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Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents
 
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Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents [Paperback]

John Dinges (Author)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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From Publishers Weekly

When a Spanish judge pressed charges against Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1998, the case broke an international code of silence on the fates of the tens of thousands of Latin Americans who were tortured and killed during more than a decade of dictatorship in Chile and neighboring countries. The United States agreed to Spain's request for 60,000 pages of secret files on Chile, including CIA operational files. Former NPR news managing editor Dinges (Our Man in Panama), who lived in Chile and was interrogated in a secret torture camp during the Pinochet dictatorship, pored through those files and has uncovered the chilling story of Operation Condor, a Chilean-led conspiracy among six South American dictatorships to hunt down and eliminate leftist rebels and their sympathizers. Condor was responsible for the 1973 murder in Washington, D.C., of Chilean exile Orlando Letelier, which U.S. diplomats were aware of and failed to stop. Indeed, the picture that emerges of U.S. policy is frightening. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's "green light, red light" human rights policy for the first time presented a public U.S. stance in favor of human rights, yet behind closed doors, he was reassuring Latin America's dictators of U.S. support. Hampered by the weight and significance of its revelations, the book gets off to a slow start. Soon enough, however, vivid stories and details emerge: double agents, the euphemisms of the spy trade (e.g., "wet work" for assassinations), bumbling murderers and rebels, and cynical U.S. diplomats. Dinges's meticulously documented study is a cautionary tale for today's war on terror-which shares a major anniversary with the 1973 Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power: September 11.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description

The headline-grabbing story of the covert, international "anti-terrorist" network responsible for South America's worst human rights abuses.

Throughout the 1970s, six Latin American governments led by Chile formed a military alliance called Operation Condor to carry out kidnappings, torture, and political assassinations across three continents. It was an early "war on terror" initially encouraged by the CIA which later backfired on the United States.

Hailed by Foreign Affairs as "remarkable" and "a major contribution to the historical record," The Condor Years uncovers the unsettling facts about the secret U.S. relationship with the dictators who created this terrorist organization. Written by award-winning journalist John Dinges and newly updated to include recent developments in the prosecution of Pinochet, the book is a chilling but dispassionately told history of one of Latin America's darkest eras. Dinges, himself interrogated in a Chilean torture camp, interviewed participants on both sides and examined thousands of previously secret documents to take the reader inside this underground world of military operatives and diplomats, right-wing spies and left-wing revolutionaries.

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6 Reviews
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4.8 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A relevant vivid account, Mar 29 2004
By 
Susan Grimes (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (Hardcover)
This is a breathtaking tour de force by one of the very best U.S. journalists who have written long and hard about Latin America, and although it may be not obvious, the book has eye-opening relevence to Washington's pursuit of al Qaeda. The Washington Post, moreover, cited the author's "subtlety and insight of his account of Condor, in which Pinochet's murderous (my word) "tactics made some sense in the face of the legitimate (if inflated) threat that the revolutionary left represented. More often, however, Condor targeted pro-democracy and human rights activists, religious leaders, opposition political leaders and peaceful dissidents -- all in the name of winning a self-anointed 'war on terrorism.'" Foreign Affairs said "But Dinges sees this whole sorry episode as a classic case of 'blowback': the unintended consequences of U.S. policies long kept secret from the U.S.public." Sound familiar? Afghanistan?
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5.0 out of 5 stars What you don't know, might be interesting, April 1 2004
By 
C. Nogar "cnogar" (Geneva, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (Hardcover)
I love this book. I actually bought it at the book signing and found John Dinges himself to be an intelligent, modest, interesting man. The book itself goes along the same lines as Assasination on Embassy Row in that it recounts the history but put it into a format that is more like a novel. I read the through the entire thing in one day, and although I thought I had a good working knowledge of Chile during the Pinochet regime, I had not even touched on most of the things recounted in this book.
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5.0 out of 5 stars A Splendid Book, Feb 16 2004
This review is from: The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (Hardcover)
The Condor Years it's a superb piece of work. It often happens to me that the more I know about an issue, the more I am unsatisfied with what I read about it, because I am able to detect mistakes and inaccuracies. With John Dinges' book, right the opposite happened. Precisely because I am familiar with quite a few of the documents that he is using, I could appreciate how sound and well grounded are each and every statement that he makes, and how thoughtful, balanced and insightful is his reading of his sources. John Dinges' book has helped me to fully understand the implications and meanings of documents I was already familiar with. And now I am much more confident about the big picture, than what I used to be before reading the book. Needless to say, it also reads beautifully. To read it was a real intellectual pleasure.
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