excerpts from the book

Predatory States

Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America

by J. Patrice McSherry

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005, paperback

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During the Cold war, highly politicized and ruthless militaries in Latin America, aided and abetted by Washington, used the methods of terror to wage their anticommunist wars in secrecy. Counterinsurgent forces created a vast parallel infrastructure of clandestine detention centers and killing machinery to avoid national and international law and scrutiny, and utilized disappearance, torture, and assassination to defeat "internal enemies."

... Six military states in South America extended ... parastatal structures and extralegal methods across borders - with a "green light" from the U.S. government - in a transnational repressive program known as Operation Condor (or Plan Condor). The militaries in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay were the key protagonists of Condor, spreading dirty war throughout the region and beyond. For them, the ends justified the means; torture, extrajudicial executions, and abductions were considered legitimate if employed against "subversives." During the Cold War, tens of thousands of Latin American men, women, and children were tortured and murdered as a result of such methods, hundreds of them killed within the framework of Operation Condor.

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The 1992 discovery of the police files known as the Archives of Terror in Paraguay provided new documentation of [Operation] Condor, confirming earlier testimonies of victims and hitherto fragmentary evidence. The investigation of Condor initiated by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, whose extradition request led to the 1998 arrest of Pinochet in London, produced new revelations.

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U.S. sanctioning of extralegal and aberrant methods during the Cold War led to widespread human rights violations and crimes against humanity in Latin America and elsewhere.

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The lessons of the Cold War have been forgotten - if, indeed, they were ever learned by those in power. The methods and strategies of terror, once they are approved by political leaders and adopted by armed, security, and intelligence forces, are not easily unlearned or controlled. Unless governments and militaries, particularly those that profess to be democratic, explicitly repudiate the use of terror (or counterterror) in the name of a higher cause, the world's people will be threatened by the specter of new [Operation] Condor-like organizations and new dirty wars.

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Operation Condor was a secret intelligence and operations system created in the 1970s through which the South American military states shared intelligence and seized, tortured, and executed political opponents in one another's territory. Inspired by a continental security doctrine that targeted ideological enemies, the military states in the Condor system engaged in terrorist practices to destroy the "subversive threat" from the left and defend "Western, Christian civilization." The Condor apparatus was a secret component of a larger, U.S.-led counterinsurgency strategy to preempt or reverse social movements demanding political or socioeconomic change.

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"Subversives" were defined as those with dangerous ideas that challenged the traditional order, whether they were peaceful dissenters, social activists, or armed revolutionaries.

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Argentine general Jorge Rafael Videla, 1976

A terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilization.

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Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms"- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

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The legacies of the [Latin American] colonial hacienda system, with its tiny land-owning elites and vast rural worker and peasant sectors, contributed to persisting inequality. So did traditions in many countries of autocratic and elitist governments that remained indifferent to the plight of their poor.

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Movements for change [in Latin America] were often met with repression. Foreign governments also played a role, especially the United States, which had supported "friendly" dictators in the region and often sent in the Marines to secure U.S. economic and political interests.

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U.S. national security strategists (who feared "another Cuba") and their Latin American counterparts began to regard large sectors of [Latin American] societies as potentially or actually subversive. They especially feared leftist or nationalist leaders who were popularly elected, thus giving their ideas legitimacy. Washington responded to the Cuban revolution by strengthening Latin American military-security forces and honing a security doctrine that targeted "internal enemies." National security doctrine - a politicized doctrine of internal war and counterrevolution that targeted the enemy within-gave the militaries a messianic mission: to remake their states and societies and eliminate "subversion".

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In the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s, U.S.-backed armed forces carried out military coups throughout Latin America, moving to obliterate leftist forces and extirpate leftist ideas. The militaries installed a new form of rule - the national security state.

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Operation Condor, formed in the 1970s, extended the dirty wars across borders. The system's key members were the military regimes of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, later joined by Ecuador and Peru in less central roles. Condor also enjoyed organizational, intelligence, financial, and technological sustenance from the United States, acting as a secret partner and sponsor... in 1980 Condor operations and methods appeared in Central America. Condor was a secret strike force of the military regimes, and it signified an unprecedented level of coordinated repression in Latin America.

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The Condor system consisted of three levels. The first was mutual cooperation among military intelligence services, to coordinate political surveillance of targeted dissidents and exchange intelligence information. The second was covert action, a form of offensive unconventional warfare in which the role of the perpetrator remains concealed. Multinational Condor squadrons carried out covert cross-border operations to detain-disappear exiles and transfer them to their countries of origin, where most disappeared permanently. The third and most secret level was Condor's assassination capability, known as "Phase III." Under Phase III, special teams of assassins from member countries were formed to travel worldwide to eliminate "subversive enemies." Phase III was aimed at political leaders especially feared for their potential to mobilize world opinion or organize broad opposition to the military states.

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In his landmark study, E. V. Walter argued that state elites manipulate fear as a mean of controlling society and maintaining power. Terror is used to engineer compliant behavior not only among victims, but also among larger target populations. While victims suffer direct consequences, broad sectors of society are the principal target. The underlying goal of state terrorism is to eliminate potential power contenders and to impose silence and political paralysis, thereby consolidating existing power relations. The proximate end is to instill terror in society, the ultimate end is control. [Operation] Condor's targets were persons who espoused political, economic, and social programs at odds with the ideologies and plans of the military dictatorships, their elite allies, and their sponsors in Washington. Through the use of terror, the military states sought to extinguish the aspirations for social justice and deeper democracy held by millions of people during the 1960s and 70s. The evidence suggests that Operation Condor, and the generalized repression of the Cold War years in Latin America, represented a military "solution" to an age-old problem: the distribution of power and wealth in human

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Under Operation Condor, military intelligence organizations created special clandestine detention centers for foreign prisoners outside of the normal prison system, hidden in military bases or abandoned buildings. Torture and execution were rife in such centers. Exiles and refugees who were legally arrested could be passed into the covert Condor system, at which point all information available to the outside world about the person ceased. Prisoners were transferred across borders without passports, on unregistered flights, and like the other disappeared, their detention and imprisonment were denied by the state. To avoid detection, Condor disposed of victims by burning their bodies or throwing them into the sea. The pervading sense of ambiguity, unreality, and dread created by the parallel state was a key element of the terror used by the militaries to consolidate power over society.

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[Operation] Condor employed a computerized database of thousands of individuals considered politically suspect and had archives of photos, microfilms, surveillance reports, psychological profiles, reports on membership in organizations, personal and political histories, and lists of friends and family members, as well as files on all manner of organizations. Several sources indicate that the CIA provided powerful computers to the Condor system (and, in fact, no other country in the region was technologically capable of doing so). An Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact in 1976 that the CIA had played a key role in setting up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states. A former Bolivian agent of Condor, Juan Carlos Fortün, told a Bolivian journalist in the early 1990s that an advanced system of communications was installed in the Ministry of the Interior in La Paz, along with a telex system interlinked with the five other Condor countries. He said that a special machine to encode and decode messages was made especially for the Condor system by the Logistics Department of the CIA.

The Condor network's secure communications system, Condortel, enabled Condor controllers to exchange data on suspects, track the movement of individuals across borders on various forms of transport, and transmit orders to operations teams, as well as share and receive intelligence information across a large geographical area. Condortel allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of [Operation] Condor.

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Concurrent with the rise of the Cold War was the eruption of nationalist sentiment in the Third World... While the USSR and Cuba were sympathetic to indigenous revolutionary movements, they did not create them. Most scholars concur that social protest and revolutionary movements in the Americas were the product of indigenous conditions coupled with a crisis of state legitimacy. Unequal socioeconomic structures and skewed distribution of wealth, poverty and economic hardship, lack of democracy, repression, and truncated freedoms for the vast majority of the populace: these conditions reflected excessive and undemocratic concentrations of political and economic power. The appeal of radical change to many people in Latin America was based not on terror by insurgents (as counterinsurgents supposed), but on the dream of social justice and better lives for their children. For those living in intolerable conditions, the realization that change was possible was deeply liberating.

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The U.S. government launched counterinsurgency programs throughout the developing world in the 1960s. Counterinsurgency warfare, directed against insurgents and broad civilian sectors of society, was, above all, a mechanism to secure social control and "stability," protecting the interests of the counterinsurgent forces and the political-economic system that fostered them against a real or potential challenge from below. As the mechanization and depersonalization of combat resulted in industrial killing in the two world wars ... so counterinsurgency warfare, in practice, produced "industrial repression. Counterinsurgency militaries organized massive new state and parastatal apparatuses for intelligence, surveillance, and social control, including secret torture-disappearance-killing systems and new technologies of violence to terrorize whole populations.

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U.S. military trainers taught techniques of assassination as early as the 1950s in Guatemala and elsewhere. U.S. national security doctrine, especially after the 1959 Cuban revolution, increasingly encouraged a concept of unconventional war subject to no rules or ethics, a "dirty war" to be won at all costs.

... The Latin American militaries, many of which had long occupied a dominant role in their societies and some of which had used torture before, began to characterize domestic conflicts as international communist conspiracies and portray themselves as the front lines in a global holy war. Over time, important sectors of the armed forces throughout the region were converted from conventional to unconventional forces that adopted counterinsurgency warfare and covert operations to combat "internal subversion." Covert paramilitary actions were a proactive tool allowing the counterinsurgents to prevent (or cause in other situations) the overthrow of a government in power.

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Even in peaceful Third World societies, it was U.S. policy to develop military counterinsurgency forces and add to their capabilities by creating paramilitary auxiliaries. Clearly, targeting people who might become insurgents was a strategy with deeply authoritarian and repressive implications. The assumption was that civilian populations were potentially subversive, even in the absence of lawless behavior... civilian sectors were weakened and progressive social change halted or reversed in numerous countries. The repressive forces of the state exponentially expanded in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world, in many cases deployed against all forms of political opposition. US. doctrine and training deeply shaped the strategic perspectives, organization, logistics, operations, intelligence, and deployment of the Latin American armed forces. It was a policy that contributed to new of mass repression in Latin America.

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The [Operation] Condor system enabled the military states to camouflage international acts of terror. Such aggressive actions by U.S.-backed militaries would have been very difficult to carry out without the support or consent of Washington. In fact, evidence demonstrates that top U.S. leaders and national security officials considered Condor to be an effective weapon in the hemispheric anticommunist crusade. Key branches of the U.S. state, namely the executive, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA, were not only closely informed of Condor operations but also supplied significant assistance and sustenance to the Condor system, and, indeed, actively collaborated with some of Condor's hunts for exiled political activists.

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Counterinsurgency was applied in countries where power seemed likely to shift to non-elite sectors associated with leftist, nationalist, or populist agendas, and away from traditional ruling elites. Such a shift was clearly unacceptable to the elites in question and, usually, to U.S. political leaders. Washington identified a series of nationalist, populist, and progressive movements and leaders in the developing world as "communist" and targeted them for neutralization of destruction.

... U.S. policy in Latin America was not simply a series of mistakes based on misperceptions but was the continuation of a historical pattern of intervention and expansionism in the region aimed at protecting growing economic, political, and military interests.

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In the first half of the twentieth century, U.S. leaders looked to right-wing autocrats worldwide as the best guarantors of stability, order, antii-Bolshivism, and openness to U.S. capitalist expansion.

U.S. investors increasingly sought raw materials and markets in Latin America, the U.S. government expanded its military reach to the Panama Canal and beyond, setting up military bases across the region. The early part of the twentieth century was marked by U.S. intervention in much of Central America and the Caribbean (Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere). In many cases, the marines created proxy forces, such as the national guards in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic to maintain "order" after their departure, and a series of pro-U.S. autocrats ruled for decades. The pattern of U.S. interventionism in Central America and the Caribbean in the twentieth century illuminated Washington's urge to control these regions and incorporate them within the U.S. political economy. Even during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" period the U.S. government maintained supportive relations with such dictators as Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, ruthless men who willingly protected U.S. investments and generally accepted U.S. political orientations.

With the close of World War II and the establishment of the UN, U.S. policymakers increasingly shifted their foreign policy strategy in the developing world: from overt to covert intervention. By the 1960s, U.S. covert operations reached Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, among other South American countries. The Cold War ideological focus on the evils of communism was a useful strategy for justifying U.S. support for anticommunist (and antidemocratic dictators; it also provided a rationale for the pursuit of U.S. economic interests in the developing world. U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was more than an anti-Soviet project. It was an expansionist effort to globalize the U.S. sphere of influence and expand U.S. hegemony, spreading free market capitalism and U.S.-style liberalism under "a military shield" worldwide.

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The broad U.S. interests in the underdeveloped world are as follows: 1. A political and ideological interest in assuring that developing nations evolve in a way that affords a congenial world environment for international cooperation and the growth of free institutions. 2. A military interest in assuring that strategic areas and the manpower and natural resources of developing nations do not fall under communist control .... 3. An economic interest in assuring that the resources and markets of the less developed world remain available to us and to other Free World countries.

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The class nature of the national security doctrine and its definition of the internal enemy ... hard-line military institutions acted, with local and U.S. support, when control of the state was contested by social sectors and political leaders seeking structural change in political or socioeconomic arenas. Washington's interests in maintaining pro-U.S., pro-capitalist governments [in Latin America] merged with the interests of economic and political elites in these countries who were anxious o retain their privileges. During the turbulent 1960s and '70s, poor and working-class movements and their allies among intellectuals, students, teachers, and other sectors stood to gain important influence over national policy and socioeconomic resources. In response, the military states, with the support of traditional elites in the region, employed harsh methods of social control. Terror was used to diminish society's expectations for social change and the pursuit of alternatives to the existing socioeconomic and political systems. As noted by Tulio Halpern Donghi, the military regimes [in Latin America] tended to represent the interests of three very specific groups: the military hierarchy, the national economic elite, and the transnational corporations... the subordinate classes lost many of the rights of citizenship. In short, the militaries acted to bolster or install systems that lacked the support of a majority of their people.

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The trigger for military coups [in Latin America] was less the elite fear of Soviet encroachment or guerrilla threats (the stated rationales) than fears of popular demands for social reform and democratic change. U.S. intelligence analyses from the 1970s acknowledged that no guerrilla force in Latin America had the strength to seriously endanger any government. As one 1970 CIA report stated, "Cooperation among Latin American revolutionary groups across national boundaries is not extensive .... Insurgency movements thus far have remained essentially national in scope .... Most revolutionary groups in Latin America have struggled merely to survive." A 1976 CIA memo similarly acknowledged that "guerrilla groups in South America have never posed a direct challenge to any government. Most of the groups have been too small and weak to engage security forces directly.

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As [Richard] Nixon put it in a National Security Council meeting of November 6,1970

Latin America is not gone and we want to keep it .... If there is any way we can hurt him [Allende] whether by government or private business - I want them to know our policy is negative .... No impression should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this, that it's safe to go this way.

Clearly, the prospect of elected progressive and socialist leaders was unacceptable to Nixon and Kissinger - not only the specter of communist guerrillas.

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In the Americas, Washington and its regional allies moved to counter populist and revolutionary forces and secure the politico-economic status quo. The U.S. government led the restructuring of the inter-American system, particularly in the 1960s, in order to build a continental counter-subversive movement of the region's militaries. The U.S. government strengthened military, intelligence, and police forces, trained them in counterinsurgency warfare and joint operations, urged the formation of clandestine counterterror squads, and encouraged anticommunist allies to actively interfere in neighboring countries. The Brazilian and Argentine militaries-the most powerful in the Southern Cone region-intervened in Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile to assist counterrevolutionary forces and undermine democratic systems, aided indirectly by the U.S. national security apparatus. The CIA introduced members of Brazilian death squads to military and police officers in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, establishing links among them and diffusing the methods of terror, and encouraged them to track political opponents across borders. Brazil, acting in alliance with Washington, offered training in repressive methods to its neighbors.

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On March 24, 1976, the Argentine armed forces staged a coordinated nationwide coup, deposing President Isabel Perón and taking over the national government as well as all provincial and municipal governments throughout the country. Now the entire Southern Cone, and most of South America, was under military rule. The Argentine junta imposed the bloodiest dictatorship the country had ever known; according to human rights organizations, some 30,000 persons "disappeared," the highest number in South America.

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The conflicts of the 1960s-1980s in Central America were rooted in the exclusionary, unequal, antidemocratic, and repressive structures that dominated the region, supported by the oligarchy, the military, and almost always, by U.S. policy. Long-standing U.S. economic interests were obscured during the Cold War, especially during the Reagan administration, as social unrest in Central America was portrayed in terms of the East-West struggle. Throughout most of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers argued that revolutionary and reformist forces in the Third World were Soviet agents rather than indigenous movements fighting to transform unjust conditions.

In the 1980s ... four of the five Central America countries reflected the legacies of the colonial era in terms of their economic and social structures: small, powerful land-owning classes, praetorian militaries, and large, poor peasant populations.

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After the Carter interlude (1977-81), the Reagan administration reintroduced Cold War categories to U.S. foreign policy and adopted a hostile and coercive attitude toward the struggles for change in Central America. The administration sent a delegation, led by hard-liner Jeanne Kirkpatrick, to Latin American capitals to meet with military leaders and essentially apologize for Carter's human rights policy. U.S. diplomats who had favored the policy were replaced or exiled from the State Department.'° The Reagan administration devoted millions of dollars in resources to finance the counterinsurgency armies in El Salvador and Guatemala and the contras in Nicaragua, utilizing a "low-intensity conflict" strategy that maximized destruction while avoiding extensive use of U.S. troops. In diplomatic arenas, the Reagan administration rejected strategies of negotiation or compromise with revolutionary and progressive forces in Central America and viewed the conflicts in strictly zero-sum terms. Washington actively worked to prevent or weaken United Nations resolutions that denounced human rights atrocities by its client armies.

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Operation Condor was a top-secret component of a larger inter-American counterinsurgency strategy - led, financed, and overseen by Washington - to prevent and reverse social and political movements in Latin America in favor of structural change... the Condor system was a criminal operation that used terrorist practices to eliminate political adversaries, and extinguish their ideas, outside the rule of law.

During the Cold War, military, intelligence, and police commanders built and worked within parallel, or parastatal, structures to carry out counterterrorist campaigns in the shadows, concealed from domestic and international view ... secret forces and infrastructure developed as a hidden part of the state to carry out covert counterinsurgency wars. A vast parallel infrastructure of secret detention centers and clandestine killing machinery enabled the military states to avoid national and international law and scrutiny, and facilitated their use of disappearance, torture, and assassination out of the public eye. Anticommunist officials adopted extreme "black world" measures to solidify or reorient the existing political and socioeconomic systems in the hemisphere and to advance the power and privilege of anticommunist, pro-U.S. elites.

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The crimes of Operation Condor in the terrifying 1970s have continued to haunt the region long after the end of the Cold War. The counterinsurgents reshaped and transformed conventional armies into lethal killing machines that respected no laws or limits, with commanders who deliberately chose to their political opponents, secretly and without due process.

... Many Condor commanders and operatives, and other veterans of the region's dirty wars, continued to wield power in their societies and block democratizing measures long after transitions from military rule. Others became common criminals, engaged in kidnapping-extortion, theft and larceny, and drug trafficking. The legacy of Operation Condor was also reflected in the still-unsolved cases of thousands of disappeared persons in Latin America, including children, whose families still mourn. The emergence of court cases in Latin America, Europe, and the United States in recent years, seeking to hold Condor officers accountable, is evocative of previous efforts to track down and prosecute Nazi criminals from the World War II era, efforts that continue to this day. Such trials have been condemned by conservative forces in the world, which counsel immunity from prosecution for crimes committed on the Western side during the Cold War. But the evidence suggests that the monumental terror and trauma visited upon Latin American societies during that epoch can only be healed through process of truth and justice.

... Powerful forces within the U.S. government apparently believe that the full historical record is too revealing, too shocking, or too incriminating to allow public disclosure. When President Bill Clinton ordered the declassification of government documents relevant to Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón's inquiries in 1998, the Pentagon and especially the CIA ferociously resisted compliance, and the declassification on Argentina in 2002 contained no documents from these two branches of the U.S. security apparatus. The impression left by such secrecy is that the CIA and the Pentagon have the most to hide. Yet like Condor itself, U.S. clandestine warfare and covert operations left a trail behind.

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The United States, combined forces with national elites and military-security institutions in Latin America to carry out the anticommunist crusade. The U.S. government was the predominant designer of the continental security agenda, and Washington exerted heavy influence in its implementation.

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As leftist and nationalist leaders won elections throughout Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and new revolutionary and progressive movements emerged, U.S. security strategists feared that the informal U.S. economic and political empire in the hemisphere was threatened. Localized elites similarly feared the threat to their traditional dominance. U.S. policy served, in most cases, to strengthen traditional elites and military-security forces, while leftist and progressive social movements and individuals were crushed.

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Why [did] the worlds most powerful liberal democracy (U.S.] sponsor and collaborate with repressive dictatorships that brutalized their own societies [in Latin America]? Seeking to protect and expand U.S. economic, political, and security interests, Washington turned to reactionary forces worldwide whose most important asset was anticommunism.

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As Washington sought to preserve its hegemony in the hemisphere, local elites and military forces in Latin America sought to strengthen themselves and weaken the social forces that challenged them. The anti-left campaign swept through the region, and beginning in the 1960s, repressive, right-wing military governments seized power and established national security states in almost all of Latin America.

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Counterinsurgency war [in Latin America] was a means to demobilize popular movements, terrorize society, and solidify military power in these countries. Social change in the interest of disadvantaged sectors of society was halted, the economic power of traditional elite classes reasserted, and inequitable class divisions reinforced. In many cases, military institutions became autonomous actors with their own interests in advancing their power.

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U.S. promotion of clandestine warfare, "unofficial" military and intelligence units, and covert operations [in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s] - including the use of terror - in the world deeply damaged not only the target societies, but also the U.S. democratic process itself, as officials maneuvered to avoid constitutional oversight, deceived and manipulated Congress and the U.S. public, and degraded constitutional rights and freedoms through obsessive secrecy. Most seriously, the complicity of the U.S. government in crimes against humanity in Latin America was a perversion of the principles and values broadly supported by the U.S. public.

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Operation Condor, the transnational arm of the parallel state, and its operations were consistent with U.S. counterinsurgency and counterterror doctrine and training. Indeed, U.S. post-September 11 military and intelligence strategies and tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq included the methods of disappearance, torture, extrajudicial transfer across borders, incommunicado detention, extrajudicial execution, and military to achieve counterterror objectives. In the United States, government agencies rounded up and imprisoned thousands of immigrants, and several U.S. citizens, without the right to counsel; set up vast new domestic surveillance programs; and planned the use of military tribunals." These are not measures normally associated with democratic governments. After 9/11, key [U.S.] political and military leaders were willing to jettison observance of the rule of law and human rights; the ends justified the means.

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In late 2003, news reports revealed the existence of a secret commando team of U.S. Special Forces and CIA paramilitaries, possibly including foreigners as well, called Task Force 121. The hunter-killer squadron was engaged in a cross-border, regional mission to pursue, and kill, "high-value targets" in the Middle East. While officials stated that details about the force were classified, it clearly evoked the Condor model. 16 Indeed, the George W. Bush administration presided over the construction of vast, worldwide parallel structures, including secret prisons in Iraq, Qatar, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the "war on terror." Suspects were transported across borders on covert aircraft and essentially "disappeared." A former CIA officer insisted that such extrajudicial kidnappings were not illegal, arguing, "There is a long history of this. It has been done for decades." Similarly, a State Department officer testified that if "a terrorist suspect is outside of the United States, the CIA helps to catch and send him to the United States or a third country." When "rendered" to third countries, U.S. specialists developed interrogation questions with their counterparts and then watched the interrogation through a two-way mirror." The use of such practices in the present, again, added significance to the evidence of U.S. collaboration with Operation Condor in the 1970s.

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Philip Agee, a former CIA officer, about the methods of the CIA in Latin America

[The CIA] contracted Brazilians in Brazil, Chileans in Chile. They weren't U.S. citizens, under the protection of the State Department, but local people who worked for the CIA. The CIA was behind the repressive operations.

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