The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Raúl Iturriaga Neumann.md

category	tags	alias	summary	location	created	updated
Intelligence & Government	Person RaulIturriagaNeumann DINA OperationCondor CarlosPrats BernardoLeighton RonniMoffitt	Raul Iturriaga Neumann Raúl Iturriaga Eduardo Iturriaga	DINA officer who carried cash to Buenos Aires for the Prats killing in 1974, set Townley on Bernardo Leighton in 1975, and by 2026 held sentences of 500 years, the last for Ronni Moffitt.	Santiago, Chile	2026-09-21	2026-09-21

Raúl Iturriaga Neumann was an officer of DINA, the secret police of Augusto Pinochet's Chile, and by 1975 head of its foreign operations. The prosecutors of the Letelier case knew him as Eduardo Iturriaga.¹²

Townley told the Chilean military prosecutor in 1978 that he had met "then-Major Eduardo Iturriaga" in 1974 to "coordinate the information I had on anti-Castro organizations in the US" and build "a coherent network of informants and sub-informants," and that early in 1975 Iturriaga took a telephone call in his presence and asked whether he knew Orlando Bosch, Guillermo Novo, and Jose Dionisio Suarez. Espinoza testified that for the 1976 mission to General Vernon Walters "the name of the second man was suggested by then-Major Iturriaga, under the name Andrés Wilson." On April 10, 1978, the prosecutor ordered Iturriaga re-examined with Espinoza and Townley on the code names Quetropillán and Avispa.³

Buenos Aires

In late July 1974 he "traveled to Buenos Aires with a bag of cash to hire assassins and to coordinate the operation with the Argentine service, Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado." The station chief, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, paid 20,000 dollars to men who did nothing; "the Argentines didn't have the guts to kill them," Michael Townley said. Townley's own bomb killed General Carlos Prats and his wife on September 30. In 2010 the Chilean courts convicted Iturriaga, Manuel Contreras, Pedro Espinoza, and José Zara of the murders.¹⁴

Rome

In 1975 he "added a new name to Townley's hit list: Bernardo Leighton, the grandfatherly Christian Democrat who was working in Rome to forge an alliance between his party and the remnants of Allende's forces," and ordered Townley to enlist the organization of Stefano Delle Chiaie. Leighton and his wife were shot on October 6, 1975, and lived. An Italian court later convicted Iturriaga in his absence on Townley's testimony; he has said that Townley is the only accuser and that he never met the Italians.¹⁴

Washington

Iturriaga briefed Townley on the mission against Orlando Letelier in 1976 and approved his taking Virgilio Paz of the Cuban Nationalist Movement. When the Chilean police came for Townley in 1978, Iturriaga led the search party into his house. On June 15, 2026, Judge Paola Plaza sentenced him, Espinoza, and Zara to fifteen years each for the death of Ronni Moffitt. He was then 88 and serving cumulative sentences of 500 years.²⁵

Footnotes

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1. Dinges, John. The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. New Press, 2004, pp. 74, 130. ↩︎

2. Branch, Taylor, and Eugene M. Propper. Labyrinth. Viking, 1982, pp. 303, 464. ↩︎

3. 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) and Pedro Espinoza Bravo (April 24, 1978); resolution of April 10, 1978. ↩︎

4. Chilean press reports of the 2010 judgments of Judge Alejandro Solís and the Supreme Court and of the 2022 court resolution on DINA's exterior department (La Tercera, CNN Chile, El Mostrador), not read in full. ↩︎

5. Kornbluh, Peter. "A Modicum of Justice for Ronni Karpen Moffitt," The Nation, September 2026. ↩︎