vault backup: 2026-09-21 19:17:08

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Carlos Prats.md

@@ -30,6 +30,10 @@ In June 1974 Pinochet met Colonel [[Manuel Contreras]], director of [[DINA]], an
 
 The DINA station chief in [[Argentina]], [[Enrique Arancibia Clavel]], had been told to have Argentine paramilitaries do the killing. When that did not advance, Contreras's deputy, Colonel [[Pedro Espinoza]], gave the job to [[Michael Townley]], an American recently recruited by the service, who arrived with his wife, [[Mariana Callejas]], on September 10. Townley fixed two cartridges of C4 under the general's Fiat 125 in the garage of his building on September 29 and detonated them by remote control from a car across the street when the couple came home just after midnight. The CIA's weekly terrorism summary repeated a police report that a bomb had been thrown at the car. Ambassador [[David Popper]] cabled from [[Santiago]] that a [[Radio Moscow]] report that DINA had killed Prats because the junta feared he would draw the loyalty of disaffected officers "makes no sense to us. Nor do we see significant interest in killing Prats of any other Chilean group with capacity of doing so."[^1]
 
+Major [[Raúl Iturriaga Neumann|Raúl Iturriaga]] of DINA had gone to Buenos Aires in late July "with a bag of cash to hire assassins and to coordinate the operation with the Argentine service, [[Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado|SIDE]]." Arancibia distributed 20,000 dollars. The men kept the money. "The Argentines didn't have the guts to kill them," Townley testified. He built the bomb "from a CB radio transmitter, primacord blasting caps, and what he called 'a tone device buzzer thing,'" hid his passport inside a pipe railing in the garage, slid under the car, and "tied the bomb to a bar supporting the transmission, almost exactly in the middle of the car." "The car turned, it came around, it slowed at the intersection and then sped on to enter the garage. All I could see was the back of the car." After the blast he heard Arancibia shout "Asi mueren los traidores." Of his reasons he said: "It was, I'll get jumped on for this, but it was a patriotic request, if you will, and I did it." Investigators noted "multiple phoned death threats to Prats; withdrawal of police from the street outside Prats's home; darkening of street lights near the Prats's apartment in the hours prior to the assassination."[^2]
+
+Chilean sources of DINA and its successor told [[Eugene Propper]] in 1981 "that President Pinochet approved the Prats murder in advance, at the instigation of Contreras." After the killing Contreras received Townley, pronounced "the operation in Buenos Aires a complete success," and said he "has earned the gratitude of all patriotic Chileans."[^3]
+
 Weeks later a friend told the Prats daughters that the regime planned to "celebrate the coup" each September by eliminating a person it considered a threat. [[Bernardo Leighton]] was shot in [[Rome]] the following year and [[Orlando Letelier]] was killed in Washington on September 21, 1976.[^1]
 
 ### Prosecution
@@ -39,3 +43,5 @@ In 1983 Sofía and Angélica Prats went to Washington with Argentine lawyers to
 ### Footnotes
 
 [^1]: Kornbluh, Peter, ed. "The Pinochet Regime at 50: The Assassination of General Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert," National Security Archive, October 1, 2024, with CIA and DINA documents and the 1999 deposition of Michael Townley. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-10-01/pinochet-regime-50-assassination-general-carlos-prats-and-sofia
+[^2]: Dinges, John. *The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents*. New Press, 2004, pp. 63, 74-78.
+[^3]: Branch, Taylor, and Eugene M. Propper. *Labyrinth*. Viking, 1982, pp. 67-69.