C.I.A. FRONT - "PEACE" CORPS

"The Peace Corps is a perfect structure for the CIA. It provides a point of contact with the working class which is so necessary for information gathering. And, because of the Peace Corps structure, the CIA does not have to control it in order to use it successfully. The Peace Corps entered Latin America as the "person-to-person" of the Alliance for Progress. Working out of the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, the first head of the Peace Corps in Chile was Nathaniel Davis, promoted to Ambassador by the time of the September 1973 coup. Under the skillful guidance of Davis, many of the youthful volunteers headed straight for the poblaciones which housed the poorest sectors of the Chilean working class and unemployed. Fresh out of Swarthmore, Bennington and Berkeley, the volunteers invaded the poblaciones, lived with the people and came to know them -- politically and socially. They worked with them, observed their customs, their way of life, their traditions. And then they drew up work reports describing their experiences.

"It was not necessary to have many agents in the Peace Corps -- just in the right places and with access to all the information which was generated. Unknowingly, thousands of U.S. youths, most thinking that they were helping the Chileans, were instead gathering data for the now undercover Project Camelot.

"Those agents in the Peace Corps who were conscious of their role had several tasks. As they mingled with the people, they were identifying future leftist leaders as well as those right-wingers who in the future would work for U.S. interests. They were assessing consciousness, evaluating reactions to reforms. And they were selecting and training future agents. It was at this point that Michael Townley, Peace Corpsman in the sixties, was recruited to enter the Agency. Townley returned to Chile in 1970 as one of the agency's closest contacts with Patria y Libertad.

"Finally, the Peace Corps was used as a front to get paramilitary equipment into the country. Ellis Carrasco, who succeeded Davis as head of the Peace Corps, was himself accused of gun-running. Later, the U.S. Army donated and installed radio receivers in all Peace Corps regional offices to facilitate communications. These same receivers were used during the coup to facilitate coordination of the Junta's bloody activities." [5]