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Allegations of £1 million in arms bribes paid to Pinochet. CIA, Kissenger, Bush, Sr., Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld implicated of supporting heinous, political murders of innocent people. Britain’s largest armament manufacturer, BAE Systems, is identified this week (October 4, 2005) on American banking records as clandestinely paying the former dictator General Augusto Pinochet £1 million. According to allegations made by the British Guardian and the Chilean La Tercera newspapers, their research shows that front companies situated in the British Virgin Islands acted as a conduit for most of the payments made in return for Chilean armament contracts. Amidst calls by Opposition Members of Parliament for a parliamentary investigation, the Liberal Democrats defence spokesman, Michael Moore, said the allegations raised “exceptionally serious questions” concerning links between BAE and Chile. Under British law since 2002 it is illegal for British companies to make corrupt payments to foreign nationals. These revelations might jeopardise a £134 million contract signed earlier this month by BAE and the Chilean authorities for the British firm to refit three Type 23 former Royal Navy frigates for the use of the Chilean navy. Pinochet led the 1973 military coup that overthrew the democratically elected administration of President Salvador Allende. Officially 3,000 Chileans were tortured and executed during this period, but many believe these figures to be an underestimation. Pinochet currently awaits trial in Chile after being stripped of his immunity concerning charges of kidnap and murder. The two newspapers obtained access to documents from the Chilean authorities, which corroborate how covert payments to groups linked to Pinochet were made as recently as June 30, 2004. Asked by the Guardian why BAE was making illicit payments to Pinochet, the corporation stated, “We at BAE Systems have clear and rigorous policies which govern the conduct of our relationship with third parties. We require all our employees to adhere to these policies and comply with the law.” This line of argument suggests that, if found guilty, BAE might offer the law courts a scapegoat. Described by the BBC as “the lynchpin of the UK defence industry,” BAE was recently a major exhibitor at a large and prestigious international arms fair in London. The Department of Trade and Industry holds a golden share in the company to protect “national interests.” However, such an elevated status has not prevented the corporation from coming under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office concerning the suspicion of money laundering and false accounting. The most serious charge levelled against BAE is the existence of a £60 million Saudi Arabian slush fund. The author Said Aburish revealed in his book The Rise and Coming Fall of the House of Saud how the corporation enjoyed intimate relations with influential members of the Saudi royal family, including Prince Turki bin Nasr, the son-in-law to Crown Prince Sultan. Superfluous arms contracts are sold to the Middle Eastern state and oiled through large bribes amounting to tens of millions of pounds. Only two weeks after the revelations concerning Pinochet and BAE, the Guardian revealed that Prime Minister Tony Blair and Defence Secretary John Reid have personally acted as salesmen for BAE to sell the Saudis the Typhoon fighter plane. The newspaper suggests that in return for the finalisation of the contract, reputed to be worth £40 billion, the Saudis want charges dropped concerning the slush fund, British Airways to resume flights to the kingdom and the return of certain political dissidents from British shores who the theocracy finds troublesome. Chilean judge Sergio Munoz is chasing Pinochet for tax evasion. In August, Munoz’s court application to the American authorities to obtain banking records regarding the ex-dictator was accepted. The records cast light on vast amounts of money flowing into banks like Coutts—the British royal family’s bank—in Miami. The bank operated accounts allegedly linked to Pinochet from 1993 until 2004. Coutts denies any wrongdoing and was recently bought out by Spanish bankers, Santander, who refused to comment. Documents held by Chilean authorities apparently reveal how BAE paid money into Coutts’ accounts in its own name and also through Red Diamond Trading—what the Guardian called “an offshore entity which does not appear on BAE’s published accounts.” Peter Urofsky, former assistant head of the fraud division of the Department of Justice, told the Times newspaper that American authorities would be able to investigate Pinochet’s financial affairs under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because certain transactions have depositary receipts in the United States. Such a scenario could lead to both the Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission investigating the Chilean general’s finances. The research outlines how payments by BAE went to offshore firms in the British Virgin Islands: Tasker Investments, Cornwall Overseas and Eastview Finance, controlled by Pinochet’s financial advisor Oscar Atkin. In a US Senate committee investigation earlier this year, Atkin was described as Pinochet’s financial “conduit.” BAE is alleged to have wooed Pinochet with substantial financial payments during the 1990s and to have consequently won contracts from the Chilean military. During the period Pinochet was courted, he was no longer president but was still the self-appointed head of the Chilean armed forces. He apparently visited Britain repeatedly as a guest of BAE and was persuaded to purchase and manufacture under licence Rayo a Royal Ordinance designed cluster bomb and rocket system. Towards the end of the 1990s BAE wished to sew up a deal with Chilean authorities and utilised Pinochet to promote their rocket system. The British arms manufacturer is currently attempting to sell them a naval electronics system. The British Ministry of Defence describes Chile as a “key market.” In October 1988, Pinochet was detained in Britain as a result of a Spanish arrest warrant. He was allowed to return to Chile in 2000 by the Blair government on the spurious grounds that he was too ill to stand trial. Since his return to Chile, Pinochet has made a truly remarkable recovery. The Guardian first alleged secret payments to Pinochet by BAE in late December of last year. At the time bank records observed by a Washington Senate investigation showed sums of £2.5 million in Pinochet’s bank records linked to an arms purchase made by the Chilean authorities from Royal Ordinance, a subsidiary of BAE. Investigating an unexplained $12 million acquired by Pinochet, the Senate subcommittee heard that the money was handled by the Washington-based Riggs Bank’s London branch. Riggs are already under investigation for money laundering. The US Senate also found that Riggs established two offshore companies in the Bahamas, Ashburton and Althorp, where Pinochet deposited $8 million. His official income at the time was $90,000 per year. Only a week prior to the Senate subcommittee hearings Pinochet was indicted by the Chilean courts and placed under house arrest. A sample charge of 10 murders from the infamous Operation Condor are levelled at the Chilean dictator. On September 28 investigators from the Ministry of Defence and the Serious Fraud Office flew to Chile to investigate the claims against BAE, as part of a long-standing probe into corruption allegations against the company. Chile’s arrest of Pinochet and the ”Condor” killers in the US The indictment and arrest of Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet Monday for the killings and disappearances of political opponents carried out under his rule has provoked no comment from the US government and relatively little attention in the American mass media during the middle of December, 2004. Yet the trail of evidence against the retired general, whose 17-year rule saw the murder, torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of Chileans, leads directly to Washington’s doorstep. It was reported this week that a Chilean judge following this trail has managed to secure an evidentiary hearing in the US capital in which two of the participants in the infamous Operation Condor assassination program will be questioned. Both have been living in the US for decades under the protection of the American government. It is not just these assassins who are implicated, however. Top US officials—both current and former—share Pinochet’s criminal responsibility for the mass murder carried out in Chile and elsewhere during the period of Operation Condor. The particular charges against Pinochet pertain to the abduction of nine individuals and the murder of one. The victims were Chilean exiles who were grabbed by security forces in neighboring countries, turned over to the Chilean secret police, the DINA, and thrown into concentration camps and torture centers, never to be seen again. The cases are drawn from those of many hundreds if not thousands of people who were liquidated as a result of the agreement forged in 1975 between military intelligence and secret police officials of six Latin American dictatorships—others would join later. In their social and political background, as well as their fate, they are representatives of the tens of thousands of people murdered by these regimes within their own borders over the course of the 1970s. Chilean prosecutors have said they chose Condor as the focus of their charges because it would be impossible for the ex-dictator to claim that he was not responsible. Judge Juan Guzman, who is leading the prosecution, reportedly has evidence that Pinochet personally participated in the November 1975 meeting in Santiago, Chile—formally titled the First Inter-American Meeting on National Intelligence—where the multinational alliance of state terror was forged. Present were top military and police officials from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia and Paraguay. Just as it would have been impossible to initiate such an operation without Pinochet’s involvement, such a meeting could not have been launched without the approval of the US government, which actively supported the military coups that brought these dictatorships to power. Declassified US documents have made it clear that Washington was fully informed about Operation Condor from the start. It knew of plans to carry out killings of exiled political dissidents and, at the very least, did nothing to stop them. There is ample reason to believe that it was not just a question of tacit approval. The US government itself was involved in multiple assassinations and assassination attempts in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when the CIA was commonly referred to as Murder Inc. It had trained the majority of those involved in Operation Condor at the US Army’s School of the Americas, then based in Panama. And it had CIA and military advisors working intimately with the military and secret police forces throughout Latin America. Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s national security advisor and then secretary of state, was the principal US architect of the Chilean coup. When the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende was elected in 1970, it was Kissinger who commented, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” From the day of Allende’s election in September 1970, Kissinger was directing the conspiracy that ultimately led to the Chilean president’s overthrow and death and the bloodbath that was unleashed against the Chilean people. Washington’s actions closely resembled those that would be carried out by the Pinochet regime under Operation Condor just a few years later. US-sponsored assassination Before the Socialist Party president was even inaugurated, the Nixon administration allocated $10 million to overthrow him. US efforts initially resulted in the assassination of the country’s chief of the army, General Rene Schneider, who opposed a military coup. The aim was to blame the killing on supporters of Allende as justification for the military seizing power. The guns used in the killing were supplied by the CIA, which subsequently paid some $35,000 to the assassins. In 2001, based on newly declassified documents confirming Kissinger’s role, Schneider’s family filed a lawsuit charging the ex-secretary of state with responsibility for the general’s death. The same batch of documents declassified during the waning days of the Clinton administration made it clear that Washington was intimately familiar with Operation Condor and the plot to carry out assassinations outside Latin America and took no action to stop its execution. The best known of these killings took place in Washington itself. Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister of the Allende government, had emerged as the most prominent figure lobbying for the US to break relations with the dictatorship on human rights grounds. On September 21, 1976, he was killed by a remote-controlled bomb that ripped through his car as he rode through a section of the US capital known as embassy row. The blast severed both his legs, and he bled to death. An American aide, Ronni Moffit, was hit in the throat by shrapnel and drowned in her own blood. The CIA and State Department knew immediately that the assassination had been organized by the Chilean dictatorship. From the first, the US government sought to cover up the role of its ally, Pinochet. George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father, was then director of the CIA. Although the agency had overwhelming evidence that the killings were the work of the DINA, it fed a cover story to the media that they had been carried out by “left-wing extremists” in an attempt to discredit the Pinochet regime. Thus, Newsweek wrote that “the Chilean secret police were not involved” in the assassination. It said the CIA had come to this conclusion because “the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing US support, could only damage the Santiago regime” (Newsweek, October 11, 1976). Justice Department investigators and federal prosecutors received no cooperation from the CIA in pursuing an investigation into the killings. Yet voluminous evidence led them to two DINA agents—Michael Townley and Armando Fernandez Larios. These are the two individuals that the Chilean judge is now coming to question. Townley was extradited to the US in 1978 and served only five years in prison. Fernandez came in 1987 and was sentenced to just five months. Both of them were placed in the US witness protection program, provided with new identities, financial support and security by the US government. The judge is pursuing a separate case against Pinochet over the 1974 assassination of General Carlos Prat and his wife in a Buenos Aires car bombing. Townley confessed to making that bomb, as well as the one that took the lives of Letelier and Moffitt. Based on his testimony, the former head of DINA, Colonel Juan Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, was convicted and sentenced to prison in Chile for the Letelier assassination, and convicted in Argentina of organizing the Prat assassination. Contreras, a paid “asset” of the US Central Intelligence Agency, has insisted that all of DINA’s operations were undertaken on the orders of Pinochet. Was Townley working for the CIA? Townley, the son of the American director of Ford Motor’s operations in Chile, became involved with an extreme right-wing Chilean organization. He reportedly approached the CIA, offering to work in Chile on its behalf. The agency claims it did not accept the offer, a standard answer in the case of covert operatives. Whether Townley was acting solely on behalf of the DINA, or was working with the CIA as well, remains an open question. The protection he has received from Washington would suggest the latter. The connections with the CIA do not stop there, however. In carrying out the assassination in Washington, Townley recruited a team that consisted of right-wing anti-Castro exiles who had worked closely with the CIA in carrying out armed attacks on Cuba. They provided the explosives and manpower for the car bombing. A key figure among these Cuban exiles was Guillermo Novo Sampol, who first gained fame with a bazooka attack on the United Nations headquarters in New York City in 1964. He was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy and other charges in the Letelier case and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The verdict was subsequently overturned on procedural grounds. In November 2000, Novo Sampol was arrested together with three other Cuban exiles for attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro at the Ibero-American summit meeting in Panama. One of his co-conspirators was Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veteran, who was previously charged in the 1976 terrorist bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. Carriles later played a key role in the Iran-Contra network in Central America, maintaining direct ties to then Vice President Bush. At the end of last August, the outgoing Panamanian president pardoned the four men arrested in the Castro murder plot. The pardon came the day before a Miami campaign rally for President George W. Bush, who refused to condemn the freeing of four convicted terrorists. Three of these terrorists, including Sampol, returned to Miami to a tumultuous welcome from prominent right-wing Cuban exiles, who were then playing a key role in Bush’s Florida election campaign. There is another connection between the present administration and these assassins that bears investigation. Porter Goss, installed as CIA director in September, joined the CIA as a covert agent in 1962, working out of its Miami station and participating in the US attempts to overthrow Castro. In that capacity, he forged close ties to the Cuban exile terrorists who provided the manpower for the Letelier assassination. In 1970, Goss officially left the CIA. It appears that Pinochet may finally be brought to trial in Chile. One obvious question is why he has never been placed on trial in the US itself. There is ample evidence to indict Pinochet in a US court as the principal author of what constituted—before September 11, 2001—the worst act of terrorism carried out in Washington’s history. There has been no such indictment because the US government in general, and leading figures in the current administration, in particular, are implicated. They deserve to be indicted as well for the mass killing, repression and torture that were carried out in Chile and throughout Latin America in the 1970s. Henry Kissinger belongs in the dock alongside the Chilean dictator, and is already the subject of an extradition order from a Chilean court. He remains a prominent figure in the affairs of the US ruling establishment and is protected by the government. In 2002, the Bush administration attempted unsuccessfully to name this war criminal as the head of the “independent” panel investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. George Bush senior should be the subject of an indictment for the role the CIA played under his direction in fostering and covering up for the assassination squads that roamed Latin America and, ultimately, the streets of Washington. The most prominent figures in the Bush administration—Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—are likewise implicated. Cheney was the White House chief of staff during the Condor Operation, while Rumsfeld was defense secretary, supervising US ties to the Latin American military. What emerges from an examination of the connections of the current administration to the case of Augusto Pinochet is that those who are ostensibly prosecuting a “global war on terrorism” are themselves implicated in criminal acts of state terror. The victims of Operation Condor The indictment handed down by Judge Juan Guzman against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in connection with Operation Condor includes brief biographies of the ten Chileans whose disappearance and murder he is accused of ordering. This information came out in December, 2004. While the ten represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of people who were murdered, tortured and imprisoned during Pinochet’s 17-year rule, the indictment provides a glimpse of the magnitude of the dictatorship’s crimes and gives some insight into the types of people who were murdered by the US-backed military regime. Among those the indictment describes as “permanently kidnapped” is Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcón, a 28-year-old sociologist and urban planner who was at the University of the North in Antofagasta at the time of the 1973 coup. He was seized by security forces in Paraguay in May 1975, after crossing the border from Argentina. Four months later, he was handed over to DINA, taken to Pinochet’s torture chambers at Villa Grimaldi, and, after January 1976, never seen again. Fuentes Alarcón was a member of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). During his university years, he was president of the Student Federation of the University of Concepcion. He was married and had a four-year-old son at the time of his disappearance. “His family remember him as a being good at sports, a reader, who sang and played the guitar,” the indictment states. “He was a man of solidarity, with principles and solid values, honest and transparent.” After the September 11, 1973 coup, he was hunted by the dictatorship because of his political activity and fled first to Argentina and then France. Acting as a courier for the MIR in exile, he returned to the region and was arrested on the Paraguayan-Argentine border. Manuel Jesus Tamayo Martínez was a 22-year-old student leader and member of the Chilean Socialist Party at the time of the coup. He was forced to flee into exile in Argentina in March 1976, just weeks before the military seized power in that country. He was living in the city of Mendoza at a residence set up by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees when he was seized in the street in a joint operation conducted by DINA and the Argentine military. Taken with him were Luis Gonzalo Munoz, a 27-year-old accountant, who was also a member of the Socialist Party, and Juan Humberto Zape, 23, a lathe operator, who was a member of the Socialist Youth and president of the Federation of Students of Industrial and Technical Schools. They were all taken back to Villa Grimaldi, where they disappeared. Also rounded up in the joint Chilean-Argentine crackdown was Edgardo Enríquez Espinoza, 34, a leading member of the MIR, who was grabbed off the street in Buenos Aires. Witnesses saw him at various Argentine detention and torture centers. It is believed that he was also transported to Villa Grimaldi. He was never seen again. Alexei Vladimir Jaccard Siegler was abducted by security forces in Buenos Aires in May 1977. A university student and sympathizer of the Communist Party, he was forced to flee Chile after the military coup, arriving in Switzerland at the end of 1973. There he continued his studies and married a fellow Chilean exile. He was arrested while making a stop in Argentina on his way to Chile to see his father, who was sick. Arrested with him were three other Chileans and five Argentine citizens who were members of a committee in solidarity with Chile. All of them are now listed among the disappeared. Also included in the indictment is the case of Jacobo Stoulman Bortnik and his wife Matilde Pessa Mois, who were detained when they got off a plane at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires in May 1977. They were bundled into a truck and never seen again. Bortnik, a successful banker, was suspected by the dictatorship of handling funds that were destined for oppositionists inside Chile. Julio Valladares Caroca was grabbed by secret police in Bolivia in July 1976. Four months later, he was taken to the Chilean border and handed over to DINA agents, never to be seen again. A member of the Socialist Party, he was 29 at the time of his disappearance. Before the military seized power, he worked as an accountant in the Agrarian Reform Corporation. Married and a father of two, he was studying agricultural engineering in Cuba at the time of the coup. He could not return to Chile, and could maintain contact with his family only by mail. The murder victim named in the indictment is Ruiter Correa Arce, brutally beaten and then killed by security agents in Santiago in May 1977. His body was found in the Mapocho River. Born in 1915, he had been a member of the Communist Party for 35 years. A professional telegraph operator, he was the leader of the union representing these workers before joining the government of Salvador Allende as an administrator in the Ministry of Transport. After the coup, he ran a newspaper stand, which functioned as a letter drop for the clandestine Communist Party. While going home for lunch from the stand, he was grabbed off the street and murdered.