Michael Townley

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For the Australian politician, see Michael Townley (Australian politician).

Michael Vernon Townley is an American terrorist currently living in the United States under terms of the federal witness protection program. An operative of the Chilean secret police, DINA, Townley confessed, was convicted, and served time in the United States for the 1976 Washington, D.C., assassination of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States. As part of his plea bargain, Townley received immunity from further prosecution, and was therefore not extradicted to Argentina to stand trial for the assassination attempt on Chilean general Carlos Prats and his wife.[1] Townley has also been convicted (1993), in absentia, by an Italian court in carrying out the 1975 Rome murder attempt on Bernardo Leighton.[2] Townley worked in producing chemical weapons for Pinochet's use against political opponents, along with Colonel Gerardo Huber [3] and the DINA biochemist Eugenio Berrios. [4]

Contents

[edit] 1974 assassination of Carlos Prats

According to head of DINA Manuel Contreras, Michael Townley returned to Chile at the end of 1973, working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with the intent of receiving from the "Highest National Authority, in agreement with what had already been planned by the CIA... the order to act in direct, personal and exclusive form, without intermediaries, against General Carlos Prats González in Buenos Aires"[citation needed].

According to Contreras, Townley travelled with a false passport provided by the CIA, under the name of Kenneth Enyart,[5]. Contreras stated that Townley was aided by CIA agents, as well as Argentine and Chilean agents, and also political groups such as the Triple A and the Grupo Milicias. Manuel Contreras stated that he thought this occurred because the CIA feared that Carlos Prats would try to overthrow Pinochet's dictatorship with the help of the Argentine Army , thus leading to a war between Chile and Argentina, which would constitute "a difficult problem for the United States in the Cold War era".[6]

[edit] 1975 Bernardo Leighton assassination attempt

Main article: Leighton case

According to declassified CIA documents, in 1975, he met with Gladio member Stefano Delle Chiaie, a far-right Italian terrorist, founder of Avanguardia Nazionale, and was also in contact with OAS member Albert Spaggiari.[7] He has been sentenced in absentia in Italy to 15 years of jail, due to his role as an intermediary between the Chilean DINA and Italian neo-fascists[8] According to Townley, both Stefano Delle Chiaie and Albert Spaggiari worked for DINA.[9]

Michael Townley also stated that Enrique Arranciaba had traveled to California in Fall of 1977 on banking business for ALFA, alias Stefano Delle Chiaie.[9] Enrique Arranciaba is a former DINA agent who resided in unofficial exile in Buenos Aires after the assassination of Chilean Army Chief of Staff René Schneider on October 25, 1970. Arranciaba was arrested by Argentine intelligence officers shortly after the extradition of Townley to the US, and charged of espionage.[10]

[edit] Convicted for Orlando Letelier's murder

Main article: Letelier case

Townley has been convicted in the United States for Orlando Letelier's murder in Washington, D.C. in 1976, and during his trial, he stated that Augusto Pinochet was responsible for planning the murder. Head of DINA Manuel Contreras also stated that Pinochet planned the assassination of both Carlos Prats and Letelier.[6]

Michael Townley confessed that he had hired five anti-Castrist Cuban exiles to booby-trap Letelier's car. According to Jean-Guy Allard, after consultations with the leadership of the anti-Castro Cuban organization CORU, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, those elected to carry out the murder were Cuban-Americans José Dionisio "Bloodbath" Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll.[11] According to the Miami Herald, Luis Posada Carriles was also at this meeting, which decided on Letelier's death and also about the Cubana Flight 455 bombing.

In 1978, Chile agreed to extradite him to the USA, in order to reduce the tension resulting from Orlando Letelier's murder. He made an agreement with the US government on April 17, 1978, which required that he only provide information relevant to violations of US law or offenses committed in US jurisdiction. Based on that argument, he refused to provide any information concerning DINA during the trial of the three Cuban defendants in Washington DC, early 1979, concerning Letelier's assassination.[12] Michael Townley was then freed under the federal Witness Protection Program. The United States is still waiting for Contreras and Pedro Espinoza Bravo to be extradited.

On an interview with authorities on October 20, 1981, Townley declared that Castro opponent Virgilio Paz Romero brought with him a Colt.45 caliber automatic pistol, which was a special competition model, when he visited Chile in Spring 1976. According to Townley, Romero said that the weapon had recently been used in a "hit" by the Cuban Nationalist Movement and that his purpose in Chile was to use it again. Townley then said that Romero had broken the weapon in pieces and scattered the pieces through-out Santiago[13]

In 2005, DINA chief Manuel Contreras also told the Chilean judge responsible for trying the case that Townley had been supported for Letelier's assassination by CIA agents, as well as the Cuban Nationalist Movement and members of the DISIP (for which Luis Posada Carriles worked for). CIA deputy director from 1972 to 1976, General Vernon Walters, informed Pinochet that Letelier represented a threat for the US and was preparing a Chilean government in exile, according to Contreras. Contreras wrote in the document that "the Chilean President disposed in personal, exclusive and direct manner of the action of CIA agent Michael Townley against Mr. Orlando Letelier".

Contreras also stated that the CNI handed out monthly payments between 1978 and 1990 to the persons who had worked with Townley in Chile, all members of Patria y Libertad: Mariana Callejas (Townley's wife), Francisco Oyarzún, Gustavo Etchepare and Eugenio Berríos.[6] Assassinated in 1995, Berrios worked with drug traffickers and DEA agents[14]

[edit] Ongoing investigations

In 2003, Argentine Federal Judge Maria Servini de Cubria asked Chile for the extradition of Mariana Callejas (formerly Townley's wife), who was accused of Carlos Prats' murder. But, in July 2005, Chilean Judge Nibaldo Segura of the Court of Appeals stated that the case cannot proceed, arguing that Callejas was already being tried in Chile.


Questioned in March 2005 by Judge Alejandro Madrid about ex-Chilean Christian Democrat President Eduardo Frei Montalva's death, Michael Townley acknowledged links between Colonia Dignidad, led by ex-Nazi Paul Schäfer, and DINA on one side, and the Laboratorio de Guerra Bacteriologica del Ejercito (Bacteriological War Army Laboratory) on the other side. It is suspected that the toxin that killed Frei Montalva in a Santa Maria clinic in 1982 was created there. This new laboratory in Colonia Dignidad would have been, according to him, the continuation of the laboratory that the DINA had in Via Naranja de lo Curro, where he worked with DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos. Townley would also have testified on biological experiments made upon the prisoners in Colonia Dignidad with the help of the two above-mentioned laboratories.[4]

Furthermore, Townley testified end of 1992 that the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria, assassinated in 1976, had been detained at his home Via Naranja in the sector of Lo Curro [15]. There, he was tortured and, since he didn't speak, subjected to sarin gas (which had been re-invented by Berrios) [16]. Soria was then detained and tortured again in the Villa Grimaldi, and his case was included in Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon's indictment of Pinochet [17].

[edit] Others

During a 1981 interview which contents were revealed by 2000 CIA declassified documents, Michael Townley explained that Novo Sampol, member of CORU, had agreed to commit the Cuban Nationalist Movement in the kidnapping, in Buenos Aires, of a president of a Dutch bank. The sequestration, organized by civilian SIDE agents, the Argentine intelligence agency, was to obtain a ransom. Townley said that Novo Sampol had provided $6.000 from the Cuban Nationalist Movement, forwarded to the civilian SIDE agents to pay for the preparation expenses of the kidnapping. After returning to the US, Novo Sampol sent Townley a stock of paper, used to print pamphlets in the name of "Grupo Rojo" (Red Group), an imaginary Argentine Marxist terrorist organization, which was to claim credit for the sequestration of the Dutch banker. Townley declared that the pamphlets were distributed in Mendoza and Córdoba in relation with false flag bombings perpetrated by SIDE agents, which had as aim to accredit the existence of the fake Grupo Rojo. However, the SIDE agents procrastinated too much, and the kidnapping finally was not carried out.[18]

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Diplomat's Assassin to be Freed", Washington Post, 1983-07-26. 
  2. ^ "Agent of Chilean Secret Service Convicted of Murder Attempt", UPI, 1993-03-11. 
  3. ^ Manuel Salazar Salvo, Roto el pacto de silencio en la inteligencia militar, Punto Final, n°611, 24 March - 6 April, 2006 (Spanish)
  4. ^ a b Michael Townley fue interrogado por muerte de Frei Montalva, Radio Cooperativa, 30 March 2005 (Spanish)
  5. ^ Declassified documents, 2, 3 published by the National Security Archive
  6. ^ a b c Contreras dice que Pinochet dio orden "personal, exclusiva y directa" de asesinar a Prats y Letelier, La Tercera, May 13, 2005, mirrored on CC.TT. website (Spanish)
  7. ^ Declassified documents 2, 4 and 2, 5 available on the National Security Archive website
  8. ^ Arancibia, "clave" en la cooperación de las dictaduras, La Jornada, 22 May 2005 (Spanish)
  9. ^ a b Declassified documents, 2, 6 published by the National Security Archive
  10. ^ Declassified documents, 2, 7 and 2,8, published by the National Security Archive
  11. ^ **Terrorism Then and Now, Saul Landau, in CounterPunch, August 20-21, 2005 **Posada and his accomplices, active collaborators of Pinochet’s fascist police, Granma, 26 March 2003
  12. ^ Interview of Michael Townley by special agents of the FBI in Washington DC on 10/20/81, National Security Archive
  13. ^ Declassified documents, 2, 2 published by the National Security Archive
  14. ^ El coronel que le pena al ejército, La Nación, September 24, 2005 (Spanish)
  15. ^ Albert Vallejo, Chile indemniza a la familia de Soria 26 años después de su asesinato, El Mundo, 24 December 2002 (Spanish)
  16. ^ Jorge Molina Sanhueza, El último secreto del crimen de Soria abre la puerta para condenar a brigadier (R) Lepe, La Nación, 21 August 2006 (Spanish)
  17. ^ Senado aprobó indemnización para familia de Carmelo Soria, Radio Cooperativa, 18 July 2007 (Spanish)
  18. ^ Visit by Guillermo Novo Sampol to Chile in 1976, 1 and 2, on the National Security Archive website

[edit] External links