A Federally Protected Terrorist

By Jim Scanlon

A year ago while in Buenos Aires on assignment for the Coastal Post, I began following newspaper accounts of the trial of a former Chilean intelligence operative named Enrique Arancibia Clavel charged with complicity in the 1974 murder of General Carlos Prats and his wife. Prats had been the former commander in chief of the Chilean Armed Forces before the CIA sponsored coup in 1973 destroyed the democratically elected government of Chile.

A strange aspect of this trial, which had dragged on for many years, was the secret testimony of Michael Townley, a US citizen born in Iowa, a cold blooded professional assassin employed by DINA, the secret intelligence service of the Chilean military government of General Agusto Pinochet. Townley was identified as living in the US as a federal protected witness.

According to newspaper reports I read in both Chile and Argentina, Townley testified that Clavel had nothing to do with the murder of Prats and his wife. He said that he himself had placed the bomb that killed Prats. He described how he had stalked Prats and was, at one point, ready to shoot him in a park near his home-but there were too many people around.

He cased out the former general's home and managed to get into his garage and place a bomb in his car. He had some trouble getting out until he managed to inconspicuously join a group of tipsy people leaving the building after a party. Townley said that he had not planned to kill Prats' wife but she happened to be in the car the next day when the general drove off. When Townley's wife, who was also a DINA agent, failed to detonate the bomb with a remote control device, Townley set off the bomb that killed the married couple.

Newspaper reports also noted that in 1975, Townley had participated in the attempted assassination of Bernardo Leighton an exiled Chilean diplomat who was attacked on the streets of Rome, Italy. Leighton and his wife were both seriously wounded but survived. I saw no mention in Chilean newspaper accounts that Townley had been active in an anti-Communist, fascist commando unit in Chile before the 1973 coup and has been accused of murdering a watchman in Concepcion and that he was pardoned by the government of General Pinochet when he came into power. I learned the latter upon returning to the United States.

Why was this remorseless killer under US federal protection? In 1978, Townley pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to murder Orlando Letelier a Chilean anti-fascist diplomat who was killed when a bomb blew up his car in the heart of downtown Washington DC on September 21, 1976. The blast also killed an American citizen, Ronni Moffitt. Her husband of four months, who was sitting in the back seat, escaped serious physical injury.

Until the bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic fanatics years later, and the bombing of a Federal Building in Oklahoma City killing 143 people, the Letelier assassination was the worst terrorist attack in United States history. Nothing like this had ever happened in Washington.

Townley and another DINA agent had entered the US from Chile with false documents. He had contacted a group of Cuban anti-Castro terrorists in New Jersey. Two of the Cubans had been involved in firing a bazooka rocket at the UN building and another had been implicated in the bombing of a Cuban airliner in which 73 people died. At least one had assisted him in the attack on the Leightons. One was believed to have bombed a Spanish freighter, the Sartrustegui in Montreal harbor on which, coincidentally, your reporter had sailed from Cadiz to Vera Cruz in 1964. (small world)

Townley expertly placed a bomb in Letelier's Chevette just as he had done in 1974, two years earlier, in Prats' car in Buenos Aires, and while he was making his way back to Chile, one of the Cubans detonated the explosives that ended the lives of Letelier and Moffitt.

The killings had all the marks of yet another assassination by the military government of Chile which was rightly being criticized for abducting, torturing and killing opponents and suspected opponents. Just a few weeks before his murder, the Chilean military junta had revoked Letelier's Chilean citizenship. It seemed perfectly logical that they then decided to revoke his life.

The US investigation into the murders did not proceed rapidly. There was turmoil in Washington at the time. Gerald Ford was President, the only man in US history to be vice president and president without ever having been elected to those offices. He had pardoned Richard Nixon, disgraced, in part, by the Cuban burglars at the Watergate. George Bush, the elder, was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency believed to be the source of leaks to the Washington Post, NY Times, US News and World Reports etc. that the bombing was a communist plot to disrupt relations between the Military Government of Chile and the US. (A version of "The Big Lie" cover story, that is, that "They couldn't be that stupid!")

It is not clear if the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter made it easier for the FBI and the Justice Department to conduct their investigation, but slowly, over the next two years, Townley was identified as a suspect and after great pressure was exerted on the Pinochet Government by the Carter administration, Townley-not legally Chilean, but American-was expelled for having overstayed his visa.

Townley was given a deal he couldn't refuse. Plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to murder, cooperate, get a ten years sentence and he, his wife (who helped him kill the Prats) and his children would become protected witnesses.

More importantly, he was also managed to get immunity from any other charges that might arise from crimes he committed outside the US (i.e.: Buenos Aires and Rome, and who knows where else?). As a matter of fact, it seems strange now, that he provided testimony in the Clavel case in Buenos Aires. There is no apparent reason, or compulsion for him to have done this. In any event, the judge in Buenos Aires did not believe his testimony and convicted Clavel. It must have been especially difficult for the three daughters of the Prats to hear the testimony of Townley, the federally protected killer of their parents.

All, in all, one has to admit that Townley was fortunate. He officially admitted to killing four people he did not know and attempting to murder two others. All of these acts involve special circumstances, using explosives, having reckless disregard for human life, acting in concert with conspirators, using false documents and identities, crossing international borders to commit crimes, fleeing, covering up.

Townley is believed to have served five hears in federal custody somewhere. He and his family will be supported by the our government for life-he may be your next door neighbor!

To quote the XVI Century, Pope Leo X upon the death of Cardinal de Richelieu, " If there is a god, the Cardinal has many sins to answer. If not, I'd say he has done very well." Normally when a prosecutor offers a "deal" he gets something in return. A lesser is exchanged for a greater. Townley was a "tool" following orders. He testified against lesser "tools" he recruited. The "authors" are not touched. The prosecutor cold have offered one or more of the Cubans a deal to get Townley.

To take a local example. A few years ago Assistant District Attorney Paula Kamena granted limited immunity to an actual murderer in exchange for testimony that convinced a jury to convict the two "authors" of the crime. Risky and controversial such tactics may be, but they make sense: bring the hidden, cloaked "calculators" to justice who hire others.

Who did he finger, what higher ups did Townley point to in order to earn such leniency? He implicated General (then a Colonel) Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA (surprise!) He implicated the number two man in DINA (Who would have suspected?). He testified that General Pinochet knew nothing of the assassination plans. (Naturally, out of the loop, plausible denial!)

George, the elder, Bush was head of the CIA in 1976 at the time when assassin Townley traveled to Washington to meet with General Vernon Waters the outgoing CIA chief. Do we learn anything about this? Not for quite some time, and then not very much. National security is important.

The mid 1970s was a time when South American refugee trade unionists, socialists, communists and others were systematically hunted down, murdered and abducted in a cooperative effort by secret police of the military governments in power in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and maybe Brazil. The coordinated plan was called Operation Condor. Our CIA is believed to have supported and encouraged these activities. National Security Advisor Henry Kissenger and Richard Nixon are known to have supported coup attempts in Chile from 1970 until it happened.

The Pinochet Government officially returned power to civilian control in 1990. Your reporter visited Chile in 1990, 1992, 1995, 1997, 1998 and 2000 investigating the environmental effects of ozone depletion. During this time there appeared a slow strengthening of democratic confidence and a glacially slow process of resolving the many charges of murder, torture kidnapping and disappearances of political opponents the years after the 1973 coup.

General Contreras who resigned and was supposedly under house arrest during the trial of the three Cubans in Washington in 1979, was freed after the trial, and the feeble efforts of the Carter administration for his extradition to the US were turned down by the Chilean Courts.

He was eventually tried in Chile in the late 1990s. He was again placed on house arrest but then fled to a military hospital in an Army base where he was sheltered and protected until finally placed in a real prison, Puente Peuco-actually it was a prison especially built for officers unlucky enough to be convicted of serious crimes under the Junta. If he has not already been released, he will be shortly, having served, maybe, five years, about same as Townley.

The US government has gone to great lengths to extradite foreign drug dealers from Columbia and Mexico-to the point of causing political instability for those countries. Bush, the elder, as president, ordered the invasion of a sovereign country, Panama, to arrest Manuel Noriega an alleged drug trafficker, another former CIA agent now in a US prison. President Reagan ordered air attacks against the home of Moammar Kadaffi in Libya killing Kadaffi's infant daughter and others , because suspicion of Libya's involved in the terrorist bombing of a US commercial airliner and the bombing of a Disco in Berlin.

It seems perfectly clear that comparable efforts were not made to extradite Contreras, a mere Colonel. Perhaps it was that he, like Townley, was connected to the Bush CIA. CIA actually had paid Contreras a large sum of money for something or other, but claimed it was a mistake.

Meanwhile, in November 2,000 the Judge in Argentina found Clavel guilty of being an accessory in the murder of the Prats. She also made a request for the extradition of General Pinochet in connection with the murder of the Prats.

This extradition request from Buenos Aires is different from the 1998 one from Spain that kept the General under house arrest in a luxurious town house in London for over a year. The Spaniards killed while he was dictator were abstractions. They were abstractions like those leftists and undesirables who were thrown out of Argentine airplanes, under orders from the Argentinean generals, naked, drugged but alive, into the South Atlantic.

Pinochet and his wife knew the Prats. They were friends and exchanged gifts. It is just conceivable that a subordinate might kill someone like Letelier without actually informing Pinochet, but is totally inconceivable that any subordinate would allow the murder Prats his former commander, without the knowledge and compliance of the General.

So the "Senator For Life", General Agusto Pinochet, like Macbeth killed his former Chief to stay in power. He obviously killed others but they mostly get lost in the crowd. The best he can say is that he murdered them for a higher cause, to avoid Socialism and Communism-or that it was a mistake and he really didn't mean it.

But he obviously didn't know world literature and he made the mistake of King Lear. Unlike Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he gave up his power and his kingdom before he died. Now he ends his bitter days almost in hiding, with little of the pomp and glory of a conquering Caesar. His friends the British betrayed him. He had business interests with them producing weapons. The Spanish humiliated him. The Dutch, the Norwegians too! Only the Americans are still protecting him.

Pinochet is said to be a devout Catholic who goes to mass every day. One wonders if he ever thinks, or dreams disturbing dreams of his former Chief and his wife-and their daughters-and if he ever thinks of telling what he knows of his Iago Contreras or King Richard III or the Duke of Kissenger and maybe even the assassin Townley?

Habla mi General! Speak! Before it is too late!