Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges

From the Publisher

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.

Foreign Affairs

Dinges, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and former managing editor of National Public Radio News, takes a hard, careful look at Latin America in the 1970s, that woeful time of vicious struggles between bitter extremes, when human life was cheap and torture, kidnapping, and terrorism common. Dinges is careful not to go further than his evidence allows. On the contentious question of the U.S. role in the Chilean coup of 1973, for instance, he says the record remains incomplete, even with the recent declassification of 24,000 U.S. government documents. But the core of Dinges' book treats the period after the coup, examining the alliances that formed within the clandestine Latin American left, on the one hand, and between the United States and General Augusto Pinochet after he took power, on the other.

Dinges' account includes much new disturbing information and some remarkable revelations, particularly about the relationship of the United States to the Latin American intelligence agencies responsible for the Operation Condor assassinations and other systematic human rights violations. He cautiously weighs evidence of CIA support for Chile's notorious intelligence service, dina, and examines dina's role in targeting Pinochet's opponents at home and abroad. He also shows how contradictory U.S. behavior was, especially when human rights and intelligence concerns intersected. In June 1976, after Washington learned of planned assassinations outside of Latin America (including the targeting of a prominent U.S. Democratic member of Congress), U.S. support for the dictator began to wane. But Dinges sees this whole sorry episode as a classic case of "blowback": the unintendedconsequences of U.S. policies long kept secret from the U.S. public. This is a remarkable book and a major contribution to the historical record.

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