Allegations of U.S. foreknowledge
According to
John Dinges, author of
The Condor Years (The New Press 2003), documents released in 2015 revealed a CIA report dated April 28, 1978 that showed the agency by then had knowledge that Pinochet ordered the murders. A State Department document also referred to eight separate CIA reports from around the same date, each sourced to "extremely sensitive informants” who provided evidence of Pinochet's direct involvement in ordering the assassination and in directing the subsequent cover-up. When Townley and his Chilean associate tried to obtain B-2 visas to the United States in Paraguay, Landau was told by Paraguayan intelligence that these Paraguayan subjects were to meet with General
Vernon A. Walters in the United States, concerning CIA business. Landau was suspicious of this declaration, and cabled for more information. The B-2 visas were revoked by the State Department on August 9, 1976. However, under the same names, two DINA agents used fraudulent Chilean passports to travel to the U.S. on diplomatic A-2 visas, in order to shadow Letelier. Townley himself flew to the U.S. on a fraudulent Chilean passport and under another assumed name. Landau had made copies of the visa applications though, which later documented the relationship of Townley and DINA with the Paraguayan visa applications. According to Dinges, documents released in 1999 and 2000 establish that "the
CIA had inside intelligence about the assassination alliance at least two months before Letelier was killed, but failed to act to stop the plans." The intelligence was about Condor's plans to kill prominent exiles outside of Latin America, but did not specify Letelier was the target. It also knew about an
Uruguayan attempt to kill U.S. Congressman
Edward Koch, which then-CIA director
George H. W. Bush warned him about only after Orlando Letelier's murder.
Kenneth Maxwell claims that U.S. policymakers were aware not only of Operation Condor in general, but in particular "that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States." A month before the Letelier assassination,
Kissinger ordered "that the Latin American rulers involved be informed that the 'assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad ... would create a most serious moral and political problem." Maxwell wrote in his review of
Peter Kornbluh's book, "This demarche was apparently not delivered: the U.S. embassy in Santiago demurred on the ground that to deliver such a strong rebuke would upset the dictator", and that, on September 20, 1976, the day before Letelier and Moffitt were killed, the State Department instructed the ambassadors to take no further action with regard to the Condor scheme. [Maxwell, 2004, 18]. On April 10, 2010, the
Associated Press reported that a document discovered by the
National Security Archive indicated that the State Department communique that was supposed to have gone out to the Chilean government warning against the assassinations had been blocked by then Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger. During the
FBI investigation into the assassination, documents in Letelier's possession were copied and leaked to journalists
Rowland Evans and
Robert Novak of
The Washington Times and
Jack Anderson by the
FBI before being returned to his widow. The documents purportedly show Letelier was working with Eastern Bloc Intelligence agencies for a decade and coordinating his activities with the surviving political leadership of the
Popular Unity coalition exiled in
East Berlin. The FBI suspected that these individuals had been recruited by the
Stasi. Documents in the briefcase showed that Letelier had maintained contact with Salvador Allende's daughter,
Beatriz Allende who was married to
Cuban
DGI station chief Luis Fernandez Ona. The documents showed Letelier was receiving $5,000 a month from the Cuban government and under the supervision of Beatriz Allende, he used his contacts within the
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), and western human rights groups to organize a campaign within the
United Nations as well as the US Congress to isolate the new Chilean government Fellow IPS member and friend
Saul Landau described Evans and Novak as part of an "organized right wing attack". In 1980, Letelier's widow, Isabel, wrote in
The New York Times that the money sent to her late husband from Cuba was from western sources, and that Cuba had simply acted as an intermediary, although Novak and Evans point out that the documents from Beatriz Allende were very clear on the source of the money. In a letter dated March 14, 1976, Townley recounted how he received orders to carry out the assassination from Contreas' deputy Pedro Espinoza, and later also added that he in fact recruited the assassination team composed of American Cuban exiles after entering the U.S. on false visas he obtained in Paraguay. However, Townley stated that his source of foreign assistance was in fact the so-called "Red Condor," the
Condor network of
Southern Cone secret police services. ==See also==