The Condor Years (33 page)

The bombing on Sheridan Circle was in 1976 the most egregious act of foreign-inspired terrorism ever committed in the U.S. capital. The crime was aggravated by the fact that it was organized and carried out not by an enemy of the United States but by a government that was a firm ally, and by a security force trained and with intimate ties to the U.S. military and to the CIA.

In inside-the-office exchanges, few U.S. officials doubted that Chile’s hand was behind the crime. Officers at the State Department’s Latin America bureau expressed the common assumption that Chile’s DINA was the most likely perpetrator. One officer remembered someone bursting into his office and proclaiming, “DINA killed Letelier.”

Connections to Condor and the Paraguayan incident were also made. CIA Director George Bush told an assistant he remembered the communications about the Paraguay passports. The assistant checked it out and wrote a memo to Bush, saying:

The CIA also quickly made the connection to Operation Condor. In a meeting with Justice Department officials on October 4, Bush was told “the killing had been professionally executed . . . , and may well have been planned by DINA or may have been a CONDOR operation.” On that basis, Bush approved CIA participation in the investigation as part of its “counterintelligence activities abroad.”

The CIA immediately produced intelligence information pointing to Pinochet himself. In a October 6 “Intelligence Information Cable,” a field official, probably in Chile, reported that “[source blacked out] believes that the Chilean government is directly involved in Letelier’s death and feels that investigations into the incident will so indicate. . . . [Source] has pointed to comments made by Chilean President Augusto Pinochet Ugarte to the effect that Letelier’s criticism of the Chilean government was ‘unacceptable.’ ”

That was in private, however. The story that received unofficial public sanction was the idea that leftist terrorists had committed the crime to discredit the Pinochet government and create a martyr of Letelier. This “martyr theory” found its way into early newspaper accounts, sourced to the CIA and unnamed government officials. One story said “the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency had virtually ruled out the idea that Mr. Letelier was killed by agents of the Chilean military junta. . . . The intelligence officials said a parallel investigation was pursuing the possibility that Mr. Letelier had been assassinated by Chilean left-wing extremists as a means of disrupting United States relations with the military junta.”

The leaked stories were deeply at odds with what was actually known about Chile, DINA, the Paraguay passports episode, and the three-month debate over Operation Condor. So deeply at odds that it must raise the possibility of an intentional effort in some quarters of the U.S. government to divert attention away from evidence pointing to Chile, DINA, and Condor. We will not be able to resolve the question of whether the deception was intentional and approved by high officials. In any case, the false trails were ultimately overwhelmed by the massive and determined investigation launched by the FBI and the Justice Department with the cooperation of the State Department. That investigation, described in
Assassination on Embassy Row
, solved the case after some delay, once it began to focus on the Paraguayan passport photos of DINA agents Townley and Fernández, which had been in CIA and State Department files for weeks before the assassination.

Our concern here is the story of what the officials knew
before
the assassination and what they did about it when the assassination occurred. Declassified documents now available tell a very different story from what officials led the public to believe in the official version of the Letelier assassination presented in court documents and testimony.

I have raised the question in this book: why didn’t the officials privy to intelligence about Condor’s assassination plans make the connection to the DINA mission thought to be on its way from Paraguay to Washington, D.C.? The context is the devastating possibility that a chance was missed to avert the act of terrorism in Washington.

The answer put out twenty-five years ago was that no connection could have been made, because Condor’s international assassination plans were not discovered until
after
the Letelier assassination. For more than two decades,
the only source of information on Condor was a cable from Robert Scherrer, the FBI’s legal attaché in Buenos Aires, who has played a central role in many of the events in this book. Scherrer’s cable, a week after the assassination, is still the most detailed description of the working of the three-stage Condor system.

Scherrer, in interviews with the author in 1979, said he learned about Condor on September 28 from an Argentine intelligence officer who complained that the Letelier assassination was “a wild Condor operation” by Chile’s DINA. The head of Argentina’s Army Intelligence Service (
Servicio de Inteligencia de Ejército—
SIE) had actually been in Santiago for consultations with DINA Chief Contreras during the week the assassination took place, the source said.
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Argentina was concerned that the high-profile assassination in the U.S. capital would ruin Condor’s plans for other ongoing operations in Argentina and abroad.

Scherrer said he had heard about intelligence sharing, data banks, and other kinds of cooperation among the countries of the Southern Cone, but nothing like this. That is only Phase One, the source said, and proceeded to reveal what Scherrer thought was the first information about Condor’s international assassination plans.

Scherrer told the author he thought he was the first U.S. intelligence officer to develop information about Condor’s international assassinations, and that the information emerged only after the Letelier assassination. The same view is expressed by Letelier case prosecutor Eugene Propper. According to Scherrer and Propper, what was known about Condor before Letelier was murdered was that it was conducting intelligence exchange, not assassinations.
*

That, we now know, was not true.

Detailed knowledge about Condor assassination plans went back several months before the Letelier assassination, as I have demonstrated in this and previous chapters. An effort endorsed by Secretary of State Kissinger was launched to stop Condor by warning the member governments. The effort was called off on September 20, even as the bomb had already been affixed to Letelier’s car. The day it exploded and killed Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, the State
Department’s INR Afternoon Summary contained yet another item about Condor, describing it as designed for the “covert elimination of subversives,” but not mentioning the elimination of Letelier that same morning.

ARA chief Shlaudeman had issued the order for the ambassadors of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay to “take no further action” on the Condor démarche. Then, in one of the strangest episodes in this perplexing saga, Shlaudeman again reversed himself and reinstated the cancelled order. Here is what is known from available documents and interviews.

On September 25, four days after the assassination, Shlaudeman reported on the Condor connection to Kissinger’s Political Undersecretary, Philip Habib, who had handled liaison with CIA and Kissinger during the drafting of the Condor démarche cable:

Then, Shlaudeman sent a Roger Channel cable to Santiago that is truly bewildering in the context of what has preceded it. You must recall that Kissinger’s démarche cable was sent August 23, and Ambassador Popper answered immediately, asking for authorization to skip the approach to Pinochet and go directly to DINA’s Contreras. For more than a month, Popper received no clarifying instructions. Then, on October 4, two weeks after the assassination in Washington, Shlaudeman abruptly replies by Roger Channel to Popper’s six-week-old question:

Contreras answered predictably. DINA had nothing to do with any assassination plots, in Europe, Washington, or elsewhere.

Former Assistant Secretary Shlaudeman, in correspondence with the author about the declassified documents, called the argument based on the documents “speculative.” But he said, “I simply do not remember the Condor affair and have no idea what caused the delay in the telegram to Popper. . . . On my side, I have no doubt that démarche or no démarche, Contreras’s operatives would have gone ahead and murdered Letelier.” Shlaudeman declined to elaborate on the basis for that conclusion.

Other officials did remember and were disturbed by the missed opportunity to act. CIA official Charles Bertram Dickens had been station chief in Paraguay until 1973. He was working at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in later years and discussed the cable traffic about both Condor and the Paraguay passports with FBI official Robert Scherrer. According to Scherrer, Dickens said he looked up the traffic from the weeks before the assassination and was “appalled by the way the cables were handled.” The CIA should have taken action, but didn’t. “We should have called the attention of the Chileans on this, and said, Hey, if anything happens to anyone with [connections] in Chile, we’ll hold you responsible.”

Another U.S. official also has addressed the devastating implications of the botched Condor démarche. He is Hewson Ryan, who was Shlaudeman’s second deputy and was present at the briefing on Condor that led to the démarche.

In an oral history interview in 1988, a few years before his death, he made this comment, apropos of State Department shortcomings in human rights:

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*
Condor One is Condor headquarters in Chile. In this case, according to what Guanes told the FBI, the use of the first person indicated the message was a personal request from DINA chief Contreras. Alejandro Rivadeneira was the false name used by Fernández Larios.

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This intriguing note has been overlooked until now because it is incorrectly dated as August 23, 1976. An internal reference to an article in “today’s”
New York Times
, established the real date as September 23—two days after the assassination. The note is addressed “To: DCI [Director of Central Intelligence—Bush’s title], Subject: Two Chilean Army Officers and Paraguayan Passports” (Chile Project).