The Condor Years by John Dinges Read Free Book Online Page B

investigations led directly and indirectly to the release of voluminous new documentation on the inner workings of the secret security agencies and their allies in the six Condor countries.
    A few months after filing the case, Garcés flew to Washington, D.C., and called his old friend Saul Landau. Landau was a fellow in the moderate left-leaning think tank the Institute for Policy Studies, an organization with a unique history in the battle against Pinochet. Founded by two former White House officials from the most idealistic wing of the John F. Kennedy presidency, the Institute’s fellows were in the front lines of the 1960s intellectual and political battle against the war in Vietnam. In the 1970s it naturally evolved into a centerof opposition to U.S. government alliances with South American dictatorships such as Pinochet’s.
    At Landau’s invitation, Orlando Letelier came to the Institute soon after his release from a Chilean prison camp in 1974 and used it as a base of operations in lobbying U.S. and European political leaders to throw up obstacles to the dictatorship. Letelier was on his way to work at the Institute’s Dupont Circle offices the day he was assassinated. After Letelier’s assassination, his widow, Isabel Margarita Morel de Letelier, continued as a fellow at the Institute, and with Landau mounted an unrelenting campaign to push forward the U.S. investigation of Letelier’s murder.
    Arriving in Washington, Garcés asked Landau to arrange a meeting. He wanted to enlist the support of the prosecutors and FBI agents, now retired, who had conducted the investigation of the Letelier assassination. That investigation had produced an enormous body of information about the workings of the Pinochet military and had led to the public discovery of Operation Condor. Most importantly, the still secret files held by major U.S. agencies—the Justice Department and FBI, the CIA and the State Department—contained what was undoubtedly the most complete investigative record of the inner workings of the Pinochet government and its relations with the United States.
    The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation had been the only successful international prosecution of crimes committed by the Chilean dictatorship. But its success was limited—the conviction of several Cuban exiles who assisted Chilean agents in the assassination. One of the assassins, American-born Michael Townley, pleaded guilty and cooperated with the U.S. prosecution. Colonel Manuel Contreras and other DINA officers were indicted, but Chile refused to extradite them to the United States. In 1990, Pinochet ended his seventeen-year dictatorship (while remaining as chief of the armed forces). For the first time, Chilean courts began an untainted investigation of the Letelier assassination, and in 1995, DINA Chief Contreras and his deputy, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, were convicted. Both were serving sentences in special military prisons at the time of Garcés’s arrival in Washington.
    Former Assistant U.S. Attorney E. Lawrence Barcella, one of two lead prosecutors in the case, hosted the meeting at his law offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, just three blocks from the White House. Lead FBI investigator Carter Cornick also attended. Garcés laid out his plan and progress so far since the charges had been filed in Spain. The goal, he said, was to achieve a formal indictmentby the Spanish court and an order of arrest, which would have the effect of preventing Pinochet from traveling freely abroad. Finding the truth and documenting it in a credible international court, sending a message for history about the end of impunity—these were measures of justice as important as any possible punishment of the guilty.
    The Spanish judge, García-Castellón, calling on the provisions of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), a 1990 agreement signed by Spain and the United States, had made a broad, bold request—called “letters rogatory”—for U.S. secrets about