Operation Condor



Operation Condor (Operación Cóndor, also known as Plan Cóndor, Operação Condor) was a campaign of political repression and terror involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate communist or Soviet influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments.

Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. Some estimates are that at least 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor, and possibly more. Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States provided technical support and supplied military aid to the participants until at least 1978, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles.

Antecedents
In 2007, U.S. professor Patrice McSherry of Long Island University, through secret CIA documents dated June 1976, confirmed the abduction and torture of Chilean and Uruguayan refugees in Buenos Aires. She said those plans emerged in the sixties in the School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies. A declassified CIA document dated 23 June 1976, explains that "in early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets." Condor was an operation similar to Operation Gladio, the strategy of tension used in Italy in the 1970s, of which Licio Gelli was a member.

The program was facilitated through a series of government takeovers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s:


 * General Alfredo Stroessner took control of Paraguay in 1954.
 * The Brazilian military overthrew the democratic and popular government of João Goulart in 1964.
 * General Hugo Banzer took power in Bolivia in 1971 through a series of coups.
 * Forces loyal to General Augusto Pinochet bombed the presidential palace in Chile (La Moneda) on 11 September 1973, overthrowing democratically elected president Salvador Allende.
 * A military junta headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power in Argentina on 24 March 1976.

History
Cooperation between various security services existed prior to the creation of Operation Condor, with the aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion." During the Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on 3 September 1973, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, head of the Brazilian army, proposed to "extend the exchange of information" between various services in order to "struggle against subversion."

In March 1974, representatives of the police forces of Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A death squad, to implement cooperation guidelines in order to destroy the "subversive" threat represented by the presence of thousands of political exiles in Argentina. In August 1974, the corpses of Bolivian refugees were found in garbage dumps in Buenos Aires.

On 25 November 1975, leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA (the Chilean secret police), in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor.

According to French journalist Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la mort, l'école française (2004, Death Squads, The French School), the paternity of Operation Condor is to be attributed to General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces and former student of the French.

Cold War context
Operation Condor, which took place in the context of the Cold War, had the tacit approval of the United States. In 1968, U.S. General Robert W. Porter stated that "in order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are...endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises." Condor was one of the fruits of this effort.

The targets were officially armed groups (such as the MIR, the Montoneros or the ERP, the Tupamaros, etc.) but in fact included all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission. The Argentine "Dirty War", for example, which resulted in approximately 30,000 victims according to most estimates, targeted many trade-unionists, relatives of activists, etc.

From 1976 onwards, the Chilean DINA and its Argentine counterpart, SIDE, were the operation's front-line troops. The infamous "death flights," theorized in Argentina by Luis María Mendía — and also used during the Algerian War (1954–1962) by French forces — were widely used, in order to make the corpses, and therefore evidence, disappear. There were also many cases of child abduction.

Revelations about Condor
On 22 December 1992, a significant amount of information about Operation Condor came to light when torture victim Martin Almada and José Fernández, a Paraguayan judge, visited a police station in the Lambaré suburb of Asunción to look for files on a former political prisoner. Instead he found what became known as the "terror archives", detailing the fates of thousands of Latin Americans secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Some of these countries have since used portions of this archive to prosecute former military officers. The archives counted 50,000 persons murdered, 30,000 "desaparecidos," and 400,000 incarcerated.

According to these archives, other countries such as Peru cooperated to varying extents by providing intelligence information in response to requests from the security services of the Southern Cone countries. Even though Peru was not at the secret November 1975 meeting in Santiago de Chile, there is evidence of its involvement. For instance, in June 1980, Peru was known to have been collaborating with Argentine agents of 601 Intelligence Battalion in the kidnapping, torture and disappearance of a group of Montoneros living in exile in Lima.

The "terror archives" also revealed cooperation to some degree by Colombia and Venezuela (Luis Posada Carriles was probably at the meeting that ordered Orlando Letelier's car bombing). It has been alleged that a Colombian paramilitary organization known as Alianza Americana Anticomunista may have cooperated with Operation Condor. Brazil signed the agreement later (June 1976), but refused to engage in actions outside Latin America.

Mexico, together with Costa Rica, Canada, France, the UK, Spain and Sweden received many people fleeing from the terror regimes. Operation Condor officially ended with the ousting of the Argentine dictatorship in 1983, although the killings continued for some time after that.

Argentina
The Argentine Dirty War was carried out during and around Operation Condor. The Argentine SIDE cooperated with the Chilean DINA in numerous cases of desaparecidos. Chilean General Carlos Prats, former Uruguayan MPs Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, as well as the ex-president of Bolivia, Juan José Torres, were assassinated in the Argentine capital.

The SIDE also assisted Bolivian general Luis Garcia Meza Tejada's Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, with the help of Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (see also Operation Charly). In April 1977, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers who had lost their children to the dictatorship, started demonstrating each Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada on Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The Mothers, who were seeking to reclaim their children from the junta, continue their struggle for justice to this day (2012).

The National Commission for Forced Disappearances (CONADEP), led by writer Ernesto Sabato, was created in 1983. Two years later, the Juicio a las Juntas (Trial of the Juntas) largely succeeded in proving the crimes of the various juntas which had formed the self-styled National Reorganization Process. Most of the top officers who were tried were sentenced to life imprisonment: Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Eduardo Massera, Roberto Eduardo Viola, Armando Lambruschini, Raúl Agosti, Rubén Graffigna, Leopoldo Galtieri, Jorge Anaya and Basilio Lami Dozo.

However, Raúl Alfonsín's government passed two amnesty laws protecting military officers involved in human rights abuses: the 1986 Ley de Punto Final (law of closure) and the 1987 Ley de Obediencia Debida (law of due obedience). President Carlos Menem then pardoned the leaders of the junta in 1989–1990. Following continuous protests by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other associations, the amnesty laws were repealed by the Argentine Supreme Court nearly twenty years later, in June 2005.

DINA civil agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, who was prosecuted for crimes against humanity in 2004, was condemned to life imprisonment for his part in the murder of General Prats. It has been claimed that suspected Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie — also an operative of the Gladio "stay-behind" secret NATO paramilitary organization – was involved in the murder as well. He and fellow extremist Vincenzo Vinciguerra testified in Rome in December 1995 before federal judge María Servini de Cubría that DINA agents Clavel and Michael Townley were directly involved in this assassination. In 2003, judge Servini de Cubría requested that Mariana Callejas (Michael Townley's wife) and Cristoph Willikie, a retired colonel from the Chilean army, be extradited, as they were accused of also being involved in the murder. Chilean appeals court judge Nibaldo Segura refused extradition in July 2005 on the grounds that they had already been prosecuted in Chile. 

Brazil
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso ordered the release of some military files concerning Operation Condor in 2000. Italian attorney general Giancarlo Capaldo, who was investigating the disappearances of Italian citizens, probably by a combination of Argentine, Chilean, Paraguayan and Brazilian military, accused 11 Brazilians of involvement. However, according to the official statement, "they could not confirm nor deny that Argentine, Brazilian, Paraguayan and Chilean militaries will be submitted to a trial." As of December 2009, nobody in Brazil has been convicted of human rights violations for the 21 years of military dictatorship there.

Kidnapping of Uruguayans
The Condor Operation expanded the clandestine repression from Uruguay to Brazil in an event that happened in November 1978 and later known as "o Sequestro dos Uruguaios", or "the Kidnapping of the Uruguayans." On that occasion, with the consent of the Brazilian military regime, high officers of the Uruguayan army secretly crossed the frontier, heading to Porto Alegre, capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. There they kidnapped a militant couple of the Uruguayan political opposition, Universindo Rodriguez and Lilian Celiberti, along with her two children, Camilo and Francesca, five and three years old.



The illegal operation failed when two Brazilian journalists – reporter Luiz Cláudio Cunha and photographer Joao Baptista Scalco, from Veja Magazine – were warned by an anonymous phone call about the disappearance of the Uruguayan couple. The two journalists decided to check the information and headed to the appointed address: an apartment in the borough of Menino Deus in Porto Alegre. There they were mistakenly taken as other members of the Uruguayan opposition by the armed men who had arrested Lilian. Universindo and the children had already been clandestinely taken to Uruguay.

The unexpected arrival of the journalists exposed the secret operation, which was suspended. Lilian was then taken back to Montevideo. The failure of the operation prevented the murder of the four Uruguayans. The news of a political kidnapping made headlines in the Brazilian press and became an international scandal that embarrassed the military governments of both Brazil and Uruguay. A few days later, the children were taken to their maternal grandparents in Montevideo. Universindo and Lilian were imprisoned and tortured in Brazil and then taken to military prisons in Uruguay, where they remained for the next five years. After the Uruguayan re-democratization in 1984, the couple was released and then confirmed all the details of the kidnapping.

In 1980, two inspectors of DOPS (Department of Political and Social Order, an official police branch in charge of the political repression during the military regime) were convicted by the Brazilian Justice as being the armed men who arrested the journalists in Lilian's apartment in Porto Alegre. They were João Augusto da Rosa and Orandir Portassi Lucas (a former football player of Brazilian teams known as Didi Pedalada), both identified later as participants in the kidnapping operation by the reporters and the Uruguayan couple — conclusively confirming the involvement of the Brazilian government in the Condor Operation. In 1991, through the initiative of Governor Pedro Simon, the state of Rio Grande do Sul officially recognized the kidnapping of the Uruguayans and compensated them for this, inspiring the democratic government of the President Luis Alberto Lacalle in Uruguay to do the same a year later.

Police officer Pedro Seelig, the head of the DOPS at the time of the kidnapping, was identified by the Uruguayan couple as the man in charge of the operation in Porto Alegre. When Seelig was denounced to Brazilian justice, Universindo and Lílian were in prison in Uruguay and were prevented from testifying against him. The Brazilian policeman was then cleared of all charges owing to alleged lack of evidence. Lilian and Universindo's later testimony also revealed that four officers of the secret Uruguayan Counter-information Division – two majors and two captains  – took part in the operation with the consent of the Brazilian authorities. One of these officers, Captain Glauco Yanonne, was personally responsible for torturing Universindo Dias in the DOPS headquarters in Porto Alegre. Even though Universindo and Lilian recognized the Uruguayan military men who had arrested and tortured them, not one of them was prosecuted in Montevideo. This failure was due to the Law of Impunity, which guaranteed amnesty to all Uruguayan citizens involved in political repression.

The investigative journalism of Veja magazine rewarded Cunha and Scalco with the 1979 Esso Prize, the most important prize of the Brazilian press. Hugo Cores, a former Uruguayan political prisoner who was living in São Paulo at the time of the kidnapping and had made the anonymous phone call to Cunha, made the following statement to the Brazilian press in 1993: "All the Uruguayans kidnapped abroad, around 180 people, are missing to this day. The only ones who managed to survive are Lilian, her children, and Universindo".

The kidnapping of the Uruguayans in Porto Alegre entered into history as the only failure with international repercussions among several hundred clandestine actions by the Latin American Southern Cone dictatorships, which were responsible for thousands of killed and missing people in the period between 1975 and 1985. Analyzing the political repression in the region during that decade, Brazilian journalist Nilson Mariano estimates the number of killed and missing people as 297 in Uruguay, 366 in Brazil, 2,000 in Paraguay, 3,196 in Chile and 30,000 in Argentina.

The so-called "Terror Files" (Portuguese: "Arquivos do Terror") – a set of 60,000 documents weighing 4 tons and comprising 593,000 microfilmed pages – that were discovered in 1992 by former Paraguayan political prisoner Martin Almada in Lambare, Paraguay, give even higher numbers: the total result of Southern Cone Operation Condor had left up to 50,000 killed, 30,000 missing and 400,000 arrested.

Assassination of João Goulart
After his overthrow, João "Jango" Goulart became the first Brazilian president to die in exile. He died of an alleged heart attack in his sleep in Mercedes, Argentina, on 6 December 1976. Since his body was never submitted to an autopsy, the true cause of his death remains unknown.

On 26 April 2000, former governor of Rio de Janeiro Leonel Brizola alleged that ex-presidents João Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek (who died in a car accident) were actually assassinated as part of Operation Condor, and requested the opening of investigations into their deaths.

On 27 January 2008, newspaper Folha de S. Paulo printed a story with a statement from Mario Neira Barreiro, a former intelligence service member under Uruguay's dictatorship, declaring that Goulart was poisoned, endorsing the suspicions of the late Brizola. The order to assassinate Goulart, according to Barreiro, came from Sérgio Fleury, head of the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (Department of Political and Social Order) and the licence to kill came from president Ernesto Geisel himself. In July 2008, a special commission of the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul, Goulart's home state, released a document saying that "the evidences that Jango was willfully assassinated, with knowledge of the Geisel government, are strong."

In March 2009, the magazine CartaCapital published previously unreleased documents of the National Intelligence Service created by an undercover agent on Jango's properties in Uruguay, which reinforces the theory that the former president was poisoned. The Goulart family has not yet identified who could be the "B Agent," as he is referred in the documents. The agent was a close friend to Jango, and described an argument during the former president's 56th birthday party with his son because of a fight between his employees Manoel dos Santos and Tito. According to the "B Agent," Manoel pointed a knife at Tito, a "sexual deviant" who refused "sexual advances" by him. As a result of the story, the Human Rights Commission of the Chamber of Deputies decided to investigate the thesis that Jango was poisoned.

Later, during an interview in the same magazine, Jango's widow, Maria Teresa Fontela Goulart, revealed documents from the Uruguayan government which reinforced her complaints that her family was being monitored. The Uruguayan government followed the footsteps of Jango, his business, and his political activities. These files from 1965 – a year after the coup in Brazil – say that he could have been the victim of an attack. In a document requested by the Movement for Justice and Human Rights and the President João Goulart Institute, the Uruguayan Interior Ministry said that "serious and responsible Brazilian sources" talked about an "alleged plot against the former Brazilian president."

Chile
When Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 in response to Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón's request for his extradition to Spain, information concerning Condor was revealed. One of the lawyers who asked for his extradition talked about an attempt to assassinate Carlos Altamirano, leader of the Chilean Socialist Party: it was claimed that Pinochet met Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie during Franco's funeral in Madrid in 1975 in order to have Altamirano murdered. But as with Bernardo Leighton, who was shot in Rome in 1975 after a meeting the same year in Madrid between Stefano Delle Chiaie, former CIA agent Michael Townley and anti-Castrist Virgilio Paz Romero, the plan ultimately failed.

Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia eventually established a precedent concerning the crime of "permanent kidnapping": since the bodies of victims kidnapped and presumably murdered could not be found, he deemed that the kidnapping was deemed to continue, rather than to have occurred so long ago that the perpetrators were protected by an amnesty decreed in 1978 or by the Chilean statute of limitations. Ironically, the perpetrators' success in hiding evidence of their crimes frustrated their attempts to escape from justice.

General Carlos Prats
General Carlos Prats and his wife were killed by the Chilean DINA on 30 September 1974, with a car bomb in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they lived in exile. In Chile, the judge investigating this case, Alejandro Solís, definitively terminated the prosecution of Pinochet after the Chilean Supreme court rejected a demand to revoke his immunity from prosecution in January 2005. The leaders of DINA, including chief Manuel Contreras, ex-chief of operations and retired general Raúl Itturiaga Neuman, his brother Roger Itturiaga, and ex-brigadiers Pedro Espinoza Bravo and José Zara, were accused in Chile of this assassination. DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel has been convicted in Argentina for the murder.

Bernardo Leighton
Bernardo Leighton and his wife were severely injured by gunshots on 5 October 1976, while in exile in Rome. According to the National Security Archive and Italian attorney general Giovanni Salvi, who was in charge of former DINA head Manuel Contreras' prosecution, Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Michael Townley and Virgilio Paz Romero in Madrid in 1975 to plan the murder of Bernardo Leighton with the help of Franco's secret police.

Orlando Letelier
Another target was Orlando Letelier, a former minister of the Chilean Allende government who was assassinated by a car bomb explosion in Washington, D.C., on 21 September 1976. His assistant, U.S. citizen Ronni Moffitt, also died in the explosion. Michael Townley, General Manuel Contreras (former head of the DINA), and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravo (also formerly of DINA), were convicted for the murders. In 1978, Chile agreed to hand Townley over to the U.S. in order to reduce the tension about Letelier's murder. Townley, however, was freed and taken into the witness protection program. The U.S. is still waiting for Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza to be extradited.

In an article published 17 December 2004, in the Los Angeles Times, Francisco Letelier, the son of Orlando Letelier, wrote that his father's assassination was part of Operation Condor, which he described as "an intelligence-sharing network used by six South American dictators of that era to eliminate dissidents."

Michael Townley has accused Pinochet of being responsible for Orlando Letelier's death. Townley confessed that he had hired five anti-Castro Cuban exiles to booby-trap Letelier's car. According to Jean-Guy Allard, after consultations with the terrorist organization CORU's leadership, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, those elected to carry out the murder were Cuban-Americans José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll. According to the Miami Herald, Luis Posada Carriles was at this meeting, which decided on Letelier's death and also the Cubana Flight 455 bombing.

Operación Silencio
Operación Silencio (Operation Silence) was an operation to impede investigations by Chilean judges by removing witnesses from the country, starting about a year before the "terror archives" were found in Paraguay.

In April 1991 Arturo Sanhueza Ross, linked to the murder of MIR leader Jecar Neghme in 1989, left the country. According to the Rettig Report, Jecar Neghme's death was carried out by Chilean intelligence agents. In September 1991, Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who killed trade-unionist Tucapel Jiménez, flew away. In October 1991, Eugenio Berríos, a chemist who had worked with DINA agent Michael Townley, was escorted from Chile to Uruguay by Operation Condor agents in order to avoid testifying in the Letelier case. He used Argentinian, Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Brazilian passports, raising concerns that Operation Condor was not dead. Berríos was found dead in El Pinar, near Montevideo (Uruguay), in 1995; his murderers tried to make the identification of his body impossible.

In January 2005, Michael Townley, who now lives in the U.S. under the witness protection program, acknowledged links between Chile, DINA, and the detention and torture center Colonia Dignidad, which was founded in 1961 by Paul Schäfer, who was arrested in March 2005 in Buenos Aires and convicted on charges of child rape. Townley also revealed information to Interpol about Colonia Dignidad and the Army's Bacteriological Warfare Laboratory. This last laboratory would have replaced the old DINA laboratory on Via Naranja de lo Curro street, where Townley worked with the chemical assassin Eugenio Berríos. The toxin that allegedly killed Christian-Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva may have been made in this new lab in Colonia Dignidad, according to the judge investigating the case.

U.S. Congressman Edward Koch
In February 2004, reporter John Dinges published The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (The New Press, 2004). In his book, he reveals how Uruguayan military officials threatened to assassinate U.S. Congressman Edward Koch (later Mayor of New York City) in mid-1976. In late July 1976, the CIA station chief in Montevideo received information about it, but recommended that the Agency take no action because the Uruguayan officers (among them Colonel José Fons, who was at the November 1975 secret meeting in Santiago, Chile, and Major José Nino Gavazzo, who headed a team of intelligence officers working in Argentina in 1976, where he was responsible for more than 100 Uruguayans' deaths) had been drinking when the threat was made.

In an interview for the book, Koch said that George H.W. Bush, the CIA director at the time, informed him in October 1976 – more than two months afterward, and after Orlando Letelier's murder – that "his sponsorship of legislation to cut off U.S. military assistance to Uruguay on human rights grounds had provoked secret police officials to 'put a contract out for you'." In mid-October 1976, Koch wrote to the Justice Department asking for FBI protection, but none was provided. In late 1976, Colonel Fons and Major Gavazzo were assigned to prominent diplomatic posts in Washington, D.C., but the State Department forced the Uruguayan government to withdraw their appointments, with the public explanation that "Fons and Gavazzo could be the objects of unpleasant publicity." Koch only became aware of the connections between the threats and the post appointments in 2001.

Other cases
The Chilean leader of the MIR, Edgardo Enríquez, "disappeared" in Argentina, as well as another MIR leader, Jorge Fuentes. Alexei Jaccard, Ricardo Ramírez, and a support network to the Communist party was dismantled in Argentina in 1977. Cases of repression against German, Spanish, Peruvian, and Jewish people were also reported. The assassinations of former Bolivian president Juan José Torres and former Uruguayan deputies Héctor Gutiérrez and Zelmar Michelini in Buenos Aires in 1976 were also part of Condor. The DINA entered into contact even with Croatian terrorists, Italian neofascists and the Shah's SAVAK to locate and assassinate dissidents.

Operation Condor was at its peak in 1976 when Chilean exiles in Argentina were threatened and had to go underground or into exile again. Chilean General Carlos Prats had already been assassinated by the Chilean DINA in Buenos Aires in 1974, with the help of former CIA agent Michael Townley. Cuban diplomats were also assassinated in Buenos Aires in the infamous Automotores Orletti torture center, one of the 300 clandestine prisons of the dictatorship. These centers were managed by the Grupo de Tareas 18, headed by convicted armed robber Aníbal Gordon, who reported directly to General Commandant of the SIDE Otto Paladino.

Automotores Orletti was the main base of foreign intelligence services involved in Operation Condor. One of the survivors, José Luis Bertazzo, who was detained there for two months, identified Chilean, Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Bolivian prisoners who were interrogated by agents from their own countries. It is there that the 19-year-old daughter-in-law of poet Juan Gelman was tortured along with her husband, before being transported to Montevideo, where she delivered a baby which was immediately stolen by Uruguayan military officers.

According to John Dinges's book Los años del Cóndor, Chilean MIR prisoners in the Orletti center told José Luis Bertazzo that they had seen two Cuban diplomats, 22-year-old Jesús Cejas Arias, and 26-year-old Crescencio Galañega, tortured by Gordon's group and interrogated by a man who travelled from Miami to interrogate them. The men, who had been responsible for the protection of Cuban ambassador to Argentina Emilio Aragonés, had been kidnapped on 9 August 1976, at the corner of calle Arribeños and Virrey del Pino by 40 armed SIDE agents who blocked the street with their Ford Falcons, the cars used by the security forces during the dictatorship.

According to Dinges, the FBI and the CIA were informed of their arrest. He quotes a cable sent from Buenos Aires by FBI agent Robert Scherrer on 22 September 1976, in which he mentioned in passing that Michael Townley, later convicted for the assassination of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., had taken part in the interrogations of the two Cubans. The former head of the DINA confirmed to Argentine federal judge María Servini de Cubría in Santiago de Chile on 22 December 1999, that Michael Townley and Cuban Guillermo Novo Sampoll were present in the Orletti center, having travelled from Chile to Argentina on 11 August 1976, and "cooperated in the torture and assassination of the two Cuban diplomats." Anti-Castro Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles also boasted in his autobiography, "Los Caminos Del Guerrero," of the murder of the two young men.

U.S. involvement
Although the United States was not a member of the Condor consortium, evidence shows that the United States provided key organizational, financial and technical assistance to the operation. The United States government sponsored and collaborated with DINA and with the other intelligence organizations forming the nucleus of Condor. CIA documents show that the agency had close contact with members of the Chilean secret police, DINA, and its chief Manuel Contreras. Contreras was retained as a paid CIA contact until 1977, even as his involvement in the Letelier-Moffit assassination was being revealed.

In the Paraguayan Archives, there were official requests to track suspects to and from the U.S. Embassy, the CIA, and FBI. The CIA provided lists of suspects and other intelligence information to the military states. The FBI also searched for individuals wanted by DINA in the United States in 1975.

On October 5, 1976 Henry Kissinger met with Argentina's Foreign Minister and stated:

In June 1999, the State Department released thousands of declassified documents showing for the first time that the CIA and the State and Defense Departments were intimately aware of Condor; one Defense Department intelligence report dated 1 October 1976, noted that Latin American military officers bragged about it to their U.S. counterparts. The same report approvingly described Condor's "joint counterinsurgency operations" that aimed to "eliminate Marxist terrorist activities"; Argentina, it noted, created a special Condor team "structured much like a U.S. Special Forces Team." Material declassified in 2004 states that "'The declassified record shows that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its 'murder operations' on August 5, 1976, in a 14-page report from Shlaudeman. 'Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys,' Shlaudeman cautioned. 'We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good.' Shlaudeman and his two deputies, William Luers and Hewson Ryan, recommended action. Over the course of three weeks, they drafted a cautiously worded demarche, approved by Kissinger, in which he instructed the U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries to meet with the respective heads of state about Condor. He instructed them to express 'our deep concern' about 'rumors' of 'plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad.''"

Ultimately, the demarche was never delivered. Kornbluh and Dinges suggest that the decision not to send Kissinger's order was due to a cable sent by Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman to his deputy in D.C which states "you can simply instruct the Ambassadors to take no further action, noting that there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme." McSherry, adds, "According to [U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert] White, instructions from a secretary of state cannot be ignored unless there is a countermanding order received via a secret (CIA) backchannel."

Kornbluh and Dinges conclude that "The paper trail is clear: the State Department and the CIA had enough intelligence to take concrete steps to thwart Condor assassination planning. Those steps were initiated but never implemented." Shlaudeman's deputy Hewson Ryan later acknowledged in an oral history interview that the State Department was "remiss" in its handling of the case. "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. ... Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don't know", he stated in reference to the Letelier-Moffitt bombing. "But we didn't."

A CIA document called Condor "a counter-terrorism organization" and noted that the Condor countries had a specialized telecommunications system called "CONDORTEL." A 1978 cable from the US ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, to the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, was published on 6 March 2001 by The New York Times. The document was released in November 2000 by the Clinton administration under the Chile Declassification Project. In the cable Ambassador White reported a conversation with General Alejandro Fretes Davalos, chief of staff of Paraguay's armed forces, who informed him that the South American intelligence chiefs involved in Condor "[kept] in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which cover[ed] all of Latin America".

According to Davalos, this installation was "employed to co-ordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries". Robert White feared that the US connection to Condor might be publicly revealed at a time when the assassination in the U.S.A. of Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier and his American assistant Ronni Moffitt was being investigated. White cabled that "it would seem advisable to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in US interest."

Declassified State Department documents suggest that the US may have facilitated communications for Operation Condor, and has been called by J. Patrice McSherry (Long Island Univ.) "another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that U.S. military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret partner or sponsor."

In addition, an Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact that the CIA was privy to Condor and had played a key role in setting up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states.

Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, was closely involved diplomatically with the Southern Cone governments at the time and well aware of the Condor plan. According to the French newspaper L'Humanité, the first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups, movements such as the Triple A set up in Argentina by Juan Perón and Isabel Martínez de Perón's "personal secretary" José López Rega, and Rodolfo Almirón (arrested in Spain in 2006).

On 31 May 2001, French judge Roger Le Loire requested that a summons be served on Henry Kissinger while he was staying at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. Le Loire wanted to question Kissinger as a witness for alleged U.S. involvement in Operation Condor and for possible US knowledge concerning the "disappearances" of 5 French nationals in Chile during military rule. Kissinger left Paris that evening, and Loire's inquiries were directed to the U.S. State Department.

In July 2001, the Chilean high court granted investigating judge Juan Guzmán the right to question Kissinger about the 1973 killing of American journalist Charles Horman, whose execution at the hands of the Chilean military following the coup was dramatized in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film, Missing. The judge's questions were relayed to Kissinger via diplomatic routes but were not answered.

In August 2001, Argentine Judge Rodolfo Canicoba sent a letter rogatory to the US State Department, in accordance with the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), requesting a deposition by Kissinger to aid the judge's investigation of Operation Condor.

On 10 September 2001, a civil suit was filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court by the family of Gen. René Schneider, murdered former Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, asserting that Kissinger ordered Schneider's murder because he refused to endorse plans for a military coup. Schneider was killed by coup-plotters loyal to General Roberto Viaux in a botched kidnapping attempt. As part of the suit, Schneider's two sons are attempting to sue Kissinger and then-CIA director Richard Helms for $3 million.

On 16 February 2007, a request for the extradition of Kissinger was filed at the Supreme Court of Uruguay on behalf of Bernardo Arnone, a political activist who was kidnapped, tortured and disappeared by the dictatorial regime in 1976.

The "French connection"
French journalist Marie-Monique Robin found in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the original document proving that a 1959 agreement between Paris and Buenos Aires set up a "permanent French military mission" of officers who had fought in the Algerian War, and which was located in the offices of the chief of staff of the Argentine Army. It continued until François Mitterrand was elected President of France in 1981. She showed how Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's government secretly collaborated with Videla's junta in Argentina and with Augusto Pinochet's regime in Chile.

The first Argentine officers, among them Alcides Lopez Aufranc, went to Paris to attend two-year courses at the Ecole de Guerre military school in 1957, two years before the Cuban Revolution and when no Argentine guerrilla movement existed. "In practice", said Robin to Página/12, "the arrival of the French in Argentina led to a massive extension of intelligence services and of the use of torture as the primary weapon of anti-subversive war in the concept of modern warfare." The annihilation decrees signed by Isabel Perón had been inspired by French texts. During the Battle of Algiers, police forces were put under the authority of the Army, and in particular of the paratroopers, who generalized interrogation sessions, systematically using torture and then disappearances.

On 10 September 2003, French Green Party deputies Noël Mamère, Martine Billard and Yves Cochet petitioned for the constitution of a Parliamentary Commission on the "role of France in the support of military regimes in Latin America from 1973 to 1984" before the Foreign Affairs Commission of the National Assembly, presided by Edouard Balladur. The only newspaper to report this was Le Monde. However, Deputy Roland Blum, in charge of the Commission, refused to hear Marie-Monique Robin, and in December 2003 published a 12-page report described by Robin as being in the utmost bad faith. It claimed that no agreement had been signed, despite the agreement found by Robin in the Quai d'Orsay

When French Minister of Foreign Affairs Dominique de Villepin traveled to Chile in February 2004, he claimed that there had been no cooperation between France and the military regimes.

Reporter Marie-Monique Robin said to L'Humanité newspaper: "The French have systematized a military technique in the urban environment which would be copied and passed to Latin American dictatorships.". The methods employed during the 1957 Battle of Algiers were systematized and exported to the War School in Buenos Aires. Roger Trinquier's famous book on counter-insurgency had a very strong influence in South America. Robin said that she was shocked to learn that the French intelligence agency Direction de surveillance du territoire (DST) communicated to the DINA the names of refugees who returned to Chile (Operation Retorno), all of whom were killed. "Of course, this puts the French government in the dock, and Giscard d'Estaing, then President of the Republic. I was very shocked by the duplicity of the French diplomatic position which, at the same time received political refugees with open arms, and collaborated with the dictatorships."

Marie-Monique Robin also showed ties between the French far right and Argentina since the 1930s, in particular through the Roman Catholic fundamentalist organization Cité catholique created by Jean Ousset, a former secretary of Charles Maurras (founder of the royalist Action Française movement). La Cité published a review, Le Verbe, which influenced military officers during the Algerian War, notably by justifying their use of torture. At the end of the 1950s, the Cité catholique established itself in Argentina and set up cells in the Army. It greatly expanded during the government of General Juan Carlos Onganía, in particular in 1969.

The key figure of the Cité catholique was priest Georges Grasset, who became Videla's personal confessor and had been the spiritual guide of the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) pro-French Algeria terrorist movement founded in Franquist Spain. This Catholic fundamentalist current in the Argentine Army explains, according to Robin, the importance and duration of Franco-Argentine cooperation. In Buenos Aires, Georges Grasset maintained links with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of St. Pius X in 1970 and excommunicated in 1988. The Society of Pius-X has four monasteries in Argentina, the largest in La Reja. There, a French priest declared to Marie-Monique Robin: "to save the soul of a Communist priest, one must kill him." There she met Luis Roldan, former Under Secretary of Religion under Carlos Menem (President of Argentina from 1989 to 1999), who was presented by Dominique Lagneau, the priest in charge of the monastery, as "Mr. Cité catholique in Argentina". Bruno Genta and Juan Carlos Goyeneche represent this ideology.

Argentine Admiral Luis María Mendía, who had theorized the practice of "death flights", testified in January 2007 before Argentine judges that a French intelligence "agent", Bertrand de Perseval, had participated in the abduction of two French nuns, Léonie Duquet and Alice Domont, who were later murdered. Perseval, who lives today in Thailand, denied any links with the abduction but admitted being a former member of the OAS, and having escaped for Argentina after the March 1962 Evian Accords that ended the Algerian War (1954–62). Referring to Marie Monique Robin's film documentary titled The Death Squads – the French School (Les escadrons de la mort – l'école française), Luis María Mendía asked of the Argentine Court that former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, former French premier Pierre Messmer, former French ambassador to Buenos Aires François de la Gorce, and all officials in place in the French embassy in Buenos Aires between 1976 and 1983 be called before the court.

Besides this "French connection" he has also accused former head of state Isabel Perón and former ministers Carlos Ruckauf and Antonio Cafiero, who had signed the "anti-subversion decrees" before Videla's 1976 coup d'état. According to ESMA survivor Graciela Daleo, this is another tactic which claims that these crimes were legitimised by the 1987 Obediencia Debida law, and that they were also covered by Isabel Perón's "anti-subversion decrees" (which, if true, would give them a veneer of legality, despite torture being forbidden by the Argentine Constitution) Alfredo Astiz also referred before the courts to the "French connection".

Legal actions
Chilean judge Juan Guzman, who had arraigned Pinochet at his return to Chile after his arrest in London, started procedures against some 30 torturers, including former head of the DINA Manuel Contreras, for the disappearance of 20 Chilean victims of the Condor plan.

In Argentina the CONADEP human rights commission led by writer Ernesto Sabato investigated human rights abuses during the "Dirty War", and the 1985 Trial of the Juntas found top officers who ran the military governments guilty of acts of state terrorism. However, the amnesty laws (Ley de Obediencia Debida and Ley de Punto Final) put an end to the trials until the amnesties themselves were repealed by the Argentine Supreme Court in 2003. Criminals such as Alfredo Astiz, sentenced in absentia in France for the disappearance of the two French nuns Alice Domont and Léonie Duquet will now have to answer for their involvement in Condor.

Chilean Enrique Arancibia Clavel was condemned in Argentina for the assassination of Carlos Prats and of his wife. Former Uruguayan president Juan María Bordaberry, his minister of Foreign Affairs and six military officers, responsible for the disappearance in Argentina in 1976 of opponents to the Uruguayan regime, were arrested in 2006.

On 3 August 2007 General Raúl Iturriaga, former head of DINA, was captured in the Chilean town of Viña del Mar on the Pacific coast. He had previously been a fugitive from a five-year jail term, after being sentenced for the kidnapping of Luis Dagoberto San Martin, a 21-year-old opponent of Pinochet. Martín had been captured in 1974 and taken to a DINA detention centre, from which he "disappeared." Iturriaga was also wanted in Argentina for the assassination of General Prats.

According to French newspaper L'Humanité "in most of those countries legal action against the authors of crimes of 'lese-humanity' from the 1970s to 1990 owes more to flaws in the amnesty laws than to a real will of the governments in power, which, on the contrary, wave the flag of 'national reconciliation'. It is sad to say that two of the pillars of the Condor Operation, Alfredo Stroessner and Augusto Pinochet, never paid for their crimes and died without ever answering charges about the 'disappeared' – who continue to haunt the memory of people who had been crushed by fascist brutality.".

South American intelligence agencies

 * DINA
 * DIM
 * SNI
 * SIDE

Some participants in Operation Condor

 * Stefano Delle Chiaie, Italian operative, also an alleged operative for Gladio "stay-behind" NATO clandestine structure
 * Michael Townley, US expatriate, DINA agent involved in Orlando Letelier's 1976 murder in Washington, D.C.
 * Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban anti-Castro volunteer who participated in Operation Condor and worked for the Venezuelan DISIP (currently in the US)
 * Virgilio Paz Romero, who participated to Orlando Letelier's 1976 assassination and the attack against Bernardo Leighton in Rome
 * Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (aka Triple A)
 * Italian secret services

Prominent victims of Operation Condor
A few well-known victims of Operation Condor:


 * Martín Almada, educator in Paraguay, arrested in 1974 and tortured for three years
 * Víctor Olea Alegría, member of the Socialist Party, arrested on 11 September, 1974 and "disappeared" (head of DINA Manuel Contreras was convicted in 2002 for this crime)
 * General Carlos Prats, who immediately preceded Pinochet at the head of the Chilean army, assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1974
 * William Beausire, businessman with dual British and Chilean nationality, abducted in transit in Buenos Aires airport in November 1974, taken to the Villa Grimaldi torture centre in Chile and never seen since.
 * Bernardo Leighton, Christian-Democrat who narrowly escaped murder in Rome in 1975 organized by Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie
 * Carlos Altamirano, leader of the Chilean Socialist Party, targeted for murder by Pinochet in 1975
 * Attempted assassination against Emilio Aragonés, the Cuban ambassador in Buenos Aires, in 1975, organized by leader of the CORU, Orlando Bosch
 * Sheila Cassidy, British physician, arrested in Chile in 1975 and tortured for medical treatment to an opponent of the regime.
 * Volodia Teitelboim, member of the Communist Party of Chile, targeted for murder alongside Carlos Altamirano, in Mexico in 1976
 * "Disappearance" of two Cuban diplomats in Argentina, Crecencio Galañega Hernández and Jesús Cejas Arias who transited through Orletti detention center in Buenos Aires (9 August, 1976 – see Lista de centros clandestinos de detención (Argentina)); both were questioned by the SIDE and the DINA, with the knowledge of the FBI and the CIA
 * Andrés Pascal Allende, nephew of Salvador Allende and president of the MIR, escaped assassination attempt in Costa Rica in March 1976
 * Orlando Letelier, murdered in 1976 in Washington, D.C. with his assistant Ronni Moffitt
 * Christian-Democrat and president of Chile from 1964 to 1970 Eduardo Frei Montalva, who may have been poisoned in the early 1980s according to current investigations
 * former Bolivian president Juan José Torres, assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1976
 * Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, former Uruguayan deputy, assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1976
 * Zelmar Michelini, former Uruguayan deputy, assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1976
 * Carmelo Soria, Spanish diplomat, civil servant of the CEPAL (a UN organism), assassinated on 21 July 1976
 * Jorge Zaffaroni and Maria Emilia Islas de Zaffaroni, maybe members of the Tupamaros, "disappeared" in Buenos Aires on 29 September, 1976, kidnapped by the Batallón de Inteligencia 601, who handed them out to the Uruguayan OCOAS (Organismo Coordinador de Operaciones Anti-Subversivas)
 * Dagmar Ingrid Hagelin, 17-year-old Swedish girl shot in the back by Alfredo Astiz in 1977 and later murdered
 * Poet Juan Gelman's son and daughter-in-law (whose baby was stolen by the Uruguayan military)


 * US Congressman Edward Koch, who became aware in 2001 of relations between 1970s threats on his life and Operation Condor

Archives and reports

 * National Security Archives, a NGO which publicizes the few CIA documents obtained under Freedom of Information Act
 * "Terror archives", discovered in 1992 in Paraguay, which permitted opening of prosecution cases against former or active militaries involved in Operation Condor
 * Rettig Report
 * Valech Report
 * Memoriaviva (Complete list of Victims, Torture Centres and Criminals – in Spanish)

Detention and torture centers
Automotores Orletti
 * Colonia Dignidad, a bizarre and secretive German enclave in Chile, active until 2005, when it was put under state control
 * Esmeralda (BE-43)
 * Estadio Nacional de Chile
 * Villa Grimaldi

Other operations and strategies related to Condor

 * Operation Colombo, for which Augusto Pinochet was being judged at the time of his death
 * Caravan of Death, carried on a few weeks after the 1973 coup

Fictional references

 * Don Winslow's 2005 books The Power of the Dog is based on the actions and some of the consequences of Operation Condor.
 * In DC Comics, the father of the superheroine Fire was a key figure in Operation Condor.
 * Nathan Englander's novel The Ministry of Special Cases is set in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. Its main characters are Kaddish and Lillian, a Jewish couple whose son Pato is disappeared shortly after the Videla junta takes power. Faber and Faber, London, 2007.
 * Memorias de un desaparecido / Memoirs of a Missing One (1996)

Footnotes and references
75 A.J. Languth, Hikden Terrors New York, Pantheon, Nueva Yor 1978, pag. 251