Washington. On the occasion of the 48th anniversary of the coup against the government of the socialist Salvador Allende in Chile on Saturday, the National Security Archive of the George Washington University in the US capital published Australian files that had previously been kept under lock and key.
It shows that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) set up a post in Santiago de Chile in 1971 following a request from the US CIA. The Liberal Secretary of State William McMahon had approved the establishment. He became Prime Minister of Australia in March 1970.
The ASIS post remained active for 18 months. The agents used their own sources and wrote intelligence reports which were sent directly to the CIA headquarters in Langley. After McMahon’s coalition suffered a severe defeat in the December 1972 general election, left-wing Social Democrat Gough Whitlam took over the post of prime minister. In the spring of 1973, Whitlam ordered the ASIS to end its operation in Chile.
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In 1975 Whitlam himself was ousted in a highly controversial constitutional process. An ex-CIA agent later described the crackdown on Whitlam as “a kind of Chile” to the press.
Australia and Chile first established relations in 1899 when the South American country established a consulate in the then self-governing British colony of New South Wales. It was not until 1901 that the various colonies on the Australian continent merged to form Australia. At the end of 1945, the two states established official diplomatic relations. A year later, Australia opened a representative office in Santiago de Chile. In 1968 the Australian side upgraded the office to an embassy. A year later, Chile also elevated its representative office to an embassy.
After the Whitlam affair there were political discussions that resulted in Australian independence from Great Britain in 1986. Today the governments of both countries work closely together, for example in the format of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation).
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