The Condor Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

incapacitate, or otherwise impede the enemy’s ability to act. They include disseminating propaganda (“black” propaganda, meaning the use of lies, also known as “disinformation,” to discredit or confound the enemy), surveillance, and location of enemy targets, and covert missions to capture and hold enemy activists.
    The pinnacle of intelligence operations is assassination, sometimes called “wet work” in the intelligence world. In the mid-1970s Latin America security parlance, operations was the word used for kidnapping, interrogation under torture, and killing.
    Phase Two operations were limited to actions against targets inside the six-member countries. Colonel Contreras’s proposal met an obvious need. Activistsof all political stripes had moved from country to country as military crackdowns were imposed. Many were refugees under official protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Tens of thousands of refugees had gathered in Argentina, the only country that did not yet have a military government. As long as the exiles did not break the laws of the country in which they had sought refuge, they were protected—at least in theory—under international law. Contreras’s proposal made refugee protection meaningless by creating a mechanism for the intelligence services to conduct operations in each other’s countries.
    The model for Phase Two was the successful joint operation that had just been completed by Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay in the months prior to the November meeting. Paraguay captured two leftists, a Chilean and an Argentine, arriving from Argentina. They were on the first stop of a mission to several Latin American countries to recruit leftist groups to the new Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR). Chilean and Argentine intelligence officers converged on Asunción to interrogate the two men. After three months of shared interrogation, Paraguay permitted Chile to transport the Chilean prisoner to a clandestine interrogation center in Chile. He was held for another four months, and then disappeared. The operation was one of several documented examples of direct U.S. collaboration with the joint security force actions. The FBI shared and distributed the intelligence product of the Paraguay arrests, even while knowing that the information had been obtained under torture.
    The new system would formalize and improve such collaboration, expanding it to include Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil. The intelligence services would exchange information, allowing each to keep track of the whereabouts and movements of its enemy targets present in another country. One or both countries would carry out surveillance and capture; all interested countries would participate in interrogation. The reports based on interrogation would be shared, and upon request a captured leftist would be transported to his or her home country for further interrogation and eventual execution.
    Torture was an inevitable and integral part of the process of interrogation in all of the countries. Under the system, prisoners in neighboring countries could be interrogated simultaneously, based on quick exchanges of questions and data among the interrogators. Documents captured in raids were to be copied and exchanged for analysis in each country.
    What Contreras had in mind for Phase Three stunned even some of this group of hardened intelligence veterans. Phase Three operations would include surveillance and assassination outside Latin America. Colonel José A. Fons, Chief of Uruguay’s delegation recalled the meeting twenty-six years later in an interview:
    Chile proposed operations to eliminate enemies all over the world, to eliminate people who were causing harm to our countries, people like Letelier. That was an operation that required a lot of preparation, a very well done operation. Chile had the resources and the will to operate. I repeat, Chile had the resources and will to operate.
    The five top intelligence