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OPERATION CONDOR: A NETWORK OF TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION 50 YEARS
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National Security Archive
November 26, 2025
National Security Archive
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_ Launched in 1975 from Pinochet’s Chile, Operation Condor was a
secret police operation of “cross-border repression, [whose] teams
… launch[ed] assassination missions and other criminal operations in
the United States, Mexico and Europe.” _

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WASHINGTON, D.C., NOVEMBER 26, 2025 - On General Augusto Pinochet’s
60th birthday, November 25, 1975, four delegations of Southern Cone
secret police chieftains gathered in Santiago, Chile, at the
invitation of the Chilean intelligence service, DINA. Their
meeting—held at the War College building on la Alameda, Santiago’s
downtown thoroughfare—was called “to establish something similar
to INTERPOL,” according to the confidential meeting agenda, “but
dedicated to Subversion.” During the three-day meeting, the military
officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay agreed
to form “a system of collaboration” to identify, track, capture
and eliminate leftist opponents of their regimes. As the conference
concluded on November 28, a member of the Uruguayan delegation rose to
toast the Chileans for convening the meeting and proposed naming the
new organization after the host country’s national bird, the condor.
According to secret minutes of the meeting, there was “unanimous
approval.”

Chilean records refer to Condor as “Sistema Condor.” CIA
intelligence reports called it Operation Condor. It was, as John
Dinges writes in his comprehensive history, _The Condor Years_, an
agency of “cross-border repression, teams went far beyond the
frontiers of the member countries to launch assassination missions and
other criminal operations in the United States, Mexico and Europe.”
His investigation documented 654 victims of kidnapping, torture and
disappearance during Condor’s active operational period in the
Southern Cone between 1976 and 1980. A subdivision of Condor codenamed
“Teseo”—for Theseus, the heroic warrior king of Greek
mythology—established an international death squad unit based in
Buenos Aires that launched 21 operations in Europe and elsewhere
against opponents of the military regimes. 

On the 50th anniversary of the secret inauguration of Operation
Condor, the National Security Archive is posting a selection of
documents that record the dark history of transnational repression
under the Condor system. The selected records include:

* The only known DINA document on the inaugural meeting—the
“Closing Statement of the First Inter-American Meeting of National
Intelligence”—which summarized the agreement between the original
five Condor nations. 
* The first declassified CIA document to name “CONDOR” as a
“cooperative arrangement” against subversion. The heavily censored
CIA document, dated June 25, 1976, provides initial intelligence on
the 2nd Condor meeting held from May 31 to June 2 in Santiago. It was
the first in a flurry of CIA intelligence cables in the summer of 1976
on Condor’s evolution from an intelligence sharing collaboration to
a transnational system of disappearance and assassination. “The
subjects covered at the meeting,” this CIA report noted, “were
more sweeping than just the exchange of information on terrorism and
subversion.” 
* A CIA translation of the “Teseo” agreement—an extraordinary
document that bureaucratically records the procedures, budgets,
working hours, and operational rules for selecting, organizing and
dispatching death squads to eliminate targeted enemies of the Southern
Cone regimes. The “Teseo” operations base would be located “at
Condor 1 (Argentina).” Each member country was expected to donate
$10,000 to offset operational costs, and dues of $200 would be paid
“prior to the 30th of each month” for maintenance expenses of the
operations center. Expenses for agents on assassination missions
abroad were estimated at $3,500 per person for ten days “with an
additional $1000 first time out for clothing allowance.” 
* A CIA report on how the Teseo unit will select targets “to
liquidate” in Europe and who will know about these missions. The
source of the CIA intelligence suggests that “in Chile, for
instance, Juan Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, chief of the Directorate of
National Intelligence (DINA) the man who originated the entire Condor
concept and has been the catalyst in bringing it into being, will
coordinate details and target lists with Chilean President Augusto
Pinochet Ugarte.” 
* The first briefing paper for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
alerting him to the existence of Operation Condor and the political
ramifications for the United States. In a lengthy August 3, 1973,
report from his deputy Harry Shlaudeman, Kissinger is informed that
the security forces of the Southern Cone “have established Operation
Condor to find and kill terrorists…in their own countries and in
Europe. Brazil is cooperating short of murder operations." 

[JUAN MANUEL MENTIONED]
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* CIA memoranda, written by the chief of the Western Hemisphere
division, Ray Warren, sounding the alarm on Condor’s planned
missions in Europe, and expressing concern that the CIA will be blamed
for Condor’s assassinations abroad. One memo indicates that the CIA
has taken steps to preempt the missions by alerting French
counterparts that Condor operatives planned to murder specific
individuals living in Paris. 
* The completely unredacted FBI “Chilbom” report, written by FBI
attaché Robert Scherrer one week after the car bomb assassination of
former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in
downtown Washington, D.C. It was this FBI report that resulted in the
revelation of the existence of the Condor system in 1979, when its
author, FBI attaché Robert Scherrer, testified at a trial of several
Cuban exiles who assisted the Chilean secret police in assassinating
Letelier and Moffitt. 

[IIC JUNE 25, 1976]
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* The first Senate investigative report on Condor based on CIA
documents and briefings written in early 1979 by Michael Glennon, a
staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on
International Operations. The draft report was never officially
published but was leaked to columnist Jack Anderson; a copy was
eventually obtained by John Dinges and Saul Landau and used in their
book, _Assassination on Embassy Row_. A declassified copy was released
as part of the Obama-authorized Argentina Declassification Project in
2019.

“These documents record the dark history of multilateral repression
and state-sponsored terrorism in the Southern Cone—a history that
defined those violent regimes of the past,” notes Peter Kornbluh,
author of _The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and
Accountability_. “Fifty years after Condor’s inauguration, these
documents provide factual evidence of coordinated human rights
atrocities that can never be denied, whitewashed or justified.”

 

After many years of investigations and resulting trials, it is now
clear that Condor may have backfired on its perpetrators, according to
John Dinges, whose updated and expanded edition of _The Condor Years_
was published in Spanish in 2021 as _Los Años del Condor: Operaciones
Internacionales de asesinato en el Cono Sur_. “It is a kind of
historic irony,” Dinges notes, “that the international crimes of
the dictatorships spawned investigations, including one resulting in
Pinochet’s arrest in London, that would eventually bring hundreds
of the military perpetrators to justice. Moreover, because Condor’s
most notorious crime was in Washington, D.C., the United States
government unleashed the FBI to prosecute DINA and the Chilean
regime.”

Other documents on Condor discovered in the archives of member states
such as Uruguay can be found on this special
website—[link removed]
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Condor’s human rights atrocities and hold those who committed them
accountable for their crimes.

Special thanks to Carlos Osorio whose years of work documenting
Operation Condor made this posting possible.

Read the documents.
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_Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising
government secrecy, the __National Security Archive_
[[link removed]]_ combines a unique range of functions:
investigative journalism center, research institute on international
affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents ("the
world's largest nongovernmental collection" according to the Los
Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of
Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding
public access to government information, global advocate of open
government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets._ 

* Operation Condor
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* state terrorism
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* Augusto Pinochet
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* CIA
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* repression
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