Teaching Torture: The Death and Legacy of Dan Mitrione
by Brett Wilkins Posted on August 11, 2020
In the pre-dawn darkness of Monday, August 10, 1970, Dan Mitrione’s bullet-ridden body was discovered in the back seat of a stolen Buick convertible in a quiet residential neighborhood of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital. He had just turned 50, and he had recently started a new dream job, although it was thousands of miles from his home in Richmond, Indiana. Who was Dan Mitrione, and what work was he doing in Uruguay that led him to such an early and violent end?
As the Cold War heated up, one of the ways in which the United States government fought communism abroad was through foreign assistance programs. These were favorite vehicles for Central Intelligence Agency and other US meddling. Dan Mitrione, a Navy veteran and former small-town police chief from Indiana, joined one such agency, the International Cooperation Administration, in 1960. The following year, ICA was absorbed by the United States Agency for International Development, which in addition to its stated mission of administering assistance to developing nations, gained global notoriety for its role in helping brutal dictatorships repress, torture and murder innocent men, women and children around the world.
Brazil Brutality
Mitrione’s first posting was in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he worked on the police aid program for USAID’s Office of Public Safety. OPS trained and armed friendly – read anti-communist – Latin American police and security officers. Ostensibly, it was meant to teach police how to be less corrupt and more professional. In practice, it operated as a CIA proxy. As for its parent organization, one former USAID director, John Gilligan, later admitted it was "infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people." Gilligan explained that "the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind."
Before Mitrione’s arrival, standard operating procedure for Brazilian police was to beat a suspect nearly to death; if he talked he lived, if not, well… Under Mitrione’s tutelage, officers introduced refined torture techniques drawn from the pages of KUBARK, a CIA instruction manual describing various physical and psychological methods of breaking a prisoner’s will to resist interrogation. Many of the abuses in KUBARK would later become familiar to the world as the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used during the US war against terrorism: prolonged constraint or exertion, ‘no-touch’ torture (stress positions), extremes of heat, cold or moisture and deprivation or drastic reduction of food or sleep. KUBARK also covers the use of electric shock torture, a favorite tool of both the Brazilian and Uruguayan police under Mitrione’s instruction.
More:
https://original.antiwar.com/brett_wilkins/2020/08/10/teaching-torture-the-death-and-legacy-of-dan-mitrione/
I started bumping into information about this man years ago, and have posted information about him multiple times at D.U. It's important for people to know that torture from US personnel didn't start during the Presidency of George W. Bush.
Mitrione's photo:
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Dan Mitrione (above left); also shown a finger crushing device, an electric shock device, and dental devices - all smuggled into Brazil and Uruguay by "diplomatic pouch" from the United States. Mitrione is the man who made torture a routine part of the CIA's operations throughout Latin America. He is quoted as having said: "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect." He used homeless people for training purposes, who were executed once they had served their purpose. On July 31, 1970, the left-wing Tupamaros in Uruguay kidnapped Mitrione and an Agency for International Development associate, Claude L. Fry. Although the Tupamaros released Fry they proceeded to interrogate Mitrione about his past and the intervention of the U.S. government in Latin American. Mitrione was later found dead in a car. He had been shot twice in the head. Image: antipasministries.com
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Daniel Mitrione
Daniel Mitrione was born in Italy on 4th August, 1920. The family emigrated to the United States and in 1945 Mitrione became a police officer in Richmond, Indiana.
Mitrione joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1959. The following year he was assigned to the State Department's International Cooperation Administration. He was then sent to South America to teach "advanced counterinsurgency techniques." His speciality was in teaching the police how to torture political prisoners without killing them.
According to A.J. Langguth of the New York Times, Mitrione was working for the CIA via the International Development's Office of Public Safety (OPS). We know he was in several foreign countries but between 1960 and 1967 he spent a lot of time in Brazil and was involved in trying to undermine the left-wing president João Goulart, who had taken power after President Juscelino Kubitschek resigned from office in 1961.
João Goulart was a wealthy landowner who was opposed to communism. However, he was in favour of the redistribution of wealth in Brazil. As minister of labour he had increased the minimum wage by 100%. Colonel Vernon Walters, the US military attaché in Brazil, described Goulart as “basically a good man with a guilty conscience for being rich.”
More:
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmitrione.htm
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- click for photo below -
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_Qr_bu0VHhI/UYYMfjlfi8I/AAAAAAAAAVA/HoNds-iZBf0/s1600/frank+sinatra+mitrione+family.jpg
TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2013
July 31: Dan Mitrione, CIA, Kidnapped
On this date in History ... July 31, 1970:
Dan Mitrione, a CIA agent, was kidnapped in Uraguay by guerillas in Latin American affairs. 11 days later, Mitrione was found in the trunk of a car, shot twice in the head.
Mitrione was Italian-born who made Richmond, Indiana his hometown, where he served as Richmond’s police chief before moving on to the State Department & later the CIA. He left a wife and 9 children. His funeral was a big media event, attended by David Eisenhower, and the Secretary of State, William Rogers.
Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis came to Richmond to do a benefit concert that raised $20,000 (over $100K in 2010 dollars) for Mitrione’s children.
However, there is a dark side to this "hero's" story......
Mitrione was hailed as a hero to his hometown of Richmond. Growing up in Richmond, I was eleven years old at the time and I remember the adults explaining that he was like the guys on the TV show “Mission Impossible”: top secret and the “government will disavow any knowledge of your activity”.
Mitrione joined the FBI in 1959 and became a counter-insurgency specialist while assigned to the Agency for International Development with the Office of Public Safety.
But the untold part of the story is that he was a torture expert, taking it to a “cold science”. He instructed police in Brazil and Uruguay in "advanced anti-subversion and torture techniques". He also directly participated in and oversaw information extraction from prisoners.
More:
http://thimblefulsofhistory.blogspot.com/2013/07/july-31-dan-mitrione-cia-kidnapped.html
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Story from his home town, commemorating their local hero, 50 years later!
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Remembering Dan Mitrione: Ex-RPD chief's murder made international news 50 years ago
Jason Truitt
Richmond Palladium-Item
RICHMOND, Ind. — Just inside the east entrance to the Richmond Municipal Building hangs a plaque that's likely to leave many who read it with questions.
"Dan A. Mitrone. 10 August 1970. In eternal memory with reverence from the citizens of Uruguay."
You might wonder, who was Dan Mitrione? Why is there a plaque in his honor at the city building? And what's the connection to a South American country that's some 5,000 miles away?
It's a story that begins in Italy, quickly moves to Richmond and eventually finds its way to Brazil and Uruguay.
Mitrione is the central figure, of course, but there are cameos from a U.S. secretary of state and other dignitaries, both foreign and domestic. It even includes key roles near the end from Frank Sinatra and an Academy Award-wining film director.
It's been 50 years since the events that led to that plaque being placed inside the rotunda of the city building. It's a good time to reflect on Mitrione's life and how his death at the hands of a guerrilla group brought international attention to Richmond.
More:
https://www.pal-item.com/story/news/local/2020/08/10/richmond-police-chief-dan-mitrione-ex-rpd-murder-international-news-50-years-ago/3317249001/
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- click for photo below -
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/817ub85nmVL.__BG0,0,0,0_FMpng_AC_UL600_SR393,600_.jpg
Book available for purchase online, probably at libraries, as well, one would think.
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BRASIL WIRE , DECEMBER 13, 2018
Brasil according to William Blum
64-85 DICTATORSHIP AUTHORITARIANISM DEMOCRACY SOVEREIGNTY UNITED STATES
On December 9th 2018, historian, analyst and long term critic of US Imperialism and Foreign Policy, William Blum, died at the age of 85. Author of Rogue State, Killing Hope, and others, rather than a regular obituary, we compile some of his writings and observations, both historical and contemporary, on Brasil, its neighbors, and their relationship with Empire.
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Uruguay, 1964 to 1970: Torture—as American as apple pie
“The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.”
The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo.
Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover, although Mitrione was not one of them.
OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes, student demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events during the past year; and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities, there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the public’s imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions, as well as in the military and police.
“Unlike other Latin-American guerrilla groups,” the New York Times stated in 1970, “the Tupamaros normally avoid bloodshed when possible. They try instead to create embarrassment for the Government and general disorder.” A favorite tactic was to raid the files of a private corporation to expose corruption and deceit in high places, or kidnap a prominent figure and try him before a “People’s Court”. It was heady stuff to choose a public villain whose acts went uncensored by the legislature, the courts and the press, subject him to an informed and uncompromising interrogation, and then publicize the results of the intriguing dialogue. Once they ransacked an exclusive high-class nightclub and scrawled on the walls perhaps their most memorable slogan: O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie … Either everyone dances or no one dances.
Dan Mitrione did not introduce the practice of torturing political prisoners to Uruguay. It had been perpetrated by the police at times from at least the early 1960s. However, in a surprising interview given to a leading Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US advisers, and in particular Mitrione, had instituted torture as a more routine measure; to the means of inflicting pain, they had added scientific refinement; and to that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoner that it was his family being tortured.
“The violent methods which were beginning to be employed,” said Otero, “caused an escalation in Tupamaro activity. Before then their attitude showed that they would use violence only as a last resort.”
The newspaper interview greatly upset American officials in South America and Washington. Byron Engle later tried to explain it all away by asserting: “The three Brazilian reporters in Montevideo all denied filing that story. We found out later that it was slipped into the paper by someone in the composing room at the Jornal do Brasil.”
More:
https://www.brasilwire.com/brasil-according-to-william-blum/
(This section is located around 1/3rd of the way down the page.)