How Pinochet duped British embassy staff (UK Archives)

From:
Our men in Santiago welcomed Chile coup

Newly released documents show how Pinochet duped British embassy staff

Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Sunday January 16, 2005
The Observer

One of the Foreign Office's darkest periods of diplomacy has finally emerged from the shadows, as records have been released detailing British diplomatic blundering over General Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup in Chile against the civilian government of Salvador Allende on 11 September, 1973.

The papers - made available by the National Archives in Kew - reveal how British diplomats in Chile at the time were hopelessly deluded about Pinochet's commitment to democracy and fooled into wildly underestimating his murderous brutality. The figures involved included Sir David Spedding, who went on to become "C", head of the Secret Intelligence Service between 1994 and 1999 and who died in 2001.

On instructions from the Heath government, the British Embassy stood out from the other European missions by refusing asylum to any Chilean trying to flee the new dictatorship. Documents show that Britain resisted helping any of Pinochet's victims and that no one who did eventually come was allowed in without laborious consultations with the US.

One Foreign Office memo set out the strategy on the question of Britain's attitude to Allende's supporters who had become Pinochet victims. 'It is intended to keep the number of refugees to a very small number and, if our criteria are not fully met, we may accept none of them', it said.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1391449,00.html