User:Veritas Aeterna/Draft The ITT Scandal

Involvement in the 1964 coup in Brazil

João Goulart was the president of Brazil. The US government, including President Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, ambassador Lincoln Gordon, and others, felt he had Communist leanings. ITT owned the phone company of Brazil; Washington was afraid he would nationalize it. ITT's president, Harold Geneen, was friends with the Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone. The CIA performed psyops against Goulart, performed character assassination, pumped money into opposition groups, and enlisted the help of the Agency for International Development and the AFL-CIO. The 1964 Brazilian coup d'état exiled Goulart and the military dictatorship of Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco took over. McCone went to work for ITT a few years later. The dictatorship lasted until 1985.

Involvement in 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile

In 1970, ITT owned of 70% of Chitelco (the Chilean Telephone Company) and funded El Mercurio, a Chilean right-wing newspaper. In 1972, newspaper columnist Jack Anderson reported on secret ITT documents showing collusion with the CIA in undermining the government of democratically elected leader Salvador Allende. A memo of ITT's Washington lobbyist, Dita Beard, 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. Altogether, "...twenty-four secret documents totaling seventy-nine pages of strategy papers, memoranda of conversations, and meeting notes -- candidly charted the intrigue of covert corporate collaboration between the CIA, White House, and embassy officials to provoke economic chaos and subvert Chilean democracy in 1970 and 1971." Subsequently, on September 28, 1973, an ITT building in New York City, New York, was bombed by the Weather Underground for ITT's involvement in the September 11th overthrow of the democratically elected socialist government in Chile. Finally, in 2000, documents released by the CIA as part of the Chilean Declassification Project further established that ITT financially helped opponents of Salvador Allende's government work towards a military coup.