Bush Shields Dad on Chile Terrorism
By Robert Parry
Friday 22 September 2006
Chilean investigators say the Bush administration is undercutting their case against former dictator Augusto Pinochet
for his alleged role in the terrorist assassination of a political rival on the streets of Washington three decades ago,
a crime that then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush appears to have tolerated and then helped cover-up.
Now, George W. Bush has picked up the mantle from his father for protecting the 90-year-old Pinochet from ever facing
justice for the murder of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt, who
were killed by a car bomb on Sept. 21, 1976, as Letelier drove down Massachusetts Avenue.
Six years ago, near the end of the Clinton administration, an FBI team reviewed new evidence that had become available
in the case and recommended the indictment of Pinochet. But the final decision was left to the incoming Bush
administration, which has failed to act while also withholding relevant documents from Chilean investigators.
"Every day it is clearer that Pinochet ordered my brother's death," human rights lawyer Fabiola Letelier told the New
York Times. "But for a proper and complete investigation to take place we need access to the appropriate records and
evidence." [NYT, Sept. 21, 2006]
By frustrating the Chilean investigation, the Bush administration also is protecting former President George H.W. Bush
against possibly being implicated in this act of terrorism, conceivably as an accessory after the fact for diverting
suspicion away from Pinochet.
The Letelier-Moffitt murder is considered the worst act of state-sponsored terrorism in the history of Washington, D.C.
At minimum, George H.W. Bush's CIA operated with extraordinary incompetence and negligence in failing to act on explicit
warnings about the assassination plot.
Thirty-Year Tale
The case dates back to 1976 when the elder George Bush was running the CIA and right-wing military dictatorships - many
with close CIA ties - were striking out at political adversaries through a cross-border assassination project known as
Operation Condor.
At the time, one of the most eloquent voices making the case against Pinochet's regime was Orlando Letelier, who was
living in exile and operating out of a liberal think tank in Washington, the Institute for Policy Studies.
Earlier in their government careers, when Letelier was briefly defense minister in the leftist government of Salvador
Allende, Pinochet had been Letelier's subordinate. In 1973, after Pinochet took power in a military coup that killed
Allende, Pinochet imprisoned Letelier at a desolate concentration camp on Dawson Island off Chile's south Pacific coast.
International pressure won Letelier release a year later.
By 1976, however, Pinochet was chafing under Letelier's criticism of the regime's human rights record. Letelier was
doubly infuriating to Pinochet because Letelier was regarded as a man of intellect and charm, even impressing CIA
officers who observed him as "a personable, socially pleasant man" and "a reasonable, mature democrat," according to CIA
biographical sketches.
Pinochet fumed to U.S. officials, including to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, that Letelier was spreading lies and
causing trouble with the U.S. Congress. Soon, Pinochet was plotting with Manuel Contreras, chief of Chile's feared DINA
secret service, on how to silence Letelier for good.
By summer 1976, Bush's CIA was hearing a lot about Operation Condor from South American sources who had attended a
second organizational conference of Southern Cone intelligence services.
These CIA sources reported that the military regimes were preparing "to engage in 'executive action' outside the
territory of member countries." In intelligence circles, "executive action" is a euphemism for assassination.
On July 30, 1976, a CIA official briefed State Department officials about these "disturbing developments in [Condor's]
operational attitudes." The information was passed to Kissinger in a "secret" report on August 3, 1976.
The 14-page report from Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlaudeman said the military regimes were "joining forces to
eradicate 'subversion,' a word which increasingly translates into non-violent dissent from the left and center left."
[See Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File.]
Targeting Letelier
While information about the larger Condor strategy was spreading through the upper levels of the Ford administration,
Pinochet and Contreras were putting in motion an audacious plan to eliminate Orlando Letelier in his safe haven in
Washington, D.C.
In July 1976, two DINA operatives - Michael Townley and Armando Fernandez Larios - went to Paraguay where DINA had
arranged for them to get false passports and visas for a trip to the United States.
Townley and Larios were using the false names Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral and a cover story claiming they were
investigating suspected leftists working for Chile's state copper company in New York.
Townley and Fernandez said their project had been cleared with the CIA's station chief in Santiago. A senior Paraguayan
official, Conrado Pappalardo, urged U.S. Ambassador George Landau to cooperate, citing a direct appeal from Pinochet in
support of the mission. Supposedly, the Paraguayan government claimed, the two Chileans were to meet with Bush's CIA
Deputy Director Vernon Walters.
An alarmed Landau recognized that the visa request was highly unusual, since such operations were normally coordinated
with the CIA station in the host country and were cleared with CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Though granting the visas, Landau took the precaution of sending an urgent cable to Walters and photostatic copies of
the fake passports to the CIA. Landau said he received an urgent cable back signed by CIA Director Bush, reporting that
Walters, who was in the process of retiring, was out of town.
When Walters returned a few days later, he cabled Landau that he had "nothing to do with this" mission. Landau
immediately canceled the visas.
Landau also alerted senior State Department officials. In one cable, Landau said the "Paraguayan caper" had
"troublesome aspects" and recommended that the two Chileans be barred from entering the United States.
"If there is still time, and if there is a possibility of turning off this harebrained scheme," assistant secretary
Shlaudeman wrote in reply, "you are authorized to go back [to Paraguayan officials] to urge that the Chileans be
persuaded not - repeat not - to travel."
But the Ford administration dithered over delivering a formal demarche demanding that Pinochet's government cease and
desist in its cross-border assassinations. Though a plan for warning Santiago was developed, the State Department could
not agree how to carry it out without offending the prickly Pinochet.
Bush's CIA
It also remains unclear what - if anything - Bush's CIA did after learning about the "Paraguayan caper."
Normal protocol would have required senior CIA officials to ask their Chilean counterparts about the supposed trip to
Langley. However, even with the declassification of more records in recent years, that question has never been fully
answered.
The CIA also demonstrated little curiosity over the Aug. 22, 1976, arrival of two other Chilean operatives using Juan
Williams and Alejandro Romeral, the phony names that were intended to hide the identity of the two operatives in the
earlier plot.
When these two different operatives arrived in Washington, they made a point of having the Chilean Embassy notify
Walters's office at CIA.
"It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage functions that it would simply have ignored a
clandestine operation by a foreign intelligence service in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere in the United States," wrote
John Dinges and Saul Landau in their 1980 book, Assassination on Embassy Row. "It is equally implausible that Bush,
Walters, Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of international assassinations that had been attributed
to DINA."
Apparently, DINA dispatched the second pair of operatives, using the phony names, to show that the initial contacts for
visas in Paraguay were not threatening. In other words, the Chilean government had the replacement team of Williams and
Romeral go through the motions of a trip to Washington with the intent to visit Walters to dispel any American
suspicions or to spread confusion among suspicious U.S. officials.
But it's still unclear whether Bush's CIA contacted Pinochet's government about its mysterious behavior and, if not,
why not.
The Bomb Plot
As for the Letelier assassination, DINA was soon plotting another way to carry out the killing.
In late August 1976, DINA dispatched a preliminary team of one man and one woman to do surveillance on Letelier as he
moved around Washington. Then, Townley was sent under a different alias to carry out the murder.
After arriving in New York on Sept. 9, Townley connected with Cuban National Movement leader Guillermo Novo in Union
City, N.J., and then headed to Washington. Townley assembled a remote-controlled bomb that used pieces bought at Radio
Shack and Sears.
On Sept. 18, joined by Cuban extremists Virgilio Paz and Dionisio Suarez, Townley went to Letelier home in Bethesda,
Maryland, outside Washington. The assassination team attached the bomb underneath Letelier's Chevrolet Chevelle.
Three days later, on the morning of Sept. 21, Paz and Suarez followed Letelier as he drove to work with two associates,
Ronni Moffitt and her husband Michael.
As the Chevelle proceeded down Massachusetts Avenue, through an area known as Embassy Row because many of the city's
embassies line the street, the assassins detonated the bomb.
The blast ripped off Letelier's legs and punctured a hole in Ronni Moffitt's jugular vein. She drowned in her own blood
at the scene; Letelier died after being taken to George Washington University Hospital. Michael Moffitt survived.
At the time, the attack represented the worst act of international terrorism on U.S. soil and remains the most
notorious terror attack sponsored by a foreign government inside the United States.
Adding to the potential for scandal, the terrorism had been carried out by a regime that was an ostensible ally of the
United States, one that had gained power with the help of the Nixon administration and the CIA.
Though initially treated in the press as a murder mystery, the facts behind the Letelier bombing threatened to unleash
a major political scandal at just the wrong time for President Gerald Ford's election campaign.
Bush at Risk
George H.W. Bush's reputation was also at risk. As authors Dinges and Landau noted in Assassination on Embassy Row,
"the CIA reaction was peculiar" after the cable from Ambassador Landau arrived disclosing a covert Chilean intelligence
operation and asking Deputy Director Walters if he had a meeting scheduled with the DINA agents.
"Landau expected Walters to take quick action in the event that the Chilean mission did not have CIA clearance. Yet a
week passed during which the assassination team could well have had time to carry out their original plan to go directly
from Paraguay to Washington to kill Letelier. Walters and Bush conferred during that week about the matter."
"One thing is clear," Dinges and Landau wrote, "DINA chief Manuel Contreras would have called off the assassination
mission if the CIA or State Department had expressed their displeasure to the Chilean government. An intelligence
officer familiar with the case said that any warning would have been sufficient to cause the assassination to be
scuttled. Whatever Walters and Bush did - if anything - the DINA mission proceeded."
Within hours of the bombing, Letelier's associates accused the Pinochet regime, citing its hatred of Letelier and its
record for brutality. The Chilean government, however, heatedly denied any responsibility.
That night, at a dinner at the Jordanian Embassy, Sen. James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat, spotted Bush and
approached the CIA director. Abourezk said he was a friend of Letelier's and beseeched Bush to use the CIA "to find the
bastards who killed him."
Abourezk said Bush responded: "I'll see what I can do. We are not without assets in Chile."
A problem, however, was that one of the CIA's best-placed assets - DINA chief Manuel Contreras - would turn out to be
the mastermind of the assassination.
Wiley Gilstrap, the CIA's Santiago station chief, did approach Contreras with questions about the Letelier bombing and
wired back to Langley Contreras's assurance that the Chilean government wasn't involved.
Following the strategy of public misdirection already used in hundreds of "disappearances," Contreras pointed the
finger at the Chilean Left. Contreras suggested that leftists had killed Letelier to turn him into a martyr.
Evidence of Lying
The Ford administration, of course, had plenty of evidence that Contreras was lying.
Like a quarter century later, when the U.S. government immediately recognized al-Qaeda's hand in the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington because U.S. officials knew about Osama bin Laden's intentions, there were
signs everywhere in September 1976 that DINA had been plotting some kind of attack inside the United States.
If anything, the Letelier assassination should have been even easier to solve since the Pinochet government had flashed
its intention to mount a suspicious operation inside the United States by involving the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay and the
deputy director of the CIA. Bush's CIA even had in its files a photograph of the leader of the terrorist squad, Michael
Townley.
"The CIA had substantive evidence to show that Contreras was lying," research Peter Kornbluh wrote in The Pinochet
File. "The Agency had concrete knowledge that DINA had murdered other political opponents abroad, using the same modus
operandi as the Letelier case. The Agency had substantive intelligence on Condor, and Chile's involvement in planning
murders of political opponents in Europe."
Rather than fulfilling his promise to Abourezk to "see what I can do," Bush ignored leads that would have taken him
into a confrontation with Pinochet.
Any publicity might have opened up the Ford administration to another round of political damage for coddling a
terrorist regime. The CIA either didn't put the pieces together or chose to avoid the obvious conclusions that the
evidence presented.
Indeed, the CIA didn't seem to want any information that might implicate the Pinochet regime. On Oct. 6, a CIA
informant in Chile went to the CIA station in Santiago and relayed an account of Pinochet denouncing Letelier.
The informant said the dictator had called Letelier's criticism of the government "unacceptable." The source "believes
that the Chilean Government is directly involved in Letelier's death and feels that investigation into the incident will
so indicate," the CIA field report said.
But Bush's CIA chose to accept Contreras's denials and even began leaking information that pointed away from the real
killers.
Newsweek's Periscope reported in the magazine's Oct. 11, 1976, issue that "the Chilean secret police were not involved.
… The [Central Intelligence] agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and
because the murder, coming while Chile's rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime."
Similar stories ran in other newspapers.
Breaking the Case
Despite the lack of help from Washington, the FBI's legal attaché in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, began putting the
puzzle together only a week after the Letelier bombing.
Relying on a source in the Argentine military, Scherrer reported to his superiors that the assassination was likely the
work of Operation Condor, the assassination project organized by the Chilean government.
"It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the recent assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., may
have been carried out as a third phase of Operation Condor," Scherrer wrote, referring to acts of assassination.
On Nov. 1, 1976, the day before the presidential election, the Washington Post became another vehicle for trumpeting
Pinochet's innocence.
"Operatives of the present Chilean military Junta did not take part in Letelier's killing," the Post wrote, citing CIA
officials. "CIA Director Bush expressed this view in a conversation late last week with Secretary of State Kissinger."
Despite these false claims of innocence about Pinochet and his regime, Democrat Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated Ford to
win the presidency on Nov. 2.
Over the next two years, federal investigators would crack the case, successfully bringing charges against Townley and
several other conspirators. But prosecutor Eugene Propper told me that the CIA didn't volunteer the crucial information
about the Paraguayan gambit or supply the photo of the chief assassin, Townley.
"Nothing the agency gave us helped us break this case," Propper said.
Regarding the Letelier murder, neither Bush nor Walters was ever pressed to provide a full explanation of their
activities.
When I submitted questions to Bush in 1988 - while he was Vice President and I was a Newsweek correspondent preparing a
story on his year as CIA director - Bush's chief of staff Craig Fuller responded, saying "the Vice President generally
does not comment on issues related to the time he was at the Central Intelligence Agency and he will have no comment on
the specific issues raised in your letter."
Newsweek editors subsequently decided not to publish any story about Bush's year at the CIA though he was then running
for President and citing his CIA experience as an important element of his resumé. Walters also rebuffed interview
requests on the Letelier topic prior to his death on Feb. 10, 2002, in West Palm Beach, Florida.
In 1995, after the Pinochet dictatorship had ended, DINA chief Contreras was convicted in Chile for the Letelier
assassination and was sentenced to seven years in prison. Contreras began implicating Pinochet in the Letelier murder
and other acts of terrorism, saying Pinochet knew and approved all of Contreras's actions.
As for Pinochet, Bush didn't appear to hold a grudge against this foreign leader who had sponsored a terrorist attack
under the nose of the U.S. government at a time when Bush was chief of U.S. intelligence.
In 1998, when Pinochet was detained in Great Britain on an extradition request from Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who
was pursuing Pinochet for his role in killing Spanish citizens, one of the world leaders who rallied to Pinochet's
defense was George H.W. Bush, then the former President of the United States.
Bush called the case against Pinochet "a travesty of justice" and urged that Pinochet be sent home to Chile "as soon as
possible," a position ultimately endorsed by the British courts.
Now, eight years later, the baton of the Letelier-Moffitt-murder cover-up has passed to a new Bush generation, with
George W. Bush now protecting Pinochet from prosecution and sparing the Bush Family possible exposure as hypocrites on
terrorism.
*************
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book,
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'