Five days after a bloody coup on Sept. 11, 1973, that toppled Salvador Allende Gossens, the Marxist leader of Chile, Henry A. Kissinger chatted on the phone with President Richard M. Nixon about the event, which had clearly delighted both men.

Henry Kissinger told President Richard Nixon days after the 1973 coup in Chile the United States helped create the conditions for the ouster of socialist President Salvador Allende, newly declassified transcripts showed on Wednesday.

The transcripts show Nixon and Kissinger relieved about the toppling of Allende, who killed himself the day of the coup. The transcripts quote Kissinger, then national security adviser, as saying newspapers were "bleeding because a pro-communist government has been overthrown."

"I mean instead of celebrating - in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes," Kissinger told Nixon on Sept. 16, 1973, five days after the bloody coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. About 3,000 people were killed or disappeared under Pinochet's 17-year rule.

"Well we didn't - as you know - our hand doesn't show on this one, though," Nixon told Kissinger in the Sept. 16 transcript.

"We didn't do it. I mean we helped them," Kissinger told Nixon, adding that "(deleted) created the conditions as great as possible," in an apparent reference to a person or institution.

"That is right and that is the way it is going to be played," Nixon responded.

While critics and supporters of the Bush administration's pre-emption doctrine have described it as unprecedented in U.S. diplomacy, the release of a 34-year-old memo advocating ''regime change'' in Chile shows the policy has been around for quite some time.

The eight-page document by then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger to former president Richard Nixon also suggests that Washington's destabilization of Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens was not largely motivated by any direct military or subversive threat the Allende government then posed or might pose in the future to the United States.

...To be precise, a 17-year-old in the BET audience told Mr. Powell that "the United States staged a coup in Chile on September 11th, despite the wishes of the Chilean populace against the coup and the populace in support of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende, the CIA, regardless, supported the coup of Augusto Pinochet and that resulted in mass deaths."

Mr. Powell lamely responded: "With respect to your earlier comment about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of." ...

When a student asked Secretary of State Colin Powell about the 1973 military coup in Chile, the retired general turned diplomat made no secret of his deep misgivings about the U.S. role in that upheaval.

"It is not a part of American history that we're proud of," Powell said, quickly adding that reforms instituted since then make it unlikely that the policies of that Cold War era will be repeated. The matter might have ended there had not Washington operative William D. Rogers taken notice of Powell's televised comment. Rogers served under Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975-76 as the department's top official on Latin America and maintains a professional relationship with Kissinger. In a highly unusual move, the State Department issued a statement that put distance between the department and its top official. The statement asserted that the U.S. government "did not instigate the coup that ended Allende's government in 1973" — a reference to the elected president, Salvador Allende.

Rogers was concerned that Powell's comment was reinforcing what he called "the legend" that the Chile coup was a creation of a Kissinger-led cabal working in league with Chilean military officers opposed to Allende. He called the department legal office to point out that there was a pending law suit against the government and Powell's comment was not helpful.