The Condor Years (38 page)

Going forward, the cable portrays an organization in the process of scaling back the elaborate systems that held the six-country alliance together. A meeting on “Psychological Warfare Techniques Against Terrorists and Leftist Extremists” planned to be held in Asunción in early 1977 was cancelled because Paraguay was no longer willing to participate. Finally, the cable said,

The scaling back of Condor coincided with another security disaster in Argentina. The Orletti interrogation center, where many of the Phase Two Condor operations were carried out, had to be shut down in early November after two prisoners managed to escape. The Orletti Taskforce 18 team had just begun another joint operation with Bolivia, and Orletti housed several prisoners recently transferred from Bolivia in addition to the Uruguayans who remained. Publicity about the escape revealed for the first time the existence of the Orletti prison in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. With the exception of the two escapees, none of the final group of Bolivian, Uruguayan, and Argentine prisoners in Orletti survived.

The four-day Condor member meeting ended on December 16. On one of the evenings during the meeting, SIDE chief Otto Paladino, threw a large and loud party for the assembled intelligence officers. The occasion was his own dismissal as head of SIDE. It was a
despedida
—a farewell party, for him and other officers being transferred out of the intelligence service to other posts. One of the SIDE officers present described the party in secret testimony to an army tribunal in 1977. He said Uruguayan and Chilean officers were present. The party was held at Los Años Locos, a riverside restaurant, which had long been a favorite hangout for the men carrying out the dirtiest operations of the dirty war.
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The name was appropriate: “The Crazy Years.”

The Dirty War would continue with brutal intensity in Argentina, but in the other Condor countries the levels of repression never again approached those of the period from 1973 to 1976. As an apparatus for international assassination outside Latin America—Phase Three operations—there is no evidence of any Condor activity after December 1976.

Condor’s deadly operations inside Latin America continued, however. Intelligence exchanges expanded, and at least two new members—Peru and Ecuador—joined the Condor System in 1978. The Condortel communications network was fully operational at least through that year. The final intelligence document mentioning ongoing Condor activity is a report from Paraguayan police intelligence chief Pastor Coronel, dated April 13, 1981. The CIA and U.S. military intelligence kept tabs on Condor activity, but U.S. officials—assured by their sources that Condor no longer ventured outside of Latin America—never again attempted to stop any Condor operations or express disapproval of Condor activities.

The security services employed the methods developed under Condor for several years to eliminate perceived enemies of the military governments.
Many of the deaths and disappearances were seen as isolated actions at the time, but now can be more clearly seen as fitting the pattern of Condor Phase Two joint operations. Some of the operations can be linked by documentary evidence directly to Condor; in other cases we can only draw reasonable conclusions from the modus operandi. Here are a few of the most prominent examples among the many that could be listed in which adversaries of a Condor member were captured outside their own countries and killed.

Paraguay continued to track down its neighbors’ enemies living in Paraguay, and received reciprocal help in capturing Stroessner’s two most prominent enemies, who were operating from Argentina. One case is documented in detail in the Paraguay Archive. On March 29, 1977, Paraguayan intelligence police picked up two Uruguayans and three Argentines on suspicion of subversive activity against their home countries. The group was attempting to obtain false documents to send back to Argentina to help large numbers of Montoneros and Uruguayan PVP fugitives escape to Europe. Paraguay’s Condor chief Colonel Benito Guanes notified his Argentine and Uruguayan intelligence counterparts, and a group of officers came to Asunción to participate in the interrogation of the suspects. Then, on May 16, the two Argentine SIDE officers returned with an airplane and took the five suspects to Argentina, where they disappeared.

The Condor transfers went in the other direction as well. In February 1977, at Paraguay’s request, Argentine agents kidnapped exile leader Dr. Augustín Goiburú, a former Colorado Party ally of Stroessner’s who had masterminded the botched attempt to assassinate the Paraguayan dictator in 1974. Goiburú was living in the Argentine provincial city of Paraná, where he was a practicing physician. Paraguay Archive documents establish that he was delivered across the border into the hands of Paraguayan intelligence police, and disappeared. Another prominent Paraguayan exile, Epifanio Mendes Fleitas, was also arrested in Argentina, but was released alive after several months.

One of the most complex Phase Two operations involved the roundup and disappearances of sixteen people in two countries, the extortion and confiscation of tens of thousands of dollars, and an elaborate three-country coverup scheme. A Chilean Communist with a Swiss passport, Alexei Jaccard Siegler was transporting a suitcase of cash from Europe for delivery to party contacts in Santiago. He landed in Buenos Aires on May 16, 1977, and was picked up in the street the next day. Argentine agents immediately rounded up twelve Argentine
Communists and two other Chileans linked to Jaccard. It was one of the rare instances of deadly repression against members of the Argentine Communist Party, which had not openly opposed the military.

In Santiago, DINA agents kidnapped two Communist Party operatives thought to be the intended recipients of the money Jaccard was carrying. Within a few days of these arrests, two other Chileans, wealthy currency trader Jacobo Stulman
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and his wife, Matilde, were taken into custody as they arrived from Santiago to Buenos Aires Ezeiza Airport. All seven Chileans and nine of the Argentines picked up were never seen again and are listed as disappeared.

The Swiss government and U.S. Jewish organizations made aggressive efforts to investigate the disappearances. To cover their tracks, the intelligence agents faked the departure of Jaccard and the Stulman couple from Argentina, using airline manifests, forged hotel registrations, and falsified immigration documents. The false documents showed Jaccard traveling to Chile a few days after his arrest, and then departing Santiago to Uruguay. False records also purported to show the Stulman couple’s arrival in Montevideo. In the vain hope of rescuing the couple, family members paid tens of thousands of dollars in ransom to unknown persons. The extortion scheme intensified in the weeks following the kidnapping. Stulman’s banks received payment orders with Stulman’s authentic signature authorizing the transfer of a total of $127,000.

Brazil had kept an arm’s length relationship with Condor, but its security force swung into action in 1980 to help Argentina smash an attempted guerrilla counteroffensive. Montonero leader Mario Firmenich, in exile in Spain, recruited a group of young exiles, who were trained in the Arab countries and organized as “Special Infantry Troops”—TEI in Spanish. Converging in Southern Cone countries in early 1980, they tried to smuggle themselves back into Argentina to renew the fight against the military.

But the 601 Battalion had penetrated the operation with informers and collaborators. The agents learned that two top Montonero leaders were about to fly from Mexico to Rio de Janeiro. One was Horacio Campiglia, the commander of the TEI operations. A U.S. security official got the whole story from his 601 source: “The Argentine military intelligence [601] contacted their Brazilian military intelligence counterparts for permission to conduct an operation
in Rio to capture two Montoneros arriving from Mexico. Brazilians granted their permission and a special team of Argentines were flown under the operational command of Lt. Col. Roman to Rio aboard an Argentine air force C130. Both of the Montoneros . . . were captured alive and returned to Argentina aboard the C130.”

Then, as they had done in the Jaccard and Stulman cases, the 601 agents created a false paper trail in Rio showing that the two Montoneros had registered at a hotel, checked out, and departed Brazil on a commercial flight. In fact, the Montoneros were taken to one of the secret prisons at Campo de Mayo army base in Buenos Aires. Another Montonero was captured in the southern Brazilian city of Uruguayana about the same time and turned over to Argentina. In a short time virtually the entire counteroffensive force was captured. Almost all disappeared.

Following the failed counteroffensive, according to the well-informed U.S. officials, Argentina dispatched “three teams operating abroad with the specific mission of killing Firmenich.”

Peru had shed its left-leaning military government and in 1980 was Condor’s most recent member. In June 1980, a 601 Battalion team traveled to Peru to track down a group of Montoneros residing there. Again, U.S. officials in Buenos Aires received detailed information about the operation. The agents brought with them a Montonero collaborator to identify the suspects in Peru, three of whom were captured at their homes in a joint operation with Peruvian security forces. The captives were savagely tortured inside a Peruvian military installation, according to the eyewitness account of a Peruvian Army intelligence agent, Arnaldo Alvarado, to journalist Ricardo Uceda. After a few days the captives were transported to Bolivia with the intention of transporting them back to Argentina. “Once in Argentina, they will be interrogated and permanently disappeared,” a U.S. official reported.

The operation blew up in the Peruvian press, however, and the Peruvian government was forced to acknowledge the detentions and “expulsions” to Bolivia. The U.S. embassies in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina as well as Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission were immediately involved in tracking the case. Some of the captives had recently been in Europe, and one was a well-known human rights activist, Noemi Gianotti de Molfino, one of the founders of the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” group. With all the publicity about the operation and the knowledge that some
of the captives were in Bolivia, U.S. officials expected “the media spotlight will provide a continuing measure of protection” and that the transfer to Argentina would be aborted. The scandal was still in the air in mid-July when U.S. ambassador Raul Castro had a meeting with Argentine Army Commander Leopoldo Galtieri. Ambassador Castro, according to his report to Washington, prodded him so much about the issue that Galtieri waved his hand and said, “enough is enough.”

Despite the pressure and publicity, Battalion 601 proceeded with what appears to have been a far-reaching plan that included transporting the captive Noemi Gianotti secretly to Madrid. Judging from past 601 international operations, the plan may have been to use the woman, a prominent Montonero, to trap other Montoneros in exile in Europe. Whatever the plan, it resulted in Gianotti’s death. Her body was discovered in an apartment in Madrid on July 21. Two men had rented the apartment only a few days before, in the name of one of the other captives in Peru, Julio César Ramírez.

No other bodies were ever found. Both Peru and Argentina were pilloried in the local and European press, and Peru was deeply embarrassed by its foray into Condor cooperation. Like the Letelier assassination, it was a Condor operation that had a diplomatic cost. Peru cancelled its invitation to President Videla to attend inauguration ceremonies of Peru’s new president, Fernando Belaunde Terry. The episode caused wonderment in the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires that the military government was continuing to sponsor such seeming counterproductive international operations.

The bloody yet damaging Peru operation is the last joint operation with a clear Condor trademark. It betrayed the disarray into which Manuel Contreras’s grandiose scheme had fallen. Chile had ceased joint operations with Argentina in 1978 when the two countries fell into near warfare over a territorial dispute. Contreras was no longer the leader of DINA, much less of the international alliance. The Letelier assassination in Washington had exposed the existence of Condor and put a stop, for all practical purposes, to its Phase Three operations outside of Latin America. Contreras, the mastermind of the secret multicontinent war on terrorism and the most powerful man in Chile next to Pinochet, was suddenly vulnerable inside Chile. The FBI investigation of the Letelier murder, following the paper trail of the false Paraguayan passports, was leading directly to Contreras and DINA. Pinochet cut his loses in August 1977 and dissolved DINA. Contreras resigned from the army in March
of 1978, a few weeks before a U.S. grand jury indicted him for the Letelier murder and the U.S. government officially asked for his extradition.

The wreckage left by Operation Condor would leave scars for decades to come. State-sponsored terror had eviscerated the nonviolent political opposition, creating an entire generation of political exiles forced to look over their shoulder wherever they were in the world, haunted by the specter of the assassination attempts against leaders like Letelier, Michelini, Gutiérrez, Torres, Prats, and Leighton—and even Paraguay’s Goiburú. When other democratic and military leaders died, if the circumstances were at all uncertain, the possibility of assassination was inevitably raised even if no overt connection to Operation Condor could be shown. In a short span of years, so many prominent opponents of the dictators—civilian and military—died of natural or unnatural causes that questions have to be raised and investigations continued. Such are the cases of three Brazilians, all perceived as possible alternatives to the military: former president Joao Goulart died of a heart attack at fifty-eight at his exile home in Argentina in December 1976); former president Juscilino Kubitchek died in an automobile accident a few months earlier; and perennial “presidential hopeful” Carlos Lacerda died suddenly in the same year. There were never-solved assassinations in Paris that eliminated the most prominent dissident military leaders of Bolivia and Uruguay, Colonel Ramón Trabal in 1974, and General Joaquin Zenteno in 1976. Despite claims of responsibility by leftist-sounding groups, the doubts persisted. Chile’s respected former President Eduardo Frei died at 71 from a massive infection after routine surgery in 1982.