The Condor Years (17 page)

Scherrer volunteered a story linking the arrests in Paraguay to a famous terrorist incident in Paris a few weeks later. He said the wealth of intelligence gleaned from Fuentes and Santucho had provided an important clue that helped track down one of the most famous international terrorists of the era, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelanborn operative living in Europe.

According to Scherrer, Paraguayan police found a reference to a “Carlos” in Santucho’s address book with an address or telephone number in Paris. They thought it was a clue to the whereabouts of Santucho’s brother, Roberto, whose code name in ERP was Carlos. They passed the intelligence on to the French security service, DST. As it happened, on June 27—forty days after the arrests
in Paraguay—three DST agents and an informant knocked on the door of a Paris apartment where Ilich Ramírez, the Venezuelan Carlos, was posing as a student and living with his girlfriend. After letting them enter, Carlos pulled a gun and shot all four, then escaped. According to Scherrer, “They were looking for Roberto Santucho, using the alias ‘Carlos.’ The [French] agents went at the apartment to get Roberto, but instead they found the real Carlos, the Jackal. He had an arsenal and bodyguards. They shot their way out and killed the agents.”

French intelligence sources did not confirm Scherrer’s story. In a briefing, they said an informant led them to the apartment and that they intended to question Carlos, not arrest him. He panicked and started shooting when he realized the agents knew of his connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), they said. Carlos the Jackal remained free for more than twenty years, committing ever more egregious acts of terror, including the kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers later that year and the hijacking of an Air France jet that ended in a spectacular—and bloody—Israeli commando raid at the airport at Entebbe, Uganda. Carlos once bragged he was responsible for the deaths of eighty-three people.

Was the famous raid on Carlos the Jackal the result of the tip from South America? There is independent corroboration for Scherrer’s story.

The first is DICP chief Pastor Coronel, who wrote about the Carlos connection in secret documents found in the Paraguay Archives. Coronel was in a position to know, since he was in charge of the interrogations of Fuentes and Santucho. More than once he claimed credit for leading the French police to Carlos. In a paper prepared for presentation at a 1976 meeting of several intelligence services and in two other documents, he reported on the capture of Santucho and Fuentes, describing them as “high level leaders of the Revolutionary Junta [JCR]”:

Other Paraguay Archive documents show that Pastor Coronel followed up on the Carlos investigation. Soon after the arrests, he requested and received a photo of Carlos from Argentine SIDE chief Otto Paladino. Other supporting information comes from Venezuela, whose police had a vital interest in Carlos, a Venezuelan citizen. Venezuela’s intelligence service, DISIP, also claimed credit for the raid on Carlos’s apartment. “We knew he [Carlos] was in France and we told French police,” said Orlando García, who was DISIP General Commissioner at the time. Whether the Venezuelan information had its origin in the Paraguayan arrests or was entirely separate could not be learned.

In March 2001, I was able to ask Carlos himself—imprisoned in Paris—about the matter. The most obvious explanation for the reference to Carlos in Santucho’s address book was that there was a relationship between the Venezuelan extremist Carlos and ERP or the JCR. Such a relationship is asserted in later CIA and DIA reports and was widely believed by other intelligence agencies in South America. In a faxed exchange of letters from La Santé Prison, where he is serving a life sentence for the shootings, Carlos acknowledged a relationship between his organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and ERP. In the handwritten letter, Carlos also said, “My contact with MIR comrades [in the Middle East] was of a social nature.”

Such international connections fed the already heightened paranoia of the security forces in the Southern Cone. They saw the JCR as the hub of an impending offensive from outside Latin America. The security forces knew of the existence and goals of the JCR, at least from the time of the clandestine press conference in February 1974, but as far as is known, no JCR official of any importance had ever been captured alive. Fuentes and Santucho were the first. Their capture generated an elaborate paper trail in the intelligence agencies—now available in document collections obtained for this book.

Intelligence reports on the JCR, including those released by the CIA and other U.S. agencies, are suddenly filled with rich detail on the internal workings of the JCR. Some of the reports are within weeks of the Fuentes and Santucho arrests. From Paraguay, we have at least twenty documents found among the roomful of DICP archives confiscated by a Paraguay judge in 1992. From Argentina, the files of DINA operative Enrique Arancibia Clavel, first described in
Chapter 5
, allow us to track Chilean and Argentine intelligence operations following up on the arrests. Also from Argentina, analytical reports ranging from fifteen to forty pages on the JCR were obtained from among the
documents turned over to Argentine courts for trials in the mid-1980s. From Chile, interviews with a former DINA agent and fellow detainees provided additional firsthand descriptions of what happened.

Stroessner’s enemies who survived years of imprisonment and interrogation in Paraguay called one of the prisons
El Sepulcro de los Vivos
—“the tomb of the living.” The man in charge of day-to-day security operations was DICP Chief Pastor Coronel, who liked to conduct the most important interrogations and torture sessions at DICP headquarters on Presidente Franco Street, a narrow, busy thoroughfare only a few blocks from the Paraguayan Parliament. Pastor Coronel had a large suite of offices facing the street on the second floor, framed by five once elegant, floor-to-ceiling French colonial windows. Other investigators’ offices were on the first floor. The fifteen or so prison cells were to the rear, in what once had been a separate building crudely joined to the headquarters building by narrow doors carved out of walls and ramps bridging the differences in floor elevations. The prison space had a bizarre, disorienting effect. Walls stopped short of the ceiling, columns left over from some previous construction supported nothing. Stairways dead-ended in brick walls. There were no windows to the outside. Cell doors were covered with sheets of iron with a small slit as the only opening. There was only one bathroom, on the ground floor, but prisoners were not allowed to use it. Instead, each cell had a large tin can.

The cells had all been full for months when Fuentes and Santucho arrived in May. Six months earlier, in November 1974, DICP rounded up hundreds of suspects thought to be connected to the group that had tried to assassinate President Stroessner with a car bomb. The cells could not hold them all. Many had to spend the days sitting on the stairs, and sleep on the concrete floors of the corridors. Now only a few dozen were left, thought to be the hard-core operatives directly involved in the plot.

Torture in Paraguayan jails was routine, but hardly scientific. Coronel and his men used a short, crude whip, called a
tejuruguai
, made of heavy cable and pieces of metal wrapped in leather. Cast-iron shackles and leg irons immobilized the prisoners, sometimes for days at a time in their cells. To those methods, which had changed little since the dungeons of the Dark Ages in Europe,
the policemen added the newer Latin American techniques of electric shock and submersion in water, sometimes in combination.

One routine described by the prisoners may have been unique to Paraguay. When a prisoner was broken and ready to talk, Pastor Coronel would convene an interrogation session in his spacious front offices. High officials from Stroessner’s government and foreign military attachés were invited to attend the secret sessions. The prisoner, sometimes blindfolded, was brought in and made to stand or sit next to Pastor Coronel’s desk. Dark-suited waiters serving coffee and snacks circulated among the dozen or so officers seated in semicircle rows around the prison. One prisoner forced to undergo this routine described it as a tribunal, with questioning from the foreign visitors as well as from Pastor Coronel and his interrogators. Several prisoners interviewed said they could tell from the questions and accents that the visitors included Chileans, Argentines, Uruguayans, and Brazilians. One prisoner said he was convinced that Stroessner himself was in the room for his interrogation.

Santucho, who eventually was released, described such a session in Pastor Coronel’s office soon after he arrived, with questioning from Argentines. “The interrogation took place in the office of the chief of investigations. It was during this interrogation that they applied electric shocks to my ears. There were several Argentines, I don’t know if they were police or military. I somehow got the impression they were personnel of the Argentine embassy in Paraguay.” In later interrogation sessions, Santucho said he was questioned by men he concluded were military officers from Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Among the documents in the Paraguay Archive are five pages of detailed questions for Santucho. More than half of the sixty questions concerned the Junta Coordinadora or ERP and their alleged relationship with Paraguayan militants. This early questionnaire reflected little inside intelligence about JCR operations, however, and appeared to be more of a fishing expedition than a systematic interrogation.

That changed quickly after the first weeks as information for the interrogations flowed in from Chile and Argentina. Questioning shifted from Paraguay to clandestine activities in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Documents that appear to be notes taken by interrogators show they are trying to get the two prisoners to help them locate important targets in Buenos Aires. Notes and a hand-drawn map refer to the “Meeting House of the Junta”—a reference to the
JCR—and to an “ERP Military School” outside Buenos Aires. In a signed “Interrogation Statement,” Pastor Coronel asked questions based on intimate knowledge of clandestine MIR activities in Chile. One series of questions involves the telephone number of a person in Santiago who is supposed to act as an emergency contact with “Benjamín,” the code name for MIR leader Andrés Pascal. The exchanges are clear evidence that Pastor Coronel was interrogating Fuentes for the benefit of DINA in Chile, and was sending and receiving information in order to advance the questioning. Fuentes is asked—but gives few details—about methods for sending letters back and forth to Chile, and about plans to infiltrate weapons into Chile.

Another set of documents shows the involvement of the Argentine intelligence officer, Major José Osvaldo Riveiro, who will become an important operative in later Condor activities. A handwritten letter dated June 23 is addressed to “Benito”—military intelligence chief Colonel Benito Guanes—and signed “Osvaldo.” The two officers clearly have just gotten off the phone—“No sooner did I talk to you than I dedicated myself to fulfilling your requests.” The letter is five pages long, and is accompanied by five additional documents for use in the questioning.

The correspondent refers to Fuentes as
“el Nene”
—the kid. Enclosure four is a handwritten, nearly illegible list of fifteen detailed questions and a typed page with a picture attached. The questions appear to concern Fuentes’s contacts and activities in Buenos Aires, especially with regard to transfers of messages and money. A photograph of Bolivian JCR member Rubén Sánchez is enclosed with a request that Fuentes be interrogated about his whereabouts and activities.

In the letter, Osvaldo stresses that the interrogation is “very important, because we almost have him located.” Osvaldo’s main target, it is clear from other documents, was MIR’s top leader, Edgardo “Pollo” Enríquez, whose presence in Argentina most likely was learned in the interrogations—Fuentes and Santucho both knew of Enríquez’s recent arrival from Europe. The information obtained by torturing Fuentes and Santucho had launched a massive manhunt for JCR leaders that would occupy Chilean, Argentine, and other intelligence services for more than a year. We will return to that account and to “Osvaldo” shortly. First our story shifts back to Colonel Manuel Contreras at DINA headquarters in Santiago.

The terrible but seldom discussed secret of underground revolutionary organizations of this era was that torture, methodically and universally applied as it was by DINA and the other security forces, converted most human beings into sobbing, broken, and submissive puppets under the control of the interrogator masters. Humiliation was total. Manacled on a metal bed frame, naked and spread-eagled, with electric current delivered to their most intimate and sensitive body parts, victims lost all physical control. Sphincters released, muscles cramped in spasms. The entire body quivered and shook in waves of violent seizures. Hangings, dunkings, asphyxiation, beatings, rapes, and mock executions were variations on the basic routine. Some prisoners were run over with trucks. This was real-life horror with sweat and smells and screams, cracking bones and the gushing of every manner of human effluent.