Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story by Jack Devine, Vernon Loeb Page B

tit-for-tat harassment was carried on throughout the Cold War. It was humorous but mindless—the wrong way to approach psychological operations. Covert operations should be based on solid objective evidence with important national security benefits. They never should be used for amusement.
    Pat soon felt at home in Santiago but realized she needed to learn how to drive to get around town on her own. Being a city girl, she had no license and had never really driven a car. I gave her a quick driving lesson, which left her feeling confident—and me uneasy. An embassy employee helped her get a license, which was secured, after all the paperwork was completed, with a bottle of scotch. Pat’s first test was to drive to an embassy function at the ambassador’s residence. When it came time to leave, Pat graciously offered to give a close friend, Terry Svat, a lift without revealing that she had just learned to drive. I heard from several sources that the trip was not uneventful. Apparently, approaching the entrance gate, Pat went for the brake but hit the gas pedal instead, jumping the curb and proceeding at a relatively high speed in the direction of the guardhouse, barely missing it and the armed guards. Today, any car jumping a curb in front of an embassy or ambassador’s residence should expect to be fired upon. Fortunately, this took place long before our embassies became modern-day fortresses.
    While I was out meeting contacts and supporting the opposition media, Pat was coping with running a household for a family of seven in a country that was slowly falling apart. It is, in part, her experience in Santiago that convinces me still that Allende would not have lasted long whether the CIA had been there or not. Too many people were being hurt by his economic policies—not just the moneyed but the middle and working classes, too. Allende, perhaps fearing that his narrow margin of victory gave him a short time line to pursue his vision of a Socialist Chile, rushed into a multipronged program of land reform, nationalizing industry, and government spending to stimulate the economy. Initially, his program seemed to be working. In the government’s first year, GDP grew by 7.7 percent, production increased by 13.7 percent, and consumption levels rose by 11.6 percent. 11 But by the time I arrived with my family, those economic policies had come back to bite him. Inflation was over 45 percent and climbing. 12 Landlords were reluctant to spend money to maintain property that might be seized at any moment; business owners who could were leaving, taking their capital and entrepreneurial know-how with them; and there were massive consumer shortages.
    Pat spent a good portion of her day hunting for basic household items on the black market. Flour could be obtained at one location, soap at another. She had a network of contacts and secret codes to rival my own. Hers were aimed at locating particularly scarce products. She would be told, for example, to go to a garage or building and “knock on the green door” to find black-market oil and toilet paper, which were in very scarce supply in Santiago. Butter was so scarce that some of the embassy wives made their own. Pat was raised in a row house in Philadelphia; she had no desire to learn how to churn butter. So we did without a lot of things. Beef was one of the things we gave up; it was nearly impossible to find. We switched to fish, chicken, and pork. One day, a colleague told me that he had found a black-market butcher who could provide steak. I got him to take me there, and I felt like a hero coming home with a bagful of supposed “quality” beef. It did look odd, with a yellowish tint to its fat. Pat was a little skeptical, but she prepared it. One taste and we knew we’d been had. It was horsemeat! We fed it to our dogs, who seemed to enjoy it well enough.
    These deprivations were much worse for Chileans—who, after all, were not on temporary assignment—and contributed to