Kissinger and the 1976 Push to Curb Condor's International Murders
By Theo Marchetti ·
A secret memorandum kept from the public for decades shows the U.S. attempting to shield right-wing dictators from the fallout of their own cross-border assassination plots.
The victims were political exiles, students, and union leaders whose only crime was believing the Southern Cone of South America could be something other than a graveyard for the left. They were hunted across borders by a coordinated regional machine, disappeared into clandestine centers, and executed in a system where national sovereignty ended at the edge of a torture chamber.
Because the original pages are withheld, this column draws from the archive's curated description of the memorandum. The record is an Action Memorandum for Kissinger dated August 30, 1976, marked SECRET. In it, Harry Shlaudeman, a diplomat who had previously served as Ambassador to Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Nicaragua, advises the Secretary of State on the U.S. position regarding assassination plots linked to Operation Condor—a campaign of political repression by right-wing dictatorships in the Southern Cone that used intelligence operations and coups to liquidate left-wing sympathizers.
"International Murders"
Shlaudeman’s objective in the memorandum is not the preservation of human life, but the preservation of image. The record shows that Shlaudeman was attempting to "head off a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved."
This phrasing is the key to the entire exchange. The public record establishes that Operation Condor was formally created in November 1975, when the spy chief for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Contreras, gathered intelligence officers from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to coordinate their repression. It further establishes that the United States backed this operation, providing the financial funding for its covert activities.
The connection here is a stark, clinical irony: the United States was paying for the engine of repression while simultaneously worrying that the engine was making too much noise. Shlaudeman was not warning the Southern Cone that murder was a crime; he was warning them that international murder was a public relations disaster. The distinction is the difference between a moral objection and a branding exercise. When the record speaks of "damage to the international status," it is not speaking of the loss of life in a basement in Santiago or Buenos Aires, but of the discomfort of diplomats in New York and Geneva.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
The Montevideo Channel
To manage this risk, Shlaudeman proposed a specific tactical move. The record shows he requested approval from Kissinger to direct Ernest Siracusa, a career Foreign Service Officer who served as U.S. Ambassador to Uruguay from 1973 to 1977, to meet with high officials in Montevideo, the capital and largest city of Uruguay. The purpose of this meeting was to present a "Condor demarche"—a formal diplomatic protest.
Uruguay was one of the founding participants of Operation Condor, and Siracusa was the man on the ground in a city that served as a hub for the operation's regional coordination. By routing the warning through Siracusa in Montevideo, the U.S. was using a narrow, controlled channel to signal its discontent.
The pattern suggests that the U.S. was not implementing a regional policy shift to dismantle Condor, but was reacting to a specific, imminent plot. If the objective had been to end the campaign of repression, the demarche would have been delivered across every capital in the Southern Cone simultaneously. Instead, the focus on a single ambassador in one city suggests a surgical strike of diplomacy intended to stop one particular "loud" event that threatened to leak into the global press.
The Paper Trail of Disapproval
This memorandum arrived at a moment of extreme vulnerability for the American executive branch. The public record shows that by late 1975, the Senate Select Committee, led by Senator Frank Church, was aggressively investigating U.S. involvement in foreign assassinations. The Church Committee's findings were turning the secret history of the CIA into a public record of attempted hits and regime changes.
This is where the desk's reading enters: the August 30 memorandum is not a document of policy, but a document of insulation. The pattern suggests the State Department was establishing a paper trail of disapproval to provide plausible deniability for simultaneous intelligence cooperation. By creating a record that the U.S. had "warned" its partners against international murders, the administration could claim it had acted responsibly if a Condor hit later sparked a global scandal. It is the diplomatic equivalent of a "do not kill" memo sent to a hired hitman—not to stop the killing, but to ensure the employer can claim they gave the order to stop when the police arrive.
Furthermore, the desk's reading is that the operational intelligence relationship between the U.S. and the Condor participants continued unabated beneath this diplomatic layer. The memorandum is an "Action Memorandum" for the Secretary of State, yet there is a conspicuous absence of the CIA from this specific channel of communication regarding a covert intelligence operation. This gap is shaped like a firewall. By keeping the "disapproval" in the State Department and the "funding" and "cooperation" in the intelligence channels, the U.S. government could maintain two contradictory positions at once.
The Cost of Reputation
Ultimately, the focus of the Shlaudeman memo is the "reputation of the countries involved." This is the only stake the record recognizes. The lives of the exiles being hunted by Condor are not mentioned; they are merely the instruments through which "damage" to a country's status is delivered.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the U.S. objective was the prevention of high-profile, "loud" international assassinations—the kind that happen in European capitals or high-traffic urban centers—rather than the dismantling of the repression system itself. A murder in a remote village or a secret detention center is a statistic; a murder in a way that embarrasses a friendly regime on the world stage is a diplomatic crisis. The U.S. was not fighting against the murder of dissidents; it was fighting against the visibility of those murders.
The desk's reading is that this memorandum represents the peak of the Kissingerian approach to the Southern Cone: a cynical balancing act where the U.S. provided the money and the intelligence tools for right-wing terror, then issued polite, secret warnings when that terror became too clumsy to hide. The full release of these files would likely show that the "demarche" delivered by Siracusa in Montevideo had zero effect on the actual machinery of death, because the people running that machinery knew their funding was secure.
The pattern established here is one of calculated negligence. The U.S. government spent the mid-1970s pretending to be the adult in the room, warning dictators to be more discreet, while continuing to underwrite the very systems that made the disappearances possible. The cost of protecting the "international status" of these regimes was paid in the blood of the people they murdered—people who were treated not as victims of a crime, but as liabilities to a reputation.