Evidence: Kissinger Rescinded Warning Against Condor Assassinations

Kissinger "has instructed that no further
action be taken on this matter", reads a declassified Sep. 16, 1976
cable sent by Kissinger's office from Zambia, where he was travelling at
the time, to his assistant secretary of state for inter-American
affairs, Harry Shlaudeman.

The "matter" in question concerned
instructions sent under Kissinger's name to U.S. ambassadors to Chile,
Argentina, and Uruguay Aug. 23, 1976, to make a formal demarche to the
leaders of their host governments regarding Washington's "deep concern"
about reports it had received of "plans for the assassination of
subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national
borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad".

The Aug.
23 cable ordered the ambassadors to warn to the highest possible
officials that such plans - part of a secret, Chilean-led intelligence
collaboration among the Southern Cone's military regimes known as
Operation Condor - would "create a most serious moral and political
problem".

When Washington's ambassador in Montevideo, Ernest
Siracusa, balked at the directive, Shlaudeman explained to Kissinger in a
memo one week later that the instructions were designed "to head off
...a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the
international status and reputation of the countries involved".

Kissinger's
Sep. 16 cable, which, along with the others, are posted at the NSA's
website, fills in some key gaps in the chain of events leading up to the
car bomb assassination of Letelier and a colleague, Ronni Karpen
Moffitt, while they were driving to work at the Institute for Policy
Studies less than two kilometres from the White House Sep. 21, 1976.

Until
the 9/11 al Qaeda attack on the Pentagon, the assassination, which was
carried out by agents of the regime of Chilean President Augusto
Pinochet, was the most serious act of international terrorism committed
in the U.S. capital.

In particular, it settles a controversy -
played out most dramatically in the 2004 resignation of the senior Latin
America specialist at the most influential U.S. foreign-policy journal,
Foreign Affairs - over a Sep. 20, 1976 directive by Shlaudeman to his
deputy, William Luers, to "instruct the (U.S.) ambassadors (in the
region) to take no further action" on the Aug. 23 instructions. The
cable noted that "there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an
intention to activate the Condor scheme".

Both the Sep. 20 and
Aug. 23 cables were previously released by the NSA, a non-profit group
founded in 1985 and supported by private foundations.

"The Sep.
16 cable is the missing piece of the historical puzzle of Kissinger's
role in the action, and inaction, of the U.S. government after learning
of Condor assassination plots," said Peter Kornbluh, the NSA's senior
analyst on Chile.

"We know now what happened: the State
Department initiated a timely effort to thwart a 'Murder Inc.' in the
Southern Cone, and Kissinger, without explanation, aborted it," he said.

While Kissinger himself has not spoken about his role, his
defenders have insisted that he had nothing to do with Shlaudeman's Sep.
20 cable that countermanded the Aug. 16 instructions. Kissinger's Sep.
16 cable from Lusaka, however, makes it clear that Shlaudeman was acting
at his boss' behest.

"The Kissinger cancellation on warning the
Condor nations prevented the delivery of a diplomatic protest that
conceivably could have deterred an act of terrorism in Washington,
D.C.," noted Kornbluh, author of "The Pinochet File: A Declassified
Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability".

Some analysts,
including Kornbluh, believe that a strong U.S. warning of the kind
pushed by Shlaudeman's bureau also could have discouraged hundreds of
disappearances and killings of dissidents carried out by the
intelligence services of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and
Brazil, among others, as part of Operation Condor.

According to
the cables, Siracusa, the U.S. ambassador in Montevideo, resisted his
Aug. 18 instructions to deliver a demarche to Uruguay's military junta
because he feared that his life would be in danger.

Shlaudeman
recommended that Kissinger authorise a telegram to Siracusa "to talk to
both (Foreign Minister Juan Carlos) Blanco and General (Julio Cesar)
Vadora" while Shlaudeman would meet with the Uruguayan ambassador in
Washington. As an alternative, he suggested that a senior CIA official
meet with his Uruguayan counterpart in Montevideo.

The U.S.
ambassador to Chile at the time, David Popper, had also objected to the
Aug. 18 instructions, arguing that, "given Pinochet's sensitivities, he
might well take as an insult any inference that he was connected with
such assassination plots".

In his Sep. 16 cable, Kissinger
explicitly "declined to approve message to Montevideo and has instructed
that no further action be taken on this matter", effectively reversing
the instructions to Popper and the U.S. ambassador in Argentina to make a
demarche.

In early October - after the Letelier assassination -
a Santiago-based CIA officer met with the head of the Chilean secret
police (DINA), Col. Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, to discuss the demarche,
although declassified documents obtained by the NSA offer no indication
that the assassination came up in the exchange.

It was the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which first related Condor to the
Letelier assassination. Shortly after the car bombing, an Argentine
general told an FBI agent that DINA was the likely perpetrator, and the
tip led to the prosecution and conviction of several DINA agents here
and eventually to a prison term for Contreras, who called himself
"Condor One".

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be
read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.