The Cable That Solved The Mystery

On the 21st of December, 1976 a car bomb detonated in downtown Washington DC, killing former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his 26-year old American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt.  The assassination was part of “Condor”, a multinational collaboration between Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and several other Latin American military dictatorships.   Condor’s aim was to find and kill opponents of the conspiring regimes.  Senior US State Department officials were tipped off to the assassination plans and arrangements were made to send a diplomatic démarche which expressed “our deep concern” over “plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians, and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad.”  The US ambassador’s instructions to deliver the démarche however were rescinded and five days latter one of the Condor assassinations exploded in DC.

A long standing mystery has been Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s role in rescinding the Condor démarche, but with the uncovering of Kissinger’s cable, the answer to that mystery has finally come to light.  Earlier this week, The National Security Archive published it’s report on the new revelation that it was in fact Kissinger himself who blocked any further action being taken to deter the “Condor scheme”.

IF you want to learn more on the subject of Kissinger, Chile and Pinochet, a wealth of information can be found at the National Security Archives.  Also, audio recordings of Kissinger and Nixon discussing Chile were posted on Knosha in 2008 and are worth going back to for a listen.  While you’re at it, you may want to give this a listen too:

Pinochet and the U.S.

There has been some recent buzzing about McCain’s 1985 visit with Chilean president Pinochet.  See, John Dinges’s report that broke the story.  Shady relations between the U.S. and Pinochet go a lot deeper than McCain’s visit.

At The National Security Archive, are some very interesting documents related to Pinochet.  The doc’s were declassified during the Clinton administration, as well as  audio of Nixon and White House press secretary, Ron Zeigler referring to Ambassador Edward Korry being given the “green light” to “do everything short of a Dominican Republic-type action” to prevent democratically elected Allende from assuming the presidency in Chile.

Included in the declassified texts are numerous comments from Henry Kissinger, in which he repeatedly insists on U.S. support for Pinochet despite awareness of severe human rights violations under the dictator’s regime.

Suspicions remain that the U.S. contributed in some fashion to the military coup which lead to president Allende’s death and Pinochet’s return to power as a brutal dictator.  Related documents remain classified.