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Assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs who warned Kissinger of Operation Condor's assassination plans on August 3, 1976, received Landau's cable on the DINA passports, and saw no warning delivered before Letelier died. | Washington, D.C. | 2026-09-21 | 2026-10-15 |
Harry Shlaudeman was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs under Henry A. Kissinger in 1976.1
The Third World War
An intelligence memorandum of June 4, 1976, the day the exiled Bolivian president Juan José Torres was found murdered in Buenos Aires, considered the possible "existence of an intergovernmental assassination program" and concluded that "there is no evidence to support a contention that Southern Cone governments are cooperating in some sort of international Murder Inc." Four days later Kissinger met General Augusto Pinochet in Santiago. On August 3 Shlaudeman sent Kissinger a paper titled "The Third World War and South America," which described the plans of Operation Condor to kill opponents abroad. He and William Luers enlisted the under secretary, Philip Habib, to persuade Kissinger to tell the military governments that the United States knew of the plans. Kissinger's cable to the ambassadors said the new reports put "Prats in Buenos Aires and Leighton in Rome, in a new and more ominous context." The plan had not been carried through when Orlando Letelier was killed in Washington on September 21.1
The Paraguayan Caper
Ambassador George Landau's cable of July 28 on the Paraguayan passports issued to two DINA officers reached Shlaudeman's office by way of Kissinger's. After General Vernon Walters disowned the mission on August 4, Landau wrote to Shlaudeman of "the so-called 'Paraguayan caper'" which "in my view has troublesome aspects." Shlaudeman answered: "If there is still time, and if there is a possibility of turning off this harebrained scheme, you are authorized to go back through Conrado Pappalardo to urge that the Chileans be persuaded not, repeat, not to travel." On November 11 Robert Driscoll of the Chile desk reported to him that two Chileans using the same names had entered the country in August "after Ambassador Landau had ordered the visas revoked and lookouts placed."123
Horman
A memorandum to Shlaudeman of August 25, 1976, on the death of Charles Horman in Chile in 1973, read: "This case remains bothersome. The connotations for the Executive are not good." It concluded: "U.S. intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death. At best, it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the GOC. At worst, U.S. intelligence was aware the GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and U.S. officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia."34
On July 15, 1976, Rudy Fimbres sent Shlaudeman a draft letter to Senator Edward Kennedy on the case, with a covering memorandum that said the draft "will not do." The memorandum stated that the department had "'withheld' for almost two years any reference to a Chilean memorandum which accused Teruggi, and Horman, of leftist activities," that the department had "failed to pursue the basis" for the Chilean allegations, and that the public claim to be pursuing every lead "is overdrawn." It reported that the Washington Post's Lewis Diuguid said he had a source who told him embassy superiors were informed early of Horman's fate and did not follow up. It also stated that "Vice Consul Anderson's participation in this matter will eventually be the subject of further probing." Fimbres recommended that Shlaudeman not sign the letter.5
Footnotes
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Dinges, John. The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. New Press, 2004, pp. 159-166, 171-174, 180, 183. ↩︎
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Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 260-261, 383. ↩︎
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Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. New Press, 2003, pp. 269, 343. ↩︎
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Fimbres, Rudy, Robert Driscoll and William Robertson, memorandum to Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman, Secret, August 25, 1976, NSA Chile in Their Hearts, document 9. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Dinges9FimbresDriscoll-ocr.pdf ↩︎
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Fimbres, Rudy, memorandum to Ambassador Harry Shlaudeman, "The Charles Horman Case," July 15, 1976, NSA Chile in Their Hearts, document 8. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/dinges8fimbresmemoonKennletter-ocr.pdf ↩︎