Not long ago a strange, slightly disheveled man approached Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky in the Buenos Aires subway to request a meeting. What began as a casual encounter led to a journalistic bombshell: The man was a former naval officer, Francisco Scilingo, and he was prepared to break the code of silence on the conduct of the Argentine military during its "dirty war" against subversion (1976-82).

The Flight, which has become a record-breaking bestseller in Argentina, summarizes (and in many cases, actually reproduces) the ensuing conversations. It provides a pitiless, candid and frankly horrifying look at the way that the Argentine military dealt with opponents (real or imagined) after the death of President Juan Peron in 1974 and particularly after the deposition of his successor (and widow) Isabel Martinez de Peron in 1976. Scilingo knows whereof he speaks. During those years he was a junior officer at the Naval Mechanical War School, whose very name has become synonymous with torture, murder, kidnappings and (a macabre new addition to the lexicon) "disappearances"--at least 9,000 of them, according to a national investigative commission appointed by then-President Raul Alfonsin in 1983. More to the point, he participated in dozens of flights over the South Atlantic, during which political prisoners were drugged, stripped and then dispatched into the briny deep from an elevation of several hundred feet. On one occasion, Scilingo himself almost slipped into the void and was pulled back only through the efforts of an alert crew member. These journeys form the grisly centerpiece of Verbitsky's book.

Perhaps the experience of almost meeting the same fate as his victims suddenly sensitized Scilingo to the enormity of his crime. In any event, eventually he asked to be taken off this duty and entered a severe emotional crisis. This in turn led to his being dropped from the list of candidates for promotion, his voluntary retirement from the Navy and his subsequent reemergence in the press as a star witness against his former colleagues. Unfortunately, his revelations have not advanced the cause of justice; indeed, at this writing Scilingo is serving a jail sentence for fraud.

The Flight is therefore both a historical document and a moral treatise. A rapid reading of the book suggests that there is something uniquely corrupt about a society that does not know, and does not wish to know, what was done in its name--and worse still, wants to ostracize or even punish inconvenient witnesses. Yet Argentine history, particularly recent history, is an ideological and political battlefield, and Verbitsky is far from an impartial observer.

Unlike Nazi Germany, Argentina had no foreign occupier to administer justice once the repressive regime had collapsed. Instead, the task was forced upon a judicial system never known for political independence, and with the perpetrators--in this case, the military--hovering ominously in the wings. Even as convinced a proponent of human rights as President Alfonsin (1983-89) found it prudent to limit prosecutions to a handful of flag officers. His zeal to settle accounts with the torturers was likewise tempered by knowledge that some of the events described in this book (though not the flights themselves) actually began during the administration of Isabel Peron, whose party was (and remains) Argentina's largest and most important political force. The decision of Alfonsin's successor, Carlos Menem, to subsequently pardon the generals can be criticized on many grounds, but it remains true that today Argentina enjoys an unprecedented degree of civilian control of the military.

Nor does Verbitsky tell us very much about what led to the events described in this book, except in some arguably tendentious references in a chronology that follows the main text. See, for instance, the activities of various urban guerrilla groups whose specialty was humiliating the armed forces and baiting them into assuming an ultra-repressive stance. (While not in themselves regime-threatening, these activities also unmasked the government as incapable of providing basic security for its citizens, thereby "softening up" public opinion for an eventual military coup.)

There is, in fact, a growing literature of self-criticism by those who participated in urban guerrilla activities that would provide a needed counterpoint to the tone of moral superiority that informs Verbitsky's narrative. The New Press, which has performed a splendid service in translating this book, would do well to consider making this other genre likewise available to American readers. It might even consider getting Verbitsky himself to write a book on the subject, since his relationship with some of these groups was far from platonic, as was indeed that of Juan Mendez of Human Rights Watch/Americas, who contributes the useful afterword to this book.