Hidden Terrors ― The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America

A “devastating” exposé of the United States’ Latin American policy and the infamous career and assassination of agent Dan Mitrione (Kirkus Reviews).

In 1960, former Richmond, Indiana, police chief Dan Mitrione moved to Brazil to begin a new career with the United States Agency for International Development. During his ten years with the USAID, Mitrione trained and oversaw foreign police forces in extreme counterinsurgency tactics—including torture—aimed at stomping out communism across South America. Though he was only a foot soldier in a larger secret campaign, he became a symbol of America’s brutal interventionism when he was kidnapped and executed by Tupamaro rebels in Montevideo, Uruguay.

In Hidden Terrors, former New York Times Saigon bureau chief A. J. Langguth chronicles with chilling detail Mitrione’s work for the USAID on the ground in South America and Washington, DC, where he shared his expertise. Along the way, Langguth provides an authoritative overview of America’s efforts to destabilize communist movements and prop up military dictators in South America, presenting a “powerful indictment of what the United States helped to bring about in this hemisphere” (The New York Times). Even today, the tactics Mitrione helped develop continue to influence operations in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and black sites around the globe.

A. J. Langguth (1933–2014) was an American author, journalist, and educator, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His works include several dark, satirical novels; a biography of the English short story master Saki; and lively histories of the political life of Julius Caesar, the Trail of Tears, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Vietnam War, and US involvement with torture in Latin America. A graduate of Harvard College, Langguth was the South East Asian correspondent and Saigon bureau chief for the New York Times during the Vietnam War. He also wrote and reported for Look magazine in Washington, DC, and the Valley Times in Los Angeles, California. Langguth joined the journalism faculty at the University of Southern California in 1976 and was professor emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 and received the Freedom Forum Award, honoring the nation’s top journalism educators, in 2001.