The Condor Years
Authors: John Dinges
Also by John Dinges
Assassination on Embassy Row
(with Saul Landau)
Our Man in Panama: The Shrewd Rise and Brutal Fall of Manuel Noriega
How Pinochet and His Allies Brought
Terrorism to Three Continents
John Dinges
© 2004 by John Dinges
Afterword © 2005 by John Dinges
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to:
Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2004
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York
Extract from Pablo Neruda’s “Vienen los pájaros” from
Canto General
is reprinted by permission of Fundación Pablo Neruda, © 1950 by Pablo Neruda and Fundación Pablo Neruda
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dinges, John, 1941–
The Condor years : how Pinochet and his allies brought terrorism to three continents /
John Dinges.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-5955-8902-6
1. Chile—Politics and government—1973–1988. 2. Southern Cone of South America—Politics and government. 3. Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto. 4. Operaciân Cândor (South American countersubversion association) 5. Chile. Direcciân de Inteligencia Nacional. 6. State-sponsored terrorism—History—20th century. 7. Victims of state-sponsored terrorism—History—20th century. 8. Chile—Relations—Foreign countries. 9. United States—Military policy. I. Title
F3100.D565 2004
327.1283'009'047—dc22 2003060265
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Composition by dix!
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
For Carolina, my companion in those years and these
Y sobre las plumas carnivoras
volaba encima del mundo
el condor, rey asesino
—P
ABLO
N
ERUDA, FROM
“V
IENEN LOS
P
AJAROS” IN
Canto General
A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments
4. Revolution in the Counterrevolution
8. “The Old Man Doesn’t Want to Die”
11. A Preventable Assassination
12. Kissinger and Argentina’s “Terrorist Problem”
13. Ed Koch and Condor’s Endgame
14. The Pursuit of Justice and U.S. Accountability
Afterword: A Dictator’s Decline
This book is in large part underground history. It covers roughly the period 1973–1980, when military dictatorships ruled in most of South America. I have sought out the principal actors—the security forces, the armed leftist groups, and U.S. officials—who went to great lengths to keep their activities secret from the public at the time. Many of those directly involved, especially among the opponents of the military governments, are dead. Many others among the military and even among former U.S. officials continue to conceal what they did. But it was not an impervious group, and I was able to interview or obtain testimony from more than 200 people among those who participated in the events of the period. The second major source of new authoritative information is the plethora of contemporary secret documents that have been discovered, confiscated, officially declassified or otherwise made available in recent years.
I have tried to bring together the documents and the interviews to achieve a laminate of maximum strength in reconstructing the once secret events. Often those interviewed were able to refresh their memories with the documents, but most crucially the contemporary documents provided a factual spine that could not be changed by faulty or self-interested memories. When there was conflict between the documents and memories a quarter century later, I usually gave greater authority to the documents.
Four collections of documents are used most extensively: The U.S. government,
by executive order during the Clinton administration, declassified approximately 24,000 documents about Chile and 4,000 about Argentina for the period of the military governments, the latter containing a significant number of documents concerning events in Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. An immense cache of files from Paraguay’s intelligence police were discovered in Paraguay in 1992 and are stored in an archive in Asunción. Finally, I obtained copies of the secret correspondence between Chile’s intelligence agency, DINA, and the agency’s undercover operative in Buenos Aires, numbering approximately 2,400 pages. In addition I received about 2,000 pages of declassified files from U.S. agencies in response to my requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
A word must be said about the secrecy of intelligence documents. Secret documents often have a special aura because they may provide an insider’s view of events or reveal actions that have never been made public. But secrecy does not inoculate them against inaccuracy and they are only as factual as the reporting and sourcing that went into them. Whenever possible, therefore, I have attempted to independently confirm events described in the intelligence documents. The fact that these documents have been kept secret for all these years, however, does tell us one important thing: it is highly unlikely the drafters of the intelligence reports were manipulating facts or crafting lies to deceive the public. They were exchanging with each other and with allied intelligence agencies their best information on unfolding events. The documents are therefore a reliable roadmap of what the intelligence officials and their superiors believed at the time to be an accurate version of the facts.
The secret documents demonstrate, for example, that the intelligence agencies were preoccupied with an alliance of leftist armed groups called the JCR and this perceived threat was a major factor in the creation of the military’s own alliance, Operation Condor. In reality, the military capability of the leftist groups never presented a serious threat to the dictatorships, and in hindsight the military’s portrayal of the threat seems exaggerated. But it is undeniable that the military services gave high credence to the information they were exchanging in secret among themselves.
Detailed notes, particularly regarding documentary sources, are arranged by page and chapter at the end. A keyword is provided to identify the passage to which a note refers. Direct quotation from a conversation is based on the recollection of at least one of the parties to the conversation.
With regard to names of Latin Americans, who use the last names of both their fathers and mothers, I will include both last names in first reference. Thereafter only the patronymic will be used. For example I use Andrés Pascal Allende on first reference, and Andrés Pascal or Pascal thereafter. In some exceptional cases I will continue to refer to the person using both last names, usually because the person is known publicly in that way.
In pursuing this investigation, I rejoined a broad community of journalists, lawyers, judges, and human rights activists who have been working, now into the third decade, to bring truth and justice to bear on the terrible events of these years in the southernmost countries of South America. I learned from them all and in many cases they helped me directly. My thanks and admiration go out to Joan Garcés, who devised the international legal strategy that led to General Pinochet’s arrest in London, thus setting a precedent for major advances in international human rights law. That success built on the groundwork of Judge Giovanni Salvi, of the Italian federal court of Rome, former assistant U.S. attorneys E. Lawrence Barcella and Eugene Propper and their FBI colleagues, special agents Carter Cornick and Robert Scherrer, who were the vanguard in investigating and prosecuting the international assassinations documented in this book.
I am also grateful for the insights and generosity of investigating officials Giancarlo Capaldo of the federal court of Rome, Roger Le Loire of the criminal court of France, and Oscar Aguirre, judicial secretary to Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, of the Argentine Federal Court, all of whom are pursuing groundbreaking human rights prosecutions centered on the crimes of Operation Condor. In Chile, Judge Juan Guzmán has done singular work to overcome the hostile judicial climate of post-dictatorship Chile to make once rare human rights prosecutions a matter of everyday news.
Many of the lawyers and investigators who did the behind the scenes work in these milestone cases were extraordinarily generous in helping me. My thanks to Anabel Alcaide, Carlos Zamorano, Sophie Thonon, William Bourdon, Hernán Quezada, Alejandro González, Cristina Mihura, and Giulia Barrera.
In the task of keeping track and making sense of the thousands of documents used in my investigation, and for a host of other indispensable jobs during
the three years devoted to this book, I want to thank my able researchers Stacie Jonas, Pascale Bonnefoy, Kate Lasso, Nicholas Udugama, Francisco Rivera, and Karla Polito. In the final stages of the book I relied on Tomás Dinges for crucial fact-checking and a candid editorial eye. The National Security Archive, where I am a senior fellow, supported my document research and FOIA requests. My thanks to director Tom Blanton and to NSA analyst Carlos Osorio, who discovered and shared with me several critical pieces of documentary evidence for the book.
Dean Tom Goldstein of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism supported my project with encouragement and generous academic leaves. I am grateful to the institutions who provided grants of financial support: The Ford Foundation, and the support of Alexander Wilde, Augusto Varas, and Martin Abregú; The Fund for Constitutional Government, and the support of Conrad Martin; The Freedom Forum Pacific Coast Center; The Sam Rubin Foundation, and the Institute for Latin American Studies of Columbia University.
André Schiffrin and Jonathan Shainin of The New Press gave me unflinching editorial guidance that has made this a better book. Many other friends and colleagues in the United States and in the four countries where I did the bulk of my reporting, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, helped in a hundred ways but most of all provided a community of friendship and interest during my many trips to their countries. Thanks to Stella Calloni, Miriam Lewin, Alejandro Inchaúrregui, Horacio Verbitski, Luis D’Andrea Mohr, Maria Seoane, Arnol Kremer, Victor Gariboldi, Carlos Libenson, Claudio Jacquelin, and Patricia Nazario in Argentina; to Alfredo Boccia, Martín Almada, Rosa Palau, Julia Fernández Albertini, Carlos Mojoli, and Aldo Zocolillo in Paraguay; to Manuel Flores, Roger Rodríquez, Raul Roncinni, Daniel Gianelli, Danilo Arbilla, Raúl Olivera, Rafael Michelini, Ana Laura Lissardi, Alfonso Lessa, and Luis Nieto in Uruguay; to Monica González, Patricia Verdugo, Ignacio González Camus, Pedro Matta, Manuel Cabieses, Pedro Schwartz, Catherine Kenrick, and John O’Leary in Chile; and in the United States Elizabeth Farnsworth, Martin Edwin Anderson, Franklin “Tex” Harris, Dale Van Atta, Peter Kornbluh, Paz Cohen, Don Bohning, Jeff Stein, and Sarah Anderson.
I want to thank the many other people who consented to interviews and who did their best to help me reconstruct the truth about long past events in their lives and careers. Many are named as sources in the book. Some still cannot
be named or preferred not to be named. I hope they will consider the final telling of the story a worthy justification for the time spent with me. For those who disagree with my account in minor or major details, or find that it diverges from some longheld political interpretations of the events of those years, I can only ask that they evaluate the new evidence I have brought to the historical record and judge it with an open mind. I have tried mightily to avoid errors, but lament those that may remain. I am grateful to those who read portions of the book in draft form, especially Ariel Armony, Alfredo Boccia, Martín Almada, Martin Edwin Andersen, Robert Cox, Mónica González, Luis Nieto, Rafael and Zelmar Michelini (
hijo
) and Martín Sivak. Any mistakes will be fewer because of their help.