Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: When the Terrorists Were 'Our Guys'

When the Terrorists Were 'Our Guys' 
That car bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, on Washington’s Embassy Row, killed
Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker
Ronni Moffitt, while wounding Moffitt’s husband.
It soon became clear to the FBI and other federal investigators that the
attack likely was a joint operation of DINA, the fearsome Chilean
intelligence agency of military dictator Augusto Pinochet, and U.S.-based
right-wing Cuban exiles.
But Bush’s CIA steered attention away from the real assassins toward
leftists who supposedly killed Letelier to create a martyr for their
cause. Eventually, the CIA’s cover story collapsed and – during the Carter
administration – at least some of the lower-level conspirators were
prosecuted, though the full story was never told.
Recently obtained internal FBI records and notes of a U.S. prosecutor
involved in counter-terrorism cases make clear that the connections among
Bush’s CIA, DINA and the Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM) – which supplied
the trigger men for the Letelier bombing – were closer than was understood
at the time.
DINA provided intelligence training for CNM terrorists who acted like a
“sleeper cell” inside the United States; federal prosecutions of
right-wing Cuban terrorists were routinely frustrated; and the CIA did all
it could to cover for its anticommunist allies who were part of a broader
international terror campaign called Operation Condor.
Beginning in late 1975, Operation Condor -- named after Chile's national
bird -- was a joint operation of right-wing South American military
dictatorships, working closely with U.S.-based Cuban and other
anticommunist extremists on cross-border assassinations of political
dissidents as far away as Europe.
This meant that during George H.W. Bush’s year at the CIA’s helm, the
United States both harbored domestic terrorist cells and served as a base
for international terrorism. Yet no U.S. official was ever held
accountable -- and in many cases, just the opposite.
George H.W. Bush rose to be Vice President four years later and to be
President eight years after that, with his son now sitting in the Oval
Office. Former President Bill Clinton has said his wife's first act as
President would be to dispatch him and George H.W. Bush on a worldwide
fence-mending tour.
The Letelier Plot
Regarding the DINA-CNM alliance, Chile’s star assassin Michael Townley
told FBI interrogators after his arrest in 1978 that Cuban exiles involved
in the Letelier murder had received DINA training, including CNM member
Virgilio Paz, who “attended a one-month ‘quickie’ intelligence course
sponsored by DINA,” the internal FBI report said.
Townley, a fiercely anticommunist American expatriate who had emerged as
DINA’s chief overseas assassin, told the FBI that Paz’s training was
personally approved by DINA’s director, Col. Manuel Contreras, who – the
CIA later acknowledged – was an asset of the U.S. spy agency.
Paz lived at Townley’s residence during his three-month stay in Chile and
DINA paid for Paz’s frequent calls back home to the United States, Townley
said, recalling that Paz left Chile close to his son Brian’s birthday on
June 6, 1976.
About a month later, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, DINA’s director of
operations, summoned Townley to a meeting near St. Georges School in
suburban Santiago. Townley recalled driving his DINA-supplied Fiat 125
sedan to the early-morning meeting and taking a thermos of coffee.
Espinoza asked Townley if he’d be available for a special operation
outside Chile. Townley complained “that he had spent a majority of 1975 in
Europe on DINA missions and that he felt he was neglecting his family with
constant travel on behalf of DINA,” according to the FBI report.
(Only later would investigators learn that Townley had been working with
European neo-fascists in hunting down Chilean dissidents in Europe,
including Christian Democratic leader Bernard Leighton, who was severely
wounded along with his wife in an assassination attempt in Rome on Oct. 6,
1975.)
In late July 1976, Townley said he drove a stubby metallic green MG 1300
to a second meeting and spoke with Colonel Espinoza outside the car.
Espinoza informed Townley that his mission would be the assassination of
Orlando Letelier, who had emerged as an articulate critic of Pinochet’s
dictatorship and was putting an unwanted spotlight on Chile’s central role
in the spreading human rights calamity across South America.
Espinoza said Paraguayan travel documents would be used for the operation
and the preferred method of death was an arranged traffic accident while
Letelier was alone.
“Colonel Espinosa [sic] instructed him [Townley] that Cuban exile
terrorists were to be utilized to carry out the actual assassination, and
that his and [his DINA accomplice’s] role would be to plan the
assassination and then withdraw leaving its execution to the Cubans,” the
FBI report said.
“Based on his [Townley’s] recent favorable association with Paz and the
latter’s recent training under DINA sponsorship, he [Townley] told Colonel
Espinosa [sic] that he believed the assassination in the United States
might be arranged,” the FBI document said.
The CORU Umbrella
By June 1976, CNM also had joined in another campaign of right-wing
terrorism, this one organized by Cuban exile Orlando Bosch under an
umbrella group called the Coordination of United Revolutionary
Organizations (CORU), which targeted Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
According to the federal prosecutor’s notes, the CORU organizational
meeting in the Dominican Republic in June 1976 brought together CNM and
four other exile groups, including the “Force Fourteen (F-14, led by a CIA
asset),” meaning the U.S. spy agency surely knew about CORU’s plans from
the start.
In early July 1976, after getting the assignment to murder Letelier,
Townley said he contacted Paz and other CNM members to assist him.
First, however, Townley and his DINA accomplice, Chilean Army Lieutenant
Armando Fernandez Larios, went to Paraguay to arrange visas for a trip to
the United States, using the false names, Juan Williams and Alejandro
Romeral.
Their cover story was that they were investigating suspected leftists
working for Chile’s state copper company in New York and that – while in
the United States – they would meet with Bush’s CIA deputy, Lt. Gen.
Vernon Walters. 
A senior Paraguayan official, Conrado Pappalardo, urged U.S. Ambassador
George Landau to cooperate, citing a direct appeal from Pinochet. An
alarmed Landau recognized the visa request as 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,
but the U.S. government apparently never delivered a specific warning to
DINA to call off the operation.
To this day, it remains unclear what – if anything – Bush’s CIA did after
learning about the “Paraguayan caper.”
Nevertheless, Townley said he and DINA’s Col. Espinoza worried about
delays in getting the original visas, which suggested that the Paraguayan
approach was compromised, Townley said in his FBI interrogation.
To allay any U.S. suspicions, DINA did dispatch two other Chilean
operatives using the phony names Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral.
After they arrived in the United States on Aug. 22, 1976, they made a
point of having the Chilean Embassy notify Walters’s office, but the CIA
again demonstrated little curiosity about the mission.
‘Beyond Belief’
“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.”
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, consisting of Larios Fernandez and a female agent, to do
surveillance on Letelier as he moved around Washington.
Then, on Sept. 8, 1976, Townley followed, using an official Chilean
passport under the fictitious name of Hans Petersen Silva.
After arriving at New York’s Kennedy International Airport, Townley said
he contacted Virgilio Paz by telephone and then rented a car to drive to
Union City, New Jersey, to meet Paz at a restaurant named “Bottom of the
Barrel,” according to the FBI report.
The next night, Paz brought members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement to
Townley’s motel room, including Guillermo Novo Sampol and Jose Dionisio
Suarez Esquivel, Townley said.
“Cuban exiles present at the meeting agreed that the CNM would assist DINA
in assassinating Letelier,” the FBI report said. “Shortly thereafter he
[Townley] traveled to Washington, D.C. in the automobile of Virgilio Paz
in order to conduct additional surveillance on Letelier and to purchase
additional materials necessary to make the bomb which would be utilized to
kill Letelier.
“Basically, the bomb was made up of TNT and a substance which he [Townley]
believed to be C-3 plastic. Several months previously he modified a CB
Fanon Courier … receiver in Chile at the request of the CNM to be utilized
at a future date. … 
“The crystal on the receiver was set at 31.040 megahurts [sic]. A major
modification made by Townley was to remove the speaker from the receiver
and put in a transformer. A standard blasting cap was used in the
construction of the bomb. The bomb was contained in an aluminum baking
tin.”
Townley’s remark about DINA’s preparation of the explosive device for the
U.S.-based Cuban extremists further indicates that the DINA-CNM
relationship represented an active penetration of the United States by an
international terrorist cabal operating under the nose of U.S.
intelligence.
Final Plans
After arriving in Washington and checking into a downtown Holiday Inn,
Townley and Paz spent several days conducting surveillance of Letelier.
After another CNM operative Suarez Equivel arrived, the assassination team
took the next step, heading to Letelier’s house in suburban Maryland.
Late that Saturday night, Sept. 18, or early Sunday morning, Sept. 19, Paz
drove Townley to Letelier’s neighborhood. Townley “was dropped off at the
top of a hill in a cul-de-sac street, immediately adjacent to the Letelier
home. [After crawling under Letelier’s Chevelle] he affixed the bomb to
the cross-member and recalled he had some trepidation as to whether the
bomb would remain attached since he ran out of tape," the FBI report said.
“The bomb contained a safety switch which he placed in the ‘on’ position
after covering the switch with tape. … While he was placing the bomb he
recalled that a police cruiser passed by … however, he was undetected.
After placing the bomb he walked down the hill and joined Virgilio Paz in
the latter’s automobile and they left the area and returned to their
hotel.”
On Sunday morning, Townley flew from Washington National Airport to Newark
where he met CNM leader Novo Sampol for breakfast. Then they drove to New
York City where Novo had a meeting with an “attorney apparently connected
with the local New York City government,” the FBI report said.
After a family visit in Westchester County, Townley flew to Miami where he
saw his parents at their Boca Raton home before meeting with Miami CNM
member Felipe Rivero Diaz, who pressed Townley for more assistance from
DINA, the FBI report said.
By Monday evening, Townley had become “troubled that no news had been
received concerning Letelier and he suspected that something had gone
wrong with the plan to assassinate him.”
Early Tuesday morning, Sept. 21, Townley called Virgilio Paz to find out
what had happened. “Paz was extremely angry at the early hour of the call
and the use of the telephone from a security standpoint. Paz furnished no
information concerning the Letelier bomb,” the report said.
“Later on during the morning he [Townley] contacted Ignacio Novo Sampol in
Miami and they arranged to have lunch at a Miami restaurant. During the
telephone conversation, Novo informed him that something had happened in
Washington, D.C. Subsequent news broadcast the death of Letelier as a
result of a bomb which detonated in the latter’s automobile.”
Next, Townley said he “eliminated the identity of Hans Petersen Silva and
returned to Chile utilizing a United States passport under the name of
Kenneth Enyart.”
Slowly into Focus
Back in Washington, the facts of the assassination slowly came into focus.
The explosion that ripped apart Letelier’s Chevelle had shattered a quiet
morning in the stately section of the capital where embassies line
Massachusetts Avenue, what is called Embassy Row.
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.
Ronni’s husband, 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 in 1973 with the help of the Nixon administration and the CIA.
The scandal also jeopardized the reputation of CIA Director George H.W.
Bush and the political future of his boss, President Gerald Ford, who was
in the midst of a heated presidential campaign against Democrat Jimmy
Carter.
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.” [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
A problem, however, was that one of the CIA’s best-placed assets – DINA
chief Manuel Contreras – would turn out to be a 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 that DINA already had used
in hundreds of “disappearances” of dissidents, 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 had plenty of reasons to disbelieve Contreras. 
“The CIA had substantive evidence to show that Contreras was lying,”
researcher Peter Kornbluh wrote in his 2004 book, 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.
As the Ford administration dawdled and Bush’s CIA kept its head down,
right-wing Cuban terrorists stepped up their war against leftists in
general and Fidel Castro’s communist government in particular.
On Oct. 6, 1976, a Cubana airliner, flying the Cuban Olympic fencing team
and other passengers to Cuba, exploded after taking off in Barbados,
killing everyone onboard. At the time, this sort of mid-air bombing was
unprecedented, and the evidence quickly pointed to Cuban extremists linked
to CORU and the CIA.
But the U.S. government either resisted putting the pieces together or
chose to avoid the obvious conclusions.
On Oct. 6, the day of the Cubana Airline bombing, a CIA informant in Chile
went to the CIA station in Santiago and relayed an account of Pinochet
denouncing Letelier, with the dictator calling 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 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. 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 [Henry] Kissinger.”
Despite Bush’s success in keeping the truth about the Letelier
assassination under wraps, Democrat Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated Ford on
Nov. 2, 1976.
Cracking the Case
Over the next two years, federal investigators would crack the case,
successfully bringing charges against Townley and several Cuban-American
conspirators. But prosecutor Eugene Propper told me that the CIA didn’t
volunteer the crucial information about the Paraguayan gambit or hand over
the photo of the chief assassin, Townley.
“Nothing the agency gave us helped us break this case,” Propper said.
According to the recently obtained prosecutor’s notes, one of the breaks
in the Letelier case came from Rolando Otero, a Cuban exile who was
believed to be the youngest member of the CIA-trained Bay of Pigs invasion
force in 1961 and who was implicated in a string of 1975-76 bombings in
Miami (though ultimately acquitted).
Otero had worked with Chile’s DINA, but – according to John Dinges’s 2005
book, The Condor Years – was a double agent for Venezuela’s intelligence
service, DISIP, causing his Chilean controllers to jail and torture him
before expelling him to the United States.
According to the prosecutor’s notes, “Otero became the witness who gave a
Washington, D.C. AUSA [assistant U.S. attorney] the key to the car-bombing
of Orlando Letelier. … The AUSA cut a deal with Otero that if Otero talked
about the Letelier case, he would not have to give any information about
[terrorism] cases … in Miami.”
The prosecutor’s notes also complained of a wider lack of cooperation from
Washington in the many cases of Cuban-exile terrorism in Miami.
Regarding the information generated by the Letelier prosecution, the Miami
prosecutor asked, “why wasn’t that information ever communicated to Miami,
the Cuban exile stronghold, where the most devious and clandestine plots
were discussed on a regular basis? The links to Miami were so thick, the
exchange of communication so thin.”
As for the CIA's initial Letelier cover-up, neither Bush nor Walters was
ever pressed to provide a full explanation.
When I submitted questions to Bush in 1988 – while he was running for
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 killed my critical story about Bush’s CIA
tenure, even though he was citing that experience as an important element
of his résumé for the presidency. Walters also rebuffed interview requests
on the Letelier topic prior to his death on Feb. 10, 2002, in West Palm
Beach, Florida.
New Cover-up
In 1995, after the Pinochet dictatorship had ended, DINA chief Contreras
and his assistant Espinoza were convicted in Chile for the Letelier
assassination and sentenced to seven and six years, respectively.
Contreras began implicating Pinochet in the Letelier case and other acts
of terrorism, saying Pinochet knew and approved all of these actions.
As for Pinochet, former President Bush didn’t hold a grudge against this
foreign leader who allegedly 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
killing Spanish citizens, George H.W. Bush was one of the world leaders
who rallied to Pinochet’s defense.
Bush called the case against Pinochet “a travesty of justice” and demanded
that Pinochet be sent home to Chile “as soon as possible,” which the
British courts did.
However, Garzon’s initiative prompted the Clinton administration to take a
second look at the Letelier case in 2000. An FBI team reviewed new
evidence that had become available and recommended the indictment of
Pinochet.
But the final decision was left to the incoming administration of George
W. Bush. In effect, the baton of the Letelier-Moffitt-murder cover-up was
passed to a new Bush generation. Besides failing to act on the FBI’s
recommendation, the Bush II administration continued to withhold relevant
documents from Chilean investigators.
The younger George Bush – and his brother Florida Gov. Jeb Bush – also
helped out in protecting the old Cuban terrorists who were implicated in
the Cubana Airline bombing, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Both
have been allowed to live out their golden years in the relative safety
and comfort of the United States.
As for Pinochet, the aging general never had to face justice for his acts
of international terrorism or for his domestic human rights crimes.
Pinochet died of a heart attack on Dec. 10, 2006, at the age of 91.
‘Blood Boil’
When I tracked down former Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerry Sanford, who was
assigned to the Cuban terrorism cases in the mid-1970s, he still sounded
frustrated at the lack of support he got from Washington to pursue these
killers who inflicted death both inside and outside the United States.
“My blood starts to boil when I think of how much we could have done but
how badly we were kept in the dark,” said Sanford, now 66, living in
northern Florida. “I asked for stuff and never got it.”
Sanford recalled that when CIA Director Bush visited Miami at the end of
the bloody year 1976, FBI agents “asked him for information from the CIA
on where explosives [for the Cuban exiles] were stashed.” The response
from Bush, according to Sanford, was “forget about it.”
Referring to the umbrella organization CORU, Sanford said, “it was the
only terrorist group that ever exported terrorism from the United States.”
Ironically, the CIA’s analytical division reached a similar, troubling
conclusion in an annual report entitled “International Terrorism in 1976”
that was published in July 1977, after CIA Director Bush had left office.
“Cuban exile groups operating under the aegis of a new alliance called the
Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations [CORU] were
particularly active during the second half of the year,” the CIA reported.
“They were responsible for no less than 17 acts of international terrorism
(at least three of which took place in the US).
“Statistically, this matches the record compiled by the various
Palestinian terrorist groups during the same period. But largely because
the Cuban exile operations included the October bombing of a Cubana
Airlines passenger aircraft, their consequences were far more bloody.”
In other words, Cuban exiles based in the United States – during George
H.W. Bush’s year in charge of the CIA – outpaced Palestinian terrorists in
terms of a total body count.
After the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, the U.S. government presented
itself as the innocent victim of international terrorism with a moral
right not only to pursue the “bad guys” across the globe but to subject
some captives to torture, to lock others up indefinitely without trial,
and to launch attacks that have killed many thousands of innocents.
In the years that have followed, there were few recollections of the days
under the current president’s father when the bloodiest terrorists were
“our guys.” 
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous
Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and
Nat, and can be ordered at 
neckdeepbook.com
. His two previous books,
Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq
and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also
available there. Or go to Amazon.com. 
-- 
visitate 
http://www.comunisti-italiani.it/frames/index.htm
 
http://www.larinascita.org
http://www.italia-cuba.it/associazione/associazione.htm
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it


bravo hai detto cose giuste...
ma ti dimentichi che i peggiori terroristi sono quei magistrati che oggi 
hanno liberato il figlio di RIINA per decorrenza dei termini.
Tutte le altre cose sono balle che servono a nulla.
--
"Il Popolo che Lavora e Produce Vince Sempre" Per questo il dittatore lo
teme e lo persegue.   Anche brogliando le elezioni. :-)