Pulling Back the Veil on Condor (Page 2)

That remarkable document is labeled "INR Afternoon Summary, September 21, 1976." It describes Condor as "inspired by Chile" and designed for "the covert elimination of subversives." Another INR (the State Department's Intelligence and Research Department) document and two CIA documents discuss internal squabbling among the Condor members: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay were planning "the assassination of leftist targets resident in Western Europe," according to the August 13 INR document, but Brazil was refusing to participate. An August 12 CIA report says training sessions for the European assassination operations are scheduled to be held in Buenos Aires. The documents are among thousands on Chile ordered declassified by the Clinton Administration in the wake of the 1998 arrest in London of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The new evidence does not indicate US foreknowledge of Chile's plot against Letelier, but the existence of an international assassination ring led by Chile must have been of inescapable relevance on the afternoon of the car bombing. Yet it was almost a year before the US investigation focused directly on Chile, eventually resulting in the indictment of Condor organizer Contreras and two other DINA officers.

The newly declassified documents--in Paraguay as well as the United States--are helping to reveal a wide range of Condor operations, which included assassination plans or attempts (some of them aborted) in the United States, Portugal, France, Italy and Mexico, and the arrest and torture of an undetermined number of foreigners, including citizens of Spain, Britain, France and the United States. Those Condor activities are at the heart of a variety of new and revived judicial investigations of human rights crimes of the era: The US Justice Department has recently revived its investigation of the Letelier murder and is now focusing on Pinochet's involvement. Brazil is releasing documents about Condor, and its Congress is probing possible Condor involvement in the 1976 deaths in Argentina of two former Brazilian presidents, João Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek. An Argentine judge has traveled to Chile twice in six months to interrogate military suspects in the 1974 Buenos Aires car-bomb assassination of a Pinochet rival, Gen. Carlos Prats.

Latin Americans seem determined to push forward to a final accounting of their past. But so far the United States has gone no further than the release of revelatory--but often heavily censored--documents from that era. (A final release of Chilean documents is scheduled for mid-September.) The flood of new information and new investigations adds up to a compelling argument for the US government to go beyond its current posture--a kind of Clinton-era "limited hangout" policy--and move quickly to a final truth-telling, along the lines of the official Truth and Reconciliation investigations our country has applauded in Chile, South Africa and other countries on the front lines of the cold war. In the case of Operation Condor, the revelations about the FBI role in the Fuentes case, as well as the detailed US intelligence about Condor before an act of Condor terrorism in Washington, raise questions about what else was known and done in the liaison relationships between our intelligence services and military missions and their counterparts in the Condor dictatorships.

FBI agent Scherrer (who died in 1995) was aware of the moral dilemmas into which he was thrust. "I agree with the necessity to exchange information on terrorists," Scherrer told me in a 1979 interview. "I think they should be rounded up, but tried, not slaughtered."

The issue is not only whether a single FBI agent crossed a line by distributing and acting on information he knew was gained by torture. The real question goes to the shared objectives among US agencies and Gestapo-like secret-police organizations in Latin America, and to the US policies that justified working with them in full knowledge and tacit approval of their methods.

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