By Robert Parry In
early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a
Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington,
D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s
military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction. The
bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other
U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness
at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a
cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s
own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing
in Washington. In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA. The
new report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of
former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni
Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb
ripped apart Letelier's car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a
stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row. In the new report, the CIA also acknowledged publicly for the first time that it consulted Contreras in October 1976 about the Letelier assassination. The report added that the CIA was aware of the alleged Chilean government role in the murders and included that suspicion in an internal cable the same month. “CIA’s
first intelligence report containing this allegation was dated 6 October
1976,” a little more than two weeks after the bombing, the CIA
disclosed. Nevertheless,
the CIA – then under CIA director George H.W. Bush – leaked for
public consumption an assessment clearing the Chilean government’s
feared intelligence service, DINA, which was then run by Contreras. 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] Bush, who later became president of the United States and is the father of the current Republican nominee for the presidency, has never explained his role in putting out the false cover story that diverted attention away from the real terrorists. Nor has Bush explained what he knew about the Chilean intelligence operation in the weeks before Letelier and Moffitt were killed. Dodging
Disclosure As a Newsweek correspondent in 1988, a dozen years later, when the elder Bush was running for president, I prepared a detailed story about Bush’s handling of the Letelier case. The
draft story included the first account from U.S. intelligence sources
that Contreras was a CIA asset in the mid-1970s. I also learned that the
CIA had consulted Contreras about the Letelier assassination,
information that the CIA then would not confirm. The
sources told me that the CIA sent its Santiago station chief, Wiley
Gilstrap, to talk with Contreras after the bombing. Gilstrap then cabled
back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Contreras’s assurances that
the Chilean government was not involved. Contreras told Gilstrap that
the most likely killers were communists who wanted to make a martyr out
of Letelier. My
story draft also described how Bush’s CIA had been forewarned in 1976
about DINA’s secret plans to send agents, including the assassin
Michael Townley, into the United States on false passports. Upon
learning of this strange mission, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay,
George Landau, cabled Bush about Chile’s claim that Townley and
another agent were traveling to CIA headquarters for a meeting with
Bush’s deputy, Vernon Walters. Landau also forwarded copies of the
false passports to the CIA. Walters
cabled back that he was unaware of any scheduled appointment with these
Chilean agents. Landau immediately canceled the visas, but Townley
simply altered his plans and continued on his way to the United States. After
arriving, he enlisted some right-wing Cuban-Americans in the Letelier
plot and went to Washington to plant the bomb under Letelier’s car. The
CIA has never explained what action it took, if any, after receiving
Landau’s warning. A natural follow-up would have been to contact DINA
and ask what was afoot or whether a message about the trip had been
misdirected. The new CIA report made no mention of these aspects of the
case. After
the assassination, Bush promised the CIA’s full cooperation in
tracking down the Letelier-Moffitt killers. But instead the CIA took
contrary actions, such as planting the false exoneration and withholding
evidence that would have implicated the Chilean junta. “Nothing
the agency gave us helped us to break this case,” said federal
prosecutor Eugene Propper in a 1988 interview for the story I was
drafting for Newsweek. The CIA never volunteered Ambassador
Landau’s cable about the suspicious DINA mission nor copies of the
fake passports that included a photo of Townley, the chief assassin. Nor
did Bush’s CIA divulge its knowledge of the existence of Operation
Condor. FBI
agents in Washington and Latin America broke the case two years later.
They discovered Operation Condor on their own and tracked the
assassination back to Townley and his accomplices in the United States. In
1988, as then-Vice President Bush was citing his CIA work as an
important part of his government experience, I submitted questions to
him asking about his actions in the days before and after the Letelier
bombing. Bush’s chief of staff, Craig Fuller, wrote back, saying Bush
“will have no comment on the specific issues raised in your letter.” As
it turned out, the Bush campaign had little to fear from my discoveries.
When I submitted my story draft – with its exclusive account of
Contreras’s role as a CIA asset – Newsweek’s editors
refused to run the story. Washington
bureau chief Evan Thomas told me that Editor Maynard Parker even had
accused me of being “out to get Bush.” [In
1992, I published the Bush-Contreras account and Newsweek’s
reaction to it in my first book, Fooling America. I reprised the
Bush-Contreras story in my latest book, Lost History, in 1999.] |
