The Condor Years (4 page)

Phases Two and Three of the new organization were “operations,” activities so secret that the word itself does not appear in the documents. In the intelligence world, the distinction between information and operations separates the men from the boys. Operations means planning and executing actions that directly advance the military or political objective the agency is trying to achieve. Sometimes the actions are designed to gather intelligence and serve the information gathering and analysis arm of the agency. Most often operations are designed to attack, incapacitate, or otherwise impede the enemy’s ability to act. They include disseminating propaganda (“black” propaganda, meaning the use of lies, also known as “disinformation,” to discredit or confound the enemy), surveillance, and location of enemy targets, and covert missions to capture and hold enemy activists.

The pinnacle of intelligence operations is assassination, sometimes called “wet work” in the intelligence world. In the mid-1970s Latin America security parlance, operations was the word used for kidnapping, interrogation under torture, and killing.

Phase Two operations were limited to actions against targets inside the six-member countries. Colonel Contreras’s proposal met an obvious need. Activists
of all political stripes had moved from country to country as military crackdowns were imposed. Many were refugees under official protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Tens of thousands of refugees had gathered in Argentina, the only country that did not yet have a military government. As long as the exiles did not break the laws of the country in which they had sought refuge, they were protected—at least in theory—under international law. Contreras’s proposal made refugee protection meaningless by creating a mechanism for the intelligence services to conduct operations in each other’s countries.

The model for Phase Two was the successful joint operation that had just been completed by Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay in the months prior to the November meeting. Paraguay captured two leftists, a Chilean and an Argentine, arriving from Argentina. They were on the first stop of a mission to several Latin American countries to recruit leftist groups to the new Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR). Chilean and Argentine intelligence officers converged on Asunción to interrogate the two men. After three months of shared interrogation, Paraguay permitted Chile to transport the Chilean prisoner to a clandestine interrogation center in Chile. He was held for another four months, and then disappeared. The operation was one of several documented examples of direct U.S. collaboration with the joint security force actions. The FBI shared and distributed the intelligence product of the Paraguay arrests, even while knowing that the information had been obtained under torture.

The new system would formalize and improve such collaboration, expanding it to include Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil. The intelligence services would exchange information, allowing each to keep track of the whereabouts and movements of its enemy targets present in another country. One or both countries would carry out surveillance and capture; all interested countries would participate in interrogation. The reports based on interrogation would be shared, and upon request a captured leftist would be transported to his or her home country for further interrogation and eventual execution.

Torture was an inevitable and integral part of the process of interrogation in all of the countries. Under the system, prisoners in neighboring countries could be interrogated simultaneously, based on quick exchanges of questions and data among the interrogators. Documents captured in raids were to be copied and exchanged for analysis in each country.

What Contreras had in mind for Phase Three stunned even some of this group of hardened intelligence veterans. Phase Three operations would include surveillance and assassination
outside
Latin America. Colonel José A. Fons, Chief of Uruguay’s delegation recalled the meeting twenty-six years later in an interview:

The five top intelligence officials
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endorsed Chile’s proposal and signed the final document, dated November 28. A delegation from Brazil attended as observers, but did not formally join until 1976. After consultation with their respective governments, they were to ratify the agreement within sixty days.

The new entity needed a name. A Uruguayan air force colonel, the second ranking member of the delegation, had a suggestion that was incorporated in the final document.

The Letelier assassination would not take place for another ten months, but it was uppermost in Colonel Fons’s mind when he thought back on the Condor meeting. Letelier was the most typical victim—targeted as a dangerous democrat rather than a violent terrorist, a man who worked against Pinochet not in secret but in public corridors of power in the United States and Europe.

The Letelier assassination was to become the single most notorious act involving the Condor alliance being forged at the November 1975 meeting. The Uruguayan officer who described the meeting could have chosen from a stunning list of similar examples, before and after the meeting, of attacks against enemies from all the countries represented, including his own. All fit the international parameters set forth in Chile’s proposal for Phase Two and Three operations: the targets were violent or nonviolent enemies residing outside their own country at the time they are attacked.

The high-profile Condor victims include a former president, a dissident military chief, and moderate political leaders with impeccable democratic credentials. Some of the victims, had they lived, would have been at the top of lists for potential presidents when their countries returned to democracy. There were many other lower-profile cases—Argentines, Uruguayans, Chileans, Paraguayans, and Bolivians kidnapped outside their own countries in the period 1974–80. Some were unabashed Marxist revolutionaries planning guerrilla war; some were trying to live in peace. Only a few survived.

All fit the pattern of Phase Two and Phase Three “operations” discussed at the Santiago meeting on inter-American intelligence those days in November 1975. Some of the killing took place before the meeting. Condor operations of both Phase Two and Phase Three reached a peak in the period after the military coup in Argentina in March 1976.

A final case must be noted. In late July 1976, a CIA official in Montevideo, Uruguay, learned that a Uruguayan officer was talking at a cocktail party about killing U.S. Congressman Edward Koch. The congressman had angered the military government by passing an amendment to cut off U.S. military aid to Uruguay. CIA Director George Bush personally called Representative Koch to warn him that there was a “contract” out on his life because of his amendment on Uruguay. The hit was to be carried out not by Uruguay but by Chile’s DINA—a detail that betrayed the threat’s modus operandi as a Phase Three Condor plan.

The implications are inescapable: U.S. intelligence officials had knowledge about the new organization’s assassination plans but treated that information with insouciant disregard bordering on indifference to the possible fatal consequences of its allies’ terrorist actions. As will become evident in the course of this book, even more information was in the hands of officials about the planned mission that resulted in Chile’s assassination of Letelier around the
same time. We will examine in detail the actions taken and omitted that led to the failure to avert that act of international terrorism in the heart of the U.S. capital.

The written documents from the Santiago meeting referred to the Condor System, or the Condor Organization. They maintained Condor’s cover, even in the secret documents, that Condor was simply a data bank, an exchange of information, and a communication system. But U.S. intelligence reports referred almost universally to “Operation Condor,” capturing more accurately the organization’s aggressive, activist nature.

The Santiago meeting and the creation of Operation Condor is a central event in one of the darkest periods in Latin American history, from 1973 through 1980, when countries previously renowned for democracy and civilized virtues submerged themselves in terrorism, clandestine warfare, and systems of repression not experienced before or since. The Condor Years stand for the destruction of more than one hundred years of virtually uninterrupted democracy and rule of law in Chile and Uruguay. Argentina and Brazil had spottier records, going in and out of authoritarian rule, but both were modern societies with enormous economies. Argentina was considered the most “Europeanized” country in Latin America, whose elegant capital, Buenos Aires, was compared in its architecture and broad avenues with Paris. The same sophisticated Argentina that tended to look down on its neighbors as less cultured, less European, was transformed during the Condor Years into the country with a mass-murder body count in the tens of thousands.

Until the late 1960s and 1970s “revolution” usually connoted military imposition of one ruler to replace another. Opponents were arrested and mistreated, even tortured and sometimes killed. It is not to diminish the gravity of the crimes of earlier eras to point out that they differed by many orders of magnitude from the practices of the Condor Years—when the mass arrests, secret prisons, concentration camps, even the use of extermination methods and crematoriums are comparable only with the worst practices of the Nazi era.

Operation Condor itself was responsible for a relatively small proportion of the total deaths and violence, but it represents the final, worst departure from the rules of law and civilized society. States at their highest level of authority
entered into an agreement to cooperate in the enterprise of state terrorism. They discarded not only the human rights protections of their own citizens, but conspired to violate the norms of international protections: the right to sanctuary, asylum, protection of refugees, habeas corpus, and the carefully crafted procedures for extradition of those charged with crimes in one country and arrested in another.

As a secret treaty, Condor elevated human rights crimes to the highest level of state policy, under the direct control and manipulation of the heads of state and ministers of government. Its existence as an official policy instrument of six nations made it impossible for those regimes to write off their human rights crimes as isolated acts of aberrant officials or rogue agents.

The story of the Condor Years would be miscast, however, if it were told only as a litany of human rights violations. The story requires an objective and realistic recounting of the Marxist revolutionary side as well. In retrospect, the movements that brandished incendiary rhetoric and real weapons against states they denounced as bourgeois and corrupt may seem in hindsight predestined to defeat. But at the time, the outcome was by no means clear in Latin America. Both the right (ranging from the radical anti-Communism of the traditional land- and business-based rightist parties to the moderately liberal movements whose priorities were democracy and social reform) and the left (populist movements such as Peronism, Soviet-line, and other types of Communist parties, Social Democratic, and Marxist Socialist parties) took seriously the challenge represented by the “extreme” left. The revolutionaries inspired by the example of Cuba and Ernesto “Che” Guevara were convinced they were winning (for a time) and that their pockets of underground guerrilla warfare would become a catalyst for a countrywide, perhaps even continent-wide, uprising in the name of Socialism.

As many as 5,000 members of the Movement of National Liberation-Tupamaros were organized in urban cells in tiny Uruguay and had gained a worldwide reputation as Robin Hood–like romantic revolutionaries. Che Guevara himself seemed to live on even after being captured and executed by Bolivian soldiers and their CIA advisers. Argentina had a variety of radical groups arising from the traditional left and the Peronist movement. By 1974, the Peronist Montoneros had assassinated a former president, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, and kidnappings of businessmen for multimillion-dollar ransoms were common.

Chile’s extreme left radicalism was mostly at the level of overheated rhetoric. Violence was mostly limited to rock-throwing against rightist youth groups. But in the first year of Allende’s government an extremist group assassinated a former cabinet minister, Edmundo Pérez Zucovic.

Paraguay was a perennial caldron of conspiracy. Marxist ideology played little role in the plotting against the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, whose Colorado Party had been in power for twenty years. Young Paraguayans studying in neighboring Argentina, however, were joining Marxist revolutionary groups, and a well-organized but unsuccessful effort was made to kill Stroessner with a car bomb in that year.

It was an era of great violence and great idealism; the most radical groups on both left and right rejected democracy as a solution to society’s most pressing problems. It was an era in which the United States itself played a role profoundly at odds with its historical legacy and deepest values. Absorbed by the larger geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union, the United States could no longer be counted as an ally by the political forces in Latin America most committed to democracy.

By 1970, and lasting until the inauguration in 1977 of President Jimmy Carter, the United States in effect had switched sides. In Allende’s election democracy had brought to power a Marxist proclaiming he would create a unique and peaceful “Chilean road to socialism,” an unacceptable outcome to the United States. Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money.