Robert Scherrer

Robert Scherrer was the legal attaché of the FBI at the embassy in Buenos Aires, responsible from 1972 for the southern cone of South America. The bureau "recruited him when he was eighteen, gave him a job as a filing clerk, and sent him to Fordham University to get a law degree." In the middle 1960s he served on the New York squad that watched Cuban exiles. "He had made it his business to get to know Chile's Manuel Contreras," on whom he called "on each trip to Chile."¹

"In fact, he was a one-man intelligence station whose sources in all of the Southern Cone countries were the envy of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence." He had gone abroad with the first wave of legal attachés after J. Edgar Hoover persuaded President Richard Nixon in 1970 to approve the program. After arrests of members of the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria in Paraguay, "Scherrer sent a letter informing his main police source in Chile, General Ernesto Baeza," which has been called "the first documented case of U.S. official participation in the multicountry operations against the JCR." The bureau called it a "routine and traditional form of cooperation." "They should be rounded up," Scherrer said of the revolutionaries in 1979. "But they should be tried, not slaughtered." He said the military governments in 1975 formally proposed that the bureau have a "more open exchange of information with them" about people in the United States they considered terrorists. Contreras later testified that Scherrer was in "permanent contact" with Condor's representative in Buenos Aires "and received the information that he asked for." Scherrer said he learned that the CIA had provided DINA with the computer systems he presumed were used in the Condor data bank.²

The Condor Cable

After Orlando Letelier was killed in Washington on September 21, 1976, a source told Scherrer the murder was "a 'wild Condor operation.'" His cable to headquarters read: "Operation Condor is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning leftists, communists and Marxists which was recently established between the cooperating services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorists and their activities in the area. In addition Operation Condor provides for joint operations against terrorist targets in member countries. Chile is the center for Operation Condor, and in addition it includes Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. Brazil has also tentatively agreed to supply input." It went on: "A third and more secret phase of Operation Condor involves the formation of special teams from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to non-member countries to carry out sanctions, [including] assassinations, against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organizations." He learned that Contreras, "Condor One," had "personally provided the inspiration and organizational impetus," and that Chile had paid much of the early cost.¹

Santiago

In 1976 Scherrer obtained the surrender of the Cuban exile fugitive Rolando Otero from Chile. "The Chilean government first denied having Otero, then offered to turn him over in a coffin." The embassy warned that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would cancel his visit of that June. At their first meeting after the Letelier murder, in late November 1976, Contreras offered him "confidential information" that Ronni Moffitt had been Letelier's lover and that her husband was the likeliest suspect. With Carter Cornick he questioned Michael Townley on April 17, 1978.¹

He retired as chief of the bureau's records. In 1988 he joined the prosecutors of the case, Eugene Propper and E. Lawrence Barcella, and Cornick in Counter Terrorism Consultants, Inc.³