(IPS) feature At the height of the Argentine military's ''dirty war'' against suspected leftists, then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told his Argentine counterpart Washington backed the junta's efforts to deal with ''the terrorist problem,'' according to a series of recently declassified documents.

The documents, which have been reviewed by US investigative reporters Martin Edwin Andersen and John Dinges, show that attempts by the US ambassador in Buenos Aires at the time to press the junta to reduce its repression were made futile by Kissinger's apparent refusal to support him.

''We now have contemporaneous documents that show that the message given to Argentina, as well as other South American dictatorships, by Washington was, at best, ambiguous and, at worst, encouraging of human rights violations,'' according to Dinges, who reported on the repression in Argentina and Chile for the Washington Post at the time.

The documents have come to light amid a simmering controversy over Kissinger's stewardship of US foreign policy in the 1970s, when he served first as President Richard Nixon's national security adviser, then as Nixon's secretary of state, and finally in the same position under President Gerald Ford after Nixon's resignation due to the Watergate scandal in August 1974.

Kissinger, who left office after Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, remains a highly influential foreign-policy analyst and consultant for a number of large multinational companies with foreign investments.

In a book published last year, journalist Christopher Hitchens argued that Kissinger should be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in formulating US policies toward Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus and Indonesia between 1969 and 1977.

Declassified documents released over the last two years have bolstered the case against Kissinger. Just last month, for example, documents obtained by the independent National Security Archive at George Washington University confirmed that Ford and Kissinger, during a visit to Jakarta in December 1976, gave a green light to Indonesian President Suharto to invade East Timor.

''It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,'' Kissinger told Suharto, according to a State Department memorandum of the conversation. Indonesian forces invaded the former Portuguese colony the next day, launching an occupation that killed as much as one third of Timor's population in five years.

Pending lawsuits

Kissinger has been asked to testify in a number of pending lawsuits brought by the victims of torture, disappearances, and assassination or their survivors regarding his knowledge of the repression carried out by Southern Cone military regimes, including Argentina's, during the mid-1970s when they were linked through Operation Condor, an intelligence network that targeted and often assassinated their foes both in the region and abroad.

Kissinger abruptly left Paris on one occasion last year, apparently to avoid a summons issued by a magistrate there who was investigating the disappearances of five French nationals in Chile after the US-backed 1973 military coup d'etat against President Salvador Allende Gossens.

The latest documents, the subject of an article by Andersen and Dinges in this week's 'Insight' Magazine, a publication of the Unification Church, cover events between June and October, 1976, and the controversy between the ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill, and Washington regarding the message being conveyed to the Argentine junta, and specifically to its foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Guzetti.

Kissinger met Guzetti first in June 1976, after a ministerial meeting of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Santiago.

In that meeting, according to a previously released cable by Carter's top human rights aide based on a conversation with Hill, Kissinger failed to bring up the repression, which at that time had reached its height at about 800 disappearances a month. When Guzetti raised the issue, Kissinger reportedly asked only how much longer it would continue and indicated approval when Guzetti said would last until the end of the year.

Human rights atrocities

In the succeeding months, Hill attempted to convince Guzetti that Washington would not tolerate continuing atrocities by the junta. On the eve of a two-week trip by the foreign minister to Washington, Hill sent a cable to his superiors Sept 20 in which he recounts those efforts, stating that he had told Guzetti that ''murdering priests and dumping 47 bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in context of defeating the terrorists quickly; on the contrary, such acts were probably counter-productive.''

But Guzetti's visit to Washington where he held separate meetings with Kissinger, then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and Kissinger's top Latin America aide, Harry Shlaudeman failed to reinforce that message, according to a subsequent cable from Hill.

Guzetti had left for the United States, he wrote, ''fully expecting to hear some strong, firm, direct warnings on his government's human-rights practices. Rather than that, he has returned in a state of jubilation, convinced there is no real problem with the United States over this issue.''

Guzetti had told him that Kissinger ''had assured him that the United States 'wants to help Argentina','' Hill, now deceased, reported, ''(and), that if the terrorist problem was over by December or January (Kissinger) believed serious problems could be avoided in the United States.''

''Based on what Guzetti is doubtless reporting to the (Government of Argentina), it must now believe that if it has any problems with the US over human rights, they are confined to certain elements of Congress and what it regards as biased and/or uninformed minor segments of public opinion,'' he wrote in what Shlaudeman later called a ''bitter criticism'' of Kissinger's role.

Shlaudeman responded by insisting that Guzetti may have misunderstood the message he had given the foreign minister in his meeting because of his ''poor grasp of English'' or his desire to ''(hear) only what he wanted to hear.'' But he did not offer a correction of Guzetti's understanding of his meetings with Kissinger and Rockefeller.

''In the circumstances,'' he wrote Hill, ''I agree that the Argentines will have to make their own decisions and that further exhortations or generalised lectures from us would not be useful at this point.''

Kissinger's response to Guzetti was remarkably similar to a conversation he held with Chilean General Augusto Pinochet at the OAS meeting in June 1976.

According to a memorandum of that meeting obtained and released 18 months ago by the National Security Archive, Kissinger reassured Pinochet repeatedly that Washington supported his junta and the ''overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here,'' and that human-rights concerns in Washington were confined to some sectors in Congress and were not shared by the Ford administration.

When Pinochet complained about efforts by Allende's exiled defence minister, Orlando Letelier to persuade Congress to cut off US support for the junta, Kissinger noted the existence of a ''world-wide propaganda campaign by the Communists.''

Letelier was assassinated in central Washington DC in a Condor operation in late September, 1976, three months after Kissinger's conversation with Pinochet and just days before Guzetti's arrival for talks with US officials.