The Condor Years (3 page)

Rounding up subversives in their own countries was one thing. Planning assassinations in European capitals was another. Officials at the State Department reacted with the kind of common sense directness that most people would have brought to bear on such a situation: something had to be done to stop this craziness. The officials drafted an urgent and top-secret cable. Signed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the cable instructed the U.S. ambassadors to Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay to contact those governments at the highest level possible to make clear that the United States knew about the plans
and opposed them. The language was diplomatic, larded with reassurances that the United States shared the governments’ goal in defeating terrorism and subversion, but the message the ambassadors were to deliver was unmistakable: We know what you are planning; don’t do it. Kissinger’s cable stressed that the ambassadors should act with speed and urgency, containing this sentence in the first paragraph: “Government planned and directed assassinations within and outside the territory of Condor members has most serious implications which we must face squarely and rapidly.”

What happened next? Inexplicably, amazingly, nothing happened. Kissinger’s orders were not carried out. Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay went ahead with the Condor planning. Weeks went by, and none of the ambassadors delivered the warning.

Twenty-eight days later, on September 21, a remote-control bomb exploded under the driver’s seat of a car rounding Washington’s Sheridan Circle, on Massachusetts Avenue, only a few hundred feet from the Chilean embassy. Orlando Letelier was General Pinochet’s most prominent and effective opponent in the United States. He had been foreign minister and defense minister in the Popular Unity government of President Allende. He had served as Allende’s ambassador to Washington. His contacts and access in Washington as well as in the capitals of Europe where he traveled frequently were unmatched. Letelier had had a hand in two recent blows against Pinochet—legislation in the U.S. Congress making respect for human rights a condition for aid, and the cancellation of major Dutch investments in Chile.

His legs severed by the blast, Letelier died almost instantly. A twenty-five-year-old American woman, Ronni Moffitt, staggered from the car, helped by her husband, Michael Moffitt, who had been sitting in the back seat. Shrapnel had sliced her carotid artery, and she drowned in her own blood before an ambulance could arrive. Her husband survived, dazed and shouting that DINA—the Directorate of National Intelligence—Pinochet’s secret police, had done this.

The FBI investigation subsequently confirmed that he was right. The investigation also uncovered documentary evidence that the Chilean agents who carried out the assassination used the Condor apparatus to obtain passports and visas intended for use in the plot.

Would Pinochet have called off the assassination planned for Washington if the U.S. ambassador had put him on notice that the United States had discovered
Condor and its plans for international assassinations? One U.S. State Department official, Hewson Ryan, was troubled by this question, and expressed his concern about U.S. awareness of Condor in an interview shortly before his death in 1991:

There is additional, even more compelling, evidence that U.S. intelligence had in its possession information that could have been used to avert the act of terror in the United States. We now know that there were not one but two Condor-related assassination missions underway in the summer and fall of 1976. Amazingly, both were detected in progress by U.S. intelligence. The plan to send assassins to Paris was one, and it led directly to the Kissinger cable, containing the orders to send the (undelivered) warning message. The second mission was discovered by the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, George Landau. Paraguayan officials had asked him to provide U.S. visas for false Paraguayan passports for two Chilean security agents on their way to the United States. Landau became suspicious and alerted the CIA in Washington. Landau did not know he had discovered an assassination plot in progress, but his action alerted the U.S. government that Chile security agents were planning something in the United States. Landau’s action (he also made copies of the passport photos, one of which was the actual assassin) eventually implicated Chile, Paraguay, and the Condor apparatus in Letelier’s death and led to the case being solved by the FBI.

Our concern here—in the weeks prior to the Letelier assassination—is with the advance knowledge. New information was coming in about Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina planning an assassination in Paris; then separate information arrived about Chile planning a suspicious mission to Washington, D.C. The information from both streams was developed during the same period of time (late July, August, and early September) and was handled by the same CIA and State Department officials.

It is reasonable to ask, even after all these years, who aborted the clear instructions
intended to stop Condor’s assassination plans and why. It is also reasonable to think that a strong and clear warning to Chile about Condor would have caused Pinochet and his security chief to cancel the mission to kill Letelier.

What we know for certain is that the warning to the Condor countries, including Chile, was set in motion, then inexplicably pulled back. The most benign explanation is that the dots were not connected until it was too late, that it was simply an innocuous mistake by busy officials. This explanation, given by several State Department officials, is undermined by the subsequent effort to conceal how much U.S. officials knew about both streams of Condor information. It is further undermined by the State Department’s and the CIA’s continuing refusal to declassify relevant documents that would answer these still unanswered questions.

This is one of the Condor stories that is the object of this investigation. The missed opportunity to prevent an act of terror and murder on the streets of Washington pales beside the deeper tragedy in Latin America and of the deeper failure of the United States in that period. The historical question is this: How many of the thousands of murders committed by Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil could have been prevented if the United States had taken “a strong forward public posture, [or] even a private posture” against the killing, torture, and disappearances its allies in friendly intelligence agencies were carrying out?

November 1975

The meeting to create the Condor system was held in one of the mansions of fading elegance along Santiago’s broadest avenue, the Alameda. The building housed the Army War Academy, where officers already in service took advanced training in leadership and—more recently—intelligence. It was late November 1975, a pleasant season, when the days are hot and bright in the Southern Hemisphere’s spring. For most of a week, colonels, majors, and captains from six countries gathered each morning beneath the arched ceiling of what once might have been a formal banquet room. They were all intelligence officials, most with traditional military training, some with police backgrounds,
men whose job it had become to defeat what they variously referred to as subversion, terrorism, or international Communism.

Together, the military forces they represented dominated the lives of more than two-thirds of the population of South America. The geographic area under their sway was only a little smaller than that of the continental United States—spanning the entire Southern Cone of South America, from Chile’s 2,500-mile Pacific Coast, south to the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn, east to the Atlantic shores of Argentina and Uruguay, and then north almost 4,000 miles to encompass the Andes highlands of Bolivia, the plains of Paraguay, and the vast cities and Amazonian expanses of Brazil.

They looked to the United States as their leader in the worldwide Cold War, but they had been shocked, only seven months before, when the United States allowed its ally, the South Vietnamese military government, to fall in defeat in a
guerra de guerrillas
—a war of underground rebels outmaneuvering traditional armies. To these gathered military officers, it was all too ominous, too similar to their own situation. Their own enemies were the bands of young leftists in each of their countries who had taken up arms for the cause of revolution, inspired by Marx and Che Guevara and dedicated to the slogan of repeating “1, 2, 3 Vietnams” in Latin America.

Now, military intelligence had learned that the most dangerous underground groups had joined together in an international campaign combining armed attacks and international diplomacy, with bases all over Latin America and support networks in Europe. Secret intelligence reports from those months show a focus bordering on obsession on the nonviolent threat that the military considered even more dangerous: the nonviolent politicians lobbying in Europe and the United States against the military governments under the banner of democracy and human rights.

Chile had gathered this group of intelligence chiefs to present a plan to strike against these enemies anywhere in the world. General Augusto Pinochet was the host, and he was paying the expenses of all those attending. Pinochet stood stern and tall among the region’s military leaders. He had taken power two years before in a ferocious military assault that reversed the growing momentum of radical change in Latin America.

Chile’s experiment in democratic revolution, and its leader, President Salvador Allende, died on that day, September 11, 1973. With the coup, Pinochet gained a reputation as a kind of anti-Communist avenging angel.
With aggression and brutality never before seen in South America, he decimated the region’s largest and best organized leftist establishment. He did it first with mass arrests, concentration camps, and the summary executions in the days and weeks following the coup. He then moved to the more arduous task of rooting out the clandestine opposition groups. For this he created a new intelligence force, answerable only to him: the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA). By late 1975, the new tactics had achieved almost total victory inside Chile, and Pinochet and his intelligence chief turned their attention abroad.

Pinochet’s success was making him a hero of the world anti-Communists, earning him the gratitude, access, and even friendship, of leaders like Francisco Franco, Henry Kissinger, and Margaret Thatcher.

If Pinochet addressed the assembled intelligence chiefs that balmy Tuesday morning, November 26, 1975, he did it during a ninety-minute opening session scheduled for “ceremonial greetings.” Then, the “First Inter-American Meeting of National Intelligence” was brought to order by the chief of DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras.

This account of the secret proceedings of that meeting is based on the eyewitness account of one of the participants and two documents given to participants. One document is the meeting’s program and schedule; the other is the final resolution over the signatures of the heads of delegations of the countries joining Chile’s new organization. Additional details are provided by CIA and FBI documents and sources.

Contreras explained the rationale for his plan:

The informal cooperation of the past was not enough to combat this “psychopolitical war,” he argued. Contreras outlined his proposal for three phases of what he called “effective coordination.” The first, relatively innocuous phase was described in detail in the documents. It called for the creation of a Coordinating Center (Centro Coordinator) in Chile to gather, exchange, and communicate information on people and organizations linked to “subversion.” The center was to be “similar to that which Interpol has in Paris, but dedicated to subversion.”

The system would have what was then the latest technology: “Telex, microfilm, computers, cryptography.” In the final document, for approval by each country’s president, there is a thinly veiled reference to the expected interaction with the American CIA and FBI: “We recommend the utilization of liaison resources outside the countries of the System,
especially those that are outside the continent
, to obtain information on Subversion” (emphasis added). Contreras would later say publicly that both the CIA and the FBI knew about this intelligence data bank, contributed information to it, and sought information from it.