The Condor Years Read Online Free PDF

officials * endorsed Chile’s proposal and signed the final document, dated November 28. A delegation from Brazil attended as observers, but did not formally join until 1976. After consultation with their respective governments, they were to ratify the agreement within sixty days.
    The new entity needed a name. A Uruguayan air force colonel, the second ranking member of the delegation, had a suggestion that was incorporated in the final document.
    The present organization will be called CONDOR, by unanimous agreement, in accord with the motion presented by the Uruguayan delegation in homage to the country that is its headquarters.
    The Letelier assassination would not take place for another ten months, but it was uppermost in Colonel Fons’s mind when he thought back on the Condor meeting. Letelier was the most typical victim—targeted as a dangerous democrat rather than a violent terrorist, a man who worked against Pinochet not in secret but in public corridors of power in the United States and Europe.
    The Letelier assassination was to become the single most notorious act involving the Condor alliance being forged at the November 1975 meeting. The Uruguayan officer who described the meeting could have chosen from a stunning list of similar examples, before and after the meeting, of attacks against enemies from all the countries represented, including his own. All fit the international parameters set forth in Chile’s proposal for Phase Two and Three operations: the targets were violent or nonviolent enemies residing outside their own country at the time they are attacked.
    The high-profile Condor victims include a former president, a dissident military chief, and moderate political leaders with impeccable democratic credentials. Some of the victims, had they lived, would have been at the top of lists for potential presidents when their countries returned to democracy. There were many other lower-profile cases—Argentines, Uruguayans, Chileans, Paraguayans, and Bolivians kidnapped outside their own countries in the period 1974–80. Some were unabashed Marxist revolutionaries planning guerrilla war; some were trying to live in peace. Only a few survived.
    All fit the pattern of Phase Two and Phase Three “operations” discussed at the Santiago meeting on inter-American intelligence those days in November 1975. Some of the killing took place before the meeting. Condor operations of both Phase Two and Phase Three reached a peak in the period after the military coup in Argentina in March 1976.
    A final case must be noted. In late July 1976, a CIA official in Montevideo, Uruguay, learned that a Uruguayan officer was talking at a cocktail party about killing U.S. Congressman Edward Koch. The congressman had angered the military government by passing an amendment to cut off U.S. military aid to Uruguay. CIA Director George Bush personally called Representative Koch to warn him that there was a “contract” out on his life because of his amendment on Uruguay. The hit was to be carried out not by Uruguay but by Chile’s DINA—a detail that betrayed the threat’s modus operandi as a Phase Three Condor plan.
    The implications are inescapable: U.S. intelligence officials had knowledge about the new organization’s assassination plans but treated that information with insouciant disregard bordering on indifference to the possible fatal consequences of its allies’ terrorist actions. As will become evident in the course of this book, even more information was in the hands of officials about the planned mission that resulted in Chile’s assassination of Letelier around thesame time. We will examine in detail the actions taken and omitted that led to the failure to avert that act of international terrorism in the heart of the U.S. capital.
    The written documents from the Santiago meeting referred to the Condor System, or the Condor Organization. They maintained Condor’s cover, even in the secret documents, that Condor was