A month before the assassination of Letelier and Moffitt in 1976, the US government ordered its envoys in Latin America to try to avert a plot to murder leftist opponents of the region's governments.

Covert US operations in Chile to instigate the coup in 1970 and aimed at undermining Allende were all explicitly approved by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

The CIA maintained relations with a top Chilean intelligence official, even though he was considered one of the country's major human rights violators.

The former chief of the Chilean secret police, convicted of masterminding a lethal car bombing in Washington in 1976, was an informer for the CIA when the bombing occurred.

After 27 years of withholding details about covert activities following the 1973 military coup in Chile, the CIA released a report acknowledging its close relations with General Augusto Pinochet’s violent regime.

In the 1960s and the early 1970s, as part of the US Government policy to try to influence events in Chile, the CIA undertook specific covert action projects in Chile.

The White House ordered a new look at several hundred files that the CIA intends to withhold when it releases American documents about the 1973 military coup in Chile.

CIA Director George Tenet is refusing to declassify hundreds of records on CIA covert intervention to destabilize the democratically elected government of Allende and support the violent consolidation of the Pinochet dictatorship.

CIA Director George J. Tenet has fired back at critics inside and outside government who are angry that he has decided to withhold hundreds of documents relating to CIA covert operations in Chile.

Federal investigators have uncovered evidence that some of them believe is sufficient to indict Gen. Augusto Pinochet for conspiracy to commit murder in the 1976 car bombing that killed Orlando Letelier on Washington's Embassy Row.