The Condor Years (21 page)

Manuel Contreras, of Chile’s DINA, hosted the meeting in the grand hall of the War Academy, in western Santiago, where two years before he had created
Chile’s new intelligence force and trained its elite group of officers. We know which of those officers were assigned tasks in Contreras’s international venture: Air Force Colonel Mario Jahn, in charge of the internationalization project as a whole; Lieutenant Colonel Pedro Espinoza, in charge of liaison with Brazilian intelligence and later chief of operations; Major Raul Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, chief of DINA’s Exterior Department (and the officer carrying out the day-to-day correspondence with Arancibia in Buenos Aires); and finally Captain Cristoph Willeke, a young officer who had accompanied Contreras and Espinoza to Washington and would take over the Exterior Department in 1976.

It was an upbeat meeting. The headlines were the recent attacks and intelligence gains against the JCR. Each country, starting with Chile, was allotted one and a half hours for a report about “their intelligence organization, the current situation of subversion and how it is being combated.” Available documents allow us to reconstruct the kind of intelligence information the various agencies were sharing with one another around the time of the Condor meeting. These documents, including a CIA report dated November 26, the first day of the meeting, provide a contemporary picture of how the intelligence agencies perceived their enemies as they launched Operation Condor to combat them internationally.

The documents confirm that the security forces had ample and elaborate information on the JCR military strategy—gathered from sources we now are familiar with: the Fuentes and Santucho interrogations, the ninety-seven microfilms found on the courier Claudet, and DINA’s raid on MIR headquarters in Malloco. A four-page secret cable from the embassy in Santiago summarized U.S. intelligence: “In July 1975, the JCR drew up a plan for a major guerrilla operation targeted against Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, with the MIR portion to be initiated in November-December 1975 with the assassination of four senior government personalities, whose identities were given in code.”

Argentina’s knowledge about the JCR is revealed in a ten-page report dated October 28, 1975, a month before the Condor meeting. The Argentine report has a detailed and accurate account of one of the most secret founding meetings of the JCR, in Santiago in early November 1972, including direct quotation from MIR’s Miguel Enríquez and a list of decisions taken. The JCR’s strategic vision of Marxist revolutionary war is becoming “increasingly important” among other leftist groups in Latin America, the report says, and it lists
eleven other countries, including the United States, whose militant organizations “have sought contact with this continental revolutionary organization.”

A long report found in the Paraguay Archive, from late 1975, devotes eight pages to a description of the JCR’s recent activity, especially its network in Europe. Both the Argentine and the Paraguayan reports lump together the guerrilla organizations allied in the JCR with solidarity and human rights organizations in Europe and elsewhere. It portrays the “defense of human rights” by two organizations, the Russell Tribunal operating out of Belgium, and the International Council of Jurists in Paris, as providing a front for the JCR.

The intelligence reports, without exception, make little attempt to distinguish between the armed guerrilla forces of the JCR and their allies in political, solidarity, and even church-related organizations. Contreras set the tone in the Condor Agenda:

Even as the JCR’s continent-wide subversion was portrayed as the principal threat, the intelligence documents also report the devasting recent defeats suffered by the leftist organizations. A CIA document, sent to Washington the day the Condor meeting opened, takes stock of MIR after the Malloco raid:

The Uruguayans also were shifting their focus to international enemies. A U.S. embassy cable quoted an intelligence communiqué on the success of the new joint forces commando in smashing two Tupamaro infiltration efforts, in May 1974 and June 1975. It continued: “This germ of the seditious organization . . . is a warning about the tireless activity of the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy which uses all types of international organizations with pretensions to seriousness in order to trick people who are not well informed. These international organizations have carefully chosen titles like tribunals, Amnesty, commissions, etc . . .”

This was the shared information base out of which arose Operation Condor. The bottom line was that domestically the leftist organizations had been decimated in every country except Argentina, where the military had only recently launched a full country-wide offensive. The security agencies’ main concern now was outside their own borders, and they were especially obsessed with the JCR, which was functioning underground in Argentina and openly in Europe. Defeating this new, internationally organized threat was a complex, multinational task. It involved tracking underground and public organizations, Marxist extremists along with pro-democracy moderates, political groups, church groups, and human rights groups. All of this had to be confronted on three continents, in Latin America, Europe, and the United States—even elsewhere if needed.

It was a challenge Colonel Contreras relished. His remedy was drastic, and he described it bluntly. We have two statements. To a CIA counterpart, he said: “We will go to Australia if necessary to get our enemies.” The second was his speech to the gathered security chiefs, paraphrased by the Uruguayan representative:

What role did General Pinochet play in this historic meeting? At a minimum, it is likely that he was present to greet the delegates in the formal opening session. Colonel Jahn said the meeting was a priority at the highest level of the military junta and has raised the possibility of a more hands-on role by
Pinochet. “I don’t remember who presided over the conference . . . ,” Jahn said in still-secret testimony to Judge Juan Guzman in October 2003. “It is possible that it was presided over by General Pinochet or by one of the members of the junta because of the importance they wanted to give to this meeting.” Jahn had been intimately involved in the organizational phase of the conference and of Operation Condor, and he probably knows more details than his vague answer reveals. It was he who met in September with Pinochet to discuss an increased budget for DINA’s international activities, and he then had personally delivered Chile’s invitation to each of the intelligence chiefs to attend the meeting.

The first day of the meeting ended with a gala dinner hosted by Contreras. The party was held at a DINA installation in the small town of Melipilla, a few miles west of the city—not far from the site of the recent battle between DINA and MIR. Whiskey was flowing freely. A female DINA officer had been assigned to bring a group of attractive young Chilean women to entertain the men—and another DINA agent took pictures of the festivities.

By Friday evening, agreement was reached. The chiefs of the five delegations signed the final “Acta” or resolution and decided to call the new system “Condor” in honor of the host country’s national bird.

The feature of Condor most openly described in the founding documents, and acknowledged by Contreras in interviews, was the establishment of a central data bank to which all member countries would contribute intelligence. The data bank was located in the headquarters’ Coordinating Center in Chile, designated as “Condor One.” The data bank was designed to gather in one place the best information from each country, and from countries outside the system, about “people . . . organizations and other activities, directly or indirectly connected with subversion.” The model Contreras had in mind for this data bank was the Interpol system of international police communication, without the formalities of charges, warrants, extradition, or any sort of judicial oversight. Contreras claimed the FBI and CIA participated in the information bank. He said, in little known court testimony, that the FBI’s Robert Scherrer was in “permanent contact [with Condor’s representative in Buenos Aires] and received the information that he asked for, with regard to records that he requested on numerous occasions. . . . Also the CIA knew about the Condor Organization, and in many opportunities contributed information in this regard,” Contreras said.

Computers were almost nonexistent in South America in the mid-1970s, and Contreras’s promise that the data bank would be computerized was itself a
revolutionary step forward. Intelligence files in police stations and military installations were typed and copied using carbon paper. Cross-indexing required laborious systems of card files with mechanical sorting techniques.

FBI Agent Scherrer said he learned that the CIA provided DINA with the computer systems and training that he presumed were used in the Condor data bank. Several U.S. intelligence documents refer to computer use in Condor. A diagram in the Condor Agenda of the “System of Coordination” indicates the information center was to be organized in four divisions: data bank, police records, microfilm, and computers.

The intelligence services were to communicate by telex
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and by a continent-wide radio network—infrastructure elements that also were provided by the United States. The telex system was given the name “Condortel,” a label that is found on several documents. Member organizations using the telex system referred to one another by number: Condor one (Chile/Condor headquarters), Condor two (Argentina), Condor three (Uruguay), Condor four (Paraguay), and Condor five (Bolivia). Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru joined later as Condor six, seven, and eight.

The telex messages were at first transmitted in a primitive code, which consisted of a simple exchange of letters.
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Later, an automatic encrypting device was installed in all Condortel telex terminals. A Bolivian security agent, quoted by author Gerardo Irusta, revealed the existence of the machines and claimed that the devices were provided by the CIA. The agent, Juan Carlos Fortun, said, “The chief of our department, generally an Army liaison officer, had access to a special machine, which was kept locked, that served to encode and decode the messages that were sent to and received from each of these countries.”

The telex system was the most common method of communication among the agencies. Contreras provided funds to set up a telex terminal for the use of Lieutenant Colonel Osvaldo Rawson in Buenos Aires, one of several indications
that Rawson may have been operating as an agent on Contreras’s payroll independent of his work in his own intelligence service, Battalion 601.

A powerful military radio network provided by the U.S. military, whose central transmitter was located in the Panama Canal Zone, was also used for Condor communications. Paraguayan General Alejandro Fretes Dávalos revealed Condor’s use of the system in a conversation with U.S. Ambassador Robert White in 1978 and reported in a declassified cable. A U.S. military intelligence officer who served in Latin America confirmed the existence of the network in an interview. The U.S. military installed transmitters in countries where U.S. trainers were operating, usually in local military facilities. He said a common use of the radio system was for Latin American officers studying at the School of the Americas in the Canal Zone to talk to their fellow officers and families back home on personal business. It was a way to avoid expensive long-distance calls. There were no restrictions, however, on the use of the radio transmitters by the Latin American military, and he acknowledged that intelligence agencies would have access to the system and with simple codes could have used it as the infrastructure for a continent-wide communication system.

As subversives and their allies moved from country to country, information about their whereabouts and activities was to be fed by each service to the central data bank. The agreement, for example, specified that there should be “very rapid and immediate contact when someone is expelled from a country or when a suspect travels so as to alert the Intelligence Services.” Each country contributed, and each country retrieved information, using the communications system.

In addition, the system called for members to use their liaison relationships with agencies “outside the member countries, especially those outside the continent, to obtain information about subversion.” This provision—5i—in the agreement, was intended to greatly enhance the Condor information base with material provided by friendly agencies in the United States and Europe. The full extent of such information exchange is not known, but my investigation has revealed specific examples of exchanges involving the FBI and the CIA in the United States, and the West German Bundesnachtrichtendienst (BND).