Uncovering Operation Condor: a 50-Year Fight for Accountability

This episode marks the 50th anniversary of Operation Condor's assassination program, codenamed "Teseo" (Theseus). Condor was the coordinated campaign of state-sponsored terror carried out by U.S.-backed military dictatorships in South America during the 1970s and early 1980s. Our guest is Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba and Chile documentation projects at the National Security Archive, who has spent decades uncovering declassified documents and accounts about this dark chapter. Kornbluh explains that Operation Condor was a transnational collaboration among the secret police forces of Southern Cone military regimes to share intelligence, track, kidnap, and assassinate their political opponents across borders and even around the world. The operation was formally established in November 1975, with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's secret police chief Manuel Contreras serving as the principal organizer. A particularly sinister component was Project Teseo, the assassination program established at a second meeting in Santiago in May 1976. Kornbluh describes declassified documents revealing the bureaucratic nature of this killing apparatus: monthly dues, membership fees, and detailed protocols for locating targets, carrying out assassinations, and escaping afterward. The most notorious Condor operation occurred on September 21, 1976, when a car bomb killed Orlando Letelier, Chile's former foreign minister under Salvador Allende, and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C.'s Sheridan Circle—the worst act of foreign terrorism in Washington until September 11, 2001. Kornbluh details the complicated U.S. role in these events. The CIA helped create and train intelligence services like Chile's DINA. However, agency officials grew concerned about Condor's blowback potential. Nonetheless, Ford administration officials, particularly Henry Kissinger, pulled back diplomatic efforts that might have prevented the Letelier-Moffitt attack. The conversation traces how accountability eventually came—partially. The Carter administration's response was "demonstrably weak," undermined by bureaucracies protecting their relationships with Southern Cone security forces. Under Reagan, Pinochet initially served as an ally in Central American counterinsurgency, though some distancing came later. Kornbluh reflects on how this history was uncovered through FOIA requests, congressional investigations, and special declassifications ordered under Clinton and later Obama. The Teseo documents only emerged in 2018—more than forty years after the program's creation. The episode concludes with sobering parallels to today: Daniel Ortega's regime sending assassins to kill opponents, Venezuelan agents murdering a military officer in Chile, and the current U.S. administration's killings on the high seas. Kornbluh expresses hope that those committing current human rights atrocities will eventually face accountability, just as Contreras spent his final years in prison and Pinochet faced arrest in London and Santiago.