Condor Reborn

The Need for Hemispheric Security

Operation Condor was a security apparatus that is still shrouded in some secrecy, conjuring disgust and fear among leftists and dissidents. The latter, who are primarily downstream of the former’s parapolitical research, decry the hegemony of the Yanqui. The hapless innocent Indios of Latin America, so they believe, suffer the lash and the bullet, the effects of capitalism and imperial death-squads. Dissidents and leftists agree that self-determination through popular democracy should be normative for the Southern Hemisphere, even if these peoples elect their version of Socialist governments. Whether it was General Smedley Butler’s lamentation about being a “gangster for Capitalism” or the New Left’s abhorrence for CIA operations like JMARC or ZR/RIFLE in Cuba, let alone the new adventure to capture Maduro and put Venezuela on a course for regime change, El Norte is the great evil toward their southern brothers. Operation Condor is a crescendo in this long litany of crimes, so called.

This paradigm is wrong, naïve, and delusional. Hegemony is a dual-edged question: Should America be paramount in Latin America, or should pardocratia (and its anti-Yanqui realignment toward China) rule? If the former, through the Pan-American Network, then the political Left, with its tendency toward violent revolution, guerilla warfare, and international terrorism, must be confronted with an alternative that has the muscle to resist and win. This binary cannot be considered merely “down there,” as if Latin American politics have not become normative in the United States. The republics of the hemisphere will rise or fall together, according to one geopolitical paradigm or another. Therefore, to understand this need for mutual joint security, a reappraisal of Condor, and its notoriety, must be assessed.

Before examining Condor itself, it is necessary to contextualize America’s original hemispheric geopolitical vision, the Monroe Doctrine. Contrary to some sanguine dreamers on the Right, the Monroe Doctrine was not live-and-let-live policy of allowing the new southern republics to do as they willed. On the other hand, this involvement did not require dominance or conquest. Henry Clay was a premier architect of cooperation, with a clear pecking order of influence and strength, that would recognize the cultural vigor, and priority, of the Yanqui, while allowing Hispanidad among the new Latin republics under responsible, propertied, creole leadership.

While Simón Bolívar was caught between his wariness to the North and his contempt for pardo government, Francisco Santander turned toward friendship with the Yanquis. A president of Colombia and former ally of Bolívar, Santander believed in joint-cooperation in a hierarchical relationship. Santander saw the possibility in “liberalism,” that commitment to hemispheric trade that prioritized the rapidly industrialized United States. American imperium, not conquest, would allow the flourishing of urban centers under a propertied elite, basking in the possibility of uplift through thrift, engineering, and Enlightenment (in faith and otherwise). This relationship would operate not only with the American, but also the British, with several Latin American republics thriving under the Anglo-Saxon’s capital commitments. Railroads were built, manufactures began to expand, and rational agricultural practices made the tropical produce of the Southern Hemisphere flow throughout the world. As both Bolívar and Santander understood, liberal and enlightened government could not be sustained through mass-democracy of urban sprawl and the many indigenous villages throughout the jungles and coasts. For visionaries in both the United States and Latin America, the Yanqui was the keystone to an alliance of these nations.

However, many of these gains saw reversals over the 20th century. The appeal of communism in Latin America was not Marxist dialectical materialism, but the demand for codified indigenous rights and land redistribution through a party-state that operated as a massive patronage machine. As historian Panagiotis Kondylis noted for his native Greece, socialism was not possible without widespread capitalism. In the villages, barrios, and favelas, socialism meant taking from the rich to give to the poor to buy their loyalty. It was nothing more than gangsterized feudalism between patrons and clients. That was the real reason for American anti-communism south of the border. These patronage-machines, often rising to power on the back of guerilla warfare and revolutionary terrorism (as well as gangs often selling drugs), would destroy the capacity for capital investment, industrial development, and the creation of a propertied, enfranchised middling class. As many third-world socialists and postliberals imagine, the world of Latin American leftists was the primitive collectivization of the village and the heath. That was a world of darkness, squalor, and degeneration that many Latin creoles resisted.

What could America do? Early 20th-century America moved increasingly away from swinging the big stick, a policy that tied together Theodore Roosevelt to Calvin Coolidge. Beginning with Herbert Hoover (and continuing under Franklin Roosevelt), the American “Good Neighbor Policy” moved toward collegial, though hierarchical, cooperation (especially in response to the growing power of Germany through its diaspora). After the World War, the problem became more acute, with the Soviet Union attempting to gain influence in these Latin American republics through the diffusion of communism as pardocratia. The Eisenhower administration took the indirect path of psychological warfare, pressuring out Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz, for his land redistribution efforts and chumminess with the communists. But these efforts were half-hearted and inept, with Arbenz’s successor, Carlos Castillo Armas, leading a confused government before he was assassinated by a leftist insurgency that plunged the nation into civil war.

The Cuban Revolution was the turning point. The United States bungled Fidel Castro’s overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista (whether or not the CIA initially helped Fidel Castro, the same way they helped Ho Chi Minh in his war against the French). Later plans for intervention were bad, and their execution (under Kennedy) worse. The CIA paradigm of exporting social democracy only made matters worse. Leftist drug gangs, urban revolutionaries, and jungle armies proliferated as elected governments dithered or became increasingly severe in their countermeasures. Cuba would not only have the capacity to attempt to export their revolution abroad in Latin America, but even intervene in Angola. The Left was ascendant through the AK‑47. The Americans were unsure. Chile’s Condor was a solution.

To contextualize Condor, with all its brutality and struggle, it is necessary to introduce a theory of terrorism. In the magisterial work of Philip Bobbitt, one of the last grand strategists in political theory, terrorism was the ultimate means to delegitimate and overthrow a state. In Terror and Consent, Bobbitt writes that the terrorist is the supreme political operative, able to strip the state of its monopoly of violence, and thus one of its major justifications. Why pay taxes or submit to authority when men with masks and guns may kill you at random? The state that cannot repress terrorism will cease to exist.¹ In the days of concentrated territorial state, terrorism meant attacking the symbols of the king. Pirates under the black flag would rob the crown’s galley. With the turn to the constitutional nation-state, the targets of terrorism widened. The professional revolutionary of the 19th century would rob banks, throw bombs, and commit acts of random violence. All citizens, particularly those associated with the operations of the wider social system, were targets.²

For Bobbitt, however, the nation-state paradigm has begun to fade. Instead, the new state form, beginning with the United States, is the market-state, large global economic system that exceeds any one people or nation. The market-state has become an increasingly dominant paradigm not out of any preference or desire by state actors, but because information technology has made it paramount. As much as the printing press drove mass literacy and new sailing technology created the Atlantic world, so too have the airplane and Internet created conditions for hemispheric, if not global, state organization. The market-state does not entail the contemporary markers of globalism (open borders, universal suffrage, Human Rights, civic post-nationalism); nevertheless, the market-state is a global actor. Terrorism against this state form will thus take an international form through media spectacle. Market-state terrorism will besiege the symbols of prosperity and stability, be they private or public entities involved in the traffic of goods. Al Qaeda, for example, would produce global media of theatrical beheadings to demonstrate the weakness of the United States and its coalition.³

With this theory in hand, Condor can be understood as a market-state effort at counter-terrorism against the revolutionary Left. It was a global struggle across multiple continents that would determine the viability of a state not dedicated to pardocratia.

Condor began out of the fires of the Chilean counterrevolution. In the 1970s, America lost nerve. President Nixon abandoned the global struggle against international communism (which seemed to weaken as a force) for spheres-of-influence. Thus, while Nixon would officially tolerate communism in China and Russia (and Cuba, by extension, as Russia’s proxy), Latin America belonged to the sphere of the United States. Chile had elected an eclectic socialist to its presidency, and Nixon, utilizing the indirect method of Eisenhower through the CIA and State Department, vowed to make their economy scream. After sending a green light of support, the previously depoliticized Chilean military, under General Augusto Pinochet, began the coup. Salvador Allende was cornered and chose suicide. Pinochet purged Chilean socialist actors and networks to place his counterrevolution on firm ground. This strategy, however, could not neglect the continental threat of revolutionary leftist terrorism, whether they came to power through votes or through bombs. Thus, Pinochet, presaging the market-state, hatched Condor.

What was Operation Condor? It was, according to political scientist J. Patrice McSherry, a cross-border security pact to target foreign operatives who were exiles abroad. It selectively targeted influential leftists, as nodes in an international network, and eliminated them. Condor was a parastate organization, meaning that while it was rooted in Santiago, it incorporated other national military and intelligence services that operated through black ops, black budgets, and the supply of bleeding-edge information technology from abroad.⁴ Or, as recorded in a 1980 FBI cable from Agent Robert Scherrer:

“OPERATION CONDOR” IS THE CODE NAME FOR THE COLLECTION, EXCHANGE AND STORAGE OF INTELLIGENCE DATA CONCERNING SO CALLED “LEFTISTS,” COMMUNISTS AND MARXISTS, WHICH WAS RECENTLY ESTABLISHED BETWEEN COOPERATING INTELLIGENCE SERVICES IN SOUTH AMERICA IN ORDER TO ELIMINATE MARXIST TERRORIST ACTIVITIES IN THE AREA.⁵

The United States was, indirectly, involved in the establishment of Condor. Ray Warren, CIA station chief in Santiago, was a key liaison to the new Pinochet government, and he cooperated with Chile’s intelligence network DINA, especially its head, Colonel Manuel Contreras. Warren provided much of the technology to create an international, indexed database on leftist terrorists, agitators, and political activists. Condor was modeled on American anti-communist parastate networks throughout Europe (e.g., Gladio in Italy, Sheepskin in Greece, CATENA in France) during the Cold War.⁶ However, pace McSherry, Condor was unique in its independence and scope, defying the far more limited and unidirectional coordination within (not among) European postwar nation-states.

Condor moved in three phases: establish a database on subversives, conduct operations among member states to eliminate leftist networks, and carry on the mission abroad.⁷ Condor was Chilean-led, but had active cooperation of its five members (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia). Argentina was especially important, as its military intelligence, fresh from the repression of the Justicialist Left during the Dirty War, had experience with rooting out leftist networks.⁸ Even exiled Cubans, at the behest of the shadowy American operative Michael Townley, would move to Santiago and coordinate with the South Americans.⁹

Townley is an eccentric figure. An American who grew up in Chile as the son of a Ford plant manager, Townley would fall in love with a fiercely anti-communist Chilean, and the couple would engage in several daring plots to assassinate the enemies of Condor. These operations included bombings in Argentina, Italy, and, most dramatically, in Washington, D.C. Townley organized a hit on Orlando Letelier, a Chilean socialist and Pinochet critic, who had joined the Institute for Policy Studies in the United States, a New Left NGO to promote Human Rights regimes. The car bomb not only killed Letelier, but also claimed the life of an American woman, Ronni Moffitt, who also worked at the IPS. George H.W. Bush, Director of Central Intelligence, was furious with the Chileans for brazenly bringing the war so close to home.

At this point, some readers may feel sick. Sure, Letelier was a revolving minister in Allende’s cabinet and was committed to the global victory of the international Left. But killing him with a car bomb? In America? With an American woman dead as collateral damage? Have you no decency?

Such is the current moral conundrum, where many people believe that warfare requires an official declaration from Congress and takes place on a designated battlefield. If international revolution is to be overcome, it must face international counterrevolution. If revolutionary forces are willing to wield terrorism, then counterrevolutionary forces must be willing to wield counter-terrorism. These are the dimensions of market-state warfare, operating through both public and private nodes of influence to advance the interests of a state or to delegitimize and replace it. Latin American leftists were not dreamy-eyed peasant chiefs, woman in hand, waiting for the harvest. They exercised their own revolutionary terrorist networks, particularly the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR), to overthrow Yanqui hegemony and smash the states of the propertied.¹⁰ Condor was the answer to this problem, an equally international network that could break, delegitimize, and scare leftists from their organizational efforts. Che Guevera, idol of college potheads and ditzy women, died in Bolivia in a failed attempt to organize the peasants to overthrow the state. Condor was messy and bloody, but should Latin American counterrevolutionaries turn to dust because of the supposedly iron laws of class war? Should the Americans wring their hands and see the world grow dark?

Those questions are not hypotheticals, for the American establishment shared the same feelings. It was not that the postwar deep-state was in any way favorable to communism; quite the contrary. But the remnants of this besieged liberal center, under Nixon and Ford, did not like the alternative. Could counter-terrorism be conducted through soft, invisible means? Harry Shlaudeman, Assistant Secretary of State and veteran diplomat to Latin America, worried in a report to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about the stakes:

Over the horizon, there is a chance of serious world-scale trouble. This is speculative, but no longer ridiculous. The Revolutionary Coordinating Junta now seems to have its headquarters in Paris, plus considerable activity in other European capitals. With terrorists being forced out of Argentina, their concentration in Europe (and possibly the U.S.) will increase. The South American regimes know about this. They are planning their own counter-terror operations in Europe. Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay are in the lead; Brazil is wary but is providing some technical support. The next step might be for the terrorists to undertake a worldwide attack on embassies and interests of the six hated regimes. The PLO has shown the way.¹¹

Both revolution and counterrevolution were distasteful, so the sensible centrism of Shlaudeman, to which Kissinger agreed, was confusion: give an unsaid green light to the Condor nations to stop revolutionary terrorism, while flashing a red light to the international community about the need to stop Human Rights abuses. The South American counterrevolutionaries were condemned for doing the things that the Americans secretly desired. Somehow, these conflicting messages would temper, not increase, the destruction on both sides. It appeared pragmatic and realistic in a world that did not condone the violence necessary to restrain communist guerillas and gangs. However, for many counterrevolutionaries in South America, this attitude smacked of cowardice and betrayal.

Not all Americans were so dismally urbane. Oliver North, like other cowboys in the Reagan administration, offered to give an unqualified green light abroad. Here was the beginning realignment of joint security. When President Anastasio Somoza fell from power in Nicaragua, with the socialist Sandinistas forming a revolutionary government, the counterrevolutionary remnant formed the Contras to reclaim their nation. Condor offered their support to Nicaragua, as well as other Central American republics, to curb revolutionary socialism.¹² The United States struggled to join them. Riding high off the moral indignation of Vietnam and Watergate, a Democratic Congress prohibited any military support for the Contras from any funding bills. The Bohlen Amendment tied Reagan’s hands. Oliver North refused to accept these terms, and through his Enterprise, the Americans offered military supplies and training for the Contras. This involved the murky and dark world of narco-trafficking, which may have had its own impulses and direction while overlapping with anticommunism and counterrevolution (c.f. Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup).¹³ Suffice to say, both sides, Left and Right, made money how they could without official state support.

The Enterprise would collapse under the discovery of American aid to the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries. The Sandinistas shot down a plane, captured a crewman, Eugen Hasenfus, and soon began the Iran–Contra scandal as liberals were dismayed, once again, that the White House was involved in extra-legality. This time it was not a story about the Plumbers and the rattled deep-state under Nixon’s paranoid hand. Rather, Congress fixed the blame on North for, effectively, refusing the small-minded world of civic nationalists and Human Rights NGOs to declare the United States on the side of counterrevolution.

Additionally, Hasenfus was an old acquaintance of the recently deceased Barry Seal. Likely with a career spanning back to the Cuban Revolution, Seal had been tapped to get dirt on the Sandinistas and their ties to narco-trafficking. He was used as a “clay pigeon” by North, with the Reagan administration showing photographs which revealed that Seal was an American asset in his dealings with Colombian cartels. Seal was later shot dead by a Colombian hit-squad. The FBI removed many of his personal belongings, though local police discovered Vice President Bush’s private number scribbled on a paper in his pocket. This story, and the relation between counter-terrorism and narco-trafficking, still needs further excavation.

The dissolution of the counterrevolutionary cowboys in the Reagan administration signaled the return to the dither. The ’90s would see increasingly shrill red lights about Human Rights abuses. Condor would eventually fade with the fall of Pinochet and his replacement with a nice Christian Democratic government. However, the fall of the Soviet Union did nothing to solve the actual issue. It was never communism in the abstract, let alone Marxism, that defined the problems in the American hemisphere. The new variety of pardocratia, Bolivarian Socialism, would sweep Venezuela through Hugo Chavez’s coup. Many other South American states followed suit. Argentina, under the Kirchners, returned to the gangster patronage of leftist Justicialism. Then Brazil, under Lula, helped lead anti-Yanqui pardocratia into a possible global realignment, with BRICS as an unwieldy alternative market-state. The Americans seemed powerless, and President Barack Hussein Obama, because it was popular among Progressives, agreed.

The old counterrevolutionaries were frustrated that Condor had gone to seed. Ricardo Dominguez, Uruguayan security officer and participant in Condor, lamented to a journalist in 2004:

This Plan functioned within the framework of Latin American integration, something like Mercosur [South American economic bloc], and served to defend us from Marxist aggression. But then the United States reversed itself and, to protect itself, left us on our own. The same way they betrayed Oliver North and Osama Bin Laden. From the United States you can’t expect anything. What we did was professional work in the service of the state.¹⁴

There is no reason to allow this failure to continue. There is an essential role for the United States to advance a 21st-century Monroe Doctrine, to lead and integrate as hemispheric market-state. The excesses of Condor were a product of it being forced in the dark, but the self-serving arbitrary ideology of Human Rights has begun to wane. The need for Condor is greater now than ever. The operation was part of a struggle for civilization, not to be sweated over by diplomats swirling their martinis. It was a noble fight for ordered liberty and propertied government against revolutionary leftist terror, against pardocratia. It was ugly, it was brutal, but the arrest and prosecution of criminals is often ugly and brutal, especially when it is oriented to capture the state. Oliver North was one of the few Americans who understood the stakes of the game, and he risked his career and honor in the struggle.

The Pan-American Network, the vision that united Francisco Santander and Henry Clay, as much as it did Oliver North and Augusto Pinochet, is a vision for a counterrevolutionary market-state. It is the policy of transnational security and intelligence-sharing among friendlies. Condor was partnership, unequal but toward co-prosperity, throughout the hemisphere. There is no room for the policies of red light/green light, of mouthing platitudes and hoping the boogeyman goes away. Rather, the future of America is tied to the future of the hemisphere, the nation tethered to the ability to operate as a global market-state. If Americans cannot offer a justification for doing the hard work, then they may as well throw in the towel and accept that they will be swept away through the destructive energies of pardocratia. Global security concerns require global security coordination, as much as terrorists need to face the riot shield of counter-terrorism. The house of the Americas must be set in order.

It is time for the Condor to take flight once more.

1. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent (Anchor Books, 2008), 23–26.

2. Bobbitt, 40–43.

3. Bobbitt, 46–62; 123–126.

4. J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005), 7–10.

5. quoted in John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents (The New Press, 2005), 24.

6. McSherry, 71; 95–96.

7. Dinges, 10–15.

8. McSherry, 207.

9. McSherry, 156–157.

10. Dinges, 51–52.

11. quoted in Dinges, 172–173.

12. McSherry, 207–208.

13. Henrik Krüger, tr. Jerry Meldon, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism (Trine Day, LLC, 2016 [1980]).

14. McSherry, 194–195.