Buenos Aires

The Prats Assassination

Four days after the coup of September 11, 1973, the former Chilean army commander Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, left for Buenos Aires. Six weeks later Augusto Pinochet sent General Sergio Arellano Stark there on a mission whose first purpose, a CIA source reported, was to "discuss with the Argentine military any information they have regarding the activities of General (retired) Carlos Prats."¹ Enrique Arancibia Clavel ran the DINA station in the city from 1974, forming "a parallel network of informants in Buenos Aires to supply data on those being pursued."² In late July 1974 Major Raúl Iturriaga came "with a bag of cash to hire assassins and to coordinate the operation with the Argentine service, SIDE"; a DINA captain filed a surveillance report with the couple's addresses and a drawing of the entrance to Prats's garage, and four days before the killing the Chilean foreign ministry told its consul it would be "inconvenient" to issue them passports to travel to Brazil.¹³ Prats and Cuthbert were killed on September 30, 1974, by a bomb built by Michael Townley, who had come to the city with Mariana Callejas; Manuel Contreras afterward called "the operation in Buenos Aires a complete success."¹⁴ An Argentine federal court sentenced Arancibia Clavel to life imprisonment in November 2000, and the Chilean courts convicted Contreras, Pedro Espinoza, Iturriaga and José Zara in 2010.²⁵

Condor and the FBI

Robert Scherrer, the FBI's legal attaché at the embassy from 1972, responsible for the southern cone, obtained the surrender of the Cuban exile Rolando Otero in 1976 and sent the first written description of Operation Condor to reach Washington soon after the murder of Orlando Letelier. Contreras later testified that Scherrer was in "permanent contact" with Condor's representative in Buenos Aires "and received the information that he asked for."⁶³ On June 4, 1976, the day the exiled Bolivian president Juan José Torres was found murdered in the city, an intelligence memorandum found "no evidence to support a contention that Southern Cone governments are cooperating in some sort of international Murder Inc."³ On August 23 the State Department cabled the embassies in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago that "government planned and directed assassinations within and outside the territory of Condor members has most serious implications."⁷

Other Operations

Rafael Eitan took part in the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960.⁸ Hal Hendrix worked for ITT from Buenos Aires until mid-1970, with Robert Berrellez reporting to him; on September 17, 1970, two weeks after Salvador Allende won a plurality in Chile, the two recommended paying for a relocation center in Mendoza or Buenos Aires for the families of "key persons involved in the fight."⁹ In 1994 Argentine investigators implicated Iranian officials, among them Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, in the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in the city.¹⁰