"Missing" CIA Documents Still Withheld

by Jim Lobe

All relevant U.S. documents on the cases of Charles Horman, whose case was the inspiration for the 1982 blockbuster movie "Missing," and Frank Teruggi, were supposed to have been declassified here June 30 as part of two-year effort ordered by Clinton to make public what Washington knew about political violence and human rights abuses in Chile from the late 1960s until 1990.

But almost nothing on the two cases was released that had not been previously known or made available, and investigators believe that important information is being withheld by the CIA and the Pentagon, the two U.S. agencies most closely associated with support for the coup and the repression which accompanied it.

"The lack of documents raises the question whether the CIA and the Pentagon are withholding documents or whether they were so focused on supporting the consolidation of the Pinochet regime that they did absolutely nothing to search for or protect U.S. citizens," said Peter Kornbluh, a Chile analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research group.

"Until these two agencies are more forthcoming, these cases cannot be closed," he added.

The release was the third in the process whose completion has been delayed until mid-September when a final release is scheduled to take place. A CIA spokesperson said the agency will be reviewing all documents related to covert actions it carried out in Chile during the period in question between now and then.

Clinton ordered the declassification in the wake of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet's arrest in Britain in October 1998. After being held under house arrest for more than year, Pinochet, the military dictator who emerged from the 1973 coup against elected President Salvador Allende Gossens, returned to Chile earlier this year. The British government concluded that he was unfit to stand trial in Spain, which had issued the arrest warrant, for crimes against humanity.

Since his return, Pinochet has been trying to fend off more than 100 cases brought against him in Chilean courts for kidnapping, murder and torture, committed during his 17-year rule. A decision by the Santiago court of appeals to strip him of immunity in these cases is now pending before the country's Supreme Court.

Also pending is a U.S. Department of Justice investigation regarding Pinochet's role in the 1976 assassination here of former Chilean Defence Minister Orlando Letelier.

But Washington has also focused on Harmon, Teruggi, and a third U.S. citizen, Boris Weisfiler, who disappeared in 1985 while hiking near Colonia Dignidad, a German settlement which reportedly was used as a torture center for the military authorities. Weisfiler is believed to have been picked up by Chilean army units, tortured, shot, and thrown in a nearby river.

In April, the State Department recently formally asked the Chilean government for a "full accounting" of all three cases, a request which has not been referred to the Chilean courts.

But, judging by the document releases which have taken place here so far, Washington may make more progress in determining the fate of the three men in the Chilean courts than if it relies on the declassification process here.

So far, U.S. agencies have released 7,000 previously classified documents. But virtually all of them have come from the State Department, which was praised by Kornbluh and others here as a "model" of cooperation. The Pentagon, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies all of which played a far more important role in Chile in the early 1970s -- have been far less forthcoming.

Indeed, all but a handful of the 505 new documents released last month came from the State Department, and what few documents were declassified by the CIA and the Pentagon provided virtually no new information on the Horman case, and none at all on Teruggi's fate, apart from a 1971 report by the FBI on his political activities here in the United States.

"Our quest is not over," said Joyce Harmon, Charles' widow, who participated in a press conference here after studying the newly declassified material. "I'm very disappointed at the paucity of information that has been released by the intelligence agencies."

The CIA released a total of six documents on Harmon's case, all of them heavily edited to remove sensitive material and none of them originating in the CIA station in Santiago at the time of the coup and his disappearance. "These are essentially Washington inter-bureau communications," said Kornbluh.

One government official said about half a dozen more documents were withheld altogether to protect "sources and methods." "But they do not contain information that would add to what has been declassified in other documents," she noted, adding that there are no more documents relevant to the ca se in the agency's possession.

The Harmon case is particularly sensitive not only because of the cultural importance as an Academy Award-winning movie, but also because the State Department released a 1976 cable last fall which argued that U.S. intelligence may have played a deliberate or unwitting role in helping Chilean security agencies locate and arrest him.

Harmon, a journalist and film-maker, worked with Teruggi on a newsletter in Santiago. According to various accounts put together over the years, the two men were abducted separately and taken to the National Stadium where they were later executed.

The one new development was the release of a previously unknown 1987 State Department cable recounting the visits to the Santiago embassy of a senior Chilean intelligence officer who provided an account of Horman's arrest, torture, and death at the Stadium.

In a subsequent exchange with Washington, it was decided that the officer, whose name was blacked out in the cable and whose story was broadly consistent with what was already known by the U.S. government at the time, could not be trusted.