Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

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The CIAs reluctance to approve the action at the Chinese Embassy may have stemmed from the fact that the National Security Council had specifically refused to authorize the Agencys involvement in the coup at all. This was, as we have seen, not the first instance of the CIA taking American foreign policy into its own hands. On such occasions, the modus operandi calls for putting as little into writing as feasible, or keeping records out of official CIA files, thus making them immune to Freedom of Information disclosures or congression al investigations; technically the records do not exist, legally they can be destroyed at anytime. This was the case with the Ghanaian coup and may explain why more details of the CIA role have never been revealed.

The American right-wing view of what happened

According to John Barron, the Readers Digests resident KGB expert, Nkrumah was overthrown by only native insurgents, the only foreigners in the picture being 11 KGB officers who were found in Nkrumahs headquarters and summarily executed. The Soviet Union didnt say a word about this, he wrote, because they didnt want the world to know that KGB officers were actually sitting in the Ghanian Presidents office running the country. Barron offers no evidence at all to support his claim of the KGB running the country, nor does he explain why the new government didnt publicize this very interesting fact.

He goes on to write of the copious secret files of the Nkrumah regime which were discovered and then studied and analyzed. The files revealed, he says, that the KGB had converted Ghana into one vast base of subversion, which the Soviet Union fully intended to use to capture the continent of Africa . For reasons best known to himself perhaps, Barron fails to offer the reader a single quotation from any of the copious secret files to support his allegations.11

33. Uruguay 1964-1970

Torture-as American as apple pie The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired

effect. 1

The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo.

Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover, although Mitrione was not one of them.2

OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes,



student demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events during the past year; and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities, there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the publics imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions, as well as in the military and police.

Unlike other Latin-American guerrilla groups, the New York Times stated in 1970, the Tupamaros normally avoid bloodshed when possible. They try instead to create embarrassment for the Government and general disorder. 3 A favorite tactic was to raid the files of a private corporation to expose corruption and deceit in high places, or kidnap a prominent figure and try him before a Peoples Court . It was heady stuff to choose a public villain whose acts went uncensored by the legislature, the courts and the press, subject him to an informed and uncompromising interrogation, and then publicize the results of the intriguing dialogue. Once they ransacked an exclusive high-class nightclub and scrawled on the walls perhaps their most memorable slogan: O Bailan Todos O No BailaNadie ... Either everyone dances or no one dances.

Dan Mitrione did not introduce the practice of torturing political prisoners to Uruguay. It had been perpetrated by the police at times from at least the early 1960s. However, in a surprising interview given to a leading Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US advisers, and in particular Mitrione, had instituted torture as a more routine measure; to the means of inflicting pain, they had added scientific refinement; and to that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoner that it was his family being tortured.4

The violent methods which were beginning to be employed, said Otero, caused an escalation in Tupamaro activity. Before then their attitude showed that they would use violence only as a last resort. 5

The newspaper interview greatly upset American officials in South America and Washington. Byron Engle later tried to explain it all away by asserting: The three Brazilian reporters in Montevideo all denied filing that story. We found out later that it was slipped into the paper by someone in the composing room at the Jornal do Brasil.

Otero had been a willing agent of the CIA, a student at their International Police Services school in Washington, a recipient of their cash over the years, but he was not a torturer. What finally drove him to speak out was perhaps the torture of a woman who, while a Tupamaro sympathizer, was also a friend of his. When she told him that Mitrione had watched and assisted in her torture, Otero complained to him, about this particular incident as well as his general methods of extracting information. The only outcome of the encounter was Oteros demotion.7

William Cantrell was a CIA operations officer stationed in Montevideo, ostensibly as a member of the OPS team. In the mid-1960s he was instrumental in setting up a Department of Information and Intelligence (DII), and providing it with funds and equipment.8 Some of the equipment, innovated by the CIAs Technical Services Division, was for the purpose of torture, for this was one of the functions carried out by the DII.9

One of the pieces of equipment that was found useful, former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth learned, was a wire so very thin that it could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing against the gum increase the electrical charge.



And it was through the diplomatic pouch that Mitrione got some of the equipment he needed for interrogations, including these fine wires. 10

Things got so bad in Mitriones time that the Uruguayan Senate was compelled to undertake an investigation. After a five-month study, the commission concluded unanimously that torture in Uruguay had become a normal, frequent and habitual occurrence , inflicted upon Tupamatos as well as others. Among the types of torture the commissions report made reference to were electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the testicles, daily use of psychological torture ... pregnant women were subjected to various brutalities and inhuman treatment ... certain women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same treatment

Eventually the DII came to serve as a cover for the Escuadrdn de la Muerte (Death Squad), composed, as elsewhere in Latin America, primarily of police officers, who bombed and strafed the homes of suspected Tupamaro sympathizers and engaged in assassination and kidnapping. The Death Squad received some of its special explosive material from the Technical Services Division and, in all likelihood, some of the skills employed by its members were acquired from instruction in the United States.12 Between 1969 and 1973, at least 16 Uruguayan police officers went through an eight-week course at CIA/OPS schools in Washington and Los Fresnos, Texas in the design, manufacture and employment of bombs and incendiary devices.13 The official OPS explanation for these courses was that policemen needed such training in order to deal with bombs placed by terrorists. There was, however, no instruction in destroying bombs, only in making them; moreover, on at least one reported occasion, the students were not policemen, but members of a private right-wing organi-zation in Chile (see chapter on Chile). Another part of the curriculum which might also have proven to be of value to the Death Squad was the class on Assassination Weapons- A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin is how OPS put it.14

Equipment and training of this kind was in addition to that normally provided by OPS: riot helmets, transparent shields, tear gas, gas masks, communication gear, vehicles, police batons, and other devices for restraining crowds. The supply of these tools of the trade was increased in 1968 when public disturbances reached the spark-point, and by 1970 American training in riot-control techniques had been given to about a thousand Uruguayan policemen.15

Dan Mitrione had built a soundproofed room in the cellar of his house in Montevideo. In this room he assembled selected Uruguayan police officers to observe a demonstration of torture techniques. Another observer was Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban who was with the CIA and worked with Mitrione. Hevia later wrote that the course began with a description of the human anatomy and nervous system ...

Soon things turned unpleasant. As subjects for the first testing they took beggars, known in Uruguay as bichicomes, from the outskirts of Montevideo, as well as a woman apparently from the frontier area with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the human body, as well as demonstrating the use of a drug which induces vomiting-I dont know why or what for-and another chemical substance. The four of them died.16

In his book Hevia does not say specifically what Mitriones direct part in all this was, but he later publicly stated that the OPS chief personally tortured four beggars to death with electric shocks .17



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