The day Pinochet bombed Washington to assassinate an opposition leader: the ruthless crime of Orlando Letelier

On the morning of September 21, 1976, 45 years ago, a car explosion on Massachusetts Avenue in the heart of Washington’s diplomatic district revealed an unthinkable, tacit, hidden, but undeniable truth: the Chilean military dictatorship, then led by Augusto Pinochet, had bombed the capital of the United States.

Among the ruins of the car, blown up by a bomb placed inside, were the bodies of Orlando Letelier, former Chancellor and Minister of Defense in the government of socialist Salvador Allende, overthrown by Pinochet in 1973, that of her American aide-de-camp, Ronni Moffit, and, seriously injured, of her husband, Michael Moffit. The autopsy revealed that Letelier died of “exsanguination, traumatic amputation of the lower limbs” and “injuries sustained during an explosion”.

Nearly half a century of investigations and the declassification of secret CIA and State Department documents delivered to Chile shed light on what the suspicions had anticipated and supported: Letelier was assassinated by order of Pinochet, with the knowledge and some consent of the United States and as part of the so-called “Condor Plan”, which the dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay designed to assassinate opponents and which came into effect in November 1975.

In August 1976, a month and a half before the assassination of Letelier, then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who with a certain candor had admitted in his memoirs that in 1970 Richard Nixon had $ 40 million “to crack the economy ”. From the Chilean government of Allende, received a fourteen-page report, classified as secret, entitled “World War III and South America“, in which then-Under-Secretary for Latin America Harry Schlaudeman made him aware of” Operation Condor. “An excerpt from that report read:”Extensive cooperation underway between the security and intelligence services of six governments: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Their respective secret police hold formal meetings to plan “Operation Condor,” which includes extensive exchanges of information similar to that of the FBI regarding the suspects. There are plans for a special communication network. The details of this case remain secret, but not the high degree of security collaboration ”.

Who was Orlando Letelier and why did Pinochet order his assassination? He was a brilliant mind of Chilean socialism and a henchman of Allende. He was born in 1932 and, in his youth, had joined socialism, which cost him in 1959 his post as advisor to the copper department of Chile. He was to go to Venezuela with his family, his wife and his three children, then a fourth would arrive, Juan Pablo, now an economist and senator in Chile. In Venezuela, he was a consultant to the Ministry of Finance and then joined the newly established Inter-American Development Bank, where he headed the lending division. He was also a consultant to the United Nations and responsible for the creation of the Asian Development Bank.

In January 1971, Allende appointed him Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States. Letelier was tasked with exposing and defending the Chilean government’s congressional-approved decision to nationalize large-scale copper mining. In 1973 he was Chancellor and Minister of the Interior and Defense. In the latter position, he was surprised by Pinochet’s violent military coup on September 11, 1973. He was arrested by the military when he entered the ministry, next to the Palacio de La Moneda. He was tortured in each of his places of detention: at the Tacna Artillery Regiment, at the Liberator Bernardo O’Higgins military school, at the political prison on Dawson Island, in the Strait of Magellan, at the Academy of the Air Force and Camp Ritoque in Valparaíso. International pressure saved him from death.

He went into exile with his people to Venezuela and then to the United States, and by 1975 he was a staunch opponent of Pinochet and his government. He was a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and director of the Transnational Institute, as well as a professor at the School of International Services at American University, Washington. He successfully argued for the rejection of international loans to Chile by European countries. On September 10, 1976, eleven days before his assassination, Pinochet signed a decree withdrawing his Chilean nationality.. Responded : “I was deprived of my dignity as a Chilean, but I want you to know that I am Chilean, I was born Chilean and I will die Chilean. They, the fascists, were born traitors, they live like traitors and we will always remember as traitors fascists ”.

For Letelier’s murder, Michael Townley, a CIA agent linked to Chile’s DINA, (National Intelligence Directorate) headed by General Manuel Contreras, was also prosecuted along with his peer, Brigadier General Pedro Espinoza. In 2015, documents declassified by the United States and circulated in Chile demonstrated the direct involvement of Pinochet and DINA in Letelier’s assassination. A few years ago, Juan Pablo Letelier revealed that one of the documents released by Washington mentioned “a communication between Secretary of State George Schultz with the presidency”, (Schultz was Secretary of State to Ronald Reagan) which reveals the existence of a conclusive CIA document “with convincing information that Pinochet ordered Manuel Contreras, head of the regime’s secret police, to assassinate my father”.

Schultz’s report says, among other things: “Never before has the CIA drawn and presented any conclusions that there is such strong evidence of its leadership role (of Pinochet) in this act of terrorism. It is not. clear whether we can or want to consider prosecuting Pinochet, yet this is a blatant example of a head of state’s direct involvement in a particularly disturbing act of state terrorism both because it took place in our capital and because since then its government is generally considered friendly. ”

The perpetrator was CIA agent Michael Townley: he assembled the homemade bomb, placed it in Letelier’s car, and probably flipped the remote control that set it off. He was born in 1942, on December 9 he will be 79 years old, and lives today under the regime of protected witnesses. Linked to the CIA from an early age, his father was probably an agent of the American Central Intelligence, he arrived in Chile in 1957 because his father had been appointed director in this country of the Ford Motor Company. He married a Chilean woman, in 1967 he returned to the United States, lived in Miami where he became an explosives expert for the CIA, in that Miami which was plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro and in 1969 he returned to Chile, under the orders of David Atlee Phillips to prevent the election, then the hypothesis, of Salvador Allende. He organized paramilitary groups in Chile and, according to his own confession, a smear campaign against General Carlos Prats, Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean army who resigned on August 21, 1973 and went into exile with his wife in Buenos Aires. Prats has been replaced by Pinochet. On September 30, 1974, General Prats and his wife were killed by the explosion of a car bomb, as they entered their residence in the district of Palermo.

Years later, on August 18, 1993, in front of Chilean journalist Marcelo Araya and for the show Special report, Townley admitted to planting the bomb that killed Letelier and Moffit. He said he had placed it with the help of Cuban exiles and on the orders of General Manuel Contreras, head of DINA.

November 9, 1999 Townley confessed to Argentine judge María Servini to having murdered the Prats couple and even gave specific details about the explosive used in the attack and even the type of radio transmitter chosen to detonate the bomb.. He was tried in the United States, along with three other DINA officers in absentia, because Pinochet refused to extradite them. He was found guilty and sentenced. But in exchange for vital information, some of which is reproduced here, he was released under the witness protection program. If he still lives, he does so under a different name somewhere in the United States.

Pinochet, who died in 2006, has never been prosecuted for Letelier’s murder. The memory of the former socialist minister has been claimed at public events. In 2016, then Chilean President Michelle Bachelet received declassified documents from the case and participated in an act in Washington at the scene of Letelier’s death. One of his sons Francisco, a California-based muralist, presented one of his works which included some of the declassified reports on the case. He says he spent his life trying to satisfy his mother’s request on the day of the murder: this crime does not teach him to hate. “The last thing I want is to be a revenge thinker. However, we have not dismantled the myth of Henry Kissinger, which remains the bedrock of cunning in foreign policy. As a Chilean and Latin American who reaches millions of people in Asia, Cambodia, Vietnam, I think he is a criminal who must be prosecuted. It is a myth which deserves and must be investigated ”.

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