On another occasion, Hevia sat with Mitrione in the latters house, and over a few drinks the American explained to the Cuban his philosophy of interrogation. Mitrione considered it to be an art. First there should be a softening-up period, with the usual beatings and insults. The object is to humiliate the prisoner, to make him realize his helplessness, to cut him off from reality. No questions, only blows and insults. Then, only blows in silence.

Only after this, said Mitrione, is the interrogation. Here no pain should be produced other than that caused by the instrument which is being used. The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect, was his motto.

During the session you have to keep the subject from losing all hope of life, because this can lead to stubborn resistance. You must always leave him some hope ... a distant light.

When you get what you want, and I always get it, Mitrione continued, it may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening-up. Not to extract information now, but only as a political measure, to create a healthy fear of meddling in subversive activities.

The American pointed out that upon receiving a subject the first thing is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, by means of a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician ... Its important to know in advance if we can permit ourselves the luxury of the subjects death. 18

Not long after this conversation, Manual Hevia disappeared from Montevideo and turned up in Havana. He had been a Cuban agent-a double agent-all along.

About half a year later, 31 July 1970 to be exact, Dan Mitrione was kidnapped by the Tupamaros. They did not torture him. They demanded the release of some 150 prisoners in exchange for him. With the determined backing of the Nixon administration, the Uruguayan government refused. On 10 August, Mitriones dead body was found on the back seat of a stolen car. He had turned 50 on his fifth day as a prisoner.

Back in Mitriones home town of Richmond, Indiana, Secretary of State William Rogers and President Nixons son-in-law David Eisenhower attended the funeral for Mitrione, the citys former police chief. Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis came to town to stage a benefit show for Mitriones family.

And White House spokesman, Ron Ziegler, solemnly stated that Mr. Mitriones devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere. 19

A perfect man, his widow said.

A great humanitarian, said his daughter Linda.20

The militarys entry into the escalating conflict signaled the beginning of the end for the Tupamaros. By the end of 1972, the curtain was descending on their guerrilla theatre. Six months later, the military was in charge, Congress was dissolved, and everything not prohibited was compulsory. For the next 11 years, Uruguay competed strongly for the honor of being South Americas most repressive dictatorship. It had, at one point, the largest number of political prisoners per capita in the world. And, as every human rights organization and former prisoner could testify, each one of them was tortured. Torture, said an activist priest, was routine and automatic. 21

No one was dancing in Uruguay.

In 1981, at the Fourteenth Conference of American Armies, the Uruguayan Army offered a paper in which it defined subversion as actions, violent or not, with ultimate pur-poses of a political nature, in all fields of human activity within the internal sphere of a state and whose aims are perceived as not convenient for the overall political system. 22

The dissident Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, summed up his countrys era of dictatorship thusly: People were in prison so that prices could be free. 23

The film State of Siege appeared in 1972. It centered around Mitrione and the Tupamaros and depicted a Uruguayan police officer receiving training at a secret bomb school in the United States, though the film strove more to provide a composite picture of the role played by the US in repression throughout Latin America. A scheduled premier showing of the film at the federally-funded John F. Kennedy Arts Center in Washington was canceled. There was already growing public and congressional criticism of this dark side of American foreign policy without adding to it. During the mid-1970s, however, Congress enacted several pieces of legislation which abolished the entire Public Safety Program. In its time, OPS had provided training for more than one million policemen in the Third World. Ten thousand of them had received advance training in the United States. An estimated $150 million worth of equipment had been shipped to police forces abroad.24 Now, the export of repression was to cease.

That was on paper. The reality appears to be somewhat different.

To a large extent, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) simply picked up where OPS had left off. The drug agency was ideally suited for the task, for its agents were already deployed all over Latin America and elsewhere overseas in routine liaison with foreign police forces. The DEA acknowledged in 1975 that 53 former employees of the CIA were now on its staff and that there was a close working relationship between the two agencies. The following year, the General Accounting Office reported that DEA agents were engaging in many of the same activities the OPS had been carrying out.

In addition, some training of foreign policemen was transferred to FBI schools in Washington and Quantico, Virginia; the Defense Department continued to supply police-type equipment to military units engaged in internal security operations; and American arms manufacturers were doing a booming business furnishing arms and training to Third World governments. In some countries, contact between these companies and foreign law enforcement officials was facilitated by the US Embassy or military mission. The largest of the arms manufacturers, Smith and Wesson, ran its own Academy in Springfield, Massachusetts, which provided American and foreign public and industrial security forces with expert training in riot control .25

Said Argentine Minister Jose Lopez Rega at the signing of a US-Argentina antidrug treaty in 1974: We hope to wipe out the drug traffic in Argentina. We have caught guerrillas after attacks who were high on drugs. The guerillas are the main drug users in Argentina. Therefore, this anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerrilla campaign as well. 26

And in 1981, a former Uruguayan intelligence officer declared that US manuals were being used to teach techniques of torture to his countrys military. He said that most of the officers who trained him had attended classes run by the United States in Panama. Among other niceties, the manuals listed 35 nerve points where electrodes could be applied.27

Philip Agee, after he left Ecuador, was stationed in Uruguay from March 1964 to August 1966. His account of CIA activities in Montevideo is further testimony to the amount of international mischief money can buy. Amongst the multifarious dirty tricks pulled off with impunity by Agee and his Agency cohorts, the following constitute an interesting sample:28

A Latin American students conference with a leftist leaning, held in Montevideo, was undermined by promoting the falsehood that it was nothing more than a creature of the Soviet Union-originated, financed and directed by Moscow. Editorials on this theme authored by the CIA appeared in leading newspapers to which the Agency had daily access. This was followed by publication of aforged letter of a student leader thanking the Soviet cultural attache for his assistance. A banner headline in one paper proclaimed: Documents for the Break with Russia , which was indeed the primary purpose of the operation.

An inordinate amount of time, energy and creativity was devoted, with moderate success, to schemes aimed at encouraging the expulsion of an assortment of Russians, East Germans, North Koreans, Czechs, and Cubans from Uruguayan soil, if not the breaking of relations with these countries. In addition to planting disparaging media propaganda, the CIA tried to obtain incriminating information by reading the mail and diplomatic cables to and from these countries, tapping embassy phones, and engaging in sundry bugging and surreptitious entry. The Agency would then prepare Intelligence reports, containing enough factual information to be plausible, which then made their way innocently into the hands of officials of influence, up to and including the president of the republic.

Anti-communist indoctrination of secondary-level students was promoted by financing particular school organizations and publications.

A Congress of the People, bringing together a host of community groups, labor organizations, students, government workers, etc., Communist and non-Communist, disturbed the CIA because of the potential for a united front being formed for electoral purposes. Accordingly, newspaper editorials and articles were generated attacking the Congress as a classic Communist takeover/duping tactic and calling upon non-Communists to refrain from participating; and a phoney handbill was circulated in which the Congress called upon the Uruguayan people to launch an insurrectional strike with immediate occupation of their places of work. Thousands of the handbills were handed out, provoking angry denials from the Congress organizers, but, as is usual in such cases, the damage was already done.

The Uruguayan Communist Party planned to host an international conference to express solidarity with Cuba. The CIA merely had to turn to their (paid) friend, the Minister of the Interior, and the conference was banned. When it was shifted to Chile, the CIA station in Santiago performed the same magic.

Uruguay at this time was a haven for political exiles from repressive regimes such as in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay. The CIA, through surveillance and infiltration of the exile community, regularly collected information on exiles activities, associates, etc., to be sent to CIA stations in the exiles homelands with likely transmission to their governments, which wanted to know what these troublemakers were up to and which did not hesitate to harass them across frontiers.

Other operations, wrote Agee, were designed to take control of the streets away from communists and other leftists, and our squads, often with the participation of off-duty policemen, would break up their meetings and generally terrorize them. Torture of communists and other extreme leftists was used in interrogation by our liaison agents in the police.