THE BLACK ART OF GRAYMAIL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00561R000100070074-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 9, 2012
• Sequence Number: 74
• Publication Date: February 24, 1979
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP91-00561 R000100070074-3 -STATE
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE 1`73:2o7
THE BERRELLEZ CASE
TH-iii _uLACK
ART OF
THE NATION
24 February 1979
CARL KAPLAN
and RANDALL ROTHENBERG
On February :8, the. Government an-
nounced that. it was dropping perjury
charges against Robert Berrellez-and
thereby hangs a tale: or, more precisely, a
piece of mail.
A while ago, a bulky, brown envelope ar-
rived at the offices of The Nation. The enve-
lope had no return address and there was no explanation of who had sent it. or why. It
contained sealed transcripts of a closed-
court hearing that took place in Washing-
ton last October. The hearing was part of
the perjury prosecution of Robert Berre-
llez, a high I.T.T. official who was stationed
in Chile at the time of the election of Salva-
dore Allende. =
It is alleged in the transcripts that Ber-
rellez, who was LT.T.'s director of inter
-American relations in Santiago, lied. at the
behest and with the aid of the C.I.A., before
Senator Frank Church's 1973 Senate sub-.
committee investigating the links between
the C.I.A. and I.T.T.-in Chile. Subsequent investigations have "estab
lished the authenticity of the transcripts,
but the identity of their sender remains a
mystery. The Berrellez case raises a num-
ber of important questions about the use
and abuse of the "national security" defense
in criminal cases involving the intelligence.-
community. The case also lays bare a pro-
found issue of justice: how can the Govern-
ment proceed against a defendant whose
defense threatens to expose in open court
information the Government rightly or
wrongly believes
conceivable that
tion as part of
proposed new la
ment prosecutioi
whether we are
lishing the docu
set: we feel than rte t~JUeS 1-113CU uy wC Itl61C11G1
transcend the more remote and speculative harm that
might result from their publication.}
The facts of the Berrellez perjury case are .these:
While Berrellez was working for I.T.T. in Chile, the
C.I.A. allegedly assisted and encouraged the corpora-;
tion in channeling hundreds of thousands of dollars
into the campaign fund of Salvadore Allende's oppo-
nent in the 1970 Presidential election. In testimony
before Senator Frank Church's Subcommittee on
Multinational Corporations in 1973, Berrellez denied
having any knowledge of the C.I.A. and I.T.T.
operation.
n March 1978, the Justice Department charged
Berrellez with -perjury. The Government fur-
ther, thaL:Berrellez-lied ..when.. he
of certain top-secret information -he cabled back to
I.T.T. headquarters in New York. Finally, the Justice-
Department charged that Berrellez's perjury was
committed with the complicity of various C.I.A. and
I.T.T. officials-named and unnamed-none of whom.
have been indicted.
Among those cited in the original Government in-
dictment were former I.T.T. Latin American public
relations director Harold 'Hendrix; Jonathan G.
Hanke, a C.I.A. office director in Chile, and Hernan
Cubillos, who is currently-the Foreign Minister of
Chile. Cubillos's name was stricken from the revised
indictment issued last October, and. charges against
Hendrix were dropped after he agreed to testify for I
the prosecution. The Justice-Department has said
that all of the co-conspirators acted "for their own
purposes," but in the transcripts received by Tire Na-
tion, defense attorney-Patrick NVdll claims to have evi-
dence proving that the perjury was suborned by
C.I.A. officers acting on higher orders.
When the Berrellez case went. to trial before Fed-;
eral District Judge Aubrey E. Robinson Jr. in Wash-
ington on October 23, 1978, the Justice Department
asked for a closed hearing because of the sensitive evi-
dence Wall.claimed he would present in his defense!
arguments. They also requested, "on national security
grounds," a protective order designed to circum
scribe the areas the defense attorney could touch upon'
in the trial. According to The Nation documents. Fed-
eral attorney John Kotelly_ told-.'the?Judge that the
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP91-00561 R000100070074-3