Operation Condor: Cable Suggests U.S. Role
March 6, 2001
On March 6, 2001, The New York Times reported the existence of a recently
declassified State Department document revealing that the United States
facilitated communications among South American intelligence chiefs who
were working together to eliminate left-wing opposition groups in their
countries as part of a covert program known as Operation Condor.
The document, a 1978 cable from Robert E. White, the U.S. ambassador to
Paraguay, was discovered by Professor J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island
University, who has published several articles on Condor. She called the
cable "another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that U.S.
military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor
as a secret partner or sponsor."
In the cable, Ambassador White relates a conversation with General
Alejandro Fretes Davalos, chief of staff of Paraguay's armed forces, who
told him that the South American intelligence chiefs involved in Condor
"keep in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation
in the Panama Canal Zone which covers all of Latin America." This
installation is "employed to co-ordinate intelligence information among the
southern cone countries." White, whose message was sent to Secretary of
State Cyrus Vance, is concerned that the U.S. connection to Condor might be
revealed during the then ongoing investigation into the deaths of former
Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni
Moffitt who were killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. "It would seem
advisable," he suggests, "to review this arrangement to insure that its
continuation is in U.S. interest."
The document was found among 16,000 State, CIA, White House, Defense and
Justice Department records released last November on the Pinochet
dictatorship in Chile, and Washington’s role in the violent coup that
brought his military regime to power. The release was the fourth and final
"tranche" of records released under the Clinton Administration's special
Chile Declassification Project.
"This document opens a pandora's box of questions on the U.S. knowledge of,
and role in, Operation Condor," said Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh,
director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project.
The Archive published a second document - a page from a CIA cable regarding
Brazil's role in Operation Condor - that Kornbluh said contained
information that could shed light on this issue. The undated page refers
to "CondorTel" - the "communications network established by the Condor
countries." Kornbluh pointed out that the entire next line has been
censored by the CIA.
The National Security Archive called on the U.S. Intelligence Community -
NSA, CIA, DIA and other Defense Department bureaus at the U.S. Southern
Command - to fully divulge their files on communications assistance to the
military regimes in the southern cone.
