The Condor Years (22 page)

Condor was not just an information exchange. Perhaps its most tradition-breaking aspect was the establishment of close personal relationships among top officers, whose agencies in the past had looked on one another as targets of counterintelligence rather than as collaborators. Part of the Contreras plan was
regular meetings and personal visits. The next meeting of all members of Condor was scheduled for the following June, in conjunction with the U.S.-sponsored Conference of American Armies meeting in Santiago. The founding documents also talk of encouraging bilateral meetings—evidence of four such meetings involving intelligence planning and information exchange have been found in the Paraguay Archive.

The heart of the system was the capacity of each agency to station its agents with permission to actually operate in other countries. Until Condor, each country’s military presence in another country was limited to the formal militarry attachés located in foreign embassies. There had been covert espionage as well. Contreras began stationing DINA officers covertly in each country, using embassy cover, after July 1974, to recruit friendly officers in the host country to conduct surveillance on Chilean exiles.

Condor allowed for much more extensive and officially sanctioned operational capability. The Condor agreement, in section 5g, called for “the establishment in the embassies of our countries of the presence of National Intelligence personnel, . . . for direct and personal liaison, who will be fully accredited by the Services.” In other words, each country’s Condor service would have at least one intelligence official from each other country permanently stationed and working alongside the local service. It was an idea that Contreras borrowed from the CIA, which had its personnel installed inside the Venezuelan intelligence service. Contreras, in an interview, insisted he turned down a similar arrangement offered by Vernon Walters to station CIA officers inside DINA.

In addition, according to the Condor documents, each country had the right and obligation to provide “technical staff” to man the Coordinating Center, the headquarters and data base in Chile. Personnel working there from other countries enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

The system thus created an elaborate multilateral intelligence infrastructure with a central office in Chile and branch offices in each country. These elements—information, communications, and the stationing of operational personnel—created enormous potential capacity for international activity. There could be no illusions about the intended use of this capacity. Contreras made it clear in his opening speech to the meeting that Condor was being created to capture and interrogate his leftist enemies still in Latin America, and to “eliminate” those living as exiles in other parts of the world. These were the
operational phases about which the founding documents gave few specifics—Phase Two for joint operations in Latin America, Phase Three for missions to Europe and the United States. Details about those phases would emerge as they were put into action, and detected by U.S. intelligence agencies.

For the moment, the signing of the final Act of Closure of the First Inter American Meeting of National Intelligence concluded the work of the officers from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. They had finished one day ahead of schedule. They had before them a weekend of recreation—dining and gambling at casinos in the lush seaside city of Vina del Mar, then an afternoon of horseback riding at the Quillota military base in the coastal plains to the north.

They returned to their home countries having embarked on an enterprise of colossal hubris. The Condor alliance was born from the aggressive instincts of military leaders who saw themselves facing a conflict of world scope. They used the term World War III without irony or qualification. More even than a war of irregulars extinguishing guerrilla uprisings as they occurred, the Southern Cone axis was equipped to project its power abroad, to create “extraterritorial capability.” The forces now united to preserve the vaguely defined “Western way of life” were prepared to go even to the European and American capitals to root out the subversive cells there that those governments, softened by democracy, were unwilling to eradicate.

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*
Walters conveyed a similar message a few weeks earlier to the White House. In a memo to President Ford’s national security aide, General Brent Scowcroft, July 25, 1975 (Chile Project), Walters is the go-between to the White House for another message from Pinochet. He writes:

What Pinochet wanted basically was:

1. Understanding for the Chilean decision not to receive the United Nations Human Rights Commission which they regarded as highly prejudiced.

2. Assurance of U.S. support against any effort in the United Nations to expel Chile and, if necessary, a veto.

3. Chileans know they cannot get direct aid because of Congressional opposition. Wonder if there is any way they could get it indirectly via Spain, Taiwan, Brazil or the Republic of Korea.

(signed) Vernon A. Walters, Lieutenant General, USA, Deputy Director.

*
The owner of the Hotel Liberty, Benjamin Taub, had exchanged millions of dollars for ERP, including most of the $14.2 million ransom for Exxon executive Victor Samuelson in early 1974, as described in Chapters 4 and 9.

*
A Navy captain is equivalent in rank to an Army colonel.

*
Telex is a point-to-point text communication system that was widely used until it was rendered obsolete by fax and e-mail. Sender and receiver each needed special equipment, similar to a large typewriter, and communication was established via a dedicated telephone line.

†
In one of the documents, Contreras gave an example of the code using the message “I will travel tomorrow”:

Message in the clear: viajare manana

Message in code: NXDBD TCADJ DJD

There was a reason Manuel Contreras’s ideas for international operations were so well developed and so convincing to his fellow intelligence commanders: by the time the five agencies signed the Condor agreement, DINA’s Exterior Department was already up and running and had almost a year’s experience in on-the-ground operations in Europe and the United States. The new organization would provide a multinational umbrella for many operations already underway.

The Prats assassination in Buenos Aires—successful despite false starts, intelligence leaks, wasted money, and an awkward combination of military and civilian actors—had been the inauguration of Contreras’s international team. The DINA operatives used in that assassination were still an intact unit and would continue to carry our similar operations for the next two years. The DINA Exterior Department would be expanded and trained and tested in dozens of trips abroad. The full extent of those operations may never be known—one agent bragged he had traveled to Europe eighty-four times.

Much of what we know has been obtained from the sources who have testified, principally the Chilean-American Michael Townley. Townley was clearly at the center of DINA’s foreign operations, and participated in a long string of assassinations and assassination attempts. It would be a mistake, however, to circumscribe DINA’s Exterior Department and Condor only to what we know about and from Townley. But if the details obtained from Townley, who claims to have had only a vague notion of his role within Condor, are the tip of the ice
berg, his testimony is evidence that the iceberg itself—DINA operations abroad—was truly enormous.

“Contreras considered himself a focal point or a ‘capo’ of the anti-Marxist movement and of the groups scattered throughout Europe and in the United States,” Townley testified to an Italian judge. “One of the things that Contreras most wanted to accomplish was the creation of an alliance—maybe that term is too fancy—of various movements and various groups which he knew he could trust, and obviously which he could manipulate at his pleasure.”

Contreras was building a monster with several heads and many arms. Condor was official, multilateral, and embedded in the institutions of military intelligence. As a military alliance it had enormous resources and operational capacity but also was encumbered by its own military bureaucracy. Contreras meant it to complement his other international operations: the Exterior Department had created a network of civilians recruited from right-wing terrorist groups in Europe and the United States. This “civilian” network was already in place and was to be one of Condor’s assets—perhaps its most powerful asset—available for espionage, propaganda, assassinations, and any manner of dirty tricks, for pay or for ideological devotion to Pinochet. DINA’s private network was informal and able to respond with maximum flexibility to Contreras’s instructions. What it lacked in professionalism and institutional credentials it made up in improvisation, fanaticism, and energy.

General Pinochet himself had a direct role in setting up this network. His overthrow of Allende had made him a hero in the networks of fascist extremists left over from World War II in Europe. One of the most famous, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, a naval officer in Mussolini’s fascist regime, made a pilgrimage to Chile in May 1974 to pay homage to Pinochet and pledge his assistance. Borghese’s followers had formed underground organizations that had carried out some of Italy’s most spectacular acts of terrorism of the time, including a bank robbery in Milan in 1969 that left sixteen people dead. The general strategy was to provoke chaos and a military coup that would bring Borghese to power. The coup scenario never materialized, giving the aging Borghese even more reason to admire Pinochet for accomplishing the kind of anti-Communist takeover in Chile that had eluded Borghese in Italy.

The meeting with Pinochet cemented a relationship that would extend to
Borghese’s followers. He brought with him to Chile his younger lieutenant, Stefano Delle Chiaie, who headed the group
Avanguardia Nazionale
—National Vanguard—and had masterminded the bloody bank assault. Delle Chiaie had earned the name “the Black Bomber.” Recognizing an asset for his plans in Europe, Manuel Contreras immediately incorporated Delle Chiaie into DINA, where he was known by the code name “Alfa.”

The second group of extremists were Cuban exiles who, a decade after the failure of the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, were increasingly resorting to terrorist tactics to unseat Fidel Castro. A small group—Guillermo Novo, José Dionisio Suárez, and Orlando Bosch, names that would soon become infamous—also made the pilgrimage to Santiago in December 1974.

Building on those contacts, Contreras was able to create a makeshift team for operations in both the United States and Europe. In early 1975, he activated the network. Townley was dispatched to Miami, and several other DINA officers from the Exterior Department were sent to Europe. Their mission: conduct surveillance on the Chilean exiles traveling around the world to organize resistance and persuade democratic governments to repudiate Pinochet. For several exiles under surveillance, the orders included assassination.

Townley arrived in Miami in early February with $25,000 in his money pouch and a list of potential collaborators given to him by DINA. One of the organizations that had sent a delegation to Chile, the Cuban Nationalist Movement, assigned a young, sometime used car salesman named Virgilio Paz to work with Townley on his mission, which he called Operation Open Season.

DINA’s new international strategy coincided nicely with that of the Cuban movement, which its leaders expressed as “war throughout the roads of the world.” Translated, the slogan meant a terrorist campaign against Castro’s institutions outside Cuba—against supporters in the United States, Cuban diplomatic posts, and Cuban airlines. (In the most ferocious attack, masterminded by Orlando Bosch, a bomb exploded aboard an Air Cubana airplane bound from Caracas to Havana, killing all seventy-three passengers and crew.)

Townley’s first assigned targets were in Mexico City, where a meeting of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Crimes of the Military Junta in Chile was about to start. Carlos Altamirano—the principal target—would be arriving from East Germany. Other important Communist and Socialist leaders would also be there. Orlando Letelier would be arriving from Washington, D.C., where he had recently relocated. Communist Leader Volodia Teitelboim
was also on the list. Townley gathered the makings for a remote-control bomb, similar to the one he had used to kill Prats in Argentina a few months earlier. Paz bought a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight. Townley’s wife, Mariana, was the third member of the team.

Townley would later testify he was supposed to kill as many of the top leaders as he could, but in fact the would-be assassins never got close to their targets. Driving incongruously through Mexico, patching together a bomb with C4 plastic explosive in the rear of their rented American Traveler camper, they arrived too late for the meeting.

He reported the bungled mission back to Santiago, to Raul Iturriaga, the chief of DINA’s Exterior Department. Iturriaga instructed Townley to return to Chile and then to continue to pursue Altamirano in Europe. The priority was always Altamirano. “Contreras had a personal resentment against Altamirano. I don’t know why,” Townley recalled.

Arriving in Frankfurt in July, Townley, Mariana, and Paz linked up with other DINA Exterior Department teams that had been carrying out similar missions in the capitals of Europe. One of the teams was headed by Major Cristoph Willeke, Iturriaga’s deputy and a German speaker. His primary mission was to follow a prominent Christian Democrat making the rounds of European capitals, Patricio Aylwin, the former senator who in 1990 would be elected president of Chile. Townley and Willeke were also building Contreras’s anti-Marxist network. Willeke established liaison with the West German intelligence, the BND (Bundesnachtrichtendienst), a contact that, according to Townley, had been arranged by leaders of a crypto-Nazi German colony in Chile, known as Dignity Colony. BND and DINA exchanged lists of suspected MIR and JCR operatives in Europe, with special attention to those thought to be working with the German terrorists, the Baader-Meinhof gang. Townley also established contact with two unidentified right-wing groups in Germany to incorporate them into Contreras’s network.