Last week’s post ended with a contest- can you figure out the very obvious and very famous thing that the political thriller Three Days of the Condor is signaling? I mentioned the timing- the timing couldn’t be more obvious. The film was released on September 25, 1975.
Pay attention to how many times the word “condor” is repeated in this trailer:
Although the main character is named Joe Turner, also repeated twice, his codename is “Condor.” The only other famous thing in the whole world named Condor is also from 1975. November 25, specifically.
It concerns covert intelligence activities in a region of Latin America called the Southern Cone. South Americans also think that their continent looks like a scoop of ice cream, with the “cone” being the cooler climate countries toward the bottom.
The Andean Condor is the largest flying bird in the world and is a national symbol of most of the nations of El Cono Sur, but especially of the Republic of Chile which comprises most of the bird’s habitat. It appears on their national seal.
Three Days of the Condor is based on a political thriller novel called Six Days of the Condor, published sometime in the winter of 1974:
February of 1974, a clandestine joint operation that would later be named “Operation Condor” was simultaneously being conceived of in the South American nation of Chile. A summit of national intelligence agencies from the region had been called:
Almost all of South America had fallen under U.S.-backed military juntas by the mid-1970s, who all wanted to engage in violent crackdowns on communists and political dissidents that may have challenged their rule.
They agreed to provide each other with assistance in running terror campaigns against “subversives;” assassinating prominent defectors exiled in Europe and the U.S.; and persecuting leftist political opposition from each of their countries. Death squads, forced disappearances, torture, assassinations. I do literally mean death squads. They were official entities with names and logos:
The Condor nations trained each other’s militaries, civilian paramilitary death squads and police- providing logistical support for mass incarceration and torture of each other’s political prisoners, many of whom ended up dying at black sites in neighboring countries.
State sponsored terrorism across an entire continent, itself sponsored by the U.S. government.
There are so many countries involved, and the operation went on for so many years, I think a primer might be helpful:
The film itself is giving coded information about two separate coups- a moratorium on what had happened in Chile in ‘73 and plans for a coup in Argentina that coming spring of 1976. The film illustrates how instituting Operation Condor addresses the mistakes that were made in Chile, to ensure a successful military takeover in Argentina in the near future.
The main mistake being that so many targets of assassination had escaped in ’73.
Operation Condor would prevent that from happening again.
Joe Turner is clearly named after a real person who escaped assassination in Chile, by the way.
This is Joan Turner. We’ll get to more about her later.
What’s metaphorical and what’s literal?
It got brought to my attention on X after last week’s post that I frequently conflate several different semiotic concepts and lump them all under the same banner as being “symbols.” I should read Hegel. I’ll get to that eventually, but it’s on the backburner. For now I’m going to do my best to glean what is being said.
A significant amount of the messaging Three Days of the Condor is concrete information about what were, at the time, active intelligence operations. This means we’re going to have to do some sifting through what is signaled on screen. How do you separate what is an allegorical allusion and what is a factual detail being hinted at in an obscure way?
Numbers are the hardest ones. There are consistent concrete meanings attached to numbers in Symbolism and they are consistent- but there are usually no context clues to work with. Experience can teach you the gist, but it’s important not to make assumptions or try to crowbar in a meaning just because it feels like it fits.
17 pops up in almost every piece of media we look at (and it’s about to again!) but that’s mostly because I exclusively work with major mass media that has an international reach. Movies are slow to produce and long enough to contain complex messaging. The timescales involved are years, sometimes decades. Hollywood movies are where you would naturally stick "17" messages.
Incidentally, when characters spout off numbers as a description, that’s usually the style in which they’re doing it. Imagine air quotes around the number. It’s not describing an amount, it’s describing an abstract quality. When Turner rants at the end of the film about “7” people being killed, the actual symbolic message is about a certain kind of person.
”Lucky” people, as in people who were born into a good position in life. The beautiful people, wealthy people, upperclass, elite. 7 repeated 3 times means jackpot.
Repeating something 3 times means that something intangible has become tangible. It has gone from being abstract to being incarnated in the real world, it has become 3D, it is a material reality now. It can also be a way to say a plan has been completed, or that a plan is being enacted. Such an enactment is possibly why there are specifically three days in Three Days of the Condor.
“7” people should never be killed in a CIA-backed coup. Coups are supposed to be done in their interest, to their benefit. They’re supposed to get special treatment and be given exemptions. The system exists to serve 7s. 7 is heaven.
Sometimes how allegorical a symbol is will be obvious, and sometimes there will be so much ambiguity we’ll just have to guess and accept that we can’t account for every single thing flashed on screen or spoken by a character, much as that pains me. Fluency would mean understanding it all, and missing nothing.
For instance, I don’t understand what all of the conversations about computers at the beginning of the movie are about. I can’t even come up with a guess.
Before we examine the film further, we need to set the scene. What was South America like in 1975, when Three Days of the Condor was released?
Actual Fascism
All of the nations highlighted in the graphic above were ruled by fascist military dictatorships in the 1970s. When I say fascist I mean that literally, in the correct political sense of the term. It was integral to these nations’ ruling far-right nationalist political ideologies.
Fascism had been every bit as popular in South America as it had been in Europe. Unlike Europe, the nations of the Southern Cone had not participated in WWII as combatants and their fascist governments were never deposed. Fascist political parties competed equally with liberals and populists.
Socialism and communism, however, were becoming increasingly dominant among poor workers and urban intellectuals as the Cold War progressed. Leftists began seriously threatening fascist dominance on the continent. There was widespread paranoia about Cuba exporting its 1959 revolution, fears that there were communist enemies within waiting to strike. Argentine native Che Guevara had hopped the continent founding and training guerilla groups until his execution in Bolivia in 1967.
Fascism’s intense South American resurgence in the 70s largely came as a reaction to these absurdly violent communist guerilla groups. Most were armed wings of their local communist parties: The Tupamaros in Uruguay, the MIR and the VOP in Chile, the Ñancahuazú Guerrillas in Bolivia, the ERP in Argentina.
Bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, hijackings and clandestine executions by leftist groups were common enough that they caused a backlash. Militaries retook the continent by force. The fascists felt entitled to respond in kind.
Paraguay had fallen under a U.S.-backed military dictator (Alfredo Stroessner) in 1954. Brazil and Bolivia would both follow after military-led coups d’état in 1964. The “Revolutionary Junta” deposed the legally elected government in Argentina in 1966, only to be forced back out of power again in 1973 by famed demagogue Juan Perón and later his wife Isabel- who took over the presidency after his death in 1974.
Ecuador came under the permanent rule of its generals after a golpe de estado in 1972. Uruguay’s armed forces toppled its democratically elected government in June of 1973. Chile was traumatized by the brutal armed takeover of Augusto Pinochet in September of 1973. Peru suffered the Tacnazo at the hands of its armed forces on August 29, 1975.
The newly democratic Argentina would be the last to finally fall. Thanks to the coordination provided by the November 1975 commencement of Operation Condor, and with full support of neighboring military juntas, President Isabel Perón was overthrown by the nation’s generals on March 24, 1976.
Fear of encroaching communism dominated the institutions of South America in the 60s and 70s. The societies of the Southern Cone had modern developed economies, but suffered severe income inequality and lacked social mobility. Communist groups were a dime a dozen and violent uprisings had became increasingly common. South America’s elite saw themselves as waging a Third World War against a relentless invisible enemy.
Operation Condor was ostensibly the brainchild of Chile’s national intelligence agency DINA. Augusto Pinochet served as the official leader. It was on his 60th birthday in 1975 that the intelligence agencies of these dictatorships signed official agreements to share intel and resources in persecuting suspected communists and followers of Catholic liberation theology.
Condor was actually developed by South American intelligence personnel during training exercises at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia over the course of several years between the late 60s and early 70s.
The U.S. military, the State Department and the CIA provided courses there for personnel of Latin American governments that aimed to indoctrinate them in “an American worldview and way of life,” teaching everything from artillery tactics to nation building. The school’s counterinsurgency courses taught CIA torture techniques.
French journalist Marie-Monique Robin attributes the torture apparatus of Plan Cóndor to Argentine General Santiago Omar Riveros, who had studied anti-subversive warfare techniques developed by the French during their colonial war in Algeria in the 1950s.
“From now on, the new war is psychological, it is ‘the counter-revolutionary war’. Political power gives the green light to develop these military responses. The objective was to eradicate the FLN in urban areas in Algiers. The intelligence technique is developed in such a way that the entire civilian population becomes suspect.”
All of this was done with both the implicit and explicit support of the U.S. State Department. Henry Kissinger (National Security Advisor ‘69-’73, Secretary of State ‘73-77) routinely ignored reports of human rights abuses being filed by U.S. diplomats, while at times openly condoning these regimes when dealing with them directly.
"…you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist."
-Kissinger to Pinochet. June 8, 1976
Kissinger also pretended to his own agitated staff that he intended to denounce these regimes, repeatedly assigning aids to draft démarche statements. Somehow, he never actually delivered any of them.
Paraguay, being the oldest and most totalitarian right-wing dictatorship, served as the administrative base for the operation. Most existing records of Plan Cóndor come from a single stash of documents discovered at a former black site in Paraguay. What little information that was there finally confirmed that instructions were, indeed, coming from the U.S.
Actual Nazis
If you’re thinking, “this sounds like Nazis,” you won’t be surprised to find out that this region was rife with former Nazis- even in the 1970s.
Several South American governments were friendly to Nazism. German-speaking ethnic enclaves had dotted the continent since mass emigration during the Kulturkampf of the 19th century. After the fall of the Third Reich, “ratlines” had developed to smuggle wanted Nazi war criminals and their families into the Southern Cone.
Future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who worked in army intelligence during the war, had been made commandant of an occupied region of Hesse in 1945 and had to have known about the ratlines. He may even have participated in them, if an asset sought by Operation Paperclip resided in his district.
The Nazis who ended up in the Southern Cone were unrepentant. Many of them would be convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in absentia. They became politically active in their new host countries.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel “The Eagle of the Eastern Front” became a close confidant of 1950s Argentine dictator Juan Perón. This friendship led to Rudel working as a military contractor for the government of Brazil and serving as an advisor to the Bolivian, Paraguayan and Chilean governments in the mid-to-late 70s. Rudel had founded a mutual aid group for fleeing Nazis, the Kamaradenwerk, in the late 40s and with it built a network of former SS members that he could use to smuggle firearms and operate as mercenaries. Rudel co-founded a mercenary firm, La Estrella, with Friedrich Schwend and “The Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie.
Exiled in Peru, Schwend had received American assistance in fleeing through the ratlines after serving as an informant. U.S. intelligence had nicknamed him “Flush” due to his ability to flush out other ex-SS Kommandos who were in hiding.
Schwend had married into a German-Argentine family before the war and in the early 1930s, as an employee of his in-laws’ international export business, had traveled internationally extensively. He had even lived in Hollywood for a year and been a frequent party guest of L.A.’s German consul Georg Gyssling.
Settling in the outer suburbs of Lima after the war, Schwend busied himself with various underground rackets and schemes. Money counterfeiting, drug trafficking and arms dealing. In 1972 he was caught harboring his La Estrella partner Klaus Barbie after a high-profile murder which was probably a hit done on behalf of the Peruvian government. Luis Banchero Rossi was the richest businessmen in Peru. Dictator Juan Velasco Alvarado nationalized Banchero’s companies immediately after his death.
La Estrella’s main mercenary, Klaus Barbie, was the head of the Gestapo in Nazi occupied Lyon, France and personally engaged in grotesque and sadistic torture of Jewish prisoners and members of the French Resistance. This earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Lyon.”
Barbie began working for American intelligence while still in Germany in 1946, headhunting talent for Operation Paperclip and reporting on torture techniques. He began assisting with anti-communist efforts in Western Europe. After the French government sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes in 1950, U.S. government agents smuggled him to Bolivia through a ratline.
Bolivia holds the record for most coups d’état in the world, with 190 since its independence in 1828. Beginning in 1951, Barbie served as a military advisor for each successive dictator, culminating in an especially close relationship with General Hugo Banzer after he took power in the 1972 coup. Barbie was made a lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian armed forces and guided the regime’s brutal repression of dissidents and communist rebels under Plan Cóndor.
Barbie also ran a protection racket against drug cartels that was known as Los Novios de la Muerte (the Fiancés of Death.). Bolivia was the world’s top coca producer up until the 1980s, producing about 90% of the world crop in 1975. Colombian cartels bought raw coca in Bolivia and then refined their product in Colombia before transporting it to the U.S. Barbie was famously hired by Pablo Escobar to protect his coca shipments from rival distributers in exchange for funding the Nazi’s anti-communist activities.
Los Novios de la Muerte are believed to be the key to the Medellin Cartel’s rise to total dominance of the cocaine trade by the late 70s. It may be that Barbie was smuggled into Bolivia specifically to manage the coca trade.
Chile, 1973
The first third of Three Days of the Condor continually references the violent 1973 Chilean golpe de estado that removed democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende from power.
The coup d’état is acted out in the movie in a dramatic scene where the “7” people are killed. These are representing targeted assassinations of well-connected people who were probably upper class:
The coup serves as a baseline for the main message of the film- that Operation Condor addresses tactical mistakes that were made in Chile in 1973 with the aim of ensuring a successful military takeover in Argentina in the near future.
The main mistake being dissidents successfully fleeing the country and organizing subversion of the regime from safe havens abroad.
Henry Kissinger had begun worrying about U.S. interests in Chile upon Allende’s election in 1970. U.S. conglomerates controlled the country’s main industry, copper mining, and the country’s communications infrastructure. Allende planned to nationalize both. Copper, in particular, was skyrocketing in value because of the 70s boom in the tech industry. Copper is the cheapest high-quality conductor and is ubiquitous in electronics.
The Chilean military initially resisted Kissinger’s push for a coup. Following a couple of major assassinations at his orders, including head general René Schneider in October of 1970, the military changed its tune.
Chile’s 9/11 took place on September 11, 1973 and it was every bit as cinematic and traumatizing as our own in the U.S.
At 7 a.m., the military invaded the capital city of Santiago, bombarding the presidential palace and seat of government La Moneda. Allende holed up inside the building and refused to surrender. Radio reporters gave live blow-by-blow coverage from the plaza outside.
Pinochet and Allende engaged in a battle of speeches aired on Chilean national radio. The general offered the president exile if he resigned. Allende refused. Meanwhile, the armed forces locked down the capital arresting any citizens who engaged in “sabotage.” Police in controlled areas began rounding up known leftist activists and allies to the President. Pinochet declared victory at 9 a.m. The coup had lasted only two hours. Allende delivered his legendary farewell radio address at 10:15 a.m.
Workers of my country!: I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this gray and bitter moment where betrayal seeks to prevail. Keep knowing that, much sooner rather than later, the great avenues through which the free man passes will once again open, to build a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, knowing that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am certain that, at the very least, there will be a moral sanction that will punish felony, cowardice and betrayal.
Allende’s security was still holding the army back with sniper fire. Officer Javier Palacios Ruhmann led the unit that breached the building, cornering the president in the Hall of Independence. Although the Pinochet regime would maintain for decades that Allende had shot himself to avoid capture, Palacios would later claim that he had assassinated Allende point-blank. The ex-president would be declared dead at 2 p.m., with Pinochet’s official rule beginning at 2:30 p.m.
Persecution of communists and leftists began immediately. Allende had been scheduled to announce a national referendum at a rally at the State Technical University that morning. As La Moneda was being barraged, a call had been put out for student activists to assemble as previously planned to show support for the socialist regime.
Military units surrounded the campus, declaring anyone present to be an insurgent. About 900 students and professors were rounded up and transported to the national stadium, Estadio Chile, where they were held captive along with political activists and dissident journalists who were being arrested in raids throughout the day. An estimated 7,000 people were interned there on the first day, with upwards of 40,000 more arriving in the coming months.
Among the crowd at the stadium was “the Bob Dylan of South America,” musician and communist activist Victor Jara. Seen here performing at a May Day rally in Santiago, 1973:
He was the most popular artist of the Nueva Canción Chilena folk revival movement and had campaigned for Allende so enthusiastically that he was appointed the administration’s cultural ambassador. Jara also taught folk music in the theater department at the nearby University of Chile, and had been scheduled to perform at the planned Allende rally at the State Technical University. He assembled with the student activists on the morning of the coup and was arrested alongside them.
Awaiting the detainees inside the Estadio Chile were intense interrogations, torture and murder. The armed forces had converted the facility into a concentration camp. Locker rooms and storage areas were converted into torture chambers, the Olympic swimming pool had been drained in preparation for mock executions. The actual executions mostly took place in bathrooms. Prisoners were not given food and slept out in the open in the stands surrounding the soccer field.
Victor Jara was a celebrity. Soldiers recognized and targeted him. He was tortured on and off for 5 days, in between writing his final song “We Are Five Thousand” which was smuggled out of the stadium on the inside label of a cigarette carton. Towards the end, soldiers broke all ten of his fingers. He was executed on September 16, and his body was discovered dumped on the street in Santiago the next day riddled with 44 gunshot wounds.
Jara is the great martyr of the 9/11 coup. After the torture camp was shut down in November of 1973, the national stadium was cleaned up and remained in use until the late 80s. In 2003 it was converted to a national memorial to victims of the Pinochet regime and renamed Estadio Victor Jara. It now operates as a museum.
The U.S. government de facto endorsed Pinochet’s crackdown on leftists, and Kissinger and Nixon privately griped about Americans who were outraged at the violence. They privately admitted to assisting in planning the coup.
Escaping Assassination
In Three Days of the Condor Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, a CIA-associated civilian academic who is paid to read international novels for unspecified reasons. He works in an office dedicated to poring over newspapers and books looking for patterns that may either point to CIA leaks or undiscovered conspiracy networks.
What I do on this Substack is not something I came up with.
I couldn’t track down the group this is signaling in Chile, but there has to have been a private society or association with a similar name in Santiago that was acting as a front for people doing this exact type of reader/researcher activity.
Victor Jara was married to a fellow academic and professor at University of Chile, a British expat name Joan Turner.
Turner was a professional ballerina who had met and married legendary Chilean choreographer Patricio Bunster while touring Europe with a Dutch dance company in the early 1950s. She followed him back to his native Chile in 1954, where she joined him as a professor in the theater department at the University of Chile.
The political scene in Chile was abnormally quiet for the first decade Turner lived there, moderate populist president Carlos Ibáñez del Campo was peacefully succeeded by center-left liberal Jorge Alessandri. Turner and Bunster had amicably separated when she began dating a student, Victor Jara, in 1961. They married after her divorce from Bunster was finalized in 1965. Salvador Allende had just failed in his first bid at the presidency.
The political situation in the country would become increasingly unstable and fraught over the next eight years. The Jaras would become passionate supporters of socialism, campaigning across the nation on behalf of Allende. Their home became a hub for the activist arts community in Santiago.
I need to be clear that there isn’t any indication at all in the film that Turner was spying on her husband or involved in any actual espionage. She wasn’t monitoring political activity or informing on the people around her.
It is emphasized repeatedly in the film that the assassinated assets were academics who monitored media in their specialties for trends and patterns. It is emphasized over and over again that they aren’t spies.
Turner was a dance professor, the amicable ex-wife of the director of the national ballet and the current wife of the celebrity face of Allende. She presumably could have been attending theater performances and concerts in Santiago and reporting to a handler on any symbols or themes that stuck out to her. She wouldn’t even need to know that they meant anything.
According to the film she didn’t. She just needed to serve as someone else’s eyes and notice that they were there.
Even still, she is reported to have been growing uncomfortable with the secrecy of what she was doing. Given that this enterprise was likely being laundered through an academic organization, she may not have initially known there was an intelligence service involved. There’s no guarantee it was the CIA, either. Being British, she is more likely to have been recruited by her own country. It could have even a private entity, along the lines of the Rockefeller Fund.
The explanation given in the film for how Turner evaded arrest at the State Technical University was that she was “out to lunch.” It’s acted out, then repeated. Since “out to lunch” can also mean zoned out, or disassociated, the implication was that she was too high or too drunk to leave the house on the morning of the coup. Turner herself never gave a reason why she didn’t go to the Allende rally and there is a possibility that she’s either being slandered or that I’ve misunderstood.
Who claimed the coup?
This isn’t Joan Turner: The Movie, though.
She’s being used as an example of a high-profile target of the coup who got away. That itself is the main focus, with Operation Condor being promoted as the solution to the “Joan Turner” problem from Chile that would not be repeated in Argentina.
”17” is signaled right off the bat.
Turner enters the office to a debate about a disappearing bullet. How could you commit a murder without leaving a trace? Ice.
Ice refers to keeping attention away from information. Not just keeping it secret, but making sure no one ever get close enough to it to ask questions to begin with. Think of the kid’s game where you locate something by prompting the player “you’re getting warmer… you’re getting colder…” When they’re on top of the object, they’re hot, red hot. When they’re on the complete wrong side of the room, they’re ice cold. If the object you’re hunting is the bullet that solves who’s responsible for a murder- say, the assassination of Salvador Allende- an ice bullet with no ballistics will have you looking in the wrong zip code.
Coverage in the alternative press led American anti-government radicals to blame U.S.-based telecommunications conglomerate ITT for the coup. ITT had controlled 70% of the Chilean telephone market and funded Allende’s opposition in the 1970 election. The company had also done extensive business with the Nazi party in the 1930s. They had just been publicly accused of bribing the Republic National Committee to ensure a favorable anti-trust ruling the previous year, in 1972.
They made great scapegoats.
The Weather Underground bombed their Manhattan offices two weeks after Pinochet’s takeover.
Back in the office, Turner has noticed an odd symbol repeatedly popping up- a Chinese pictogram. The resident China expert informs him it’s the number ten. Ten in Symbolism seems to equate to cycles- the tenth Tarot card is the wheel. As I outlined in Guided Attention and Awareness, wheels and cycles both likely refer to programming- oscillations, or clocks, are what time programs so that they can run in a predetermined sequence. Since we’re speaking in an abstract sense here, the programming is social and psychological. Plans that define societies.
The reason wheels connect to programming is probably analog computers (which are much older than most people realize) and which were timed with physically cranked wheels. They were originally used to track and predict astronomical events up until the 16th century, when the first calculators were invented. The oldest analog computer dates back to 200 B.C.
Heavy emphasis is placed on the fact that this is a Chinese character. The USSR wasn’t the only communist country attempting to spread the ideology abroad.
Allende, being a socialist, had expressed unusually enthusiastic support for communist China. Chile had followed suit with the rest of the Western world in 1949 in maintaining Taiwan as the real Chinese government in exile. Allende made Chile the first South American nation to formally recognize China.
The “face who has never been to China” is probably a real South American “reader” of Chinese descent with access to intermediaries that represented the CCP’s interests. Peru, Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia had large ethnic Chinese populations in the 70s that dated back to the 19th century. The actress who plays Janice, Tina Chen, was born on the day of the Price Control Stabilization Act of 1942, which could be an indication that Allende was being pushed by China toward a planned economy.
Whatever the Chinese communist plan was, drastic action was being taken to address it.
Turner’s unit is Section 917. He shows up 17 minutes late, he highlights a 17 in the book he’s perusing. This is lynchpin of the coded communication in the film- Operation Condor being initiated and the author of the message signing it.
“East Wing” is almost definitely the source of the message. Something on the 17 level is coming, 17 being the symbol of the macrocosm/ epoch-shaping events. But what East Wing?
Although this could be referring to the East Wing of the White House, it’s a lot more likely that it’s referring to the East Wing of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that’s right next door to the White House.
That’s where the Vice President’s offices are, and the Vice President in 1975 was none other than Henry Kissinger’s former boss and close ally Nelson Rockefeller.
His Wikipedia page contains one of the great understatements I’ve ever read:
The Rockfeller family had long specialized in gaining political power through dispensing charitable aid.
Nelson had been a vocal advocate for the founding of the United Nations, and arranged for his family to donate the Manhattan land on which its Headquarters now stands. Kissinger had Rockefeller had been personally meddling in Latin America since the 1930s.
The abstract from a research paper on his influence in Latin America:
Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979), known for his political career in the United States, built his public reputation upon experiences in Latin America and impacted US relations with the region. His initial interest grew through art collecting and business investments in the 1930s.
He developed a conviction that US policy should foster collaborative efforts to promote economic development, in large measure to combat economic nationalism but also for humanitarian purposes and to encourage democracy. During World War II, he led the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), which combated Axis influence, developed cultural and propaganda programs, and launched the first long-term US foreign aid programs of technical assistance through the Institute of Inter-American Affairs.
As assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs (1944-1945), he cultivated Latin American aspirations to maintain US interest in the region characterized by the Good Neighbor Policy, through renewed commitment to collaboration and nonintervention, continued US support for economic and social development, and protection of regional organization within the larger United Nations. After the war, Rockefeller promoted a reformed capitalism he envisioned would involve collaboration among government and private groups in the United States and Latin America.
Starting in Venezuela and Brazil, he created a nonprofit entity, the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA), that partnered with Latin American governments, especially in public health and agriculture, and a for-profit business, the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), which fostered joint investments.
In 1950, he headed the International Development Advisory Board to advise the Truman administration on the Point Four program, established to foster US technical assistance toward developing nations. Rockefeller advocated for continued focus on economic development abroad, even as the Korean War intensified the defensive nature and military requirements of US Cold War policy.
He promoted partnerships with private capital investment and increased public loans that prioritized developing nations' concerns. The scope he suggested was not adopted in the region, but models for technical assistance he had pioneered in Latin America spread globally.
He leveraged his experiences in the region to promote a political career, serving as governor of New York (1959-1973) and vice president of the United States (1974-1977), and he attempted to win the presidency several times.
In 1969, he led a series of Latin American tours for President Richard Nixon that were met with violence and harsh criticism of the United States. His economic prescriptions changed little, yet alarm over potential radical change led Rockefeller controversially to suggest friendly relations with authoritarian military governments.
Kissinger had worked on Rockefeller’s Special Studies Project at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in the 50s. He’d also served as Foreign Relations Advisor to Nelson’s ‘60, ‘64 and ‘68 Republican presidential primary campaigns.
The Rockefeller Foundation had paid to establish the School of Public Health at the University of Chile in 1943.
The Rockefeller family owned a controlling interest in the Anaconda Company, which owned the largest copper mine in the world at Chuquicamata, Chile. As an executive for Chase Bank, Nelson’s younger brother David managed the family’s assets in Chile. He would later found the Center for Latin American studies at Harvard in 1994.
David was also a former employer of Henry Kissinger, appointing him to the board of the family fund he managed in the 60s.
The Rockefellers were distant cousins to the Dulles family, and David became close to former CIA director Alan Dulles. He was known to participate in covert operations.
So we have Vice President Rockefeller sending out the order to begin Operation Condor. We know he means Condor because of the reference to Lubyanka.
Lubyanka Prison was housed in the Lubyanka Building in Moscow, which also served as the national headquarters for the KGB. Political dissidents and suspected subversives were taken there and tortured for information. The prison had been most active under Stalin, with secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria sadistically torturing anyone who displeased the regime in any way- no trial, no proof needed. He famously tortured Stalin’s doctor in the basement for suggesting that the chairman needed more bed rest.
This Lubyanka system would be writ large across South America with the advent of Plan Cóndor. Assassination targets who escaped would be hunted down extrajudicially and tortured in the style of the KGB.
Machine gun fire could be heard throughout Santiago as the afternoon progressed on September 11. Entire neighborhoods known to support Allende were being arrested and prominent supporters were being executed on the spot. Paramilitary members of the Caravana de la Muerte death squad were hunting down Allende sympathizers who attempted to hide. Panic ensued.
Thousands of people flooded embassies seeking asylum from the death squads. Turner herself went to the British embassy only to find it closed and chained up. Although she was a foreign national, she had no way to leave the city. I don’t see any reason to take any of the CIA procedures shown in the film literally, but Turner did seek official assistance in real life, and she did see bodies.
“I saw literally hundreds of bodies that were piled up in what was actually the parking place of the morgue,” Joan Jara says of finding her husband’s body 40 years ago. “I recognized him. I saw what had happened to him. I saw the bullet wounds. I saw the state of his body. I consider myself one of the lucky ones in the sense that I had to face in that moment what had happened to Victor. I could [later] give my testimony with all the force of what I felt in that moment — and not the horror, which is much worse, of never knowing what happened to your loved one.”
-Joan Turner Jara, to Democracy Now! September 9, 2013
In the film, Turner is told to wait an hour and call back.
The actual authors of the 1973 golpe de estado are signaled by an odd interlude where Turner wanders around the Guggenheim to kill time waiting for his call.
The reason the Guggenheims have money to finance spectacular architecture and fine art is because they made their fortune in mining. Mostly in South America.
The Guggenheims’ interests in Chile were shared with the Anaconda Company, owned by the Rockefeller family.
As for the real-life Turner, she never gave an explanation for her whereabouts in the weeks after the fall of the socialist government. She negotiated her escape over a month later while the military was actively looking for her.
The explanation from the film, that she was taken in by a stranger, has a ring of truth to it. She was the wife of a beloved singer who was associated with Allende, it’s plausible that she could have talked her way into a stranger’s home and hidden from the death squads there. I can’t substantiate that, though.
The British government allowed her to return to the UK on October 15 in order to avoid diplomatic problems with Chile. It is implied they couldn’t protect her any longer and exile was her only option.
Argentina, 1976
There’s a line of delineation drawn where the tone shifts, the camera cuts to new establishing shots of a new city (D.C.,) and 17 is signaled again. There is a second message coming through.
The remaining target not accounted for is named Heidegger, a clear reference to the German philosopher most closely associated with the Nazi party. He was still living in Freiburg and had retired from teaching at the University there. Heidegger always maintained that he had been right in supporting the Nazis, giving interviews as late as the 60s justifying his Nazism on the promise that they would be released after his death.
In the summer of 1975 he had just published the first volume of his collected works. After 17 is signaled on screen, Turner goes to find Heidegger and finds “Argento,” who he indicates with his index finger. Choosing. “You’re next.”
Argentina would be the first golpe de estado after the institution of Plan Condór, falling on March 24, 1976.
This has to be an intentional signal of the upcoming military coup in Argentina, because Heidegger died two days later.
Much ado is made about how a civilian assassination target managed to escape. Turner’s handler is Higgins, as in Bernardo O’Higgins the national hero of Chilean independence. Their version of the Presidential Medal of Freedom is the Order of O’Higgins, and the real-life person represented here was probably someone who had received that award. He’s stuck explaining what went wrong.
When Kathy Hale, the stranger who takes in Turner, a succession of American companies begin to be signaled. These are probably the American financial backers and logistical operators for the upcoming Argentine military takeover.
Kathy Hale is going on a skiing trip in the Green Mountains in Vermont. Hale and Green Mountain being referenced so closely together seems like a Revolutionary War signal, which could be indicating the Society of the Cincinnati. The Society is the oldest native fraternal organization in the U.S., comprised of the male descendants of Continental Army officers. Membership is hereditary and kept quiet. Winston Churchill is known to have been a member through ancestry, and most presidents are made honorary members. George C. Marshall, author of the Marshall Plan, and “Father of the United Nations” Cordell Hull are both commonly believed to have been honorary members.
Critics like John Adams accused the Society of attempting to institute a hereditary peerage in the U.S. Their greatest claim to fame is being the actual namesake of the city of Cincinnati, which is named for the Society and not Cincinnatus himself. Their headquarters are at Dupont Circle on Embassy Row in Washington D.C.
The Rockefeller family had multiple ancestors serve in the Continental army, including a Lt. John M. Rockefeller of Raritan, NJ who was an officer. It can be assumed there are Rockefellers among the Cincinnati.
Kathy, who I think is representing the financial backers for the planned Argentine military takeover, is planning a skiing holiday and is spotted by Turner buying ski clothes. In addition to popular slang, skiing has a pretty high likelihood of referring to cocaine symbolically as well. Although both skiing and coca use are activities that go back centuries in their native countries, both went mainstream in their modern forms at the same time. Cocaine was isolated from coca and named in 1855, skiing became a competitive recreational sport for the first time in Telemark, Norway in that same timeframe.
Hale is a photographer, and Turner comments on her photography. The whole conversation is mostly an excuse for him to drop “November” in a very conspicuous way. He will repeat November two more times in her apartment. The pact for Operation Condor would be signed in Santiago, Chile that coming November on Pinochet’s birthday.
As he signals November, a full Eastern Airlines commercial is playing in the background. A shot of an Eastern Airlines plane landing at the airport had already been used to show Turner’s CIA handler arriving in New York City.
This seems incongruous until you realize who controlled Eastern Airlines. Laurance Rockefeller.
Kathy pulls into a gas station with “No Lead” given focus in the foreground.
That’s a Ford Bronco, at a Getty Oil gas station. Thanks to the Machiavellian existence of Getty Images it is impossible to do any research online about the Getty family. They may or may not have held oil interests in South America. Ford definitely did, though.
Ford Argentina was the company’s first truly international subsidiary (the first subsidiary, Ford Canada, had been established in 1904.)
Given the “No Lead” sign prominently displayed in the foreground, this shot is probably ordering that Ford’s facilities and any Getty Oil holdings in Argentina not be targeted by the military government during or after the coming coup.
When Turner makes another call to the CIA, this time with a device that scrambles the switchboard, he’s shown entering a Bell Telephone facility. Bell was a subsidiary of AT&T.
This is potentially signaling a real-life secret telephone exchange used in Operation Condor that was hosted on by the U.S.
The Canal Zone was U.S. territory at the time, meaning Bell parent company AT&T could conceivably have been the service provider of the secret telephone exchange. As portrayed in the film, the purpose of the exchange was to make tracing calls impossible.
To connect Bell to the other coup conspirators, former longtime AT&T president Walter S. Gifford had sat on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.
A 1975 muckraking exposé “The Rockefeller Syndrome” contained the accusation that the Rockefeller family held an undisclosed controlling interest in AT&T, among other major conglomerates, through stockholding and banking leverage.
Lucifer in Argentina
The man responsible for the “7” deaths in the film is a mercenary.
The freelancer is never sent after Turner, but is responsible for the massacre of intelligence assets at the beginning of the movie. Turner tracks him down and delivers a weirdly specific description of him:
This can only be Klaus Barbie.
Barbie’s parents were from Merzig, right on the border with Alsace-Lorraine, and his biography points to him being a native Alsatian speaker. He grew up in Bad Godesberg in the Rhineland, also close to the French border, and his career always ended up with him stationed in France.
His son, Klaus-Georg, lived in France as an adult. Barbie’s French daughter-in-law would later claim he was pressured into working for the CIA:
The mercenary in the film has the same employment history:
»He works for the company?
»He did, once. He’s a contract agent.
»Contract agent?
»Freelance
Klaus Barbie’s employer is eventually identified as Lucifer: The only surprising thing about Lucifer showing up in a message about globalist bankers toppling foreign governments is that it took so long.
The Rockefeller family funded the U.N. They directly benefitted from the dollar becoming the global reserve currency under Bretton Woods. The Rockefeller Fund’s public health initiative promoted birth control in developing nations and funded the research that would lead to the discovery of the Pill in 1951 that coincided with the premiere of “I Love Lucy.” John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council in 1952:
Scion of the family John D. Rockefeller Sr. looks like Lucifer to me.
Towards the end of the film, the Lucifer faction’s reason for the Argentine takeover is finally given. Oil. A month after the fall of Chile, on October 6, The Arab Coalition attacked Israel in the Yom Kippur War. In response to U.S. support of Israel, OPEC instituted an oil embargo causing the 1974 oil shock that rocked the U.S. stock market.
Presumably the justification for toppling Perón was that the U.S. needed to shore up access to oil producers outside of OPEC after the 1973 oil crisis. Argentina has had a state-owned oil monopoly called YPF since 1922 and was formerly one of the top ten oil producing nations in the world.
Argentina had already suffered a (probably) U.S.-backed coup d’état in 1930 over an attempt to block American investment in the nation’s oil industry.
What happened to Joan Turner?
After all of the business with the coup is taken care of, there’s a scene at the end that doesn’t really contain any symbolism. The mercenary appraises Turner and gives him instructions. I can only take this as a translation to allegory of Klaus Barbie’s professional opinion on Joan Turner:
Turner wants to return to New York (read: Santiago.) The mercenary advises he flee to Europe. He says he will remain in the country of his birth.
Which she did. Turner changed her name to Jara in London and took comfort in a community of leftists who had been exiled from South America. She plugged into an international network of anti-Pinochet activists.
At the end of the film, her analogue blackmails Higgins with the threat of negative press coverage to ensure his own safety. As a high-profile activist, Jara had access to journalists and received ample press coverage. She did serious damage to the international reputation of the Pinochet regime.
After a decade campaigning abroad, Jara was given permission to return to Chile with her daughters and she opened a modern dance school in Santiago. She remained a committed human rights campaigner until her death. In 2013 she successfully sued to have her husband’s killers tried for murder in a U.S. court. They were convicted.
She passed away on November 12, 2023 at the age of 96 and is buried next to her husband in Santiago.
