The Cable from Zambia
On 16 September 1976, a cable went out from the office of the United States Secretary of State. Henry Kissinger was travelling in Zambia at the time. The subject line read: Operation Condor. The instruction was brief. Kissinger had directed that no further action be taken on this matter.
The matter in question was a set of diplomatic warnings, already drafted and ready to be delivered. US ambassadors in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay had been instructed to approach the highest possible officials in their host governments — preferably the head of state — and make clear that Washington knew about plans to carry out political assassinations abroad, and that such murders would create, in the State Department’s own words, a most serious moral and political problem.
Kissinger cancelled those warnings. He gave no public explanation.
Five days later, on 21 September, a car bomb detonated on Sheridan Circle in Washington D.C., less than two kilometres from the White House. Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador and minister under President Salvador Allende, was killed instantly. His twenty-five-year-old American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, died shortly afterwards. Her husband, sitting in the back seat, survived.
Until the attacks of 11 September 2001, it was the most serious act of international terrorism ever carried out on American soil.
The bomb had been built on the orders of the government of Chile. The operation was part of a continental network of state terror that six South American dictatorships had assembled, with American backing, over the preceding year. They had called it Operation Condor. And by September 1976, it had already killed thousands.
The Last Bastion of Christian Civilisation
By the mid-1970s, South America’s southern cone was governed almost entirely by military dictatorships. Paraguay had been under General Alfredo Stroessner since 1954. Brazil’s generals had been in power since 1964. Bolivia fell in 1971. Uruguay and Chile in 1973, the latter via the CIA-backed coup that brought Pinochet to power in 1973. Argentina’s junta seized control in March 1976.
Each regime framed itself in the language of the Cold War. They were, in their own telling, holding the line against communist subversion — defending Western civilisation from an existential threat that operated across borders, infiltrated institutions, and had to be rooted out without mercy or legal constraint.
Washington largely accepted this framing. The State Department’s own briefing to Kissinger, written by his deputy Harry Shlaudeman in August 1976, noted that the Southern Cone nations saw themselves as “the last bastion of Christian civilisation” engaged in a Third World War against Marxism. The US viewed them as essential Cold War allies. Military and intelligence cooperation flowed accordingly.
In Washington, the Nixon administration had already demonstrated its appetite for covert intervention in the region — backing the coup that destroyed Chilean democracy in 1973. The same administration that was secretly authorising regime change abroad was simultaneously engaged in the domestic abuses that would become Watergate. Few in the public were connecting the threads.
What the public was told — to the extent it was told anything — was that the United States supported stable, anti-communist governments in the region. That regional security cooperation was a legitimate response to genuine subversive threats. That internal repression, however regrettable, was a domestic matter for sovereign governments.
This was the official story. The documents tell a different one.
Something Similar to Interpol, but Dedicated to Subversion
The first crack appeared not from a whistleblower or a journalist, but from a police station in a suburb of Asunción, Paraguay.
On 22 December 1992, a Paraguayan lawyer named Dr Martín Almada walked into a building in Lambaré with a judge at his side. Almada had spent years trying to prove that he had been tortured during the Stroessner dictatorship. A contact had told him there might be documents relevant to his case. What the two men found was not just relevant to Almada. It was a record of an entire system.
The archive contained 60,000 documents. They weighed four tonnes. There were 593,000 microfilmed pages. The files documented the fates of thousands of Latin Americans who had been abducted, tortured, and killed by the intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. They contained correspondence between those services, operational requests, prisoner lists, surveillance reports, and evidence of coordination stretching across a continent.
Among the documents was a copy of the formal invitation sent by Chile’s Directorate of National Intelligence, DINA, to the Chief of the Paraguayan National Police on 29 October 1975. The purpose of the proposed gathering, the letter stated, was
“to promote coordination and establish something similar to what Interpol has in Paris, but devoted to subversion.”
That meeting took place a month later, on 25 November 1975 — Pinochet’s sixtieth birthday — at Santiago’s War College. Intelligence chiefs from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay gathered for three days. At the close of proceedings, a member of the Uruguayan delegation rose to propose naming the new organisation after Chile’s national bird, the condor. The motion passed unanimously.
The Archives of Terror had cracked the story open. What came next — years of declassified US documents, court proceedings across nine countries, and the testimonies of survivors — would fill in the machinery.
Earlier, in the days after the Letelier bombing, FBI legal attaché Robert Scherrer had sent what became known as the Chilbom cable from Buenos Aires. His sources pointed to Pinochet and DINA as responsible. The cable, when it became public years later, described the assassination as a likely Phase Three operation of a network called Operation Condor. At the time, almost no one outside the intelligence community had heard the name.
The Machinery
Operation Condor ran on three phases. The first was intelligence sharing: a computerised database of suspected subversives, accessible to all member states, holding names, photographs, psychological profiles, organisational affiliations, and lists of family members. The second was joint cross-border operations — agents of one country operating on another’s territory to abduct dissidents who had fled across a border. The third was Teseo: an international assassination unit, its base in Buenos Aires, tasked with hunting and killing opponents of the regimes in Europe and the Americas.
The documented scale of Operation Condor across its active years — roughly 1975 to 1983 — was 60,000 killed, 400,000 imprisoned, and 30,000 forcibly disappeared in Argentina alone. These figures did not come from advocacy organisations. They emerged from truth commissions, court proceedings, and the Archives of Terror across six countries. Six governments, operating in coordination, killed, imprisoned, or disappeared a number of people that would fill Wembley Stadium twice over.
The infrastructure was not built by the dictatorships alone. The computers for Condor’s centralised intelligence database were provided by the CIA — no other country in the region had the technological capacity. The Condortel secure communications network, which allowed member states to share intelligence in real time, was based at a US military facility in the Panama Canal Zone. The United States did not merely observe Operation Condor from a distance. It provided the hardware.
The Teseo unit was the operation’s sharpest instrument. Composed of agents from multiple member countries, it was bureaucratically documented in a CIA-translated agreement that survives in the National Security Archive. Assassination agents were budgeted at $3,500 per person for ten days of operations, with an additional $1,000 first-time clothing allowance for operatives going abroad for the first time. The Teseo unit launched 21 documented operations in Europe and the Americas.
One of those operations unfolded in Washington D.C. in September 1976.
The orders for it were later set down in writing by the man who carried them out. In a confession letter dated 14 March 1978, DINA operative Michael Townley recorded what he had been instructed to do by DINA deputy director Pedro Espinoza:
“Find Letelier’s home and workplace and contact the Cuban group to eliminate him, or use SARIN gas, or orchestrate an accident, or in the end by whatever method — but the government of Chile wanted Letelier dead.”
Townley had obtained fraudulent passports in Paraguay, entered the United States on false visas, and recruited a team of Cuban exile terrorists. He built the bomb himself. He placed it under Letelier’s car.
Now consider the sequence of events in the weeks before.
On 30 August 1976, Kissinger’s deputy Shlaudeman sent him a memorandum. It explained the purpose of the diplomatic warnings that were being prepared for delivery to Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay:
“What we are trying to head off is a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved.”
The concern was reputational. Not moral. Reputational.
On 16 September 1976, the cable went from Zambia. Kissinger had directed that
”no further action be taken”.
Five days later, Letelier and Moffitt were dead.
In 1987, at the request of Secretary of State George Shultz, the CIA reviewed its intelligence files. The resulting assessment was unambiguous:
“A review of our files on the Letelier assassination has provided what we regard as convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder.”
The assessment added that Pinochet subsequently “decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement and, ultimately, to protect his hold on the presidency.”
This assessment was classified. It would not be released publicly until 2016. By then, Pinochet had been dead for a decade. He was never charged.
The same playbook the FBI had run against civil rights leaders at home [INTERNAL LINK — COINTELPRO] was being exported, systematised, and funded across an entire hemisphere.
What Happened to the People Involved
Michael Townley was arrested in Chile in 1978, extradited to the United States, and convicted of the Letelier-Moffitt murders. He served sixty-two months. He is now free, living under a new identity within the United States Federal Witness Protection Programme.
Manuel Contreras, who had conceived Condor and directed DINA, was retained as a paid CIA informant until 1977 — even as his role in the Letelier assassination was becoming clear to investigators. He was eventually convicted in Chile in 1993 and sentenced to seven years. He died in 2015 under house arrest. He was never extradited to the United States, where Letelier and Moffitt had been killed on American soil.
Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, at the request of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who had built much of his case using documents from the Paraguayan Archives of Terror. Pinochet spent 503 days under house arrest before the British government allowed him to return to Chile on medical grounds. He died in Santiago in December 2006 without standing trial for Operation Condor or the Letelier murder.
The Argentine Condor Trial, which ran from 2013 to 2016, resulted in the conviction of fifteen former military officials for crimes committed as part of the Condor network. In 2019, Rome’s First Assize Appeals Court incorporated newly declassified documents into its proceedings, overturned eighteen acquittals, and sentenced twenty-four South American defendants to life imprisonment for the murders of Italian and Uruguayan nationals. To date, across nine countries, 112 military and civilian officials have been convicted of Condor-related crimes.
In Argentina, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo — the grandmothers of children stolen from disappeared parents and given to military families — have been searching for those children for nearly fifty years. Of an estimated 500 stolen infants, 133 have been identified and had their identities restored as of 2024. The search continues.
Martín Almada, the lawyer who found the Archives of Terror, was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2002. He called the documents “a mountain of ignominy, of lies.” He has spent years lobbying for UNESCO to list the archives as an international cultural heritage site, to secure funding for their preservation. No decision has been made.
The Template
Operation Condor was not an aberration. It was a prototype.
What Condor established — a shared computerised database of political suspects, a secure cross-border communications network, multi-state intelligence cooperation targeting exiles, and assassination units operating across national jurisdictions — is the template for what Freedom House now calls transnational repression, a phenomenon it has documented in thirty-eight countries in the twenty-first century. The targets are different. The architecture is familiar.
The infrastructure was not unique to South America. At the same moment Condor’s assassination units were operating across the Southern Cone, NATO had constructed a parallel covert network across Western Europe — Operation Gladio — built on the same logic of state-sponsored violence operating beneath democratic oversight. The targets were different. The architecture was identical.
The CIA’s contribution to that architecture — the computers, the communications infrastructure, the intelligence sharing, the knowing — has never been the subject of a full congressional investigation. The Church Committee examined CIA activities extensively in 1975 and 1976. Operation Condor, which was running simultaneously, was not a focus of those hearings. The documents that would have made it one were still classified.
The Kissinger cable of 16 September 1976 sits in the US National Archives. The State Department released it as part of a declassification tranche in 2010. The five days between that cable and the car bomb on Sheridan Circle are, by any reading, documented history. What Kissinger knew, what he weighed, and what he decided has never been publicly explained. He died in November 2023 at the age of one hundred.
Manuel Contreras, who conceived Operation Condor, coordinated the assassination of a foreign diplomat on the streets of Washington, D.C., and oversaw the systematic murder and disappearance of thousands of people across a continent, was retained as a paid CIA contact until 1977. He died under house arrest in Chile in 2015. He was never extradited.
The Documents
- DINA, “Acta de Clausura de la Primera Reunión Interamericana de Inteligencia Nacional” [Closing Statement of the First Inter-American Meeting of National Intelligence], Secret, 28 November 1975. National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16240-03-acta-de-clausura-de-la-primera-reunion
- Department of State Telegram 209192, “Operation Condor,” 23 August 1976. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E-11, Part 2. Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve11p2/d241
- Department of State, Action Memorandum for Kissinger, “Operation Condor,” SECRET, 30 August 1976. National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/30309-document-31-department-state-action-memorandum-kissinger-operation-condor-secret
- State Department Cable, “(Kissinger, Henry A.) Subject: Actions Taken,” 16 September 1976. Declassified 2010. National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-11-26/operation-condor-network-transnational-repression-50-years
- FBI “Chilbom” Cable, Robert S. Scherrer, Buenos Aires, 29 September 1976. Fully declassified 2019. National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-11-26/operation-condor-network-transnational-repression-50-years
- Michael Townley, “Relato de Sucesos en la Muerte de Orlando Letelier el 21 de Septiembre, 1976” [Report of Events in the Death of Orlando Letelier], confession letter, 14 March 1978. National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-11-26/operation-condor-network-transnational-repression-50-years
- CIA, “Pinochet’s Role in the Letelier Assassination and Subsequent Coverup,” Intelligence Assessment, 1 May 1987. Declassified 2016. National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2016-09-23/cia-pinochet-personally-ordered-letelier-bombing
- CIA Translation of the Teseo Agreement, c. 1976. National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-11-26/operation-condor-network-transnational-repression-50-years
- Archives of Terror (Archivo del Terror), Paraguay. Discovered 22 December 1992. Held at the Palace of Justice, Asunción. Plan Cóndor, https://plancondor.org/en/node/1474
Go Deeper
The definitive account of how Condor worked, who built it, and what it cost: The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges, The New Press, 2004 — built from years in the Paraguayan Archives and the declassified US document record, and the source of the 654 confirmed victim figure that remains the most rigorously documented count.