The Condor Years (20 page)

A military coup was still half a year in the future, but in early October—following a Montonero attack on an army installation in Formosa Province—the government capitulated to military demands that the army take over the fight against the subversives in the entire country. Decree 2770 gave the army virtually unlimited power, and its draconian language was seen in retrospect as an
invitation to the mass murder that was to ensue. The decree empowered the armed forces “to execute any military and security operations that might be necessary for the purpose of anihilating the action of subversive elements in all national territory.”

In case there was any doubt about the new mandate, Armed Forces Chief General Jorge Videla made it even clearer in a statement at a meeting of fellow Latin American military leaders several weeks later in Montevideo: “If needed, in Argentina as many people will have to die as are necessary to achieve peace in the country.”

In the realm of intelligence, the new authority was of monumental importance. It meant that all intelligence operations directed against political and guerrilla targets were now centralized in the army and its security forces were able to operate all over the country. The Army Intelligence Service (SIE), given the cover name Intelligence Battalion 601, became the most powerful security and intelligence apparatus, to which all other security units were subordinate. Intelligence Battalion 601—where Rawson served—became the “Center of Reunion” coordinating all other intelligence units. This included the federal police and SIDE, the government’s State Information Service, which had had a role in the Prats murder. SIDE had been originally designed to be a kind of central intelligence agency under the control of the civilian government, but it was widely disparaged as subject to political influence and was even thought to be infiltrated by the left.

Now, for the first time, the Argentine military had the operational power, similar to that enjoyed by DINA in Chile, to launch a concerted drive against the underground left. And for the first time, real operational coordination across borders was coming into place.

The next major blow against the JCR was struck in Chile. On October 15, just after midnight, a DINA squadron attacked a small vegetable farm near the village of Malloco, a few miles west of Santiago. A captured suspect had led them to the headquarters of Andrés Pascal, where he was gathered with MIR’s most important underground leaders. There was a fierce gun battle. MIR military chief Dagoberto Pérez was killed while holding off the attackers with automatic rifle fire and grenades at the main entrance. Pascal and five other leaders retreated on foot through fields at the back. To cover their escape, they set on fire an outbuilding where weapons were stored, and there was an enormous explosion.

The escaping Miristas, one of whom was seriously wounded, commandeered a car and made their way to Santiago, but their network of safe houses was so compromised, they dared not use it. Instead, they went to the house of a Catholic priest, who agreed to hide them and arrange medical treatment. At one point, Pascal—an AK-47 assault rifle in his backpack—his companion, Mary Anne Beausire, and an American priest rode a motorcycle to a hiding place in a Trappist monastery in the Santiago foothills. A few days later Pascal and Beausire were smuggled into the Costa Rican embassy, where they were granted asylum.

A personal footnote: When photos of Andrés Pascal and his companion Beausire appeared in newspapers, I understood more about a terrifying event that had happened to me several months before. In April 1975, two carloads of DINA agents came to my house east of Santiago, in the village of Lo Barnechea. Carolina Kenrick—who became my wife a year later—and I lived there with another couple. At first the agents pretended to be police investigating a car accident in which a little boy had been hit. Quickly it became clear we were being detained, and agents with automatic rifles began searching the house. They showed us pictures of two men and two women—one of whom bore a strong resemblance to Emma, the other woman in the house. I didn’t recognize the picture, but six months later—after the Malloco raid—I saw the same picture published in the newspaper. It was Mary Anne Beausire, the fugitive companion of Pascal.

First the agents took Emma away in a car, then they loaded me, the other man, and Carolina into a pickup truck with a camper cover in the back. They taped our eyelids shut with Scotch tape, but I could see a little by looking downward. I tried to keep track of where we were going. I knew we had descended toward Santiago, then climbed again toward the mountains on another road. The truck stopped, and someone banged on a metal door. We drove inside a large compound—I kept track of every detail I could see beneath the tape—the cobblestone driveway, a shallow drainage ditch, the steps up to a building with a veranda and columns. Later, I was able to confirm I was in DINA’s most notorious detention camp, Villa Grimaldi.

It was midafternoon on a Sunday, and we had been in custody almost all day. Carolina and I were interrogated separately—she was asked whether I was a
“good American” who supported the anti-Communist side in the Vietnam War, which had just ended in victory for the North Vietnamese Communist side. I was asked only perfunctory questions about why I was in Chile. By that time the agents had confirmed that none of us were the people they were seeking. Emma, who looked like Mary Anne Beausire, actually had an identification card as an employee of the government’s economic planning commission. “You have to understand why we have to do these things,” the officer in charge of my questioning said. “There are Marxist terrorists all over the country, and we are trying to catch them to protect people like you Americans.” The agents put us all back in the truck, eyes still taped, and dumped us near our home. In the coming days, they returned several times to drive by the house and ask trivial questions in a feigned joking manner.

We were lucky. Perhaps my U.S. passport helped. It was the fourth time I had been detained since the coup. I reported the incident to the American Consulate. The vice consul who received me, John Hall, listened noncommittally. He told me he could file a protest if I wanted, but that I had to understand that it would anger the government and they would probably expel me. I later learned, doing research for my book on the Letelier assassination, that John Hall was actually an undercover officer for the CIA.

The Malloco raid was a near-mortal wound to MIR’s operations inside Chile. For the second time, their top leadership had been neutralized. Now they had lost a large part of their arsenal, and their carefully constructed underground operations network was in disarray. Documents and correspondence captured at the Malloco farm allowed DINA to complete its accumulating store of knowledge about MIR and its international JCR connections. One letter, for example, made reference to a $1 million grant to MIR from the JCR war chest. Another document contained details of the planned MIR-JCR counteroffensive, which DINA labeled—perhaps with some irony—Operation Boomerang. A map of the Southern Cone, said to have been captured in the Malloco raid, showed guerrilla offensives branching out from Argentina into Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. DINA propaganda greatly exaggerated the threat, proclaiming that assassination plans were afoot against Pinochet, and that 1,200 guerrilla troops had invaded from the south. Those claims were without
basis. But the offensives described in the captured map coincide almost exactly with those actually being planned by the JCR member organizations. The Malloco raid also revealed the increasing cooperation between DINA and Argentine security forces. A DINA communiqué said the plan had been uncovered and dismantled “in a preventive operation coordinated with authorities of Argentine intelligence.”

Now the action moved again to Argentina. Two weeks after the Malloco raid, 601 Battalion operative Osvaldo Rawson, working closely with Arancibia, was closing in on MIR’s apparatus in Buenos Aires. Arancibia reported back to Chile that roundups of Chileans had started. He asked DINA to send photos of MIR’s leader, Edgardo “Pollo” Enríquez, to help Rawson in his search.

Edgardo Enríquez was in fact in Buenos Aires. The Malloco disaster had left him as MIR’s highest ranking officer, and as a result he was accelerating his plans to return to Chile to rebuild the guerrilla force. One of his lieutenants was a Chilean with a French passport, Jean Yves Claudet Fernández, a thirty-six-year-old chemical engineer, who acted as an international courier for MIR. A few days after the Malloco raid in Chile, Enríquez dispatched him to Paris with coded messages about MIR’s dire security situation in Chile. In Paris, Claudet met with MIR/JCR representative, René “Gato” Valenzuela.

“I sent Claudet back with letters and money. He was in a hurry to get back to Buenos Aires, even though I told him he could wait,” Valenzuela said in an interview.

Claudet arrived back in Buenos Aires early on the morning of October 31. He checked into the Liberty Hotel, at Corrientes and Florida, whose owner Benjamin Taub ran a black market money exchange out of the hotel and had previously handled large amounts of cash from kidnappings for the JCR.
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Claudet’s planned meeting with Enríquez never happened. He had walked into a trap set by Osvaldo Rawson. He signed the register, took his bags with the money and documents to his room, and the next day disappeared without a trace.

Rawson informed Arancibia about his success, which Arancibia immediately reported to his DINA superiors:

But Enríquez, who at one point had shared an apartment with Claudet, escaped the dragnet. Claudet apparently was able to resist under torture, or simply did not have the information to lead Rawson to Enríquez. There was other bad news for DINA. There had been a serious security breach. The captured documents, Arancibia reported, revealed that JCR headquarters in Paris “was informed about [Fuentes’s] transfer from Paraguay to Santiago, and even mentioned the agency or a member of the same who was the informant.” The search for Enríquez continued intensely for weeks, according to Arancibia’s reports, but the MIR leader had given them the slip.

It was the third week of November. The date of DINA’s major event, the “First Inter American Working Meeting on National Intelligence,” was approaching. The invitations had gone out in October. DINA was footing the bill for the region’s top intelligence representatives to converge on Santiago to formalize the kind of joint operations that had been carried out since May with Paraguayan and Argentine agencies. Arancibia lobbied for Rawson to attend, but he wasn’t invited. Argentina’s delegation would be led by the State Information Service, SIDE, who confirmed they would attend what was now being described as “the cocktail party on the 26th.”

The officers who gathered in Santiago on November 26 were several ranks above street-level operational agents like Rawson and Arancibia. These were the superiors of the superiors of people like them. They were the men who developed the strategy and gave the orders. Contreras, based on what we know about his approaches to Venezuela and Paraguay, conceived of the meeting as bringing together the command officers or their deputies for the top military intelligence organizations of each country. Police commanders with intelligence and antiterrorism responsibility were also included in each country’s
contingent, which numbered at least three official representatives, plus lower ranking staff. In the underground world of competition and mutual suspicion, the Santiago meeting was a unique and unprecedented event, a summit of historic importance.

Before going on, I want to put on the record the names of the men who are known to have participated in the meeting that created Operation Condor or were otherwise associated with its subsequent operations.

The head of Argentina’s delegation was a navy captain,
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Jorge Demetrio Casas, deputy chief and head of international operations for SIDE. Casas later became head of naval intelligence on his promotion to rear admiral in 1977. He was accused of human rights crimes and was pardoned in the blanket amnesty of 1986.

For Paraguay, the delegation of police and military officers was led by Colonel Benito Guanes Serrano, head of G-2, the intelligence department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. Police Chief Francisco Britez declined the invitation delivered by Colonel Jahn in early October.

Uruguay had created a combined intelligence command of all branches of the armed forces, called Defense Intelligence Service (SID—
Servicio de Inteligencia de Defensa).
Two subdirectors, representing the army and the air force, were sent to Santiago. Army Colonel José Fons was the head of the delegation. Fons was later refused entry to the United States because of a CIA report linking him to a death threat against Congressman Ed Koch the following year. (See
Chapter 13
.)

Bolivian President Hugo Banzer, perhaps reflecting his skepticism about the enterprise, sent the lowest ranking officer, Major Carlos Mena Burgos, of SIE (
Servicio de Inteligencia del Estado).
Mena was named in a report by European human rights investigators as a torturer.

Brazil, according to U.S. intelligence reports and the source who was present, sent an observer delegation, but no names could be learned. What is known is that the original recipient of the Condor invitation—according to Colonel Mario Jahn—was SNI director, General Joao Batista Figueiredo, who later became president.