The Condor Years (37 page)

This is how it happened. In late July 1976, there had been what in the Southern Cone is called a “well-irrigated” cocktail party. From available documents it appears to have been the farewell party for the U.S. Army Attaché, Colonel Raul Garibay. Koch’s amendment to cut off aid had been made public but had not yet been passed in Congress. Fons started to shoot his mouth off about Koch, about how the United States had trained the Uruguayans for decades to fight Communism, then the liberals came in and said the Communists were the good guys. Americans who understood Spanish had no trouble picking up what he was saying when he said he could arrange for Chile’s DINA to go to Washington to kill Koch. Latrash heard him, and Latrash knew about Condor. It was a hot topic in July 1976, especially at CIA stations in the Condor countries. Most likely Latrash had done some of the reporting on Condor. He may even have known that Colonel Fons was Uruguay’s representative to the first Condor meeting.

Fons was wrong about Latrash. It wasn’t his CIA friend who had betrayed him. Latrash had reported the threat with no recommendation for action. It was someone at the CIA who had put two and two together after the Letelier assassination and had dug out Latrash’s report, setting in motion the events
that followed. In the dry language of an agency required to tell the minimum truth after the fact, the CIA eventually wrote to tell Koch how they had come to take the threat more seriously.

In other words, three months late, the CIA decided to do something about a an assassination threat against a U.S. congressman. There is another recognizable pattern of U.S. inaction: Congressman Koch wrote to Attorney General Edward Levi with the common sense suggestion that the U.S. government should put the Uruguayan government on notice “that it will be held responsible in the event of an assault upon him or his staff.” Levi, in a declassified letter, passed the buck to Henry Kissinger, saying he should take “any action you deem appropriate.” As far as the declassified record shows, no démarche on the Koch threat was ever presented to Uruguay, by any U.S. agency.

Fons and Gavazzo paid a small price for the incident. Both officers now had a record that could not be ignored in U.S. intelligence and State Department files. Those records were brought out when, in December 1976, the Uruguayan government attempted to reward both officers with plum assignments to represent the Uruguayan military in Washington, D.C. Fons was to become vice president of the Inter-American Defense Board, and Gavazzo was named defense attaché in the Uruguayan embassy. Both assignments required agreement by the U.S. government.

Assistant Secretary Shlaudeman, in a heavily redacted memorandum to Undersecretary Habib, explained the threat against Koch and named Fons and Gavazzo as the two officers linked to the threat. He noted that “Gavazzo is apparently a dangerous type.” The appointments should be blocked, he said. “The fact alone of the threat against Koch seems to me sufficient grounds.” Habib agreed and the two officers were refused visas. The only public reason ever given until now, however, was that Fons and Gavazzo might be subject to “unpleasant publicity” if they came to the United States because of their connection to Uruguay’s controversial human rights record.

The Condor countries had at least one more Phase Three operation in advanced
stages of preparation. Condor was planning to assassinate three leftist “terrorists” in Europe. The CIA had detected the plans as early as June. One of the Condor member services was leaking operational details of the mission to CIA officers. The targets were two JCR leaders in Paris, where the JCR was headquartered after it abandoned its base of operations in Buenos Aires. The plan also called for another assassination to be carried out about the same time in Lisbon. Brazil, known to have reservations about the plan, ultimately backed out, deciding that its participation in Condor would be limited to operations within Latin America.

The three most hardline Condor countries, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, began to put the operation into action around the time of the Letelier assassination, in September 1976. A CIA report three days after the assassination was titled “Operation Condor goes Forward,” and stated, “With the Brazilian decision to confine its activities to the territorial limits of the Condor nations, training has begun in Buenos Aires for Argentine, Chilean and Uruguayan agents, who will operate in Western Europe.”

FBI legal attaché Robert Scherrer also learned about the Paris and Lisbon plans, and about the training activities in Buenos Aires. The Condor team was made up of members of Argentine Army intelligence (SIE-601 Intelligence Battalion) and the state information service (SIDE), and included Uruguayan and Chilean participants. A DIA report based on Scherrer’s information said, “They are reportedly structured much like a US Special Forces Team with a medic (doctor), demolition expert, etc. They are apparently being prepared for action in Phase Three.”

In Chile, Michael Townley had been assured he would be allowed to lie low until the furor about the Letelier assassination blew over. Nevertheless, in November, DINA chief of operations Colonel Pedro Espinoza—the same officer who had given him the order to kill Letelier—told him he was being sent to Paris on another mission. In a handwritten letter in Spanish later obtained by a Chilean court, Townley described the mission as “an operation that we were going to carry out in Paris in combination with the Argentines and the ‘Condor’ network . . .” The targets, according to Townley, were René “Gato” Valenzuela, the MIR leader who ran the JCR office in Paris, and his companion, Silvia Hernández, the daughter of a prominent Chilean journalist.

Valenzuela had never been a high-profile leader of MIR during the Allende government, when demonstrations, speeches, and public debate were at the
top of the revolutionary agenda. But in the time since the coup, he had proven an invaluable underground operative. He handled the day-to-day business of keeping the underground organizing functioning. Seldom a decision maker, he was the one doing the dangerous street work, running the network of couriers moving messages and documents among the safe houses, meeting in person with MIR militants to transmit the leadership’s strategies and plans, and to impart instructions for operations. His distinctive facial features had gained him his nickname
“El Gato”
(“The Cat”), and he was careful to regularly change his appearance.

DINA brigades hunted obsessively for Gato Valenzuela. Tortured captives frequently talked about his central role, but he always eluded capture. In late 1974, he moved to Argentina to work with Jorge Fuentes and Patricio Biedma in the fledgling JCR. They worked under the direction of Edgardo Enríquez. After Fuentes was captured in Paraguay in mid-1975, Enríquez stayed in Argentina, and Valenzuela moved again, to run MIR and JCR headquarters in Paris. After living underground for two years in the most dangerous countries of South America, he considered Paris a safe haven. Still, he kept away from public events and never called attention to himself, living quietly with Silvia, who later became his wife. From Paris, he managed the flow of men, money, intelligence, and documents from JCR’s growing European support network to the people in the underground in Chile and Argentina. He was meticulous about secrecy, keeping all his records in code, based on Soviet methods learned from East German intelligence.

In late 1976, his job had become damage control, as the coordinated security forces systematically obliterated the final traces of the MIR and JCR network in Argentina. Among his responsibilities was the debriefing of survivors who began to arrive in Europe, many having passed through DINA prisons. It was assumed that few had been able to resist the torture. His task was to evaluate the information they had delivered to assess how much damage had been done and what, if anything, of the decimated underground network could be reactivated.

The third major Condor target in Europe was the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal. Condor’s international mission, in the mind of its designer Manuel Contreras, was to rid the world of all manner of terrorists, such as Carlos, that the European governments were unable or unwilling to catch. Townley in testimony to an Italian court described
an “intense” hunt for Carlos, and said that DINA was pursuing radical leftist groups in Europe, including the Baader Meinhof gang, the Irish Republican Army, and the ETA in Spain. Other confirmation that Carlos was a target is found in the still-top-secret Senate report, “Activities of Certain Foreign Intelligence Agencies in the United States.” After describing Condor’s Phase Three, the report says, “Condor thereupon planned an operation aimed at assassinating three well-known European leftists, one of whom was the notorious terrorist Carlos.” A possible scenario for the operation was that Carlos had been located in Lisbon—the other city mentioned in CIA documents as the site of Condor’s European operation.

It was an extremely complex mission, involving Townley and his wife; two other DINA Exterior Department agents, Cristoph Willeke and Ingrid Olderock; two Argentine military officers; and two Uruguayan officers. At one point in late November or early December, at least six of the eight members of the Condor team arrived in Paris. The size of the team would seem to indicate that the plan called for the creation of a permanent Condor headquarters in Europe. Two CIA documents refer to plans for such an ongoing presence.

But Condor was leaking badly. Reaction to the Letelier assassination started a flow of information that so severely compromised Condor that it caused the Paris-Lisbon mission to be aborted, and by the end of the year, Condor’s Phase Three operations were dismantled entirely. Within a short time after the assassination, information about the European Condor mission appears to have become an almost open secret in intelligence circles. The notorious and spectacular nature of the assassination was a major factor in the decision by an Argentine intelligence officer to give detailed information about Condor to FBI legal attaché Robert Scherrer. The Argentine officer, who was most likely involved in the Paris and Lisbon Condor plans, said he considered Condor “ruined” by Chile’s audacity in commiting such a crime in Washington, D.C.

Many documents showing the detailed flow of information about Condor after the Letelier assassination are still secret. But we know this much: On September 25—four days after the assassination—a CIA officer informed the State Department, “the security services in the Condor countries now know that we know about the proposed Paris Operation.” Then, at an undisclosed date, the CIA informed French and Portuguese intelligence that assassinations were being planned in their cities. The French and Portuguese services did not dither or hesitate or debate the diplomatic implications. They went directly to
their contacts in Chilean, Argentine, and Uruguayan intelligence and told them bluntly to stop the operations.
*

Townley, who was waiting in Frankfurt, received word he was to abandon the operation against Valenzuela and Hernández. There had been
infidencias—
“disloyalties”—by the Argentines, and the operation was compromised. Townley was sent to Madrid, with yet another assignment: to team up with an Italian terrorist to try one more time to kill Socialist leader Carlos Altamirano, who was to attend a political meeting there. Again, nothing came of it, even though Townley says he located Altamirano and at one point physically bumped into him in the concourse of Barajas Airport in Madrid.

Another assassination plan, possibly part of the same Condor mission, was also aborted. Around the same time as the Paris operation, Scotland Yard contacted Uruguayan senator Wilson Ferreira in London, where he had begun his life in exile. Ferreira had survived the roundup in Argentina that had resulted in the assassinations of his colleagues Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez. He had testified before Congress in Washington in June, then gone to London to begin an exile of many years. The Scotland Yard agents told him they had detected a plot to kill him, and they provided protection.

A few weeks later, the six Condor security agencies assessed the damage, meeting in Buenos Aires in what was to be their final plenary meeting. Condor, in the argot of the intelligence services, was blown. The elaborate Phase Three scheme to carry the war against the left to the farthest corners of the world was collapsing under the weight of Chile’s arrogance and Condor members’ own inability to keep its secrets. The CIA had a source at the meeting who later provided a full report.

Argentina took the blame for the leaked operation in Europe, the CIA source said.

Condor’s botched Phase Three operations were discontinued. Condor was far from over, however. The cable continues: