The Condor Years (29 page)

The State Department’s intelligence and research office, INR, dispatched a report summarizing the CIA information to all U.S. embassies in Latin America, and in France, Portugal, Sweden, Italy, and Norway—the European countries harboring the greatest numbers of exiles. The INR has no independent intelligence sources of its own, but distills and analyzes intelligence from embassies, military and CIA intelligence, and prepares reports for State Department use. The report is clearly based on the CIA reports, but plays down the CIA conclusion about security cooperation. Evidence for “an intergovernmental
assassination plot” is “scanty,” it said. The report hangs its skepticism on the distinction between intelligence exchange, which was the explicit purpose of Condor, and international assassinations, which had not yet been proven as part of Condor’s activities.

An unusual debate ensued among the Condor country ambassadors, at the prompting of Kissinger’s recently appointed top Latin American officer, Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman. A career diplomat with a reputation inside the State Department for cold toughness and close relations with the CIA, Shlaudeman had served in Chile as deputy to the ambassador during the two-track coup plotting against Allende in 1970.

Shlaudeman had initiated the original queries to ambassadors on the killings and roundups of refugees, and now sent a third query. He said he intended to draft a formal “Trends Report” on the military governments, and asked the ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries for more information and opinions about security coordination, the seriousness of the “subversive threat,” and human rights.

The ambassadors weighed in with long, sometimes passionate, cables. Reading the cables decades later, one can still palpate the deep ambivalence of these career foreign service officers. U.S. policy dictated support for dictatorships whose methods were profoundly at odds with American democracy and moral values, and they struggled to square loyalty to policy with basic common sense ethics. Lacking hard evidence or a pattern of criminal activity, no hard decisions were called for. As long as each ambassador was looking only at his own country, no one was compelled to look for international patterns. It was a system that subjected evidence of criminal conspiracy by governments to the strictest scrutiny but accepted at face value the military governments’ disclaimers and professions of good intentions.

Shlaudeman’s insistence that the embassies exchange views on security coordination, however, had the effect of bringing the evidence out in the open. Seeing one another’s cabled assessments, the ambassadors found it more and more difficult to avert their gaze. The embassy in Buenos Aires showed barely concealed disdain for the overly cautious INR assessment of “scanty” evidence. Granted, the embassy wrote, the conspiracy to eliminate exiles has not been confirmed. “It should be emphasized, however, that local governments have motivation and opportunity to do so, and it would be equally erroneous to conclude that such conspiracy is unlikely.” To conceive of Operation Condor as
limited to its relatively innocuous activities such as intelligence exchange underestimates the degree of cooperation, the cable said. In fact, the cable said, security officers from Chile and Uruguay have been operating inside Argentina since the coup, and “appear to be acting as advisors to the Argentine forces in connection with nationals of their own countries supposed to be involved in the subversion.”

One ambassador said the United States should go along with the new development, not criticize it. From Montevideo, Ambassador Siracusa argued that the “increasingly coordinated approach to terrorism” was a logical response to the international threat confronting the regimes, and should not be viewed with hostility by the United States.

It was an argument that would echo through the coming months: These are our friends; we share their goals if not their methods in fighting terrorism. If we express our qualms too loudly, we risk offending them and losing our effectiveness in guiding events in the region.

The ambassadors appear to have based their assessments on incomplete intelligence. Until this point, no report had said explicitly (at least in the portions
that have been declassified) that Operation Condor was involved in assassinations outside Latin America, and the State Department’s intelligence arm, INR, had taken pains to cast doubt on that possibility. CIA reports also skirted the issue, except to say that Edgardo Enríquez had been returned to Chile and killed.

Finally the debate was resolved. On Friday, July 30, the top Latin American officials for the CIA and the State Department sat down in the same room and exchanged intelligence on Operation Condor. For the first time, CIA laid out in plain language that Condor was set up to assassinate exile leaders and that an operation had already been planned for Europe.

According to a heavily redacted State Department memorandum, the CIA representative, whose name is blacked out,

The State Department officials were shocked. Details about the location and targets of the Condor “hits” are blacked out in the declassified documents, but other documents specify Paris and Lisbon.

Shlaudeman’s deputy, William Luers, who had served in the Soviet Union and prided himself on his impeccable anti-Communist credentials, said he left the meeting upset. Fighting terrorist guerrillas in South America was part of the strategic struggle against the Soviet Union, and he supported it. But sending assassination squads to other countries, especially to a U.S. NATO partner like France, was beyond the pale. Shlaudeman’s other deputy, Hewson Ryan, had recently been the State Department’s point man in opposing congressional efforts to cut off military aid to Uruguay. In hearings on Capitol Hill, he had launched an energetic defense of Uruguay’s military government and assured the congressmen there was no evidence the military had anything to do with
Michelini’s and Gutiérrez’s deaths. He now knew he had been misled, and had misled Congress.

Shlaudeman was a man of action who rarely shared his emotions, even years later. He and his deputies agreed they had to act immediately on the new information. Kissinger would have to be brought into whatever they proposed. How widely was the intelligence about Condor’s assassination plans distributed in the Ford administration? Unquestionably the information went directly to Kissinger, who briefed President Ford daily on national security matters. The intelligence is summarized in two daily intelligence reports, called the INR Afternoon Summary, which was distributed to officials with top secret clearance at State, the White House, and the Pentagon.

A veteran CIA official, Sam Halpern, who was an assistant to CIA director Richard Helms in the early 1970s, examined the reports at the request of the author. “This kind of report would have been highlighted right away,” he said. “It would go right to the president [in the document known as the PDB, or President’s Daily Briefing], particularly because of the Western Europe part. It would mean you have to assume they will do it [commit assassinations] in the U.S. as well. It is direct action against U.S. interests. If it didn’t [go to the president], something was wrong in the system.”

Shlaudeman had already been working on a long report to Kissinger on the Southern Cone military governments, based on the queries to the embassies on security coordination and human rights. Now, in the manner of a reporter on the trail of a big story, he had a new lead.

He finished the report (drafted by Luers) over the weekend and sent it to Kissinger on Tuesday, August 3. He gave it a title that would grab the attention of a strategic thinker like the secretary of state: “The ‘Third World War’ and South America.”

He borrowed the title from Uruguayan foreign minister Juan Carlos Blanco, who said the Southern Cone governments were engaged in a Third World War against the terrorist left. To fight this war, Shlaudeman said, the military governments are coalescing in an alliance that involves both political solidarity and international security actions.

Shlaudeman emphasized that the enemies in this war were so broadly defined that they could include “nearly anyone who opposes government policy.” The problem is then compounded when police pursue these dissidents into foreign countries where they have sought refuge, he wrote, citing the cases of the Uruguayans killed in Argentina, perhaps as a “favor.”

The term “Third World War” was significant as a description of the antiterrorist campaign, Shlaudeman said, because it “justifies harsh and sweeping ‘wartime’ measures [and] . . . the exercise of power beyond national borders.”

Shlaudeman’s report keeps the human rights aspects at a cool remove, avoiding moral commentary or alarmist characterizations. Instead, he casts the problem presented by the Condor alliance as the danger that the United States will lose influence as the dictatorships band together.

On the world scale, which he calls “the main East-West stage,” the United States would be a “casual beneficiary” of the formation of a right-wing bloc, since it will be a sure ally against the Soviets and Cubans. But it would be a mistake to be lulled into complacency.

He ticked off the problems: human rights is becoming more and more a problem for international diplomacy; the bloc might be an obstacle to a “natural” alliance between the United States and Brazil; democratic countries in the north might start feuding with the dictatorships in the south. The most serious problem, he says, is the danger of spreading terrorism.

In response to this critical problem, Shlaudeman recommended the U.S. should continue to exert a “moderating influence” while demonstrating support and understanding for the military regimes. The State Department should have a balanced strategy of persuading the South American regimes that the “Third World War” idea is exaggerated and dangerous and that they need not fear a gradual return to democracy. On the other hand, the State Department should continue to defend the regimes against criticism in the U.S. Congress and help them prove the terrorist threat they face.

On human rights, Shlaudeman said only that Secretary Kissinger’s speech in Santiago provided the framework for policy: a multilateral approach through the OAS to avoid charges of U.S. intervention, while launching parallel attacks on Communist violators “to make clear that authoritarian regimes of the right have no monopoly on abuses.”