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Operation Condor—often called Plan Condor—was a secret multinational system created by South American military governments and intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Its purpose was to locate, monitor, abduct, interrogate, torture, forcibly return, “disappear,” or assassinate political opponents who had escaped from one country into another.

The historical record is unusually strong. Operation Condor is documented by:

• Original invitations, meeting agendas, communications codes, and intelligence reports.
• Declassified CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department, and FBI records.
• Paraguay’s “Archives of Terror.”
• Judicial findings and criminal convictions in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Italy.
• Truth commissions, survivor testimony, and human-rights investigations.
• Reporting by the Associated Press and other international news organizations.

It was not merely an allegation or conspiracy theory. Courts and governments have established that Operation Condor existed and that its members committed systematic transnational human-rights crimes.

When did Operation Condor begin?

The most precise answer is:

Operation Condor was formally established at a secret intelligence conference held in Santiago, Chile, from November 25 to December 1, 1975.

Its roots, however, reach back several years.

South American intelligence services were already exchanging information, conducting joint interrogations, and returning political refugees across national borders before the name “Condor” was adopted. Researcher Francesca Lessa’s database records transnational repression beginning as early as 1969.

A useful timeline is:

The discrepancy between November 1975 and May 1976 in some documents is not necessarily a contradiction. November 1975 marks Condor’s founding conference. Later meetings formalized its communications system and operational machinery. One declassified CIA document consequently described the cooperative arrangement as being formalized in late May 1976.

Who started Operation Condor?

Manuel Contreras was its principal organizer

The central architect was Gen. Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, director of Chile’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, or DINA.

Contreras:

• Invited intelligence representatives to Santiago.
• Proposed a permanent system for collecting and exchanging intelligence.
• Offered Santiago as the network’s coordinating center.
• Helped create coded communications and centralized files on political opponents.
• Directed DINA during several of the most notorious overseas attacks associated with Chilean repression.

An original October 1, 1975 invitation from Contreras to Paraguayan officials survives in Paraguay’s archives. The invitation included an agenda and proposed encrypted communications procedures. It is among the clearest pieces of documentary evidence concerning Condor’s creation. View the Contreras invitation and supporting documentation.

Augusto Pinochet authorized the Chilean system behind it

Chile’s dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, did not personally administer Condor’s daily communications. Nevertheless, DINA was directly subordinate to his military government, and Contreras had unusually close access to him.

For that reason, historians generally describe:

• Pinochet as the principal political sponsor on the Chilean side.
• Contreras as Condor’s primary organizer and operational architect.
• The participating governments and intelligence chiefs as its joint founders.

It would therefore be incomplete to say that Pinochet alone invented Condor. It would be equally misleading to portray Contreras as operating independently of Pinochet’s government.

It was a multinational creation

The original participating services represented:

• Chile
• Argentina
• Uruguay
• Paraguay
• Bolivia

Brazil attended the founding conference but initially maintained some distance from the proposed foreign assassination operations. Nevertheless, Brazil exchanged intelligence and cooperated in cross-border repression. Later U.S. documents routinely listed Brazil among the six participating Condor countries.

Argentina’s involvement requires an important qualification: Argentina’s March 1976 military coup had not yet happened when the Santiago conference met. Argentine security and intelligence organizations were already involved in violent anti-leftist repression under President Isabel Perón. After the military coup, Argentina became one of Condor’s most active operational centers.

Peru and Ecuador participated in aspects of regional intelligence cooperation later, but they were not among the five principal signatories of the original November 1975 organizational agreement.

Why was it created?

The military governments claimed they were fighting “terrorism,” “Marxist subversion,” and revolutionary organizations such as:

• Chile’s Movement of the Revolutionary Left, or MIR.
• Uruguay’s Tupamaros.
• Argentina’s Montoneros and People’s Revolutionary Army, or ERP.
• Bolivia’s National Liberation Army.
• The Revolutionary Coordinating Junta, which attempted to coordinate several armed leftist movements.

Some initial targets were indeed members of armed revolutionary organizations. But Condor’s definition of “subversion” expanded far beyond people who had committed acts of violence.

Victims included:

• Former elected officials.
• Political refugees and exiles.
• Union organizers.
• Journalists and writers.
• Students and teachers.
• Human-rights advocates.
• Lawyers and clergy.
• Socialists, communists, and other left-wing activists.
• Moderate and center-left opponents of military government.
• Relatives, friends, and associates of wanted individuals.
• Children taken with their parents or born during illegal detention.

The UN human-rights office describes Condor as a mechanism used to search for, persecute, torture, summarily kill, and forcibly disappear perceived dissidents throughout the region. UN statement on the Operation Condor judgment.

How Operation Condor worked

Condor was a framework through which national intelligence organizations could cooperate without observing borders, extradition law, refugee protections, or ordinary judicial procedures.

Intelligence collection

Member governments compiled information on:

• Political beliefs and organizational memberships.
• Addresses and places of employment.
• Border crossings and travel plans.
• Family relationships.
• Photographs and physical descriptions.
• Passport and identity information.
• Meetings, correspondence, and personal contacts.

Records were circulated through a centralized communications arrangement sometimes called Condortel. Officials developed codes, secure channels, and common intelligence files.

Surveillance

An exile who escaped from Chile to Argentina, for example, might be watched by Argentine officers using information provided by Chilean DINA. Security services could follow a person, identify associates, and determine when an abduction could be performed secretly.

Joint arrest and abduction teams

Personnel from one country operated in another or worked with the host country’s security forces. Victims were frequently seized without warrants by armed men in civilian clothes.

Families sometimes could not determine whether the abductors were police officers, soldiers, intelligence agents, or members of an unofficial death squad.

Secret detention and torture

Victims were taken to clandestine detention centers rather than registered prisons. Interrogation under torture was used to obtain:

• Names of colleagues.
• Addresses of safe houses.
• Organizational structures.
• Information about family members.
• Foreign political and humanitarian contacts.

Some prisoners were interrogated by officers from several countries.

Illegal transfer across borders

Prisoners could be transported secretly to their country of origin without extradition proceedings. This practice later became known as rendition, although Condor’s transfers frequently ended in prolonged torture, disappearance, or death.

Records were altered or omitted so that the person officially appeared never to have been arrested.

Assassination

The most extreme part of the system involved targeted killings. Declassified U.S. records show that American officials understood Condor as having two major elements:

1. Intelligence exchange and coordinated action inside South America.

2. “Executive action,” meaning planned assassinations outside the region, including in Europe.

A State Department document stated that Condor involved both intelligence exchange and the planning of assassinations abroad. Read the declassified State Department record.

The phases of Condor

Investigators commonly divide the network into three functional phases, although procedures changed over time.

Phase One: Information exchange

Participating services established common files, surveillance lists, coded communications, and a system for tracking political opponents.

Phase Two: Cross-border operations

Member services carried out surveillance, abductions, interrogation, torture, secret transfers, and disappearances inside participating countries.

Phase Three: Overseas assassination operations

Special teams were contemplated for operations beyond South America. A particularly secret assassination component was called Teseo—the Spanish name for Theseus.

Plans reportedly included:

• Special teams of operatives.
• False documents and cover identities.
• Weapons and explosives.
• Surveillance of exiles in Europe and elsewhere.
• A communications arrangement for proposing, approving, and reporting operations.

Not every proposed Teseo operation was carried out, but the documentation demonstrates that foreign assassination was discussed and organized as a multinational capability.

Major crimes associated with the Condor system

Gen. Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert

Carlos Prats had been commander in chief of the Chilean Army and a supporter of constitutional government. He and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, were killed by a car bomb in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974.

This happened before Condor’s formal creation, so it is more accurate to describe it as a precursor to Condor rather than an operation conducted under the fully established network. It demonstrated DINA’s ability to locate and assassinate an exile in another country.

Bernardo Leighton and Anita Fresno

Former Chilean vice president Bernardo Leighton and his wife, Anita Fresno, were shot in Rome on October 6, 1975. Both survived, but Fresno was permanently disabled.

The attack also preceded Condor’s formal founding conference by several weeks. Evidence connected DINA agents with European far-right extremists. Like the Prats bombing, it revealed the type of international operation that Condor would institutionalize.

Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz

Uruguayan legislators Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz were abducted in Buenos Aires in May 1976. Their bodies were subsequently found in a car with gunshot wounds.

Their murders demonstrated that exile in a neighboring country no longer provided safety. Argentine and Uruguayan security cooperation was central to the case.

The Orletti Motors detention center

Automotores Orletti—an automobile workshop in Buenos Aires—became a clandestine detention and torture center associated with Argentine intelligence.

Uruguayan, Chilean, Cuban, Bolivian, and other prisoners were held there. Foreign security officers participated in interrogations. Numerous victims were subsequently disappeared or secretly transferred.

Orletti illustrates Condor’s everyday machinery more clearly than a spectacular overseas assassination: coordinated surveillance, abduction, torture, information exchange, and cross-border prisoner transfers.

Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt

The best-known Condor-era assassination occurred in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1976.

Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador and cabinet minister under President Salvador Allende, was killed when a bomb exploded beneath his car. His American colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt was also killed; her husband, Michael Moffitt, survived.

The operation was organized through DINA personnel and anti-Castro Cuban operatives. American-born DINA agent Michael Townley played a central role.

This was an extraordinary act: agents connected to a foreign dictatorship committed a political car-bomb assassination in the capital of the United States.

Condor provided the broader setting of multinational, extraterritorial repression. The Letelier operation was principally directed by Chile’s DINA, however, so historians sometimes distinguish between a general Condor operation and a DINA assassination conducted within the Condor environment.

The disappearance of children

Condor’s victims were not limited to adult activists. Children were:

• Seized along with their parents.
• Held in clandestine detention.
• Separated from detained parents.
• Transferred across borders.
• Given false identities in some cases.

An example is the family of Uruguayan militants Mauricio Gatti and Sara Méndez. Méndez was abducted in Buenos Aires in 1976, and her infant son Simón was taken from her. She searched for him for decades before his identity was confirmed.

How many people were killed or disappeared?

No reliable historian can give one definitive number for “Condor victims” without first explaining what is being counted.

Large estimates—sometimes 50,000 or 60,000 deaths—usually combine most or all repression committed by the participating dictatorships. Those figures should not automatically be attributed to Condor’s cross-border operations.

A more careful distinction is:

• National repression killed or disappeared tens of thousands across the participating countries.
• Condor was the transnational portion of that repression.
• Hundreds of victims have been individually documented in cross-border cases.
• Many additional cases remain unresolved or insufficiently documented.

Francesca Lessa’s transnational-repression database identifies 805 victims persecuted between 1969 and 1981, including the years of informal cooperation before Condor’s formal establishment. Operation Condor research database.

Historian and journalist John Dinges documented 654 victims of kidnapping, torture, or disappearance during Condor’s principal operational period from 1976 through 1980. National Security Archive’s 50-year review.

These figures may overlap and use different definitions. They should not be added together.

Argentina was the location of the largest proportion of known transnational abductions. It had initially served as a haven for people escaping dictatorships elsewhere, but after the 1976 coup it became a major center of coordinated repression.

What did the United States know?

Declassified documents demonstrate that U.S. agencies knew about Condor while it was operating.

Reports reached:

• The CIA.
• The State Department.
• The Defense Intelligence Agency.
• American embassies.
• The FBI and other officials concerned with foreign operations inside the United States.

By mid-1976, American intelligence reporting described Condor as a cooperative effort among Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. Officials knew that it went beyond normal information-sharing.

Documents discussed:

• Cross-border operations.
• Special teams.
• The targeting of exiles.
• Proposed assassinations in Europe.
• Concern that Condor operations could have severe political consequences.

A declassified report summarized Condor as an effort by the six governments to conduct secret intelligence activities and eliminate “subversion.” Other records explicitly used the term “assassinations.” U.S. Office of the Historian’s Condor documents.

Did the United States create Operation Condor?

There is no documentary basis for saying that the CIA founded Condor or that an American official sat down and created its organizational plan.

The strongest evidence indicates that:

• Chile’s DINA, under Manuel Contreras, initiated the formal organization.
• The Southern Cone intelligence services jointly established and operated it.
• The United States had trained, funded, armed, advised, or maintained intelligence relationships with several participating governments.
• U.S. officials knew about Condor’s development and were slow, inconsistent, or ineffective in confronting it.
• Cold War American support for anti-communist governments helped create a permissive political and security environment.
• Some American officials privately sympathized with the dictatorships’ anti-communist objectives even while recognizing serious human-rights abuses.

That represents substantial U.S. responsibility, but it is different from proving that Washington designed or directly commanded every Condor crime.

Henry Kissinger and the warning controversy

In August 1976, the State Department prepared instructions for U.S. ambassadors to warn Condor governments against international assassination operations.

The diplomatic warnings were delayed, altered, and ultimately not delivered in the form originally contemplated. Orlando Letelier was murdered in Washington the following month.

The record has produced continuing controversy over whether stronger and faster American action might have disrupted the assassination plans. The documents establish U.S. knowledge and internal concern; they do not establish that Kissinger personally ordered Letelier’s murder.

The relevant diplomatic record can be reviewed in the State Department’s official historical collection.

The Associated Press and contemporary reporting

Associated Press reports have helped bring Condor-related court decisions, document releases, survivor accounts, and Pinochet-era crimes to a general audience.

Contemporary news organizations faced serious limitations during the operation itself:

• Condor was classified and deliberately concealed.
• Arrests were not registered.
• Governments denied holding the victims.
• Bodies were hidden or given false identities.
• Families received conflicting official explanations.
• Journalists and witnesses risked arrest or death.
• Individual crimes appeared unconnected until secret records emerged.

Therefore, early wire reports might describe a missing exile, an unexplained murder, or a government denial without knowing that the case belonged to an organized multinational system.

Later AP coverage has reported on:

• Pinochet-era criminal trials.
• Identification of disappeared persons.
• Declassified American records.
• The activities of DINA.
• Efforts to preserve dictatorship-era archives.
• Continuing attempts to prosecute former security officers.

AP reporting is valuable, but the most decisive proof comes from the underlying official documents and court evidence.

The “Archives of Terror”

One of the greatest breakthroughs occurred in Paraguay on December 22, 1992.

Paraguayan lawyer and former political prisoner Martín Almada, working with Judge José Agustín Fernández, discovered a vast collection of secret-police records near Asunción. They became known as the “Archives of Terror.”

The files documented:

• Political surveillance.
• Arrests and interrogations.
• Torture and imprisonment.
• Communications between intelligence services.
• Lists of suspected opponents.
• Prisoner transfers.
• Paraguayan participation in Condor.
• Correspondence related to the November 1975 organizing conference.

Because these were the repressors’ own administrative records, they provided especially powerful corroborating evidence. UNESCO recognizes the collection as part of its Memory of the World program and states that it contains evidence of Condor’s assassination and intelligence activities. UNESCO’s Archives of Terror collection.

Declassified American documents

FOIA requests, presidential declassification programs, and releases by the State Department and intelligence agencies opened thousands of pages concerning Southern Cone repression.

Important collections include:

• CIA FOIA records concerning Operation Condor.
• State Department historical documents.
• National Security Archive Operation Condor collection.
• Documents released through the Argentina Declassification Project.
• Chilean and Paraguayan intelligence records.
• FBI and Justice Department material associated with the Letelier investigation.

Declassification did not create the story; it allowed investigators to compare American intelligence reporting with survivor testimony, Latin American records, and criminal evidence.

Trials and convictions

Argentina

A landmark Buenos Aires trial began in 2013. In May 2016, a federal court convicted 15 former officers and officials for their participation in unlawful imprisonment, torture, and the criminal association underlying Condor.

The proceedings involved more than 100 victims and established Condor’s multinational criminal structure in court. Former Argentine dictator Reynaldo Bignone and Uruguayan officer Manuel Cordero were among those convicted.

A scholarly account of the proceedings is available through the Journal of Latin American Studies.

Chile

Chilean courts have convicted former DINA officers in cases involving Condor-era kidnappings, disappearances, torture, and assassination. Manuel Contreras received sentences for numerous dictatorship-era crimes and died in prison in 2015.

In 2023, the UN human-rights chief welcomed a major Chilean Supreme Court judgment imposing sentences on former DINA agents for Condor-related crimes.

Italy

Italy prosecuted South American military and intelligence officials because several Condor victims held Italian citizenship. After lengthy proceedings, courts imposed multiple life sentences for murders and disappearances.

Uruguay and other countries

Uruguayan courts convicted former officials in dictatorship-era disappearance and murder cases. Investigations and proceedings have also occurred in Paraguay and elsewhere, though amnesty laws, destroyed records, delays, deaths of defendants, and political resistance have repeatedly obstructed justice.

Why Operation Condor matters

Operation Condor transformed political repression from a national practice into an international system.

A refugee might legally leave one dictatorship, obtain residence in another country, and still be:

1. Identified through shared intelligence.

2. Followed by the host country’s agents.

3. Abducted by a joint team.

4. Tortured by officers from multiple countries.

5. Secretly transported across a border.

6. Killed or permanently disappeared.

7. Erased from official arrest records.

It destroyed the traditional expectation that political exile offered protection. It also anticipated modern forms of transnational repression in which governments surveil, kidnap, poison, or assassinate opponents living abroad.

Bottom line

Operation Condor was formally founded in Santiago, Chile, in late November 1975. Its principal organizer was DINA chief Manuel Contreras, acting within Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and in partnership with the intelligence services of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia; Brazil participated in intelligence cooperation while initially showing reservations about assassination missions.

It grew out of earlier cross-border repression and developed into a coordinated system of intelligence-sharing, surveillance, kidnapping, torture, illegal prisoner transfers, enforced disappearance, and assassination. Its victims included armed militants, but also elected officials, peaceful political opponents, refugees, journalists, union members, relatives, and children.

The documentary record establishes both the direct responsibility of the participating South American regimes and the knowledge, Cold War relationships, and deeply inadequate response of the United States. What was once denied as rumor is now supported by the perpetrators’ files, declassified American reports, survivors’ evidence, and criminal judgments.

you left out the role Ft. Bragg and School of Americas played in this Operation Condor

You are correct that U.S. military training—especially the School of the Americas and Special Forces doctrine associated with Fort Bragg—belongs in the broader history of Operation Condor. But the evidence supports a carefully worded conclusion:

These institutions helped train, connect, and shape the counterinsurgency forces from which Condor emerged; available records do not prove that either Fort Bragg or the School of the Americas formally created or commanded Operation Condor.

The School of the Americas

The U.S. Army School of the Americas—SOA—was founded in 1946 and operated in the Panama Canal Zone during Operation Condor. It moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984 and was replaced in 2001 by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

By 2000, approximately 60,000 Latin American military, police, and security personnel had attended its courses.

Training subjects included:

• Military intelligence.
• Counterintelligence.
• Counterinsurgency.
• Interrogation.
• Psychological operations.
• Urban warfare.
• Commando and ranger operations.
• Internal security.
• Identification of clandestine organizations.
• Surveillance and handling of informants.
• Military government and civic action.

These subjects overlap significantly with the capabilities used by Condor: tracking opponents, organizing intelligence files, exchanging information, interrogating prisoners, operating covertly, and conducting joint actions.

The National Security Doctrine

The most important influence was not one particular class. It was the Cold War doctrine taught through SOA, U.S. military missions, regional conferences, and bilateral training programs.

This doctrine presented communism as an “internal enemy.” The perceived enemy did not have to be a foreign army invading across a border. It could be found inside the country among:

• Students.
• Teachers.
• Labor organizers.
• Journalists.
• Clergy.
• Political parties.
• Refugees.
• Human-rights organizations.
• Social reform movements.
• Relatives and associates of suspected activists.

That idea helped military officers redefine ordinary political opposition as a military-security problem. Under the most extreme application of the doctrine, dissenters were treated as enemy combatants even when they had committed no violent act.

Operation Condor internationalized that system. If the supposed “internal enemy” escaped to another country, the participating security services agreed that borders should not protect that individual.

Condor participants and SOA training

Thousands of officers from Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador attended American military courses. Some later became dictators, intelligence chiefs, commanders, torturers, or members of units implicated in disappearances.

The connections vary considerably:

• Some senior figures attended the School of the Americas.
• Some trained at other American military institutions.
• Some received instruction from U.S. mobile training teams inside their own countries.
• Some worked alongside U.S. military and intelligence advisers.
• Some attended regional intelligence conferences supported by the United States.
• Others had no documented SOA attendance but served in organizations influenced by American counterinsurgency doctrine.

Therefore, a list of SOA graduates does not by itself prove that the school taught them to participate in Condor. It does, however, demonstrate how extensive the institutional relationship was.

Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, whose security services participated in Condor, is frequently identified as having received U.S. military education. Bolivian forces also received intensive American counterinsurgency instruction, particularly during the campaign against Che Guevara’s guerrilla group.

Argentina’s dictators and security commanders likewise had numerous professional ties to U.S. military education, although Argentina also developed its “dirty war” doctrine from its own experience and from French officers who had served in Indochina and Algeria.

Chile’s Augusto Pinochet was not principally a product of the School of the Americas. Manuel Contreras’s documented importance comes from his leadership of DINA, his relationship with Pinochet, his contacts with the CIA, and his organization of the November 1975 Condor conference—not from a clearly established claim that SOA itself assigned him to organize Condor.

This distinction is important because online lists sometimes incorrectly label almost every Latin American dictator or intelligence officer an SOA graduate.

The Fort Bragg connection

Fort Bragg, North Carolina—renamed Fort Liberty in 2023 and Fort Bragg again in 2025—was the main institutional home of the U.S. Army Special Forces and Army psychological-warfare organizations during the Cold War.

It was associated with training in:

• Unconventional warfare.
• Counterinsurgency.
• Special operations.
• Psychological warfare.
• Intelligence preparation.
• Interrogation and exploitation of information.
• Training of foreign military forces.
• Creation of specialized ranger and commando units.
• Internal-defense planning.

An official Defense Department report for fiscal year 1966 stated that the Latin America Special Action Force, built around the 8th Special Forces Group, provided military advice and assistance related to “internal defense” to 17 Latin American countries. It also reported that major psychological-operations forces were stationed at Fort Bragg. Defense Department annual report.

Fort Bragg was part of a larger training system

It would be misleading to imagine Condor representatives meeting at Fort Bragg and receiving an American order to create the organization. Condor’s founding meeting took place at the Chilean Army War Academy in Santiago.

Fort Bragg’s influence was more indirect but still important:

1. U.S. Special Forces personnel developed and taught counterinsurgency methods.

2. Latin American officers attended training in the United States or received instruction from mobile teams.

3. U.S. military missions helped create specialized intelligence, ranger, airborne, and counter-guerrilla units.

4. Graduates returned home and trained additional personnel.

5. These officers developed professional relationships with counterparts from other countries.

6. Condor later brought many of the region’s intelligence and security services into a permanent transnational organization.

The result was a shared military vocabulary and security outlook. Officers from different countries increasingly viewed themselves as fighting the same continental war against a common ideological enemy.

The 8th Special Forces Group

The 8th Special Forces Group was based in the Panama Canal Zone, not Fort Bragg, but it belonged to the larger American Special Forces system whose institutional center was Fort Bragg.

It played a substantial role in Latin American counterinsurgency training. Its personnel and associated mobile teams instructed Latin American forces in subjects such as:

• Small-unit tactics.
• Patrolling.
• Communications.
• Intelligence collection.
• Ranger operations.
• Psychological operations.
• Civic action.
• Counter-guerrilla warfare.

A well-documented example was Bolivia in 1967. A 16-man U.S. Special Forces team trained Bolivia’s 2nd Ranger Battalion, which participated in the campaign that captured Che Guevara. The Army’s own historical account describes the training program. U.S. Army Special Operations History Office.

That Bolivian campaign was not Operation Condor—it occurred eight years before Condor’s founding. But it strengthened the same military and intelligence structures that later participated in regional repression.

Conference networks and personal relationships

SOA and other U.S.-sponsored programs did more than teach military skills. They brought officers from different countries into contact with one another.

Students:

• Trained together.
• Shared intelligence concepts.
• Developed personal relationships.
• Learned compatible procedures.
• Returned home knowing officers in neighboring services.
• Participated in later conferences and joint programs.

These networks made regional coordination easier. Condor did not have to create every relationship from the beginning; it built upon years of military exchanges, bilateral assistance, hemispheric defense conferences, intelligence contacts, and common anti-communist doctrine.

The intelligence manuals

One of the most serious discoveries concerning the School of the Americas involved seven Spanish-language intelligence manuals used in Latin American training.

The manuals discussed practices such as:

• Blackmail.
• False imprisonment.
• Infiltration of civilian organizations.
• Surveillance of political activity.
• Recruitment of informants.
• Threats and coercion.
• Targeting suspects’ relatives.
• Execution in certain passages.
• Techniques that could facilitate torture or abusive interrogation.

In 1996 the Pentagon publicly acknowledged that parts of these manuals were inconsistent with American policy and principles.

The manuals included titles translated as:

• Handling of Sources
• Counterintelligence
• Revolutionary War and Communist Ideology
• Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla
• Interrogation
• Combat Intelligence
• Analysis I

A Congressional Research Service report acknowledged that the manuals discussed coercive practices, including torture and execution. Congressional Research Service history of SOA.

An essential chronological qualification

These seven particular manuals were used mainly from 1982 through 1991. Condor was established in 1975 and conducted its most intense operations from approximately 1976 through 1980.

Consequently:

The 1980s SOA manuals cannot be presented as the original instructional blueprint for Operation Condor.

Nevertheless, the manuals incorporated material derived from earlier U.S. Army and CIA intelligence doctrine dating to the 1950s and 1960s. Their contents demonstrate that abusive concepts survived inside portions of the American training system long after Condor began.

They are evidence of a continuing institutional problem, not proof that instructors handed those exact seven manuals to Condor’s founders in 1975.

Earlier CIA interrogation doctrine

The CIA’s 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual discussed methods for breaking a prisoner’s resistance through isolation, dependency, humiliation, threats, disruption of time, sensory deprivation, sleep disturbance, fear, and psychological pressure.

Later manuals recycled portions of this material.

The legal and moral problem is that even when a manual did not explicitly order physical torture, its methods could create the structure for:

• Secret detention.
• Removal of legal protections.
• Psychological disorientation.
• Threats against prisoners or their families.
• Prolonged isolation.
• Coercive interrogation.
• Concealment of responsibility.

Those features closely resemble practices reported by Condor survivors.

However, similarity alone does not prove that every Condor interrogator followed a particular CIA manual. Latin American services also drew upon domestic traditions of political policing, French counterrevolutionary warfare doctrine, Brazilian training programs, and lessons exchanged directly among the dictatorships.

Brazil and regional instruction

Brazil’s military regime had begun constructing its own national-security and intelligence system before Condor. Brazilian officers trained personnel from other South American countries in methods of counterinsurgency and internal security.

Brazil therefore served both as:

• A recipient of American doctrine and assistance.
• A regional exporter of its own authoritarian security methods.

This is another reason it would be too simple to attribute Condor entirely to one American school. By 1975, the participating governments had developed their own intelligence agencies, torture centers, death squads, and counterinsurgency institutions.

French influence

Argentina and other Southern Cone militaries were also influenced by French officers who had fought in Indochina and Algeria.

French counterrevolutionary doctrine emphasized:

• The revolutionary organization as a hidden political network.
• Intelligence as the central element of counterinsurgency.
• Systematic interrogation.
• Territorial control of civilians.
• Secret detention.
• Destruction of the opponent’s political organization.
• Cross-border pursuit of insurgent networks.

Argentine officers studied these concepts before American counterinsurgency influence reached its height. Argentina subsequently transmitted some of its experience to other Latin American countries.

Condor was therefore produced by several overlapping influences:

Did the SOA teach torture?

The fairest answer is divided.

What is documented

• Some instructional manuals contained passages approving or describing execution, coercion, blackmail, threats, and other unlawful conduct.
• The Pentagon acknowledged that objectionable material had been used.
• SOA graduates included officers subsequently accused or convicted of grave human-rights abuses.
• Screening and accountability were inadequate.
• American assistance continued to security forces despite extensive reports of torture and disappearance.

What has not been proved

• That torture was the stated mission of every SOA course.
• That every graduate received abusive instruction.
• That every graduate who committed crimes did so because of SOA training.
• That SOA leadership formally ordered the establishment of Operation Condor.
• That Condor was commanded from Fort Bragg or Fort Benning.

The school’s defenders point out that many graduates never committed known abuses and that lawful military subjects were also taught. Critics correctly answer that the presence of abusive material, the repeated admission of notorious officers, and weak American accountability cannot be dismissed as a handful of unrelated accidents.

Training versus responsibility

U.S. training and assistance help explain how Condor-era forces acquired compatible skills and common doctrine. They do not relieve the South American perpetrators of responsibility.

The chain of responsibility operated at different levels:

• The United States supplied training, equipment, doctrine, funding, political support, intelligence relationships, and institutional access.
• Southern Cone dictators and intelligence chiefs decided whom to persecute.
• Condor officials organized the multinational system.
• Operational teams conducted kidnappings, torture, illegal transfers, disappearances, and murders.
• American officials learned about Condor’s assassination plans but did not respond effectively enough to prevent major crimes.

That is a more complete conclusion than either extreme—claiming that the United States had no meaningful role or claiming that Fort Bragg directly controlled every Condor operation.

Corrected conclusion

Operation Condor was formally created in Santiago in November 1975 by the intelligence services of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia, with Brazil attending initially as an observer and later participating in the broader cooperation. Manuel Contreras and Chile’s DINA were the principal organizers.

But Condor did not arise in isolation. Its officers and security organizations operated within a hemispheric counterinsurgency system developed over decades. The School of the Americas, U.S. military missions, CIA liaison relationships, the Fort Bragg-centered Special Forces and psychological-warfare establishment, the 8th Special Forces Group, and mobile training teams helped construct that environment.

They provided doctrine, training, contacts, and institutional capacity that could be—and repeatedly was—turned against civilians. The available record establishes a serious American enabling and support role, while the direct planning and execution of Condor’s crimes remained in the hands of the participating South American dictatorships and intelligence services.