4.1 KiB
| category | tags | alias | summary | start | location | created | updated | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foreign Government |
|
|
Secret police of the Pinochet government under Manuel Contreras, 1974 to 1977, which killed Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires and Orlando Letelier in Washington while its director was in liaison with, and once paid by, the CIA. | 1974 | Santiago, Chile | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-21 |
The Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional was the secret police of the government of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Colonel Manuel Contreras directed it from 1974 to 1977, and Pedro Espinoza was its director of operations. It was the organizing service of Operation Condor.1
Killings Abroad
General Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, were killed in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974, by a bomb built by the American-born agent Michael Townley. The National Security Archive describes it as the service's first assassination outside Chile. On October 6, 1975, the Christian Democratic Party (Chile) leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife were shot and gravely wounded in Rome by Italian fascists led by Stefano delle Chiaie, whom Townley had recruited. In July 1976 agents of the Mulchén Brigade beat to death Carmelo Soria, a Spanish official of the United Nations in Santiago, in the front yard of Townley's house. On September 21, 1976, Townley's bomb, placed with members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement, killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington.2
The CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency reported to Congress in 2000 that it had kept up liaison with Contreras from 1974 to 1977. By April 1975 its own reporting called him "the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy" within the junta. An interagency committee directed that the relationship continue. A proposal to put Contreras on the payroll was overruled, and one payment was made to him in 1975 all the same. He met the deputy director, General Vernon Walters, that August. The Archive's summary of the report was that "the head of Chile's feared secret police, DINA, was a paid CIA asset in 1975," and that contact went on after his agents had been to Washington to kill Letelier. It ended in November 1977.3
Townley pleaded guilty in Washington in August 1978 and testified against Contreras, Espinoza, Armando Fernandez Larios, and five Cubans. He served 62 months and entered the Witness Protection Program. Argentina's request for his extradition in the Prats case was not granted. Contreras was convicted in Chile in 1995 and died in a military hospital on August 7, 2015, under sentences that came to more than 500 years.24
Footnotes
-
Central Intelligence Agency, "CIA Activities in Chile," report to Congress under section 311 of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, September 18, 2000. https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/chile/index.html ↩︎
-
National Security Archive, "The Pinochet Regime at 50: The Assassination of General Carlos Prats and Sofia Cuthbert," October 1, 2024. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-10-01/pinochet-regime-50-assassination-general-carlos-prats-and-sofia ; 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 ↩︎
-
Central Intelligence Agency, "CIA Activities in Chile," report to Congress under section 311 of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, September 18, 2000. https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/chile/index.html National Security Archive, "CIA Acknowledges Ties to Pinochet's Repression," September 19, 2000. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20000919/index.html ↩︎
-
"Ex-Chile spy chief dies while serving 500-year sentence," Al Jazeera, August 8, 2015. ↩︎