Australia’s overseas spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), actively assisted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in destabilising the Chilean government ahead of the bloody US-backed military coup on September 11, 1973.
Declassified government documents, released from the National Archives of Australia in June, after a four-year legal battle, show that Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam eventually shut down the ASIS operation in April 1973, just five months before the coup. But that was only out of concern that if the public became aware of it, “he would find it extremely difficult to justify our presence there.”
Although heavily-redacted, the documents reveal that Whitlam’s predecessor, Liberal Prime Minister Billy McMahon, approved an ASIS request in December 1970 to open a base in
— source wsws.org | Mike Head | 13 Sep 2021