TARGETS

On June 9, 1969, a US consular officer in São Paulo typed a three-word subject line into a classified cable: SECURITY ROCKEFELLER MISSION.

The body of the cable warned that a guerrilla organization called the Marighella group had decided Nelson Rockefeller was a target - and that the attacks would serve their purposes "whether they succeed or not."

The cable named three people. Nelson Rockefeller, sixty years old, son of Standard Oil and four-term Governor of New York, was already in the air on his way to Brazil. Carlos Marighella, fifty-seven, had been a Communist Party congressman before the 1964 coup and was now running Brazil's most operationally capable urban guerrilla organization from a series of rented rooms in São Paulo. And in the second paragraph, almost as an afterthought: "Honestino Guimarães, student agitator from Brasília." Twenty-two years old. The cable offered nothing else about him.

Honestino Guimarães was arrested in 1973. He was never seen again.

TARGETS reconstructs the world that cable inhabited: the CIA-backed coup that installed Brazil's military government, the AI-5 decree that suspended habeas corpus and drove the student movement underground, the Rockefeller mission that produced the policy framework the United States used to support military governments across the hemisphere for the following decade. It draws on declassified State Department cables from the National Archives - the actual traffic that American diplomats produced as they watched a democracy be dismantled and a generation be disappeared. The diplomats saw what was happening. They reported it, classified it, and moved on.

TARGETS is a work of narrative nonfiction built on the cables themselves - the actual classified traffic that American diplomats sent to Washington as they watched a democracy be dismantled. The diplomats saw what was happening. They reported it, classified it, and moved on. The cables are still in the Archives. This book is what they say.