Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents
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Behind the covert, international anti-terrorist network responsible for South America's worst human rights abuses.President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.—1970 CIA internal memo Operation Condor, set up by Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, was a secret alliance among six Southern Cone intelligence agencies that waged an international dirty war against internal enemies. Between 15,000 and 30,000 people were tortured and murdered as the operation, with funding and operational support from the CIA, ranged across national borders to destroy "subversion." Award-winning journalist John Dinges, who was himself interrogated at a secret Chilean torture camp, draws on hundreds of interviews and newly opened secret police files to prove the extent of cooperation between Operation Condor and the United States government. Revolutionaries, spies and military officers—many speaking out for the first time—retell the brutal struggle between Condor and its enemies, alongside the suspenseful present-day narrative of the lawyers and judges whose relentless efforts to end the impunity of Condor's perpetrators led to Pinochet's arrest and changed international human rights law forever. About the Author:: John Dinges, former managing editor of NPR News, is the author of Assassination on Embassy Row and Our Man in Panama. He is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. Publishers Weekly When a Spanish judge pressed charges against Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1998, the case broke an international code of silence on the fates of the tens of thousands of Latin Americans who were tortured and killed during more than a decade of dictatorship in Chile and neighboring countries. The United States agreed to Spain's request for 60,000 pages of secret files on Chile, including CIA operational files. Former NPR news managing editor Dinges (Our Man in Panama), who lived in Chile and was interrogated in a secret torture camp during the Pinochet dictatorship, pored through those files and has uncovered the chilling story of Operation Condor, a Chilean-led conspiracy among six South American dictatorships to hunt down and eliminate leftist rebels and their sympathizers. Condor was responsible for the 1973 murder in Washington, D.C., of Chilean exile Orlando Letelier, which U.S. diplomats were aware of and failed to stop. Indeed, the picture that emerges of U.S. policy is frightening. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's "green light, red light" human rights policy for the first time presented a public U.S. stance in favor of human rights, yet behind closed doors, he was reassuring Latin America's dictators of U.S. support. Hampered by the weight and significance of its revelations, the book gets off to a slow start. Soon enough, however, vivid stories and details emerge: double agents, the euphemisms of the spy trade (e.g., "wet work" for assassinations), bumbling murderers and rebels, and cynical U.S. diplomats. Dinges's meticulously documented study is a cautionary tale for today's war on terror-which shares a major anniversary with the 1973 Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power: September 11. (Feb. 2) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments1The First War on Terrorism12Meeting in Santiago103Tilting at Windmills234Revolution in the Counterrevolution415Agents in Argentina636Mission in Paraguay827The Condor System998"The Old Man Doesn't Want to Die"1269Death in Argentina13510Green Light, Red Light15611A Preventable Assassination17512Kissinger and Argentina's "Terrorist Problem"19913Ed Koch and Condor's Endgame21414The Pursuit of Justice and U.S. Accountability230Bibliography255Notes261Index305
