Operation: Condor

Operation: Condor is the stuff of which movies are made, and as a matter of fact I believe that a movie may have been made based on this particular operation. The Cold War that dominated worldwide politics from the end of World War Two until the beginning of the 1990’s made the entire planet a battleground. Where Marxism and communism where making gains, there were right-wing governments mounting opposition to them, the South American continent was no exception.

Operation: Condor was a collaborative effort by the intelligence agencies of the right-wing dictatorships of South America to undermine leftist opposition to their regimes. The countries involved in the operation included: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and to a lesser extent Ecuador and Peru. It has been rumored that the CIA facilitated the activities of this operation by providing some logistical support.

It is believed that the results of the operation began to appear in 1974 when the bodies of leftist agitators began to show up in various places around Buenos Aires, Argentina. As the operation unfolded and found its stride, the intelligence services of Chile (DINA) and Argentina (SIDA) became the major forces of the operation. While it has been found that the operation was officially brought to an end in 1983, after the death of a reported 50,000 people, those killings continued for some time.

The SIDA of Argentina concocted a particularly gruesome method of dealing with those that they determined were enemies of the state. They implemented what became known as “death flights”, which is exactly what one would think that it would be. After a person was established to be a threat to national security that person would be taken by SIDA operatives, remanded into custody, and taken to the airport for one of these flights. Allegedly, the person would be drugged, taken onto the aircraft, and thrown out of the aircraft at high altitudes, to never be seen again.

Probably the most notable assassination conducted by members of Operation: Condor involved Orlando Letelier, an economist and former Chilean Ambassador to the United States. After serving time at Dawson Island, a remote Chilean island used as a detention camp following the 1973 coup, Letelier fled Chile in exile and took a job in Washington D.C. On 21 September, 1976 Letelier and his American assistant were killed by a car bomb in Washington D.C.

It was later determined that Letelier’s death was perpetrated by operatives for Operation: Condor , through lesser prominent proxies. Michael Townley, a former CIA operative, confessed that he had hired a group of Cuban nationals to plant the bomb that killed Letelier. An amazingly brazen attack if there ever had been one; Pinochet advocated the assassination of a former political opponent on U.S. soil. This incident clearly shows how arrogant Pinochet had become, that he would order this attack without fear of blowback is beyond belief.

Townley would become a source of valuable information for the prosecution of the people responsible for the crimes committed during Operation: Condor . After cutting a deal with prosecutors for federal witness relocation, Townley told everything he knew in regards to Condor.

This is just a brief discussion of the activities carried out in the name of Operation: Condor , to get into detail would probably take an entire book. In the broader spectrum of the Cold War this operation fit the agenda of those opposed to Marxism and communism, the individuals involved in Condor went entirely too far. The right-wing dictators of the South American continent participated in activities that seemed more the standard operating procedure of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China

Copyright© 2012 R. Bertz; all rights reserved.

Dinges, J. (2004). The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. The New Press.