Pinochet Investigation Raising Questions On U.S. Ties To Political Murders

by Lucy Komisar

Known as "Operation Condor," armies and security services cooperated in dealing with political opponents from one country who crossed into another and assigned their own men to out- of- country operations to avoid the identification of local agents.

Now, Spanish authorities handling the Pinochet investigation want to know what the U.S. knows about Operation Condor, and Washington has been sending them declassified documents. But it has balked at requests to release all relevant papers in the archives of State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI, and the CIA.

The U.S. government denied a report in The Guardian newspaper in London that it had urged the British to release Pinochet and not agree to his extradition to Madrid for fear revelations of the U.S. role in the 1973 coup would come out at a Pinochet trial. But since the current investigation concerns the post-coup period, some American officials are more likely worried about revelations of U.S. knowledge of and connections to Operation Condor.

Scherrer had learned from an Argentine official that Chile was the center of something called Operation Condor, established to share intelligence and engage in joint operations against "so-called 'leftists,' communists and Marxists." His cable, recently declassified, said the operation included setting up teams to carry out assassinations around the world and speculated that it might have executed the Washington bombing. Scherrer learned that the CIA had already reported on Operation Condor.

Col. Manuel Contreras, who organized the terror network, had set up the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), the Chilean secret police, two months after the September coup. CIA station chief, Stuart Burton, who arrived in Santiago in May 1974, established a close liaison with Contreras and DINA. U.S. Embassy political officer John Tipton, who was making official demarches protesting human rights abuses and also co-authored a dissent channel memorandum that urged more U.S. attention to the issue, told me the CIA and DINA were working together.

"I don't believe the CIA set up DINA, but they were in a close relationship," Tipton said. "Burton and Contreras used to go on Sunday picnics together with their families. That permeated the whole CIA station."

The Chilean government's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" says U.S. embassy personnel were involved in the capture of a Chilean by Paraguayan police. In the 1991 report, it said that Chilean Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcon was arrested by the Paraguayan police crossing the border to Argentina in May 1975 and that the participants in his capture were "the Argentine intelligence services, who provided the information about his false passport, persons from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires who informed the Chilean Investigative Police of the result of the interrogations, and the Paraguayan police, who permitted the clandestine transport of the detainee."

Fuentes Alarcon was brought to a Chilean torture center, Villa Grimaldi, in Santiago. He never left.

A Paraguayan, Federico Tatter, who had fled to Argentina in 1963 out of opposition to the Gen. Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship, was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in 1976. Years later, his widow got photographs from Paraguayan human rights groups that showed her husband in the company of Paraguayan police. The pictures were in records opened in 1993 after an ex-political prisoner, acting on a tip, took a judge to a police station to get his own files. They discovered a massive cache of documents, now known as the "Archives of Terror."

The papers revealed that the terror network murdered a former president of Brazil and two Uruguayan parliamentarians as well as hundreds of political activists. They also documented the presence of Nazis throughout the southern Cone and the assassination of Israeli agents who were pursuing them. Finally, they detailed the connection of local intelligence services with drug traffickers and with the CIA.

Argentine journalist Stella Calloni, correspondent for the daily La Jornada in Mexico, reported that after the U.S. Agency for International Development arrived to help microfilm the Paraguayan files, some of which detailed American connections with the Paraguayan police, journalists who sought to look at the archives discovered that the military-related material about Operation Condor had been put out of their reach.

The month after meeting with Walters, however, Contreras asked Pinochet, in a memo obtained by Italian courts, for another $600,000 for "reasons that I consider indispensable," one of which was "the neutralization of the [Chilean] government junta's principle adversaries abroad, especially in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, the U.S.A. and Italy."

After Contreras's meeting with the military intelligence chiefs of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay in October, the relationship was formalized and a joint data bank and information center was established at DINA headquarters.

In March 1976, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and two Democratic colleagues visited Chile and met with human-rights defenders there. Miller and 35 other congressmen have called on Clinton to release "critical information that will help link Pinochet directly to acts of international terrorism."

Meanwhile, the Spaniards are seeking a CIA report said to assert that Pinochet sought to impede the investigation of the 1976 car-bomb assassination in Washington of Letelier and Moffitt. Those killings prompted a Senate investigation and a still secret report on Operation Condor and its link to the bombing.

Operation Condor had already carried out the 1974 Buenos Aires killing of Pinochet's predecessor, the democrat Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife, and the 1975 Rome attack that disabled Christian Democratic oppositionist Bernardo Leighton and his wife. Those cases are being investigated by judicial authorities in Argentina and Italy, who might like to see America's archives.

The CIA immediately connected the Letelier-Moffitt killings to Operation Condor. After the assassinations, the agency decided that the network had become a rogue operation that could create problems in the U.S. When it found out about Condor plans in Europe, it advised police in France and Portugal, where assassinations were planned.

However, Operation Condor stayed in business elsewhere. Chilean and Argentine military helped Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in the years before his 1979 overthrow. Through the network, Argentina helped organize death squads in El Salvador in 1979 and '80. Operation Condor is believed to have operated until 1983.