The Condor Years (35 page)

If there were lingering doubts about Kissinger’s real sentiments about Argentina’s war on terrorism, they were dispelled after the secretary of state left office and was welcomed by the junta in a private visit in 1978. According to a cable by the new ambassador, Raul Castro, Kissinger met alone with Videla to offer suggestions about how to improve relations with the U.S. government under President Jimmy Carter, who had placed unprecedented emphasis on human rights. In open meetings with prominent Argentines, Kissinger lavishly praised the Videla government. “He explained his opinion [that] GOA [Government of Argentina] had done an outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces. But also cautioned that methods used in fighting terrorism must not be perpetuated.”

Indeed, Argentina’s military leaders had followed Kissinger’s recipe for quick, intensive victory in the war on terrorism. The government had moved with all speed. Roberto Santucho and the top ERP leadership were killed in a raid in July. By the end of 1976, the ERP had been eliminated as a guerrilla force, and Montoneros were fleeing the country. More than 4,000 people had disappeared into the military network of secret torture camps. Another 1,000 people were killed in military actions in which bodies were left behind and could be identified. Not surprisingly, however, the Argentine military had ignored
Kissinger’s advice to change their “methods” once the war was won. The secret mass killing continued throughout 1977 and 1978, resulting in 3,937 additional disappearances, according to the conservative count of the Sabato commission, and did not stop completely until the military left power in 1983.

Condor’s coordinated offensive against foreign leftist groups still in Argentina reached its greatest intensity in the period from July to October 1976. The center of operations was a nondescript building with a large metal door in the middle-class neighborhood of Floresta in Buenos Aires. A battered sign reading A
UTOMOTORES
O
RLETTI
remained from its former existence as an automobile repair shop. Since June it had been taken over by SIDE, the
Secretaria de Informaciones del Estado.
Orletti was one of an estimated 300 such secret prisons in Argentina. It had the distinction, according to later investigations, of headquartering the operations of foreign intelligence forces working in Argentina. Argentine military intelligence set aside this detention center for joint operations involving Argentina’s Condor partners. Orletti was run by a civilian SIDE employee with a record for armed robbery, Anibal Gordon, and staffed by a squad of civilians and military known inside SIDE as Taskforce 18 or simply as “the Gordon Gang.” The overall commander was SIDE chief General Otto Paladino. Orletti had an additional distinction: of the hundreds of prisoners interrogated there, only a handful survived.

Orletti was called
El Jardin
, “The Garden,” by the security force squads that used it. Prisoners were kept on the first floor, in spaces once used for changing oil and overhauling engines. A few hulks of old cars still remained. Interrogations and torture took place on the second floor, where Gordon and the military interrogators had offices. During the day, from their filthy cells and the interrogation rooms, the prisoners could hear the sounds of classroom bells and children playing. There was an elementary school on the other side of an adjoining wall.

One of the few survivors, José Luis Bertazzo, who spent almost two months in Orletti, said in confidential testimony that he was able to identify Chileans, Uruguayans, Paraguayans, and Bolivians among the prisoners. They told him they were being interrogated by security officers from their own countries. Two prisoners from Chile’s MIR also told Bertazzo that two Cuban “diplomats” had also been tortured at Orletti.

The two Chileans and two Cubans are at the center of our first story about Condor operations in Orletti, an episode that establishes that the CIA was receiving detailed, up-to-the-minute reports based on interrogations inside Orletti.

One of the Chilean activists was Patricio Biedma, who was MIR leader Edgardo Enríquez’s right-hand man in Argentina. Since the March coup, his main function was to organize the escape of the remaining MIR elements from Argentina. Biedma had also been one of the MIR operatives staffing the JCR headquarters in Buenos Aires, and was in charge of moving money and messages back and forth to Chile. Biedma had been born in Argentina but lived most of his life in Chile. He had successfully arranged for his wife, Luz, and their child to leave Argentina before the coup.

The JCR war chest having been exhausted, money was short for the Chileans, Uruguayans, and even the Argentines operating in the JCR underground. And money was the key to obtaining the airline tickets, visas, and false documents needed to escape the rapidly tightening noose created by the military offensive and the accelerating Condor operations. Biedma and some of the Uruguayans turned to the Cubans for help. The Cuban embassy in Argentina was one of the few in Latin America. President Juan Perón, in defiance of the United States, had reinstated diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1973 and signed a lucrative trade agreement that included a $1.2 billion line of credit. It was because of this mutually beneficial relationship that Fidel Castro had turned a cold shoulder to the ERP emissaries who had asked his support for their guerrilla campaign in Tucumán.

In mid-1976, the Cubans were in a bind. They needed to keep the trade relations with Argentina, even as their ideological comrades from MIR and Tupamaros were being swept up. According to several sources, the Cubans began to provide clandestine financial support to help the various groups organize what was in effect an underground railroad for guerrillas and their families to escape from Argentina. Biedma was one of the intermediaries through whom the Cubans passed relatively small amounts of money to the fugitives.

Biedma was rounded up with other suspects in July, and when his captors learned he was Chilean, they delivered him to Orletti. On August 9, two young Cubans who worked as drivers and bodyguards at the Cuban embassy were walking to a bus. Clean-cut and muscular, Jesús Cejas Arias and Crescencio Galañena resembled in age and training the marine guards at the American
embassy. They were part of a team of specially trained commandos brought in to guard ambassador Emilio Aragones, who had already survived one attempted kidnapping, and other Cuban diplomats. They also did odd jobs and messenger tasks as needed.

Because it was their day off, Arias and Galañena had been shopping for gifts to take home to Cuba and were unarmed. Witnesses said a detachment of thirty-five to forty armed men shut off both ends of the street where the two Cubans were walking. They put up a tremendous fight—both were trained in hand-to-hand combat. The Argentine commando didn’t fire their weapons, clearly under orders to take the Cubans alive. They were taken to Orletti, where they were interrogated by both Argentine and Chilean officers.

Bertazzo, a nineteen-year-old bank clerk who by all accounts had no connections with guerrilla activity, arrived at Orletti on August 23 and was put in the same room with the MIR operative Patricio Biedma and another Chilean he knew only as “Mauro.” In conversations, Biedma told Bertazzo about the two Cubans. He said he had been interrogated with them and that he could hear the Cubans (recognizable for their distinctive accents) being tortured upstairs.

The CIA’s Buenos Aires station learned from its intelligence sources about this potential bonanza of information about the JCR and the Cuban connection in Argentina. The CIA station had been following closely the growing threat. A May cable expressed concern about the guerrilla alliance’s continuing strength in Argentina, and its ability to organize effective propaganda operations in Europe against the military governments. The cable said JCR documents captured in Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina indicated “the
Junta [Coordinadora Revolucionaria
] has already achieved a status and operational capability that exceeds past efforts by Latin American revolutionaries to form an intra-hemisphere terrorist organization.”

The interrogations of Biedma, Mauro, and the Cubans linked two areas of major U.S. intelligence interest: Cuba and the JCR. Both the FBI and the CIA were informed about the arrests and interrogations. Robert Scherrer, the FBI’s man in Buenos Aires, said he was told, “It was a SIDE operation. The Argentines said the two Cubans were a
chofer
[driver] and a DGI [Cuban intelligence] agent. They were identified as having passed funds to MIR/ERP contacts. They said there had been in a meeting with the guerrillas.”

Scherrer also pointed out that DINA agent Michael Townley had traveled
from Santiago to Buenos Aires several days after the Cubans were captured. He suggested that Townley, who handled DINA’s contacts with anti-Castro Cubans, may have been tasked to help with the interrogation of the Cubans in Orletti.

The U.S. embassy’s CIA station received a briefing on the Orletti interrogations within days and reported the news to CIA headquarters. The CIA Directorate of Operations field report provides a rare window into the CIA’s intimate knowledge of the Argentine security forces and their most secret repressive operations. The source of the report is not revealed, of course, but the information could only have come from SIDE or other Argentine intelligence contacts working at Orletti. The report is dated September 22, 1976—when the two Cubans and two Chileans were still alive and under interrogation inside Orletti. The text is as follows:

“Mauro” and “Mario Espinosa” are clearly two false names for the same person Bertazzo saw with Biedma and the Cubans in Orletti. In their final conversation, Biedma told Bertazzo he thought he and Mauro were going to be transferred to Chile. Both men and the two Cubans disappeared.

Biedma, Mauro, and the Cubans were four human beings about whose illegal capture, imprisonment, and torture the CIA was informed in time to have intervened to save their lives. In the case of Mauro, the CIA information provided details that eventually allowed the author to establish his probable identity and to inform his family about a long-lost son. Mauro, in all likelihood, is Homero Tobar Aviles, the half brother of a famous guerrilla, Elmo Catalán, who fought with Che Guevara in Bolivia in the 1960s. Tobar received military training in Cuba and is known to have arrived in Argentina in the 1970s before his family lost track of him. The family never brought his disappearance to the attention of Chile’s human rights organizations.

A second major Condor operation revolved around Orletti. A team of officers from Uruguay’s SID, the newly consolidated defense intelligence service, began operating inside Argentina around the time of the coup. The Uruguayan operations in Argentina resulted in the largest group of disappearances carried out by Operation Condor. Indeed, more Uruguayans disappeared and were assassinated in Argentina—135—than in Uruguay itself as a result of security police operations.

Later investigations put names to the Uruguayan officers. They were led by then-Major José Nino Gavazzo, operations chief of Uruguay’s Defense Intelligence Service (SID—
Servicio de Inteligencia de Defensa
), the centralized security force. SID deputy director was Colonel José Fons, who had led Uruguay’s delegation to the Santiago meeting at which Condor was founded in late 1975. During much of 1976, Major Gavazzo was stationed almost exclusively in Argentina, returning home on weekends to visit his family. Several U.S. intelligence documents refer to an Uruguayan major, whose name is blacked out, operating in Argentina in coordination with Argentine security police.

There were three groups of politically active exiles in the large Uruguayan community in Buenos Aires. Prominent political leaders such as Senators Zelmar Michelini and Wilson Ferreira Aldunate and Camara of Representatives president Héctor Gutiérrez were pursuing a return to democracy. The second group, the deeply divided Tupamaros, had all but ceased guerrilla activity. The assassinations of Michelini, Gutiérrez, and Tupamaro leader William Whitelaw in May scattered these two groups into exile. That left a more recent third group, with anarcho-syndicalist roots, called the Party for Victory (Partido por la Victoria del Pueblo—PVP).

The newer PVP network was less known and more deeply hidden. It was better organized than the Tupamaros and flush with money. And Party for Victory included a small but capable military apparatus often referred to as the OPR-33. The military unit had carried out a quiet but successful kidnapping of a wealthy Argentine businessman in 1974, which netted a $10 million ransom. The PVP was seeking to supplant the dormant Tupamaros movement by launching a bold campaign of publicity and armed actions inside Uruguay. For the Uruguayan security forces and their Argentine partners, the PVP was an inviting target—as much for its subversive plans as for the prospect of confiscating the multimillion-dollar ransom thought to be stashed in a PVP safe house in Buenos Aires.