Operation Condor - U.S. Involvement

U.S. Involvement

Although the United States was not a member of the Condor consortium, evidence shows that the United States provided key organizational, financial and technical assistance to the operation. The United States government sponsored and collaborated with DINA and with the other intelligence organizations forming the nucleus of Condor, despite the fact that the military dictatorships were killing and torturing tens of thousands of people. CIA documents show that the CIA had close contact with members of the Chilean secret police, DINA, and its chief Manuel Contreras. Contreras was retained as a paid CIA contact until 1977, even as his involvement in the Letelier-Moffit assassination was being revealed.

In the Paraguayan Archives there were official requests to track suspects to and from the U.S. Embassy, the CIA, and FBI. The CIA provided lists of suspects and other intelligence information to the military states. The FBI also searched for individuals wanted by DINA in the United States in 1975.

In June 1999, the State Department released thousands of declassified documents showing for the first time that the CIA and the State and Defense Departments were intimately aware of Condor; one Defense Department intelligence report dated 1 October 1976, noted that Latin American military officers bragged about it to their U.S. counterparts. The same report approvingly described Condor's "joint counterinsurgency operations" that aimed to "eliminate Marxist terrorist activities"; Argentina, it noted, created a special Condor team "structured much like a U.S. Special Forces Team." Material declassified in 2004 states that

"The declassified record shows that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its 'murder operations' on August 5, 1976, in a 14-page report from Shlaudeman. 'Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys,' Shlaudeman cautioned. 'We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good.' Shlaudeman and his two deputies, William Luers and Hewson Ryan, recommended action. Over the course of three weeks, they drafted a cautiously worded demarche, approved by Kissinger, in which he instructed the U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries to meet with the respective heads of state about Condor. He instructed them to express 'our deep concern' about 'rumors' of 'plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad.'"

Ultimately, the demarche was never delivered. Kornbluh and Dinges suggest that the decision not to send Kissinger's order was due to a cable sent by Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman to his deputy in D.C which states "you can simply instruct the Ambassadors to take no further action, noting that there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme." McSherry, adds, "According to White, instructions from a secretary of state cannot be ignored unless there is a countermanding order received via a secret (CIA) backchannel."

Kornbluh and Dinges conclude that "The paper trail is clear: the State Department and the CIA had enough intelligence to take concrete steps to thwart Condor assassination planning. Those steps were initiated but never implemented." Shlaudeman's deputy Hewson Ryan later acknowledged in an oral history interview that the State Department was "remiss" in its handling of the case. "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. ... Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don't know", he stated in reference to the Letelier-Moffitt bombing. "But we didn't."

A CIA document called Condor "a counter-terrorism organization" and noted that the Condor countries had a specialized telecommunications system called "CONDORTEL." A 1978 cable from the US ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, to the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, was published on 6 March 2001 by The New York Times. The document was released in November 2000 by the Clinton administration under the Chile Declassification Project. In the cable Ambassador White reported a conversation with General Alejandro Fretes Davalos, chief of staff of Paraguay's armed forces, who informed him that the South American intelligence chiefs involved in Condor " in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which cover all of Latin America".

According to Davalos, this installation was "employed to co-ordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries". Robert White feared that the US connection to Condor might be publicly revealed at a time when the assassination in the U.S.A. of Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier and his American assistant Ronni Moffitt was being investigated. White cabled that "it would seem advisable to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in US interest."

The "information exchange" (via telex) included torture techniques (e.g. near-drowning, and playing recordings of victims who were being tortured to their families). This demonstrates that the US facilitated communications for Operation Condor, and has been called by J. Patrice McSherry (Long Island Univ.) "another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that U.S. military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret partner or sponsor."

In addition, an Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact that the CIA was privy to Condor and had played a key role in setting up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states.