The Condor Years (32 page)

Popper ended the meeting. He quickly drafted a cable and had it sent out by the Roger channel before lunch. He recommended that he be allowed to drop the meeting with Pinochet.

Popper wrote that he agreed with Station Chief Burton’s alternative approach, that Burton carry the message directly to DINA Chief Contreras.

Then he closed the cable with a sentence that can only be read with tragic irony after the fact:

Popper’s assessments that Pinochet was probably uninformed about Condor, and his question about the imminence of assassination, should not be judged with the hindsight we enjoy twenty-six years later. As Boyatt commented, this was an ambassador at work, responding to an official instruction in less than twenty-four hours. We have to believe that had the State Department replied as quickly to his request to “please advise,” Popper would have
acted immediately: Burton would have delivered the message to Contreras—at least within a day or two—and history perhaps would have been different. But that was not the way it happened.

Other ambassadors also reacted immediately. Ambassador William P. Stedman replied by Roger Channel on August 26. Bolivia was not suspected of participation in the Condor assassinations abroad, so Stedman had a very different message to deliver, one more in line with Kissinger’s Green Light approach. In the Condor cable, Kissinger authorized Stedman to propose intelligence exchanges on terrorism. Stedman had for weeks been seeking authorization to provide U.S. intelligence on international terrorism to the Bolivian government, which felt particularly targeted because the Bolivian military had executed the guerrilla hero Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Now, Stedman was able to report that he had already had a meeting with a two high officials. “Both [names redacted] were pleased at the positive U.S. response and look forward to a fruitful interchange of information. [One of the officials] noted that the intelligence services of several countries are more closely cooperating than heretofore. However, there is still a desire on the part of the GOB [Government of Bolivia] to enter into a more productive interchange of information with the USG.”

The intelligence sharing was offered to Argentina as well. “We are prepared to undertake periodic exchanges with the government of Argentina of information on the general level and mode of communist and other terrorist activity in the hemisphere and elsewhere if the GOA would be interested.” The offer of U.S. intelligence on the military governments’ enemies shows once more the dual nature of U.S. policy. Even as the United States was warning governments not to assassinate their enemies, it was offering information on them. A disclaimer at the end of the Kissinger cable demonstrates that the contradiction may have been noted: “You should of course be certain that no agency of the U.S. government is involved in any way in exchanging information or data on individual subversives with host government. Even in those countries where we propose to expand our exchange of information, it is essential that we in no way finger individuals who might be candidates for assassination attempts.”

In Asunción, Paraguay, Ambassador George Landau also acted immediately on the instruction. Even though Stroessner’s government had not been identified in the CIA reports as participating in Condor’s extracontinental assassination plotting, Landau saw his job as preventive. “The approach was a warning
that we were aware of it and we wanted to make sure that Paraguay does not get involved in this,” he said in an interview. Stroessner received Landau alone in his office early in the morning, as he almost always did. He heard Landau out on Condor, said nothing in reply, then changed the subject. A few weeks before, Landau had handled the messy situation of the Chilean officers asking for U.S. visas under false pretenses, yet when the Condor démarche cable came in, he didn’t connect the two issues.

Those three actions—Popper’s request for further guidance, Stedman’s reporting on new intelligence exchanges, and Landau’s meeting with Stroessner—are the totality of the known embassy responses to Kissinger’s August 23 instruction on Operation Condor. As far as is known, only one ambassador—Landau in Asunción—actually delivered the warning about U.S. disapproval of Condor’s plans. There are no messages from the embassies in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Brasilia. Ambassadors Hill (Argentina) and Siracusa (Uruguay) are dead, and senior diplomats in those embassies at the time said they were never informed about the Condor telegram and know nothing about how their ambassadors carried out Kissinger’s instructions. One thing is universally agreed: it is inconceivable that an ambassador in Henry Kissinger’s State Department would ignore a direct order from the secretary of state. That is the unanimous and categorical judgment of every foreign service officer I interviewed.

So far as we can now determine, in the twenty-seven days between the sending of Kissinger’s cable and the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, Kissinger’s instructions to warn Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina—the countries thought to be planning international assassinations—were not carried out.

Shlaudeman and Luers met with their CIA counterparts in Washington for their regular intelligence briefing on Friday, August 27. The declassified record of the meeting, dated August 30, is almost obliterated by redactions—only sixty-eight words can be read in a twenty-five-line typewritten section on Operation Condor containing approximately 250 words. Shlaudeman says, “we are not making a representation of Pinochet as it would be futile to do so.”

The message seems to endorse Ambassador Popper’s recommendation to avoid an approach to Pinochet that would be taken as an insult. The second part of Popper’s recommendation, to send the CIA station chief directly to DINA chief Contreras, is not mentioned in what can be read of the memo.
Neither decision was conveyed to Santiago. DCM Boyatt says he remembers distinctly that no message endorsing Popper’s alternative approach was received at the Santiago embassy:

Three more weeks passed. In that period, ambassadors to both Argentina and Uruguay had opportunities to meet the heads of state in their respective countries. Ambassador Siracusa met on September 14 with General Aparicio Méndez, whom the military junta had recently named president. Siracusa discussed human rights in the context of recent U.S. legislation cutting off military aid to Uruguay, but nothing that could be construed as a warning on assassinations.

Ambassador Robert Hill had finally obtained his first audience with Argentina’s top military leader and junta president, General Jorge Videla. The meeting was scheduled for September 21.

The day before, a message was received that seemed to put an end to the entire effort to warn the three countries about Condor. Shlaudeman, writing from the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica, where he was visiting, sent a secret cable to his deputy Luers to be conveyed to U.S. ambassadors to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay:

In fact the plan was well underway. Michael Townley had been in the United States almost two weeks. Lieutenant Armando Fernández Larios had come and
gone. His part of the operation was to conduct surveillance on Letelier in Washington. He had handed Townley the surveillance report as they crossed paths in JFK Airport. Townley had all the information he needed—Letelier’s address, car description, daily routine, and the route Letelier drove daily to his office in downtown Washington. Fernández and Townley had started the mission together as a Condor operation with the trip to Paraguay to obtain false passports and U.S. visas. But the gringos had gotten suspicious. The Paraguayan passports were worthless; the Paraguayans’ bumbling had ruined the plan to use the Condor system to cover DINA’s tracks. Instead, Townley and Fernandez traveled to the United States on official Chilean passports identifying them as government employees. It was a greater risk, but Townley intended to delegate the killing to the Cubans.

On September 16, Townley went to New Jersey to meet the Cuban members of DINA’s network. Virgilio Paz had worked with Townley in Mexico, then in Europe the previous year as he crisscrossed the continent in futile pursuit of Socialist leader Carlos Altamirano. He had been in Rome before the assassination attempt against Bernardo Leighton, and had conducted spying missions for DINA in a variety of countries. He was the young operations man; his political leader was Guillermo Novo, chief of the Cuban Nationalist Movement, northern division, based in the large Cuban exile community around North Bergen and Union City, New Jersey. The CNM members’ hatred of Fidel Castro had led them to embrace terrorism in the United States and to make common cause with Chile’s Pinochet. Both Paz and Novo had spent time in Chile, most recently the previous June, when they received DINA training and solidified their relationship with the group of right-wing Italian fugitives hiding out in Chile. Among other things, Townley had taught Paz to build remote control bombs. Now Paz and Novo had accepted another DINA mission.

It was after midnight when Paz and Townley pulled up to the Union City house. Novo and another Cuban, Dionisio Suárez, were in the house with the supplies they needed: detonating cord and a fist-sized chunk of the putty-like explosive known as plastique, or C-4. There was also some TNT. Paz brought the radio paging device Townley had helped him modify at Townley’s workshop in Santiago.

On Saturday, September 18, Paz, Suárez, and Townley gathered at a seedy motel room in northeast Washington to assemble the bomb inside an aluminum baking tin. When it was late and dark, they drove across the city to the
well-appointed suburb where Letelier lived. They had driven by earlier to verify the address and confirm other details of Fernández’s surveillance report. Letelier’s Chevy Chevelle was parked in the driveway on the quiet cul-de-sac as expected. It was Chilean Independence Day. Orlando Letelier and his wife, Isabel Margarita Morel, had attended a party with other members of the large Washington-area Chilean community, and had arrived home about 11
P.M.

For Townley, it was familiar work. He walked down the street, quickly turned into the driveway, and slid under Letelier’s car. Using black electrician’s tape, he positioned the bomb under the driver’s seat, the explosive shaped to direct its force upward. The Cubans had insisted that he, the DINA agent, have a direct role in the assassination. When morning came, Townley took an early plane to Newark and then spent part of the day with his sister, Linda, who lived in Tarrytown, north of New York City. Then he flew to Miami, where his father lived.

On Tuesday morning, September 21, Letelier drove down Massachusetts Avenue on his way to his office near Dupont Circle. With him were Michael Moffitt and his wife of four months, Ronni. Both worked at the Institute for Policy Studies—Michael as an economist assisting Letelier in writing projects, and Ronni as a fund-raiser. They lived near Letelier and were catching a ride because their car had broken down.

The bomb exploded just as the car entered Sheridan Circle, on a stretch of road known as Embassy Row. Letelier’s legs were blown off, and he died almost immediately. Ronni Moffitt, in the front seat, caught a piece of shrapnel to the neck, which severed her carotid artery and windpipe. She drowned in her own blood. Michael Moffitt, riding in back and shielded from the main force of the blast, suffered cuts but survived.

The assassins escaped undetected. Investigators believe Dionisio Suárez, following Letelier’s car in his own, used a remote-control device fashioned from a pager to detonate the bomb. Michael Townley got the news in Miami and flew back to Chile the next day, after visiting his parents and buying souvenirs for his children.