The Condor Years (13 page)

Such a scenario cannot be considered factual solely on Contreras’s word. He has shrewdly used his relationship with the CIA to embarrass the United States and has charged that the CIA was responsible for some of the crimes of which DINA has been accused, including the Letelier assassination. In this case, however, there is a significant body of corroborating evidence for Contreras’s statement about CIA training of DINA.

DINA already had 700 employees (not counting the web of paid and unpaid informants) in January 1974. The U.S. defense attaché in Chile reported on its training needs: “The major problem of DINA is that its personnel, a mix of military and civilians, are not properly trained for their jobs. They especially lack elementary training in intelligence and interrogation techniques and tend to be extremely secretive.”

That the CIA provided such training is established by several official sources. The Hinchey Report, in a passage first cited in
Chapter 4
, refers to CIA training of DINA “to combat subversion and terrorism from abroad, not in combating internal opponents of the government.” A still secret 1979 report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee corroborates elements of Contreras’s
story directly. “Shortly after DINA was established, Director Contreras came to the United States to seek American assistance. According to the CIA, the United States made clear to Contreras that no training or support which could aid internal repression could be given. Agency officials did, however, brief Contreras on the fundamentals of intelligence organization and management.”

Declassified CIA documents are mum about the details of the training and about Contreras’s assertion that eight CIA trainers spent several months in Chile. On the crucial fact of the CIA trainers’ presence, Contreras is corroborated by his chief of operations, Colonel Pedro Espinoza. In subpoenaed testimony in 2000 Espinoza said he set up an intelligence school partly based on “courses given by the CIA instructors in Santiago.” My interviews with two lower ranking former DINA agents provide other evidence. One said he attended lectures given by Americans he presumed to be CIA. The sessions took place at Contreras’s Tejas Verde regiment, the site of DINA training. The other agent said he saw CIA manuals of procedure and intelligence instruction. Before he learned of the U.S. role, he said, “I thought Contreras was some kind of genius to have built up such a large, complicated apparatus in such a short time.”

Finally, there is corroboration for Contreras’s claim that the CIA attempted to post its own agents in operational jobs inside DINA. I learned that a similar arrangement was in place in Venezuela. The country’s intelligence service, manned by CIA-trained officers, many born in Cuba, had become a virtual subsidiary of the CIA—what Contreras says the CIA had in mind for Chile. I interviewed Orlando Garcia, of the Venezuelan intelligence service, DISIP, and Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was president at the time. Both confirmed that at least one CIA officer was posted full time and had operational duties in the offices of the Armed Forces Intelligence Service in Caracas, which was the Venezuelan equivalent of the CIA.

There are three additional pieces of evidence of the CIA’s intimate relationship with Contreras around this time. The CIA ordered a “covert name trace” on Contreras on May 20, 1974—during the time Contreras alleges the CIA trainers were present in Chile. A name trace is an elaborate security procedure involving queries to all CIA stations and records searches about the person. It is a CIA prerequisite to establishing a close, often paid, relationship with a source. Contreras received at least one payment from the CIA, in mid-1975, of an undisclosed amount, according to the Hinchey Report. (The same document that revealed the name trace also says that the CIA security files on Contreras
were destroyed in 1991, an act of extraordinary arrogance by the agency to prevent further embarrassing disclosures about its working relationship with Contreras.)

The third piece of information is a CIA memo written about the time Contreras was in Washington in early 1974. It contains a detailed insider account of Pinochet’s rivalries with his fellow generals. An annotation indicates it was written with input from General Vernon Walters, then deputy director of the CIA. Its primary focus is on Pinochet’s efforts to neutralize the other members of the ruling junta and concentrate power in his own hands:

The CIA was also well informed about DINA’s first expansion of operations beyond its borders. “In early 1974, security forces from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, [and] Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets,” a CIA report said, noting, however, that the coordination was not yet “very effective.” U.S. embassy officials began to hear of regular meetings of the security and intelligence forces for the five countries in the region, sometimes including Brazil as well. They knew it as the “coordinating group,” whose most important meetings were held at Campo de Mayo army base in Buenos Aires.

As predicted, Pinochet began to deal with “disgruntled officers.” No military rival was as threatening to Pinochet as his predecessor, General Carlos Prats, who was living in voluntary exile in Argentina. Prats’s resignation as commander in chief in August 1973 had preserved unity in the armed forces and removed the last obstacle to the coup plotters’ move against Allende. Shortly after
the coup, he accepted an offer of support and protection from Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón. Prats and his wife, Sofia, took up residence in a comfortable apartment—subsidized by his hosts—in the affluent Palermo district. Argentine as well as Chilean military officers were frequent visitors. The discreet former general made no public comments, but to his visitors, Prats made no secret of his disgust with the brutality and antidemocratic character of Pinochet’s regime. He had regular, friendly conversations with the Chilean military attaché in Argentina, who reported on his activities to SIM, the military intelligence service. Prats’s correspondence with officers in Chile was also voluminous and open. He conducted himself as a proud military man who had served his country while in office and had nothing to fear or hide in retirement.

Prats began writing a memoir of his military service, intended as an
apologia
for military subordination to the constitution, the guiding principle developed by his assassinated predecessor General René Schneider and ultimately repudiated by Pinochet. He had taken his private papers with him into exile and used them to reconstruct a day-by-day account of the events inside the military leading to the coup. Prats wrote daily until late at night, even while holding a regular job at an export-import firm to support his family. By September 20, 1974, he had finished the manuscript, more than 100,000 words. That day, he composed a fifteen-page handwritten prologue, titled “Letter to my fellow citizens”—a letter that, along with his memoir, would not become public for more than a decade.

The plot to assassinate Prats began to unfold in the months of June and July 1974, about the time Prats lost the protection of President Perón, who died on July 1 and was replaced by his ineffectual widow, Isabelita (María E. Martínez), and a cabal of mostly right-wing Peronists.

This account of the crime is based on new information developed by Argentine investigating judge María Servini de Cubría and her staff and on the never before published confession of DINA’s American-born assassin, Michael Vernon Townley.

Townley, captured by the FBI in April 1978 for his role in the Letelier assassination, has provided hundreds of hours of testimony for other investigations in Europe and Latin America. He has long been linked to the Prats murder—stamps in his passport place him in Buenos Aires at the time—but he had always refused to talk about his role. A plea bargain agreement, in exchange for his full testimony in the Letelier case, seemed to shield him from being questioned about murders outside the United States. Then, in 1999, in secret testimony in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal court, in the presence of Judge Servini, Townley finally described in detail what happened on those days in late September 1974.

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, Townley moved to Chile as a boy when his father was made general manager of Ford Motor Company’s operations there. In his twenties, he was caught up in fighting against the Allende government. He first came to the attention of the CIA in 1970—a covert name trace was done just as it would later be done for his future boss, Colonel Contreras. Townley wanted to fight world Communism as a CIA agent, but the CIA maintains he was never more than a wanna-be, and spurned his overtures. Failing to find CIA employment, Townley made contact with DINA in June 1974 to pursue his ambition to be an undercover agent.

At about the same time, another agent began to operate in Buenos Aires. Enrique Arancibia Clavel was the black sheep of one of Chile’s most prominent military families. He had attended Chile’s Naval Academy but was forced to leave because of his homosexuality.

Arancibia and Townley both were veterans of the violent gangs carrying out petty terrorism and some serious crimes against the Allende government. Townley had broken into a television station in 1972 and killed a guard. Arancibia, nicknamed “el
Dinamitero
,” led a group of upper-class youths that set off a series of bombs. He was on the fringes of the group that kidnapped and murdered armed forces chief René Schneider in 1970. He joined those who escaped into exile in Argentina. Now, in 1974, both Arancibia and Townley were seeking membership in a new gang, DINA. The Prats murder was their test of fire.

Sometime in the middle of 1974, according to Townley, Pinochet took up
the matter of Prats in a meeting with the chiefs of DINA. Pinochet knew that Prats was writing his memoirs and had refused warnings to desist. He described Prats as “a dangerous man for Chile.” Pinochet’s words were all the mandate Contreras needed. He gave the job of eliminating Prats to his chief of operations, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, and to the head of DINA’s newly created Exterior Department, Colonel Raúl Iturriaga Neumann.

The first plot was expensive and badly botched. According to evidence gathered by the Servini investigation, Iturriaga traveled to Buenos Aires in late July with a bag of cash to hire assassins and to coordinate the operation with the Argentine service, SIDE (
Secretaría de Informaciones de Estado).
Enrique Arancibia was DINA’s point man. He distributed $20,000 to the would-be assassins, including Juan Martín Ciga Corréa, a leader of a fascist group called Milicia and a member of the Triple A, a death squad that had begun to operate after the death of Perón. The plotters were an unwieldy conglomeration of military, government, and civilian participants who kept DINA’s money but failed to carry out the assassination. Townley commented, in later testimony, “the Argentines didn’t have the guts to kill them.”

The assassins, acting with impunity in a country that, in mid-1974, was approaching lawlessness, apparently talked openly about their plans in military and extreme rightist circles. Accurate information about the plot was picked up in mid-August by intelligence agencies in France and East Germany.

In East Berlin, exile leader Carlos Altamirano, head of Chile’s Socialist Party, received a visit from Markus Wolf, chief of international intelligence for East Germany’s Stasi intelligence service. Altamirano knew Wolf well and owed him his life. At the time of the coup in Chile, Altamirano went into hiding and sought Stasi’s help to evade Pinochet’s roundups of opposition leaders. He was one of the most wanted and hated figures by the military, not least because his party was organizing opposition to the coup inside the armed forces. Wolf, a fluent Spanish speaker who ran Stasi operations in Chile during the Allende government, set up a system using false compartments in cars to smuggle fugitives like Altamirano across the border into Argentina.

In August 1974, Wolf was on an errand to save another Chilean. He told Altamirano he had impeccable information of a DINA contract on Prats in Buenos Aires. The assassination was imminent. “They are going to kill Prats, it could only be a matter of hours,” he said, according to Altamirano. “You have
got to get him out of Argentina.” Altamirano immediately called a friend in Buenos Aires, who personally carried the message about the threat to Prats. Prats said he, too, was aware that his life was in danger, but refused to leave the country until he had a Chilean passport. It was a matter of military honor. His application for the passport had been languishing in the Chilean bureaucracy for months.