There’s a long read in the Graun today about Operation Condor, the formal (if clandestine) conspiracy which conjoined the police, intelligence and military apparatus of numerous right-wing governments across South America in the 1970s.
It is an interesting overview for the casual reader, and focuses on the positive aspects of surviving state terror, and of the importance of working to hold to account those who instigated and sustained it, no matter how many years tumble along the way.
There is, however, a curious determination to divorce Condor – founded in Chile under the approving eyes of Augusto Pinochet, bringing together the secret police of that country together with those of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, then later Brazil, Ecuador and Peru – from its sponsors up north.
Author Giles Tremlett goes so far as to claim that “Although many of the men who carried out Operation Condor were alumni of the US army’s School of the Americas – a training camp in Panama for military from allied regimes across the continent – this was not a US-led operation.”
Yet elsewhere he acknowledges that public awareness of Condor stemmed from journalistic and activist investigations following the leak of “an obscure FBI note quoted in a book [in which] an FBI officer wrote: ‘Operation Condor is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning leftists, communists and Marxists which was recently established between the cooperating services in South America.’” *
He even refers to the recent revelation that Washington was fully aware of coordination between the Condor partners thanks to the transfer of proprietary secure communications equipment to them by Crypto AG, a CIA/BND front.
Simply saying ‘Condor was not led by the United States’ and leaving it there is not enough. In the same way the right-wing elements in the Chilean military would not have moved against Allende in the way they did without tacit approval from their patrocinadores norteamericanos, it beggars belief that with all the training programmes and intelligence-sharing and military advisor deployments throughout the Cone and – most of all – a shared world view between the US government and its counterparts in the downstairs hemisphere – the Condor conspirators were not confident (and with good reason) that they were pursuing an approved course of action.
Anyway, I’ve been trawling the drives and come up with a few juicy titbits, like this: **
…A close associate of [Dr Lothar] Bossle’s on the Board of the IfD was Prof. Dieter Blumenwitz, Professor of International and Constitutional Law at Würzburg University from 1976 on, who shared Bossle’s close links with Chile and would reportedly visit Colonia Dignidad with Bossle. In 1979, Blumenwitz was one of the co- authors with [Brian] Crozier of Pinochet’s Chilean Constitution; in 1980, Blumenwitz intervened on behalf of Colonia Dignidad in legal proceedings seeking to block Amnesty International’s German section from publishing allegations that the colony had served as a secret DINA torture centre (319).
(319) For biographies of Bossle, Blumenwitz and Rohrmoser, see IGfM, pgs 59, 63 and 65. Bossle would die in 2000, Blumenwitz in 2005, Rohrmoser in September 2008 – see Rohrmoser’s obituary in Die Welt, 18/9/08. In 1981, Rohrmoser would work with the Federal Government on a publication covering the philosophical bases of terrorism; in 1987-88, he would work several times as speaker for the German section of CAUSA. As for Blumenwitz, the legal proceedings against Amnesty International’s German section would run for more than twenty years and would trigger a Chilean court inspection in 1988, leading to a Chilean government decision to close Colonia Dignidad in February 1991 – see Guardian, 24-25/8/91. Blumenwitz’ Chile – Rückfahrt zur Demokratie (Chile – Return to Democracy) would be published by the IfD in 1987. On Colonia Dignidad and its links to DINA, see Gero Gemballa’s Colonia Dignidad, Rowohlt rororo aktuell, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1990, pgs 148-151. On DINA’s Washington assassination of Orlando Letelier, see John Dinges and Saul Landau’s Assassination on Embassy Row (Pantheon, New York 1980; McGraw-Hill, New York 1981); Taylor Branch and Eugene Propper’s Labyrinth (Penguin, London 1983). On DINA’s international cooperation within Operation Condor, see John Dinges’s excellent The Condor Years (New Press, New York 2004). On DINA’s 1975 production of nerve-gas using precursor chemicals purchased from Britain, see Observer, 23/4/89.
There’s also a chapter touching on the topic of Condor in Portrait of a Black Terrorist, the monograph on Italian neofascist and strategy of tension provocateur Stefano Delle Chiaie by the recently departed Scots anarchist Stuart Christie. Certainly worth a read. ***
Notes:
[*] Since that original 1980 story emerged, there has been a steady drip of evidence of official US complicity, and even politically non-aligned, academic works have acknowledged that the US government was aware of Operation Condor at the time it was running, and attempted to influence its directing minds, e.g:
U.S. diplomatic documents released in October 2002 revealed that U.S. officials had been aware that Operation Condor was being directed at leftist dissidents of those countries in exile. Although U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had ordered U.S. diplomats on 23 August 1976 to convey official “deep concern” over Operation Condor to the governments involved, this order was rescinded on 20 September 1976 by a senior State Department official in charge of Latin American affairs for fear that the message would antagonize Chilean President Augusto José Ramón Pinochet and the other heads of state. The next day, former Chilean foreign minister Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, an American associate, were both killed by a bomb rigged into the ignition system of Letelier’s car.
Historical Dictionary of Terrorism by Sean K Anderson with Stephen Sloan, Scarecrow Press, 2009 (third edition), p153.
[**] Rogue Agents: Habsburg, Pinay and the Private Cold War 1951-1991 by David Teacher (third edition, 2011), p119.
[***] Christie may be dead, but he outlived Delle Chiaie, who fucked off this mortal coil fifty-one weeks ago.
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