The Condor Years (31 page)

As described in the previous chapter, CIA and State Department officials met July 30 to discuss the shocking new developments in Operation Condor. CIA revealed that Condor was going beyond mere information exchange to begin “hitting” guerrilla leaders abroad. Operations were being planned for targets in Paris and Lisbon. State’s Latin America chief Harry Shlaudeman reported the information to Henry Kissinger on August 3, in a long memo on strategy. He stressed that the Condor targets include not only violent guerrillas but peaceful political exiles as well.

Two days later, on Thursday, August 5, Shlaudeman received a Roger Channel message marked “Eyes Only for Asst Secretary Shlaudeman from Ambassador Landau.” The cable from Asunción says, “I want to bring to your attention the following matter, which in my view has troublesome aspects.” Landau laid out the details of the visas granted to the two Chilean officers using false Paraguayan passports to enter the United States. He said a Paraguayan official
had assured him that the Chilean mission was being coordinated with the CIA and that the officers would be meeting with CIA deputy director Vernon Walters in Washington. Landau had gotten suspicious, however, and ordered the passports and visas photocopied, including the photographs of the two men. He then had checked the story with CIA and found out, from CIA director George Bush, that Walters wanted nothing to do with the Chileans’ mission.

Shlaudeman replied late that same day: “If there is still time, and if there is a possibility of turning off this harebrained scheme, you are authorized to go back through Pappalardo [the Paraguayan official who had arranged the visas] to urge that the Chileans be persuaded not, repeat, not to travel.”

The photographs of the passports and visas were pouched to CIA, which passed them on to the State Department. Shlaudeman issued an alert to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to stop the men bearing the passports at the border should they try to enter. A few days later, the visas were officially revoked.

Three new CIA reports were filed the following week, adding additional detail to the Condor plots, and demonstrating how closely CIA was monitoring Condor developments. The new facts: Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay will hold a training course in Buenos Aires to prepare teams for assassination operations in Europe, to be centered in France, which has the highest concentration of exiles. The plans and the identities of the targets are so secret, they will not be revealed to some of the government leaders. Brazil decides it will not participate in the European operations.

For the State Department officials, it was time to move from information to action. Based on this information, a reasonable person could elaborate a simple and disturbing syllogism: Condor countries are planning assassinations of exile leaders abroad. There is specific evidence they plan to send teams of agents to Paris and Lisbon on collaborative assassination missions. There is separate evidence that Paraguay and Chile, both known to be Condor members, are collaborating to send a team of agents to Washington, D.C. Conclusion: the mission to Washington might be an assassination mission, and urgent measure should be taken to prevent such an act of terrorism in the capital of the United States.

If any official executed the syllogism outlined above and wrote it down, that document has not been released. If such a conclusion was indeed recorded before
the assassination and not acted upon, its continued secrecy constitutes an official coverup of a devasting intelligence failure.

It is hard to believe that the officials didn’t add two and two (Paraguay and Condor) and come up with four (a possible act of terrorism in Washington). There is no record in the declassified documents, however, to show that those privy to both streams of intelligence connected Condor to the DINA officers in Paraguay. In interviews, Shlaudeman, Luers, and Ambassador Landau say they did not make the connection. Shlaudeman’s other deputy, Hewson Ryan, the one official known to have connected the events, as described below, is deceased. Nevertheless, whatever the conclusions there is ample evidence that Shlaudeman and his deputies took the warnings about Condor assassination plans very seriously at the time.

What action, then, was taken?

ARA chief Shlaudeman and his deputy William Luers knew that any effective action had to come from “the seventh floor”—the suite of offices occupied by Kissinger, his senior deputies, particularly undersecretary for political affairs Phillip Habib, and the senior policy staff. Habib had a track record of standing up to foreign dictators. Doing nothing was not an option, at least not for the officials informed about Condor. But they shared a two-pronged anxiety. First, they feared Kissinger might be hostile to anything that smacked of “human rightsy” criticism—a term of derision Kissinger had more than once used to brush aside reports from the Latin American desk. Second, and more ominously, there lurked just beneath the surface, never expressed in writing, the fear that the CIA may have a strong interest in Condor that went beyond gathering intelligence about it. The CIA guarded information about Condor with the highest “codeword” classification, and it was parceled out to State in dribbles. No one really believed that the CIA was involved in the assassination plans, but the CIA had encouraged assassinations before and it would be naive to rule it out. Less than a year earlier, the U.S. Senate had issued its report on CIA involvement in assassination plots in Cuba, Africa, and, most relevantly, in Chile.

Shlaudeman and Luers, both former ambassadors in Venezuela, knew well the peculiar competition between ambassadors and CIA station chiefs. Shlaudeman by all accounts was close to the CIA and had worked without friction with the CIA station. Luers had resisted CIA actions in Venezuela and felt long-lasting scars from his battles there. A common complaint, repeated often
but off the record by former State Department officials, is “the CIA has its own policy for Latin America,” separate from State.

Most of the negotiations about trying to head off the planned Condor assassinations took place in person and by phone between ARA and the seventh floor. The basic idea was simple and obvious: the United States government should tell each of the Condor governments that it knew about the assassination plans and was unequivocally opposed to them. In diplomatic language, such an official course of action is called a “démarche.”

The devil in the details, of course, involved how to frame the warning, how strong it should be, to whom it should be addressed, and—of particular concern to Kissinger—how to signal that the United States understood and sympathized with the goal of fighting terrorism, even as it admonished the countries to change their methods. The actions must conform to Kissinger’s Green Light–Red Light approach laid down by the secretary in his Santiago meetings and elaborated by Shlaudeman in his “Third World War” memo.

The process took two weeks and multiple drafts. Luers did the writing, as he had done on Shlaudeman’s first long report to Kissinger on Condor. Undersecretary Habib was Kissinger’s point person on the seventh floor. He also acted as go-between with the CIA, which had to sign off on the action. No record of Habib’s conversations with CIA has been declassified, however. Habib died in 1992.

Kissinger initialed a final draft, titled “Operation Condor,” on Wednesday, August 18. Another week passed before the four-page cable was dispatched via the Roger Channel, addressed for “immediate” action to U.S. ambassadors in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, La Paz, Brasilia, and Asunción:

The basic message of the démarche was unequivocal. It was a direct order, an immediate action instruction. It not only had Kissinger’s signature at the end, there was a rarely seen annotation at the top “approved by the secretary.” The ambassadors would understand that the instructions had Kissinger’s full backing. Moreover, the cable had the effect of transforming the intelligence information on Condor into an official finding—information on which action must be taken. For the ambassadors, the existence of “government planned and directed assassinations” was presented as a given, whose factual confirmation was as strongly established as is ever possible in the murky world of espionage. Assassinations had already occurred—Michelini, Gutiérrez, Torres, and dozens of other Condor country exiles only weeks ago in Argentina. And the new reports put previous terrorist attacks—Prats in Buenos Aires and Leighton in Rome—in a new and more ominous context.

The language suggested to the ambassadors was clear but couched in diplomatic escape clauses. Rather than accuse the governments directly, the ambassadors were to inform them that the United States was aware of and deeply concerned about “rumors.” The message was clear: if nothing happened, if no assassinations occurred, the rumors would remain rumors. But if there was “any shred of truth” to the rumors, the governments were forewarned of moral and political consequences that could follow.

There was no threat of U.S. retaliation or sanction, only the general admonition that carrying out such assassinations would worsen the already deteriorated reputations of the military governments on the world stage. The most serious threat was unspoken but unmistakable: you have been found out; the U.S. government—including your counterparts in the CIA—oppose what you are doing; we want you to halt these plans.

The greatest potential impact was in Chile. Ambassador David Popper was a professional’s professional. In being named as ambassador to Chile only three months after the coup, he had been given one of the toughest assignments in the U.S. diplomatic corps. With Chile’s civilian leaders, he had to contend with the conviction that the United States had sold out the democratic political parties in favor of the right-wing military. With the military, Popper’s challenge was to carry out Kissinger’s mandate to support and defend, while attempting to convey a message that human rights was also a value to the United States. Popper presided over an oftentimes deeply divided embassy. On one side were the Cold War hawks in the military and CIA missions who advocated uncritical obeisance to Pinochet for dealing a death blow to Communism in Latin America. On the other were the more liberal foreign service officers who kept in touch with the Catholic Church’s human rights organization and were appalled at Pinochet’s rejection of democracy and the atrocities of his secret police. Popper let the debate rage in his embassy. The open environment earned him the near-universal respect of every officer who worked under him, even while exposing him to occasional rebukes from Kissinger, such as the “stop the political science lectures” note. Perhaps no other U.S. official so exemplified the Manichaean moral dilemmas facing those charged with executing U.S. policy in the Condor years.

And for Popper, the arrival of Kissinger’s cable presented a dilemma of classic
proportions. What follows is based on the declassified documents and the recollections of Popper’s then deputy-chief of mission (DCM), Thomas Boyatt.

The U.S. embassy was located just off Constitution Plaza, where the bombed and burned Moneda Palace stood as a blackened monument to Pinochet’s entry on the pages of Latin American history. When Popper arrived at the embassy that Tuesday morning, Kissinger’s cable was his first order of business. As a Roger Channel communication, it was received through the most secure CIA radiotelegraph facilities controlled by the CIA station on the top floors of the embassy, and would have been delivered to Popper personally by CIA Station Chief Stewart D. Burton. Typical of his open style of leadership, Popper called in his two top political officers, DCM Boyatt and political counselor Charles Stout.

They all read the cable, focusing on a paragraph addressed specifically to their embassy: “For Santiago, discuss [with CIA station chief] the possibility of a parallel approach by him.” The suggestion made sense: if Condor was operating out of DINA then one way to stop the assassinations was for CIA Chief Burton to go directly to Contreras.

But Popper’s dilemma was about whether to confront Pinochet directly. Boyatt’s account:

“My memory is that the station chief, the ambassador, myself and Charlie [Stout], we looked at this and we said, ‘Now what the hell do we do.’ ” The obvious question—what did CIA in Chile know about this and when did they know it—went unasked. Burton said little in the meeting, and Boyatt assumed the ambassador already had an answer in his one-on-one meetings with Burton. Popper ran a tight embassy and insisted on regular briefings on what CIA was learning from its contacts with Contreras. Boyatt: