Recently disclosed US State Department and CIA records cast a new light on the Letelier assassination, revealing that the US had extensive awareness of a secret assassination operation and suggesting that US officials called off actions that might have stopped it.
A little over 25 years ago, my daughter, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, was murdered by Chilean terrorists in Washington. This past summer one of those terrorists was freed after serving his prison term.
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 and the former head of the Chilean secret police are scrambling to blame each other for a series of murders at home and abroad, including a notorious 1976 car bombing in Washington.
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 CIA is acknowledging for the first time the extent of its deep involvement in Chile, where it dealt with coup-plotters, false propagandists and assassins.
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.
As Augusto Pinochet continues to fight extradition from England to face charges of crimes against humanity, the historical record of US support for the former Chilean dictator remains disappeared, like so many victims of his violent regime.
Researchers and relatives of victims of human rights abuses in Chile charged yesterday that the CIA is withholding information about its covert operations in that country, contrary to a White House directive.
While recently declassified documents are conspicuously lacking in information about the US role in helping Pinochet take and consolidate power, they are rich in detail about the inner workings of his bloody regime.
