New Report Sheds Light on CIA Meddling in S America

by Jim Lobe

Indeed, the revelation of Contreras' relationship to the Central Intelligence Agency tends to confirm the impression that the agency recruited top intelligence officers in Latin America virtually as a matter of course and regardless of their human rights records.

And the fact that even Contreras was on the CIA payroll lends credibility to reports that Vladimiro Montecinos, Peru's notorious and now-beleaguered intelligence chief, may enjoy a similar relationship with the agency, despite the CIA's insistence that it now routinely screens out known human-rights abusers.

The CIA has not yet disclosed how much it paid Contreras, who is now completing a seven-year prison term in Chile for ordering the assassination of former defense minister Orlando Letelier and a U.S. co-worker in Washington, D.C. in 1976. But if he was compensated anything like what the CIA gave military officers of comparable or lesser rank in Central America, he should have done very well indeed.

Confirmation of Contreras' ties to the CIA came in a report issued by the CIA itself this week in compliance with a law passed by Congress last year requiring it to provide a full account of its covert actions at the time of the 1973 coup d'etat against elected president Salvador Allende and its subsequent relations to the Pinochet regime.

It confirms, for example, that, within a year of the coup, the CIA was already aware of bilateral arrangements between the Pinochet regime and other Southern Cone intelligence services to track down and kill its political opponents. This arrangement was the beginning of the infamous Operation Condor.

Contreras described Operation Condor to the CIA as an information-sharing system between the security bodies of the Southern Cone countries, while he denied any involvement in rights abuses, the report adds.

Despite the fact that the CIA did not instigate the September 11, 1973 coup that put an end to the government of Salvador Allende, it was aware of the military conspiracy, says the document.

The report adds that the CIA maintained a relationship with the Chilean officers to gather information, and given the fact that it did not dissuade them from seizing power, and that it had instigated an earlier attempt in 1970, it was probably giving the impression that it supported the move.

It also disclosed that the CIA paid the group of coup plotters $35,000 in hush money after they murdered Chile's military commander, Gen. Rene Schneider, in October 1970. In the 1975 Congressional hearings, the CIA had insisted that it had ended its support for the group several days before the murder.

And it revealed that the agency has an October 1973 report on Gen. Arellano Stark, Pinochet's right-hand man after the coup, showing that Stark had ordered the murder of 21 political prisoners during the notorious "Caravan of Death" -- a document which could be highly relevant to the ongoing prosecution of Pinochet, who is facing trial for the disappearance of 14 Caravan victims.

But the revelation which has received the most attention here was that the CIA put Contreras on its payroll in 1975, several months after it had concluded that he "was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights within the Junta" that took power after the 1973 coup.

Moreover, the CIA maintained that relationship until Contreras was transferred to another post in late 1977. That was long after Contreras had himself become a suspect in the Letelier assassination and had lied to the CIA about Operation Condor.

Despite the fact that the CIA knew about the early days of Operation Condor as early as mid-1974, it did not approach Contreras directly about it until October 1976, according to the report. "Contreras confirmed Condor's existence as an intelligence-sharing network," the report said, "but denied that it had a role in extra-judicial killings."

Although the report insists the CIA continuously urged Contreras and other senior military officers to improve the military's human rights performance, the report does not reflect any effort to confront Contreras about contrary evidence gathered by it or the FBI, which began investigating Operation Condor within days of the Letelier assassination.

In El Salvador, the CIA had a number of senior military officers on its payroll at one time or another, including the head of the Salvadorean Treasury Police during the early 1980s, Col. Nicolas Carranza. Mentor to the notorious Roberto D'Aubuisson, Carranza, who directed most death squad activity on behalf of the army during the bloodiest years of the civil war there, was paid $90,000 a year as an informant. When that relationship came to light, he was permitted to retire quietly to Tennessee.

Ten years later, Haitian Gen. Raoul Cedras, the head of a junta which, like Pinochet, overthrew an elected leader, was also exposed as a CIA informant on the eve of a U.S. intervention to depose him. He retired to Panama which has rejected Haiti's attempts to extradite him.

Similarly, Washington itself has refused to extradite Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, the leader of a pro-military death squad under Cedras. Constant also was identified as a paid CIA informant who slipped out of Haiti quietly after the 1994 U.S. intervention. He now lives in New York City.

Still other confirmed CIA informants included Salvadorean Army Col. Roberto Mauricio Staben, a senior commander in the mid-1980s, who was caught running a kidnap ring that held wealthy businessmen for ransom but who was protected by his agency relationships for years afterward, and Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a senior military intelligence officer in Guatemala reportedly responsible for the killings of a U.S. hotelier and a guerrilla commander married to a U.S. lawyer.

The fact that all of these men were paid by the CIA created some problems for it, but nothing like those created by former Panamanian military chief Gen. Manuel Noriega to whom a comfortable retirement was offered several times. He was finally ousted from power after the United States invaded Panama in 1989 and now is serving out a long sentence in a Florida federal prison for drug-trafficking.

Although the relationship went sour, Noriega is believed to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for intelligence information over a career that stretched almost 30 years.