Iran

The notorious Iranian security service, SAVAK, which employed torture routinely, was created under the guidance of the CIA and Israel in the 1950s.9 According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, Jesse J. Leaf, SAVAK was instructed in torture techniques by the Agency. 10 After the 1979 revolution, the Iranians found CIA film made for SAVAK on how to torture women.11

Germany

In the 1950s, in Munich, the CIA tortured suspected infiltrators of Soviet emigre organizations in Western Europe, which the Agency was using in anti-Soviet operations. Amongst the techniques employed by the CIA were such esoteric torture methods as applying turpentine to a mans testicles or sealing someone in a room and playing Indonesian music at deafening levels until he cracked. 12 This information probably surfaced because its weird-sounding to the point of being amusing; there was likely more of regular torture methods not fit for conversation.

Vietnam

The Green Berets taught its members who were slated for duty in Vietnam in the 1960s how to use torture as part of an interrogation. 13

The notorious Operation Phoenix, set up by the CIA to wipe out the Vietcong infrastructure, subjected suspects to torture such as electric shock to the genitals of both men and women, and the insertion into the ear of a six-inch dowel, which was tapped through the brain until the victim died; suspects were also thrown out of airborne helicopters to persuade the more important suspects to talk, although this should probably be categorized as murder of the ones thrown out, and a form of torture for those not. 14 In violation of the Geneva Convention, the US turned prisoners over to their South Vietnamese allies in full knowledge that they would be tortured, American military personnel often being present during the torture.15

Bolivia

In 1967, anti-Castro Cubans, working with the CIA to find Che Guevara, set up houses of interrogation where Bolivians suspected of aiding Ches guerrilla army were brought for questioning and sometimes tortured. When the Bolivian interior minister learned of the torture, he was furious and demanded that the CIA put a stop to it. 16

Uruguay

In the late 1960s, Dan Mitrione, an employee of the US Office of Public Safety (part of the Agency for International Development), which trained and armed foreign police forces, was stationed in Montevideo, Uruguay. Torturing political prisoners in Uruguay

had existed before Mitriones arrival. However, in a surprising interview given to a leading Brazilian newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US advisers, and Mitrione in particular, 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.17

The newspaper interview greatly upset American officials in South America and Washington. The director of OPS in Washington 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

Brosil. 18

Mitrione built a soundproofed room in the cellar of his house in Montevideo, in which he assembled Uruguayan police officers to observe a demonstration of torture techniques. Four beggars were rounded up to be the subjects upon whom Mitrione demonstrated the effects of different voltages on different parts of the body. The four of them died.

The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect, was Mitriones motto.

When you get what you want, and I always get it, he said, 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. 19

Brazil

Before the Office of Public Safety assigned Dan Mitrione to Uruguay, he had been stationed in Brazil. There, he and other Americans worked with OPS, AID and CIA in supplying Brazilian security forces with the equipment and training to facilitate the torture of prisoners. The Americans also advised on how much electric shock could be administered without killing the person, if his or her death might prove awkward.20

Guatemala

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Guatemalan security forces, notably the Army unit called G2, routinely tortured subversives . One method was electric shock to the genital area, using military field telephones hooked up to small generators, equipment and instructions for use supplied by Uncle Sam. The US and its clients in various countries were becoming rather adept at this technique. The CIA advised, armed and equipped the G-2, which maintained a web of torture centers, whose methods reportedly included chopping off limbs and singeing flesh, in addition to electric shocks. The Army unit even had its own crematorium, presumably to dispose of any incriminating evidence. The CIA

thoroughly infiltrated the G-2, with at least three G-2 chiefs of the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as many lower-level officers, being on the Agencys payroll. 21

Also benefiting from the Agencys generosity was General Hector Gramajo Morales (see Haven chapter), who was Defense Minister during the armed forces 1989 abduction of Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun. She was burned with cigarettes, raped repeatedly, and lowered into a pit full of corpses. Typically, torturers exult in demonstrating the power they hold over their victims-one of them put a large knife or machete into Ortizs hand, put his own hands on top of hers, and forced her to stab another female prisoner. Ortiz thinks she may have killed the woman. A fair-skinned man, whom the others referred to as Alejandro , and as their boss , seemed to be in charge, she said. He spoke Spanish with an American accent and cursed in English. Later, Ortiz adds, when this man realized she was American, he ordered the torture stopped. Clearly, if his motiva-tion had been humanitarian, and not simply trying to avoid a possible political flap, he would have stopped it regardless of her nationality.22

In 1996, in the United States, Ortiz received a number of documents from the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Only one, dated 1990, contained a significant reference to Alejandro. It read as follows:

VERY IMPORTANT: We need to close the loop on the issue of the North American named by Ortiz as being involved in the case...The EMBASSY IS VERY SENSITIVE ON THIS ISSUE, but it is an issue we will have to respond to publicly...23

The next two pages were completely redacted.

El Salvador

During the counter-insurgency period of the 1980s, there was widespread torture practiced by the various Salvadoran security forces, all of whom had close working relations with the CIA and/or the US military. In January 1982, the New York Times published an interview with a deserter from the Salvadoran Army who described a class where severe methods of torture were demonstrated on teenage prisoners. He stated that eight US military advisers, apparently Green Berets, were present. Watching will make you feel more like a man, a Salvadoran officer apprised the army recruits, adding that they should not feel pity of anyone but only hate for those who are enemies of our country. 24

Another Salvadoran, a former member of the National Guard, later testified in a 1986 British television documentary: I belonged to a squad of twelve. We devoted ourselves to torture, and to finding people whom we were told were guerrillas. I was trained in Panama for nine months by the [unintelligible] of the United States for anti-guerrilla warfare. Part of the time we were instructed about torture. 25

Honduras