Presidential X-Files: Operation Condor
Operation Condor was a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state-supported terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents. Because of its secretive nature, the exact number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is unclear, with some estimates putting the death toll at 60,000, with roughly 30,000 of these in Argentina. In addition, 30,000 persons are listed as "disappeared" and another 400,000 imprisoned. Victims included dissidents and leftists, union leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals and suspected guerrillas. It was described by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as "a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion." Operation Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, and to some extent Ecuador and Peru. The United States government provided planning, coordinating, training on torture, technical support and supplied military aid to the South American governments during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and the Reagan administrations.
According to American historian J. Patrice McSherry, CIA documents from 1976 disclose that, in the 1960s and early 1970s plans were developed among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies to deal with perceived threats in South America from political dissidents. A declassified CIA document dated June 23, 1976, states that "in early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets." The program was developed as a reaction to a series of government coups d'états by military groups, primarily in the 1970s in Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina.
Prominent victims of Condor include two former Uruguayan legislators, former Bolivian president Juan José Torres, former Chilean Minister of the Interior, Bernardo Leighton, former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 26-year old American colleague, Ronni Moffitt. A loose cooperation among various security services had existed prior to the creation of Operation Condor. The goal was "eliminating Marxist subversion." During a Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on September 3, 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. Their goal was to destroy the "subversive" threat represented by the presence of thousands of political exiles in Argentina.
On November 25, 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, General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces developed the concept of Operation Condor. The targets of the operation were armed groups, but the governments broadened their attacks against all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others.
In July, the CIA gathered intelligence that members of Plan Condor had the intention of striking "against leaders of indigenous terrorist groups residing abroad." In late 1977, numerous corpses washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires. There were also hundreds of children taken from mothers in prison who had been kidnapped. The children were handed over in illegal adoptions. In a report written from Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Harry W. Shlaudeman to Secretary Kissinger on August 3, 1976, it was reported that the military regimes in South America were coming together to join forces for security reasons, concerned about the spread of Marxism and the implications that this could have on their hold on power. Shlaudeman expressed concern that the "siege mentality" that permeated the members of Operation Condor could lead to instability between the military and civilian institutions in the region.
The dictatorships and their intelligence services were responsible for tens of thousands of killed and missing people in the period between 1975 and 1985. Brazilian journalist Nilson Mariano estimates the number of killed and missing people as 2,000 in Paraguay; 3,196 in Chile; 297 in Uruguay; 366 in Brazil; and 30,000 in Argentina. Estimates of numbers of killed and disappeared by member countries during the period of operation are 7,000-30,000 in Argentina, 3,000-10,000 in Chile, 116–546 in Bolivia, 434–1,000 in Brazil, 200–400 in Paraguay and 123–215 in Uruguay.
On December 22, 1992, torture victim Martín Almada and José Agustín Fernández, a Paraguayan judge, visited a police station in the Lambaré suburb of Asunción to look for files on a former political prisoner. They found what became known as the "Archives of Terror", documents recording the demise of thousands of Latin American political prisoners, who were secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The archives held a total of 60,000 documents, weighing 4 tons and comprising 593,000 microfilmed pages. The evidence in the archives were later used to prosecute former military officers. According to these archives, other countries, such as Peru, cooperated by providing intelligence information in response to requests from the security services of the Southern Cone nations.
Mexico, along with Costa Rica, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Sweden, received many people fleeing as refugees from the terror regimes. The third phase of Operation Condor included plans to assassinate and take other measures against opponents of the military dictatorships in other countries, such as France, Portugal, the United States, Italy and Mexico. These plans were carried out in cases such as the murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt in the United States.
Operation Condor officially ended when Argentina ousted the military dictatorship in 1983 (following its defeat in the Falklands War) and restored democracy. During its tenure, the level of debt contracted illegally by the military dictatorships reached high levels. Argentina's foreign debt increased fourfold, resulting in the worst financial crisis in Argentine history.
The United States provided key organizational, financial and technical assistance to the operation into the 1980s. In a United States Department of State briefing for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Operation Condor was described as an effort of six countries in the southern cone of Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) to win the "Third-World-War" by wiping out "subversion" through transnational secret intelligence activities, kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination. The report describes these countries seeing themselves as "the last bastion of Christian civilization", justifying their efforts against communism, seeing it like the "Israeli actions against Palestinians terrorist".
From 1960 to the early 1970s, the plans were developed among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies to deal with political dissidents in South America. A declassified CIA document dated June 23, 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." US officials were aware of what was going on.
In September 1976, US intelligence services were quite aware of the infrastructure and goals of Operation Condor and that Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile were already fervently conducting operations, mainly in Argentina, against leftist targets. The United States government was aware of Operation Condor's more nefarious operations. The report to Kissinger notes, "the formation of special teams from member countries who are to carry out operations to include assassinations against terrorist or supporters of terrorist organizations." The report also highlighted the fact that these special teams were intelligence service agents rather than military personnel. The State Department briefing for Kissinger mentioned awareness of Operation Condor's plans to conduct possible operations in France and Portugal.
The US government sponsored and collaborated with DINA (Directorate of National Intelligence), as well as 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 after his involvement in the Letelier-Moffit assassination came to light. The Paraguayan government made 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. In 1975 the FBI searched in the US for individuals wanted by DINA.
In a February 1976 telecom from the embassy in Buenos Aires to the State Department, intelligence noted the United States possessed awareness of the coming Argentinian coup. The telecom indicates the US also was aware of the planning of human rights violations before they occurred and did not step in to prevent them. It adds: "It is encouraging to note that the Argentine military are aware of the problem and are already focusing on ways to avoid letting human rights issues become an irritant in US-Argentine Relations." Kissinger expressed his support for the repression of these political opponents." On October 5, 1976 he met with Argentina's Foreign Minister and said: "Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better... We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help."
Patricia M. Derian, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs from 1977 to 1981, later said that Kissinger's role in approving of the junta's repression "sickened me that with an imperial wave of his hand, an American could sentence people to death."
In June 1999, by order of President Bill Clinton, the State Department released thousands of declassified documents which revealed that the CIA and the State and Defense Departments were clearly aware of Condor. One Department of Defense report dated October 1, 1976, reported that Latin American military officers bragged about it to their U.S. counterparts and that Argentina had created a special Condor team "structured much like a U.S. Special Forces Team." The declassified record shows that Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its "murder operations" on August 5, 1976, in a 14-page report from Shlaudeman.
A 1978 cable from the US ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, to the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, was published on March 6, 2001 by The New York Times. The document confirmed that Paraguayan military officials kept in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covered all of Latin America. The US feared that the 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.
Henry Kissinger served as Secretary of State in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He was well aware of the Condor plan and was closely involved diplomatically with the governments who supported Condor, going so far as to be Jorge Videla's personal guest at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. On May 31, 2001, a French judge named Roger Le Loire requested that a summons be served on Henry Kissinger while Kissinger was staying at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. Le Loire wanted to question Kissinger about alleged U.S. involvement in Operation Condor and for possible US knowledge concerning the "disappearances" of five 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, who was executed by the Chilean military (portrayed dramatically in the 1982 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 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.
According to American historian J. Patrice McSherry, CIA documents from 1976 disclose that, in the 1960s and early 1970s plans were developed among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies to deal with perceived threats in South America from political dissidents. A declassified CIA document dated June 23, 1976, states that "in early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets." The program was developed as a reaction to a series of government coups d'états by military groups, primarily in the 1970s in Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina.
Prominent victims of Condor include two former Uruguayan legislators, former Bolivian president Juan José Torres, former Chilean Minister of the Interior, Bernardo Leighton, former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 26-year old American colleague, Ronni Moffitt. A loose cooperation among various security services had existed prior to the creation of Operation Condor. The goal was "eliminating Marxist subversion." During a Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on September 3, 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. Their goal was to destroy the "subversive" threat represented by the presence of thousands of political exiles in Argentina.
On November 25, 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, General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces developed the concept of Operation Condor. The targets of the operation were armed groups, but the governments broadened their attacks against all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others.
In July, the CIA gathered intelligence that members of Plan Condor had the intention of striking "against leaders of indigenous terrorist groups residing abroad." In late 1977, numerous corpses washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires. There were also hundreds of children taken from mothers in prison who had been kidnapped. The children were handed over in illegal adoptions. In a report written from Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Harry W. Shlaudeman to Secretary Kissinger on August 3, 1976, it was reported that the military regimes in South America were coming together to join forces for security reasons, concerned about the spread of Marxism and the implications that this could have on their hold on power. Shlaudeman expressed concern that the "siege mentality" that permeated the members of Operation Condor could lead to instability between the military and civilian institutions in the region.
The dictatorships and their intelligence services were responsible for tens of thousands of killed and missing people in the period between 1975 and 1985. Brazilian journalist Nilson Mariano estimates the number of killed and missing people as 2,000 in Paraguay; 3,196 in Chile; 297 in Uruguay; 366 in Brazil; and 30,000 in Argentina. Estimates of numbers of killed and disappeared by member countries during the period of operation are 7,000-30,000 in Argentina, 3,000-10,000 in Chile, 116–546 in Bolivia, 434–1,000 in Brazil, 200–400 in Paraguay and 123–215 in Uruguay.
On December 22, 1992, torture victim Martín Almada and José Agustín Fernández, a Paraguayan judge, visited a police station in the Lambaré suburb of Asunción to look for files on a former political prisoner. They found what became known as the "Archives of Terror", documents recording the demise of thousands of Latin American political prisoners, who were secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The archives held a total of 60,000 documents, weighing 4 tons and comprising 593,000 microfilmed pages. The evidence in the archives were later used to prosecute former military officers. According to these archives, other countries, such as Peru, cooperated by providing intelligence information in response to requests from the security services of the Southern Cone nations.
Mexico, along with Costa Rica, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Sweden, received many people fleeing as refugees from the terror regimes. The third phase of Operation Condor included plans to assassinate and take other measures against opponents of the military dictatorships in other countries, such as France, Portugal, the United States, Italy and Mexico. These plans were carried out in cases such as the murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt in the United States.
Operation Condor officially ended when Argentina ousted the military dictatorship in 1983 (following its defeat in the Falklands War) and restored democracy. During its tenure, the level of debt contracted illegally by the military dictatorships reached high levels. Argentina's foreign debt increased fourfold, resulting in the worst financial crisis in Argentine history.
The United States provided key organizational, financial and technical assistance to the operation into the 1980s. In a United States Department of State briefing for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Operation Condor was described as an effort of six countries in the southern cone of Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) to win the "Third-World-War" by wiping out "subversion" through transnational secret intelligence activities, kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination. The report describes these countries seeing themselves as "the last bastion of Christian civilization", justifying their efforts against communism, seeing it like the "Israeli actions against Palestinians terrorist".
From 1960 to the early 1970s, the plans were developed among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies to deal with political dissidents in South America. A declassified CIA document dated June 23, 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." US officials were aware of what was going on.
In September 1976, US intelligence services were quite aware of the infrastructure and goals of Operation Condor and that Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile were already fervently conducting operations, mainly in Argentina, against leftist targets. The United States government was aware of Operation Condor's more nefarious operations. The report to Kissinger notes, "the formation of special teams from member countries who are to carry out operations to include assassinations against terrorist or supporters of terrorist organizations." The report also highlighted the fact that these special teams were intelligence service agents rather than military personnel. The State Department briefing for Kissinger mentioned awareness of Operation Condor's plans to conduct possible operations in France and Portugal.
The US government sponsored and collaborated with DINA (Directorate of National Intelligence), as well as 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 after his involvement in the Letelier-Moffit assassination came to light. The Paraguayan government made 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. In 1975 the FBI searched in the US for individuals wanted by DINA.
In a February 1976 telecom from the embassy in Buenos Aires to the State Department, intelligence noted the United States possessed awareness of the coming Argentinian coup. The telecom indicates the US also was aware of the planning of human rights violations before they occurred and did not step in to prevent them. It adds: "It is encouraging to note that the Argentine military are aware of the problem and are already focusing on ways to avoid letting human rights issues become an irritant in US-Argentine Relations." Kissinger expressed his support for the repression of these political opponents." On October 5, 1976 he met with Argentina's Foreign Minister and said: "Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better... We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help."
Patricia M. Derian, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs from 1977 to 1981, later said that Kissinger's role in approving of the junta's repression "sickened me that with an imperial wave of his hand, an American could sentence people to death."
In June 1999, by order of President Bill Clinton, the State Department released thousands of declassified documents which revealed that the CIA and the State and Defense Departments were clearly aware of Condor. One Department of Defense report dated October 1, 1976, reported that Latin American military officers bragged about it to their U.S. counterparts and that Argentina had created a special Condor team "structured much like a U.S. Special Forces Team." The declassified record shows that Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its "murder operations" on August 5, 1976, in a 14-page report from Shlaudeman.
A 1978 cable from the US ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, to the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, was published on March 6, 2001 by The New York Times. The document confirmed that Paraguayan military officials kept in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covered all of Latin America. The US feared that the 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.
Henry Kissinger served as Secretary of State in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He was well aware of the Condor plan and was closely involved diplomatically with the governments who supported Condor, going so far as to be Jorge Videla's personal guest at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. On May 31, 2001, a French judge named Roger Le Loire requested that a summons be served on Henry Kissinger while Kissinger was staying at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. Le Loire wanted to question Kissinger about alleged U.S. involvement in Operation Condor and for possible US knowledge concerning the "disappearances" of five 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, who was executed by the Chilean military (portrayed dramatically in the 1982 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 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.