The kidnapping of former Venezuelan First Lieutenant Ronald Ojeda Moreno, more than a week ago, has been described by many officials (including the Minister of the Interior) as an unprecedented operation in Chile and has also meant that in different media outlets The term “extraction” is used, which is the euphemism used by intelligence agencies to refer to kidnappings or rescues of people bypassing border crossings, local police and rival services, which is one of the hypotheses that exists in the case.
The best-known “extraction” worldwide was that of former Nazi SS commander Adolf Eichmann, which occurred in Buenos Aires in 1960, when a group of Mossad agents arrived in the Argentine capital in February of that year, in order to confirm information that the German prosecutor Fritz Bauer had given them, stating that a German named Klement, who lived on Garibaldi Street, in the town of San Fernando, was actually the war criminal.
After monitoring him for a little over two months and verifying that this was the case, the Israelis kidnapped him on May 11 of that year and took him to one of the seven safe houses they had. On May 19, he was clandestinely boarded on a flight on the El AL lines. On May 23 of that year, the then Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, announced that Eichmann was “detained.” Despite Argentine protests, for the violation of his sovereignty, Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem, and was sentenced to death.
The “extraction” of Altamirano
One of the most famous “extractions” in the history of Chilean intelligence was the one that occurred a couple of months after the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, when Erich Honecker – who at that time ruled with an iron fist in the former East Germany – gave the order to “extract” from Santiago, at any cost, one of the men most wanted by the dictatorship: the then general secretary of the Socialist Party, Carlos Altamirano. The order reached the HVA, the outer arm of the infamous Stasi (Honecker’s secret police), led by Markus Wolf. In his biography, he would relate years later that the mission was entrusted to one of the most legendary agents that the HVA had in Chile, Paul Ruschin, better known as “Agent Pablito.”
To do this, Ruschin and another agent – the only ones who stayed in the country after the coup – set up a double bottom in the suitcase of a car and, posing as two German jewelry sellers, went to Mendoza with Altamirano hidden in the double. background, circumventing border controls.
Carreño’s kidnapping
Another similar event occurred in September 1987, when the then deputy director of Famae (Army Factories and Maestranzas), Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Carreño, was kidnapped outside his house on Simón Bolívar Street (La Reina) by individuals who seemed to uncover a sewer and that they were wearing helmets and workers’ clothes. As told in the book Operation Prince (co-written by Miguel Bonasso, Laura Restrepo and Roberto Bardini), the executors of the kidnapping were members of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) Autonomous; that is, the faction that did not accept the order issued in 1986 by the Communist Party – which had created the FPMR – ordering them to lay down their arms.
After the kidnapping, Carreño was taken to a “safe house” somewhere in Santiago, where he remained for 10 days. From there they took him to another home, from which, at the end of November, they took him out in a van in which three frontists were traveling, which headed to the Agua Negra border crossing, near Paihuano.
Carreño had been given a fake mustache and black glasses and was also snoring deeply at the time of the check, as he had been administered flunitrazepam, a medication that – say the authors of the book – “was capable of making elephants faint.”
Furthermore, both he and the kidnappers were traveling with Uruguayan documents. The truck also had license plates from that country, so they did not raise any suspicion and thus they were able to cross to Argentina and then reach Sao Paulo, where they released him on December 2.
The frustrated kidnapping in Iquique
At the beginning of 2001, several months before the attacks against the twin towers, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Chile asked the PDI for cooperation to investigate the activities of several citizens of Lebanese origin who had businesses in Iquique, especially in the Free Zone (Zofri), the most notorious of which was Assad Barakat, who – in the opinion of the CIA – was head of a cell of the Lebanese Hezbollah that was based on the triple border between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, in the zone of the Iguazú Falls.
Based on the information provided by the CIA, which originated in Paraguay, an investigation was opened in the Court of Appeals of Iquique, for the crime of financing terrorism, which began to be investigated by the Police Intelligence Brigade (Bipol ) of Iquique, together with a group of PDI officers grouped in what would later be called the Department of Foreign Affairs (DAEX), of the same institution.
After the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the CIA’s pressure on the PDI grew, arguing that Barakat was also linked to Al Qaeda, something that did not make much sense, given the conflicting factions to which both groups belong: While Hezbollah is Shia, Al Qaeda (like ISIS) not only belongs to the Sunni wing of Islam, but within it is part of Takfir Salafism, which considers anyone who is not Salafist (for example, Shiites) to be a heretic and infidel.
At the beginning of 2002, eager to show results, the CIA increased pressure on the PDI, asking not only for results but also for something unusual: that they help them “extract” from Zofri itself one of Barakat’s collaborators, Arafat Ismail, who was closely watched by agents of the US agency, who at that time already occupied two apartments that operated as safe houses in Iquique.
According to them, Ismail had direct links with Bin Laden and that is why they asked Bipol to have the detectives kidnap Ismail in one of the Zofri corridors, and then take him to a sector of the desert near Huara, where a helicopter would be waiting for them. from the DEA (the US anti-drug agency), which would take him to Bolivia. “It’s something very simple,” their CIA colleagues explained smilingly to the Bipol officers in Iquique, but they were met with a resounding refusal. One of the participants in said meeting told The counter that “we told them that this was a kidnapping and that we would not participate in it,” which was not at all welcomed by the Americans, who therefore decided to nullify the “extraction” of Ismail.
The case of agent “Antares”
The most recent case is that relating to the agent of the Russian federal intelligence service, the SVR (the former KGB) who said his name was Andrei Semenev, although his real name was Alexay Ivanov, who arrived in Chile around 2005 or 2006. According to an investigation by The Clinic, the objective of the subject – known by the code name “Antares” – was to blend in with the country, learn the language and, from Providencia (where he settled), support a spy network that operated in New York, of which Some Peruvians were part of it. Ivavov bribed two officials from the San Miguel Civil Registry and thanks to this he obtained a Chilean identity: Andrés Alfonso Vilches Carrasco.
In 2010, the US FBI arrested the New York network, which also included a Peruvian citizen, and Ivanov was “extracted” from Latin America, accompanied by an SVR “extraction” team that waited for him. in Buenos Aires, from where they transferred him – using false identities – to Montevideo, to ship him to Madrid and from there to Istanbul (Turkey), where Interpol, which was following in his footsteps, lost him definitively, never to be heard from again. of the.