3 KiB
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| Law Enforcement & Legal |
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Federal prosecutor of the Letelier murder, from whom the CIA withheld its 1976 knowledge of the Chilean agents' passports, and who in 1988 formed a counterterrorism consultancy with the FBI men from the case. | Washington, D.C. | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-21 |
Eugene M. Propper was the assistant United States Attorney in Washington assigned in September 1976 to the murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. His deputy was E. Lawrence Barcella, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were Carter Cornick in Washington and Robert Scherrer, the bureau's representative in Buenos Aires.1
The Investigation
The Central Intelligence Agency began sending him classified files, most of them on Chilean leftists. It "withheld from Propper the information that Deputy Director Vernon Walters, a few weeks before the assassination, had learned about a covert mission to Washington by two Chilean intelligence officers using the names Juan Williams and Armando Fernandez Larios," the subject of Ambassador George Landau's cable from Paraguay, which Director George H.W. Bush "had personally handled." A source with personal knowledge said that Bush, meeting Propper, "made no mention of the mysterious Chilean agents or of his discussions with Walters." On October 21, 1976, Propper sat beside Attorney General Edward Levi when Letelier's widow and her lawyer asked that the CIA be subpoenaed, which Levi declined. The photographs from the Paraguayan passports, which the Department of State had given him in the fall of 1976, were first shown to a witness on July 12, 1977, and identified Michael Townley. Propper obtained Townley's expulsion from Chile in April 1978 and his guilty plea that August.2
Afterward
With the journalist Taylor Branch he wrote Labyrinth (1982), an account of the case. By 1988 he was with the Washington law firm of Lane and Edson and a partner, without title, in Counter Terrorism Consultants, Inc., formed with Cornick, Scherrer, who had "recently retired from the FBI as its records chief," and Barcella. The firm offered governments, airlines, shipping companies, and the sponsors of events such as the Olympic Games "pro-active" plans against attack, the management of kidnappings and hijackings, "in-depth intelligence files," and "liaison programs with national and international law enforcement and intelligence agencies."1
Footnotes
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"A group of top former FBI agents and federal prosecutors," United Press International, August 2, 1988. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/08/02/A-group-of-top-former-FBI-agents-and-federal/9684730900658/ ↩︎
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Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 242-243, 252, 297, 309-311. ↩︎