First, let us recall September 11, a day of chaos and death in the capital when, for a while, no one knew who was in charge. The year was 1973 and the city was Santiago.
After a long, U.S.-orchestrated campaign of political and economic destabilization, Chilean military commanders staged a coup. The presidential palace was bombed by aircraft and armored units, while the US Navy observed offshore. It was reported that President Salvador Allende shot himself, but few believed it.
The September 11 coup began three Septembers earlier, when Allende's socialist-led coalition won the national election, an outcome National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger could not accept. "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people," Kissinger and Nixon's efforts against Allende ranged from propaganda and media smearing all the way to criminal attacks, including the killing of Chilean chief of staff Gen. Rene Schneider, a crime for which Kissinger is wanted to this day.
(Exactly to this day. It was September 11, 2001 that Schneider's family filed suit against Kissinger, former CIA director Richard Helms and others for directing a series of covert operations that led to Schneider's death. Huge news that would have been the lead headline on every paper in the country, but something else must've been going on Sept. 11, 2001, because there was little mention of the suit).
The coup inaugurated a rule of terror by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. His 17-year rule was marked by brutal oppression of political opponents, with at least 3,000 killed and "disappeared". Pinochet's junta dovetailed perfectly with the dictatorships in Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, countries whose secret police apparati were joined with Chile's DINA joined forces in Operation Condor, a region-wide campaign of torture, killings, disappearances, arrests and harassment aimed at oppressing or destroying leftist and opposition groups.
Despite the 1973 claim of UN Ambassador George H.W. Bush that the U.S. had no role in the coup, Nixon, Kissinger and Helms were deeply involved in the campaign against Allende, up to and including the coup, while trying to distance the U.S. from the uglier aspects of the Pinochet rule and Operation Condor. Peter Kornbluth's "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability" uses declassified documents to detail Nixon Administration efforts to tacitly assist the junta.
By 1976, Nixon was long gone, but Henry Kissinger was, amazingly, still around. Now Secretary of State under Gerald Ford, his the Latin American campaigns that had served his anti-communist aims so well were under fire. Sen. Frank Church's investigations into U.S. covert operations had gotten a bit too close for comfort. Still, with a military junta in power in Argentina, Operation Condor activities hadn't slowed. In fact, Condor had expanded beyond the "Southern Cone" countries to strike at the dictators' enemies elsewhere.
Orlando Letelier del Solar had once been the Allende government's ambassador to the U.S. and later its foreign minister and defense minister. After the coup, he was arrested, tortured and detained until 1974, when he moved to Washington and worked with the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank concentrating on issues of peace, social justice and the environment.
Letelier was a thorn in Pinochet's side, speaking about the coup and the repression afterward. The general even complained to Henry Kissinger when they met at the 1976 Organization of American States meeting in Santiago.
At that meeting, Pinochet said: "We are constantly being attacked by the Christian Democratics. They have a strong voice in Washington. Not the people in the Pentagon, but they get through to Congress. Gabriel Valdez [a leading Christian Democrat] has access. Also Letelier."
Kissinger: "I have not seen a Christian Democrat for years."
Pinochet: ". . . Letelier has access to the Congress. We know they are giving false information. . . . We are worried about our image." Kissinger did not take the occasion to indicate America's support for the rights of political opponents.
Gen. Pinochet was doing more than complain to his patron about the former minister. Chilean intelligence (DINA) chief Manuel Contreras was tasked with eliminating Letelier. The team included Michael Townley, an American ex-patriate acting for the DINA as a hired assassin in Operation Condor projects.
Intel chief Contreras had no worries about getting the team into the U.S. He would simply use his contacts as a CIA operative The US ambassador to Paraguay George Landau sent a cable to CIA director George H.W. Bush (name keeps coming around, huh?) of a Chilean claim that Townley and another agent were being sent to meet with Bush deputy Vernon Walters. Walters cabled back that he had no meeting with the men and the visas were cancelled. Townley found another route to America, but the CIA was on notice that a Chilean assassin was trying to get to Washington.
On September 21, 1976, Letelier was driving into Sheridan Circle in Washington. With him in the car were two colleagues from the Institute of Policy Studies, Michael Moffitt and his wife Ronni. As the car entered the traffic circle, a bomb planted by Townley and his team was detonated, killing Letelier and Ronni Moffitt.
Director of Central Intelligence Bush pledged the CIA's cooperation in solving the Letelier killing, but instead blocked the investigation at every turn. Federal prosecutor Eugene Propper said in 1988 that the Agency had given them "nothing" to break the case. In fact, Bush used the CIA's authority to mislead the press about Chile's involvement.
Relying on the word of Bush's CIA, Newsweek reported that "the Chilean secret police were not involved" in the Letelier assassination. "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." [Newsweek, Oct. 11, 1976]
Put shortly and simply, the CIA, under the direction of George H.W. Bush had foreknowledge of and abetted after the fact (at the very least) a terror bombing on the streets of Washington, D.C. But the story cannot be put either shortly or simply. Operation Condor is a decades-long, hemisphere-wide black box full of killings, torture and terror. The killings of Letelier and Moffitt were part of a web of horrors that stretches from the 1950s through Iran-Contra and into the militia death squads of today's Iraq. Everywhere you pull at this web, the name George Bush pops up.
So it's not hard to understand why Junior might want to skip the terror attack anniversary events, eh?
Afterword One: I apologize for the rather disjointed diary. The subject matter is so twisty and interconnected, it's hard to make a straight narrative from it. Also, apologies for the literary license taken in the title. There are indeed commemorations of the lives of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington this week, including a memorial program this Sunday, Sept. 17 at Sheridan Circle. On Wednesday, October 18, the 30th Annual Letelier/Moffitt Human Rights Award ceremony will be held at the National Press club. Honorees will include Maher Arar and the Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign.
Afterword Two: As many of you know, the Chilean Supreme Court recently lifted Augusto Pinochet's immunity from prosecution on financial corruption charges. The general's family claims he is far too ill to withstand the rigors of a trial. However, there is good news: even if you can't throw all the dictators in jail, they do have to die sometime. Last month, Condor-era Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner finally ascended to that big presidential palace in the sky.
Afterword:
September 11, 2019
Augusto Pinochet, like his peer Stroessner, has gone on to whatever judgment awaits him. Henry Kissinger remains, to my knowledge robust and smug.