The Foreign Service Journal, January 2006

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 69 ears before I joined the Foreign Service, standing watch as a Marine guard in Buenos Aires in the early 1960s showed me the career path I wished to follow and the part of the world I wanted to concentrate on. In the past year, however, my Latin American assignments have come back to haunt me with a vengeance. Two events in rapid succession shocked me out of a bliss- ful retirement. First, in April 2005, I received an e-mail from the State Department Legal Adviser’s office forward- ing a summons from the Argentine Justice Ministry. The document called me to make a sworn statement answering seven questions having to do with the penetration of left- wing guerrilla organizations by Argentine security forces in the 1970s. The order, originated by an Argentine judge in September 2002, had been transmitted to the U.S. Justice Department and then was kicked around for nearly three years between Justice and State before being passed to me — without any guidance or annotation as to how (or whether) I should respond to the summons. I replied that I did not wish to answer the questions, and the department assured me it would pass my reply back to the Argentine government. Several months later, in August 2005, I became aware of the publication in the United States of a book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America , by Professor J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island University. The thesis of this book is that the U.S. govern- ment secretly condoned and assisted the implementation of Operation Condor, a covert Latin American military net- work created during the Cold War to facilitate the seizure and murder of political opponents across state borders. McSherry identifies me as a linchpin in the alleged U.S. liai- son with this shadowy multinational entity. As best as I can tell, my name first came to the attention of both the Argentine judge and McSherry as a result of a 2002 decision by the State Department to declassify and release under the Freedom of Information Act thousands of documents concerning exchanges between Embassy Buenos Aires and the department during the 1970s. These communications dealt with the conduct of Argentine securi- ty services in combating two left-wing guerrilla organiza- tions, the ERP and the Montoneros, during the period com- monly known as “the dirty war.” They included reports I T HE D OMINO E FFECT OF I MPROPER D ECLASSIFICATON A RETIRED F OREIGN S ERVICE OFFICER CONFRONTS FALSE ALLEGATIONS THAT HE WAS A CENTRAL FIGURE IN U.S. ASSISTANCE TO O PERATION C ONDOR WHILE SERVING IN L ATIN A MERICA DURING THE 1970 S . B Y J AMES J. B LYSTONE James J. Blystone retired from the Foreign Service in 1994 after 28 years of service as a security and administrative officer in posts including Santiago, Buenos Aires, Rome, Cairo and Riyadh, where he served as administrative counselor and acting DCM. His Washington assignments included a tour as deputy executive director for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Since retiring from the Service, he has been held various positions both overseas and in Washington as a WAE annuitant. Y