The Condor Years (42 page)

The Spanish have a saying that fits what happened to the military leaders who created Condor:

The CIA also has a term for it, “blowback”—the unintended consequences of U.S. policies kept secret from the American public. Here in the United States this era is undigested history. Only in the United States, whose diplomats, intelligence, and military were so intimately intertwined with the military dictators and their operational subordinates, has there been judicial silence on the crimes of the Condor years. No prosecutor has opened an investigation into the deaths in Chile of two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, even after declassified documents produced promising new leads. The Letelier investigation has returned to a state of dormancy. For a while after Pinochet’s arrest in London, the U.S. Justice Department began pursuing an energetic new approach to the solving of the still pending elements of the Letelier murder. There was talk of indicting Pinochet for giving the order to kill Letelier, but in the end, especially with the Bush presidency, the investigation seemed to be kept open more as a pretext for continued secrecy about unanswered questions in the case—such as those raised in this book—than a genuine effort to indict additional participants in the plot.

I have tried to establish the historical baseline of truth, at least of documented fact, about the United States government’s relationship to the military personnel responsible for these mass international crimes. I have tried to balance my criticism of U.S. complicity with respect for the many U.S. officials who tried to keep their moral compass intact while implementing policies of deep moral ambiguity. Even after all these years, the toughest obstacle to this task continues to be U.S. official secrecy and a continuing will in some quarters
to deceive, obfuscate, and even to cover up the extent of official U.S. connections to Operation Condor.

The Letelier assassination in Washington, D.C., was blowback. It was ordered by a close ally, a dictator the United States helped install, maintain, and defend in power; it was planned by an intelligence official who had been on the CIA payroll and who traveled frequently for consultation with CIA officials in Washington; it was carried out by DINA, a newly created security organization whose personnel were trained in Chile by a CIA team; it was detected in its initial operational stages not by alert spycraft but by the very chumminess of CIA officials with those planning the crimes.

Yet the U.S. ally carried out this major act of international terrorism on U.S. soil unimpeded. It is a major conclusion of this book that U.S. officials knew enough to have stopped the assassination, and that they launched a flawed and foreshortened effort to do so, then covered up their failure after Letelier and an American woman were murdered. Records declassified two decades later show that U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Kissinger, knew about Operation Condor’s plans to assassinate nonviolent opposition leaders who were living in exile outside Latin America. Those same officials knew that Chile had attempted around the same time to send DINA agents clandestinely to the United States using false Paraguayan passports—one of Condor’s standard operating procedures. The exact record of what happened next remains drastically censored, but we can know this much: Condor’s assassination plans were taken so seriously that Kissinger himself sent a long cable to the ambassadors in the Condor countries, instructing them to take action to stop the Condor plans. Yet the instructions were not carried out and the assassination plans went forward.

The official story, promulgated at the time, was that U.S. intelligence knew about Condor only as a relatively innocent apparatus for international intelligence exchange. The Phase Three assassination plans were discovered only after Letelier was dead, according to this version. Therefore, U.S. officials could not have concluded an assassination was afoot. That version is starkly contradicted by documents declassified under President Clinton’s executive order in 1999. The updated version of the cover story is that the Letelier assassination was not a Condor operation in the first place, that Operation Condor was barely visible on the radar screen of the busy officials surrounding Kissinger
in the weeks prior to the Letelier assassination, but that, in any case, Kissinger, with his August 23 cable, spoke out against Condor.

This is the framework of Kissinger’s official reply to Judge Canicoba’s request for his testimony about Condor. The State Department letter to Canicoba, on behalf of Kissinger, is the most authoritative statement the U.S. government has made about its involvement with Condor.

Some excerpts:

In the manner of U.S. government denials, this one is carefully qualified. “Firm and unequivocal” are strong words, but the denial of U.S. complicity in Condor is restricted to the “last few months” of 1976 and thereafter. That period covers the period after which the Condor countries agreed to implement Phase Three assassination plans (June 1976, just after Kissinger’s speech at the OAS meeting). But it excludes Condor’s period of gestation in 1975, the founding
of Condor at the Santiago meeting, and the early months of its intense Phase Two activity. During that period of more than a year, there were frequent contacts between Condor mastermind Manuel Contreras and the CIA, including at least three trips to Washington (January and July 1975 and July 1976) and a CIA payment to Contreras. There is also direct evidence of CIA and FBI access to interrogations under torture by Condor agents (the June 1975 letter from FBI officer Robert Scherrer concerning Fuentes and Santucho and the CIA report on two Chileans being held in Condor’s secret Orletti detention center).

It is my argument, based on the declassified evidence, that the CIA and other U.S. agencies encouraged and supported the integration of the security forces of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. This activity was applauded in Washington, not criticized, and was seen as a needed response to “international terrorism,” especially the growing international organization of the JCR. The United States maintained liaison with Condor operations, provided training and material support to the Condor data bank and communications system, and received and disseminated intelligence generated by Condor kidnappings and torture. It is highly probable that Contreras informed his CIA contacts, including the Santiago station chief and CIA deputy director Vernon Walters, of his plans before convening the Santiago meeting, and that the CIA was immediately informed about the formation of Condor. I have established, based on the account of one of the intelligence officers present, that international assassinations were discussed at that meeting. Intelligence exchange and cross-border prisoner transfers (Phase One and Two) began immediately, and there is no evidence of U.S. “opposition” to those activies. Cooperation, liaison, acquiescence, and even complicity are words that would seem to accurately describe the relationship prior to the latter months of 1976.

The U.S. attitude changed from support to opposition, however, when our agents learned in June 1976 that Phase Three operations were being planned outside Latin America. Adding to the U.S.’s second thoughts were the assassinations in Argentina around the same time of prominent Bolivian and Uruguayan exiles, Juan José Torres, Zelmar Michelini, and Héctor Gutiérrez. The United States was not willing to support, even by acquiescence, the assassination of democratic, nonviolent leaders or to tolerate the launching of terrorist killings in Europe.

It was these Condor activities and plans that created a stir in the State Department
when Latin American bureau officials learned about them from CIA reports. Kissinger’s cable of August 23 did indeed order a strong expression of U.S. opposition to the Condor assassination. The obvious question left by Kissinger’s response is why his instructions were not carried out. Why was his “deep concern” not conveyed to any of the three heads of state—Pinochet, Videla, and Alvarez—or to the security force chiefs who were planning the assassinations? It is inconceivable that lower-ranking State Department officials or ambassadors in the field would disobey a direct order from Kissinger. Yet the record shows that the order was not carried out, with tragic consequences.

I interviewed the principals in the Latin American bureau who handled the Condor matter for Kissinger. William Luers says he remembers being greatly concerned about Condor and personally pushed to try to stop it, but he was not able to consult still classified records to refresh his memory about why the warnings were not delivered. Harry Shlaudeman, the chief of the bureau at the time and the official whose name is on dozens of pages of documents about Operation Condor, now says he did not consider Condor important and does not remember why he sent word to the ambassadors to “take no further action” on Kissinger’s instructions. Another Kissinger aide involved in Latin matters, William Rogers, said, “I don’t have any recollection now of anything with regard to pulling our punches with respect to that cable.” Both Shlaudeman and Rogers
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asserted that the Kissinger warning, even if it had been delivered, would not have deterred Pinochet and Contreras from carrying out the assassination in Washington. No one knows the answer to that hypothetical question, but in my judgment such a supposition defies common sense. Contreras and Pinochet were American allies, not our enemies. They were running a terrorist organization, but they considered that Washington shared their strategic goals, to defeat world Communism. They were grossly mistaken to believe the United States government would tolerate the killing of a leftist exile leader in Washington, as shown by the persistent U.S. prosecution of those responsible. I find it impossible to believe they would have not called off the Washington
operation if U.S. officials had told them in no uncertain terms, as Kissinger’s démarche required, that their European assassinations plans were known and the United States officially opposed such activities.

The strongest evidence, of course, is what actually happened when the CIA got around to informing the French about the planned Paris operation. When French intelligence confronted the tri-national security forces (of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay) planning the operation, they immediately called it off.

Kissinger’s sidetracked expression of opposition to Condor should be seen in light of another series of events I have been able to document. At the same time Kissinger was sending the Condor démarche, the Argentine foreign minister was claiming that Kissinger had told him, not once but twice, that Argentine should step up its war on terrorism. Similar, though less blatant, messages were conveyed to Bolivia, Uruguay, and Chile. In the end, the red lights of opposition to atrocities were always dimmer than the green lights egging the military governments on in their war on terrorism.

The military governments were not only led to believe, they were told explicitly in secret meetings that U.S. human rights policy was public and tactical only and that United States sympathies were with the regimes that had overturned democracies and were killing thousands of their own citizens.

I do not believe the United States set out to encourage the mass killings or the international terrorist missions carried out by our military allies in South America in the Condor Years. I believe that individual officers took courageous actions to lessen the violence and save lives in some cases. Our overall policies and actions on human rights, however, were so burdened by caution and ambiguity as to be meaningless to military leaders, such as Pinochet, Videla, and others. The result was in the end the same. “You are our leader,” Pinochet said to Kissinger in the same month in which he, Pinochet, gave the go-ahead to commit an assassination in Washington, D.C. Looking to the United States for leadership, the military rulers found unequivocal support and public justifications for their war on Communism and terrorism. They therefore pursued that war in the way they thought was most effective.

What happened during the Condor Years was the first formalized international alliance to fight a war on terrorism. As such, they provide a template of pitfalls and tragedies that should be examined honestly and understood if we
are to avoid complicity with similar human rights violations in future alliances and future antiterrorist campaigns. The cautionary lesson of Operation Condor and the massive military repression against their countries’ own citizens is to be found in the way the United States exercises its leadership of the countries it gathers into its coalition against terrorism. The echoes of the past are already to be seen in the current war on terrorism: the massive pooling of intelligence, the compromised intelligence relationships, the gleaning of intelligence from the torture centers run by our allies, and even targeted, cross-boarder assassinations. Add secrecy, demands for internal loyalty among U.S. citizens and officials, and the dismantling of mechanisms of accountability. Combine with good intentions, high moral language, and the implacable will to prevail in a world struggle in which America’s place in the world is perceived to be at stake. The echoes cannot be mistaken by those who care to listen.