The Condor Years (34 page)

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Colonel Alberto Alfredo Valín was the head of SIE, which was operating since the October 1975 reorganization as Intelligence Battalion 601 and Scherrer once mentioned that his source in SIE was a colonel. Airfare receipts establish that three other Argentina intelligence officers were also in Santiago in September, including the known Condor operative, José Osvaldo Riveiro, aka Osvaldo Rawson, of Battalion 601 (Arancibia II/122–123).

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In the course of his investigation, Propper received briefings on Condor from the CIA and State Department and was told they knew about Condor’s European assassination plans before Letelier was killed (Chile Project). Yet his 1982 book
Labyrinth
portrayed the CIA as ignorant of the Condor assassination plans: “. . . the CIA station in Buenos Aires had previously reported something similar about Condor as an intelligence operation. But the Agency had not mentioned assassinations.”

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I will return to the Paris operation in Chapter 12.

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Speaking from memory twelve years after the event, Ryan was mistaken on this detail but otherwise accurately characterizes the sequence of events. In fact, the cable was sent, but the instructions it contained were not carried out.

It would be a mistake to assume there was a nefarious plot in the State Department to encourage the dictatorships to violate human rights, and that the plethora of cables to the contrary was some sort of elaborate fabrication. In fact, both message tracks were authentic, the ones putting up a green light as well as those displaying a red light.

Those who believe—out of ideology or cynicism—that there was no sincere
effort by many U.S. diplomats to encourage respect for human rights during this time of terror do so in defiance of the obvious and abundant record now available to us. Such simple condemnation misses the deeper story, with much more disturbing significance for ongoing U.S. policy in contemporary wars on terrorism. There is a clear conclusion to be drawn from U.S. actions during the Condor Years: dictators will not understand a two-track moral message on human rights with the subtlety intended by its authors, however carefully crafted the message. The U.S. message will instead be grasped as a single, muddled endorsement of the brutal tactics in which our unsubtle allies are already engaged.

Sometimes the red light is from one institution, the green light from another—as in the roles the CIA and the State Department adopted in some cases. Sometimes it was one official who showed the green light even as another tried to put up a red light. This is the case with the various ambassadors in the Condor countries—with Siracusa in Montevideo and Stedman in La Paz tending to show an encouraging green light to the dictators, while Landau and Hill in Paraguay and Argentina tended to show red.

Sometimes—too often—both red and green lights are shown side by side in the same document or in the same official. This was the case of the Condor telegram a month before the Letelier assassination. Even as it tried to stop planned assassinations known to be underway, it went to great lengths to emphasize U.S. understanding and endorsement of the goals of the antiterrorist fight. Likewise, Ambassador David Popper’s reporting from Chile combined criticism of human rights violations with condemnation of the extremist left. Yet he flinched when faced with the challenge of confronting Pinochet with a clear warning on Condor. Instead of decisive action, he undertook to fashion a compromise that would avoid offending General Pinochet. In Washington, officials dithered over details and ultimately lost the chance to stop Condor.

It would be naive to suggest that it was entirely within the power of the U.S. government to prevent the military governments of the Condor countries from killing and torturing their own citizens in their own territory, even if that were an unambiguous policy goal. Likewise, the failure to deliver a clear message to Chile was not the cause of the unprecedented act of terrorism on U.S. soil. But it was certainly the responsibility of U.S. officials to try to stop or limit the ongoing slaughter when the opportunity presented itself.

In this chapter our investigation will reveal cases in which quite the opposite
happened. In the first case, Secretary of State Kissinger directly undercut the human rights efforts of his ambassador to Argentina. In the second case, U.S. intelligence agencies treated a Condor torture center not as a human rights crime but as a source to glean intelligence information about Cuba.

Ambassador Robert Hill was an unlikely human rights hero. He married into the enormously wealthy W. R. Grace family, whose vast investments and unabashed manipulations of political power in Latin America had made it the stereotype—for Latin Americans—of Yankee imperialism. He was a Republican Party activist who had served in Congress and in several political appointments in the State and Defense Departments under Presidents Nixon and Ford. As ambassador to Spain, he was known as an inveterate defender of Generalissimo Franco.

As Argentina sank deeper into violence in 1976, however, Ambassador Hill responded not with anti-Communist ideology and pro-business instincts but with simple moral outrage at the mounting evidence of mass murder surrounding him. When the military coup took place in March, Hill had been in conversations with prospective coup leaders, and had been encouraged by assurances that the new government would avoid the atrocities of the Pinochet takeover in Chile. Indeed, for the first weeks, that seemed to be the case, and the scattered killings that occurred were able to be explained as the work of death squads outside the control of the military junta. In line with official U.S. policy, Hill endorsed the military’s goals to bring order and defeat leftist terrorism.

As described in
Chapter 9
, neither human rights observers nor U.S. intelligence were aware that the military had already begun a program of secret exterminations of hundreds of suspected enemies in the months before the coup. It would be months before the extent of the mass killing would be discovered. The events that destroyed the illusion of a “moderate” military junta were the killings of foreign leaders in Argentina—crimes now known to be linked to Operation Condor—the murders of Uruguayan leaders Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez, followed quickly by the assassination of former president Juan José Torres of Bolivia.

Hill cabled the State Department in late May that “the time has come for a démarche at the highest level” to call attention to the worsening human rights
situation. He received authorization for an urgent meeting with the new foreign minister, Admiral César Guzzetti, and gave him a strong message of U.S. concern. Those who killed Michelini and Gutiérrez and others, Hill said, “seem to operate with impunity and are generally believed to be connected with the Argentine security forces. Whether they are or not, their continued operation can only be harmful to the GOA [government of Argentina] itself and cause consternation among Argentina’s friends abroad.”

The killings only escalated, despite Hill’s imprecations. At a subsequent meeting with Guzzetti, Hill got an inkling that his tough message on human rights may have been undermined by a different message from Washington, even before he delivered it. At his September 17 meeting, Hill brought up the murders several weeks earlier of several priests and the discovery of a pile of bodies of suspected guerrillas at the locality of Pilar north of Buenos Aires. Yet Foreign Minister Guzzetti seemed to dismiss Hill’s concerns, according to Hill’s cable to Washington:

Hill said he tried to explain that Secretary Kissinger surely was not implying insensitivity toward human rights and that “murdering priests and dumping 47 bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in context of defeating terrorists quickly. . . . What USG hoped was that GOA could soon defeat terrorists, yes. But do so as nearly as possible within the law. I said if any other meaning had been placed on the secretary’s remarks, I was sure it was a misinterpretation.”

Hill was hopeful he had corrected misconceptions he believed Guzzetti had taken away from his Santiago conversation with Kissinger. There would be another opportunity soon to drive home the message on human rights. Guzzetti said he was traveling to Washington in October, and Hill helped set up a series of high-level meetings, including separate meetings with Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Human rights would be high on the list of talking points.

But when Guzzetti returned from Washington, Hill learned that no such thing had happened. Far from appearing chastened, Admiral Guzzetti was “euphoric” and greeted Hill with an effusive and uncharacteristic hug when they met. The meetings had been a grand success, and Guzzetti had already delivered an enthusiastic report to President Videla. He had encountered barely a word of criticism about human rights but rather “consensus . . . to get the terrorist problem over as soon as possible.”

From Rockefeller, he said he heard, “finish the terrorist problem quickly . . . the US wanted a strong Argentina and wanted to cooperate with the GOA.”

From Kissinger: “The secretary, he said, had reiterated the advice given to him at the Santiago meeting, had urged Argentina ‘to be careful’ and had said that if the terrorist problem was over by December or January, he (the secretary) believed serious problems could be avoided in the US.”

His open-arms reception in Washington “had gone far beyond his expectations.” Guzzetti “expressed appreciation that high officials in our government ‘understand the Argentine problem and stand with us during this difficult period.’”

Ambassador Hill reported the conversations to Washington on October 19 in a long cable in which he barely controlled his fury.

Hill’s angry cable was a rare example of an ambassador daring to criticize Secretary of State Kissinger in an official communication, and his effrontery was not missed in Washington. Assistant Secretary Shlaudeman put the matter on Kissinger’s desk within hours. “Bob Hill has registered for the record his concern for human rights in a bitter complaint about our purported failure to impress on Foreign Minister Guzzetti how seriously we view the rightist violence in Argentina,” he wrote to Kissinger. “I propose to respond for the record.”

Kissinger approved Shlaudeman’s response to Hill, which began:

Shlaudeman’s clarifications, however, referred explicitly only to his own meeting with Guzzetti. His cable did not challenge Guzzetti’s version of remarks attributed to Kissinger and Rockefeller. He seemed to throw up his hands.
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The futility of the ambassador’s lectures could not have been clearer as the toll of atrocities by the Argentine military mounted in the waning months of 1976. Kissinger’s State Department was sending both a red light and a green light, and the green light was coming from a higher authority—Kissinger himself. Hill described a “discouraging” meeting with President Videla several weeks before in which the Argentine president put the embassy officials in their subordinate place. Videla repeated Guzzetti’s version of his friendly visit with Kissinger and contrasted it to the ambassador’s pressing attitude on human rights. Videla then said, according to Hill, “He had the impression senior officers of USG understood [the] situation his government faces but junior bureaucrats do not.”