Assassination of Orlando Letelier

On 21 September 1976, Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, was assassinated by car bombing, in Washington, D.C. Letelier, who was living in exile in the United States, was killed along with his work colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt, who was in the car with her husband Michael.^[1] The assassination was carried out by agents of the Chilean secret police (DINA), and was one among many carried out as part of Operation Condor. Declassified U.S. intelligence documents confirm that Pinochet directly ordered the killing.^[2]

Background

In 1971, Letelier was appointed

After his release in 1974, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he became a senior fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, an independent international policy studies think tank.^[7] He plunged into writing, speaking and lobbying the US Congress and European governments against Augusto Pinochet's regime, and soon he became the leading voice of the Chilean resistance, in the process preventing several loans (especially from Europe) from being awarded to the military government. He was described by his colleagues as being "the most respected and effective spokesman in the international campaign to condemn and isolate" Pinochet's government.^[8] Letelier was assisted at the Institute for Policy Studies by Ronni Moffitt, a 25-year-old fundraiser who ran a "Music Carryout" program that produced musical instruments for the poor, and also campaigned for democracy in Chile.^[9]

Letelier soon became a person of interest for

Today Pinochet has signed a decree in which it is said that I am deprived of my nationality. This is an important day for me. A dramatic day in my life in which the action of the fascist generals against me makes me feel more Chilean than ever. Because we are the true Chileans, in the tradition of

Victor Jara, and they – the fascists – are the enemies of Chile, the traitors who are selling our country to foreign investments. I was born a Chilean, I am a Chilean and I will die a Chilean. They were born traitors, they live as traitors and they will be known forever as fascist traitors.^[15]

Orlando Letelier was driving to work in Washington, D.C., on 21 September 1976, with Ronni Moffitt (January 10, 1951 – September 21, 1976) and her husband of four months, Michael. Letelier was driving, while Moffitt was in the front passenger seat and Michael, in the back behind his wife.

Both Ronni Moffitt and Orlando Letelier were taken to the George Washington University Medical Center shortly thereafter. At the hospital, it was discovered that Ronni's larynx and carotid artery had been severed by a piece of flying shrapnel.^[18] She drowned in her own blood some 30 minutes after Letelier's death,^[17] while Michael suffered only a minor head wound. Michael estimated the bomb was detonated at approximately 9:30 am; the medical examiner report set the time of Letelier's death at 9:50 am and Moffitt's at 10:37 am, the cause of death for both listed as explosion-incurred injuries due to a car bomb placed under the car on the driver's side.^{[citation needed]}

Diego Arria intervened once again by bringing Letelier's body to Caracas (Venezuela) for burial, where it remained until the end of Pinochet's rule.

Cover-up effort

A U.S. Department of Justice affidavit from August 23, 1991 detailed how, the Pinochet regime made efforts to cover up its role in the assassinations of Letelier and Moffitt.^[19] The extensive efforts were codenamed “Operación Mascarada.”^[19]

Investigation and prosecution

Investigators initially determined that the explosion was caused by a plastic explosive, molded to concentrate the force of its blast into the driver's seat. The bomb was attached by wires or magnets to the car's underside, and blew a "circular hole, 2 to 2½ feet in diameter" in the driver's seat.^[16] The bomb was not believed to have been controlled by a timing device or a remote-controlled detonator.^[16]

In the days after the incident, spokespersons for the

As Chile was unwilling to submit to a determination by a U.S. tribunal, a State Department principal deputy legal advisor, Michael Kozak, originated an idea to settle the dispute invoking the arbitration clause of the 1914 Chile-United States peace treaty.^[22][23]

Chile agreed and in the early 1990s the arbitration commission determined the amounts of the payments to be made to the families.^[23]

Allegations of U.S. foreknowledge

According to John Dinges, author of The Condor Years (The New Press 2003), documents released in 2015 revealed a CIA report dated April 28, 1978 that showed the agency by then had knowledge that Pinochet ordered the murders.^[24] The report stated “Contreras told a confidant he authorized the assassination of Letelier on orders from Pinochet."^[24] A State Department document also referred to eight separate CIA reports from around the same date, each sourced to “extremely sensitive informants” who provided evidence of Pinochet’s direct involvement in ordering the assassination and in directing the subsequent cover-up.^[24] FBI Carter Cornick, an FBI special agent credited with solving the case with his partner Robert Scherrer, said that the information was hearsay gathered from people who might provide the CIA with information but would never appear in court.^[24] However, documented Michael Townley confessions which were published by the National Security Archive in November 2023 indicated that DINA head Manuel Contreras was in fact the one who ordered the assassination.^[25] Townley even at point sent Contreas a letter where he accused him of misleading Pinochet on details surrounding the assassination.^[26][25]

When Townley and his Chilean associate tried to obtain B-2 visas to the United States in Paraguay, Landau was told by Paraguayan intelligence that these Paraguayan subjects were to meet with General Vernon A. Walters in the United States, concerning CIA business. Landau was suspicious of this declaration, and cabled for more information. The B-2 visas were revoked by the State Department on August 9, 1976.^[27] However, under the same names, two DINA agents used fraudulent Chilean passports to travel to the U.S. on diplomatic A-2 visas, in order to shadow Letelier.^[27][28] Townley himself flew to the U.S. on a fraudulent Chilean passport and under another assumed name. Landau had made copies of the visa applications though, which later documented the relationship of Townley and DINA with the Paraguayan visa applications.

According to Dinges, documents released in 1999 and 2000 establish that "the

Kenneth Maxwell claims that U.S. policymakers were aware not only of Operation Condor in general, but in particular "that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States." A month before the Letelier assassination, Kissinger ordered "that the Latin American rulers involved be informed that the 'assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad ... would create a most serious moral and political problem." Maxwell wrote in his review of Peter Kornbluh's book, "This demarche was apparently not delivered: the U.S. embassy in Santiago demurred on the ground that to deliver such a strong rebuke would upset the dictator", and that, on September 20, 1976, the day before Letelier and Moffitt were killed, the State Department instructed the ambassadors to take no further action with regard to the Condor scheme. [Maxwell, 2004, 18].

On April 10, 2010, the Associated Press reported that a document discovered by the National Security Archive indicated that the State Department communique that was supposed to have gone out to the Chilean government warning against the assassinations had been blocked by then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.^[29]

During the

The documents showed Letelier was receiving $5,000 a month from the Cuban government and under the supervision of Beatriz Allende, he used his contacts within the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS),^[33][34] and western human rights groups to organize a campaign within the United Nations as well as the US Congress to isolate the new Chilean government^[33] This organized pressure on Pinochet’s government was allegedly closely coordinated by the Cuban and Soviet governments, perhaps using individuals like Letelier to implement these efforts. Letelier's briefcase also contained his address book containing the names of dozens of known and suspected Eastern Bloc intelligence agents. Correspondence between Letelier and individuals in Cuba had been handled via Julian Rizo, who used his diplomatic status to hide his activities.^[32][35]

Fellow IPS member and friend Saul Landau described Evans and Novak as part of an “organized right wing attack”. In 1980, Letelier's widow, Isabel, wrote in The New York Times that the money sent to her late husband from Cuba was from western sources, and that Cuba had simply acted as an intermediary,^[36] although Novak and Evans point out that the documents from Beatriz Allende were very clear on the source of the money.^[33]

Around the time he was identified as a murder suspect in the U.S. and Chilean press in March 1978, Townley, using the alias J. Andres Wilson, sent a letter to Contreas were he issued a series of bitter complaints about the operational mistakes in the Letelier assassination mission that had led to his public identification.^[26][25] Townley also claimed Contreras had not “let his Excellency [Pinochet] know the truth about this case.”^[26][25] In one of his first "confession" letters that he wrote the same month, Townley acknowledged that he was in fact employed by DINA and was "following orders from Gen. Contreas" when he carried out the assassination.^[37] In a letter dated March 14, 1976, Townley recounted how he received orders to carry out the assassination from Contreas' deputy Pedro Espinoza, and later also added that he in fact recruited the assassination team composed of American Cuban exiles after entering the U.S. on false visas he obtained in Paraguay.^[38] However, Townley stated that his source of foreign assistance was in fact the so-called “Red Condor,” the Condor network of Southern Cone secret police services.^[38]

In popular culture

British film director Alan Clarke was in the pre-production stages of making the story into a film titled Assassination on Embassy Row, based on Saul Landau's book of the same title. Whilst putting the film together in the US, Clarke was diagnosed with lung cancer and returned to the United Kingdom. Following Clarke's death in 1990, the project was shelved.

A minor character in the 1983 film