The Condor Years (36 page)

The operations against the PVP were relentless, and included waves of kidnappings in Buenos Aires from May to November 1976. Scores of captured Uruguayan PVP activists were packed into the small rooms on the first floor of the Orletti detention center. They included Michelini’s daughter, Margarita, and the two most important PVP leaders, Leon Duarte and Gerardo Gatti. One of the women, Sara Méndez, was kidnapped with her twenty-day-old baby, Simon. Two other woman were in advanced stages of pregnancy. The prisoners were interrogated by Major Gavazzo, who made little secret of his identity and spoke openly with the captives, sometimes allowing them to remove their blindfolds.

The ransom money was the principal target of the interrogations of the Uruguayans in Orletti. Their story was told in dramatic detail by a survivor, Washington Pérez, a newsstand vendor. Pérez was allowed to enter and leave Orletti in order to establish contact with the remnants of the underground organization. His mission was to persuade the PVP underground to turn over the remains of the ransom money (thought to be at least $2 million) in exchange for the lives of the top PVP leaders, Gatti and Duarte. The mission failed, and the two leaders, who witnesses said were savagely tortured, disappeared.

Gavazzo, however, arranged for the transfer of a group of twenty-two captives back to Montevideo, thus saving them from the fate of virtually all the other prisoners who entered Orletti. His plan was to orchestrate a staged “invasion” of guerrillas into Uruguay and announce their capture. The idea was to use the incident to magnify the continuing threat of leftist violence, especially in view of the mounting human rights legislation from the United States Congress aimed at cutting off military aid. The U.S. embassy reported that the incident
constituted “clear evidence of cooperation between GOA and GOU [governments of Argentina and Uruguay] authorities in such matters and, presumably, agreement on a ‘cover story’ to explain appearance here of persons disappeared in Argentina.”

In September, Argentine and Uruguayan commandos rounded up another large group of Uruguayans. The twenty-eight captives included virtually the entire military apparatus of the PVP. Witnesses have established that nineteen of the captives were seen inside Orletti. Others were seen in other interrogation centers. None of the second group of PVP captives was ever seen alive again. They joined the ranks of the disappeared.

U.S. intelligence—both the FBI and the DIA—detected the secret roundups, and they were immediately linked to the emerging body of information about Operation Condor.

Contemporary U.S. embassy and CIA documents demonstrate that U.S. intelligence knew soon after the Argentine coup that a team of Uruguayan intelligence officers had set up shop in Buenos Aires and had launched a dragnet against exile leaders. The presence of the Uruguayan team was one of the arguments raised early on in embassy reports to support the suspicion that the military governments were coordinating their security activities across national borders. The August 23 Kissinger cable ordering the démarche to stop Condor assassinations cites the disappearance of thirty Uruguayans from the first roundups in June and July.

Just before and after the Letelier assassination in Washington, U.S. intelligence agencies reported on intensified Condor activities in the Southern Cone. A Defense Intelligence Agency report from Buenos Aires in late September noted that high-ranking Argentine intelligence officials traveled to Montevideo and Brasilia in mid-September to discuss intelligence coordination. A source told the DIA officer how the countries worked together:

Information on Condor operations was also flying quickly into the hands of U.S. intelligence officers. Uruguay’s joint operations with Argentina in rounding up and disappearing the PVP and OPR-33 militants was a typical Phase Two Condor operation, such as that described in the cable. Another DIA cable, dating its information to September 28, showed that U.S. intelligence learned within twenty-four hours about the roundup of the Uruguayan members of the PVP and their military apparatus, the OPR-33.

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Kissinger met with Foreign Minister Guzzetti during the OAS meeting in Santiago, after Kissinger’s meeting with Pinochet described in Chapter 10.

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Shlaudeman, referring to the episode in an oral history interview in 1993, when asked about the controversy over human rights policy, replied: “It really came to a head when I was Assistant Secretary, or it began to come to a head, in the case of Argentina where the dirty war was in full flower. Bob Hill, who was Ambassador then in Buenos Aires, a very conservative Republican politician—by no means liberal or anything of the kind, began to report quite effectively about what was going on, this slaughter of innocent civilians, supposedly innocent civilians—this vicious war that they were conducting, underground war. He, at one time in fact, sent me a back-channel telegram saying that the Foreign Minister, who had just come for a visit to Washington and had returned to Buenos Aires, had gloated to him that Kissinger had said nothing to him about Human Rights. I don’t know—I wasn’t present at the interview.” Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interviewed by William E. Knight, May 24, 1993.

The CIA had also discovered another plot. This one fit the description of Condor’s top secret Phase Three capability—in which one country’s assassination team targeted another Condor country’s enemy outside Latin America. In this case, confirmed by exclusive CIA, Justice Department, and State Department documents obtained by the author, the intended victim was a prominent U.S. politician: Democratic Congressman and soon to be mayor of New York City, Ed Koch.

Koch was one of a small group of congressmen who began to focus fiercely in 1976 on human rights violations in the Southern Cone. He had entered Congress as a flamboyant liberal among the growing group of left-liberal congressmen elected in reaction to the Watergate scandal. He was looking for a way to make his mark on an issue of international importance. While
most of the human rights attention in Congress was directed at Chile, Koch and Representative Donald Fraser of Minnesota wanted to put the spotlight on Uruguay because of its large prison population and many documented cases of systematic torture. The hearings began in June with the dramatic appearance of Uruguayan Senator Wilson Ferreira, only a few weeks after the assassinations of his colleagues Senator Zelmar Michelini and Representative Héctor Gutiérrez. The hearings continued through the summer, amassing evidence of fresh human rights violations by Uruguay. Koch used the evidence to draft legislation calling for the immediate cutoff of all military aid to Uruguay. The amount of aid—about $3 million—was among the smallest in Latin America. Koch picked such a small target on purpose. He expected he could win a significant symbolic victory for human rights without provoking the full juggernaut of opposition from the Republican administration. His strategy was well wrought, and Koch’s amendment was signed into law on October 1, bolstered by outrage over the Letelier assassination only a week earlier.

As Koch was holding hearings and preparing his amendment in July, however, the CIA was picking up reports of assassination plans. The Uruguayan military, furious about Koch’s targeting of their country, was prepared to back their anger with action. In late July, CIA station chief Frederick Latrash learned that two Uruguayan intelligence officers had made a death threat against Koch. Latrash reported the threat to CIA headquarters, with the caveat that it should not be taken seriously because the two officers were at a cocktail party and had been drinking heavily. The CIA did nothing. Latrash, in violation of basic chain-of-command procedures, did not report the information to his superior in the Montevideo embassy, Ambassador Ernest Siracusa.

Siracusa, a consistent defender of the Uruguayan military government, was in the midst of a State Department campaign to turn back Koch’s amendment before it could become law. He flew to New York in August on a special trip to try to persuade Koch that he was wrong about Uruguay. After spending two hours with Koch, thinking he had made some progress, Siracusa invited Koch to come to Uruguay as his guest to see for himself. In his oral history interview, Siracusa recounted the incident: “He asked whether I thought he would be safe,” Siracusa said. “I replied that he would be as safe as I was, as, to the extent
he wished, I would be at his side at all times and that my guards would protect him as they did me.”
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Koch said he considered going to Uruguay, but couldn’t find the time. He was already preparing his next political move—to leave Congress to run for mayor of New York City. He now considers himself lucky. In September, the Letelier assassination radically changed the way the CIA looked at Operation Condor and its capability to conduct operations outside the borders of Latin America. On September 27, the CIA resurrected the death threat report and transmitted it to the FBI for possible action. It also informed the State Department.

The information about the threat was almost two months old, but it caused a small, secret earthquake inside the U.S. government. Sometime in early October, CIA Director George Bush took on the task of personally informing Koch about the threat. Koch took the call at his New York congressional office. He remembers Bush, a former and still friendly colleague from Congress, telling him that his amendment to cut off aid to Uruguay had provoked a threat and a plan of action to kill him. According to Koch, Bush said the security forces of another country, “I think he said Chile—I know it wasn’t Uruguay—had put a contract out for you.”

Koch was understandably worried. His amendment had been signed into law on October 1, ending all Fiscal 1977 military sales and aid to Uruguay. He wondered if he should have protection. Bush said the CIA was not in the business of providing security guards and suggested he contact the local police. Over the next few weeks, Koch was contacted by the FBI, who told him the Uruguayan officer who made the threat was quoted as saying to a CIA officer, “Maybe we would have to send someone to the U.S. to get Congressman Koch.” Koch also received a mollifying visit from Assistant Secretary for Latin America, Harry Shlaudeman. In an interview, Shlaudeman said that Chile was named in the threat as the country that allegedly had been enlisted to assassinate Koch.

Ambassador Siracusa was beside himself when he learned what had happened. During a visit to Washington, he was informed that Latrash had known about the threat as early as July and had not informed him. “It was deeply
embarrassing to Siracusa,” recalled his deputy chief of mission James Haahr. It had put the ambassador in the position of inviting a prominent American to visit a country whose military had said it intended to have him killed.

As soon as Siracusa returned to Uruguay, he called CIA station chief Latrash into his office and demanded to know why he had put the ambassador in an untenable situation by keeping the threat secret. The explanation that the threat was drinkers’ braggadocio was not an acceptable excuse to expose a U.S. congressman to danger, no matter how unlikely it was considered inside the CIA. Shortly thereafter, Latrash was removed from the embassy. He had lost the confidence of the ambassador.

Who were the officers who made the threat? Latrash knew at least one of them personally. He was Colonel José Fons, deputy director of SID, the defense intelligence service, and Uruguay’s representative to Condor. Fons considered Latrash a friend. They drank together, told war stories together, and sometimes Latrash gave him money for information. “I treated him like one of the family. Then he betrayed me,” Fons said in an interview. The other officer was Major José Nino Gavazzo, SID’s chief of operations on the ground in Argentina, whom we met in
Chapter 12
.