Raymond Warren and the CIA's Panic Over Condor Liquidations

By Desmond Okafor ·

Kept secret for decades, a 1976 memo shows the CIA fearing the optics of assassination squads in South America—squads the United States had already funded.

The cost of a political opinion in the Southern Cone during the 1970s was often a flight to a basement in Santiago or a nameless grave in Buenos Aires. Thousands of students, union leaders, and dissidents were disappeared or executed by a coordinated network of state killers who treated national borders as mere suggestions in their quest to erase the left from the continent.

The facts of this case are reconstructed from a curated archival description of the memorandum rather than the original pages. The record is a Secret CIA memorandum dated July 24, 1976, titled “Operation Condor – Regional Co-operation Among Latin American Intelligence Services Against Terrorism.”

"Liquidate Key Leaders"

In the memo, Raymond A. Warren, the Chief of the CIA's Latin America Division—the office responsible for managing the agency's intelligence and covert operations across the region—writes to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, the agency's second-highest statutory official. Warren is not writing to express a moral epiphany. He is sounding an alarm about a liability.

Warren warns that the “Condor” countries—the right-wing military dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay—are organizing assassination squads. The specific purpose of these squads, the record states, is "to liquidate key Latin American terrorist leaders" who were operating outside the Southern Cone region, the southernmost area of South America comprising the primary Condor states.

To the men in power in Santiago and Asunción, “liquidate” was a technical term for murder. To Raymond Warren, it was a potential PR disaster. He tells the Deputy Director that this program "poses new problems for the Agency," and insists that "every precaution must be taken to ensure that the Agency is not wrongfully accused of being party to this type of activity."

Warren closes his warning by asking his superiors "what action the Agency could effectively take to forestall illegal activity of this sort."

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

The Santiago Pact

To understand why Warren was so concerned about being "wrongfully accused," one must look at how the machinery of death was built. According to the public record, Operation Condor was formally established in November 1975. The catalyst was Manuel Contreras, the spy chief for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who invited 50 intelligence officers from the other five Condor nations to the Army War Academy in Santiago.

Their goal was simple: a cross-border intelligence web that allowed them to hunt, kidnap, and kill political dissidents regardless of where they sought refuge. If a Chilean dissident fled to Argentina, the Argentine junta would seize them and hand them back to Contreras's men, or simply kill them on the spot. The public record establishes that the United States did not just watch this happen; the U.S. financed the covert operations that made Condor possible.

This is where the record earns its irony. The CIA provided the funding, the communications equipment, and the strategic cover for a regime of state terror, yet Warren’s memo reads like the frantic note of a bystander. He is not concerned that people are being liquidated; he is concerned that the CIA might be seen as the architect of the liquidation.

The Logistics of Deniability

There is a sharp distinction in the memo between the killings happening inside the Southern Cone and those happening outside of it. Warren's anxiety triggers specifically when the assassination squads move beyond their home region.

This distinction is not accidental. The desk's reading is that the “new problems” Warren identifies are not matters of human rights, but concerns of territorial jurisdiction and diplomatic blowback. Assassinations within the Southern Cone—where the military juntas held absolute power—were viewed as acceptable or manageable risks. The danger arose when Condor squads began operating in third-party countries, where a dead body on a sidewalk in Washington or Madrid could create a diplomatic crisis that the CIA could not scrub from the headlines.

Furthermore, the desk's reading is that the request to "forestall illegal activity" was not a request to terminate the murder program, but a request for improved operational security. The Agency did not want the killings to stop; it wanted the killers to be quieter. This reading is supported by the trajectory of subsequent files. In August and September 1976, the Agency continued to track the "ramifications" and "actions taken" regarding Condor, yet there is no record of the U.S. cutting off the funding that fueled the machine.

A Paper Trail for the Committee

Timing is everything in the archives of the intelligence community. Warren’s memo was written in July 1976. By this time, the CIA was under unprecedented siege from the Church Committee, the Senate investigation into illegal intelligence activities. Just months earlier, in November 1975, Senator Frank Church—the chairman of the committee tasked with exposing the agency's dark secrets—had written to President Gerald Ford demanding transparency regarding the CIA's involvement in foreign assassinations.

If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the memorandum is a “defensive record.” It was created not to stop the killing, but to establish a paper trail of internal dissent. By documenting his "concern" and asking for "action to forestall illegal activity," Warren was building a shield. If the Church Committee ever found the evidence of Condor's death squads, the Agency could produce this memo to argue that they had warned their partners and tried to prevent the violence.

It is the classic intelligence maneuver: use the record to lie about the reality. The Agency decoupled the strategic provision of resources from the tactical execution of violence. They provided the money and the maps, then wrote memos acting surprised when the killers used them.

The pattern suggests that the Agency's objection was directed entirely at the risk of exposure rather than the morality of the liquidations. The funding continued because the goal—the eradication of left-wing influence in Latin America—was more important than the lives of the "terrorist leaders" being liquidated. The only "illegal activity" the CIA truly feared was the activity that could be traced back to Langley.

Our reading of this record is that a full release of the withheld pages would show not a struggle to end Operation Condor, but a series of adjustments to make its murders more invisible. The gaps in the file are shaped exactly like the fingerprints of the people who signed the checks. The Agency didn't want to stop the squads; they just wanted to make sure that when the bodies were found, the trail ended at the border of the Southern Cone and never reached the desks of the Deputy Director.

Sources

  1. CIA memorandum, “Operation Condor – Regional Co-operation Among Latin American Intelligence Services Against Terrorism,” Secret, July 24, 1976 — National Security Archive (GWU)
  2. Document PDF (CIA memorandum, “Operation Condor – Regional Co-operation Among Latin American Intelligence Services Against Terrorism,” Secret, July 24, 1976)
  3. Background: Operation Condor — Wikipedia