filmed during Allende's brief regime in Chile, the locale of ''Missing,'' which, for obvious reasons, was not filmed in Chile but in Mexico.

They are good arguments up to a point, and the key argument against ''Missing'' is that rather self-righteous and misleading title card about the film's being ''a true story'' and all the incidents and facts being documented. ''Missing'' is so good and so healthily provocative in all other respects that one wishes that Mr. Costa-Gavras had been able to content himself by saying only that the film was suggested by documented events, and that the conclusions reached, though they are persuasively presented in the film, are his own.

That might not get Mr. Costa-Gavras off the hook with everybody but it would, I think, weaken criticism that ''Missing'' exploits known facts to make a superficial, anti-American spectacle. The film is too serious and too timely in its implications to be so facilely dismissed. After all, Mr. Costa-Gavras knows better than anybody else that every film is fiction. To pretend that ''Missing'' is ''truth'' is a cheap, unnecessary hype. Even those documentaries that are photographed on-the-spot are transformed into fiction by the choices involved in the filming and the editing.

One can go even farther and argue that there is no single, unequivocal truth to be drawn from any event witnessed, as they say on TV, ''live.'' In that line of reasoning, however, lies madness or, at least, futility.

The truth of ''Missing'' is not in its proven facts but in the way it dramatizes the sometimes unbridgeable gulf that separates us, the governed, and those who govern us in what are supposed to be our own best interests. This is a situation most of us accept without much thought, a situation that is defined most matter-of-factly in those television news programs that present star-reporters chatting, almost as equals, with presidents, premiers and cabinet ministers.

One listens and watches intently and is convinced that neither president nor star-reporter knows what it's like to live in a world without adequate employment, housing, heat, food, medical care and public transportation. Nuclear weaponry? For them, one suspects, it's not an ever-present fear but a topic on an agenda, and not near the top at that. The people who hold the power and those TV personalities who, by hobnobbing with them, come to identify with them are out of touch with the rest of us. In this fashion, far more often than in films like Mr. Costa-Gavras's, does the current event become the show.

Since the 1960's most European filmmakers have preferred to deal with political questions in such an abstract way that all urgency ceases to exist. Think of Michelangelo Antonioni's elegant protagonists walking, walking, walking on rocky, perfectly lighted, deserted Mediterranean isles or through the empty streets of nighttime Milan. Though these zombies are meant to reflect the hollowness of our civilization at crisis point, they induce snores more often than action.

Even Bernardo Bertolucci when he is in top form, as he is in ''The Conformist'' and in his new ''Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man,'' somehow manages to defuse the explosive subject of contemporary politics and individual responsibility. In ''Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man,'' a beautiful, thoughtful if finally engimatic film, political terrorism is reduced to the dimensions of an Oedipal conflict.

Jean-Luc Godard's political films are dazzlingly beautiful, cinematic tours de force, and too cerebral for the downtrodden they would arouse. Each Rainer Werner Fassbinder film is in some degree political, but they too speak only to the few. Only Marcel Ophuls, with his epic documentaries, ''The Sorrow and the Pity'' and ''The Memory of Justice,'' and Mr. Costa-Gavras make films that deal directly with contemporary history and politics in ways to which most moviegoers can immediately respond.

Working in a form charged with the sort of visceral emotions one associates more often with American films than with European, Mr. Costa-Gavras effectively bridges the gulf between the governed and those who govern, but in none of his earlier films with quite the same impact he achieves in ''Missing.''

All of Mr. Costa-Gavras's politically-inspired movies are, at heart, chase thrillers, though the chase in the haunting ''The Confession'' is largely through the mind of the hero (Yves Montand), a Communist functionary who is urged by the Czech Communist hierarchy to confess to crimes he did not commit to prove his loyalty to the party. Where ''Z'' is virtually one long chase and the politics are little more than the landscape through which the chase is conducted, ''Missing'' is a mystery-suspense film in which the political landscape, a country in political and civil turmoil, is integral to the events.

The story of ''Missing'' is simple enough: Ed Horman, a well-to-do New York advertising executive, a political conservative and a Christian Scientist in his beliefs, comes to Chile to help his daughter-in-law Beth (Sissy Spacek) search for his son, who disappeared without trace a couple of days after the coup. Ed is impatient with the feckless Beth and furious about the trouble the two young people are putting him to. ''If you'd stayed where you belong,'' he says, ''this wouldn't have happened.''

Little by little, as he and Beth are given the runaround by both American and Chilean diplomats, Ed comes to understand a reality that had never touched his life before -the nature of governments for which the ends justify the means, and for which power has become its own justification, unconnected to the people who have handed over the authority.

The screenplay by Mr. Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart is a carefully interlocking work in which present events and flashbacks are so seamlessly joined that the film's forward momentum increases progressively, right up to the smashing finale that surprises even though it has never been in doubt.

In addition to the excellent screenplay and direction, a number of other thi ngs contribute to the film's success, including the uniformly fin e performances, the look of the locale and the casually revealed desperation of a population under siege.

Impossible to ignore also are the circumstances in which we are seeing ''Missing.'' One thinks especially of the events in El Salvador and of the contradictions, which one can read in this newspaper almost any day of the week, between official Government (United States and El Salvador) statements and the first-hand, investigative stories being sent back by American reporters there.

''Missing'' does work on our paranoia, but it reminds us that the United States Government is ours, and that we'd better pay attention to what it's doing in our name. That, I think, gives the film an urgency and importance that cannot be ignored because of the unsubstantiated conclusions that Mr. Costa-Gavras has drawn from the verifiable events.

''Missing'' reminds us that there are people being burned in that fire.

The New York Times

January 11, 1983

Section C; Page 12, Column 1; Cultural Desk

LIBEL SUIT IS FILED AGAINST 'MISSING'

By STUART TAYLOR Jr., Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10

Nathaniel Davis, the former United States Ambassador to Chile, and two other former American officials there filed a $60 million libel suit against the makers of the critically acclaimed film ''Missing'' today in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va.

The lawsuit said the film and the book on which it was based had falsely suggested that Mr. Davis and the other plaintiffs ''ordered or approved the order for the murder of Charles Horman,'' a young American who was working in Chile as a counterculture journalist. Mr. Horman disappeared in September 1973, at the time of a coup in which a right-wing military junta overthrew the Government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. Mr. Horman's body was discovered later.

The lawsuit asserts that Mr. Davis and other American officials in Chile were falsely portrayed in the film, which stars Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek and John Shea, as having approved the murder of Mr. Horman to assist in the coup and to protect United States commercial interests in Chile.

Plaintiffs Not Named in Film

The names of Mr. Davis, a career Foreign Service officer, and of the two other plaintiffs, Frederick D. Purdy, who was United States Consul in Santiago at the time, and Capt. Ray E. Davis, a retired naval officer who was commander of the United States Military Group there, were not used in the film. But characters were modeled after them, according to the lawsuit.

Named as defendants in the lawsuit were Costa-Gavras, the Greekborn French film maker who directed ''Missing''; Universal City Studios, the distributor; MCA Inc., its parent company; Thomas Hauser, author of the book on which the film was based; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, publisher of the book, and the Hearst Corporation, which published a paperback version of the book through its Avon Books division.

The suit cites parts of the film that, it says, ''were understood by those who saw the movie or heard of it to be stating and implying, directly and by innuendo, by the logic of the movie's presentation and by the progression of its action, that the plaintiffs ordered or approved'' Mr. Horman's murder by Chilean agents. The makers of the movie acted, according to the lawsuit, ''with the purpose of maliciously intending to injure the plaintiffs,'' and the plaintiffs ''have been held up to public disgrace, scorn and ridicule'' and loss of their good names.

Book Is Also Cited

Similar allegations are made about the book written by Mr. Hauser, who turned to writing after working as a lawyer with Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a large New York firm. The book was published in hard cover under the title ''The Execution of Charles Horman'' and in paperback under the title ''Missing.''

The lawsuit cites in particular what it calls the book's elaboration of charges ''that Charles Horman was executed with the foreknowledge of American Embassy officials in Santiago because he stumbled on evidence of United States involvement in the Chilean coup.'' The United States has denied involvement in the coup, and the State Department issued a statement disputing the film's innuendoes about an American role in the Horman murder last year after ''Missing'' was released.

No 'Flat Allegations'

Richard Udell, vice president and counsel of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, said today that he had not seen the lawsuit, but he noted that the book did not make ''flat allegations'' concerning an American role in the murder, although ''it does discuss the implications of some of the evidence.''

''We had nothing to do with the motion picture,'' he added, saying that the film ''is presented as a work of fiction.'' The film uses the real names of Mr. Horman, the victim, and some others, but not of the plaintiffs. Sheldon Mittleman, counsel for Universal City Studios, said today: ''Our position is we have not defamed these gentlemen. They are reading into the movie something that's not there. There's certainly no accusation that they are personally responsible for causing the death. The movie is a legitimate comment on U.S. involvement in Chile and the actions of public officials, and we will vigorously defend the lawsuit.''

The lawsuit seeks $20 million in damages as compensation for asserted harm done to the plaintifs and $10 million ''in exemplary damages to punish the defendants for their malicious conduct'' with respect to the film, and identical amounts with respect to the book.

The plaintiffs are represented by the New York law firm of Kasanof Schwartz Iason and the Washington firm of Zuckerman, Spaeder, Taylor & Kolker. Mr. Davis now teaches at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Mr. Purdy is United States Consul in Brasilia, Brazil. Captain Davis is retired and living in Chile.

The Washington Post

April 29, 1987

Editorial; Page A19 (Letters to the Editor)

MISSING EVIDENCE

By Nathaniel Davis

A four-year libel suit over the book and film "Missing" seems to be coming to an end in the federal court of first instance in the Southern District of New York. It is a controversial case, even now.

The background is that a young American, Charles Horman, disappeared and was tragically killed in Chile a few days after the military coup in that country in 1973. The young man's family brought suit in federal court in Washington, suspecting complicity on my part – I was U.S. ambassador to Chile at the time – and on the part of several American officers in Santiago and Henry Kissinger and other Washington luminaries. In due course the plaintiffs withdrew their suit. The explanation they gave was that the U.S. government was hiding the evidence. On the other side, then-Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and others made depositions to the court testifying that all government documents and materials bearing on Charles Horman had been given to the court. No evidence was presented from any source to support the Horman family's suspicions.

In the meantime, a lawyer-investigator named Thomas Hauser wrote a book, published in 1978, which revived the case and the suspicions. In 1982, the famous Greek-French filmmaker, Constantine Costa-Gavras, turned the book into a movie, titled "Missing." At its beginning the film stated that the depiction of events was based on a true story and that the incidents and facts were documented. I and two other long-suffering, or criminally evil, U.S. officers – which we were depends on the credence one gives the film – brought suit for libel.

We tried to be scrupulous in not assaulting the First Amendment's guarantee of free criticism of public officials for their acts or policies in office. Our complaint was based on our belief that the film showed us in conspiracy to murder an innocent young citizen of our own country.

The reasons suggested in the film for our crime were to defend U.S. business interests in Chile or to cover up U.S. complicity in the 1973 military coup. We did not challenge the film's portrayal of these alleged policies and motivations, however, as we recognized that it falls under the constitutional protection of free debate and controversy. But we do believe that a person, even a public figure or official, should not be publicly portrayed as a murderer without evidence or support for the charge. If American officials go around fingering innocent U.S. citizens and ordering foreign generals to execute them, our judicial system should push to the bottom of the matter, not brush it away. Killing Americans in order to further improper policy interests strikes so directly at the integrity of public service, including the career U.S. Foreign Service and the professional U.S. military services, that it should cry out for an adjudication of the facts.

Even Gen. William Westmoreland and a foreign cabinet minister, Ariel Sharon, got their day in court and the opportunity to explain themselves to a jury. In the four years of the "Missing" libel suit, we have never gotten to a trial; we have never even gotten to the question whether we were complicit in the execution of Charles Horman.

The most recent summary judgment in the case appeared to rest on two propositions. First, we could not prove actual malice in Costa-Gavras' heart or malice in the corporate heart of MCA, Inc., and Universal City Studios.

The second proposition was that "Missing" was a docudrama, and a docudrama does not need to be true in its specifics – even if the film says at the beginning that the story is true and the incidents and facts are documented.

When the film came out, Flora Lewis of The New York Times interviewed Costa-Gavras. She reported: "He brushes aside the distinction between fact and verisimilitude, proof and suspicion. 'A film is not a court,' Mr. Costa-Gavras said. 'I can't go into secondary details.' "

So Costa-Gavras showed no "reckless disregard of the truth" under the law. The barricades defending free public debate and criticism are built high. The message to public servants appears evident: don't sue, even if you believe you have been accused of murder, accused without supporting evidence of any kind.

The writer, who is retired from the Foreign Service, is a professor of humanities at Harvey Mudd College in California.

The New York Times

May 21, 1987

Section A; Page 30, Column 5; Editorial Desk (Letters to the editor)

Complicity Is the Charge in the 'Missing' Suit

To the Editor:

Nathaniel Davis, former United States Ambassador to Chile, distorts the basic charges contained in the Costa-Gavras film ''Missing'' (letter, April 29). The film never charged that the ''U.S. Foreign Service and the U.S. military services'' ''ordered Charles Horman killed.''

In March 1974 the Fund for New Priorities in America ran a Congressional Conference on the Chilean coup of September 1973. We have the transcript of this conference, and the basic charges contained in the film ''Missing'' were fully substantiated. The first Congressional investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee followed immediately thereafter. Edward Horman, the father of Charles Horman, testified at our conference rather tearfully about his struggle first to find the body of his son and then to get the answer to questions about why the State Department, the office of Ambassador Davis and all other United States Government officials in Chile and Washington had failed to provide asylum and safe conduct out of the country for his son, a United States citizen.

Investigations that have proceeded weakly in the last 13 years suggested the involvement of the Forty Committee of the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and branches of the United States military in the planning and execution of the coup against the Government of Salvador Allende Gossens. Mr. Horman filed his suit for damages against the United States Government and after many years of litigation was prevented from receiving any explanation or recovery on the ground of ''national security.''

Thus, the charge was that the United States Government and its branches had a significant degree of complicity in the coup. That does not mean that they ordered Charles Horman killed.

The investigations of the Iran-Contra scandal further confirm the abuses of the C.I.A. and the National Security Council. It is time that the false shield of ''national security'' be stripped away and that Edward Horman and the American people be given the full story.

MAURICE S. PAPRIN

New York, May 1, 1987

The writer is president of the Fund for New Priorities in America, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization.

Financial Times (London)

October 11, 1999

WORLD NEWS; Pg. 15

CIA 'PARTLY TO BLAME' FOR REPORTER'S DEATH

By Mark Mulligan in Santiago

CIA agents were partly responsible for the death of Charles Horman, the US journalist executed by Chilean military in the days immediately after the September 1973 coup which brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, according to recently declassified State Department documents. According to correspondence between Washington and the US embassy in Santiago, "there was circumstantial evidence to suggest that US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death".

Horman's execution is the subject of "Missing," the critically acclaimed film by Costa Gavras that depicts the 30-year-old American as a journalist who knew too much about the supposed involvement of US military and intelligence personnel in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende. "At best [the CIA] was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the government of Chile," the letter says.

"At worst, US intelligence was aware the government of Chile saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of the paranoia." That letter, dated August 25, 1976, was among the 1,100 documents released on Friday by US agencies as part of a broader campaign by the Clinton administration to shed light on human rights abuses, terrorism and political violence in the years leading up to and after the military takeover in Chile.

The handover to the National Archives in Santiago coincided with the ruling by a Bow Street magistrate in London that Gen Pinochet, who has been detained in London for a year, could be extradited to Spain to face charges of torture and conspiracy to torture Spanish citizens in Chile at the time of the coup. An initial set of 5,800 documents, covering mainly the brutal first five years of the military junta when an estimated 3,000 Chileans and foreigners were killed or went missing, was handed over on June 30.

Although the first tranche provided graphic first-hand accounts of the torture methods used by Chilean soldiers, security agents and police, there were few documents supporting the theory that US government agencies helped foment the unrest which led to the coup.

What is documented elsewhere, however, is that US military aid, which had fallen to about $ 800,000 before Allende came to power in 1970, surged to $ 5.7m in 1971 and $ 10.9m in 1972.

The Guardian (London)

February 14, 2000

Foreign Pages; Pg. 12

Pinochet may have had CIA go-ahead to kill two Americans, documents show

By Duncan Campbell

Los Angeles

The CIA may have given General Augusto Pinochet's government the go-ahead to murder the young American writer on whom the film Missing was based, according to newly declassified documents. The revelation is likely to weaken Gen Pinochet's case that he was unaware of atrocities committed by his secret police when he was Chile's dictator.

Two US citizens, Charles Horman, 31, and Frank Teruggi, 24, were killed in Chile in 1973 following the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende. Both men had been supporters of Allende and had worked for a newsletter sympathetic to him in the capital, Santiago.

Horman had spotted US warships off the Chilean coast at Valparaiso shortly after the coup and had believed this showed signs of American connivance. Horman was given a lift back to Santiago by a US military captain two days before he disappeared. His story was told in Costa-Gavras's 1982 film Missing, which starred Jack Lemmon. Teruggi, a friend of Horman's, was arrested by the secret police, held at the National Stadium in Santiago and had his throat slashed.

The US government released papers about the deaths in 1980, apparently exonerating the US of any involvement. But some documents remained classified. Now President Clinton has ordered the declassification of 'all documents that shed light on human rights abuses during and prior to the Pinochet era in Chile.'

One declassified document states: 'US intelligence may have played a part in Horman's death. At best, it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the government of Chile. At worst, US intelligence was aware the government saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of government of Chile paranoia.'

The declassified material giving details of a subsequent inquiry carried out by the American authorities into the deaths states: '(The CIA) may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death.' The implication is that the CIA indicated to the Chilean military that Horman was a danger who could be eliminated without too much risk of a fuss from the US.

Henry Kissinger, who was secretary of state during the period, told the New York Times, which published the declassified material yesterday, that if he had been made aware of the matter, he 'would have done something'. Horman's widow, Joyce, is now pressing the government for a fuller investigation into the links between the US government and Gen Pinochet.

The former army captain, Ray Davis, denies any involvement with the deaths of the men, but told the inquiry that Horman and Teruggi were 'part of the problem'.

The New York Times

February 15, 2000

Section A; Page 26; Column 1; Editorial Desk

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHILE

Thanks to a powerful nudge from President Clinton, the secrecy that has too long shrouded Washington's role in the 1973 political convulsions in Chile is lifting. The picture painted by newly disclosed passages from State Department papers is profoundly disturbing. It is now clear that the American government knew far more about the disappearance and murder of two American citizens in Chile than it acknowledged at the time. Indeed, American intelligence and military officials may have encouraged Gen. Augusto Pinochet's security forces to round them up even though it was clear that the two men, like thousands of Chileans arrested during the same period, were likely to be mistreated, if not killed.

The truth about clandestine American activities in the cold war has been difficult to unearth and painful to confront. In the name of opposing Communism, Washington sometimes ignored its own democratic principles and condoned the kind of brutal conduct it publicly deplored. The case of the two Americans murdered in Chile seems to belong in this category. For 26 years, American officials have steadfastly denied any role in the unsolved murders of the two young men in September 1973. Charles Horman, 31, a filmmaker and writer, and his colleague, Frank Teruggi, 24, were arrested and killed as supporters of General Pinochet overthrew the Socialist government of Salvador Allende. Mr. Horman and Mr. Teruggi applauded Mr. Allende's Socialist experiments. They worked for a newsletter that reprinted articles from American newspapers critical of American policy toward Chile. Their deaths were dramatized – and American complicity strongly implied – in the 1982 movie "Missing," made by Constantin Costa-Gavras.

The recently declassified State Department documents show that its own investigators concluded almost immediately after the murders that General Pinochet's new government had killed the two men. The investigators inferred, moreover, that the Chileans would not have done so without some sign of assent from American intelligence officials.

This damning information was not made public when portions of the same documents were selectively declassified in 1980. The State Department cited national security and executive privilege considerations in exempting the passages from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The reasoning was deceptive, and an abuse of the law.

President Clinton, who has pressed for full disclosure of cold-war secrets, directed federal agencies to search their files for information on human rights abuses and terrorism in Chile, beginning with the period from 1968 to 1978. Mr. Clinton acted after the arrest of General Pinochet in London in 1998 on human rights charges filed by a Spanish judge. It is now time for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon to follow Mr. Clinton's order, and the example of openness set by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

The Washington Post

September 17, 2000

STYLE; Pg. F01

Spook Story: Whatever America's role was in Chile that fateful day in 1973, retired CIA spy Jack Devine knows the truth. Now, he says, so do we.

By Vernon Loeb

WHERE WAS JACK DEVINE on Sept. 11, 1973?

Devine is a large man, in ambition and personality no less than sheer physical size. His whereabouts on that particular day loom large as well in one of the most pressing mysteries left over from the Cold War:

Did the Central Intelligence Agency pull the strings on a coup 27 years ago that put a ruthless dictator in power and left a democratically elected president to die in a blaze of gunfire? If, as critics charge, the CIA pulled the trigger on the Chilean coup, Devine, then a 32-year-old case officer, would have almost certainly known about it and would have been very busy in the early days of September 1973.

Retired from the agency now for two years, Devine is talking about the coup for the first time: "I'm not saying maybe, I'm saying flat out—the CIA did not overthrow Allende." In fact, he says, he was the first one in the CIA to find out about the coup plans just two or three days in advance—and his wife knew before he did. The way he tells it, he was sitting with a group of friends finishing lunch at DaCarla, a noisy Italian bistro in downtown Santiago, when another CIA man walked into the restaurant and delivered a whispered message: Call home immediately. It was urgent.

He tried to duck out of the lunch as discreetly as someone who measures 6-5 can manage. He knew what his wife would tell him.

The whole country was exhausted, waiting for weeks for something to happen, certain that Chile's restive right-wing military would move against the country's embattled left-wing president, Salvador Allende. Now it was beginning.

He called his wife, Pat, home in a well-to-do Santiago district minding five small children and fielding furtive calls for her spy husband. "Your friend called from the airport," she said. "He's leaving the country. He told me to tell you: The military has decided to move. It's going to happen on the 11th. The navy will lead it off." A second source later called the CIA station and agreed to meet Devine at a safe house just after dark. He added one key detail, the time the coup would begin: 7 a.m.

His report, confirming the first, formed the basis of a secret cable to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Markings on the document, declassified in redacted form last year, indicate that it was distributed to President Nixon and other top U.S. policymakers on Sept. 10, the following day.

The source's name has been blacked out, but his message bears an unadorned sense of urgency: ". . . a coup attempt will be initiated on 11 September. All three branches of the Armed Forces and the Carabineros are involved in this action. A declaration will be read on Radio Agricultura at 7 a.m. on Sept. 11 . . . the Carabineros have the responsibility for seizing President Salvador Allende."

This is how the U.S. government learned of the coup, Devine said, willing to talk in hopes of righting a wrong he feels has plagued the CIA ever since Allende died in a blaze of gunfire at La Moneda, the presidential palace, 27 years ago. The agency's hands are clean, he insists. That may be hard for many Americans to believe, given a central conclusion reached in 1975 by the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Frank Church. "There is no doubt that the U.S. government sought a military coup in Chile," the committee concluded.

Indeed, President Nixon ordered the CIA in 1970 to foment a coup to keep the socialist Allende from being inaugurated after a narrow victory at the polls—an effort that failed and was abandoned. The 1973 coup that toppled Allende, mounted by Gen. Augusto Pinochet and other military leaders, is a different matter. "There is no hard evidence of direct U.S. assistance to the coup, despite frequent allegations of such aid," the committee found. But the distinction has been lost over time. And even if the CIA didn't direct the coup, did its "extensive and continuous" covert operations aimed at undermining Allende's government set the stage? The Church committee posed the question—one it could not answer.

Devine believes that even with no CIA effort in Chile, the result would have been the same. "It was inevitable the coup was coming," said Devine, who retired after a 27-year CIA career and now heads the Arkin Group, a consulting firm he formed with New York power lawyer Stanley Arkin that specializes in crisis management for business clients.

"The whole country was saying the government was going to fall of its own weight," Devine said. "Had we not been there, the opposition would have collapsed before then, and the military probably would have acted sooner than it did. Allende brought this on himself."

A cold warrior who rose swiftly through the ranks of the CIA's clandestine service, Devine agreed to talk about Chile earlier this year when it looked as though the CIA would be making public hundreds of documents on its activities before and after the September 1973 coup as part of a declassification project ordered by President Clinton following Pinochet's arrest in Brittain in 1998. Devine was, in essence, willing to let the record stand as a check against his own memory.

But last month, CIA Director George J. Tenet refused to release many of the documents without further review, citing fears that they would reveal operational methods still in use around the world by the CIA. Last week the National Security Council announced that the release of any material would be delayed for another two to three weeks. Human rights activists who have tried for years to get the full story declassified were not pleased.

"The controversy over the U.S. covert role in, and responsibility for, Pinochet's bloody coup will continue until the CIA releases the full story of its actions—not a censored history, but a full and unabridged account of its operations in Chile," said Peter Kornbluh, a Chile expert and researcher at the nonprofit National Security Archive, which has led the fight for full CIA disclosure.

"The question of whether the coup would have taken place without the U.S. being present in Chile in a big way is irrelevant—because the U.S. was in Chile in a big way," said Kornbluh. "The CIA's own documents—which it gave to the Church committee—take credit for setting the stage for the coup. And these are the documents the CIA still seeks to conceal."

Devine said he isn't afraid of what the documents might reveal. He knows what he knows from being there. His judgments are, to be sure, based on impressions formed many years ago by an idealistic, inexperienced young spy. But he's confident that the documents will bear him out whenever they're finally released. "My point is, the degree to which we can get the story out," Devine said, "we're better off for it."

John J. Devine, big and bold, with jet black hair and a long, angular face, grew up playing stickball in southwest Philadelphia, the only son of a heating contractor. By 1967, when he was 25, Devine had risen to head of the social studies department at Sharon Hills High School. A bestseller changed his life. "The Invisible Government," a 1964 book by Thomas Ross and David Wise, was written as an expose of the secret schemings of the CIA. But it had an unintended effect on Devine. "I read it and thought, 'Jeez, what a

fascinating line of work,' " Devine recalled. Three years later, Devine was given one of the hottest tickets at CIA headquarters—a job on the Chile task force.

In September 1970, after socialist Salvador Allende finished first in a three-way presidential election, President Nixon summoned CIA Director Richard Helms to the White House and told him in no uncertain terms to foment a coup. Nixon believed Allende to be a dangerous leftist in a country suddenly teeming with Cuban advisers. This coup attempt, which Nixon ordered the CIA to conceal from the U.S. ambassador and other American officials in Chile, came to be known as "Track II"—the secret complement to political and propaganda efforts proceeding on Track I.

Young Jack Devine soon found himself on the night shift at the nerve center, fashioning cables from Santiago into a morning intelligence report for the bosses. "This is exactly the place I wanted to be, inside the Invisible Government, saving democracy from the commies," Devine said.

The CIA's explicit coup plotting came to an end in October 1970, when a bungled coup by a group of Chilean officers not supported by the CIA had the effect of rallying the country around Allende, who was inaugurated two days later.

In aiming to depose an elected president, Devine believed he was fighting to help maintain democracy in Chile. When he left the country three years later, he realized that hadn't happened. But his belief in covert action—support for opposition parties, propaganda campaigns, even paramilitary action—remained very much intact.

Swiftly, he rose in the CIA's Latin America Division to chief of station in the Dominican Republic, then Venezuela and Argentina. When legendary CIA operative Dewey Clarridge, then chief of the Latin America Division, called his station chiefs to Washington in 1981 to poll them on his plans for arming the contras in Nicaragua, Devine was one of only two who voiced objections.

"He was apprehensive about another potentially volatile operation and was frank in expressing his reservations," Clarridge writes in his memoir, "A Spy for All Seasons."

"I appreciated his honesty. There were some, however, who were not so kind. They saw him as someone motivated largely by a desire to advance his career." Frank Anderson, former head of the CIA's Near East Division, and a Devine supporters, sees him differently, "as the kind of guy who would speak truth to power." Either way, careerist or straight-talker, Devine's career was major-league.

He was serving as head of the Iran branch in 1985, when he refused to serve as the handler of Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman at the heart of the Reagan administration's missiles-for-hostages deal with Iran. "I told my wife, 'I might have to resign, I just can't do this one,' " Devine said, recalling how he considered Ghorbanifar a liar and strongly recommended that he be given a polygraph before the CIA dealt with him. Devine also says he wrote a memo calling the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran "inimical to U.S. interests."

When Ghorbanifar failed his polygraph badly, Devine said, Claire George, then deputy director for operations, agreed that the CIA shouldn't be doing business with him. "What I didn't know was that [CIA Director William] Casey handed him off to someone in another directorate," Devine said.

George remembered Devine's stand and, within a year, in 1986, appointed Devine chairman of the Afghan Task Force, a position that put him in control of the CIA's last and largest covert operation of the Cold War, funneling $1 billion in U.S. arms to the Afghan mujaheddin, who helped drive the Soviet army from Afghanistan.

Devine was in the middle of the action again in 1994 when, as chief of the Latin America Division, the White House sent him to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to tell the country's dictators that it was time to yield for deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return.

Devine rounded out his career as associate deputy director for operations, then acting director, of the CIA's clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations, capped by three years as London station chief before retiring in December 1998. Looking back, though, there was nothing quite like Chile.

Not long after he arrived in Santiago in the fall of 1971, Devine climbed into the car of one of the CIA's Chilean informants—or "assets"—and drove slowly around a small city park. Unexpectedly, the asset handed Devine a sheaf of documents. Devine had to decide whether to take them, knowing that his cover could be blown if he were caught with them on the street. But this was a one-time offer, and Devine's car was parked nearby, so he grabbed the papers and cut through the park on foot—only to find himself chased by five wild dogs. Imagine the scene: a towering CIA spy, secret documents in hand, running from a pack of snarling canines.

As Devine turned a corner, he realized one of his colleagues lived nearby and headed straight for his front door. By then, the dogs had tuckered out, but when the two CIA men drove back to Devine's car, there they were, like sentries. "You've got to see how ferocious these dogs are," Devine said. At which point his colleague got out of his car, approached one of the four-legged assailants and held out his hand. The dog started licking it profusely. "I bet you have cats," he said, wondering whether this new guy would ever make it as a spy.

Several weeks later, Devine handed over a wad of cash to another asset from a Chilean newspaper opposed to Allende. Since the CIA is, first and foremost, a large bureaucracy, Devine needed a receipt to send back to Langley at the end of the month. And since he was just out of spy school and didn't want to be caught with a document signed by a covert source, Devine wrote out the receipt—and had the asset sign it—in invisible ink. The asset was, needless to say, impressed by such trade craft. Devine went back to the station, applied the magic chemical. Everything had worked perfectly. There was only one problem: When he went to file his expense account several weeks later, the invisible ink had eaten through the paper. He had to go back to his source, and beg.

But Devine learned quickly. He spent his nights in safe houses and obscure cafes, meeting media and political assets working to undermine Allende's government. He spent his days in the station, furiously writing intelligence reports.

Between the unsuccessful coup in October 1970 and the successful coup that finally toppled Allende in September 1973, Chile's economy—blockaded by the United States—ground to a halt as violence between the right and the left became a daily fact of life.

The larger context in which all of this played out was the Cold War, with Nixon and Henry Kissinger fearing the spread of communism in Latin America as the Soviet Union sent aid to Allende's government and Cuba flooded the country with advisers.

There remains, to this day, some confusion about what the CIA's marching orders actually were in this interim period. Kissinger, then national security adviser, told the Church committee that he ordered the CIA to stop its coup plotting at a meeting on Oct. 15, 1970, precisely a month after Nixon set Track II in motion.

Thomas Karamessines, the CIA's deputy director for plans, came away from the meeting with the opposite impression, sending a cable to the Santiago station the following day that said: "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. . . . Please review all your present and possibly new activities to include propaganda, black operations . . . or anything else your imagination can conjure."

Devine, for his part, said he is certain that by the time he arrived at the Santiago station in the fall of 1971, Track II was long over, coup plotting was verboten, and CIA case officers were under strict orders that all military contacts were for the purposes of gathering intelligence, not fomenting coups.

"I can't recall a specific directive or cable that went to the field, but it was almost like the Bible: no coup-plotting with the military. All of the effort was geared to collecting information about what the military was doing."

A close colleague of Devine remembers no such line in the sand. "I think our posture was a little more aggressive than that," recalled Donald P. Winters, who shared space with Devine in the Santiago station and went on to several tours of heading stations in Latin American before retiring in 1993. "We were not in [on] planning. But our contacts with the military let them know where we stood—that was, we were not terribly happy with this government."

Covert involvement in Chile, the Church committee found, was "extensive and continuous," with the CIA spending $8 million on covert operations from 1970 to 1973.

"What did covert CIA money buy in Chile? It financed activities from simple propaganda manipulation of the press to large-scale support for Chilean political parties," the committee reported. As for the CIA's ties to the Chilean military, the Church committee reported that the agency maintained "close contact with the Chilean armed forces" and, throughout the months before the coup, "received intelligence reports on the coup planning."

While Devine agrees with most of the committee's conclusions, he believes the committee overestimated the CIA's sources in the military, which he insists were not nearly as numerous or important as the agency's media and political assets. "I'm not saying we didn't have assets in the military. But we didn't have flag-rank people [reporting to us]; we didn't have any of the decision makers," Devine said. The CIA had no relationship before the coup with Pinochet, he said, and it simply did not receive hard reports about the coup by those responsible throughout the summer. "Everybody was talking about a coup in August. But in terms of senior military commanders plotting, I doubt there was a report," Devine said. Winters remembers differently: "We'd been talking to military leaders for months."

But both men say the Chilean military did not need, seek or want CIA involvement in planning and executing the coup. "The understanding was they would do it when they were ready and at the final moment tell us it was going to happen," Winters said.

By the time the military finally did move on the morning of Sept. 11, the CIA had confirmed the report from Devine's first asset four times over. Inside the station, everyone waited. An observation post had been set up in a hotel across the street with instructions to keep an open line back to the station on the seventh floor of the U.S. Embassy, around the corner from La Moneda, the presidential palace. Just as Devine's asset had said, the Navy began the coup early in the morning with an uprising in Valparaiso. Troops soon filled the street in downtown Santiago, where skirmishes and sporadic gunfire erupted. Barricades went up around the U.S. Embassy, and traffic quickly ground to a halt.

Shortly before noon, Hawker Hunter jets from the Chilean air force screamed across downtown Santiago and began firing rockets into La Moneda with pinpoint accuracy. The whole city erupted in gunfire. Devine and his CIA colleagues dove for cover as stray bullets shattered windows. Around 2 o'clock in the afternoon, Chilean troops stormed into the presidential palace. Not long after that, Allende was dead. The military claimed he committed suicide, though most other accounts of the coup say his body was found riddled with bullets.

When the military imposed an ironclad curfew across Santiago, Devine and a handful of other agency officers, including station chief Ray Warren, found themselves trapped inside the embassy for three days, breaking into the cafeteria just to eat. Devine says he and his colleagues felt a certain satisfaction that Allende's government was finally gone. But there was no sense of elation. "No partying," he said. "You sensed that this was a country going through a terrible crisis."

Locked down in the embassy, he remembered, the CIA had little ability to track what was happening in the streets in the coup's immediate aftermath. And lacking close ties with Pinochet and other members of the new junta, he said, the agency had little comprehension of—and no control over—the military's bloody purge of "subversives" in the weeks following the coup.

The CIA soon gained some understanding of the magnitude of those atrocities—and reported on them to Washington. A secret memo dated Sept. 24, 1973, less than two weeks after the coup, stated that "the deaths of the great majority of persons killed in cleanup operations against extremists . . . are not recorded. Only the Junta members will have a really clear idea of the correct death figures, which they will probably keep secret." An Oct. 12, 1973, memo quoted a source as saying that 1,600 civilians had been killed between Sept. 11 and Oct. 10.

But by far the most explosive document released last year under President Clinton's declassification initiative was a State Department memorandum drafted in 1976 about the case of Charles Horman, an American journalist whose kidnapping and murder in the immediate aftermath of the coup inspired the 1982 Jack Lemmon-Sissy Spacek movie "Missing."

The document—which offers no evidence—states: "U.S. 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 . . . . At worst, U.S. intelligence was aware the [Chilean junta] saw Horman in a rather serious light and U.S. officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of [Chilean] paranoia."

What's more, another State Department document declassified last year revealed that the consular official who played the leading role in locating the bodies of Horman and Frank Teruggi, another American journalist murdered by Chilean military intelligence after the coup, was actually a CIA case officer, James E. Anderson.

Devine is categorical in denying CIA involvement in either slaying. "Horman and Teruggi were not known to CIA—at all," he said, characterizing the State Department document as after-the-fact speculation. Devine also said that Anderson became involved in searching for the bodies only because of his role as a consular official, not because of CIA interest. And after both bodies had been found, Devine said, Anderson was deeply distraught about the murders. Reached by telephone, Anderson confirmed Devine's version of events. "I was extremely upset that Americans were killed," Anderson said, breaking a long silence about his actions in Chile.

Neither the U.S. Consulate nor the CIA, he said, had any knowledge that Horman and Teruggi were even in Chile until both men were reported missing. "This was an extremely difficult time," he said. "How people can blame the agency for trying to kill these guys, I don't know. There's just no smoking gun there. I know Mrs. [Joyce] Horman will never believe that, but it was just an impossible time."

Kornbluh applauds Devine, Winters and Anderson for finally talking about what they did in Chile all those years ago. But what they have revealed, he said, only whets the appetite for full disclosure by the CIA, particularly concerning the extent of U.S. government support for Pinochet's regime in the years following the coup.

Devine left Chile in the spring of 1974, disillusioned by the Pinochet regime, he says. When a new station chief arrived to replace Warren, he asked Devine to write a memo about the situation in Chile, since by then Devine was one of the most senior officers left in Santiago. Devine remembers climbing up "on this high horse as a young man" and penning a memo called on the CIA to start using the very same tactics they used against Allende against Pinochet. "I wanted to see the democratic institutions restored," he said. "I had no sympathy for military governments."

Looking back, he laments the violence inflicted by Pinochet's regime and says no one in the CIA's Santiago station—“in their wildest dreams"—would ever have believed the dictatorship would last until 1991. As for his memo, Devine doubts the station chief even sent it back to Washington—to protect Devine's career, if nothing else. But Devine still hopes he did. Maybe someday he'll find out, when all the documents finally come out.

The Washington Post

November 19, 2000

A SECTION; Pg. A06

Files Raise Questions On Journalist's Death; Did U.S. Agents Finger American to Chile?

By Vernon Loeb

The family of an American journalist murdered in Chile 27 years ago wants to know whether U.S. intelligence operatives passed his name and address to Chilean authorities in the aftermath of a 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power.

U.S. government documents released last week show that the FBI compiled a dossier on journalist Frank Teruggi, labeled him a "subversive" and obtained his address in the capital of Santiago from a sensitive intelligence source almost a year before his death, raising the possibility that American operatives could have tipped their Chilean counterparts.

Teruggi, 24, a left-leaning journalist and student from suburban Chicago, was abducted by Chilean military intelligence agents from his duplex on Sept. 20, 1973, nine days after the coup that toppled elected socialist President Salvadore Allende and brought Pinochet to power. Teruggi's body was later found in a makeshift morgue, riddled with 17 gunshot wounds. The Clinton administration has called on Chile to provide a "full accounting" of what happened to Teruggi. His family wants the same thing from the U.S. government. "There's never been any acknowledgment in all these years from the U.S. government that it was even aware of my brother in Chile before his death," said Janice Teruggi Page, the journalist's younger sister. "Here's the evidence that they were quite aware of him. Who knows how much observation was done of him from then up until the time of his death?"

Page, a schoolteacher in suburban Chicago, said she hopes the newly declassified documents can serve as a tool to pry further information out of the State Department, CIA, FBI and Pentagon, which last week released 16,000 previously secret government documents on human rights abuses and political violence in Chile.

Even if no information was shared with the Chileans, Page said she thinks it is "outrageous" that the U.S. government compiled a dossier on her brother and branded him a "subversive" because he supported the Allende regime and other leftist causes.

CIA officials have long denied any involvement in the deaths of Teruggi and Charles Horman, another American journalist abducted and killed in the aftermath of the coup. Horman's disappearance at the hands of Chilean intelligence agents inspired the 1982 Jack Lemmon-Sissy Spacek movie "Missing," which also depicted Teruggi's abduction and the discovery of his body. Horman and Teruggi were friends and worked together on a left-leaning newsletter in Santiago called Fin.

In response to Page's comments, CIA officials quoted declassified CIA documents stating that the CIA's Santiago station did not share any information about Teruggi with the Chileans. "Santiago Station had no record of Frank R. Teruggi until after the coup of 11 September 1973," according to one CIA memo.

James E. Anderson, a CIA case officer in Santiago who helped find the bodies of Teruggi and Horman in his "cover" assignment as a U.S. consular official, said last week in a rare interview that both men were unknown to the U.S. government.

"All of the killings were upsetting to me," Anderson said. "There was absolutely no reason for that. I still have nightmares about the bodies I saw."

Anderson's true identity as a CIA officer was revealed in State Department documents released last year as part of a declassification review ordered by President Clinton after Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998. Anderson has never acknowledged any association with the CIA. The aging ex-dictator has since returned to Chile, where he has been stripped of immunity and now faces prosecution for killings and abductions during his 17-year rule.

Documents released last week in the fourth and final round of the Clinton review show that the 66th Military Intelligence Group in Germany obtained Teruggi's name and address in Santiago in 1972 from a sensitive source, probably West German intelligence, and forwarded it to the FBI's legal attaché in Bonn. The source was surveilling a leftist editor in Germany who was helping American servicemen desert from the U.S. military when Teruggi's name surfaced in conversation as a possible contact in Chile, along with his address in Santiago at 2575 Hernan Cortes.

"According to information received by source, Teruggi is an American residing in Chile who is closely associated with the Chicago Area Group for the Liberation of Americas," according to an October 1972 FBI memo. FBI documents dated December 1972, based on a subsequent field investigation by agents in Chicago, label Teruggi a "subversive" and note that he attended a 1971 conference held by a group of former Peace Corps volunteers "who espouse support of Cuba and all Third World revolutionaries and oppose United States 'imperialism and oppression' abroad."

Page said her brother and his friends were "middle-class intellectuals" who were not violent and were in no way a danger to the United States or its allies.

The FBI documents on Teruggi contain warnings addressed to other, unspecified agencies in the U.S. intelligence community: "This document . . . is loaned to your agency; it and its contents are not to be distributed outside your agency."

Page said she assumes that the document released last week is the same as one that her father, Frank F. Teruggi, tried and failed to obtain from the CIA in the mid-1970s through the Freedom of Information Act. The elder Teruggi died five years ago.

A 1976 CIA memo, released earlier this year as part of the Clinton declassification review, states that "the document in which Mr. Teruggi's son's name is mentioned was provided to representatives of the CIA by an intelligence service of a foreign government."

Peter Kornbluh, an expert on Chile at the nonprofit National Security Archive, said the documents released last week further suspicions long expressed by Teruggi's friends and family members that he might have been fingered by U.S. intelligence.

"To this day, we still don't know what kind of intelligence-sharing there was between the CIA and the Chilean military before and after the coup," Kornbluh said. He added that the U.S. government's refusal to release information in its files about Teruggi for almost 30 years "is just a scandal in terms of what the family deserved to know."

The New York Times

March 28, 2002

Section A; Page 13; Column 1; Foreign Desk

AS DOOR OPENS FOR LEGAL ACTIONS IN CHILEAN COUP, KISSINGER IS NUMBERED AMONG THE HUNTED

By LARRY ROHTER

SANTIAGO, Chile

With a trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet increasingly unlikely here, victims of the Chilean military's 17-year dictatorship are now pressing legal actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry A. Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who supported plots to overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist president, in the early 1970's.

In perhaps the most prominent of the cases, an investigating judge here has formally asked Mr. Kissinger, a former national security adviser and secretary of state, and Nathaniel Davis, the American ambassador to Chile at the time, to respond to questions about the killing of an American citizen, Charles Horman, after the deadly military coup that brought General Pinochet to power on Sept. 11, 1973. General Pinochet, now 85, ruled Chile until 1990. He was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant charging him with human rights violations. After 16 months in custody, General Pinochet was released by Britain because of his declining health. Although he was arrested in Santiago in 2000, he was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.

The death of Mr. Horman, a filmmaker and journalist, was the subject of the 1982 movie "Missing." A civil suit that his widow, Joyce Horman, filed in the United States was withdrawn after she could not obtain access to relevant American government documents. But the initiation of legal action here against General Pinochet and the declassification of some American documents led her to file a new suit here 15 months ago.

Last fall, after gaining approval from Chile's Supreme Court, Judge Juan Guzman, who is also handling the Pinochet case, submitted 17 questions in the Horman case to American authorities. An American Embassy official here confirmed that the document, known as a letter rogatory, has been received in Washington, but said it has not yet been answered and that he did not know if or when there would be a response.

"We're pressing the case in Chile because this is the first opportunity we have had to see if there is still some real evidence there," Mrs. Horman said by telephone from New York. "But the letters rogatory seem to be in a paralyzed state."

William Rogers, Mr. Kissinger's lawyer, said in a letter that because the investigations in Chile and elsewhere related to Mr. Kissinger "in his capacity as secretary of state," the Department of State should respond to the issues that have been raised. He added that Mr. Kissinger is willing to "contribute what he can from his memory of those distant events," but did not say how or where that would occur.

Relatives of Gen. Rene Schneider, commander of the Chilean Armed Forces when he was assassinated in Oct. 1970 by other military officers, have taken a different approach than Mrs. Horman. Alleging summary execution, assault and civil rights violations, they filed a $3 million civil suit in Washington last fall against Mr. Kissinger, Richard M. Helms, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and other Nixon-era officials who, according to declassified United States documents, were involved in plotting a military coup to keep Mr. Allende from power.

In his books, Mr. Kissinger has acknowledged that he initially followed Mr. Nixon's orders in Sept. 1970 to organize a coup, but he also says that he ordered the effort shut down a month later. The government documents, however, indicate that the C.I.A. continued to encourage a coup here and also provided money to military officers who had been jailed for General Schneider's death.

"My father was neither for or against Allende, but a constitutionalist who believed that the winner of the election should take office," Rene Schneider Jr. said. "That made him an obstacle to Mr. Kissinger and the Nixon government, and so they conspired with generals here to carry out the attack on my father and to plot a coup attempt."

In another action, human rights lawyers here have filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Kissinger and other American officials, accusing them of helping organize the covert regional program of political repression called Operation Condor. As part of that plan, right-wing military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay coordinated efforts throughout the 1970's to kidnap and kill hundreds of their exiled political opponents.

Argentina has also begun an investigation into American support for and involvement in Operation Condor. A judge there, Rodolfo Cancioba Corral, has said he regards Mr. Kissinger as a potential "defendant or suspect." But lawyers say it is virtually impossible for a foreign court to compel former American officials to answer a summons.

During a visit by Mr. Kissinger to France last year, for instance, a judge there sent police officers to his Paris hotel to serve him with a request to answer questions about American involvement in the Chilean coup, in which French citizens also disappeared. But Mr. Kissinger refused to respond to the subpoena, referred the matter to the State Department, and flew on to Italy.

"I think it is clear that Kissinger is now one of many, many officials who have to think twice before they travel," said Bruce Broomhall, director of the international justice program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "It will be surprising to many that an American secretary of state is among that group, but times have certainly changed" as a result of the Pinochet case, he said.

The uproar appears to have forced Mr. Kissinger to cancel a trip to Brazil. He was scheduled to make a speech and receive a government medal in Sao Paulo on March 13, but withdrew after leftist groups there said they would demonstrate against him and also called on judges and prosecutors to detain him for questioning about Operation Condor.

A spokeswoman for Kissinger Associates in New York attributed the change of plans to a "scheduling conflict." But the organizer of the event, Rabbi Henry Sobel of the Congregacao Israelita Paulista, said "the situation had become politically uncomfortable" both for Mr. Kissinger and local Jewish community leaders who had invited him.

"I spoke with him many times on the telephone and made it very clear to him what was happening behind the scenes, and he was very sensitive to that," Rabbi Sobel said in a telephone interview. "This was a way to avoid any problems or embarrassment for him and for us."

The Guardian (London)

March 29, 2002

Guardian Foreign Pages, Pg. 14

KISSINGER MAY FACE CHILEAN COURT OVER COUP KILLING

By Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles and Jonathan Franklin in Santiago

The former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger may finally have to face court action for Washington's role in the overthrow of the Chilean government in 1973 and the bloody events that followed it.

Mr Kissinger has been formally asked by an investigating judge in Chile to respond to questions about the killing of an American citizen, Charles Horman, in the wake of the coup. The story of the journalist and film-maker's death became the basis for the 1982 film Missing. Ever since the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in Britain in 1998, there have been attempts to show what part the US government played in the coup that brought him to power. Of particular interest has been whether the US in effect gave the military dictatorship carte blanche in dealing with dissidents, even if they were American citizens.

Part of the impetus for the new legal move has come from declassified documents. One such US state department memo, dated August 25 1976, says: "The GOC (government of Chile) might have believed this American could be killed without negative fallout from the USG (US government). "There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest 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 that GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia."

Juan Guzman, the judge leading the investigation, has decided there are sufficient legal grounds to consider Mr Kissinger an important witness in the Horman case. Witness statements will be taken in the next six weeks.

Fabiola Letelier, a lawyer with the Chilean human rights group Codepu, has said that a number of "VIP surprises" will give evidence in April. Codepu has secured the cooperation of retired military officers in giving testimony. One lawyer said they included witnesses to Horman's execution. Mrs Letelier said yesterday that more than 150 declassified documents "affect this case", and that Mr Kissinger appeared in several of them.

Mr Kissinger's lawyers indicated this week that the matter should be dealt with by the US state department, as he was working there at the time. He is said to be willing to assist with whatever he remembers from "those distant events".

Horman's widow, Joyce Horman, said in New York yesterday that she was heartened by the news. It was right that Mr Kissinger should be required to answer the questions. "He was in charge," she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/23/nyregion/23PROF.html

New York Times

April 23, 2002

The Mission of a Sept. 11 Widow (Sept. 11, 1973)

By LYNDA RICHARDSON

JOYCE HORMAN is talking about her search for the truth. Her cornflower blue eyes gaze into the distance, like she's staring into a camera lens. She's used to questions about her husband, Charles, a filmmaker and journalist whose execution in Chile during a 1973 military coup was dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie "Missing."

Yet, suddenly, her steady Midwestern cadence wobbles. Tears start to roll, leaving a streak of mascara on her cheeks. She sits up straight, shaking out her hands as if to will herself out of this weepy state.

"Sometimes, it just comes out and I don't know why," she says with a short, embarrassed laugh.

Mrs. Horman's life revolves around her dead husband. She makes her home in the memento-filled penthouse apartment in which Mr. Horman was raised on East 76th Street. She is in the thick of legal action to find out exactly what happened to him. She's also organizing a gala ceremony on May 15 to honor the 20th anniversary of the 1982 film by Constantin Costa-Gavras. (Sissy Spacek played her, while Jack Lemmon played Mr. Horman's father and John Shea played Mr. Horman.) The event, at Studio 54, is to take place on what would have been her husband's 60th birthday. She hopes to renew interest in her husband's case in a preoccupied world.

"This is headquarters," Mrs. Horman says apologetically about the living room clutter. Several writing desks are piled high with stationery marked the Charles Horman Truth Project, which is financed mainly by the Ford Foundation. She established the project to support investigations of abuses carried out during the 17-year dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Her hope of uncovering the truth behind her husband's murder was rekindled in 1998 with General Pinochet's arrest in London on a Spanish warrant charging him with human rights violations. Mrs. Horman, 57, decided to devote herself to her husband's case after working for 30 years as an information technology consultant.

"It was the happiest day of my life when Pinochet was arrested," she says, smiling.

Composure regained, Mrs. Horman slips her large, oval glasses back on and talks about the circumstances surrounding her husband's death. There are the declassified State Department documents, released in late 1999, that suggest that the Pinochet regime would not have killed her husband when it overthrew Salvador Allende, the Socialist president, without a green light from American intelligence — a claim denied by American officials for two decades.

"That really riled me," she says, referring to the details in the files. She filed a criminal suit in Chile in December 2000 seeking responses from Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, among other Nixon administration officials, who supported coup plots there. She thinks her husband died because he knew too much.

As it happens, the Chilean coup was on Sept. 11. So, what is it like now, trying to get your message across after last Sept. 11?

"It's very hard," she says, sounding more resigned than bitter. "People absolutely don't want to hear about it. They don't want to know the United States government overthrew a democracy and upheld a brutal dictatorship that was violating human rights.

"They don't want to know that the United States was on that side, because then you have to listen to complaints about the United States that come from the rest of the world. They only want to talk about fighting terror. I understand that. It comes from a terrible fear and sorrow, but it's a simplistic and dangerous way to go forward."

As Mrs. Horman talks, her hands are clasped around a balled-up pink napkin. She considers herself a bit shy. Even so, she's certainly been out there, traveling the world to publicize her husband's case.

HER apartment, though, feels cloistered. It is decorated with artwork painted by her mother-in-law, Elizabeth, who died last year and once lived there alone. Mrs. Horman moved in from a downstairs apartment, where she had lived since the late 1970's.

Mrs. Horman also dabbles in art. There's an unfinished painting: bright slashes on a canvas, perched on an easel in a guest room. She goes to a bookshelf, pulling out a photo album, in which her husband is frozen in time.

There's a photo of Mr. Horman as a student at Exeter; another one of the mutton-chopped Harvard graduate who became a writer for left-leaning publications like The Nation. The couple married in 1968 after meeting in Europe. There's a photo of the camper they drove to South America in 1971. "Charlie was interested in the socialist thing and I was interested in being with Charlie and traveling," she says.

The daughter of a supermarket owner in Minnesota, she took skis.

When "Missing" came out, Mrs. Horman was undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma, which has been in remission for 20 years. She regards the film as seminal. "It played a very important role in raising international consciousness about the wrongness of human rights crimes," she says.

Mrs. Horman has never remarried. As the conversation winds down, she steps onto a sunny terrace of blooming plants. She finds peace there. Does she have anything to say to people who want her just to move on? "The sadness is still there, and the need to have the truth is still there, and every family of any victim would tell you that," she says. "It's not that you wouldn't like to go on with your life; it's that you can't. You need to have that truth not hidden, not denied."