Missing: Fact or Fabrication?

By Gerald Clarke

The debate over anti-U.S. themes in new Costa-Gavras film

Moviest and TV are probably the most effective means of persuasion ever devised. Sixty-six years ago, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was the history of the Civil War for many moviegoers; so far as millions of TV watchers are concerned, Roots told them all they need to know about slavery. A vivid new movie, Missing, promises to be similarly potent for audiences around the world, suggesting that the U.S. not only helped mastermind the 1973 coup in Chile, but condoned the murder of a young American who stumbled upon the secret. The question being debated among concerned citizens, journalists and even the U.S. State Department: How factual is the film?

The death of the American, Charles Horman, is fact, certainly. A bright, left-leaning freelance writer and documentary film maker, Horman, together with his wife Joyce, moved to Santiago, Chile, in 1972, eager to watch the development of the new Socialist regime of President Salvador Allende. Horman was visiting the seaside resort of Vina del Mar with another American woman, Terry Simon, when Allende was overthrown by a military coup on Sept. 11,1973. According to a journal they kept at the time, Horman and Simon saw and spoke to several U.S. military officials in Vina who strongly hinted that the coup had been planned there--and that the U.S. had been behind it. Two days after they returned to Santiago, Horman, then 31, disappeared. A little more than four weeks later, it was revealed that he had been shot and killed.

Director Constantin Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege) builds Missing around the arrival in Santia go of Herman's father Edmund (Jack Lemmon), who joins Horman's wife (Sissy Spacek) in a frustrating quest to find out what happened to his son (John Shea). Basing his narrative largely on Thomas Hauser's 1978 book, The Execution of Charles Horman (reissued in a new paperback as Missing), Costa-Gavras shows the pair running up against a phalanx of American diplomats who profess to be helping but who know all along that the Chilean military authorities have already murdered young Horman. Indeed, the movie goes so far as to suggest that an American official might have cosigned Horman's execution order. Nathaniel Davis, who was U.S. Ambassador to Chile at the time of the coup, rejects this version of events so strongly that he and a number of other officials portrayed in the film are considering suing Universal Pictures and possibly Costa-Gavras and Hauser for defamation of character.

The film makers concede that some facts have been altered for dramatic effect: certain events telescoped, details added or subtracted. In the movie, the father and daughter-in-law go through a morgue looking for Charles' body, finding instead the remains of a friend, American student Frank Teruggi. In fact, that discovery was made by someone else.

In the essentials, however, family and friends say that the movie is honest. "It's an excellent dramatization of my book," declares Hauser. "It is true in spirit, but not precisely accurate in each and every detail." The elder Horman, who has spent the past eight years building up his case, brought suit against eleven Government officials in 1977, claiming, among other things, negligence and wrongful death. Most counts were dismissed on procedural grounds. Horman withdrew the rest since he was unable to get some classified documents that he believed would be conclusive. "They're desperate," he says. "If the real story ever comes out, its implications would be as serious as Watergate's."

He nonetheless has several documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which require some explanation. One, a cable from Davis to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, is dated Oct. 4, 1973, and recounts neighbors' descriptions of Charles' arrest and an eyewitness's report of his detention by the military. Yet when Edmund Horman arrived in Santiago on Oct. 5, he was told by the U.S. Ambassador that his son was probably in hiding. Other documents raise similar puzzles.

There is nothing approaching proof, however, and the State Department is outraged by the film's thesis. It has taken the film seriously enough to issue an unusual three-page statement disputing I its major points. After an eight-year investigation, it said, "no light was shed upon the circumstances of [Horman's] death and little upon the circumstances of his disappearance.

Furthermore, nothing was discovered to support any such charges, rumors or inferences as contained in the complaint against U.S. Government officials."

The movie, now playing to packed houses in six cities, begins its nationwide run March 13, after which moviegoers around the country will be able to form their own conclusions. --By Gerald Clarke.

Reported by Jay Branegan/Chicago and Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Jay Branegan, Elain Dutka

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