Pubdate: Sun, 1 Nov 1998
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Contact:  213-237-4712
Copyright: 1998 Los Angeles Times.
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Author: Lucy Komisar

INTO THE MURKY DEPTHS OF 'OPERATION CONDOR'

NEW YORK--The continued detention in London of Chile's former 
dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet points to many unanswered questions 
about his rule, including a terrorist conspiracy by six 
U.S.-supported Latin American governments--Argentina, Bolivia, 
Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay--to murder their political 
opponents around the world. The Central Intelligence Agency and some 
U.S. government officials knew about this 1970s operation, but didn't
reveal it to the public or Congress.

Known as "Operation Condor," foreign 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 United States 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
the 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 that revelations about 
the U.S. role in the 1973 coup overthrowing Salvador Allende would 
come out during a trial. But, since the current investigation 
concerns the post-coup period, some U.S. officials are more likely 
worried about revelations of U.S. knowledge of and connections to 
Operation Condor.

The U.S. certainly knew about it. A week after the killings of Orlando
Letelier, former Chilean foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S.,
and his Instiute for Policy Studies colleague Ronni Moffitt in
Washington in 1976, Robert Scherrer, the FBI's attache in Buenos
Aires assigned to the case, reported key information to Washington.
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," he wrote in a recently release
document. He said the operation included setting up teams to carry
out assassinations around the world and speculated it might have
orchestrated 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 1973 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 at the time was cabling protests of human-rights
abuses and coauthoring a dissent channel memorandum that called for
more U.S. attention to the issue, told me the CIA and DINA were
working together. He said, "I don't believe the CIA set up DINA, but
they were in a close relationship. 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's 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 photos 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 huge 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 Mexican
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 U.S. 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.

In August 1975, Contreras had met in Washington with CIA deputy
director Vernon A. Walters. Up until then, cooperation between the 
security services of the Latin American dictators had been informal.

There are no declassified documents that prove Walters urged or
approved the plan to set up Operation Condor, but the month after 
meeting with Walters, 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 ment
junta's principal adversaries abroad, especially in Mexico,
Argentina, Costa Rica, the U.S.A. and Italy." After Contreras'
meeting with the military intelligence chiefs of Argentina, Brazil,
Paraguay and Uruguay in October, the relationship was formalized and
a joint information center was established at DINA
headquarters.

In March 1976, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), and several other
members of Congress visited Chile and met with human-rights defenders
there. Miller has now called on President Bill 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 ordered the 1976 car-bomb 
assassination in Washington of Letelier and Moffitt.

It is widely believed that Operation Condor already had 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 opposition leader Bernardo Leighton and
his wife. Those cases are being investigated by judicial authorities
in Argentina and Italy, who might like to see U.S. archives.

The CIA immediately connected the Letelier-Moffitt killings to
Operation Condor. After the assassinations, the agency decided the 
network had become a rogue operation that could create problems in 
the United States. 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. The 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.

Evidence of Argentine participation was exposed during state
prosecution of the military junta by the government of President Raul
Alfonsin.

Two days after the congressional request, the State Department said it
was prepared to look at ways to accelerate its declassification
process. If the U.S. expects to be taken seriously in its protests
against international terrorism by political adversaries, it must
open its documents on Operation Condor, the terrorist operation of
its sleazier friends.

- - - -

Lucy Komisar Is Working on a Book About U.s. Human-rights Policy in 
the 1970s and '80s, Including a Detailed Case Study of Chile
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Checked-by: Patrick Henry