Betrayal and Terror

Police, USAID and the CIA

Dan Mitrione never heeded the warnings. It was too late to take on additional security measures, although according to a RAND Corporation study he had previously been warned of the inherent risks of his position, when five men approached his car on the residential streets of Montevideo, Uruguay on the morning of July 31, 1970 and rammed into his vehicle with one of their two stolen pick-up trucks. Within moments, Mitrione’s police chauffeur had a weapon pointed at him by the attackers and never used his .38 revolver. Mitrione, the chief of a small police training team in the Office of Public Safety (OPS) with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), was unarmed and he was soon removed from the vehicle. The attackers, from a Marxist–Leninist urban guerrilla group known as the Tupamaros, cursed and beat Mitrione as they moved him into the trunk of the other undamaged pick-up truck. While laying down, Mitrione was shot by one of the kidnappers in the shoulder, his blood later found by the authorities in the truck along with some of his belongings.

The kidnapping was part of a broader plan being carried out by the Tupamaros targeting U.S. and Uruguayan officials. The group also seized Gordon Jones, an officer of the U.S. Embassy, in his garage while he was leaving for work. After beating him on the head, he was presumed unconscious by the Tupamaros, who left him in the back of a truck, bound and wrapped up in a blanket. Jones managed to escape his captors by rolling himself off the back of the truck. Jones and his family were soon ordered out of Uruguay for safety reasons and he spent the rest of his overseas tour in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. The Tupamaros also failed to capture the Uruguayan Minister of Public Works as he left from his apartment for work, whereas the Brazilian Consul, Aloysio Gomide, was taken from his home when nine men and women invaded his property, three or four of them gaining entry by pretending to be telephone repairmen.

A communique from the Tupmaraos was issued later that afternoon, found in a downtown bar bathroom and addressed to the El Diario newspaper. The letter demanded the release of all “political prisoners” held by the police in order to secure the release of Mitrione and Gomide. They had already made similar demands for the return Judge Perevra Manelli, whom they had previously abducted.

While police conducted investigations into the kidnappings, a local radio station received note written by Mitrione, stating: “Please tell the Ambassador to do everything to liberate me as soon as possible. I have been and am being interrogated deeply about the AID program and the police.” During this interrogation, at a certain point the Tupamaros switched on a tape recorder:

Tupamaro: Are you sleepy?

Mitrione: Yes...I was, yes.

Tupamaro: Well, I’m sorry.

Mitrione: No, that’s great.

Tupamaro: Would you like to talk a little?

Mitrione: Huh?

Tupamaro: Yes, would you mind...?

Mitrione: I’d be happy to.

Tupamaro: Alright...okay. How many sons do you have?

Mitrione: I have nine, four sons and five daughters.

Tupamaro: Gee, I see. Are there some of them here [in Uruguay]?

Mitrione: Four of them are here, yes.

[...]

Tupamaro: And have you been chief of police or something?

Mitrione: Yes, I was chief of police.

Tupamaro: I heard that you were. Where was that?

Mitrione: In Indiana.

The Tupamaro soon asked Mitrione about his three employees in the USAID mission:

Tupamaro: Who are they?

Mitrione: We have three other men here.

Tupamaro: Who are they?

Mitrione: Well, you know their names, don’t you? Well, I think you know their names.

Tupamaro: Yes, I do know. But you know we [have changed places]. Now I’m the police.

Mitrione: Ha, ha.

Tupamaro: No, you should tell me the names, really.

Mitrione: I should tell you the names?

Tupamaro: Yes, please.

Mitrione: What advantage would they be?

Tupamaro: Just to know that you are really willing.

Mitrione: Well, there is no need for me to lie because you have their names. One man’s name is Martinez, Richard Martinez, another man’s name is Richard Biava, another one is Lee Echols.

They moved on to discussing what would happen to Mitrione and how he was treated during his capture:

Mitrione: Well, I hope they, I hope they bargain with you.

Tupamaro: Yes, we hope it too. We don’t like it, you know. We don’t like this mess.

Mitrione: Yeah.

Tupamaro: We’re terribly sorry about your wound, you know, but we helped—

Mitrione: That was a mistake, I think.

Tupamaro: Yes, yes, we are making an investigation about that.

Mitrione: I don’t know why he shot me. I really don’t. I was laying on the floor of the truck.

The Tupamaro tried to elicit from Mitrione information about the CIA’s work in the country:

Tupamaro: Well, now tell me something about CIA. You know we like James Bond. About the CIA, what can you say?

Mitrione: Well, you know, you are not going to believe me, and no matter what, ah, ah, I have to convince you that I know nothing about the CIA—absolutely nothing about the CIA.

A Consummate Approach

Back in 1964, the CIA in Montevideo was primarily focused on a recruiting a Cuban code clerk and were willing to use sexual enticement if necessary. Before his full-time Agency assignment in Uruguay, Philip Agee made a pit stop in Miami at the CIA’s JMWAVE Station to learn more about the work currently underway in the country. The Montevideo Station had recently asked JMWAVE, who had plenty of Cuban exile agents in their employ, if they could assist in targeting the code clerk, who handled sensitive communications between Uruguay and Cuba. The man was “exceptionally active in amorous adventures” and it was requested that JMWAVE find a suitable woman to make an intimate approach. They fulfill this task and present the option of a “stunning Cuban beauty” who had played this role before. Agee would have to wait to see if this option would work.

The CIA targeted Cuba most of all in Latin America, spending $41.5 million on operations in 1961 alone, four times the $11 million it spent on the rest of Latin America. Uruguay was eighth on the list, with $521,082 spent that year. By the time of Agee’s arrival in 1964, the Agency’s budget in the country had grown to just over $1 million, but the staff was medium-sized for the region with four operations officers, an administrative assistant, two communication officers, and three secretaries working undercover in the U.S. Embassy. Additionally, the station had two U.S. citizen contract agents serving as case officers for certain covert action and foreign intelligence operations. The Mexico City Station had recruited “two high-level officers of the Cuban Embassy, one of them the cultural attache,” recorded as successful “penetrations” in a CIA history of the Western Hemisphere Division. In contrast, the Montevideo Station believed they had come close to recruiting the Chief of Cuban Intelligence, but he had escaped from their car when the CIA officer neglected to think of placing staff members on either side of him to prevent him from acting on his second thoughts.

Agee was heading to an area perceived by some as the “Switzerland of America” due to the historical lack of intervention by the military in its politics but in this period of time, the country was undergoing in Agee’s view an “economic, political and moral crisis.” The country’s standard of living had been in decline since the 1950s, government services were known for their “inefficiency, corruption and waste,” and land ownership was concentrated in the hands of a small elite. While the CIA’s top priority in the country involved penetrations of Cuban, Soviet, and other communist missions stationed there, a second-tier priority included the training, guidance, and financial support of the Uruguayan security services to improve their intelligence collection. To further this goal, the CIA had for years been pushing for a USAID Public Safety Mission to be established in the country, which would include a CIA officer placed undercover, but for local “political sensitivity” reasons the proposal had always been rejected by the Uruguayans. The Agency would need to wait for a “strong” Uruguayan Minister of the Interior, in their view, for the pitch to ever be implemented.

Desmond FitzGerald, recently appointed as the CIA’s Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, visited the Montevideo Station from headquarters and urged Agee to focus on the recruitment of the Cuban code clerk. FitzGerald also left his mark in another tangible way: when he found out that one of the station’s walls was shared by an apartment building over which they had no control, he ordered the placement of a sign “This Room Is Bugged!” to discourage any classified conversations. Agee gathered sufficient intelligence on the code clerk, Roberto Hernandez, to learn that he had marital problems with his wife, who had just delivered a baby. This would have made “the girl offered by the Miami station” enticing were it not for a girlfriend, Mirta, who the Agency discovered was already “more than casually involved” with Hernandez. Agee decided to forego the assistance of a female agent from JMWAVE and instead offered Hernandez money for him to resettle in another country, perhaps Argentina, where he could pursue his interest in photography. Hernandez seemed interested, but he wanted to see the money first, so Agee withdrew $15,000 ($154,000 today), almost all of the cash in the station, to convince him to join their side. After the approach, Hernandez began to make himself scarce, taking fewer calls according to their telephone taps and according to the Agency’s chauffeur agent at the Cuban Embassy, the two had not spoken recently. Hernandez eventually left the country, citing unnamed persons who were attempting to coax him into betraying Cuba. Agee telephoned his replacement, offering him a similar deal: “Kiss my ass,” the man replied and hung up.

Failure Is Preferable

Agee would reluctantly spend time on a golf course for recreation with the CIA Chief of Station, Ned Holman, who clearly favored him among the Agency staff members in Montevideo. Agee could not decide whether this was good or bad for him, since he believed Holman to be incompetent and lazy. Nevertheless, Agee was willing to play the odds and stay in Holman’s good graces if it could help his career. Holman himself was protected from reprisals for poor performance despite his reputation, Agee thought, through his best friend Ray Herbert, a Deputy Division Chief at headquarters. One day on the golf course, Holman dropped a shocking admission: he was relieved the Hernandez recruitment had failed. As part of his general aversion to work, he had come to Montevideo not to succeed in any of the Agency’s objectives, but only to spend a relaxing four years before retirement, with as little operational activities as possible and aiming to keep the U.S. Ambassador happy. If the code clerk had been recruited, CIA headquarters would have pestered them constantly and likely have brought Agency “experts” to the field to tell them what to do, Holman believed. He had, however, secured one measure of advancement for the CIA: with an impoverished local police force and rumors swirling of a potential military coup in Uruguay, Holman was certain he had obtained agreement from the Minister of the Interior to set up an OPS mission under USAID to work with the police.

With the hot weather in Uruguay, the Christmas season was more akin to the Fourth of July in the United States. At a cocktail party that December, Holman displayed his temper by getting drunk and lashing out at the Agency officials in attendance, including one of their wives. Headquarters had informed him in advance that he was to be reassigned to another location. Herbert, his protector, had already warned him of this fact, but thought he was doing him a favor by securing a placement for him to Guatemala. That country, however, arguably in a more volatile situation than Uruguay given the Agency’s PBSUCCESS operation there a decade prior. Eager to find out more and after happening upon the combination to Holman’s safe in his office, Agee spent time combing through his superior’s private correspondence, discovering that he had been denigrating the performance of staff members behind their backs to FitzGerald at headquarters. Agee, as Holman’s favorite, had been left out of the disdainful messages, but Agee still shared the combination with a coworker so he could also learn the truth for himself. These negative views, Agee noted, were still assiduously left out of their annual performance assessments, known as fitness reports.

In January 1965, a terror group bombed the Brazilian Embassy, leaving behind the name “Tupamaros” on a nearby wall. The Chief of Police Intelligence in Uruguay, Alejandro Otero, vowed to discover who its members were, as they had claimed responsibility for several recent bombings. As Holman claimed, approval had been received from the Uruguayan government for the USAID Public Safety mission. For the time being, the CIA declined to put one of its officers undercover as part of the program. Agee continued to read Holman’s private exchanges with FitzGerald and they were somehow worse than before. The Inspector General’s staff came to visit on a routine inspection and Agee wondered if someone would have the courage to raise Holman’s incompetence with them; however, he and all of the others at the station ultimately remained silent.

On April 6, a general strike broke out in the country as inflation from 1962-1964 had reached 59.7%, a rate higher than its neighbors, which included Argentina at 24.4%, Chile at 36.6%, and Brazil at 58.4%. Protests also flared up when the U.S. government invaded the Dominican Republic later that month, with attacks in Uruguay occurring against the U.S. Embassy, the Organization of American States buildings, and American businesses. Agee found the official U.S. rationale for the invasion, preventing a “communist dictatorship” from forming, to be “bullshit.” They were looking to prevent the return of Juan Bosch to the country’s leadership, whom the CIA had previously termed “an extreme conservative, economically” as well as being “anti-Castro and anti-Soviet.” He was also anathema “U.S. sugar interests,” according to Agee: “They just don’t want Bosch back in.”

Strange man this Holman, Agee thought as they spent some of their final moments together at the station. Holman continued in his mission to denigrate the other officers that June, just weeks away from transfer to Guatemala. He also explained to Agee that the Dominican invasion dated back to the Rafael Trujillo assassination in Santo Domingo in May 1961, which the CIA had led. Holman had been Chief of the Caribbean Branch at headquarters at the time and had worked on the plot. The weapons to accomplish the deed had been transferred via diplomatic pouch, prompting a later gentle admonishment from the Rockefeller Commission in 1975: “We recommend that in the future, weapons should be supplied to plotters of a coup or revolution only in the rarest of circumstances, if at all” and they recommended that the CIA seek the “concurrence of the Department of State before weapons, ammunition, explosives, and similar items are transmitted by diplomatic pouch.” Despite its neutral tone, this section on CIA involvement in assassinations was removed from the final version of the Commission’s report. Agee noted the irony that given his work with the Agency, he found himself disagreeing with the idea of invading the Dominican Republic; he rationalized that the local CIA station failed to keep the situation under control and now the military being brought in as the next logical step. As the police forces were locally built up, Agee noticed a lessening desire for reforms to improve the situations in Latin American countries; he was beginning to suspect he may have chosen the wrong career.

The new Chief of Station assigned to Montevideo, John Horton, was the only person to see Holman off at the airport in July 1965 after his two years at the station were over. Horton did not speak Spanish and wanted to use Agee as his translator for his high-level meetings. Anything was preferable to Holman remaining at the station, Agee thought. Horton obtained approval from USAID to place a CIA officer undercover in the operation. Joan Humphries, a technician from headquarters, arrived at the station to show them disguise mechanisms, which Agee remembered as including “wigs, hair coloring, special shoes and clothing, special glasses, mustaches, warts, moles and sets of false documentation.”

The Tupamaros continued their bombing campaigns, this time in protest against the Vietnam War. Agee encouraged Otero to focus on them since another Agency case officer, Bob Riefe, did not believe they were large enough to warrant being targeted. The new Deputy Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division for Cuban Affairs, John Hart, asked Agee to use the Agency’s mail interception program to recruit agents by mail. Agee believed he must have been insane to think he had the time to search for needles in a haystack; he barely had enough time to skim the letters, let alone use them to make approaches for recruitment. By the beginning of October, the station had managed to bug the apartment of the KGB chief in the country, Khalturin, inside of his bed and sofa. The batteries powering the listening devices were expected to last for six months.

Bad Blood

In the police’s quest to find out information on Tupamaros members, in October they tortured a young waterworks engineer, Julio Arizaga. In response, he went berserk in his cell, after which he was transferred to a hospital where he managed to attack his guard and wound him with his own weapon. Agee wanted to check in on this situation with Otero, as he had understood that the Uruguayan police had not typically tortured political prisoners. He learned that the torture had been ordered by Inspector Juan Jose Braga, Sub-Director of Investigations, and had taken place in the same corridor as one of the CIA’s listening posts. Standard procedure was to place a hood on the interrogation subject and use the picana, a hand-cranked electric generator, on the subject’s genitals. While the picana had usually been reserved for criminals, Agee suspected “Braga’s frustration over the inability to stop the Tupamaro bombings” as the cause for the torture technique’s expanded use. Agee hoped that in sending Otero to an international policing course, the police would use methods such as recruiting agents and paying for information “instead of having to resort to torture.”

Arizaga was initially hidden from public view to mask his treatment at the hands of police, but his condition improved by November and he was released from prison. The same month, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk visited Montevideo to lay a wreath at a monument celebrating José Gervasio Artigas, widely considered the father of Uruguayan nationhood. A protestor slipped through the police cordon and spat in his face. After being taken into custody and beaten by the police, Agee heard that the young Communist Party member was “reported to be in a coma.”

The brutality for Agee truly hit home one day when he visited the Chief of Police, Colonel Ventura Rodriguez, and sat in a conference room in mid-December for a meeting at police headquarters with Horton and several senior police officials. Roberto Ramirez, Chief of the police’s anti-riot shock force, sat at the table listening to a soccer game on his transistor radio. As Rodriguez read a report supplied by the CIA officers, Agee could hear a low sound emanating from somewhere. At first, he thought it was the sound of a street vendor, but eventually he recognized it was a human voice, moaning. Rodriguez asked Ramirez to turn up the radio. The sound grew in agony until the man started screaming and the radio also increased in volume in a futile attempt to drown out the noise. By now, Agee had figured out the man was being tortured in one of the adjacent rooms to the CIA’s listening post above Rodriguez’s office. After having left the meeting, Horton agreed with Agee on the ride back that they had been hearing a torture session. I don’t know what to do about these police anyway, Agee thought, they’re so crude and ineffectual. He later confirmed with Braga that the tortured man was Oscar Bonaudi, a name Agee had given to Otero “for preventive detention.” As a result, Agee vowed to never provide another name for this purpose as long as Braga remained in his position. Agee worried of the haunting effect the experience would have on him, that he was “going to be hearing that voice for a long time."

Fed up with the “miserable, corrupt and ineffectual” Uruguayan government, Agee now viewed his anti-communist mission as absurd: “we’re reduced to promoting one type of injustice in order to avoid another.” Whenever he discussed this futility with other CIA employees, the banter had to “remain at the level of irony” for all of them to protect their own careers. Agee distracted himself with the exploitable drama surrounding the KGB in Uruguay: the Agency discovered that the wife of a KGB agent named Borisov was having an affair with Khalturin, thanks to their audio surveillance of the latter’s apartment. In a message to CIA headquarters, Agee proposed to tell Borisov “as one man to another” of the infidelity, which could have resulted in both being recalled to Moscow, disrupting Soviet operations for a time in the region. As he waited for a response, Horton and Agee also proposed bringing a CIA officer full time under the USAID cover, later identified as Bill Cantrell.

Arriving in Uruguay for his undercover mission in 1966, Cantrell worked with an officer named Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban whom the CIA had recruited. Hevia found Cantrell to be leading a “peaceful, orderly life,” with his wife and children stationed in Uruguay. “He was an excellent family man,” Hevia later wrote. Observers thought that Hevia drank heavily due to being separated from his family in Cuba, having defected to the CIA four years earlier. While walking with Cantrell down Avenida 18 de Julio, the main street in Montevideo, Hevia caught him glancing at a woman as she passed. “I don’t even look at them,” Cantrell claimed. “I would feel like a dog that chases a car barking and, when he catches up with it, doesn’t know what to do.” It began to rain and the two entered and old cafe and ordered two espressos. Hevia marveled that the customers were completely unaware that Cantrell, now in their presence, was tasked with organizing the intelligence function of their police force, that he “had been a military officer in Germany and Liberia, that he had also belonged to the American secret service and, as such, served as an escort for two former American presidents, Eisenhower and Kennedy.” If presented with these facts, they would not believe it, Hevia thought. Coworkers noticed that rather than talk in meetings, Hevia would always be scribbling on a piece of paper. They would see Cantrell lean over to whisper something in Hevia’s ear and expect that it was some important message; Hevia revealed that it was often something benign like, “I’m going to the john.”

Having returned from his training, Otero finally agreed to focus intelligence efforts on the Tupamaros, with Agee still uncertain how to get the team started on agent recruitment in lieu of using torture. More bad news followed when headquarters turned down Agee’s request to let him speak to Borisov about his cheating wife. The Agency could hear through their surveillance devices that the affair with the KGB Chief continued unabated and Horton wrote “nasty cables asking for reconsideration.” According to Agee, the “bad blood” between Dick Conolly, the local Soviet operations officer and HQ went back several years. When Dave Murphy, Chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, as well as his deputy Pete Bagley, visited the Montevideo station, their tempers got the best of them. Conolly was threatened with being back sent back to headquarters, but it appeared to be an empty threat, as they already had to replace his counterpart in Buenos Aires. That particular Soviet operations officer was immediately removed from his position after Murphy and Bagley’s earlier visit with him in which he had been unable to locate the Soviet Embassy when driving them around the city. Murphy cited security concerns as his main reason for turning down the plot involving Borisov; he thought there was a chance that Borisov would become violent and they would not be capable of avoiding a fight. He should know, Agee thought, given that Murphy “had beer thrown in his face a few years ago by a Soviet he was trying to recruit, and he still hasn’t lived down the scandal.”

One of Agee’s last operations in Uruguay involved spying on the embassy of the United Arab Republic, which briefly combined the nations of Egypt and Syria. The CIA visually surveilled their code clerk through a window and took photographs as he adjusted cryptological settings. The Agency would not require the typical sophisticated audio recordings to decrypt that country’s messages. “The code clerk doesn’t draw curtains or lower the blind,” Agee wrote with amazement. “He couldn’t make it much easier for us.” Agee left Montevideo behind in August 1966; in his two and a half years on assignment, the CIA station’s budget there had grown to nearly $1.5 million ($14.7 million today).

Upon his return to headquarters, Agee found that a counterintelligence case he inherited had been started by Desmond FitzGerald as an experiment to establish several CIA officers in Mexico City under commercial rather than embassy cover. The office was shut down due to one of the officers making pornography with a colleague that featured a disturbing twist.