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THE GHOSTS OF BOMBINGS PAST | PAGE 1, 2
At the heart of the matter is Condor. FBI agent Robert Sherrer, now deceased, filed his startling report from Argentina on Operation Condor on Sept. 28, 1976. He described it as a joint effort by Chile, Argentina and Uruguay to stamp out leftist opposition in exile. His cable noted that the "most secret phase of 'Operation Condor' involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to travel anywhere in the world to nonmember countries to carry out sanctions up to assassination." It was "not beyond the realm of possibility" that the Letelier hit was part of Condor, the cable added. Exiles had been hunted down in Italy and Spain, among other countries, in an overseas extension of the terror Pinochet had unleashed at home, torturing and "disappearing" thousands of leftists, socialists, communists or merely young foreigners attracted to Chile by the socialist government of Salvador Allende, which Pinochet had toppled. One was Charles Horman, a 31-year-old filmmaker, writer and human-rights activist, whose murder during the 1973 coup was dramatized in the Jack Lemmon-Sissy Spacek film "Missing." Hundreds of people were disappearing in Chile in the aftermath of the coup, as the U.S. well knew. One State Department memorandum to Henry Kissinger dated Nov. 16, 1973, said, "An internal, confidential report prepared for the junta puts the number of executions for the period Sept. 11-30 at 320," or more than three times the publicly acknowledged figure. The memo said Chile's leaders justified the executions as legal under martial law. "Also present is a puritanical, crusading spirit," it added. "A number of those executed seem to have been petty criminals." In its foreign assassinations, DINA often contracted with right-wing anti-Castro Cuban exiles from New Jersey and Florida. For the Letelier mission, DINA selected a special agent, Michael Townley, the American-born son of a Ford Motor Company executive in Chile, to recruit the Cubans. Pinochet was firmly in control of the operations, his secret police chief would testify in court years later. The State Department knew Townley was coming to Washington on some kind of unspecified mission, as it turned out. Relations between Washington and Santiago were cordial: President Nixon and his national security advisor, Kissinger, had helped put Pinochet in power. In 1976 Kissinger was secretary of state, while future President George Bush was head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA's deputy director was Vernon Walters, a multilingual Army officer and outspoken supporter of the Chilean military. The Chileans notified the CIA that Townley was coming, even sending along a photograph, a traditional courtesy among friendly intelligence services. On the night of Sept. 20, 1976, Townley strapped the bomb under Letelier's car in the Maryland suburbs. The next morning the Cubans set it off by remote control as Letelier drove along Washington's famed Embassy Row. As Carter Cornick and other FBI agents scrambled for leads in the aftermath of the bombing, they were surprised to pick up a newspaper and read a statement by Kissinger that the White House had "ruled out" the Pinochet regime as a suspect in the Letelier murder. The FBI had done no such thing. But it -- like everyone else in the government -- knew how to read between the lines of an official statement, especially when it came from someone as powerful as Kissinger. Investigative leads dried up. The picture of Townley remained buried in CIA and State Department files until -- years later --it was found and leaked by the FBI during the Jimmy Carter administration. Townley was then handed over to the FBI by Chile, turned state's evidence and ratted out his three Cuban conspirators, whose convictions were subsequently overturned. Townley skated into the witness protection program, where he's lived free under a new name ever since. The same Cuban exiles, as well as more of their right-wing brethren, are thought to have participated in the murders of other Chilean exiles abroad, including on Spanish soil, where Pinochet is being sought to answer murder charges. Citizens of Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands were also murdered and tortured by Pinochet's security forces in Chile. "The administration is conducting a review of documents in its possession that may shed light on human rights abuses during the Pinochet era," State Department spokesman James Rubin said Tuesday. "We will declassify and make public as much information as possible, consistent with U.S. laws and the national security and law-enforcement interests of the United States." A retired officer from the CIA, whose record of deception and evasion in Chile is unparalleled, called the Pinochet papers "a can of worms." Nobody could argue with that.
Jeff Stein covers national security issues for Salon.
He can't go home again No matter what the House of Lords decides, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is finally being held responsible for the death of President Salvador Allende -- and Chilean democracy.
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