reading

Find a full list of our authors and

titles at www.openroadmedia.com

@OpenRoadMedia

We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.

Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations—church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.

Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too “obscene” to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as “antifamily,” “Satanic,” “racist,” and/or “filthy,” from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.

How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) “dropped into the memory hole” in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of “national security” or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then “dumped,” as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as “conspiracy theory,” despite their soundness (or because of it).

Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.

These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.

Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.

The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

For Saul Landau, who will never rest in peace while there is injustice in the world.

It was in Santiago de Chile, in early September of 1973, that I met Orlando Letelier for the first and also for the last time. We could not know then, of course, that three years later—to be precise, on September 21, 1976—he would be dead, murdered along with an American coworker, Ronni Moffitt, when the car he was driving exploded at Sheridan Circle in Washington, DC.

Though the possibility of that bloody fate, ordered by General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator, was certainly not on Orlando’s mind at a late-night dinner in Chile’s capital, everybody at that gathering knew that all the guests were in danger, that many of those present might not survive a coup that loomed in the near future. In effect, less than one week later, on September 11, 1973, a military junta overthrew Salvador Allende and terminated his experiment of trying to build socialism through democratic means.

The last man who could have really prevented that coup, General Carlos Prats, had recently resigned as the commander in chief of the Chilean Army and also as Allende’s minister of defense. As the cultural and press attaché for Allende’s chief of staff, I was one of those involved in arranging that get-together. The dinner was a way of thanking Prats for his service and loyalty. Orlando Letelier had taken over as minister of defense and was there with his wife, Isabel Margarita.

My wife, Angélica, and I have often invoked one special moment of that evening, when a tango was played.

I see three couples circling, turning, becoming the music. First I see Orlando dancing with Sofia Prats, the wife of Carlos Prats. Then into my field of vision comes Isabel, Orlando’s wife, dancing with José Tohá, who had preceded Prats as minister of defense. José Toha (he had held my wife on his knees when she was a child—she called him Tio, or Uncle) was a consummate gentleman, long and thin like Don Quixote, such a sweet soul, and on that occasion he seemed to be murmuring the words of the tango gently as he and Isabel shuffled across the floor. And I am visited further by the memory of General Prats himself elegantly whirling around and around with Tohá’s wife, Moy.

All three of those men were to be killed by Pinochet. Tohá first, in prison, some months after the coup. Prats, along with Sofia, one year later, in their Buenos Aires exile—a car bomb, set off by the same agent who would later organize the murder of Orlando and Ronni in Washington. These men were each selected for death because they had the potential to lead and unite the many disparate factions and organizations opposing the dictatorship. But there is one more trait that joins all three victims: They had each been ministers of defense in Allende’s government. All three had worked closely with Pinochet, and all three were witnesses to the betrayal of his vows; all three knew too much.

They glided along the wooden floors of the Peña de los Parra, where we were holding our farewell dinner as if the tango could purify and postpone what was descending on us. They hummed the song to one another as if they could dance forever, as if they could hold the future at bay forever.

And indeed, Orlando felt that perhaps he could. Tohá remained Pinochet’s captive, and Prats was living in exile in neighboring Argentina despite the presence of death squads—both of them vulnerable. But Letelier, once he had been released from prison due to international pressure, came to Washington—a city where he had many friends from the time when he and Isabel and their four children had lived there and where he had subsequently been Allende’s ambassador to the United States. If there had been any place in the world where an adversary of Pinochet might feel safe, it was in the capital of the most powerful land in the world. And indeed, when Orlando was assassinated, it was at first inconceivable to the US investigators that Pinochet’s secret police, the DINA, could have been involved. Commit an act of terrorism in the very heart of the country that had unleashed the CIA to help put that very general in power—the country that was doing all it could to keep him there? A few blocks away from the White House? This sort of crime, precisely when Pinochet wanted to better his tarnished image abroad and particularly in the United States? Impossible.

We knew, of course, Chilean exiles and members of the resistance; we all knew immediately who had done it, as did Orlando’s family and his colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Pinochet might have denied any knowledge of the murder, but he was clearly sending a message. There is no place on this planet where I cannot reach you, those who oppose me. If you think that distance allows you freedom, you are wrong. I could almost feel him murmuring: You who danced that night, you will not dance again, you have no right to music or tangos or love. I am the god of silence. I own your bodies.

Thanks to the story told in this extraordinary book by John Dinges and Saul Landau, the world came to know the identity of the murderers—how the DINA, working with groups of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, planned every stage of the execution. More astoundingly, the world also watched how some of the perpetrators, though not Pinochet himself, were brought to justice. This real-life thriller is expertly told, cunningly structured, wildly entertaining, sadly and starkly illuminating, and impossible to put down.

The odds against the conspiracy coming to light were enormous. Assassination on Embassy Row painstakingly reveals how difficult it was to ferret out the truth. For starters, there was the gigantic, tentacular power of the dictatorship itself, with all the assets of a foreign government and its shadowy network of untouchable spies and torturers in Chile and abroad, its many ministries of fear. And its propaganda machine that began a disinformation campaign a few hours after the crime by suggesting that Letelier had blown himself up trying to bomb the Chilean Embassy. Once that claim had been quickly shot down as ridiculous, Pinochet’s underlings circulated a variety of scenarios: that the crime had been committed by left-wing extremists who wanted to create trouble for the military regime, that it was related to Orlando’s love affairs, or that Castro’s Cuba was somehow involved. And of course there was constant obfuscation, negligence, and misinformation from the CIA and even from some members of the State Department, up to the point that one might venture that some sectors of the US government were trying to sabotage—a word the authors do not hesitate in using—the FBI investigation.

Ultimately, as the book documents in riveting detail, the FBI investigators penetrated the secrets of Pinochet’s assassination squads. That the murder case was finally solved was due to two factors that Manuel Contreras, the head of Pinochet’s secret police, certainly never anticipated. The first was that Isabel and Orlando Letelier’s friends at IPS, particularly Saul Landau himself and Michael Moffitt, Orlando’s colleague and Ronni’s husband, did not back down in their fierce quest for justice, defying the fear that such a terrorist act creates and re-creates. Thanks to the encouragement and solidarity of dozens of people, Saul Landau launched a parallel investigation into the crime to keep pressure on the United States administration. Journalists broke stories that had a similar effect, including the investigations in Santiago of John Dinges, writing for the Washington Post. But such efforts would have proved futile if there had not existed a good number of decent dogged men in the government itself, in the FBI and the US prosecutors’ office, who ultimately became convinced that the DINA was indeed responsible for that assassination. And through an unrelenting pursuit of the evidence, they discovered how the conspiracy had been hatched and executed, and they ended up running down the culprits.

Indeed, one of the enduring qualities of Assassination on Embassy Row is its illustration of how the best and worst faces of America collided in this case. The worst, inasmuch as it was the Nixon administration, with the mendacious Kissinger in charge of the intervention, had been instrumental in undermining the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and later, in giving comfort and support to Pinochet’s junta as it killed, tortured, exiled, and persecuted thousands of patriots who had dared to dream of a better and more just world. And the best: joining Orlando’s American friends and colleagues who would not be cowed were the agents in the FBI and the lawyers in the US Attorney’s Office, once they had established the identity and guilt of the criminals, pursued them, and brought them to trial.

At the same time that Assassination on Embassy Row celebrates those agents and prosecutors, it also makes clear that the United States failed to extradite the Chilean officers who had set up the conspiracy, the men who gave the orders and were ultimately responsible for the deaths of Orlando and Ronni, and that it certainly fell short of accusing the grand master behind it all, General Augusto Pinochet. It was encouraging that the thugs who placed the bomb and exploded it were found guilty in a courtroom, but sobering to realize that the big fish got away, and that politics—the real reason for Orlando being the target—was incessantly, methodically, deliberately left out of the proceedings. Perhaps that was the price to be paid for some measure of justice.

The authors’ ability to uncover how the national security state works to protect itself and those who serve it, how the system is rigged against the victims even when the act of terror occurs on the streets of Washington, is one of many reasons why it is so important that this book be reprinted and made widely available again. But its relevance only grows on rereading it all these decades later. The murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt was, after all, an act of terrorism by a foreign state on American soil. Almost exactly twenty-five years later, another terror attack was perpetrated against the United States—on a date in September, the eleventh of that month, when, in New York and Washington, men and women just like Orlando and Ronni were massacred. It is easy to point out that the 9/11 assault on America (which eerily coincided with the anniversary of the Chilean coup, also on September 11) was on a vastly more lethal scale than the terrorist attack against Letelier and that its effects have changed the course of world history. But such an obvious observation would miss the real point of comparing these two acts of terror. The perpetrators of the murder in Washington in 1976 were brought to justice (though Pinochet himself escaped punishment) through efficient, persistent, intelligent police work. Again, it was America at its best. In the other case, the United States reacted to the violence by invading two countries (one of which, Iraq, had absolutely nothing to do with the crime itself) and causing mayhem, death, destruction, and terror of its own, incommensurate with the original crime. America at its worst.

There is, as well, another way of understanding the lessons that this story leaves for today’s planet. The term blowback comes to mind. Just as Osama bin Laden was the result of American intervention in Afghanistan, just as today the rise of jihadists has been generated by the blind and stupid meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, so Pinochet was the monster that the United States created to stop communism, a Frankenstein who ended up committing an act of terror a mere mile away from the White House.

No wonder so little was done to bring this creature of US foreign policy to justice. More satisfying today, as Assassination on Embassy Row is reprinted, is to verify that the ultimate culprits did not get away scot free. Manuel Contreras is now in a Chilean jail, serving many consecutive life sentences for all his many crimes—along with dozens of his accomplices, including those directly involved in the Letelier-Moffit murder. And General Pinochet died in ignominy in Santiago after being indicted in multiple human rights cases in Chile itself, getting branded as a thief, and spending a year and a half under house arrest in London, accused of crimes against humanity. It is possible to venture that the execution of Orlando Letelier and the manhunt and trial that followed contributed significantly to ending military rule in Chile.

It is thus comforting to see the story of Orlando’s death as a sort of morality tale, a ghost story, in which the hero, from beyond the grave, reaches out and curses and pursues those who killed him—the sweet revenge of history.

True and consoling as such an outcome may be, I cannot erase from my heart or my mind the image of those men and their wives, soon to be widows, dancing one night in Santiago de Chile over forty years ago. I cling to that dance of life and death so as never to forget the victims of deceit, betrayal, and cruelty, the victims of powerful men who do not care what devastation they leave behind.

CHILEAN AGENT Michael Vernon Townley described the assassination plot in hundreds of hours of interrogations with FBI agents and prosecutors, in testimony before a federal grand jury, in a long first-person account written as a deposition, and in his week-long appearance as a witness in the January 9-February 14, 1979 trial of three Cuban accomplices. We generally accept the credibility of that account. Other documents we obtained and our interviews of hundreds of persons in the United States, South America, and Europe corroborated many points of Townley’s story of the plot and revealed a number of discrepancies and self-serving omissions but no major contradictions that would lead us to doubt its overall accuracy.

The narrative of political events in Chile before and after the assassination is based entirely on our own research and personal knowledge. The most difficult part of our work was the account of the United States investigation leading up to the identification of Townley and his decision to reveal the assassination plot. United States government agencies involved in the case have imposed an extraordinary mantle of secrecy over the actions of United States officials before and after the assassination and over the records and files relating to their actions. As of March 8, 1980, we have received not one piece of paper in response to our Freedom of Information Act requests made to the CIA, FBI/Justice Department, and State Department. Some United States documents in the case were withheld from us here even after they had been made public in court proceedings in Chile. Therefore the sources of our “investigation of the investigation” must remain confidential.

In some cases our interpretations and conclusions differ from those of persons who made extraordinary efforts to help us and to puzzle out with us the unanswered questions. We are deeply appreciative of their help and respectful of their differences with us.

ALLENDE, SALVADOR Elected president of Chile September 1970; killed September 1973

CANETE, RICARDO Former member of the Cuban Nationalist Movement who became an informer for the FBI

CONTRERAS, JUAN MANUEL Colonel, then general, who founded and headed DINA, Chile’s dreaded secret police

CUBAN NATIONALIST MOVEMENT (CNM) Anti-Castro terrorist organization with a fascist ideology

DRISCOLL, ROBERT Chile desk officer at the State Department who was informed of the presence of DINA agents

INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES (IPS) A Washington research center where Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt worked

LETELIER, ORLANDO Leader of Chilean exile resistance to General Pinochet in the United States, murdered on Embassy Row

PRATS, CARLOS Pinochet’s predecessor as commander of Chile’s armed forces; murdered in Buenos Aires in September 1974

ROMERAL JARA, ALEJANDRO Name used by Fernandez in Paraguay, by Mosqueira in Washington

TOWNLEY, MICHAEL VERNON Born in Waterloo, Iowa; a DINA agent with special skills

SEPTEMBER 9, 1976. At Kennedy International Airport the arrival of LAN-Chile Airlines flight 142 from Santiago was announced. Minutes later a tall, fair-haired man in his thirties handed his passport to a U.S. Immigration official. It was mid-morning. A taut half-smile masked the traveler’s nervousness as he watched the official page through the passport, remove the official entrance form the traveler had filled out on the plane, and glance up from the passport photo to the man before him. Many times in many airports the traveler had seen officials go through the identical motions: verify the likeness of the photo, check the name, stamp the passport.

The official absorbed the facts he needed in a second: name, Hans Petersen Silva (the last name a matronymic, according to Spanish custom); nationality, Chilean; official Chilean passport and official visa indicating Chilean government business. A cut above the average Latin American tourist—probably a government expert, deserving of more than routine courtesy, the official may have thought. He began the routine turning of pages in the foot-thick loose-leaf volume called the “lookout book.” The traveler stiffened imperceptibly. His passport wouldn’t appear in the book—unless something had gone wrong.

U.S. Immigration checks all arriving passengers’ names against the several thousand names listed alphabetically and phonetically in the lookout book. Each listing appears there at the request of a United States government agency—the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency. Alongside the names, coded instructions indicate the action required: F-1, notify interested agency; F-2, search; F-3, bar entry and arrest.

The traveler’s legs felt rubbery as it became obvious that the immigration official had matched his name with a listing in the lookout book. “He examined my passport several times, reread the inscription, and finally shrugged his shoulders and returned it to me,” he would testify after his discovery. “This left me quite shaken since I thought that the inscription could refer to some other Hans Petersen or could be something referring to the passport I was carrying. From that moment on, I was quite jumpy.”

He placed the red passport in an inside pocket and headed toward the customs area. LAN-Chile crew members greeted him as he joined them and passed through customs without inspection. Some of the crew had known him for years. They thought his name was Andrés Wilson. Beyond the luggage checkout barrier he recognized Fernando Cruchaga, a New York-based LAN-Chile official.

They did not acknowledge each another until they had left the customs area. Tradecraft. It had been violated too many times on this mission already. The traveler touched the pocket where he had hidden the flash caps he called “electric matches.” He had not tested them, and this made him uneasy at the prospect of having to use them on this trip. Hidden in a medicine bottle in his shaving kit were two grams of lead trinitrite powder—in that quantity it could blow a man’s hand off. He had violated his own rules, his professional standards, by smuggling explosives. His superiors had not allowed him sufficient time to do it another way. He despised haste.

Cruchaga embraced him and addressed him as Andrés. With Cruchaga was Enrique Gambra, the New York director of LAN-Chile. The three men spoke Spanish as they walked to an airport restaurant near the LAN offices.

The men had something to eat. Gambra left. Then the traveler gave Cruchaga the name of the man he had expected to meet on arrival. Had the man appeared? “Yes,” Cruchaga later testified, “a man approached me because I had my ID from LAN-Chile on my pocket, and he said, ‘Is Andrés Wilson on the aircraft?’ I said, ‘Yes. What’s your name?’ He mentioned a name that I think was Fáundez, something like that.”

Hans Petersen Silva, alias Juan Andrés Wilson, alias Kenneth Enyart, alias Juan Williams Rose, was on a mission to arrange the assassination of Orlando Letelier. The traveler’s real name was Michael Vernon Townley. The man he was to meet was Captain Armando Fernandez, alias Armando Fáundez Lyon. Both men were experienced operatives from the External Section of DINA, Chile’s secret police.

“When I met Captain Fernández. he had various suitcases and several tennis rackets,” Townley later wrote. Fernandez was accompanied by two women, one his sister, the other an “extremely well dressed and well groomed” companion carrying a fashion magazine. Fernández and Townley politely left the two women with Cruchaga.

Once they were alone, “Captain Fernández gave me one sheet of paper which contained a sketch of Letelier’s residence and employment as well as written information setting forth a description of Letelier’s automobile and his wife’s automobile.” The two discussed in whispers and short phrases Letelier’s daily movements at work in Washington and in the Maryland suburb where he lived. A group of rabbis passed them in the terminal lobby close to the LAN-Chile lounge. Townley listened to Fernandez’ report, asked questions, and filed each detail in his mind. He studied the drawing, the license-plate numbers, and the addresses, memorized them, and destroyed the papers. From a secret compartment in his wallet he removed Orlando Letelier’s photograph, looked at it, and replaced it. Others might have to refer to it later, though he himself knew it well. The two men talked for more than an hour.

Fernández’ mission was now over. For fifteen days he had been in the United States gathering “preoperative intelligence” on the target. Townley’s mission, to organize the hit team and ensure the hit, had begun.

After the meeting, Cruchaga ushered Fernández and his fashionable companion, a DINA agent using the alias Liliana Walker, into the LAN-Chile first-class lounge.^* Their flight to Chile wouldn’t depart until 11:00 P.M. The rabbis were still wandering back and forth in the airport lobby.

Townley found Cruchaga again and asked his help in renting a car. DINA had provided him with a false passport and an international driver’s license in Petersen’s name, but no credit cards. Haste. Cruchaga obliged. As LAN assistant manager he vouched for Petersen’s credit, and Townley left a $200 cash deposit with Hertz.

As he waited, Townley’s eyes scanned like radar, picking up people and objects. The disconcerting incident at the immigration counter, the official’s too-casual attitude, had put his antennae on alert. Two men loitering near the LAN-Chile lounge could have been FBI; he had noticed them several times now. Townley had good reason to feel insecure on this mission. That fiasco in Paraguay haunted him. He hated loose ends, sloppiness, imprecision.

In the car, he took a long look in his rear-view mirror. “After assuring myself that I was not under surveillance, I proceeded through Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, where I checked into a motel … using the identity of Hans Petersen. I telephonically contacted Virgilio Paz. …” He made a dinner date for that evening with Paz and his wife. Then he made a collect call to his sister Linda, who lived in nearby Tarrytown, New York.

Townley met Virgilio and his wife, Idania, at the Bottom of the Barrel Restaurant, a Cuban exile hangout in Union City, New Jersey. The town has a Cuban exile population of some 50,000. Paz and his wife called Townley Andrés Wilson; they beat him at an electronic game; during dinner they discussed family and friends. Paz had recently been Townley’s house guest in Santiago.

“During dinner with Paz I conveyed my desire to speak with Guillermo Novo Sampol concerning an unspecified matter. I then returned to my hotel.”

HE HAD TO FINISH composing his speech by noon. After dressing hurriedly, he gulped coffee and said goodbye, patting Alfie, the sheepdog with hair over his eyes, who followed him outside to the blue Chevelle.

Orlando Letelier gunned the engine and headed out of Ogden Court, a quiet cul-de-sac in Bethesda, Maryland, and onto River Road, a main artery into Washington, D.C. The Leteliers’ neighborhood, populated by professionals and business people living in comfortable split-level homes, evoked stability and shelter.

Letelier was thinking and planning as he turned right onto 46th Street and drove toward Massachusetts Avenue. There were other ways to drive from home to his Dupont Circle office, but since returning to Washington he used the same Massachusetts Avenue route he had taken habitually during his years at the Inter-American Development Bank and the Chilean Embassy. The embassy had been his home for three years, but he wasn’t welcome there now. The present occupants represented the military junta that on September 11, 1973, had bombed and machine-gunned their way to power, overthrowing the elected government of Salvador Allende, of which Letelier was a member.

Letelier had chosen Washington as the ideal base from which to fight against the military dictatorship. A week before, an article by him in The Nation had argued that the junta’s systematic human rights violations were inextricably linked to the United States–sponsored “Chicago School” economic model imposed on Chile by the junta. The article had received favorable comments from Letelier’s United States colleagues. He was trying to arrange to have it circulated in Chile, where it could provide ammunition to the regime’s opponents. That was one of the items on his day’s agenda. Top priority, though, was work on the speech he would deliver at the Madison Square Garden concert on September 10, a commemoration and protest marking the third anniversary of the coup.

He turned left from Q Street into the alley bordering the Institute for Policy Studies. A truck blocked the entrance to his parking space. He looked back across the street toward the sidewalk tables of the Rondo Café. A couple, engrossed in each other, were drinking coffee. Several days before, Juan Gabriel Valdés, Orlando’s co-worker at the institute and political colleague, had mentioned seeing a man at the Rondo who “had the DINA look.” Perhaps Juan Gabriel was right, Letelier thought. But what could DINA do besides watch? Maybe rob or harass? What would they dare do here in the capital city of their most important international supporters? Letelier had often told his friends that inside the United States he felt safe from DINA, despite the threats. He had dismissed Juan Gabriel’s apprehensions. Paranoia was a state of mind he could ill afford. It led to paralysis.

He walked toward his office, passing two white-clad waitresses, their high turbans bobbing, members of the Oriental sect that ran the Golden Temple Restaurant nearby.

It was exactly two years since he was released from concentration camp. He saw his reflection in the mirrorlike window of IPS, tall, erect, meticulously dressed in a beige summer suit. He smiled at the image of the dashing businessman, the diplomat. Bizarre. He had first come to know about IPS when, as ambassador, he had found it a source of solid support for the programs of Chile’s Popular Unity government. Now IPS had become his base of operation, since shortly after his release from prison.

IPS had named him director of the Transnational Institute, its international program. He had just returned from his third trip that year to Amsterdam, the European seat of the Transnational Institute, and as usual the trip had afforded him an opportunity to meet with other exile leaders and with European political leaders.

As he walked up the two flights of stairs to his office, he began to rehearse phrases for the anniversary speech. Three years since the coup. Two years since my release.

He had survived a year in one concentration camp after another, the first one on Dawson Island, a cold and barren rock in the stormy Strait of Magellan, only a few hundred miles from Antarctica. There he had lost forty pounds. When he left, the camp commander had warned him that “General Pinochet will not and does not tolerate activities against his government.” The military government, the officer declared, could deliver punishment “no matter where the violator lives.”

SEPTEMBER 10, 1976. Just beyond Union City’s only Sears Roebuck store, Michael Townley met two Cubans in their late thirties. The Cuatro Estrellas Restaurant served Cuban fare and attracted large numbers of midday shoppers. Guillermo Novo and José Dionisio Suárez knew the waitresses there. They also knew Townley—as Andrés Wilson, agent for DINA. They had worked with him before. As Latin American custom demanded, the men went through the amenities of asking about families and recalling past good times before they got down to the business at hand.

“At this luncheon,” Townley later wrote, “I outlined my DINA mission to assassinate Letelier and requested the assistance of the Cuban Nationalist Movement.”

Novo and Suárez weren’t surprised. Phone calls from Townley from Chile in recent weeks had alerted them that DINA had another job for them. But they had to be convinced. They began to complain about the Pinochet government’s shabby treatment of some of their comrades in the anti-Castro Cuban exile movement. But their arguments were half-hearted. They were hero-worshippers, and Pinochet was their hero. He had led the coup that eliminated what they considered a communist regime—precisely what the Cuban Nationalists had been trying so long and unsuccessfully to pull off against the Castro government. After the coup, the Cubans began to call Chile their “darling.” But there had been an ugly incident that marred the relationship, and Novo, as head of the North Zone of the Cuban Nationalist Movement, demanded the satisfaction of a full explanation.

The Cubans complained that Chile had given safe haven to two Cuban terrorists, Orlando Bosch and Rolando Otero, both fugitives from the FBI, only to betray them. Otero had been turned over directly to FBI agents aboard a plane headed for Miami—and jail. And Bosch, after spending more than a year in Chile, was informed while outside the country that Chile had issued a warrant for his arrest.

Novo reminded Townley that his own CNM, Bosch’s group, Cuban Action (Acción Cubana), and Otero’s group, the Cuban National Liberation Front (Frente Nacional de Liberación Cubana—FNLC) had joined together just two months before in a formal alliance, the Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations (Comando de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas—CORU), to coordinate “militant” actions.

How can we help you, Novo objected, when you treat our people badly? Townley explained the Chilean position: Otero had entered Chile under his own name and passport. His whereabouts were known to the FBI and couldn’t be hidden after the fact. Novo argued that DINA should have killed Otero rather than turn him over to the FBI. Townley was ingratiating. The Bosch matter, he said, wasn’t even handled by DINA. Finally Novo and Suarez agreed to get back to him on the new DINA request. That night they would have their regular Friday meeting of the leaders of the CNM. The matter would be presented to them, then they would come to Townley’s hotel to hear him make his case. Their manner, however, indicated that they—Novo and Suárez—were interested in the operation and would argue in favor of DINA’s request to the larger meeting.

ORLANDO and Isabel Margarita Letelier set off on their drive to New York City. Isabel read and edited the text of Orlando’s speech for that evening’s Madison Square Garden commemoration of the Chilean coup. “In the name of our dead ones,” the speech began.

Orlando and Isabel discussed the program, which would feature Joan Baez, and guessed at how many people would attend. They talked about house and family affairs and recalled good times and bad together in Chile and the United States. They stopped for coffee at Howard Johnson’s. Orlando drank coffee and chain-smoked all day; his office always had an electric percolator and instant coffee. Sometimes with the coffee he took a Valium tablet. At age forty-four he felt surges of uncontrollable energy, the kind that allowed him to juggle many different projects within the course of a day and to move back and forth between professional and social activities with ease.

The couple drove north through Maryland and Delaware and into New Jersey in the late morning hours. Shortly after arriving in New York and checking into the Algonquin Hotel, they received a call from a United Press International reporter, who read Letelier a wire dispatch just received from Chile. The military government, it said, had revoked his Chilean citizenship. He was accused of “carrying out in foreign lands a publicity campaign aimed at bringing about the political, economic and cultural isolation of Chile.” His “ignoble and disloyal attitude,” the decree continued, “made him deserving of the maximum … moral sanction contemplated by our juridical order … the loss of the Chilean nationality.”

Letelier listened, more shocked and hurt than he would admit. He asked the reporter to read the whole cable. General Pinochet and all his ministers had signed the decree, but no other members of the military junta. “In the concrete case of his activities in Holland,” it said, “he [Letelier] has incited port and transportation workers of that country to declare a boycott against goods destined for or originating from Chile and has influenced its government to hinder or prevent the investment of Dutch capital in Chile.” The reporter offered one more detail: the decree had been published that day in Chile’s Official Gazette, but it was dated three months earlier—June 7, 1976.

Visibly upset, Letelier sat down to rewrite his speech. He paused, looking up at a group of friends who had gathered in the hotel room. “Can you imagine,” he asked, “that they have done something only the Nazis have done?” Yet it wasn’t really surprise that Letelier was suffering but shock, more intense and painful because, deep down, he had felt it coming. He knew that his public denunciations and lobbying against the junta would provoke, if not this reaction, then something like it. He told friends later that he felt annoyed with himself for letting himself react so emotionally, so personally, to what he realized intellectually was the illegitimate act of an illegitimate government.

That night, as keynote speaker, from the stage of Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum, he condemned again the junta’s reign of terror. Some five thousand people filled the hall. “From the very moment that that group of generals, serving the most reactionary economic groups, decided three years ago to declare war against the Chilean people and to occupy our country,” he said, “an impressive worldwide movement of solidarity with the Chilean people has emerged. This vast solidarity movement has expressed, from the most diverse ideological and political perspectives, the revulsion of the civilized world against the barbaric and brutal violation of all human rights by the Chilean military junta … the most repressive regime the world has known since the destruction of fascism and Nazism in Europe.”

In the middle of the speech he proclaimed his defiance. “Today,” he said slowly, changing his tone, “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 O’Higgins, Balmaceda, Allende, Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Claudio Arrau, and Víctor Jara; and they—the fascists—are the enemies of Chile, the traitors who are selling our country to foreign interests.”

Raising his voice in anger, he continued, “I was born a Chilean, I am a Chilean, and I will die a Chilean. They, the fascists, were born traitors, live as traitors, and will be remembered forever as fascist traitors.”

MICHAEL TOWNLEY, a few miles away across the Hudson River in Union City, New Jersey, was aware that Letelier was speaking at Madison Square Garden at that moment. Tradecraft dictated that he stay away. Some of the Chilean immigrants and exiles living in New York might have recognized Townley. Among them was his stepson, Ronnie Ernest. Other agents from the Chilean diplomatic mission to the United Nations could be counted on to cover Letelier’s activities that night, Townley knew.

Besides, Townley was waiting for the arrival of the members of the political directorate of the Cuban Nationalist Movement. He was staying in the Chateau Renaissance Motel, just outside Union City, registered under the name Hans Petersen. About midnight, seven men filed into his room. Two of them were Guillermo Novo and José Dionisio Suárez. Later he became vague about the identity of the others. They had drinks; Townley had set up a bar with whiskey and rum. He laid out DINA’s plan. The CNM would provide men to assassinate Orlando Letelier in Washington. The leftists would undoubtedly scream DINA, but there would be no proof. In exchange, DINA would continue to provide a safe haven in Chile for fugitive Cuban exiles and would allow them to make use of a DINA farm in the south of Chile; they would be able to train their men there if needed. Instruction from DINA experts would be available from time to time, but Townley could not guarantee that. The CNM would have the distinction within the Cuban exile community of being associated with the Pinochet government.

They bargained; the atmosphere was charged. The Cuban leaders again brought up the Otero and Bosch matters. Townley cajoled them. They said they were not just anybody’s gun for hire, but a political movement. Their primary motives for cooperating with DINA were political: their agreement with DINA’s project to physically eliminate communists, and their desire to enhance their own political stature within the world anticommunist movement.

Townley later said he did not recall the name of the portly middle-aged physician who spoke up against CNM involvement in the assassination. Townley said the man spoke in a whining fashion and resembled a Chilean television commentator. Guillermo Novo argued in favor of assisting in the DINA mission. Suárez, although still critical of the Chilean government’s stance in the Otero and Bosch affairs, indicated his inclination to do the job. He loved action.

“At the termination of the meeting in my motel room,” Townley said later, “I was convinced that the CNM would collaborate with DINA in assassinating Letelier. … Novo and Suárez, as the principal leaders of the CNM, were in favor … and … any objection that any other CNM members might have would bear no weight. …”

Townley claimed that he did not know exactly why Letelier had been selected as a DINA target, nor did he ask. He had heard that Letelier had plans for organizing a coalition government in exile; but that was not his concern. Townley saw himself as an exemplary soldier, an officer without uniform, without the pomp of official rank. In pay, prestige, and perquisites he considered himself the equivalent of a major. He liked to receive difficult orders and to rely on his imagination and intelligence in carrying them out.

To kill Letelier by an unspecified method with the assistance of the CNM: that was the way Townley described his orders from his DINA superior, Colonel Pedro Espinoza. “Try to make it seem innocuous, but the important point is to get it done.” Townley had brought the electric matches and the small quantity of lead trinitrite as gifts for the CNM, to overcome their resentment of the way Otero and Bosch had been handled. Now he felt he had succeeded in patching up a potentially ugly situation. Guillermo Novo appeared to have believed his explanation about Otero, and to care less about the Bosch affair. He would try to make it up to the CNM when he returned to Chile; he thought their arguments had some merit. He felt comfortable with them. They shared the same values, the same vocational skills (although less developed than Townley’s), and the same modus operandi.