Three Dictators and the 1976 US Plan to Curb International Assassinations

By Desmond Okafor ·

For decades, the record of a joint CIA and State Department effort to curb the cross-border slaughter of political dissidents remained hidden, leaving a gap where accountability should have been.

The cost of "international assassination planning" is measured in the silence of the disappeared. In the Southern Cone, this silence was bought with the blood of leftists, students, and union leaders hunted across borders by their governments.

These victims were the targets of Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression run by right-wing dictatorships in South America from 1975 to 1983. The public record establishes that Condor was a formal pact of terror, launched in Santiago, Chile, by the spy chief of dictator Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Contreras, who invited intelligence officers from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay to synchronize their purges. The operation was not a rogue alliance; it was financed and backed by the United States.

The record of the government's internal reaction to this slaughter survives as an archival description rather than the full set of original pages. This specific record is a joint CIA and State Department memorandum dated August 13, 1976, detailing a meeting to discuss a "diplomatic demarche"—a formal warning—directed at the regimes most invested in the killing of dissidents abroad.

"International Assassination Planning"

The meeting in Foggy Bottom brought together a small circle of men tasked with managing the optics of a massacre. Among them was Hewson Ryan, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs who had previously served as the US Ambassador to Honduras. Beside him sat James Gardner, head of the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the office responsible for providing the secretary with intelligence independent of the CIA’s assessments. Representing the intelligence community was Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the CIA’s deputy chief of the Latin America division, a man who would later become the director of the National Clandestine Service and a central figure in the 2005 destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes.

These three men met to finalize a warning to three specific targets: Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. According to the record, the focus of the demarche was the "international assassination planning" conducted by these regimes. The memo concludes with a critical administrative stamp: "The CIA signs off on the demarche."

On the surface, this looks like a moral correction. The public record shows the US State Department and the CIA collaborating to tell the Southern Cone’s dictators to stop killing people on foreign soil. But the timing of this meeting suggests the warning was not a product of conscience, but of panic.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The August Pivot

The pattern of the archives reveals that this August 13 meeting did not happen in a vacuum. It was the final step in a sequence of reactive maneuvers. On July 8, 1976, an FBI cable flagged Argentine terrorist activities. On July 24, the CIA issued a secret memorandum on the "Regional Co-operation Among Latin American Intelligence Services Against Terrorism." The August 13 meeting followed these intelligence summaries almost immediately, and was followed shortly after by an August 30 Action Memorandum for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The line between these dates is the story. The US did not wake up in August and decide that international assassination was distasteful. The US had been financing the covert operations of Operation Condor for a year. The sudden pivot to a "diplomatic demarche" happened only after the intelligence reports from July had formalized the knowledge of these killings in the internal record.

When the CIA signed off on the warning to Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, it was not stopping a crime; it was documenting its own attempt to distance itself from a crime it had already subsidized. The irony is sharp: the same agency that provided the cover and funding for Condor was now "signing off" on a letter telling the dictators to be less conspicuous.

A Shield for the Senate

If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the August meeting was a liability management exercise. The desk's reading is that the demarche was designed to create a formal, discoverable record of "opposition" to protect the administration from the Senate Select Committee's investigations into covert action. A draft memorandum from November 7, 1975, regarding the public disclosure of covert action, shows that the administration was already terrified of how its Latin American activities would look under congressional scrutiny.

By utilizing a "diplomatic demarche," the State Department created a paper trail of protest. The pattern suggests this functioned as a "clean" diplomatic channel to provide plausible deniability, while operational intelligence ties to the Condor regimes continued through unrecorded channels. Note who was in the room: Deputy-level principals. Hewson Ryan and the deputy chief of the Latin America division were the ones doing the talking. The desk's reading is that the selection of these subordinates served as a political buffer, insulating the Secretary of State and the CIA Director from the potential failure or blowback of these warnings. If the dictators ignored the warning, the deputies had failed; if the warning worked, the principals could claim credit for the diplomatic victory.

The Domestic Carve-Out

The most damning aspect of the August 13 memorandum is what it excludes. The record explicitly narrows the scope of the demarche to "international assassination planning." It does not mention the torture centers in Buenos Aires, the "death flights" over the Atlantic, or the systematic disappearance of thousands of citizens within the borders of Chile and Uruguay.

The pattern suggests that this was a strategic carve-out. By focusing exclusively on extraterritorial killings, the US was able to disavow the most embarrassing aspects of Condor—the public assassinations of dissidents in foreign capitals—while tacitly accepting the domestic repression within those regimes. The US was not telling the dictators to stop the slaughter; it was telling them to stop the slaughter in places where the world was watching.

The desk's reading is that the August pivot was a reactive posture triggered by the discovery of the July intelligence summaries, not a proactive change in policy. The CIA and the State Department were not trying to save lives; they were trying to save the record.

If the still-withheld pages of this era were released, the desk believes they would show that the "warnings" sent to Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay were treated as formalities by the regimes they targeted. The dictators knew the US would not pull the plug on the funding. The demarche was a script written for a Washington audience, a performance of diplomacy intended to satisfy a Senate committee while the machinery of Operation Condor continued to grind. The people who paid for this performance were the thousands of dissidents who remained in the crosshairs of a regime that knew exactly how much the United States was willing to ignore.

Sources

  1. Joint CIA/Department of State memorandum, “Meeting at Department of State to Discuss Operation Condor,” Secret, August 13, 1976 — National Security Archive (GWU)
  2. Document PDF (Joint CIA/Department of State memorandum, “Meeting at Department of State to Discuss Operation Condor,” Secret, August 13, 1976)
  3. Background: Operation Condor — Wikipedia