Radio hobbyist or CIA Spy: The 1974 kidnapping of USIA officer Alfred Laun

On Good Friday 1974, members of a Marxist guerrilla group in Córdoba, Argentina barged into the home of a US amateur radio operator and DXer in a botched attempt to kidnap and hold him for ransom. Alfred Laun, a US information officer, was shot and critically wounded after struggling with his captors. The entire episode set off a behind-the-scenes offensive in Washington, with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordering his diplomats to refute reports pinning Laun as a suspected CIA operative, based on the fact that he owned a large amount of expensive radio equipment.

A host of once-classified cablegrams that are now part of a collection on file at the National Archives in Washington DC show how US officials both in Washington and Buenos Aires scrambled to downplay spy speculations.


Dangerous terrain
In the early 1970s, Argentina was on the threshold of its darkest period in modern history. Legendary caudillo Juan Domingo Perón returned from exile in Spain in early 1973 with his third wife, María Estela (Isabel) Martínez de Perón, who as vice president would assumed the presidency following his death in July 1974.
With escalating violence fueled by a mismanaged economy, soaring inflation and the polarization of the ruling Peronist party, Argentina was bitterly divided. Leftwing and rightwing factions went for each other’s throats, and leftist guerrilla groups, such as the Montoneros and the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), unleashed a wave of terror with a string of assassinations, kidnappings and bombings across the country. Unstoppable violence mixed with the government's inept economic policies, instability, and the loss of public confidence would eventually contribute to the overthrow of Isabel Perón’s government in March 1976. It also paved the way for a hideous “Dirty War” period, in which as many as 30,000 Argentineans were tortured and forcibly “disappeared” by the military regime that ruled between 1976-83.

While the Perón government was still in power, urban guerrillas, helping to create more instability, saw foreign diplomats and businessmen as prime targets. In December 1973 the ERP kidnapped Exxon executive Victor Samuelson but released him more than four months after a $12 million ransom was paid. Weeks before Samuelson was freed, on Good Friday morning April 12, 1974, nine men and a woman brandishing machine guns broke into the Córdoba home of Alfred Laun, a 36-year-old USIA officer from Wisconsin who had served in posts in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and Thailand before coming to Argentina.

Laun tried to resist his kidnappers and was shot in the abdomen. The bullet entered through his stomach and exited his backside grazing the vertebral column.
An ERP guerrilla, apparently a physician, operated on him at a safehouse and, some 14 hours later, he was dumped outside Córdoba where police found him alive “wrapped in a blanket and connected to an IV,” according to an account given at the time in Spain’s ABC newspaper. He told authorities that he had been given a hallucinogenic drug. When word of the kidnapping got back to Washington, Secretary of State Kissinger embarked on his damage-control strategy.

“Implication is clear he is to be tagged as a CIA agent. We also understand that discovery of radio equipment in Laun’s house has produced speculation on that score,” Kissinger wrote in a cable dated the same day of the kidnapping, which ordered his team to “deny categorically” that Laun was connected to the CIA.

“We will point out that he has been a HAM radio operator for many years, which explains the radio equipment. It would be helpful if embassy could confirm that Laun is registered and/or licensed in Argentina as an amateur radio operator. Did he belong to an Argentine HAM radio club?”


Questions abound
The following day Kissinger wrote: “We expect press interest to diminish. Although there is temptation to deplore publicly this barbaric action against one of our officials, we believe that it is best to be circumspect. We must bear in mind possibility that such public denunciation at this time could complicate efforts to secure release of Samuelson (Exxon) and might provoke ERP into additional initiatives.”

Kissinger´s wish for publicity to die out didn’t come true. Pedro Massa, the Buenos Aires correspondent for the Madrid conservative daily ABC wrote on April 16: “[Laun] is an amateur radio operator and he had inside his home various transmitters and radio receivers of top quality and latest technology, which allowed him to cover the whole world. The ERP took the best one when they kidnapped Laun.”

On April 17, Laun was secretly airlifted from Argentina to Panama where he was hospitalized and debriefed. As Laun was recovering, lawmakers in the Argentinean congress demanded an official inquiry as to why Laun had so much radio equipment. The communist bloc presented a resolution which expressed serious concerns over the “discovery of a powerful radio transmitter installed in his house” and called on the Argentinean government to prohibit foreign diplomats in Argentina “from the use of shortwave radios and radio telephones.”

“Unfortunately Laun’s radio equipment has raised some suspicions even among friendly circles,” the US embassy in Buenos Aires cabled Kissinger. “Normally, friendly Mayoria [a newspaper] carried article on April 22, which implied that Laun might have been doing more than cultural / informational work in Córdoba. Even some US newsmen have expressed opinion that there must have been more than met the eye, else Laun would not have had such sophisticated radio equipment.”

Before releasing him, the ERP said it planned on trying Laun in a “people’s court” on charges of belonging to the CIA, claiming that he played "an important part" in the overthrow of Marxist President Salvador Allende the previous September "by assisting the right-wing Chilean military in their communications,” the Associated Press reported.

It wasn’t exactly known what type of equipment Laun had in his shack -- neither the inventory nor the make of the transceiver the ERP stole were made public -- but US officials were quick to prove that Laun belonged to a local radio hobby club. After the Laun case and other similar kidnappings, the US government quietly began reassigning non-essential personnel and moving families away from Argentina.


Search for the kidnappers
On April 23, the US Embassy in Buenos Aires quoted an AP report that Argentinean police arrested suspected ERP member Ana María Liendo in connection with the kidnapping. Authorities apparently released Liendo, or she may have escaped sometime afterwards. Her name was among the 100 guerrillas who died during an armed confrontation between the ERP and military on December 23, 1975 in Monte Chingolo, south of Buenos Aries. Liendo was 25.

It isn´t clear if any of the other kidnappers were ever identified. Charles Russell, a US Defense Department analyst, wrote in a 1976 article entitled Transnational Terrorism that a member of the Basque terrorist group ETA, who trained and operated with the ERP, may have possibly been involved in the Laun kidnapping before returning to Spain.

In a November 9, 2003 interview with La Capital, a daily in Rosario, Argentina, ERP founder Enrique Gorriarán Merlo admitted that he “was directly involved” in Laun’s abduction.
He explained that the ERP decided to release him immediately because the victim had been wounded and the movement didn’t want any other hostage deaths on their hands. Gorriarán Merlo (left) was a controversial figure who is credited for leading the 1980 soldier-of-fortune mission that assassinated ousted Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza in Asuncion, Paraguay. He and other guerrillas had made a spectacular prison escape in 1971 and went into hiding, traveling throughout Latin America, even fighting on the Sandinista side during the Nicaraguan Civil War. After Mexico deported him, he was arrested by Argentina in May 1995 and, seven years later, pardoned by then-Argentinean President Eduardo Duhalde. Gorriarán Merlo died from a heart attack in 2006 at age 64.


Aftermath
Laun survived his ordeal and went on to serve in other US diplomatic missions before retiring. In Nicaragua, he was the US Embassy spokesman during the height of US involvement with Contra rebels, and his radio activities again evoked suspicion while he was in Managua. On August 20, 1987, the Nicaraguan Journalists Union (UPN) charged that Laun was trying to organize support for anti-Sandinista broadcasters, “contrary to his diplomatic status,” by attending a Nicaraguan HAM radio meeting. Specifically, UPN chair Lily Soto said Laun had instructed Honduran radio journalist and VOA stringer Conrado Godoy to recruit Nicaraguan broadcasters for Radio Impacto, the pro-Contra shortwave broadcaster based in Costa Rica.

Efforts to contact Laun for this article have been fruitless; he never answered any emails requesting an interview.

On September 12, 2000, Laun left a condolence message on a qsl.net board in memory of Pero Simundza, a 29-year-old HAM who worked for UNHCR and was killed days before with two others in West Timor when his office was ambushed by a militia mob. “Amateur Radio is a wonderful hobby but it can be dangerous because people misinterpret what it is. I myself was kidnapped and shot in Argentina , but fortunately I have lived to tell about it. “