Saul Landau and John Dinges
outdo masters of the spy novel in
this compelling account of the
1976 bombing assassination of
former Chilean Ambassador
Orlando Letelier and Ronni
Karpen Moffitt. Drawing on an
extraordinary array of
sources-from unnamed in-
telligence agents to official
government transcripts-the
authors describe in detail the
planning and carrying out of the
assassination and the investiga-
tion and trial that followed. Con-
sidering the complicated nature
of the case, the book reads easi-
ly and calls to mind not only spy
or detective novels but also the
best of the books on Watergate.
The immediacy and telling
details of Assassination on Em-
bassy Row attest to the authors’
close personal ties to the case
and to their thorough investiga-
46
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tion. Veteran author and film-
maker Saul Landau worked with
Letelier and Moffitt at the In-
stitute for Policy Studies in
Washington, D.C., and was in-
strumental in pressuring a
sometimes recalcitrant U.S.
government to pursue its in-
vestigation of the case. John
Dinges, a stringer for The
Washington Post and Time in
Santiago for six years before and
after the 1973 coup, broke the
crucial story in 1977 that a
member of Chile’s secret
police-then called the
DINA-was a prime suspect in
the assassination.
Orlando Letelier and Ronni
Moffitt were killed September 21,
1976, in Washington, D.C., when
a bomb placed under Letelier’s
car exploded. Michael Moffitt,
Ronni’s husband of only four
months, was in the back seat and
escaped with slight wounds.
Letelier, his legs severed above
the knees, died before reaching
the hospital. Ronni Moffitt died in
the hospital, her carotid artery
severed by shrapnel.
The murder was a heavy blow
to the Chile solidarity movement
around the world. Letelier had
become what the authors call “a
rallying figure” in the exile
resistance movement-a leader
who maintained good relations
not only with his fellow Unidad
Popular politicians, but also with
Christian Democrats and mem-
bers of MIR. He had represented
Chile at the preparatory meeting
of the Nonaligned Conference in
Algeria that year (the organiza-
tion reserved Chile’s seat for the
UP coalition). He had also
become an effective lobbyist in
Europe and in Washington, D.C.,
against loans and investments
for Pinochet’s Chile. His
assassination in the heart of
Washington disrupted this work,
as well as the lives of everyone,
Chileans and Americans, who
worked with him. “A sense of
defeat and failure tore at them,”
say Dinges and Landau; his col-
leagues knew that the same
thing could happen to them. At
the same time, though, as Isabel
Letelier said at the time of the
assassination, the survivors
knew they “must do what is
necessary to carry on. It had
become a way of struggle. I
knew I had to do all in my power
to make Orlando’s death costly
to the enemy that killed him.”
The assassination was con-
ceived by Manuel Contreras,
then head of the DINA, and car-
ried out by a DINA officer and
right-wing Cuban exiles. After a
tortuous investigation, seven
people were indicted for the
murders. The American DINA
agent, Michael Townley, who
planned the assassination and
placed the bomb, became a
witness for the prosecution and
plea bargained his way into a
10-year prison term. He was
eligible for parole last month, but
it was denied. Two Cubans,
Guillermo Novo and Alvin Ross,
were convicted in a 1979 trial
and are serving life sentences;
the rest of the assassins remain
NACLA Reportupdate * update . update * update
at large. The U.S. Justice Depart-
ment made a half-hearted at-
tempt to extradite Contreras and
two other DINA officers, but they
are free in Santiago today.
Contreras seems to have
regained much of the power and
influence he lost temporarily
after DINA’s role in the
assassination became public
knowledge.
Landau’s and Dinges’ book
answers many of the questions
NACLA readers might have about
this case: Why Letelier? Why in
Washington, D.C.? Why did the
Pinochet government expel
Townley and why did Townley
talk? Why did the investigation
take so long? Most important, the
authors reveal an unprecedented
amount of information about
DINA’s structure and operations.
For example, the book contains a
surprising amount of detail on the
assassination of General Carlos
Prats in Buenos Aires in 1974 and
on the attempted murder of Ber-
nardo Leighton in Rome in 1975.
The book begins to read like a
detective novel when the authors
describe and analyze the FBI and
Justice Department investigation
of the case. The story follows the
FBI agents as they illogically look
for evidence that the assassination
was the work of the Left and
then-sometimes reluctantly-
turn their probing to the Cuban ex-
iles and the DINA agents who
hired them. The big “breaks” in
the case-like when an FBI in-
formant reveals that Cuban exile
Alvin Ross has bragged that he
“built the Letelier bomb”-make
fascinating reading.
The authors’ tour de force is the
book’s epilogue, where they pose
some tough questions and place
the investigation and trial in a
political framework. In asking
“could the murders have been
prevented?,” they suggest that
high U.S. government of-
ficials-including then head of the
CIA George Bush and former
Secretary of State Henry Kiss-
inger-knew before the
assassination that DINA planned
some sort of covert mission in
Washington. None of these of-
ficials tried to stop that mission,
and none came forward after the
assassination to tell what they
knew. In fact, the authors describe
five cases of withholding, destruc-
tion or concealment of key eviden-
tiary documents in the case and
conclude:
It was not DINA’s cover-ups or the
secretiveness of the Cuban na-
tionalist Movement that kept the
investigation off the track for
almost a year. It was the actions
consciously taken or willfully omit-
ted by officials and agencies of the
United States government.
Dinges and Landau do not sug-
gest that Townley or any of the
assassins worked for the CIA or
for any U.S. intelligence agency,
but they do argue that officials
within the U.S. government tried to
derail the investigation-direct it
away from Chile and the DINA-in
order to cover up past CIA ties
with Michael Townley and ongoing
CIA cooperation in certain areas
with DINA and other Latin
American intelligence agencies.
The authors also describe and
analyze the failure of the Carter
Administration to apply real
pressure on Chile to extradite Con-
treras and the other DINA agents.
In the end, Dinges and Landau
say, “the national security argu-
ment prevailed. The stability of the
Pinochet regime was judged more
sacred to U.S. interests than the
prosecution of terrorism on the
part of that regime.”
