Declassified Documents Fill in Censored Debate at Leading Journal Foreign Affairs

Controversy at Council on Foreign Relations Leads to Resignation

For more information contact:
Peter Kornbluh 202/994-7116
pkorn@gwu.edu
John Dinges 212/854-8774
Cell: 202/365-5062
jdinges@aol.com

www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., June 10, 2004 – Despite denials by the office of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the argument advanced by Council on Foreign Relations Latin American specialist Kenneth Maxwell that the September 1976 carbombing in Washington D.C. might have been prevented is bolstered by declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The declassified State Department records chart U.S. foreknowledge of Operation Condor, a network of Southern Cone secret police agencies that coordinated terrorist attacks against political opponents of their regimes around the world in the mid and late 1970s.

Operation Condor has received renewed international attention over the last several weeks. On May 28 a Chilean court stripped Gen. Augusto Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution for Condor-related crimes.

The documents are among the evidence that Maxwell, the director of the Council's Latin American program and senior reviewer for its journal, Foreign Affairs, used in a rebuttal to a letter from Henry Kissinger's former assistant secretary of State, William D. Rogers, which appeared in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. As reported in the New York Times on June 5 (”Kissinger Assailed In Debate on Chile”), and in The Nation magazine (”The Maxwell Affair”) the prestigious journal has refused to publish Maxwell's response and he has resigned in protest.

The documents were used in two recently published books, The Condor Years, by Columbia University professor John Dinges, and The Pinochet File by Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh, both published by the New Press.

Kornbluh's request to submit a rebuttal to Rogers in Foreign Affairs was also denied. The unpublished letter written by him and Dinges was also posted today on the Archive website along with the declassified documents.

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