Missing Chilean Scientist Raises Ghost of Military Rule : South America: Case stirs fears that intelligence networks of dictators past could be back in business.

The disappearance of a Chilean scientist has stirred the ashes of repressive military rule in South America, uncovering live coals of hate and fear.

Although elected civilians now govern the continent, worried Uruguayans say the mysterious case of Eugenio Berrios could signal a return of Operation Condor, an international network of ruthless intelligence agencies that served bygone dictatorships.

Berrios, a biochemical engineer, worked for the notorious secret police of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship in the 1970s. Something of a “mad scientist,” he reportedly produced a lethal nerve gas called sarin that can cause heart failure while leaving hardly a trace.

In November, 1991, a Chilean Supreme Court justice issued a detention order for Berrios, seeking his testimony in the trial of two generals charged with ordering the 1976 bomb assassination of Socialist Orlando Letelier in Washington.

Letelier was a prominent exile who had served as foreign minister and defense minister in the government of President Salvador Allende, overthrown by Pinochet in 1973. Pinochet has remained as commander in chief of the Chilean army since turning power over to an elected civilian government in 1990. Uruguay has had civilian government since 1985.

Berrios, 45, was secretly brought to Uruguay in May, 1992, presumably to prevent him from testifying in the prolonged Letelier trial proceedings. On Nov. 15, he disappeared after trying to escape custody in a resort town near Montevideo.

Widespread indications that army officers from Chile and Uruguay have cooperated in hiding Berrios--or perhaps even killing him--feed fears that Operation Condor may be back in business.

News of the incident did not emerge until earlier this month. Since then, it has raised a storm of front-page headlines in Uruguayan and Chilean newspapers and has brought Uruguay’s conservative President Luis Alberto Lacalle rushing home from a trip to Britain.

According to some Uruguayan politicians and newspapers, army generals have made it clear to Lacalle that they will not tolerate a full, open investigation of the Berrios case. Tension has also been high in Chile, where civilian authorities insist on the need to find out what happened to Berrios, despite recent unrest in the Chilean army.

On May 28, Pinochet put some army units on alert and posted heavily armed troops in battle gear around a downtown military building while he met with other generals inside. The action was a protest against alleged “harassment” of the army, including numerous trials implicating officers in human rights violations under military rule.

While democracy in Chile and Uruguay appears to be solid, both the Chilean army protest and the Berrios case underscore questions about how much control the civilian governments have over armed forces that once held absolute power, and how far the military will go to cover up past excesses.

“The concern we all have is that this is the continuation of Operation Condor, with the supposition that now it is to protect themselves,” said Matilde Rodriguez, who believes the 1976 assassination of her husband was the work of Operation Condor.

Rodriguez’s husband, Hector Gutierrez, a prominent Uruguayan exile, was abducted by gunmen in the capital of neighboring Argentina. His bullet-riddled body was found four days later in the trunk of a car.

“There was coordination between Uruguayan and Argentine military men who committed many crimes, including the assassination of my husband,” Rodriguez, 52, said in a recent interview.

Gutierrez was chairman of the lower house of Uruguay’s Congress when the armed forces seized power in 1973. Now Rodriguez, who belongs to a dissident faction of Lacalle’s National Party, is a member of the lower house herself.

Her interest in the Berrios case is special not only because of her husband’s assassination but also because she was one of a few politicians to receive an anonymous communique about the Berrios case from unidentified police in late May.

The communique said an army captain appeared on Nov. 15 in the police station of Parque del Plata, a resort town 30 miles from Montevideo, asking for help in recapturing an unbalanced “Chilean prisoner” who had escaped from a nearby house. Then another man, later identified as Berrios, entered the station and told police, “I am a Chilean citizen and I have been abducted by the Uruguayan and my country’s armies,” according to the communique.

It quoted Berrios as saying that Pinochet had ordered him killed.

Half an hour later, uniformed army troops arrived, along with retired army Col. Ramon Rivas, the district police chief, the communique said. Rivas turned Berrios over to the captain, and the Chilean has not been seen since.

The captain has been identified as Eduardo Ravelli, an intelligence officer helping to guard Berrios in a summer house that belongs to Ravelli’s parents. Lt. Col. Thomas Cassella, Ravelli’s superior in army intelligence, arranged for the loan of the house, according to Uruguayan press reports.

When the police communique was made public in early June, the interior minister fired Rivas. When Lacalle returned from Britain, he transferred the army general in charge of defense intelligence to another post.

Although the government has confirmed that Berrios was the man who disappeared, it has revealed little more about the case, which it says is under investigation. Meanwhile, the press in Chile and Uruguay has published a daily avalanche of reports on the case.

According to some reports, Berrios is dead. His body appears to be one found without limbs or head last February in the Plata River near Montevideo, say those reports, which government officials deny. Other reports say Berrios left the Parque del Plata police station voluntarily in army custody, or that he somehow ended up in the custody of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, or of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Uruguayan officials do not deny reports that Cassella received a telephone call on Nov. 16 from Berrios, who said he had arrived safely in neighboring Brazil and then vanished.

This week, Foreign Minister Sergio Abreu told Congress that a Uruguayan consular office in Milan, Italy, received a hand-written letter, purportedly from Berrios, saying he was safe and still in hiding. “Don’t look for me, it’s impossible to find me,” the letter said.

It is not the first time that Berrios has disappeared; he hadn’t surfaced since Chilean Supreme Court Justice Adolfo Banados ordered his detention in November for questioning in the Letelier assassination.

Banados has reached the final stages of a prolonged investigation in which retired army Gen. Manuel Contreras and Gen. Pedro Espinoza are charged with ordering the Washington assassination. In 1976, Contreras was chief of Pinochet’s notorious secret police agency, known as DINA, and Espinoza was also a high DINA official.

A key figure in the Letelier case is Michael Townley, an American who confessed in U.S. federal court to setting the bomb that killed Letelier on orders from Contreras and Espinoza. Townley, a former expatriate in Chile who has admitted his involvement in numerous other DINA plots, was given a light sentence in exchange for his cooperation and is now living in the United States under the federal witness protection program.

According to evidence in the Letelier case, Berrios worked in a chemical laboratory at Townley’s Santiago home, purchased for him by DINA. It was there that sarin was successfully reproduced in April, 1976, according to documents written by Townley in 1978. First developed by Germany’s Nazi regime, sarin kills quickly and its traces are difficult to detect.

The statements, now evidence in the Letelier trial, said Townley provided the gas to “eliminate” two Chileans, one a DINA agent accused of betraying his bosses. Sarin was also considered at one point as a possible means for eliminating Letelier, Townley said. His documents also refer to the participation of Chilean, Argentine, Uruguayan and Paraguayan intelligence services in Operation Condor.

Fabiola Letelier, sister of Orlando Letelier and the family’s attorney in the assassination case, said Berrios could provide testimony to corroborate other evidence linking Townley to the DINA. His disappearance, she said, is serious not only for that reason but because it renews concern about Operation Condor. “It tends to prove that the coordination is still operating,” Letelier said in Santiago.

In Uruguay, Lacalle replied with a brusque “no” when asked by reporters if the incident reveals the existence of an international paramilitary network. “He totally discounts that,” presidential press spokesman Roberto Etcheverry told The Times. Were Chilean officers involved? “Officially there is no position on Chilean or Uruguayan military involvement.”

But Jaime Trobo, a congressman and close ally of Lacalle, told reporters that “there were several Chilean officers” with Berrios.

Uruguayan news reports, citing government and military sources, have said that Lacalle was considering the dismissal of the army commander until the army’s 13 other generals made it clear that none would take the job if the commander were removed. The reports said the generals also assumed full responsibility for military involvement in the Berrios case, a signal that no civilian prosecution of lower officers would be accepted.

Carlos Baraibar, an opposition politician, said Lacalle backed down to avoid conflict with the army. “An accommodation was made in the face of a situation that could have unpredictable consequences.”

A Tangled Web of Fear

Although democratic government seems to have a solid foothold in the region, the disappearance of Chilean scientist Eugenio Berrios has raised new fears of a resurgence of an international network of repressive security agencies that operated under South American military dictatorships.

The Key Figures

Here are some of the players in this case:

Eugenio Berrios

Chilean biochemical engineer, disappeared in Uruguay. Witness, sought in Washington assassination of Chilean official. Reportedly developed a lethal gas for military-intelligence killings.

Orlando Letelier

Foreign and defense minister in administration of Chilean President Salvador Allende. Exiled to United States. Assassinated in 1976 Washington bombing.

Gen. Augusto Pinochet

Former military dictator of Chile, whose regime known for repressive tactics, especially by military. Overthrown in 1973 by Salvador Allende. Remains as commander-in-chief of army. Resists civilian investigation of military actions, past and present.

Luis Lacalle

Conservative president of Uruguay. Under pressure to investigate disappearance of Chilean scientist in his country. Has encountered stiff resistance from his army over civilian investigation of possible wrongdoing by military.

Michael Townley

American who has confessed to role in assassination of Chilean Orlando Letelier. Has linked to the killing two Chilean military figures, prominent during Chile’s Pinochet days: Gens. Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza. In U.S. witness protection program. The missing scientist Berrios apparently did work at Townley’s Santiago home.