CIA activities in Honduras have been ongoing since the 1980s. More is known with the release of declassified documents. 1984 Declassified documents from the CIA Inspector General begin with a heavily redacted 21 July 1984 cable to the National Security Council, stating that Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, head of the Honduras military, ordered the establishment of the 316th Military Intelligence Battalion (316 MI Bn). 1987 Florencio Caballero was a former Honduran Army sergeant and interrogator until 1984. He stated that he had been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, which the New York Times confirmed with US and Honduran officials. Much of his account was confirmed by three American and two Honduran officials and may be the fullest given of how army and police units were authorized to organize death squads that seized, interrogated and killed suspected leftists. He said that while Argentine and Chilean trainers taught the Honduran Army kidnapping and elimination techniques, the CIA explicitly forbade the use of physical torture or assassination. Although it forbade torture and assassination on paper, the CIA knew it was happening in Honduras. Indeed, the CIA helped train hundreds of Latin American dictatorships' police officers via both its infamous training manuals and the School of the Americas, now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Caballero described the CIA role as ambiguous. "Caballero said his superior officers ordered him and other members of army intelligence units to conceal their participation in death squads from CIA advisers. He added that he was sent to Houston for six months in 1979 to be trained by CIA instructors in interrogation techniques. "They prepared me in interrogation to end the use of physical torture in Honduras - they taught psychological methods," Mr. Caballero said of his American training. "So when we had someone important, we hid him from the Americans, interrogated him ourselves and then gave him to a death squad to kill." "The C.I.A. had access to secret army jails and to written reports summarizing the interrogation of suspected leftists, according to Mr. Caballero and two American officials. The Americans also said the C.I.A. knew the Honduran Army was killing prisoners. The American officials said that at one point in 1983 the C.I.A. demanded the killings stop. In 1984, a C.I.A. agent was recalled from Honduras after a prisoner's relative identified him as having visited a secret jail, two American and one Honduran