It Did Happen Here

Today I heard several people on TV--reporters and officials--refer to the alleged plot to explode a bomb in Washington that would kill the Saudi ambassador as "unprecedented."

Well, not exactly.  It may be unprecedented because this is an ambassador, but a bomb did kill a prominent foreign statesman in Washington, as well as an American as collateral damage.  The current plot involves an American citizen.  This earlier plot may well have involved the American CIA.

It was a car bomb in 1976 that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffit. Orlando Letelier had been an official in the Salvador Allende government in Chile, an elected government with broad public support but an openly socialist democratic agenda. Entrenched political and corporate interests didn't like it much, and the Cold War heat was on such suspiciously non-capitalistic regimes. Allende was assassinated during a military coup in 1973, that brought the now notorious dictator and ruthless murderer, General Augusto Pinochet to power.Over the next decade Pinochet and his secret police turned “disappeared” into a verb. Thousands of Chileans over the next several decades were disappeared by his secret police.

One of the first was Orlando Letelier, who in 1976 was traveling the world for the Institute for Policy Studies, and organizing boycotts and other opposition to the Chilean dictatorship. On an autumn evening in 1976, a bomb planted in his car exploded on a Washington street, not far from the White House. He was dead before he reached the hospital. A young American woman, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, his assistant, was also killed. Her husband, Michael Moffitt, was injured.

It later became clear that the Chilean coup and the murder of Allende were at least facilitated by the U.S. government, specifically the CIA. The role of Henry Kissinger was allegedly large.

It wasn’t until 2000 or so that the CIA’s involvement in Letelier’s assassination was partially acknowledged. The CIA, directed by George H.W. Bush in 1976, at the very least covered up their knowledge that the Chilean secret police did the hit. They may have been much more involved than that. Eventually a senior member of Pinochet's secret police was convicted of the assassination in a U.S. federal court.  According to Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, "The assassins had been admitted to the country on false passports with the knowledge of the CIA."



Ronni

  At the time I was the editor of a weekly alternative newspaper called Washington Newsworks, and I’m proud to say that our coverage of the Letelier assassination was more extensive that week, and holds up better now, than anyone else’s in town, including the Washington Post.

The real credit goes to Jeff Stein, who did the reporting and wrote the stories.  (This is the same Jeff Stein who until earlier this year wrote "Spy Talk" for the Washington Post.)   Just about all I did was recognize the importance of it, and I made the decision to put it on the cover and give it full play inside. In particular, Jeff’s reporting and our coverage did not buy the official line in the immediate aftermath, that the bomb was planted by leftists. It was G.H.W. Bush himself who convinced the establishment media that Chile’s Secret Police wasn’t involved. That’s why not many people know about this bit of infamous history. Letelier and Moffitt both deserved better then, and they deserve better now.