The Condor Years (28 page)

Kissinger ended the meeting by trying to nail down Pinochet on more prisoner releases and constitutional reforms. Pinochet sidestepped by saying he couldn’t do anything during the OAS meeting or it would appear he was acting under pressure. “We might be able to do it in thirty days,” Pinochet said.

Kissinger went almost directly from Pinochet’s office to the cavernous meeting hall downstairs where he delivered his address to the OAS General Assembly. It was the first formal pronouncement by Kissinger on human rights, and it made the front page of the
New York Times
and other papers. It was a tough public statement that was seen as significantly raising the profile of human rights in U.S. diplomacy. “One of the most compelling issues of our time, and one which calls for the concerted action of all responsible peoples and nations, is the necessity to protect and extend the fundamental rights of humanity,” he said, and proposed that the OAS give its fledgling Inter-American Human Rights Commission an enlarged budget and greater authority to investigate abuses. The commission had presented a 191-page report on continuing abuses in Chile, carefully documenting hundreds of cases of mass arrests, torture, and disappearances.

Then Kissinger delivered what sounded like a stark assessment of relations with Chile. “In the United States, concern is widespread in the executive branch, in the press, and in the Congress, which has taken the extraordinary step of enacting specific statutory limits on United States military and economic aid to Chile. The condition of human rights . . . has impaired our relationship with Chile and will continue to do so. We wish this relationship to be close, and all friends of Chile hope that obstacles raised by conditions alleged in the report will soon be removed.” Chile and Cuba were the only countries signaled out for specific criticism in Kissinger’s speech.

It was a strong statement, especially coming from Kissinger. Yet the public words had already been discounted by Kissinger’s private assurances of friendship, admiration, and support in his meeting with Pinochet. Kissinger made it clear that the public statement was tactical, not a matter of principle, and that Pinochet’s real problems were with Congress, not with the administration. And Kissinger did nothing to dispel Pinochet’s paranoia about his exiled enemies, such as Orlando Letelier, who had “access to Congress.”

Kissinger’s private meeting with Pinochet was the green light track, followed by the public red light warning on human rights. Only perhaps in Kissinger’s mind were the contradictory tracts reconciled as principled, effective policy.

Pinochet’s comment after the meeting to his inner circle indicated that Kissinger’s remarks on human rights hadn’t made much of an impact. “He asked a lot, but offered little,” was the paraphrase of Pinochet’s reaction by one aide who heard him. Most important to Pinochet was the fact that Kissinger had come to Santiago. Kissinger’s presence, Pinochet said, was an important contribution to his image.

The CIA quickly gave a rosy assessment, in a secret report circulated in Washington, that the Pinochet government was “gratified” and derived “badly needed respectability” from the OAS meeting in Santiago. The meeting also provided an occasion for Pinochet and his allies to strengthen what the CIA described as an emerging “anti-Marxist bloc.”

If it was Kissinger’s intention to dissuade Pinochet from the pattern of killings and kidnappings that had characterized his regime until June 1976, events immediately following the OAS meeting and in the months ahead showed that exactly the opposite happened.

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DINA chief Manuel Contreras was in a period of intense activity. DINA was in charge of security for the OAS conclave, an activity that brought Contreras into regular contact with U.S. intelligence agents. With MIR and the Socialists now soundly defeated, Contreras had redirected his agents against the Communist Party, which at that time was pursuing a non-violent strategy. At a time when Pinochet was reassuring Kissinger that he was releasing prisoners, Contreras was secretly rounding up hundreds of new prisoners in the Communist Party strongholds of the northern mining region and in Santiago. Of those captured in the latest sweep, forty-seven people disappeared, including Communist party chief Victor Diaz and other top members of the party leadership.

Contreras had already turned his focus beyond Chile’s borders. The enemies doing most damage to Chile were now outside the country. DINA had been developing what it called “extraterritorial capability” in two operational entities: the network of Italian terrorists and anti-Castro Cuban exiles that had been operating in Europe, and the new Condor system agreed upon at the founding meeting the previous November.

DINA’s exterior department had recruited a new Cuban agent, Rolando Otero, who had arrived in Santiago on the lam from the FBI for bombing attacks in Miami. DINA gave Otero some money and sent him to Costa Rica with a mission: assassinate Andrés Pascal and his companion Mary Anne Beausire. The two MIR leaders had been granted asylum by the Costa Rican embassy after escaping the DINA attack on their Malloco headquarters. They had been allowed safe passage out of Chile and had flown to Costa Rica. Otero’s mission was to follow them and kill them with the help of other Cubans who would fly in from Miami.

The plan misfired, however. Otero was actually a double agent, working for Venezuelan security police DISIP as well as DINA. Instead of going directly to Costa Rica, Otero flew to Caracas and reported the plot to DISIP. Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez quickly alerted the president of Costa Rica, Daniel Oduber Quirós, who ordered protection for Pascal and Beausire. Two Cubans arriving from Miami were arrested at the border. Otero, against the advice of his DISIP handlers, returned to Santiago and was thrown in a DINA prison cell and tortured.

The failed operation did not deter Contreras’s plans for the Cuban-Italian network. At least two Cubans and three Italians, including Stefano Delle Chiaie, were living in Chile and working for DINA in 1976. There is evidence in
secret intelligence files that Contreras planned to use the Cubans and Italians in future operational roles in the multinational Condor system that was just getting started.

Condor was next on Contreras’s agenda after ensuring the safety of the OAS meeting. As scheduled in the founding
“Acta Final”
of the first Condor meeting, Contreras convened the heads of security services and their staffs from the six Condor member countries for a second Condor meeting in June. DINA defector Luz Arce said a large group of DINA officials—she was able to name eleven, including Contreras and operations chief Pedro Espinoza—attended the ceremonial inaugural session, held in a large meeting room at DINA headquarters in Santiago. She was able to identify the nationalities of participants from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The Argentine contingent included the enthusiastic “Rawson”—Lt. Colonel José Osvaldo Riveiro, of Argentina’s 601 Intelligence Battalion, who had been so instrumental in recent Condor actions against MIR.

At the meeting, the Condor security forces made a momentous decision. Phase One—intelligence exchange, the data bank, and communications system—and Phase Two—joint operations in one another’s countries—had been working well. The joint operations had all but wiped out the JCR leadership and infrastructure in Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina. Now Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay—the three most militant countries—agreed to move to Phase Three: joint operations outside of Latin America to track down and assassinate enemies who were operating from exile.

How U.S. officials learned of Condor’s Phase Three assassination plans, and how they reacted, is perhaps the most important discovery of this book’s investigation.

The meeting marks the beginning of a broad stream of intelligence about Condor’s plans and operations. Unlike the first Condor meeting, about which not a single contemporaneous declassified U.S. document exists, the second meeting apparently was thoroughly penetrated by U.S. intelligence, perhaps due to the frequent contact between DINA and U.S. intelligence officers around that time regarding Kissinger’s visit and the OAS meeting.

The intelligence about Condor, and the threat it contained about coordinated terrorist attacks outside of Latin America, became a matter of greatest urgency among a small group of U.S. officials who had access to the top-secret information. In later years, in what appears to be an an exercise in damage control,
some of those officials, including Kissinger, claimed to have known little about Condor at the time, and to have remembered less after the fact. Thus the contemporaneous documents—those written during the days and weeks the events were unfolding—become the most important record of U.S. officials’ knowledge and actions. It becomes a question, once again, of what did they know and when did they know it. In this case, the facts in dispute concern a series of events leading up to the most egregious act of terrorism involving Condor, the assassination in Washington, D.C., of Orlando Letelier.

In reconstructing the record of U.S. knowledge, based on the now-declassified documents, we find early discovery of planned assassinations, an apparently serious and at first energetic attempt by Kissinger and his lieutenants to warn Chile and the other countries to stop the Condor assassination plans, and finally an inexplicable failure to follow through with the warnings. It is my judgment that such a warning probably would have prevented the assassination of Orlando Letelier, an act of terrorism by a country allied to the United States.

At least one of the State Department officials who knew about the events concerning Condor in the summer of 1976 shared that haunting sense of missed opportunity, and expressed it in a biographical interview before his death.

In my investigation I have found thirty-seven U.S. documents dated prior to the Letelier assassination that relate to Condor directly or to the security coordination later identified as Operation Condor. All were kept secret for at least twenty-five years, until declassification by executive order began in 1999.

The earliest U.S. documents are in reaction to the quick succession of deaths of major exile leaders in Argentina: Edgardo Enríquez of MIR, Uruguayan political leaders Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez, and former Bolivian president Juan José Torres. The embassy–State Department exchanges, occurring just before and during Kissinger’s trip to Santiago in June, discuss the immediate and obvious question of whether the various Southern Cone governments are cooperating in killing one another’s enemies. The question was raised at first with caution and with obvious skepticism.

Ambassador to Argentina Robert Hill was apparently first to raise a red flag. After reporting in detail on the capture of Edgardo Enríquez and the murders of the Uruguayan politicians, he concluded that hopes for a “moderate Videla government” had been dashed and that strong U.S. action was called for. On May 25, three days after the Uruguayans’ bodies were discovered, Hill presented
a “démarche”—a diplomatic warning—without Kissinger’s authorization to the military government “on the worsening human rights situation.”

Kissinger received an intelligence memo on the situation on June 4, the day Bolivian leader Torres was found murdered. The memo discusses the possible “existence of an intergovernmental assassination program,” but says “there is no evidence to support a contention that Southern Cone governments are cooperating in some sort of international ‘Murder Inc.’ aimed at leftist political exiles resident in one of their countries.”
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Exchanges of information and training by the Southern Cone governments, however, are “logical,” the memo says, because of the international character of the leftist organizations, whose “terrorists” are organized in the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR) and “move back and forth across Southern Cone boundaries.”

Despite the memo’s skepticism about international assassinations, Kissinger’s deputy sent an “immediate action” cable to the embassies, ordering the ambassadors to provide more information and reply to him by June 7, the day he was to leave for Santiago. Titled “Possible International Implications of Violent Deaths of Political Figures Abroad,” the cable included these questions:

Quick responses from Santiago and Buenos Aires reinforced the mounting concern. “We believe these arrangements are possible, and that it is also possible
Chilean agents have been involved in killings abroad, possibly in cooperation with foreign governments,” Santiago reported. “Possible but not proved,” said Buenos Aires.

Soon after the OAS meeting in June, probably within days of the Condor meeting conducted by Contreras at DINA headquarters in Santiago, the CIA obtained new, solid information about Condor. A CIA informant provided a detailed account of the Condor meeting, concluding that a conspiracy did exist and for the first time gave its name, “Condor.” The intelligence is contained in two heavily redacted CIA reports about the Santiago meeting.