Into the Murky Depths of 'Operation Condor'

NEW YORK — The continued detention in London of Chile's former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet points to many unanswered questions about his rule, including a terrorist conspiracy by six U.S.-supported Latin American governments--Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay--to murder their political opponents around the world. The Central Intelligence Agency and some U.S. government officials knew about this 1970s operation, but didn't reveal it to the public or Congress.

Known as "Operation Condor," foreign armies and security services cooperated in dealing with political opponents from one country who crossed into another, and assigned their own men to out-of-country operations to avoid the identification of local agents.

Now, Spanish authorities handling the Pinochet investigation want to know what the United States knows about Operation Condor, and Washington has been sending them declassified documents. But it has balked at requests to release all relevant papers in the archives of the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI and the CIA.

The U.S. government denied a report in the Guardian newspaper in London that it had urged the British to release Pinochet and not agree to his extradition to Madrid for fear that revelations about the U.S. role in the 1973 coup overthrowing Salvador Allende would come out during a trial. But, since the current investigation concerns the post-coup period, some U.S. officials are more likely worried about revelations of U.S. knowledge of and connections to Operation Condor.

The U.S. certainly knew about it. A week after the killings of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S., and his Instiute for Policy Studies colleague Ronni Moffitt in Washington in 1976, Robert Scherrer, the FBI's attache in Buenos Aires assigned to the case, reported key information to Washington. Scherrer had learned from an Argentine official that Chile was the center of something called Operation Condor, established to share intelligence and engage in joint operations against "so-called 'leftists,' communists and Marxists," he wrote in a recently release document. He said the operation included setting up teams to carry out assassinations around the world and speculated it might have orchestrated the Washington bombing. Scherrer learned that the CIA had already reported on Operation Condor.