(1) Donald Freed, Death in Washington: The Murder of Orlando Letelier (1980)
By August 1972 Plan September was underway. Townley, Vera Serafin, and their toughs were fighting police as the Pots and Pans marched again. A select Townley arson squad had been hard at work all through the spring. Townley's young freedom fighters were also active in middle- and upper-class residential districts organizing "security contingency" against the constantly predicted Marxist sacking to come.
By August 21, Allende had declared a temporary state of emergency in Santiago, primarily because of the street violence and burnings. In Concepcion, the army took control of the city as P y L-staged violence provoked left-wing youth into street responses.
On September 2, President Allende charged that there was something called Plan September, a conspiracy to overthrow the government. A radio station in the provincial capital of Los Angeles was identified as a right-wing propaganda front and ordered closed by the government. The station was, in fact, one of Phillips's assets being fed violent disinformation, composed by Callejas and others. The next radio station to be closed for forty eight hours, as violence spread, was Radio Agricultura, another component in the Phillips network, for whom Callejas also worked. Townley led bloody street fighting to protest the closings.
On October 10, Plan September went into high gear. A nationwide truckers' strike started on that day and grew into a general protest against the government. It did not end until November 5, three days after Allende had been forced to revise his cabinet.
In Langley and Rio, money and plans for the support and, in a number of instances, instigation of these strikes flowed through the fingers of David Phillips and Nathaniel Davis. By way of a dramatic compromise, President Allende shuffled his cabinet to bring a number of military officers into the government. Then he left to try to rally support outside of Chile.
(2) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993)
Soon a series of stories were planted in the press. Newsweek's "Periscope" column said: "After studying FBI and other field investigations, the CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police were not involved in the death of Orlando Letelier...
Jeremiah O'Leary, a Washington Star reporter long close to David Phillips, wrote: "Probers are not ruling out the theory that Letelier might just as well have been killed by leftist extremists to create a martyr as by rightist conspirators."
Reported the Washington Post: "CIA officials say ... they believe that operatives of the present Chilean military junta did not take part in Letelier's killing, according to informed sources. CIA Director Bush expressed this view in a conversation late last week with Secretary of State Kissinger, the sources said. What evidence the CIA has obtained to support his initial conclusion was not disclosed."
One of the more interesting interpretations of the case came from a "Special Report" produced by the Council for Inter-American Security, a right-wing think tank, and distributed to the national media. It was written by Virginia Prewett, the journalist who had a special relationship with David Phillips. The piece Prewett wrote about the Letelier bombing indicates why she was one of Phillips's most effective media assets.
Prewett's "Special Report" was actually a diatribe against the Washington press for initially assuming that Chilean generals were involved in murdering Letelier. She, too, suggested that Letelier may have been sacrificed by leftists to turn world opinion and U.S. policy against the Pinochet regime. "Letelier was headquartered at and operated under the aegis of the radical leftist Institute for Policy Studies," she noted darkly. "Since the days of Stalin and Trotsky, intramural strife and expenditure of human life for political ends have been commonplace within the left."
However, extreme pressure on the U.S. Government from Letelier's associates at the Institute for Policy Studies drove a small group of dedicated individuals in the U.S. Attorney's office and the FBI to successfully pursue the case, despite the obstacles and false markers placed along the path by their own Government. Here's what they eventually were able to prove:
The orders to kill Letelier did, indeed, come from the highest levels of the Chilean government, through the head of DINA. Two high-level DINA officers carrying false passports were sent to the U.S. and they, in turn, contacted the anti-Castro Cubans who carried out the assassination. But the designer of the plan itself, the bomb maker and bomb planter, was the DINA agent in charge, Iowa-born electronics expert Michael Townley. Thirty-eight years old, tall and lanky with longish brown hair and a droopy moustache, Townley was the son of an American business executive who wound up as general manager of the Ford Motor plant in Santiago, Chile. Young Michael went back to the States to attend boarding school in Florida. He later worked as a mechanic among the Miami's Cuban exiles and returned to Chile just before Allende's election. He immediately became involved with the most radical opposition which, after Allende's overthrow, led to his connection with DINA.
Both Townley and the CIA deny he was an agent, but Townley admitted contacting the Agency before he returned to Chile. Agency records also show he was given "Preliminary Operational Approval," the green light to be used as an asset. The Agency claims that approval was later canceled, but has never satisfactorily explained why.
Townley eventually made a deal and testified against his DINA bosses and the five anti-Castro Cubans involved. He received a ten year sentence, served five and is now living under the Government's witness protection plan. General Pinochet refused to let the DINA bosses be extradited and the Chilean military courts refused jurisdiction.
Three of the five Cubans tried were convicted but their convictions were overturned for procedural error on appeal. (The other two had fled but were eventually caught; the last one arrested in 1991. Both pleaded guilty and each given a twelve-year sentence.) As part of an informal agreement with Townley, the Government agreed not to pursue his business relationship with his father, J. Vernon Townley, who had become a vice president of a major South Florida bank. (Townley and son had set up a corporation, called PROCIN, which imported chemicals which Michael Townley used to manufacture poison gas. Michael Townley had used the pseudonym of Kenneth Enyard on the corporation papers.)
While there are no available records which indicate that David Phillips had any operational association with Michael Townley, it's quite likely. Townley, for instance, ran a clandestine radio station to broadcast anti-Allende propaganda during the period Phillips ran the CIA's anti-Allende operation. What is known is that Phillips and J. Vernon Townley were well acquainted in Chile. Both were active in the urbane Latin American subculture of American diplomats and affluent U.S. corporate executives and they were buddies at the same social club in Santiago.
(3) William Turner, Rearview Mirror (2001)
In 1968, as the CIA scaled back its Cuba campaign, Orlando Bosch's MIRR morphed into Cuban Power, a terrorist faction that, like the religious lunatic on the train in "On the Twentieth Century", stuck trademark red, white and blue stickers at the scene of the crime. On May 31, a Japanese freighter docked at Tampa and a British merchantman under way off Key West were racked by explosions. The following day, in Miami, a man calling himself Ernesto staged a press conference condemning countries doing business with Cuba and warned that "other ships are going to explode." Although Ernesto wore a sack over his head in the manner of a Mafia defector before a Senate hearing, he was easily identified as Bosch. That summer Cuban Power terrorism spread to Los Angeles, where an Air France office, the Mexico Tourist Department and the British consulate were bombed, and Manhattan, where the diplomatic and tourist agencies of six countries with normal relations with Cuba were hit, and a time bomb was found in the Air France facility in Rockefeller Center. For good measure, two bars frequented by pro-Castro Cubans were bombed, and the audience attending a play, "The Cuban Thing", at the Henry Miller Theater off Times Square were driven crying into the street by tear gas devices. But on September 16, 1968, Bosch was caught red-handed by FBI agents tipped off by an informant inside Cuban Power as he fired on the Polish motor ship Polancia at dock in Miami. Convicted of terrorism, he was incarcerated at the Marion Federal Penitentiary, where he played gin rummy with Rolando Masferrer, locked up for violating the Neutrality Act.
When Bosch was released from prison in the fall of 1972 through the intercession of Florida politicians eyeing the exile-bloc vote, Republican Governor Claude Kirk rhapsodized, "When I think of free men seeking a homeland, I must necessarily think of Dr. Bosch." As it turned out, the mad bomber was free to resume his old ways, this time promising "an internationalization of the war." By early 1975 he was in Chile, where General Augusto Pinochet, whose junta had bloodily overthrown Allende, put him up in a government guest house while he conferred with Pinochet's secret police, the brutal DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), which was responsible for hundreds of desaparecidos during the dictatorship. "Bosch had a book on the life of Yasir Arafat with him," reported a Miami newsman who interviewed him there, "and an impressive stack of cash on the table." On September 21, 1976, Allende's ambassador, Orlando Letelier, an effective opponent of the Pinochet regime, was driving along Washington's Embassy Row when a radio-triggered bomb under his car exploded, killing him and a companion.
As CIA director, George Bush was in the loop on this one: within a week the Agency knew that DINA and several CIA-connected Cubans were responsible. But it leaked an item to Newsweek reading, "The CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police was not involved." The lie was put to that when DINA agent Michael V. Townley was arrested and convicted. Townley implicated two journeymen in Bosch's network, Guillermo Novo and Alvin Ross Diaz, who were tried and convicted, then acquitted at a retrial (when arrested in Miami, the pair was in possession of a pound of cocaine, a terrorist currency). And in 1993, after democracy returned to Chile, Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA at the time, was convicted of masterminding the Letelier murder. In a recent clemency petition, Contreras deposed that Pinochet approved and supervised all major DINA operations.
(4) John Dinges & Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (1980)
Townley added the final touches to the bomb as Paz held the parts in place for him. Suarez read and talked. Townley planned to place the bomb under the driver's seat; he molded the plastique to blow the full explosive force directly upward.
At about midnight he felt satisfied with his handiwork. The three left the motel in Paz's Volvo and stopped by the train station; Townley went to the ticket window to find out if there were any trains leaving for the New York area in the early morning hours. There were none.
"During the ride to Letelier's house," he wrote, "I was informed by Paz and Suarez that they expected me to place the device on the car as they wished to have a DINA agent, namely myself, directly tied to the placing of the device."
Townley kept quiet. He carried the bomb under his dark blue sweatshirt and wore corduroy pants. He hadn't planned on getting his pants dirty, but he had weighed the alternatives and decided he would have to tape the bomb himself.
Paz drove into the street parallel to Ogden Court. Townley walked from behind two houses into the turn-around area of the cul-de-sac and surveyed the block. People were entering a neighboring house, "so I turned around, returning to the parallel street, and walked up the hill on this parallel street, until I met Paz and Suarez, at which time we drove around to take up some time and then returned to the entrance of Letelier's street, where I was dropped off at the top of the hill."
On one side of the Leteliers lived an FBI agent; on the other, a Foreign Service officer. As Townley walked down the hill, some dogs barked, then stopped. Television screens glowed greyly through windows.
Letelier's car was parked in the driveway, nose in. Townley walked directly to the car, lay down on his back on the driver's side, pulled up his blue sweatshirt to expose the bomb, put his tools in accessible positions, and slid under the car. The space was small, Townley large. Moving as little as possible, he attached the bomb to the crossbeam with black electrical tape, occasionally flicking on a pencil flashlight to check its position.
Footsteps. Townley froze, trying to control his breathing. Not more than two inches separated him from the car chassis. The footsteps faded. He began to run tape from the speedometer cable to the explosive. What had seemed like an ample supply of tape now appeared scanty. He didn't want the bomb to slip or fall off.
He heard the sound of an engine: a car was approaching with its radio on. He stopped again, perspiration now pouring down his face and soaking his hands and body. The radio became louder; it was a police band. Townley fought to stay calm. The radio got still louder; now he could see the tires from the corner of his eye. But the car moved on, turned around in the cul-de-sac, and picking up speed, left the block. Townley flicked the flashlight on. The bomb was firmly attached, even though he would have preferred to run more tape around the crossbeam. He began to slide out. But had he taped the slide switch into the "on" position? He might have covered it in the "off" or "safety" position. He slid back under and felt, trying to remember which side was on and which off. He found the nub; it was off. He pushed it until it clicked, then pressed the tape into the groove with his finger to prevent the switch from falling back. But electrical tape is pliant and may not hold the switch, he thought.
Lack of time could lead to mistakes. Paz and Suarez had insisted that he place the bomb personally and that he do it that night. Townley felt a chill enter his sweat-laden body as he walked up the hill out of Ogden Court.
The Cubans picked him up on the deserted corner and headed slowly onto River Road. Townley told them of his uncertainty about the switch being in the correct position.
(5) Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian (22nd December, 2006)
Some secrets, it turns out, are too old or too big to keep - even for the Bush administration, which has made a crusade of rooting out leaks and clamping down on information on the inner workings of government.
In the new year, the CIA, FBI, state department and more than 80 other government agencies that handle state secrets will declassify hundreds of millions of pages of documents under a new policy that institutes an automatic release of material after 25 years.
Within those documents lie the most turbulent episodes of the 20th century: the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Vietnam war, the CIA's unauthorised experiments with LSD and its internal thinking on a raft of investigations into coups and assassinations overseas, and the FBI's hunt for communist sympathisers on US soil.
The release, awaited by scholars and journalists, goes against the grain for the president, George Bush, and the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who has argued that the disclosure of information from the White House erodes presidential power.
The decision to release documents after 25 years was made in 1995 under President Bill Clinton, although the Bush administration managed to delay it. "I was pleasantly surprised," said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "I could have easily imagined this administration saying: 'Oh, no we can't possibly adopt an automatic declassification policy. That will only assist the terrorists'."
Until now, material could remain secret indefinitely unless researchers lodged a specific request under freedom of information regulations. But declassification does not guarantee documents will be made public. Government agencies can withhold them on privacy grounds, to protect an intelligence source, or to avoid compromising an ongoing investigation.
The FBI has been notoriously stringent about exercising that prerogative, refusing to release documents on the assassination in Washington of the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier by agents of the Pinochet regime on the grounds that investigators were still pursuing leads.
(6) Robert Parry, Consortium News (22nd February, 2008)
In 1976, when George H.W. Bush was CIA director, the U.S. government tolerated right-wing terrorist cells inside the United States and mostly looked the other way when these killers topped even Palestinian terrorists in spilling blood, including a lethal car bombing in Washington, D.C., according to newly obtained internal government documents.
That car bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, on Washington’s Embassy Row, killed Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, while wounding Moffitt’s husband.
It soon became clear to the FBI and other federal investigators that the attack likely was a joint operation of DINA, the fearsome Chilean intelligence agency of military dictator Augusto Pinochet, and U.S.-based right-wing Cuban exiles.
But Bush’s CIA steered attention away from the real assassins toward leftists who supposedly killed Letelier to create a martyr for their cause. Eventually, the CIA’s cover story collapsed and – during the Carter administration – at least some of the lower-level conspirators were prosecuted, though the full story was never told.
Recently obtained internal FBI records and notes of a U.S. prosecutor involved in counter-terrorism cases make clear that the connections among Bush’s CIA, DINA and the Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM) – which supplied the trigger men for the Letelier bombing – were closer than was understood at the time.
DINA provided intelligence training for CNM terrorists who acted like a “sleeper cell” inside the United States; federal prosecutions of right-wing Cuban terrorists were routinely frustrated; and the CIA did all it could to cover for its anticommunist allies who were part of a broader international terror campaign called Operation Condor.
Beginning in late 1975, Operation Condor -- named after Chile's national bird -- was a joint operation of right-wing South American military dictatorships, working closely with U.S.-based Cuban and other anticommunist extremists on cross-border assassinations of political dissidents as far away as Europe.
This meant that during George H.W. Bush’s year at the CIA’s helm, the United States both harbored domestic terrorist cells and served as a base for international terrorism. Yet no U.S. official was ever held accountable -- and in many cases, just the opposite....
Regarding the DINA-CNM alliance, Chile’s star assassin Michael Townley told FBI interrogators after his arrest in 1978 that Cuban exiles involved in the Letelier murder had received DINA training, including CNM member Virgilio Paz, who “attended a one-month ‘quickie’ intelligence course sponsored by DINA,” the internal FBI report said.
Townley, a fiercely anticommunist American expatriate who had emerged as DINA’s chief overseas assassin, told the FBI that Paz’s training was personally approved by DINA’s director, Col. Manuel Contreras, who – the CIA later acknowledged – was an asset of the U.S. spy agency.
Paz lived at Townley’s residence during his three-month stay in Chile and DINA paid for Paz’s frequent calls back home to the United States, Townley said, recalling that Paz left Chile close to his son Brian’s birthday on June 6, 1976.
About a month later, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, DINA’s director of operations, summoned Townley to a meeting near St. Georges School in suburban Santiago. Townley recalled driving his DINA-supplied Fiat 125 sedan to the early-morning meeting and taking a thermos of coffee.
Espinoza asked Townley if he’d be available for a special operation outside Chile. Townley complained “that he had spent a majority of 1975 in Europe on DINA missions and that he felt he was neglecting his family with constant travel on behalf of DINA,” according to the FBI report...
When I tracked down former Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerry Sanford, who was assigned to the Cuban terrorism cases in the mid-1970s, he still sounded frustrated at the lack of support he got from Washington to pursue these killers who inflicted death both inside and outside the United States.
“My blood starts to boil when I think of how much we could have done but how badly we were kept in the dark,” said Sanford, now 66, living in northern Florida. “I asked for stuff and never got it.”
Sanford recalled that when CIA Director Bush visited Miami at the end of the bloody year 1976, FBI agents “asked him for information from the CIA on where explosives [for the Cuban exiles] were stashed.” The response from Bush, according to Sanford, was “forget about it.”
Referring to the umbrella organization CORU, Sanford said, “it was the only terrorist group that ever exported terrorism from the United States.”
Ironically, the CIA’s analytical division reached a similar, troubling conclusion in an annual report entitled “International Terrorism in 1976” that was published in July 1977, after CIA Director Bush had left office.
“Cuban exile groups operating under the aegis of a new alliance called the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations [CORU] were particularly active during the second half of the year,” the CIA reported. “They were responsible for no less than 17 acts of international terrorism (at least three of which took place in the US).
“Statistically, this matches the record compiled by the various Palestinian terrorist groups during the same period. But largely because the Cuban exile operations included the October bombing of a Cubana Airlines passenger aircraft, their consequences were far more bloody.”
In other words, Cuban exiles based in the United States – during George H.W. Bush’s year in charge of the CIA – outpaced Palestinian terrorists in terms of a total body count.
