The Condor Years by John Dinges

Author:John Dinges [Dinges, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781595589026
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The State Department’s intelligence and research office, INR, dispatched a report summarizing the CIA information to all U.S. embassies in Latin America, and in France, Portugal, Sweden, Italy, and Norway—the European countries harboring the greatest numbers of exiles. The INR has no independent intelligence sources of its own, but distills and analyzes intelligence from embassies, military and CIA intelligence, and prepares reports for State Department use. The report is clearly based on the CIA reports, but plays down the CIA conclusion about security cooperation. Evidence for “an intergovernmental assassination plot” is “scanty,” it said. The report hangs its skepticism on the distinction between intelligence exchange, which was the explicit purpose of Condor, and international assassinations, which had not yet been proven as part of Condor’s activities.

An unusual debate ensued among the Condor country ambassadors, at the prompting of Kissinger’s recently appointed top Latin American officer, Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman. A career diplomat with a reputation inside the State Department for cold toughness and close relations with the CIA, Shlaudeman had served in Chile as deputy to the ambassador during the two-track coup plotting against Allende in 1970.

Shlaudeman had initiated the original queries to ambassadors on the killings and roundups of refugees, and now sent a third query. He said he intended to draft a formal “Trends Report” on the military governments, and asked the ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries for more information and opinions about security coordination, the seriousness of the “subversive threat,” and human rights.

The ambassadors weighed in with long, sometimes passionate, cables. Reading the cables decades later, one can still palpate the deep ambivalence of these career foreign service officers. U.S. policy dictated support for dictatorships whose methods were profoundly at odds with American democracy and moral values, and they struggled to square loyalty to policy with basic common sense ethics. Lacking hard evidence or a pattern of criminal activity, no hard decisions were called for. As long as each ambassador was looking only at his own country, no one was compelled to look for international patterns. It was a system that subjected evidence of criminal conspiracy by governments to the strictest scrutiny but accepted at face value the military governments’ disclaimers and professions of good intentions.

Shlaudeman’s insistence that the embassies exchange views on security coordination, however, had the effect of bringing the evidence out in the open. Seeing one another’s cabled assessments, the ambassadors found it more and more difficult to avert their gaze. The embassy in Buenos Aires showed barely concealed disdain for the overly cautious INR assessment of “scanty” evidence. Granted, the embassy wrote, the conspiracy to eliminate exiles has not been confirmed. “It should be emphasized, however, that local governments have motivation and opportunity to do so, and it would be equally erroneous to conclude that such conspiracy is unlikely.” To conceive of Operation Condor as limited to its relatively innocuous activities such as intelligence exchange underestimates the degree of cooperation, the cable said. In fact, the cable said, security officers from Chile

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