The Condor Years (18 page)

Successful resistance was measured not in silence but in how many hours a person could delay giving the information that would lead the agents to their comrades’ safe houses. Militants were trained—“instructed” is a better word,
since real training was impossible—to use layers of cover stories and other subterfuges to resist talking for twenty-four hours. After that it was assumed that every prisoner was providing at least some information.

Talking under torture was not necessarily a betrayal, but for the victims of torture the shame of having provided information was one of the most demoralizing scars. Not only did they suffer the guilt of survivors; they knew the information they provided may have led to the death of their revolutionary colleagues and friends.

Each country’s apparatus of death had its peculiar characteristics. DINA’s methods were selective. Torture was a tool, not primarily a punishment. Such a cruel system had its rationality, but was not totally rational. Captives who had a leadership position or were connected in any way to MIR’s military arm—called
La Fuerza Central
(the Central Force)—were condemned to almost certain death and disappearance. Many others died because of the excesses of torture; others for no discernible reason. Perhaps 90 percent of those detained by DINA survived in Chile. It was a system that killed and spared with caprice. In DINA’s first year, 1974, the system of torture and secret execution consumed the lives of 421 people. The number of people kidnapped and held by DINA is not known, but is estimated by researchers to be at least 4,000 for that year.

The DINA apparatus was working at full speed, operating out of the walled compound of a former nightclub known as Villa Grimaldi. The process was systematic: agents first detained lists of people thought to have some connection to the Socialist Party and MIR. The prisoners were forced to give up additional names and locations, and those people were picked up. Eventually, the agents penetrated the most secret layers of the underground cells organizing resistance to Pinochet.

The system led to an early and spectacular success. In September 1974, DINA located the house where the leader of MIR, Miguel Enríquez, was living. When the DINA squadron closed in on the house, Enríquez and several lieutenants grabbed their weapons and fought their way out the back to a prepared escape route. But a grenade exploded near his companion, Carmen Castillo, who was six months pregnant, and she was knocked unconscious. Enríquez took her back inside and laid her down behind some heavy furniture, then he tried to reach the escape path again. As he crossed an open patio, DINA agents on the rooftops brought him down with a fusillade of automatic
rifle fire. Enríquez was killed; Castillo was captured inside the house, critically wounded, but she survived.

There was grand publicity given to the attack. Enríquez had been a major figure in Chilean politics for a decade and was one of the most famous and divisive people in the country. The gun battle was used as proof of the continuing “terrorist threat” Chile still faced a year after the coup. But in fact, there had been not a single armed confrontation initiated by MIR or any other opposition group since the coup. DINA had also penetrated and destroyed the leadership structure of the underground Socialist Party. Chile was quiet. CIA and DIA reporting to Washington reported on DINA’s victories in dispatches that displayed a sense of awe at the effectiveness of its operations.

Contreras, however, was not ready to declare victory. Lack of extremist violence inside Chile was only a sign that the enemy had gone deeper underground and was organizing outside Chile’s borders. Contreras continued to expand DINA to face a permanent, international threat. He first needed to position DINA within the armed forces as an integral and permanent institution apart and superior to the traditional intelligence apparatus. Whereas before each branch of the armed forces had its own intelligence branch and training facilities, Contreras now staked DINA’s claim to monopoly control of all aspects of intelligence, both military and civilian. He created the National Intelligence School as an advance course for officers and put his DINA operations chief, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, in charge. With its direct connection to DINA operations, the school did not impart abstract instruction. Patterned on the National Information School that was the powerful adjunct to Brazil’s SNI intelligence service, Contreras’s new school put officers directly in contact with repressive operations and used them as a research staff for DINA’s growing empire.

It was time again to consult with Washington. As was the case when DINA was a start-up, the new Contreras initiative coincided with a new round of meetings with the CIA. In early January 1975, Contreras flew to Washington with two key officers, Operations Chief Espinoza and Captain Cristoph Willeke, both of whom had had roles in the Prats assassination the previous September. They all took their wives, according to a description Espinoza gave of the trip in testimony to a Chilean investigating judge. The trip included participation in a meeting with other Latin American intelligence schools. Espinoza said the group left Washington January 12.

The CIA, in many rounds of declassification and in specific Freedom of Information Act requests from the author, has never acknowledged a meeting with Contreras and his men in January 1975. One document from the CIA, however, provides evidence that such a meeting took place. It appears to be talking points for a meeting with General Vernon Walters, the deputy director of central intelligence (DDCI) and the same official who, according to Contreras, organized the CIA training for DINA the year before. Dated January 5, the document is a memorandum from the CIA’s Latin America operations chief about “possible topic of conversation with [Contreras].” Contreras’s name is mentioned in unexpurgated text only once, but I have concluded based on context that his name is blanked out in several other mentions, in which he appears to be the source of the information on the current security picture in Chile. I have written in his name in brackets where I think it should appear in the redacted text:

The Hinchey Report, perhaps based on the same CIA reporting, portrayed the CIA’s two-headed relationship with Contreras more bluntly: “By April 1975, intelligence reporting showed that Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta, but an interagency committee directed the CIA to continue its relationship with Contreras.” Now, the CIA went a giant step further: “In May and June 1975, elements within the CIA recommended establishing a paid relationship with Contreras to obtain intelligence based on his unique position and access to Pinochet.” The Hinchey Report says the request was at first overruled because of DINA’s notoriety for human rights abuses. “However, given miscommunication in the timing of this
exchange, a one-time payment was given to Contreras.” The CIA did not reveal the amount of the payment. But it is probably no coincidence that a deposit for $6,000 was made into Contreras’s account in Riggs Bank in Washington in June 1975, according to subpoenaed Riggs Bank records.

It is a strange world we have entered. The CIA’s words are laden with concern for human rights; yet CIA interactions with Contreras go in the opposite direction. One wonders at the still secret story that must be behind that single euphemism “miscommunication.”

In July and August, around the time Contreras was put on the CIA payroll, Contreras flew to Washington twice to meet with Walters. We have much more information about these trips and the direct relevance of the second trip, in late August, to the organization of Operation Condor. The CIA and Walters have acknowledged that the trip took place—it is the CIA’s sole admission of a meeting with Contreras. It was a visit hard to conceal, since Contreras also had meetings, arranged by the State Department, with several congressmen, including Representative Donald Fraser and Senator Frank Church, both tough critics of Chile, in an attempt to persuade them to change their position on Chile.

The trip, according to Contreras’s own account, grew out of an official request by Pinochet to the U.S. ambassador that senior officials receive Contreras in Washington so that he could convey Chile’s “position on the human rights issue to Secretary Kissinger.” The context was that Chile had barred a delegation of the United Nations Human Rights Commission from entering Chile, and there was going to be an effort to expel Chile at the upcoming U.N. General Assembly in September. That the notorious head of Chile’s secret police would serve as Pinochet’s spokesman on human rights seemed like an incongruous idea, even to the CIA. A CIA cable warned that the visit would be “counterproductive” if it were to leak that Contreras was in Washington.

But at CIA headquarters, the welcome was effusive. On August 25, Walters hosted a formal luncheon at CIA headquarters for Contreras, then met privately for forty-five minutes with Contreras. A declassified memo on the conversations says only that Walters “took the opportunity to express concern over the human rights situation in Chile . . .”

Contreras later made an extraordinary charge: that Walters in that meeting suggested he pay off U.S. congressmen. “Vernon Walters proposed that we take on a lobby of North American senators, to get them to stop harassing
Chile in the international arena,” he told a Chilean newspaper reporter. He said Walters suggested he contact five unnamed senators from both parties, “who would be paid $2 million a year so that they will act in favor of Chile.” Contreras said he took the idea back to Chile, but it was never implemented.

Contreras provided additional details about the trip to Washington in answer to questions from the author. He said that he was bringing “information” to Washington to back up his message “that we are in a war against terrorism and subversion, and [to disprove] what they have been saying that in Chile we are doing a little less than killing all the people.” Walters was Contreras’s go-between with Kissinger, according to Contreras: “I met with Mr. Vernon Walters. He met with Mr. Kissinger about the information I was bringing, [and] about the kind of support we needed to avoid this problem. Kissinger supported us. He supported us in avoiding that Chile would be expelled from the United Nations.”
*

What was the information Contreras brought that was so important it was taken to the number two man in the CIA and was so persuasive it was passed on to Henry Kissinger? There is nothing in the declassified record. It was
not
in all likelihood a recounting of leftist resistance inside Chile, since the CIA’s own intelligence—based on information provided by Contreras—was portraying that threat as “much less serious.”

Other evidence suggests that Contreras was in Washington to talk about ways to confront the new and powerful international threat presented by the
JCR. We know about the intelligence bonanza DINA and the other security forces had recently discovered with the capture of JCR couriers Fuentes and Santucho. The intelligence being developed in weeks and months of interrogation of the two men provided a picture of the JCR strategy as a continent-wide guerrilla threat.

It makes sense, if we take CIA documents at their word, that Contreras would find a warm reception for his strategy to defeat this international threat. Several documents cited previously emphasize that it was in the international area that CIA was willing to be most helpful to DINA.

There is other direct evidence that Contreras had a plan in his briefcase to defeat this new international threat. We know this because Contreras went directly from Washington to Caracas, Venezuela. There, in conversations, with Venezuelan intelligence officials, Contreras laid out the detailed plans that would eventually have the name Condor.

Contreras and another DINA officer arrived in Caracas on August 27, just two days after his lunch with Walters. According to Contreras, it was Vernon Walters who suggested he go to Caracas. Three other DINA officials had flown in separately from Santiago—a level of staffing that indicates it was not to be a casual meeting. Rafael Rivas Vásquez, head of the intelligence service DISIP, met Contreras at the airport, then took him to dinner with DISIP’s general commissioner, Orlando García.

“Then, on the following day, we had a whole session of talks about the possibility of service-to-service exchange,” Rivas Vásquez later testified. He said Contreras bragged that he had great power and resources at his disposal and that “he was building up this grandiose scheme of a very big and powerful service that could have information, worldwide information.”

In an interview, DISIP commissioner García said Contreras presented a plan for an organization that would allow the participating countries to track down leftist enemies in each other’s countries. “He came to ask for our collaboration, to unite our service in collaboration [with DINA]. . . . Contreras wanted us to capture Chilean exiles [in Venezuela] and turn them over to Chile with no legalities. He wanted us to just put them on a plane and Chile would pay the fare.”

“He said, ‘we have to eliminate the enemies,’ ” García remembered. “I knew that to eliminate meant only one thing—we knew the people he captured would be tortured and killed.”