How 'weak' Allende was left out in the cold by the KGB

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How 'weak' Allende was left out in the cold by the KGB

In the second exclusive extract from The Mitrokhin Archive II, the historian Christopher Andrew and KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin reveal how the Soviet Union influenced the rise and fall of the first democratically elected Marxist leader



BY FAR the most important of the KGB's contacts in South America was Salvador Allende Gossens (codenamed Leader by the KGB), whose election as President of Chile in 1970 was hailed as “a revolutionary blow to the imperialist system in Latin America”.

Allende was the first Marxist anywhere in the world to win power through the ballot box. He was unlike any stereotype of a Marxist leader. During his visits to Havana in the 1960s, he had been privately mocked by Castro's entourage for his aristocratic tastes: fine wines, expensive objets d’art, well-cut suits and elegantly dressed women. Allende was also a womaniser. Gabriel García Márquez described him as “a gallant with a touch of the old school about him, perfumed notes and furtive rendezvous”.


Despite the private mockery which they aroused in Allende’s Communist allies, however, his bourgeois appearance and expensive lifestyle were electoral assets, reassuring middle-class voters that their lives would continue normally under an Allende presidency. As even his opponents acknowledged, he had enormous personal charm.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-1786802,00.html

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1. In Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History,

Gott says in the introduction that many Latin American revolutionaries in the 60s had bourgeois tastes. Che was probably the exception in Cuba. Gott carried with him a jar of stinky cheese from an expensive shop in London for the Cuban minister who hosted him on the advice of a friend who had been to Cuba. Gott said it was a hit.