The Condor Years (12 page)

For people trying to get back to their normal lives in Chile, there was reason to breathe easier in the early weeks of 1974. It was summer—for many, a time to go to the beach and try to forget the traumas of the past months, to try to believe the worst was behind them. Nightly gunfire had stopped; the press was no longer filled with reports of “extremists” killed while “trying to escape”—a common explanation for summary executions. From all appearances, far fewer people were being killed.

The National Stadium no longer held prisoners and was being cleaned up for the coming soccer season. Eighteen thousand prisoners still being held
were distributed to less high-profile concentration camps in sparsely populated desert towns, with quaint names like Chacabuco, Pisagua, Melinka, and Isla Riesco in the north.
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The Catholic Church had joined with other religious organizations to create the first human rights organization, the Peace Committee (
Comité Pro Paz
), and its internal reports carefully documented arrests, disappearances, executions, and prison populations. The month-by-month reports noted a remarkable decline in deaths—to a low point of one disappearance in February. Many found reason to hope that the orgy of violence had spent itself.

The optimists were misled by the calm. In the underground world of the military, the first steps to even greater violence were already being taken. Manuel Contreras and his team at the War Academy finished their planning for the new intelligence organization, and the junta ordered it into action in the first days of the new year. The creation of the Directorate of National Intelligence (
Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional
—DINA) was a carefully guarded secret—an official decree was eventually published, but hid DINA’s real powers in secret provisions. U.S. military personnel in Chile, however, were well informed. The defense attaché sent to Washington a full biographical workup on Contreras, documenting Contreras’s promotion to full colonel and appointment on February 24, 1974, as head of DINA.

The U.S. military intelligence reports described DINA from the beginning as an extraordinarily powerful, sui generis security force unlike anything the Chilean military had ever seen. Even though its director was only a colonel, DINA was independent of the military chain of command, a power unto itself. A U.S. naval officer reported on his conversation with a concerned and nervous Chilean officer. “The DINA, contrary to original plans . . . , is directly subordinate to Junta President General Pinochet. When R[eporting] O[fficer] asked why this was so, source replied, ‘That’s too sensitive to discuss, even with you.’ ” DINA was pushing the regular military intelligence units aside, the officer reported, and—worse—DINA operatives were identifying themselves as working for army or navy intelligence when they conducted raids and detentions.
“The service intelligence departments and the CECIFA (Armed Forces Counterintelligence Center) personnel refer to DINA as ‘the monster’. . . .”

Another concern was DINA’s torture methods: “Another major problem of the DINA is its system of interrogation. Source said that their techniques are straight out of the Spanish Inquisition and often leave the person interrogated with visible bodily damage. The CECIFA and service intelligence departments are upset about this, essentially feeling that in this day and age there is no excuse for the use of such primitive techniques. Source said the CECIFA and service intelligence department interrogations usually take place in the presence of a qualified medical doctor to insure no permanent physical or mental damage is done to the person being interrogated.”

Contreras was given power to commandeer officers and troops from any of the branches of the armed forces and to hire civilians to fill the growing ranks of DINA. The best and the brightest young officers, some of whom had studied under Contreras when he was a professor of intelligence at the War Academy, competed to be chosen to serve in DINA. They were exempt from wearing uniforms, and wore their hair long. DINA service meant long, irregular hours, but also excitement, access to women, cars, and money. And for some, it would mean international travel.

The U.S. military intelligence officers put DINA in the same category as Nazi and Soviet repressive apparatus, describing it as a “modern day Gestapo” and “a KGB-type organization”.

Already in February 1974, DINA was being ascribed nearby absolute power. “No judge in any court or any minister in the government is going to question the matter any further if DINA says that they are now handling the matter,” the U.S. air attaché reported to the Pentagon. His source said “there are three sources of power in Chile, Pinochet, God and DINA.”

Pinochet and Contreras made themselves the domineering father and all-knowing mother dispensing all things good and evil in Chile’s newly totalitarian family. Pinochet was an aloof, public, and inflexible figure who cast himself as the embodiment of the
patria
, the fatherland. Contreras worked behind the scenes, controlling life and death in the country through the intimacy of his bond with Pinochet. In dealings with his equals, there was an exterior pleasantness, an almost feminine softness about Contreras. An American intelligence officer described him based on frequent meetings in the 1970s: “Contreras is mild-mannered and polite. When you talk to him he seems gentle and disarming.
He doesn’t whistle or bark orders to his subordinates. He’s not your typical Chilean officer—who usually puts on a Prussian military manner. He comes across as reasonable and likes intelligent conversation.” Friends and subordinates referred to him as “Mamo,” a derivative of Manuel. Physically he was equally unimposing. Even as a young officer, he was pudgy, carrying 185 pounds on a 5'8" frame. His face was smooth and round, drooping into jowls as he grew older.

As a young officer, Contreras was known to be a fervent Catholic, a
beato
, fervent bordering sanctimoniousness. During a posting in the south of Chile, he organized special masses on base that attracted lay people from the surrounding community as well. Another American military friend went on maneuvers with Contreras in the late 1960s and was deeply impressed by his competence in command and by the bond he achieved with his men. His strength was the ability to think strategically, to view the larger picture in a given tactical situation. The solutions he devised tended to be systems and plans rather than short-term fixes. He had the mind of an engineer, which was his military specialty and the subject of the only formal course he is known to have attended in the United States.

This well-regarded officer was the architect of a unique intelligence system that was about to embark on an orgy of mass murder. Where Contreras received his intelligence training—other than in routine courses at the War Academy—could not be learned. Robert Scherrer, the FBI official who knew Contreras well, concluded that Contreras must have received training in Brazil. There is no doubt that Contreras and DINA had a close operational relationship with Brazil’s intelligence service, SNI. U.S. documents confirm that Brazilian intelligence officers came to Chile to interrogate prisoners after that coup and that Chilean officers were sent for intelligence training in Brazil.

Years later, Contreras is proud to discuss the inspiration and concept of DINA, and its effectiveness. As Contreras describes it, Chile was armed with an inadequate intelligence-gathering capacity at the time of the coup. Each branch of the armed services had its own “institutional” intelligence branch, trained primarily to gather information about possible military actions involving other countries, such as Peru or Argentina, with whom Chile had been in intermittent conflict going back at least a century. Political intelligence—keeping track of the political enemies of whatever government was in power—had been the job of the detective branch of the civilian police known as
Investigaciones.
During the Allende government, the chief of the political police was a Socialist and was executed by the military immediately after the coup.

The new military government had completed the relatively easy task of rounding up known suspects cowering in their homes, but was unprepared for the arduous work of rooting out a tough enemy in exile or hidden inside Chile.

“I had two missions,” Contreras said in an exclusive interview.
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Contreras’s acknowledgment of the death toll is striking, and accurate. In the strange moral calculus of mass murder, 3,000 deaths in the war on terrorism is for Contreras not only justifiable but an argument for the relative moderation of his approach. Contreras exaggerates the death tolls in Peru and El Salvador, but his figure for Chile is close to the 3,197 deaths documented by Chile’s official human rights inquiry. His count for Argentina is also in the range widely accepted among human rights groups.

Contreras’s concept of national intelligence was aimed not only at repression of the left but at establishing total control of every aspect of government and social life in Chile. Repressing “terrorism” inside and outside of Chile was
only one of several major tasks. National intelligence meant his agents had to penetrate and control the government bureaucracy itself, with particular focus on the economy. He also had to monitor the military for potentially disloyal officers—classic counterintelligence. What Contreras appeared to have in mind was to combine in one colossal agency the domestic detective work of the FBI, the counterintelligence capability of the Pentagon, and the international espionage skills of the CIA.

Contreras knew he needed help. In March 1974, he traveled to the United States to get it. It is a trip that is still kept secret by the U.S. agencies who worked with Contreras and DINA, including the CIA. It involves CIA training on site in Chile and material support never acknowledged by U.S. officials, although general references in key documents confirm that CIA training of DINA took place. The context of the period of training is important: as the trainers arrived in Chile, DINA launched its first massive assault on the underground opposition inside Chile and opened its principal operations center for torture and interrogation, a walled complex in a Santiago suburb known as Villa Grimaldi. In June, July, and August, DINA agents, often in pickup trucks with camper-type coverings in the back, swept up hundreds of people. About 10 percent of those captured simply “disappeared,” a grim realization that for families and colleagues did not sink in for months. In those inaugural months of CIA training, the number of disappeared multiplied: seventeen in June, forty-six in July, forty-nine in August, forty in September. Almost all of the disappeared were suspected MIR militants.

The CIA trainers departed from Chile sometime in August. Within weeks, DINA conducted its first international assassination, of Pinochet’s rival and predecessor, General Carlos Prats, in Argentina.

The story of the CIA training must be unraveled with care. It starts with Contreras’s words: