Political Report # 1433
Secret US Intelligence Files Provide History's Verdict on Argentina's Dirty War
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Recently declassified documents constitute a gruesome and
sadistic catalog of state terrorism.
When Ambassador Héctor Hidalgo Solá was abducted off a busy
Buenos Aires street on July 18, 1977, his family had lit tle idea what had
happened to him. Unlike many of the estimated 30,000 Argentine
desaparecidos—the people disappeared by agents of the country’s military
dictatorship—Hidalgo Solá was not a liberal, a leftist, or an armed militant
opposed to the regime. He was, in fact, the military government’s appointed
diplomatic representative to Venezuela.
In that capacity, however, Hidalgo Solá opened his embassy
doors to prominent exiles, including labor leaders, politicians, and relatives
of the disappeared seeking answers on the fate of their loved ones. When Emilio
Mignone, whose daughter was one of the victims, met with Hidalgo Solá in
Caracas, the ambassador told him he would go to Buenos Aires to persuade the
military government to change its repressive policies. If he tried that,
Mignone warned him that they would kill him.
This past spring, nearly 42 years after Hidalgo Solá’s
disappearance, the Trump administration declassified some 47,000 pages of
secret US intelligence files on the “Dirty War” that Argentina’s military
government waged against its own people. More than 7,000 CIA, FBI, Pentagon,
and National Security Council (NSC) records—now posted on a specially created
US government website at the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence—shed considerable light on the state of terror that existed in
Argentina from 1976 to 1983, when the military held power. The detailed
documents provide extensive new evidence on the infrastructure of repression,
Argentina’s role in the international terrorism campaign known as Operation
Condor, and most important, the fate of hundreds of desaparecidos who were
kidnapped, tortured, and murdered—among them Hidalgo Solá.
“Suspicion will fall on military hardliners who were upset
last year when Hidalgo Solá received at his embassy a labor leader ousted after
the March 24, 1976 coup,” states one secret intelligence assessment filed just
eight days after the ambassador disappeared. FBI sources believed he had been
eliminated because the military suspected him of providing passports to exiled
opponents of the regime in Venezuela, according to another report. “Hidalgo
Solá was kidnapped and assassinated by a special group which has worked for the
State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE),” asserts a secret CIA intelligence
cable, which identified the agents responsible and provided an address for the
secret torture center where he was allegedly held.
On April 12, these documents were included in the thousands
of declassified records formally turned over to Argentina during an official
presentation at the National Archives in Washington, DC. Along with Argentine
diplomats and US officials, several family members of victims attended the
solemn ceremony. Among them was the ambassador’s granddaughter Azul Hidalgo
Solá.
“DECLASSIFICATION DIPLOMACY”
The Argentina Declassification Project, as it is officially
known in US government circles, is one of those rare cases in which Donald
Trump completed rather than reversed a policy initiated by his predecessor.
When Fernando Cutz, then the NSC’s senior director for Western Hemisphere
affairs, briefed the new president in preparation for the April 2017 state
visit of Argentine President Mauricio Macri, he explained to Trump that Macri
personally requested the special declassification when Obama visited Buenos
Aires a year earlier. Trump had personal ties to Macri: Decades before, they
bar-hopped together while their fathers negotiated real estate deals in New
York; more recently, the Trump Organization sought Macri’s assistance in its
plans to construct a Trump Tower in Buenos Aires. “It helped to be able to
present the project as a Macri ask rather than an Obama initiative,” Cutz
recalled.
The real genesis of the Argentina Declassification Project,
however, started with a presidential scheduling faux pas. In the spring of
2016, the Obama administration arranged a historic two-day trip for the
president to Havana and, from there, a three-day trip to Argentina. The timing
of the high-profile state visits was determined, in part, by the fact that it
was spring break for Obama’s two daughters, and he wanted them to vacation in
Cuba as well as in Patagonia in southern Argentina.
But the White House announcement that the US president would
be in Buenos Aires on March 24, 2016—by coincidence the 40th anniversary of the
bloody military takeover—sparked an outcry from human rights groups in
Argentina. The United States was still viewed, in the words of Argentine Nobel
Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, as “an accomplice of coups d’état
in this region.” Massive protests, with banners declaring “Day of Memory: Obama
Get Out,” were threatened. In meetings with Macri, human rights activists, led
by the famed Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, demanded that he ask Obama to
declassify intelligence records that might help them to locate their missing
sons and daughters, and even the grandchildren who had been born in secret
detention centers and then adopted by military families after their mothers
were executed.
To redress this serious affront to the victims’ families,
the White House and the Macri government orchestrated a round of what I call
“declassification diplomacy”—the use of secret US documents to advance
bilateral relations. On the morning of March 24, Obama and Macri visited the
Parque de la Memoria (Remembrance Park) in Buenos Aires to pay their respects
to the victims of the Dirty War. “Today, in response to a request from
President Macri, and to continue helping the families of the victims find some
of the truth and justice they deserve, I can announce that the United States
government will declassify even more documents from that period, including, for
the first time, military and intelligence records,” Obama stated in a poignant
speech. “I believe we have a responsibility to confront the past with honesty
and transparency.”
In June 2016, the White House issued a “tasker” to all US
national security agencies; titled “Argentina Declassification Project,” it
mandated an 18-month file search and review of relevant records. “The
Administration continues to support efforts to clarify the facts surrounding
human rights abuses, acts of terrorism, and political violence in Argentina
during the ‘Dirty War’ period from 1975 through 1984,” the directive stated,
and it called on the national security agencies “to prioritize support for this
effort.” According to John Fitzpatrick, who directed the NSC’s Office of
Records Access and Information Security Management at the time, almost 400
archivists, analysts, Freedom of Information Act officers, and records managers
drawn from 16 different government agencies participated in finding and
processing the documents, expending more than 30,000 work hours to complete the
project.
Before Obama left office, his administration released the
first two tranches of records. And during an April 2017 summit, Trump handed
Macri a pen drive containing the third tranche. Predictably, Trump marked the
final release of these documents in April by proclaiming it the biggest ever.
“The release of records,” Trump wrote in a letter to Macri, “constitutes the
largest declassification of United States Government records directly to a
foreign government in history.”
NAMING NAMES
When intelligence documents are declassified, they’re
usually replete with heavy redactions—swaths of information blacked out in the
name of national security or to protect covert “sources and methods.” But
because of the meticulous quality control exercised by an unheralded NSC
records manager named John Powers, the released CIA, FBI, and Defense
Intelligence Agency records on Argentina are far less censored than previous
special declassifications. This unique transparency has rendered them far more
valuable to historians, as well as to the legal investigators who continue to
prosecute these crimes against humanity.
As a collection, the documents constitute a gruesome and
sadistic catalog of state terrorism. For example, one CIA cable reports that
several months after the 1976 coup, federal police rounded up and murdered 30
militants en masse and then scattered their body parts—through the use of dynamite—in
an open field “as a warning to leftist extremists.” Another FBI report provides
details of how security forces intercepted and stole a funeral hearse carrying
the remains of Marcos Osatinsky, a leader of a leftist guerrilla group called
the Montoneros, “to prevent the body from being subjected to an autopsy, which
would have clearly shown he had been tortured.” At least two dozen FBI and CIA
cables record a SIDE operation to kidnap, torture, and execute two Cuban
Embassy officers suspected of aiding militants in Argentina. After the Cubans
were murdered, according to one FBI report marked “secret/eyes only,” “their
bodies were cemented into one large storage drum and thrown into the Rio Lujan”
near Buenos Aires. One State Department cable describes how security agents
detained and tortured a wheelchair-bound psychologist for the purpose of
gaining information about one of her patients.
Torture was routine, reported Patricia Derian, then the
assistant secretary of state for human rights, after a fact-finding trip to
Argentina. “The electric ‘picana,’ something like a supercharged cattle prod,
is still apparently a favorite tool, as is the ‘submarine’ treatment (immersion
of the head in a tub of water, urine, excrement, blood, or a combination of
these),” she said in a declassified summary of abuses. “There is no longer any
doubt that Argentina has the worst human rights record in South America.”
Of course, details about such atrocities have been in the
public domain for years, as surviving victims have stepped forward and hundreds
of human rights trials in Argentina have presented evidence and testimony. But
in a break from the strictures of secrecy, many of the recently declassified
documents go beyond a description of the human rights violations and identify
the violators. “These documents name names. They name the names of the
perpetrators and the names of their victims,” observes my colleague Carlos
Osorio, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, who provided
extensive expertise and support to the Argentina Declassification Project. “And
because they name those names, they provide a level of truth and accountability
that many other declassification projects have failed to achieve.”
Moreover, hundreds of reports by FBI agent Robert Scherrer,
who consistently provided the most detailed intelligence on the operations and
abuses of the Argentine security forces, contain the unredacted identities of
his confidential sources, thereby providing a master list of the individuals
who witnessed, knew about, or were directly involved in the apparatus of
repression. Although many of his sources are now deceased, the uncensored
records will allow human rights investigators to pinpoint who inside the
Argentine military, intelligence, and police were privy to details about
specific atrocities—information that will advance a number of ongoing human
rights investigations.
CONDOR 1
Based in Buenos Aires, Scherrer became the lead FBI
investigator of the September 21, 1976, car-bomb assassination of former Chilean
ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old colleague Ronni Moffitt at the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. Scherrer’s famous “Chilbom”
report was the first—and for years the only—partially declassified document
that mentioned Operation Condor, identifying it as a “recently established
[organization] between cooperating intelligence services in South America.” The
intelligence Scherrer gathered suggested that the Letelier-Moffitt
assassination was a possible “third phase” of the Condor mission spearheaded by
Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile and his secret police, the DINA.
Scherrer’s Chilbom cable has now been declassified
completely unredacted, and the identity of his source has been revealed as an
Argentine Army intelligence operative involved in death squad efforts in
Europe. “Source is Dr. Arturo Horacio Poire,” the document states, “who is a
member of the Argentine special group, which will possibly participate in the
third phase of ‘Operation Condor.’” The identification of the source has opened
the door to renewed investigation into Condor’s efforts to extend its
repression abroad.
But the unredacted version of Scherrer’s cable is only one
of dozens of exceptionally detailed FBI and CIA records on Operation Condor
found in the Argentina collection. They provide a far more comprehensive
history of Condor’s infrastructure and operational capacity than was previously
known. Among the substantive new revelations:
§ Argentina—not Pinochet’s Chile, which came up with the
idea of a Murder Inc. in the Southern Cone—was designated Condor 1.
Declassified CIA records make it clear that the numerical call signs for member
nations were alphabetical: Argentina was Condor 1; Bolivia, Condor 2; Chile,
Condor 3; Paraguay, Condor 4; Uruguay, Condor 5; etc. These designations were
used in encrypted communications among the Condor nations.
§ Argentina hosted the operational headquarters for a
special Condor program code-named Teseo—Spanish for Theseus, the mythical Greek
king who slew the fearsome Minotaur and other foes of the social order—whose
mission was “to liquidate selected individuals” abroad. Secret CIA cables
describe Teseo as “a unit established by the Condor cooperative organization of
South American intelligence services to conduct physical attacks against
subversive targets,” first in Paris and then in other European cities.
§ In September 1976, the Condor nations signed an agreement,
titled “Teseo Regulation, Operations Center,” to ratify their cooperation in
planning, financing, logistics, communications, and “selection of targets.” The
CIA obtained a copy of the accord, which describes, in banal detail, how each
intelligence service would contribute to the international assassination
program. The operations center would be staffed by “permanent representatives
from each participating service.” Their daily work schedule would run from 9:30
am to 12:30 pm and from 2:30 pm to 7:30 pm. Each country would make a
contribution of $10,000 for operational expenses, with monthly dues of $200 paid
“prior to the 30th of each month.” Assassination teams dispatched to Europe
would be made up of four individuals, “with a female eventually being
included”—presumably to help provide cover for the mission. “Operational costs
abroad are estimated at $3,500 per person for ten days,” the agreement stated,
“with an additional $1,000 the first time out for clothing allowance.” Under
the key section titled “Execution of the Target,” the accord stated that the
operational teams would “(A) Intercept the Target, (B) Carry out the operation,
and (C) Escape.”
§ CIA officials viewed these Condor murder plots as a
potential scandal for the agency and proactively moved to thwart them in
Europe. “The plans of these countries to undertake offensive action outside of
their own jurisdictions poses new problems for the Agency,” wrote Ray Warren,
the head of the Latin America division, sounding the alarm to the CIA’s acting
deputy director in late July 1976. “Every precaution must be taken to ensure
that the Agency is not wrongfully accused of being party to this type of
activity.”
A month later, Warren again warned his superiors of the
“adverse political ramifications for the Agency should ‘Condor’ engage in
assassinations and other flagrant violations of human rights.” But he also
reported on the “action” that CIA agents were taking to “preempt” those
ramifications “should the ‘Condor’ countries proceed with the European aspect
of their plans.” That section of Warren’s memorandum is still redacted. But
another declassified document based on Warren’s memo and other CIA records—a
top-secret sensitive Senate report on Condor researched and written by Senate
legal counsel Michael J. Glennon—was released unredacted. “The CIA warned the
governments of the countries in which the assassinations were likely to
occur—France and Portugal—which in turn warned possible targets,” states that
uncensored report. “The plot was foiled.”
As revealed in these records, the CIA’s ability to
countermand Condor’s murderous missions in Europe renews questions about its
failure to detect and deter a similar mission in downtown Washington—the
September 1976 car bombing that took the lives of Letelier and Moffitt. Until
now, “Operation Condor has been somewhat of a deadly mystery,” says
investigative journalist John Dinges, who is using the declassified records to
revise his pioneering book The Condor Years. “For decades, both the CIA and FBI
kept us in the dark about what they knew and when they knew it.” But with the
newly released documents, “that central question can be answered, and it’s
embarrassing for the US government,” Dinges concludes. “There was an intimate
liaison with Condor officials and ample early intelligence of Condor plans that
could have prevented the assassination in Washington.”
THE CONTRIBUTION OF DECLASSIFICATION
Like so many records in the Argentina Declassification
Project, the Condor papers provide names, dates, meeting places, and vivid
descriptions of the clandestine programs undertaken by the intelligence and
security services of the Southern Cone. This trove of new evidence will assist
human rights investigators in the former Condor countries who are continuing to
pursue the state-sponsored crimes of terrorism committed during the era of
military rule.
Indeed, since the documents were released in April, teams of
Argentine officials have been assessing them for their evidentiary value in
human rights prosecutions. In mid-September, according to Argentine Embassy
officials, the country’s justice ministry transmitted a set of inquiries and
requests for clarification to Washington. US officials who worked on the
declassification project are currently addressing those questions.
The documents are “already contributing to ongoing cases
that are both in the investigative and trial phases,” according to a statement
from the Office of the Public Prosecutor in Argentina provided to The Nation.
They have revealed “new data on how institutions [of repression] functioned
under the dictatorship” as well as “data on the responsibility of officials who
participated in massive human rights violations.”
Human rights organizations, as well as the families of
victims for whom the documents can provide a sad but poignant closure, are also
reviewing these materials. Much of Argentina’s archives of repression has been
disappeared—burned, buried, or perhaps thrown into the ocean—as were so many
victims. “In a number of cases,” as Carlos Osorio told the audience at the
April 12 release of the records, “these documents will provide those families
with the only evidence they have ever had on the fate of their loved ones.”
The family members of Héctor Hidalgo Solá are among those
reviewing the records. “The declassification process and results have been an
emotional journey,” affirmed Azul Hidalgo Solá, who never had a chance to know
her grandfather. But “the documents have helped me construct a full narrative
of my family’s history.”
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