The Condor Years (30 page)

Shlaudeman’s strategy paper to Kissinger is an articulate but ultimately selfdefeating statement. It attempts to accommodate human rights into the narrow range of options available to U.S. policy as defined by Kissinger. The goal of preserving the anti-Communist alliance was seen to trump any action to stop the military regimes’ increasingly evident human rights crimes. Having led with the alarming news of military assassination plans in Europe, the paper ends with policy recommendations that are anemic by comparison. It carefully parallels Kissinger’s actions in Santiago only a few weeks before: Even as a red light is flashed to stop human rights abuses, a green light of encouragement and defense of the military’s war on terrorism is placed beside it.

The strategy’s weakness was almost immediately demonstrated. Some quarters at State favored taking direct action to stop the Condor assassination plans. Shlaudeman and Luers enlisted Kissinger’s chief deputy, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Philip Habib, in an effort to persuade Kissinger to approve a plan of action. The goal was to warn the military regimes that the United States was aware of their assassination plans. The basic strategy was laid out at a meeting on August 3. Habib strongly supported the idea of confronting the governments directly to force them to abort their ongoing plans.
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This time, at least in the minds of those drafting the policy materials, the red light would be bright, unequivocal, and would remain on until Operation Condor’s plans were stopped.

As they deliberated, a Condor operation was already underway. It was not the one detected against targets in Europe. It was assassination in Washington, D.C.

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The Kennedy Amendment, to cut off future military aid to Chile, was passed June 16. Aid already approved and “in the pipeline” was allowed to be delivered, however. The weapons Kissinger was trying so hard to obtain for Pinochet were intended to counterbalance a feared arms buildup in neighboring Peru, which was receiving aid from the Soviet Union. Pinochet brought up the subject, and began a long discussion about the possibility of Chile launching a pre-emptive strike against Peru. He probed Kissinger about the conditions under which the U.S. would intervene militarily to support Chile. Kissinger made it clear that Chile would be on its own if it were the aggressor, but agreed with Pinochet that there would be one exception: if Cuba were to side with Peru, the U.S. would side with Pinochet.

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Congressman Edward Koch, the New York Democrat who later became mayor of New York City, had recently made such a charge. In a confidential letter to the State Department, citing a June 3, 1976, cable (State 136607), Koch said, “It is alleged that these murders [of Michelini and Gutiérrez] indicate that elements within the Argentine military are cooperating with the military dictatorships of Chile and Uruguay to eliminate troublesome exiles.” In leftist and exile circles, charges that the dictatorships were cooperating in an assault on one another’s enemies had been common since the Prats and Leighton assassinations.

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Habib had used a similar tactic before, with notable success. As ambassador to South Korea’s military dictatorship in 1973, Habib confronted a remarkably parallel human rights drama. Korean security forces, the KCIA, had kidnapped dissident leader Kim Dae Jung. The embassy’s CIA chief of Station, Donald Gregg, quickly confirmed that Kim was in the hands of the KCIA and was in danger of being executed. Habib acted immediately, ordering his embassy officers to contact every Korean official of any importance, and he personally met with the Korean prime minister to give an unequivocal message: “If Kim doesn’t come back alive, you are in deep trouble.” Kim was saved. He had been chained to concrete blocks and was being taken on a ship out to sea when the word came to abort his assassination. Kim became the architect of Korea’s return to democracy and served as president from 1998 to 2003. See Donald A. Ranard, “Kim Dae Jung’s Close Call,”
Washington Post
, February 23, 2003.

Michael Townley got his orders to kill Orlando Letelier in late June 1976, perhaps two weeks after Kissinger had his conversation on human rights with Pinochet, and a week after the Condor meeting that gave the go-ahead for Phase Three, “third country” assassinations. Four of the main actors—Townley, DINA chief Contreras, operations chief Espinoza, and Captain Armando Fernández Larios—have said directly or indirectly that Pinochet personally authorized the assassination. Contreras, in a court statement after his conviction, left no doubt that he was following orders: “In my role as representative of the President and Executive Director of DINA, I carried out strictly what he ordered me to do . . . I did not act on my own and whatever mission had to be carried out had to have come, as it always did come, from the President of the Republic.”

That Letelier was very much on Pinochet’s mind in June 1976 is evident from the transcript of his meeting with Kissinger. “Letelier has access to the Congress. We know they [Letelier and other exiles] are giving false information,” Pinochet complained. Pinochet rightly worried that Letelier’s access was an important factor in marshaling support for the cutoff of military aid to Chile.

Letelier’s influence was well grounded. He was a veteran of more than a decade of Washington’s high-stakes games of lobbying, money, and power. In the 1960s he worked as an economist at the Interamerican Development Bank. When Allende came to power, he was a natural choice for ambassador to the United States. He was a member of Allende’s Socialist Party. His high-profile mission in the U.S. shielded him from the contentious in-fighting that was rampant in Allende’s Popular Unity coalition of Marxist and non-Marxist parties. One of his main tasks was to negotiate compensation for American companies whose copper mines had been expropriated.

In 1972, Allende called Letelier back to Chile to serve as foreign minister. At the time of the 1973 coup he was defense minister, which meant that Letelier was Pinochet’s most direct civilian boss. Arrested on the day of the coup, Letelier was imprisoned with other high-ranking prisoners in a concentration camp on frigid Dawson Island in the Strait of Magellan, one of the southernmost inhabited spots on the globe. Kissinger was one of several prominent international figures who lobbied for Letelier’s release in September 1974. And Kissinger was among those who gave Letelier access when he arrived back in Washington to begin his new life as exile leader and international lobbyist against Pinochet. “I knew him. I liked him personally . . . And I saw him, I think, two or three times when he was in Washington as an exile,” Kissinger said in a previously unpublished interview. The conversations with Letelier undoubtedly had little impact on Kissinger’s attitudes toward anti-Communist dictators, but Kissinger chose not to mention the meetings when Pinochet raised the subject of Letelier in their conversation in Santiago.

Not surprisingly Letelier’s most effective influence was among liberal congressmen such as Senators Frank Church, George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. He had worked hard to provide evidence and coherent arguments for cutting off military aid to Chile. When the aid cutoff, known as the Kennedy Amendment, passed on June 16, Letelier was already off on another mission against Pinochet. He traveled to Holland, and his meetings
there were followed by announcements that major Dutch investments planned for Chile had been cancelled.

Pinochet’s fury was further inflamed by intelligence reports that Letelier was plotting with other exiles to launch a government in exile. No such plot existed, but there was no question that by mid-1976, Letelier had positioned himself as a powerful and unifying figure in Chilean politics. He was one of the few leaders, especially since the shooting of Bernardo Leighton in Rome the previous year, who bridged the political gulf between Allende supporters on the left and the centrist Christian Democrats, who had supported Allende’s overthrow but now opposed Pinochet. On the short list of possible presidents in a post-dictatorial Chile, Letelier was among the youngest, smartest, and most broadly appealing.

The plot to kill Letelier in Washington was, in the words of the chief FBI investigator Robert Scherrer, a “modified stage three Condor operation.” The complex operation put in play a conglomeration of DINA’s Condor and non-Condor assets. Over a three-month period it involved missions to Buenos Aires, Asunción, Paraguay, and Washington. Participants included an American, Cuban exiles from DINA’s civilian terrorist network, personnel from DINA’s Exterior Department, and Condor partners in Argentina and Paraguay. Condortel, the encoded communications system, was also used.

On the last Saturday in June, Operations chief Colonel Pedro Espinoza summoned Michael Townley to an early morning meeting on a sparsely traveled road on the outskirts of Santiago. He ordered Townley to prepare for another mission, this time to Washington.

“Elimination?” asked Townley.

“Yes.”

Townley was to work with Lieutenant Armando Fernández Larios, a diligent officer who, though still in his early twenties, was a veteran of a long list of major operations since the coup. He had entered La Moneda Palace immediately after it was captured on September 11, 1973, to carry out intelligencegathering activities. He was along on the so-called “Caravan of Death,” in which a team of officers traveled to five provincial cities after the coup to execute groups of captives. Assigned to DINA’s Exterior Department at its creation, Fernández Larios was in Buenos Aires as part of the preparations for the Prats murder in 1974. And in 1975 and 1976 he was a member of the DINA teams operating in Europe.

(Contreras, again on the cusp of a major operation, in early July once again traveled to Washington to meet with the CIA. His conversations with Deputy Director Walters are secret, although Walters confirmed the meeting took place. Contreras also met with former CIA operatives who helped him buy weapons and high-tech surveillance equipment in violation of the Congressional ban.)

Fernández Larios was immediately dispatched to Buenos Aires. Townley followed the next day. They made contact with SIDE, the umbrella intelligence service that was DINA’s Condor partner in Argentina, to arrange for false documents for the trip. But SIDE, which was immersed in the massive task of overseeing the kidnapping and disappearance of more than 300 people every month, declined DINA’s request.

Back in Santiago, Townley learned his target was to be the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, and that he was to enlist the help of the Cuban exiles who had worked on previous missions and had recently spent time in Chile. Fernández Larios and Townley were to fly to Paraguay to get false passports and U.S. visas. Espinoza briefed Townley on Operation Condor. Paraguay was a member, and getting the false documents was going to be a good test of their cooperation, he said. The contact there was Colonel Benito Guanes, head of military intelligence and Paraguay’s chief of delegation to the Condor founding meeting.

On July 17, Guanes’s office received an encrypted telex, using the Condortel system. It read:

Townley and Fernández arrived as scheduled in Asunción. Guanes arranged for them to receive false Paraguayan passports, in the names of Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral. Also as requested, Paraguayan officials presented the passports to the U.S. Embassy, which stamped visitors’ visas in the passports allowing the two men to enter the United States. But there was a hitch: a Paraguayan official, eager to curry favor, informed the U.S. ambassador that the passports were false and that the two men were actually Chilean agents on their way to carry out a secret intelligence mission in Washington. On July 27, Ambassador George Landau informed the CIA. His message began the paper trail of U.S. information on the mission that would ultimately solve the crime.

At the State Department, an extraordinary and intense period of activity focusing on secret police operations got underway. There were two streams of information. One involved the CIA’s revelation of Condor’s plans to assassinate exiles outside of Latin America. The other stream concerned the discovery by Ambassador Landau in Paraguay that a secret DINA mission was actually on its way to Washington, D.C. Information from both streams, conveyed through the special “Roger Channel” communications system, swirled around many of the same officials at the CIA and the State Department.