Gay spies, murder and Henry Kissinger

A previously planned conference in Chile highlighting New Technology at the Service of Historical Memory, was held on the day of Pinochet’s funeral. Newly declassified documents by the D.C.- based National Security Archive underscore the role of the United States in the military coup headed by Augusto Pinochet, among other cases.

It was also the opportunity for the investigative journalists Monica Gonzalez and John Dinges, to release the 3000 pages of previously uncatalogued documents of Enrique Arancibia Clavel, a Chilean intelligence officer.

Arancibia Clavel was a gay DINA spy sent to Argentina who was excluded from the dark corridors of intelligence and power in Chile for his sexual preference. In Buenos Aires he proved to be one of the most effective facilitators for the Operation Condor, the transnational intelligence operation responsible for carrying out Operation Colombo, undermining the transnational alliance of armed leftists called the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria (JCR) and the sharing of information obtained from captured leftists under torture.

This is the first publically available electronic catalog of these documents, under the curatorial eye of the UNIACC university in Santiago, Chile. In addition to providing judicially relevant information on Operation Condor and Operation Colombo it also documents the curious efforts by the DINA to spy on the human rights violations of Argentine security forces during the seventies.

Surprisingly enough, Arancibia Clavel duly reports to his superiors that the own, internal, Argentine security force numbers report 22,000 dead and disappeared in Argentina.

This body of documents was discovered by the award winning Chilean investigative journalist Monica Gonzalez. She was left alone in a room full of crates of documents, including the stolen identity cards of disfigured friends and acquaintances and voiced its contents into a tape recorder, which was then transcribed into text. Now, this information is readily searchable. The entirety of the documents has been catalogued using the classification system of the investigative journalist John Dinges, author of the book The Condor Years.

The National Security Archive site has also released a new document collection which, “includes CIA records on Pinochet’s role in the Washington D.C. car bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, Defense Intelligence Agency biographic reports on Pinochet, and transcripts of meetings in which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger resisted bringing pressure on the Chilean military for its human rights atrocities.”

The NSA is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, Washington DC. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.