a book by John Dinges, NEW PRESS; 322 Pages; $25.95
Reviewed
by Paul McLeary
www.sfgate.com
March 14, 2004
Henry Kissinger continues to cast a deep,
lingering shadow over the violent middle
decades of the Cold War years. From 1969 to
1977, his smug baritone dominated U.S.
foreign policy, guiding many of the more
dubious alliances formed with
less-than-democratically minded governments.
It should come as no surprise, then, as John
Dinges makes clear in his book "The Condor
Years," that Kissinger played a role in the
unflinching brutality that was known as
Operation Condor.
Led by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet,
Condor was a highly organized
anti-terrorist, anti-communist military
intelligence operation carried out by six
"Southern Cone" countries (Chile, Argentina,
Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil),
roughly between 1973 and 1980. During that
time, anywhere from 15, 000 to 30,000 people
were tortured or murdered by the group, all
in the name of keeping communist forces from
gaining a foothold in South America -- and
keeping corrupt military dictatorships in
power.
The ball started rolling with the 1970
election of Salvador Allende as the
president of Chile. Allende immediately took
steps to socialize the country's economy,
taking business ownership away from several
large U.S. corporations and handing them
over to local workers. Kissinger and
President Nixon, hardly amused by a country
in the Western Hemisphere "going communist,"
gave the nod to the CIA to stage a military
coup, resulting in the kidnapping and
(possibly mistaken) murder of Chilean chief
of staff Rene Schneider. By 1973, under
pressure from militant groups on the right
and left, and buckling under a U.S. embargo,
the Allende government was overthrown by
Gen. Pinochet's forces. Allende was killed
in a firefight.
Soon after installing himself in power,
Pinochet reached out to other like-minded
military dictatorships in South America and
set up Operation Condor, a far-reaching
operation that shared information and
coordinated action against leftist groups,
and -- through a process of intimidation,
arrest, torture and murder -- attempted to
break the back of the opposition. Although
the U.S government didn't officially support
Condor, it tended to turn a blind eye to
some of its more violent -- and illegal --
actions.
Kissinger, like any master of realpolitik,
refrained from making any overt comments
about the situation, instead using the CIA
and U.S. embassies in South America to
communicate his wishes by gesture, inference
and inaction. "Under the leadership of Henry
Kissinger," Dinges writes, "first as Richard
Nixon's national security adviser and later
as secretary of state, the United States
sent an unequivocal signal to the most
extreme rightist forces that democracy could
be sacrificed in the cause of ideological
warfare. Criminal operational tactics,
including assassination, were not only
acceptable but supported with weapons and
money."
Dinges brings to light all manner of
recently declassified CIA and State
Department memos and communications,
including one in which the U.S. ambassador
to Chile, David Popper, alarmed by the human
rights abuses he was witnessing, made the
mistake of broaching the subject to Pinochet
during a meeting, the result of which was a
quick Chilean protest to Kissinger, who shot
back a memo to the embassy saying, "Tell
Popper to cut out the political science
lectures." Unsurprisingly, this curt
reprimand doesn't exactly place Kissinger on
the right side of history.
The abuses Condor perpetrated against
leftist groups remained largely ignored for
years, but thanks to the Freedom of
Information Act and interviews with former
officials and those who escaped the carnage
alive, Dinges is able to go into remarkable
detail in exposing the actions of both the
opposition groups and the military strongmen
who battled them. One often-overlooked
nugget Dinges includes in the book is one of
the most brazen acts of terrorism Condor
ever attempted -- in Washington, D.C., of
all places.
Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean
ambassador to Washington and a Pinochet
opponent, was assassinated when his car was
blown up near Sheridan Square by a
remote-control bomb in September 1976.
Several men working for Condor were later
arrested, and it was soon discovered that
the group also had its sights on then-New
York Rep. Ed Koch for a brief period of
time.
Operation Condor fell victim to its own
internal tensions in the late 1970s and
broke apart soon after. By the early 1990s,
none of the participating governments were
still in power, and few involved had ever
been brought to justice. But in 1996, Joan
Graces, who at the time of the 1973 Chilean
coup was an adviser to Allende, and by the
1990s was working as a lawyer in Spain,
started work to bring charges against
Pinochet, alleging that Chile and Argentina
were participants in a conspiracy to commit
human rights crimes.
At the same time, in a separate case, a
court in Spain had begun proceedings to
prosecute former members of Argentina's
military junta for human rights abuses
carried out in the '70s. Using contacts at
the FBI, Graces unearthed thousands of
Department of Justice, FBI and CIA documents
outlining what the U.S. government knew
about Condor and its crimes, and in October
1998, Pinochet was arrested in London.
There are more than 200 international
warrants for the arrest of military
officials who took part in Condor, but the
U.S. government has remained mum on the
issue. Kissinger has refused to testify in
criminal proceedings related to Condor, and
Dinges says that there is ample evidence of
"cooperation, liaison, acquiescence, and
even complicity" between the United States
and Condor.
The Cold War, like the current war on
terrorism, made for strange bedfellows.
Nixon and Kissinger were willing to overlook
human rights abuses and fund the overthrow
of a democratically elected socialist
government in the name of containing
communism. Dinges' book, dense with fact and
personal account, goes a long way toward
finally bringing the truths of that dark
time into the light.
Paul
McLeary is a New York writer.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/14/RVGVQ5DN7N1.DTL