The Condor Years (19 page)

Contreras was not talking about abstract cooperation. He had concrete items to offer Venezuela, and specific requests.

Venezuela’s role was key, since many of Chile’s most prominent exile leaders had settled in Caracas. Contreras made a formal request for DISIP to provide him with “information about the activities of all the Chilean exiles living at that time in Venezuela,” including flight information about their travels. Contreras had important intelligence to provide in exchange, information about the JCR he had obtained from the interrogations of Fuentes and Santucho. The most important item was a warning that the JCR was planning to move its headquarters from Buenos Aires to Caracas.

Contreras described some of the ways the new international security organization would operate. “Contreras explained that DINA was being expanded as an intelligence service, that they would have foreign agents in the embassies abroad; that they . . . were already training all the third secretaries in the Chilean embassies—putting them through a basic intelligence course, so they could serve as case officers abroad,” Rivas Vásquez testified. If Venezuela signed up, DINA would assign a DINA liaison officer to its embassy in Caracas. Contreras gave DISIP a set of “codes and ciphers” to be used in telex communications for the new system. “He talked about computers, which got our attention since we were still using a card filing system,” García said. Contreras said his meetings in Venezuela were just one stop on his itinerary to “sell” the plan to the intelligence services of other countries. They were invited, all expenses paid, to a meeting in Santiago to plan the new system.

President Carlos Andrés Pérez vetoed any participation in the plan. Pérez, one of the few democratically elected heads of state at the time in the continent, was a fervent anti-Communist but an equally adamant opponent of Pinochet’s destruction of Chilean democracy.

Back in Chile, Contreras moved ahead with the plan to create an international security organization. He needed money, and he needed Pinochet’s approval. A memorandum purportedly from Contreras to Pinochet, which Chilean opposition leaders claimed was leaked to them in 1977, contains a request for $600,000 in special funding for the new operation. Although the document’s origin inside DINA has never been established, its signature and format match other DINA documents and the content of the letter coincides with what else is known. The key fact, Contreras’s request for money, was corroborated by a firsthand source.

Dated September 16, 1975, about two weeks after Contreras’s return from Washington and Caracas, it reads in part:

Around the same time as the letter’s date, one of Pinochet’s top aides came into a meeting with Pinochet in which the subject of money and international operations was being discussed. The aide, who described the meeting on the condition his name not be revealed, said the participants included Air Force Colonel Mario Jahn, the deputy director of DINA, who was briefing Pinochet on DINA’s international expansion.

Jahn was the man Contreras had put in charge of the project, the source said. “He was Conteras’s internationalization man (
hombre de la internacionalización),”
the source said. “He was having a meeting in one of the presidential dining rooms. He was saying, ‘This is the moment to move, to advance and bring the struggle to the world level.’ He was asking for money. He said the Americans were helping through Brazil.”

Pinochet said little, but seemed to be giving the floor to Colonel Jahn so that he could convince the source, a high-ranking civilian, of the need for the international project. The source, an avid Pinochet supporter who at one time conducted a daily morning briefing with the president, was wary of the DINA plans and tried to learn more. He said he was told by others that CIA training was provided through Brazil, and that Brazil was the “pipeline” through which DINA operatives learned interrogation and torture techniques. (Asked about the Contreras-Pinochet memo, he said he had never seen it.)

The source said DINA’s international expansion—which he later knew as Operation Condor—was an important step in the struggle for power going on around Pinochet at the time. Many of Pinochet’s close advisers—both civilians
and military—were recommending that Pinochet lift the state of siege and begin the process of reconstructing the political system as an anti-Communist “protected democracy.” Contreras opposed this, even though internal resistance had been defeated. Contreras used the argument of the international threat to convince Pinochet to continue the expansion of Contreras’s own power.

“Those of us closest to Pinochet considered Contreras a danger to Pinochet. His influence was harmful to the cause we supported, which was the reconstruction of the country,” the source said. On the other side were hardline military and powerful groups of extreme rightist civilians who opposed any relaxation of the airtight security in the country. Next to Pinochet, they considered Contreras their leader and expected him to succeed Pinochet when the time came.

The source, who still has great affection for Pinochet but considers him a failed and somewhat tragic figure, said he concluded that Contreras compromised Pinochet in the international assassinations as a way to consolidate his leverage with the president. Indeed, it was around this time that Contreras displaced Pinochet’s daily briefer and was able to position himself as the official Pinochet met with first each day, in the half-hour early morning ride from Pinochet’s residence to the presidential headquarters.

As Contreras was laying the groundwork with Pinochet for the ambitious new organization, he was benefiting from the success of the first multicountry collaboration.

On September 23, at DINA’s main operational center, Villa Grimaldi, three officers arrived in high spirits from Paraguay. They brought with them a very important prisoner, JCR courier Jorge Fuentes.

“No problems,” reported Captain Miguel Krasnoff. “We gave him the pills and put him to sleep.
Vino tranquilito
—He came along as tranquil as could be.” Krasnoff also had brought a present for a young DINA secretary, Luz Arce. A former Socialist who became a DINA collaborator after being broken by torture, she witnessed Fuentes’s delivery. Now living in Mexico, she has become an important source to human rights investigators. She described Fuentes arrival in an interview.

Fuentes was barely alive when he arrived at Villa Grimaldi, according to Arce and a dozen surviving prisoners who saw him there. His body was infested with scabies, a contagious skin parasite associated with poor sanitary conditions. He was starving. “Villa Grimaldi was a five-star hotel compared to Paraguay,” Arce said. The prisoner was cleaned up and given medication, but he was housed in a small, windowless wooden structure in the outside patio, probably to avoid contagion. The prisoners referred to it as “Trosko’s dog house.” For the first few days Fuentes was there, other prisoners heard him crying out from inside the box, saying his name was Jorge Fuentes and he had been detained in Paraguay and brought to Chile.

The interrogations and torture that had begun in Paraguay continued in Chile. Fuentes still had much to contribute to the security forces’ knowledge of the JCR and MIR. He remained in Villa Grimaldi until January, then disappeared.

Two days after Fuentes arrived, Colonel Contreras wrote to thank his colleagues in Paraguay. Addressing his Paraguayan counterpart, Police Investigations chief Pastor Coronel, Contreras conveyed “the most sincere thanks for the cooperation given us in the mission my personnel had to carry out in the sister republic of Paraguay, and I am sure that this mutual cooperation will continue and increase in the accomplishment of the common objectives of both services.”

Contreras’s promise of mutual cooperation was not empty. The Fuentes and Santucho arrests had provided a unique opportunity to coordinate interrogations among Paraguay, Argentina, and Chile. The other key piece was Paraguay’s assent to transferring Fuentes physically to Chile. Information exchange and operational cooperation were the two elements of this new level of collaboration among the security forces. What Contreras had in mind was to institutionalize this model in a formal organization.

In the first days of November, Contreras took the next step. DINA deputy director, Colonel Mario Jahn—the man Contreras had put in charge of the project—arrived in Asunción, Paraguay. He carried a formal invitation from Contreras, addressed to the chief of Paraguay police, General Francisco Britez, to attend a “strictly secret meeting,” in Santiago from November 25 to December 1. DINA would pay all expenses. Britez’s memo on Jahn’s visit, Contreras’s letter, and an accompanying ten-page agenda for the “First Working
Meeting on National Intelligence” were found in the Paraguay Archive, providing the first direct evidence in documents generated by the security forces themselves of the existence and purposes of Condor. Colonel Jahn continued on what was to be an intense five-day trip, delivering the secret invitations to the other future Condor countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil.

Joint operations that had begun with the Fuentes and Santucho capture were intensifying. In the previous chapter we met the Argentine intelligence agent “Osvaldo,” who participated in the interrogation of Fuentes and Santucho while they were in Paraguay. We have his handwritten letter to the Paraguayan military intelligence chief suggesting questions. He became the Argentine point man in a joint Chilean-Argentine operation in the coming months to find and eliminate the remaining JCR leaders in Argentina.

Osvaldo’s real identity was Lieutenant Colonel José Osvaldo Riveiro, assigned to Intelligence Battalion 601, the main operational unit of the Army Intelligence Service (SIE). For his clandestine work he used the pseudonynm Jorge Osvaldo Rawson.

For purposes of our investigation, Osvaldo’s operation against the JCR is unique. It is the only case where we possess the actual correspondence of a DINA agent involved, giving us an almost day-by-day account of the intelligence reports and detentions that resulted. The documents that tell this story are those confiscated from one of Chile’s principal DINA operatives in Buenos Aires, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, whom we also encountered previously, in his role in the Prats assassination. When we left Arancibia in the previous chapter, he was setting up shop after the assassination as a clandestine DINA operative in Buenos Aires, spying on Chilean exiles and sending regular written reports back to DINA headquarters in Santiago.

Arancibia begins to write glowing reports about his new source. “The best information that has been obtained on [the JCR] guerrilla organization was provided . . . by the number 2 chief of SIE [Army intelligence service—
Servicio de Inteligencia del Ejército
], Lt. Col. Jorge Osvaldo Rawson.”

Suddenly Arancibia’s reports are filled with details about JCR meetings in Switzerland and France, and the names of JCR intermediaries in Paris, with addresses.

Rawson had already been traveling frequently between Asunción, Santiago,
and Buenos Aires in trips involving the interrogation of Fuentes and Santucho. His relationship with DINA intensified, and DINA began to foot the bill for his travel. When Rawson learned that “Trosko” Fuentes has been transported to Chile, he pestered Arancibia to share DINA’s interrogation reports, especially any details about JCR activity in Argentina. DINA in Santiago instructed Arancibia that he was to be responsible for all contacts with Rawson, in effect making him Rawson’s case officer for intelligence and operational exchanges. Rawson was working in the most clandestine part of Army Intelligence, and all contacts were to be clandestine and compartmentalized. DINA’s officers stationed in the Chilean embassy were instructed to have no contact with Rawson.

One of the reasons for this kind of spy versus spy tradecraft was Argentina’s bizarre political situation. Military officers like Rawson were, in effect, running clandestine operations inside their own institutions. The shaky but constitutional government of Perón’s widow, Isabelita Perón, had turned over the task of repressing the leftist revolutionaries to the brutal but ineffective federal police and paramilitary death squads called the Triple A. The army was fighting the antiguerrilla war in Tucumán, but its intelligence arm was not supposed to have an operational role in the rest of the country. Gangs of thugs paid by the government’s Social Security agency roamed the city in government cars—the modest Ford Falcon became their feared trademark. Leftist intellectuals, church activists, and dissident labor leaders were put on death lists, and scores were kidnapped and killed. The government campaign inspired terror, but had little impact on the well-organized underground groups such as the ERP and Montoneros.

The country in late 1975 had the worst of all possible scenarios: a serious guerrilla campaign in the mountains of Tucumán Province, isolated but unchecked armed actions by ERP and Montoneros all over the country, and—on the part of the Peronist government—an ineffective but bloody death squad campaign targeting public figures identified with the left. Some newspapers were openly calling on the military to take over and bring order.