vault backup: 2026-09-21 22:39:08

10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Michael Townley.md

@@ -28,6 +28,10 @@ Townley had collaborated with the paramilitary [[Patria y Libertad]] in operatio
 
 He was born in Waterloo, [[Iowa]], first worked in Chile in the early 1960s as an encyclopedia salesman, and lived from 1967 in [[Miami]], where he came to know the Cuban exiles. In December 1970 he offered himself to the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] as an agent against the Allende government. The operations directorate asked for "preliminary security approval to use Mr. Townley in an operational capacity," and on December 21, 1971, told the [[CIA Office of Security|Office of Security]] that the station had cancelled its interest. In March 1973, during a raid by Patria y Libertad on a jamming station at [[Concepción]], he gagged and bound a homeless man sheltering there, who was found dead of asphyxiation the next day. The American consul in Santiago, [[Frederick Purdy]], later gave him a new passport in his own name. An embassy officer, [[Jeffrey Davidow]], wrote in June 1974 that Townley was an "AMCIT with rather unsavory past with crypto-fascist Chilean groups" and suggested "keeping him at arms length."[^3]
 
+### The 1978 Statement
+
+In a sworn statement of March 29, 1978, in the file of the military prosecutor [[Héctor Orozco]] in Santiago, Townley gave his profession as electronics technician and expert in hydraulic mechanics and said that on joining DINA he had met "then-Major Eduardo Iturriaga": "we first tried to coordinate the information I had on anti-Castro organizations in the US, and then look at how to use this information and my contacts to expand them and build a coherent network of informants and sub-informants." In late January or early February 1975, in Iturriaga's office, "he received a phone call in connection with which he asked me if I knew [[Orlando Bosch]], [[Guillermo Novo]] and [[Jose Dionisio Suarez|Dionisio Suárez]]. I told him I only knew of Orlando Bosch by reference and that I didn't like him," because "his group had been infiltrated by the CIA, the FBI, and specifically by a certain 'Mono' [[Ricardo Morales Navarrete|Navarrete]]. My final recommendation was that the service not make contact with this group." He had obtained an American passport as Kenneth Enyart in October 1973 "to return safely to Chile" after the Concepción affair; the real Enyart, a memorandum of the American prosecutors recorded, "knew Michael Townley only because Enyart took his car to be repaired at the shop where Mr. Townley worked in 1973" and did not know Townley had briefly taken his driver's license. In December 1974 Townley went to the United States as Enyart "to explore the possibility of acquiring electronic countermeasure equipment"; [[Jack Holcomb]] of [[Audio Intelligence Devices]] identified his photograph to American investigators as the "Enyart" who had presented a purchase authorization "purportedly signed by Enrique Montero" and given the name of General Washington Carrasco as a reference. Callejas testified that she had seen the document in her husband's office "bearing stamps and a signature but otherwise blank," meant "for purchasing electronic equipment whose sale in the US was restricted to governments and their security departments," and had helped him fill it in. Of September 1976 he said he met Novo, "whose nom de guerre is Santiago Otero," at the restaurant La Estrella in Union City, and that the movement's directorate asked "What can you give us in Chile," wanting "a quiet place, preferably in the countryside," to train; his conversation with [[Felipe Rivero]] "was short and quite cold," his contacts with [[Ignacio Novo]] in Miami "very friendly." Contreras told the same prosecutor: "I know this individual as Andrés Wilson and only recently learned from the press that he had this other name. Wilson was a good informant of my Service and acted as an informant to one of my Officers."[^4]
+
 ### Prats
 
 In June 1974 Pinochet ordered the DINA director, Colonel [[Manuel Contreras]], to eliminate Prats, his predecessor as army commander, who was living in exile in Buenos Aires under restrictions the CIA reported he had "faithfully carried out." The DINA station chief in [[Argentina]], [[Enrique Arancibia Clavel]], failed to arrange it through Argentine paramilitaries, and Contreras's deputy, Colonel [[Pedro Espinoza]], turned to Townley. "It was a patriotic request," Townley told an Argentine judge in 1999. "So, I did it." He and Callejas arrived on September 10, 1974. He followed Prats into a park and decided against shooting him because "there were too many people around." On September 29 he entered the garage of the general's building and fixed two cartridges of C4 to the chassis of his Fiat 125. Four days before the killing the Chilean foreign ministry told its consul that it would be "inconvenient" to issue the couple passports to leave for [[Brazil]]. Prats and [[Sofía Cuthbert]] returned from visiting friends just after midnight on September 30. Callejas pressed the detonator, "but it did not function," Townley said. "I took it from her, pressed it, and it worked."[^2]
@@ -46,7 +50,7 @@ The equipment for the laboratory, a large microwave oven and gas canisters, was
 
 ### Letelier
 
-Townley wrote that Espinoza's orders were explicit: "Find Letelier's home and workplace and contact the Cuban group to eliminate him, or use SARIN gas, or orchestrate an accident, or in the end by whatever method, but the government of Chile wanted Letelier dead." He first went to [[Paraguay]] for false documents and American visas, which the United States canceled. He entered the United States on September 9, 1976, and met the leaders of the Cuban Nationalist Movement in a hotel room in [[New Jersey]] the next day: [[Guillermo Novo]], [[Alvin Ross Díaz|Alvin Ross]], [[Virgilio Paz]], and [[José Dionisio Suárez]]. Novo told him the group would cooperate but insisted that Townley take part in person. Townley, Paz, and Suárez assembled the device in Washington, and at midnight on September 18 Townley taped it to the cross member under the driver's seat of Letelier's car. It was detonated by remote control at [[Sheridan Circle]] on September 21.[^1][^4]
+Townley wrote that Espinoza's orders were explicit: "Find Letelier's home and workplace and contact the Cuban group to eliminate him, or use SARIN gas, or orchestrate an accident, or in the end by whatever method, but the government of Chile wanted Letelier dead." He first went to [[Paraguay]] for false documents and American visas, which the United States canceled. He entered the United States on September 9, 1976, and met the leaders of the Cuban Nationalist Movement in a hotel room in [[New Jersey]] the next day: Guillermo Novo, [[Alvin Ross Díaz|Alvin Ross]], [[Virgilio Paz]], and [[José Dionisio Suárez]]. Novo told him the group would cooperate but insisted that Townley take part in person. Townley, Paz, and Suárez assembled the device in Washington, and at midnight on September 18 Townley taped it to the cross member under the driver's seat of Letelier's car. It was detonated by remote control at [[Sheridan Circle]] on September 21.[^1][^5]
 
 ### The Insurance File
 
@@ -54,12 +58,21 @@ In March 1978, after the American and Chilean press had named him, Townley wrote
 
 ### Trials
 
-Novo and Ross were convicted of murder in 1979 and Novo's brother Ignacio of lying to the grand jury. The [[United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit|court of appeals]] reversed all three convictions in 1980, because the government had used the testimony of jailhouse informants, one of whom said Ross had told him he was involved in the murder "together with generals in DINA." At the retrial in May 1981 Townley, "now serving 3½ to 10 years," admitted on the stand that he had lied to a Chilean military investigator and given a false statement of innocence to [[El Mercurio]]. In 1983 the Prats daughters came to Washington to support an Argentine request for his extradition. A federal judge ruled that his plea agreement barred it. The Argentine judge [[María Servini de Cubría|María Servini]] deposed him in the United States in 1999. Chilean courts convicted Contreras and Espinoza of the Letelier murder in 1993 and of the Prats murders in June 2010. Arancibia Clavel was imprisoned in Argentina for almost two decades.[^1][^2][^4][^5]
+Novo and Ross were convicted of murder in 1979 and Novo's brother Ignacio of lying to the grand jury. The [[United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit|court of appeals]] reversed all three convictions in 1980, because the government had used the testimony of jailhouse informants, one of whom said Ross had told him he was involved in the murder "together with generals in DINA." At the retrial in May 1981 Townley, "now serving 3½ to 10 years," admitted on the stand that he had lied to a Chilean military investigator and given a false statement of innocence to [[El Mercurio]]. In 1983 the Prats daughters came to Washington to support an Argentine request for his extradition. A federal judge ruled that his plea agreement barred it. The Argentine judge [[María Servini de Cubría|María Servini]] deposed him in the United States in 1999. Chilean courts convicted Contreras and Espinoza of the Letelier murder in 1993 and of the Prats murders in June 2010. Arancibia Clavel was imprisoned in Argentina for almost two decades.[^1][^2][^5][^6]
+
+### The Telephone
+
+During the trial persons connected with the Cuban defendants gave reporters a cassette, brought from Chile by [[Sergio Miranda Carrington]], the lawyer for Contreras, of a call Townley had made on January 30, 1979, from the office of the prosecutor [[Eugene Propper]] to Gustavo Etchepare in Santiago, "a former member of 'Patria y Libertad'" with "connections with DINA." Interviewed by [[Robert Scherrer]] and [[Carter Cornick]] on February 6, 8, and 16, Townley denied threatening Judge [[Barrington Parker]] or asking anyone to, and denied that any agent had suggested it. He said he had made the call without authorization, by direct dialing from Propper's desk while the prosecutors were in court, and that Propper on returning "ordered him to terminate his conversation." He had made other calls to Chile from the same office with Propper's or [[E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr.|Barcella]]'s consent, to Etchepare for information on the extradition proceedings against Contreras, Espinoza, and Fernández, and to his Chilean lawyer Manuel Acuña about his property and the civil suit brought by Letelier's widow, reimbursing the government for the personal ones, since the marshals' safe house could not dial Chile direct. He recalled telling Etchepare that Miranda Carrington's actions on Contreras's behalf might be read in Washington as an attempt by the Chilean government to discredit him for the Cubans' benefit, and that "Contreras' free-wheeling activities had to be curtailed," since they "would severely damage the credibility and image of the Chilean Government." The defendants' appeal quoted his own account of the tape: "That was one of the things that was talked about confidentially with people from the FBI ... how many friends we all had who could ... make threatening phone calls to the judge to get him to withdraw from the case."[^7]
+
+In its brief on appeal the government gave its account of his dealings with the CIA: before leaving for Chile in late 1970 "he called the public office of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Miami," an employee came to his workplace, Townley offered to supply information, and "he heard nothing further"; in 1973, in Miami between March and September, he called again "at the request of people he had been working with in Chile who wanted CIA help in their opposition to Allende," and "no further relationship developed." The defense had argued from discovery material that he "had been given 'operational status.'"[^8]
 
 ### Footnotes
 
 [^1]: Kornbluh, Peter, ed. "The Pinochet Dictatorship Declassified: Confessions of a DINA Hit Man," National Security Archive, November 22, 2023. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2023-11-22/pinochet-dictatorship-declassified-confessions-dina-hit-man
 [^2]: Kornbluh, Peter, ed. "The Pinochet Regime at 50: The Assassination of General Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert," National Security Archive, October 1, 2024. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-10-01/pinochet-regime-50-assassination-general-carlos-prats-and-sofia
 [^3]: Kornbluh, Peter. *The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability*. New Press, 2003, pp. 167-171, 195-196.
-[^4]: United States v. Novo Sampol, 636 F.2d 621 (D.C. Cir. 1980).
-[^5]: Kiernan, Laura A. "Townley Admits Lying to Chilean Questioners," *The Washington Post,* May 17, 1981, CIA Reading Room document CIA-RDP90-00552R000606730006-5.
+[^4]: Fiscalía Militar Ad-Hoc, Santiago, causa 192-78 (fiscal Héctor Orozco), as reproduced in *Proceso contra Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda y Pedro Espinoza Bravo,* ministro instructor Adolfo Bañados, tomo 1, scan at https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Causa-Contreras-Espinoza-1991.pdf. Quotations translated from the Spanish, declaraciones of Michael Vernon Townley Welch (March 29, 1978), Mariana Callejas (April 4, 1978), and Manuel Contreras (March 22, 1978); Fiscalía Militar Ad-Hoc, Santiago, causa 192-78, as reproduced in *Proceso contra Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda y Pedro Espinoza Bravo,* tomo 2, scan at https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Causa-Contreras-Espinoza-1991-2.pdf. Quotations translated from the Spanish, memorandum of Eugene M. Propper and E. Lawrence Barcella, June 5, 1978.
+[^5]: United States v. Novo Sampol, 636 F.2d 621 (D.C. Cir. 1980).
+[^6]: Kiernan, Laura A. "Townley Admits Lying to Chilean Questioners," *The Washington Post,* May 17, 1981, CIA Reading Room document CIA-RDP90-00552R000606730006-5.
+[^7]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington field office, file 185-425, reports of interviews of Michael Vernon Townley by Special Agents Robert W. Scherrer and L. Carter Cornick, February 6, 8, and 16, 1979, https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Letelier-townley-phone.pdf; Brief for Appellants, *United States v. Sampol,* Nos. 79-1541 and 79-1542 (D.C. Cir. 1979), https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Letelier-appeal.pdf, citing appendix 3 and trial transcript pp. 5072-5077.
+[^8]: Brief for Appellee, *United States v. Sampol,* Nos. 79-1541 and 79-1542 (D.C. Cir. 1979), https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Letelier-brief-appellee.pdf, citing trial transcript pp. 1584-1590; Brief for Appellants, *United States v. Sampol,* Nos. 79-1541 and 79-1542 (D.C. Cir. 1979), https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Letelier-appeal.pdf.