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Assassination on Embassy Row
By John Dinges, Saul Landau OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1980 John Dinges and Saul Landau
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7273-4
CHAPTER 1
THE ACT
September 9, 1976. At Kennedy International Airport the arrival of LAN-Chile Airlines flight 142 from Santiago was announced. Minutes later a tall, fair-haired man in his thirties handed his passport to a U.S. Immigration official. It was mid-morning. A taut half-smile masked the traveler's nervousness as he watched the official page through the passport, remove the official entrance form the traveler had filled out on the plane, and glance up from the passport photo to the man before him. Many times in many airports the traveler had seen officials go through the identical motions: verify the likeness of the photo, check the name, stamp the passport.
The official absorbed the facts he needed in a second: name, Hans Petersen Silva (the last name a matronymic, according to Spanish custom); nationality, Chilean; official Chilean passport and official visa indicating Chilean government business. A cut above the average Latin American tourist—probably a government expert, deserving of more than routine courtesy, the official may have thought. He began the routine turning of pages in the foot-thick loose-leaf volume called the "lookout book." The traveler stiffened imperceptibly. His passport wouldn't appear in the book—unless something had gone wrong.
U.S. Immigration checks all arriving passengers' names against the several thousand names listed alphabetically and phonetically in the lookout book. Each listing appears there at the request of a United States government agency—the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency. Alongside the names, coded instructions indicate the action required: F-1, notify interested agency; F-2, search; F-3, bar entry and arrest.
The traveler's legs felt rubbery as it became obvious that the immigration official had matched his name with a listing in the lookout book. "He examined my passport several times, reread the inscription, and finally shrugged his shoulders and returned it to me," he would testify after his discovery. "This left me quite shaken since I thought that the inscription could refer to some other Hans Petersen or could be something referring to the passport I was carrying. From that moment on, I was quite jumpy."
He placed the red passport in an inside pocket and headed toward the customs area. LAN-Chile crew members greeted him as he joined them and passed through customs without inspection. Some of the crew had known him for years. They thought his name was Andrés Wilson. Beyond the luggage checkout barrier he recognized Fernando Cruchaga, a New York-based LAN-Chile official.
They did not acknowledge each another until they had left the customs area. Tradecraft. It had been violated too many times on this mission already. The traveler touched the pocket where he had hidden the flash caps he called "electric matches." He had not tested them, and this made him uneasy at the prospect of having to use them on this trip. Hidden in a medicine bottle in his shaving kit were two grams of lead trinitrite powder—in that quantity it could blow a man's hand off. He had violated his own rules, his professional standards, by smuggling explosives. His superiors had not allowed him sufficient time to do it another way. He despised haste.
Cruchaga embraced him and addressed him as Andrés. With Cruchaga was Enrique Gambra, the New York director of LAN-Chile. The three men spoke Spanish as they walked to an airport restaurant near the LAN offices.
The men had something to eat. Gambra left. Then the traveler gave Cruchaga the name of the man he had expected to meet on arrival. Had the man appeared? "Yes," Cruchaga later testified, "a man approached me because I had my ID from LAN-Chile on my pocket, and he said, 'Is Andrés Wilson on the aircraft?' I said, 'Yes. What's your name?' He mentioned a name that I think was Fáundez, something like that."
Hans Petersen Silva, alias Juan Andrés Wilson, alias Kenneth Enyart, alias Juan Williams Rose, was on a mission to arrange the assassination of Orlando Letelier. The traveler's real name was Michael Vernon Townley. The man he was to meet was Captain Armando Fernandez, alias Armando Fáundez Lyon. Both men were experienced operatives from the External Section of DINA, Chile's secret police.
"When I met Captain Fernández. he had various suitcases and several tennis rackets," Townley later wrote. Fernandez was accompanied by two women, one his sister, the other an "extremely well dressed and well groomed" companion carrying a fashion magazine. Fernández and Townley politely left the two women with Cruchaga.
Once they were alone, "Captain Fernández gave me one sheet of paper which contained a sketch of Letelier's residence and employment as well as written information setting forth a description of Letelier's automobile and his wife's automobile." The two discussed in whispers and short phrases Letelier's daily movements at work in Washington and in the Maryland suburb where he lived. A group of rabbis passed them in the terminal lobby close to the LAN-Chile lounge. Townley listened to Fernandez' report, asked questions, and filed each detail in his mind. He studied the drawing, the license-plate numbers, and the addresses, memorized them, and destroyed the papers. From a secret compartment in his wallet he removed Orlando Letelier's photograph, looked at it, and replaced it. Others might have to refer to it later, though he himself knew it well. The two men talked for more than an hour.
Fernández' mission was now over. For fifteen days he had been in the United States gathering "preoperative intelligence" on the target. Townley's mission, to organize the hit team and ensure the hit, had begun.
After the meeting, Cruchaga ushered Fernández and his fashionable companion, a DINA agent using the alias Liliana Walker, into the LAN-Chile first-class lounge. Their flight to Chile wouldn't depart until 11:00 P.M. The rabbis were still wandering back and forth in the airport lobby.
Townley found Cruchaga again and asked his help in renting a car. DINA had provided him with a false passport and an international driver's license in Petersen's name, but no credit cards. Haste. Cruchaga obliged. As LAN assistant manager he vouched for Petersen's credit, and Townley left a $200 cash deposit with Hertz.
As he waited, Townley's eyes scanned like radar, picking up people and objects. The disconcerting incident at the immigration counter, the official's too-casual attitude, had put his antennae on alert. Two men loitering near the LAN-Chile lounge could have been FBI; he had noticed them several times now. Townley had good reason to feel insecure on this mission. That fiasco in Paraguay haunted him. He hated loose ends, sloppiness, imprecision.
In the car, he took a long look in his rear-view mirror. "After assuring myself that I was not under surveillance, I proceeded through Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, where I checked into a motel ... using the identity of Hans Petersen. I telephonically contacted Virgilio Paz...." He made a dinner date for that evening with Paz and his wife. Then he made a collect call to his sister Linda, who lived in nearby Tarrytown, New York.
Townley met Virgilio and his wife, Idania, at the Bottom of the Barrel Restaurant, a Cuban exile hangout in Union City, New Jersey. The town has a Cuban exile population of some 50,000. Paz and his wife called Townley Andrés Wilson; they beat him at an electronic game; during dinner they discussed family and friends. Paz had recently been Townley's house guest in Santiago.
"During dinner with Paz I conveyed my desire to speak with Guillermo Novo Sampol concerning an unspecified matter. I then returned to my hotel."
He had to finish composing his speech by noon. After dressing hurriedly, he gulped coffee and said goodbye, patting Alfie, the sheepdog with hair over his eyes, who followed him outside to the blue Chevelle.
Orlando Letelier gunned the engine and headed out of Ogden Court, a quiet cul-de-sac in Bethesda, Maryland, and onto River Road, a main artery into Washington, D.C. The Leteliers' neighborhood, populated by professionals and business people living in comfortable split-level homes, evoked stability and shelter.
Letelier was thinking and planning as he turned right onto 46th Street and drove toward Massachusetts Avenue. There were other ways to drive from home to his Dupont Circle office, but since returning to Washington he used the same Massachusetts Avenue route he had taken habitually during his years at the Inter-American Development Bank and the Chilean Embassy. The embassy had been his home for three years, but he wasn't welcome there now. The present occupants represented the military junta that on September 11, 1973, had bombed and machine-gunned their way to power, overthrowing the elected government of Salvador Allende, of which Letelier was a member.
Letelier had chosen Washington as the ideal base from which to fight against the military dictatorship. A week before, an article by him in The Nation had argued that the junta's systematic human rights violations were inextricably linked to the United States–sponsored "Chicago School" economic model imposed on Chile by the junta. The article had received favorable comments from Letelier's United States colleagues. He was trying to arrange to have it circulated in Chile, where it could provide ammunition to the regime's opponents. That was one of the items on his day's agenda. Top priority, though, was work on the speech he would deliver at the Madison Square Garden concert on September 10, a commemoration and protest marking the third anniversary of the coup.
He turned left from Q Street into the alley bordering the Institute for Policy Studies. A truck blocked the entrance to his parking space. He looked back across the street toward the sidewalk tables of the Rondo Café. A couple, engrossed in each other, were drinking coffee. Several days before, Juan Gabriel Valdés, Orlando's co-worker at the institute and political colleague, had mentioned seeing a man at the Rondo who "had the DINA look." Perhaps Juan Gabriel was right, Letelier thought. But what could DINA do besides watch? Maybe rob or harass? What would they dare do here in the capital city of their most important international supporters? Letelier had often told his friends that inside the United States he felt safe from DINA, despite the threats. He had dismissed Juan Gabriel's apprehensions. Paranoia was a state of mind he could ill afford. It led to paralysis.
He walked toward his office, passing two white-clad waitresses, their high turbans bobbing, members of the Oriental sect that ran the Golden Temple Restaurant nearby.
It was exactly two years since he was released from concentration camp. He saw his reflection in the mirrorlike window of IPS, tall, erect, meticulously dressed in a beige summer suit. He smiled at the image of the dashing businessman, the diplomat. Bizarre. He had first come to know about IPS when, as ambassador, he had found it a source of solid support for the programs of Chile's Popular Unity government. Now IPS had become his base of operation, since shortly after his release from prison.
IPS had named him director of the Transnational Institute, its international program. He had just returned from his third trip that year to Amsterdam, the European seat of the Transnational Institute, and as usual the trip had afforded him an opportunity to meet with other exile leaders and with European political leaders.
As he walked up the two flights of stairs to his office, he began to rehearse phrases for the anniversary speech. Three years since the coup. Two years since my release.
He had survived a year in one concentration camp after another, the first one on Dawson Island, a cold and barren rock in the stormy Strait of Magellan, only a few hundred miles from Antarctica. There he had lost forty pounds. When he left, the camp commander had warned him that "General Pinochet will not and does not tolerate activities against his government." The military government, the officer declared, could deliver punishment "no matter where the violator lives."
September 10, 1976. Just beyond Union City's only Sears Roebuck store, Michael Townley met two Cubans in their late thirties. The Cuatro Estrellas Restaurant served Cuban fare and attracted large numbers of midday shoppers. Guillermo Novo and José Dionisio Suárez knew the waitresses there. They also knew Townley—as Andrés Wilson, agent for DINA. They had worked with him before. As Latin American custom demanded, the men went through the amenities of asking about families and recalling past good times before they got down to the business at hand.
"At this luncheon," Townley later wrote, "I outlined my DINA mission to assassinate Letelier and requested the assistance of the Cuban Nationalist Movement."
Novo and Suárez weren't surprised. Phone calls from Townley from Chile in recent weeks had alerted them that DINA had another job for them. But they had to be convinced. They began to complain about the Pinochet government's shabby treatment of some of their comrades in the anti-Castro Cuban exile movement. But their arguments were half-hearted. They were hero-worshippers, and Pinochet was their hero. He had led the coup that eliminated what they considered a communist regime—precisely what the Cuban Nationalists had been trying so long and unsuccessfully to pull off against the Castro government. After the coup, the Cubans began to call Chile their "darling." But there had been an ugly incident that marred the relationship, and Novo, as head of the North Zone of the Cuban Nationalist Movement, demanded the satisfaction of a full explanation.
The Cubans complained that Chile had given safe haven to two Cuban terrorists, Orlando Bosch and Rolando Otero, both fugitives from the FBI, only to betray them. Otero had been turned over directly to FBI agents aboard a plane headed for Miami—and jail. And Bosch, after spending more than a year in Chile, was informed while outside the country that Chile had issued a warrant for his arrest.
Novo reminded Townley that his own CNM, Bosch's group, Cuban Action (Acción Cubana), and Otero's group, the Cuban National Liberation Front (Frente Nacional de Liberación Cubana—FNLC) had joined together just two months before in a formal alliance, the Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations (Comando de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas—CORU), to coordinate "militant" actions.
How can we help you, Novo objected, when you treat our people badly? Townley explained the Chilean position: Otero had entered Chile under his own name and passport. His whereabouts were known to the FBI and couldn't be hidden after the fact. Novo argued that DINA should have killed Otero rather than turn him over to the FBI. Townley was ingratiating. The Bosch matter, he said, wasn't even handled by DINA. Finally Novo and Suarez agreed to get back to him on the new DINA request. That night they would have their regular Friday meeting of the leaders of the CNM. The matter would be presented to them, then they would come to Townley's hotel to hear him make his case. Their manner, however, indicated that they—Novo and Suárez—were interested in the operation and would argue in favor of DINA's request to the larger meeting.
Orlando and Isabel Margarita Letelier set off on their drive to New York City. Isabel read and edited the text of Orlando's speech for that evening's Madison Square Garden commemoration of the Chilean coup. "In the name of our dead ones," the speech began.
Orlando and Isabel discussed the program, which would feature Joan Baez, and guessed at how many people would attend. They talked about house and family affairs and recalled good times and bad together in Chile and the United States. They stopped for coffee at Howard Johnson's. Orlando drank coffee and chain-smoked all day; his office always had an electric percolator and instant coffee. Sometimes with the coffee he took a Valium tablet. At age forty-four he felt surges of uncontrollable energy, the kind that allowed him to juggle many different projects within the course of a day and to move back and forth between professional and social activities with ease.
The couple drove north through Maryland and Delaware and into New Jersey in the late morning hours. Shortly after arriving in New York and checking into the Algonquin Hotel, they received a call from a United Press International reporter, who read Letelier a wire dispatch just received from Chile. The military government, it said, had revoked his Chilean citizenship. He was accused of "carrying out in foreign lands a publicity campaign aimed at bringing about the political, economic and cultural isolation of Chile." His "ignoble and disloyal attitude," the decree continued, "made him deserving of the maximum ... moral sanction contemplated by our juridical order ... the loss of the Chilean nationality."
Letelier listened, more shocked and hurt than he would admit. He asked the reporter to read the whole cable. General Pinochet and all his ministers had signed the decree, but no other members of the military junta. "In the concrete case of his activities in Holland," it said, "he [Letelier] has incited port and transportation workers of that country to declare a boycott against goods destined for or originating from Chile and has influenced its government to hinder or prevent the investment of Dutch capital in Chile." The reporter offered one more detail: the decree had been published that day in Chile's Official Gazette, but it was dated three months earlier—June 7, 1976.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Assassination on Embassy Row by John Dinges, Saul Landau. Copyright © 1980 John Dinges and Saul Landau. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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