The Condor Years (48 page)

89
  
Role of Amílcar Santucho and Jorge Fuentes:
For Santucho, interviews with Mattini and Gorriarán Merlo; for Fuentes, interviews with Andrés Pascal and René Valenzuela.

91
  
Scherrer letter to Baeza:
The author viewed the letter and copied it verbatim in July 2000. After being told of the existence of the letter in the Rettig archive, the FBI released a copy in response to a FOIA request to
New York Times
reporter Tim Weiner.

92
  
Story on Scherrer in NYT:
“F.B.I. Helped Chile Search for Leftists, Files Show,” by Tim Weiner,
New York Times
, February 10, 1999. “We would be remiss in not checking out these people,” one FBI official was quoted as saying.

93
  
Sonia Bacicalupo:
Interview. The address in Puerto Rico now houses an office for the Department of Education, and neighbors remember nothing about the occupants in 1975. Several sources, including JCR veterans as well as intelligence documents, confirm that the JCR had representatives in New York, but I was unable to establish if there was a connection between them and the two women listed as living in New York.

93
  
Scherrer exchange:
Interview on October 29, 1979. Scherrer said the proposal was made at the meeting of the Conference of American Armies in Montevideo, Uruguay, in October 1975. The meeting was attended by a delegation of high U.S. Army officers led by U.S. Southcom Commander General Dennis P. McAuliffe.

94
  
Carlos the Jackal raid:
Coronel included the account of the Paris raid and its connection to the Paraguay arrests in at least three reports found in the Paraguay Archive. The earliest has his name handwritten on the top and is dated “June 1976,” and may have been presented at the second meeting of Operation Condor, which occurred in Santiago in that month. Documents containing the description are as follows:
“Sintesis del Proceso de la subversion que se ha pretendido desatar en el pais,”
June 1976, with the notation “De: Pastor Coronel, jefe del Dpto de investigación de la Policia—Asunción, Paraguay,” 6 (no microfiche number on my copy); a second document with identical wording is titled
“IV Conferencia Bilateral de Inteligencia entre los Ejercitos de Paraguay y Brasil,”
microfiche 78:1674–86 (no date, but the meeting is referred to in other documents as occurring in May 1976); a third reference is an undated document “Actividades Subversivas Dentro del Pais” (78:1649–68, 13). Internal references place this document in 1977. The account of the Carlos raid is identical in each case (Paraguay Archive).

95
  
Carlos photo:
DIPC documents, August 28, 1975 (21: 1560), and April 21, 1976 (21: 1531) (Paraguay Archive).

95
  
DISIP account of Carlos raid:
Interview with Orlando García. He said the information
came from a source in an Algerian extremist organization handled by his boss, DISIP chief Rafael Rivas Vásquez. Rivas Vásquez was proud of his role and listed “The Carlos Affaire, Caracas, Paris, and London, 1975” among his intelligence experience “highlights,” in a 1996 copy of his Curriculum Vitae (provided by journalist Don Bohning). The claim is mentioned in his obituary in the
Miami Herald
, November 27, 2000.

95
  
Carlos letter:
Handwritten letter, La Santé, March 3, 2001, sent through his lawyer, Isabelle Coutant Peyre (whom he later married). He identifies himself as Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, Ecrou 274630, Q.I.3, and signed the letter “Carlos.” He said the apartment where the shootout took place was the residence of “two Venezuelan university students,” and did not have a telephone line. “I do not know personally Messrs. Amilcar Santucho, Mario Roberto Santucho, or Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcon, even if our comrades did know the ERP in Paris. . . . The Palestinian Joel Al Ardja was the PFLP responsible for South America (excepting Brazil); he was martyred in Entebbe in July 1976.” I asked Carlos for any information about the assassination attempt in early 1975 against the Chilean military attaché in Beirut, Lebanon, Colonel Alfredo Canales. He said the attack and three assassinations in Paris in 1974, 1975 and 1976 “. . . were carried out by internationalist revolutionary commandos. I can only disclose the identity of the three members of the Beirut commando: ‘El Hajj Mohmoud’ . . . ; Ahmed ‘Abdallah’ Farhan . . . ; and ‘Mujahed’ [aka] ‘Agop Agopian.’” A secret CIA Directorate of Operations document, April 3, 1975, transmits a DINA report on PFLP activity in Santiago. According to the report, DINA arrested two people in March 1975 who were “recruiting Chileans of Arab descent to work for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to carry out terrorist acts.” The last name of one of the PFLP recruiters mentioned in the document, Al Arja, coincides with a spelling variation of the name mentioned by Carlos (Chile Project.)

97
  
DICP prison and interrogation:
Author visited the prison in October 2001. Former prisoners who described their experience in interviews included Martín Almada, Gladys Meilinger de Sannemann, and Luis Alberto Wagner.

97
  
Santucho interview:
Soon after his release, Santucho gave an interview in Stockholm, Sweden, published in an obscure political magazine,
Denuncia
, November 1979. Santucho gave a more detailed, confidential interview to Amnesty International (AI) in London about the same time, but repeated requests to AI by the author and the Santucho family failed to produce that unique historical document.

98
  
Fuentes statements to Pastor Coronel:
DICP documents 28: 1020–21, July 14, 1975; and 46: 1551, July 3, 1975 (Paraguay Archive). The woman named by Fuentes, “Marcia,” was a prominent journalist in Chile at the time, with no public connection to MIR. Fuentes is also asked whether a prominent Christian Democratic politician, Belisario Velasco, was the “liaison between MIR and the Christian Democratic [Party],” which Fuentes denies.

98
  
Osvaldo letter and materials:
Documents 46:1558–59, 1520–21, and 46:1532 (the
original letter in red ink); 46:1535–37 (letter from “David” in Mexico about Fuentes’s arrest, dated June 12, 1975; 24:1754–57 (handwritten questions); 46: 1537 (question and picture about Rubén Sánchez) (Paraguay Archive).

100
  
Proportion of deaths:
For specific DINA activity, Chilean researcher Pedro Alejandro Matta, himself a torture victim, has compiled extraordinarily complete day-by-day records of prisoners detained, disappeared, or otherwise killed, and survivors of the principal DINA torture camps, including the largest, Villa Grimaldi. Pedro Alejandro Matta,
Cuartel Terranova: el palacio de la risa
(unpublished manuscript, 1998).

101
  
Enríquez death:
interview with Castillo’s mother, Mónica Echevarria.

101
  
Brazil model:
Cf. Alfred Stepan,
Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone
(Princeton University Press, 1988), Chapter 2, for a description of Brazil’s intelligence force and the importance of the intelligence school in consolidating its power.

101
  
January trip to Washington:
Notes from confidential testimony of various Chilean officers, including Espinoza, to Judge Juan Guzman, 2000. Thanks to Chilean journalist Patricia Verdugo.

102
  
Memo to Walters:
CIA document, January 4, 1975 (Chile Project).

103
  
Contreras payment:
The $6,000 deposit is mentioned in State 229940, August 31, 1979 (Chile collection). Manuel Noriega, who as head of Panamanian intelligence in the 1970s held a position comparable to Contreras, received monthly payments from the CIA totaling $160,000 and an equivalent amount from the U.S. Army. It is fair to assume, considering Chile’s relative importance that Contreras would have received payments at least as large as Noriega. See John Dinges,
Our Man in Panama
(New York: Times Books, 1991), p. ix.

103
  
CIA cable on Contreras visit:
Secret, July 10, 1975 (Chile Project). “. . . Little if anything can be accomplished by Contreras in explaining human rights problems, concerns, etc. to senior U.S. officials, given Chilean leadership’s distorted views of their own situation. . . . This aspect of planned visit not justified from our standpoint and, if there were publicity, could be counter-productive. On the other hand [name blanked out] recognizes value in maintaining good relations with President Pinochet, who should not be led to believe we are rebuffing his efforts to communicate with us.” The name of the person making these judgments is blanked out, but Contreras said in an interview the trip was requested by Ambassador Popper.

103
  
Memo on luncheon with Contreras:
CIA document, undated but containing luncheon date. Another CIA memorandum, “Meeting with State Department and Justice Department Officials Regarding Letelier Case,” August 22, 1978, refers to a written “summary of Contreras’s visits to the United States,” which was provided to Letelier case prosecutor Eugene Propper (Chile Project). The CIA has refused to provide any information about Contreras’s visits to the United States except the one in August 1975.

104
  
North American senators:
Contreras interview with journalist Lilian Olivares,
La Segunda
, September 25, 2000. In the interview, Contreras also said that Walters
arranged for the “clandestine” delivery to Chile of 2,000 LAW antiaircraft missiles, whose sale to Chile had been banned by Congress. Contreras also mentioned, in
La Tercera
, September 21, 2000, the proposal to bribe the U.S. senators.

104
  
Contreras information for Kissinger:
Interview with Contreras by journalist Gomez-Pablo from questions provided by the author.

105
  
International help to DIA:
The point is made repeatedly in the Church Committee Report, the Hinchey Report, and the Senate Report, Activities of Certain Foreign Intelligence Agencies.

105
  
Walters’s suggestion:
Gomez-Pablo interview with Contreras.

106
  
Caracas visit:
Interviews with Orlando García and Carlos Andrés Pérez. Rivas Vásquez and Orlando García testimony to grand jury of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, June 29, 1978. Intelligence about JCR moving to Caracas: 1979 interview with Robert Scherrer. Two former JCR leaders also confirmed that the move to Caracas was under consideration at the time Fuentes and Santucho were arrested.

106
  
Request for $600,000:
I have long considered this to be an important document, but one of unconfirmed authenticity. In the course of my current investigation I obtained the corroborating evidence detailed here. The memorandum appears to have a genuine Contreras signature, and its formatting and seals match other available DINA documents. Nevertheless, because it was released by exiles, who were not able to describe how they received it from within the Chilean government, the document should not, by itself, be considered of undisputed investigative value. The letter first surfaced in Mexico in 1977, where it was released to the press by former Chilean Senator Hugo Miranda. I obtained it at that time. I recently learned that lawyer Giovanni Salvi—who later prosecuted Contreras and Espinoza for the assassination attempt in Rome against exile leader Bernardo Leighton, came upon the document in
La Repúbblica
newspaper, accompanying an article I had written (John Dinges, “Anatomia di un’Anonima Omicidi,”
La Repubblica
, May 25, 1975). Salvi passed the document on to a Chilean judge investigating the Letelier murder in Chile in the early 1990s. The letter resurfaced in dubious circumstances in the late 1990s with the mistaken claim that it had been found in the Paraguay Archive. Archive staff and Martín Almada, who discovered the documents in the archive, say the document was never part of the archive. The FBI declined to use it as evidence in the Letelier case because its origin could not be traced to DINA, and Judge Salvi told the author he declined to use it in his case for similar reasons. Contreras described the letter in court testimony as a
montaje
—a montage. See John Dinges, “Dubious Document,”
Columbia Journalism Review
, January–February 2000. Judge Salvi interrogated Michael Townley about the document, attributing it to the
La Repúbblica
article, in January 1993.

108
  
Pinochet advisers opposed to Contreras:
The source named General Sergio Covarrubias, Justice Minister Mónica Madariaga, ideological adviser Jaime Guzman, Colonel René Escairuiga, and Colonel Patricio Ewing (a close friend of the slain
General Carlos Prats). Cf. Dinges, and Landau, op. cit., 329, for account of civilian and military officials who pressured Pinochet to cooperate with the United States on the Letelier case investigation, in opposition to Contreras.

108
  
Contreras presidential ambitions:
The Brazilian model again was a factor in this thinking. The leader of the security force, SNI, Joâo Baptista Figueiredo, was a major force in the Brazilian military government as it entered its second decade, and he would eventually rise to the presidency. Several sources among Contreras’s group of civilian supporters also talked in interviews about their expectation that Contreras would succeed Pinochet.

108
  
Fuentes transfer to Chile:
There is extensive documentation about Fuentes’s transfer. Paraguay’s Capital Police completed their bureaucratic paperwork to show he had left their custody. His police
ficha
(booking card), found in the Paraguay archive, has this final entry: “By superior order, he was released Sept. 23, 1975 and expelled via Presidente Stroessner Airport.” Amílcar Santucho, in an interview in Europe after his release in 1979, said two other Chilean officers, Air Force Colonels Edgar Ceballos and Jorge Otaiza, came to Paraguay to interrogate himself and Fuentes. Santucho also said the two colonels took Fuentes back to Chile, although it is unclear how he would have that information. Ceballos and Otaiza both worked for air force intelligence, SIFA, which at the time was competing with DINA in the pursuit of MIR. How the Ceballos-SIFA operation related to the Krasnoff-DINA operation could not be learned.