Ambassador Dean warns DIA reckless spy tactics leak to American press
By Desmond Okafor ·
American journalists in Lima learned the US was tracking coup plots after the DIA's reckless phone calls leaked embassy activities while Peruvians were in a "show-down mood."
The phones were ringing at the US Embassy in Lima, and the callers were not diplomats. They were from the "DIA alert center," making open telephone calls to demand extensive reporting on the internal political fractures of Peru. It was an approach so reckless that Ambassador Dean felt compelled to send a sharply worded cable to the Department of State on March 12, 1976, to put a stop to it.
Telegram 2418 begins with a void. The subject line is redacted, and the first two paragraphs—eight and seventeen lines long, respectively—have been scrubbed from the record. We are left to piece together the urgency from the surviving text, where Dean expresses his frustration with the Defense Intelligence Agency's insistence on granular intelligence at a time when the Peruvian political climate was reaching a boiling point.
DIA alert center
Dean’s primary grievance was not a lack of intelligence, but the clumsy manner in which it was being sought. The DIA was pressuring embassy attachés for reports that Dean considered unnecessarily risky. He argues that while the US should keep its "ear to the ground," there is a point where the pursuit of specifics becomes a liability.
In a moment of candor, Dean admits that the US was "caught flat-footed" during the change of government on August 29 (presumably 1975). Yet, he notes with a certain detachment that this failure to predict the specifics "in no way affected our security situation" nor did it trigger any negative reaction from Washington. For the embassy, being slightly behind on the exact timing of a regime change was a "comfortable situation to be in," provided the personnel were safe. The danger, in Dean's view, lay not in the ignorance of the coup's timing, but in the visible, aggressive effort to uncover it.
Plan Tupac Amaru
At the heart of the 1976 tension was "Plan Tupac Amaru" and the rising influence of a figure named Fernandez-Maldonado. Dean describes a city where contradictions and opposing forces were "being discussed widely all over town," with rumors of coup participants being "bruited about" in every circle.
Dean’s internal probability chart for the crisis was a study in cautious pessimism. He ranked the likelihood of outcomes in a descending order: first, that nothing would happen and the opposition to Plan Tupac Amaru would simply serve as an indicator of the "deep concern" within the body politic; second, that some "navy hot heads" would be forced into early retirement; and third, the possibility of a serious coup attempt. He warns that if the third scenario materialized, it "could be rough," noting that many Peruvians seemed to be in a "show-down mood."
While the DIA was obsessively tracking these permutations, the official line from the embassy was one of benign support. Dean asserts that the US was taking no sides and was determined to avoid even the "appearance of involvement." He claims the US position was one of support for "Peruvian development and the GOP’s programs of social reform." It is a familiar rhetorical mask: the language of development and reform serving as the public face of a mission that, behind the scenes, was preoccupied with the movements of "hot heads" and the logistics of potential putsches.
Dave Belnap's visit
The most damning evidence of the embassy's porous security came via a visit from Dave Belnap of the Los Angeles Times. Belnap informed Dean that another journalist, Jim Foster of the Scripps Howard News Service, had decided to extend his stay in Lima. The reason? Foster had received word from his own Washington office that the US Embassy was reporting on coup plotting in Lima.
This created a circular and dangerous intelligence loop. The US government was monitoring the Peruvian state, and the American press in Washington was monitoring the US government's reports, which then leaked back to journalists on the ground in Lima. This breach raised a fundamental question for Dean: not just how the embassy should "keep our ear to the ground," but the "extent and manner in which we should report what we hear."
Peru's history of institutional instability would eventually culminate in the 1992 self-coup by Alberto Fujimori, who dissolved Congress and the judiciary to seize absolute power. The 1976 cable shows that the patterns of military volatility and foreign intelligence interference were already deeply embedded in the landscape decades earlier.
Dean concludes by agreeing that a review of guidelines is necessary during these "peak points on the political fever chart," when rumors become a "torrent." The record ends with a summary and a handwritten note stating, "Dean’s answer to Rogers..." but the original instructions sent by Assistant Secretary Rogers to Ambassador Dean remain missing from the archive.