Involvement in 1973 Pinochet coup in ChileIn 1970 ITT owned of 70% of Chitelco, the Chilean Telephone Company and funded El Mercurio, a Chilean right-wing newspaper. Declassified documents released by the CIA in 2000 suggest that ITT financially helped opponents of Salvador Allende's government prepare a military coup (National Security Archives). On September 28, 1973, ITT's headquarters in New York City, New York, was bombed by protesters for alleged involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected and emerging socialist government in Chile
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In 1972 newspaper columnist Jack Anderson disclosed a memo of ITT's Washington lobbyist, Dita Beard, which revealed a relationship between ITT's providing funds for the Republican National Convention and a Justice Department settlement of an antitrust suit favorable to ITT...This was of interest to me having just read:
CounterPunch: Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and the CIAIn 1972, when Mark Felt was reading transcripts of Yeoman Radford's conversations,
Robert Foster 'Bob' Bennett was the new owner of the
Robert R. Mullen Company. This was a CIA front with offices in Washington and abroad. Among Bennett's employees was the seemingly retired CIA officer,
E. Howard Hunt. Politically hyper-active during the Nixon Administration, Bennett was also the Washington representative of the
Howard Hughes organization (which was just entering negotiations with the CIA over plans to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean's floor). It was Bennett who suggested that Hunt might want to interview
ITT lobbyist Dita Beard, and it was Bennett who volunteered his own nephew to work as an infiltrator at the DNC. One might go on, but the point is made: Bennett was a very well-placed source, if not a co-conspirator.
Today, Senator Bennett is a Mormon elder and one of the richest men in Congress. That he was also a key source of Bob Woodward's during the Watergate affair is memorialized in a Memorandum to the Record written by Martin J. Lukoskie, Bennett's CIA case-officer in 1972. (4) According to Lukoskie,
Bennett "established a 'backdoor entry' to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which was representing the Democratic Party (and the Washington Post...)" Bennett's job was to "kill off any revelation" about the Mullen Company's relationship to the CIA. But he was also responsible for dissuading reporters from the Washington Post from pursuing a 'Seven Days in May' scenario" that would have implicated the CIA in a conspiracy to "take over the country."...
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