Pinochet's Death Spares Bush Family

By Robert Parry
Created Dec 12 2006 - 8:43am

Gen. Augusto Pinochet's death on Dec. 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a
little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile's
notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and
protector, former President George H.W. Bush.

Although Chilean investigations against other defendants may continue, the
cases against Pinochet end with his death of a heart attack at the age of
91. Pinochet's death from natural causes also marks a victory for world
leaders, including George H.W. and George W. Bush, who shielded Pinochet
from justice over the past three decades.

The Bush Family's role in the Pinochet cover-up began in 1976 when then-CIA
Director George H.W. Bush diverted investigators away from Pinochet's guilt
in a car bombing in Washington that killed political rival Orlando Letelier
and an American, Ronni Moffitt.

The cover-up stretched into the presidency of George W. Bush when he
sidetracked an FBI recommendation to indict Pinochet in the Letelier-Moffitt
murders.

Over those intervening 30 years, Pinochet allegedly engaged in a variety of
illicit operations, including terrorism, torture, murder, drug trafficking,
money-laundering and illicit arms shipments - sometimes with the official
collusion of the U.S. government.

In the 1980s, when George H.W. Bush was Vice President, Pinochet's regime
helped funnel weapons to the Nicaraguan contra rebels and to Saddam
Hussein's
Iraq, an operation that also implicated then-CIA official Robert M. Gates,
who will be the next U.S. Secretary of Defense.

When Pinochet faced perhaps his greatest risk of prosecution - in 1998 when
he was detained in London pending extradition to Spain on charges of
murdering Spanish citizens - former President George H.W. Bush protested
Pinochet's arrest, calling it "a travesty of justice" and joining in a
successful appeal to the British courts to let Pinochet go home to Chile.

Once Pinochet was returned to Chile, the wily ex-dictator employed a legal
strategy of political obstruction and assertions of ill health to avert
prosecution. Until his death, he retained influential friends in the Chilean
power structure and in key foreign capitals, especially Washington.

Pinochet's History

Pinochet's years in the service of U.S. foreign policy date back to the
early 1970s when Richard Nixon's administration wanted to destroy Chile's
democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.

The CIA launched a covert operation to "destabilize" Allende's government,
with the CIA-sponsored chaos ending in a bloody coup on Sept. 11, 1973, as
Gen. Pinochet seized power and was Allende shot to death when Pinochet's
forces stormed the Presidential Palace.

Thousands of political dissidents - including Americans and other
foreigners - were rounded up and executed. Many also were tortured.

With Pinochet in control, the CIA turned its attention to helping him
overcome the negative publicity that his violent coup had engendered around
the world. One "secret" CIA memo, written in early 1974, described the
success of "the Santiago Station's propaganda project." The memo said:

"Prior to the coup the project's media outlets maintained a steady barrage
of anti-government criticism, exploiting every possible point of friction
between the government and the democratic opposition, and emphasizing the
problems and conflicts that were developing between the government and the
armed forces. Since the coup, these media outlets have supported the new
military government. They have tried to present the Junta in the most
positive light." [See Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File]

Despite the CIA's P.R. blitz, however, Pinochet and his military
subordinates insisted on dressing up and acting like a casting agent's idea
of Fascist bullies. The dour Pinochet was known for his fondness for wearing
a military cloak that made him resemble a well-dressed Nazi SS officer.

Pinochet and the other right-wing military dictators who dominated South
America in the mid-1970s also had their own priorities, one of which was the
elimination of political opponents who were living in exile in other
countries.

Though many of these dissidents weren't associated with violent
revolutionary movements, the anticommunist doctrine then in vogue among the
region's right-wing military made few distinctions between armed militants
and political activists.

By 1974, Chilean intelligence was collaborating with freelancing anti-Castro
Cuban extremists and other South American security forces to eliminate any
and all threats to right-wing military power.

The first prominent victim of these cross-border assassinations was former
Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats, who was living in Argentina and was viewed as a
potential rival to Pinochet because Prats had opposed Pinochet's coup that
shattered Chile's long history as a constitutional democracy.

Learning that Prats was writing his memoirs, Pinochet's secret police chief
Manuel Contreras dispatched Michael Townley, an assassin trained in
explosives, to Argentina. Townley planted a bomb under Prats's car,
detonating it on Sept. 30, killing Prats at the door and incinerating
Prats's
wife who was trapped inside the car.

On Oct. 6, 1975, a gunman approached Chilean Christian Democratic leader
Bernardo Leighton who was walking with his wife on a street in Rome. The
gunman shot both Leighton and his wife, severely wounding both of them.

Operation Condor

In November 1975, the loose-knit collaboration among the Southern Cone
dictatorships took on a more formal structure during a covert intelligence
meeting in Santiago. Delegates from the security forces of Chile, Argentina,
Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia committed themselves to a regional strategy
against "subversives."

In recognition of Chile's leadership, the conference named the project after
Chile's national bird, the giant vulture that traverses the Andes Mountains.
The project was called "Operation Condor."

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency confidentially informed Washington that
the operation had three phases and that the "third and reportedly very
secret phase of 'Operation Condor' involves the formation of special teams
from member countries who are to carry out operations to include
assassinations."

The Condor accord formally took effect on Jan. 30, 1976, the same day George
H.W. Bush was sworn in as CIA director.

In Bush's first few months, right-wing violence across the Southern Cone of
South America surged. On March 24, 1976, the Argentine military staged a
coup, ousting the ineffectual President Isabel Peron and escalating a brutal
internal security campaign against both violent and non-violent opponents on
the Left.

The Argentine security forces became especially well-known for grisly
methods of torture and the practice of "disappearing" political dissidents
who would be snatched from the streets or from their homes, undergo torture
and never be seen again.

Like Pinochet, the new Argentine dictators saw themselves on a mission to
save Western Civilization from the clutches of leftist thought.

They took pride in the "scientific" nature of their repression. They were
clinical practitioners of anticommunism - refining torture techniques,
erasing the sanctuary of international borders and collaborating with
right-wing terrorists and organized-crime elements to destroy leftist
movements.

Later Argentine government investigations discovered that its military
intelligence officers advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the
limits of how much pain a human being could endure before dying. Torture
methods included experiments with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation
and sexual perversions, such as forcing mice into a woman's vagina.

The totalitarian nature of the anticommunism gripping much of South America
revealed itself in one particularly bizarre Argentine practice, which was
used when pregnant women were captured as suspected subversives.

The women were kept alive long enough to bring the babies to full term. The
women then were subjected to forced labor or Caesarian section. The newborns
were given to military families to be raised in the ideology of
anticommunism while the new mothers were executed.

Many were taken to an airport near Buenos Aires, stripped naked, shackled to
other prisoners and put on a plane. As the plane flew over the Rio Plata or
out over the Atlantic Ocean, the prisoners were shoved through a cargo door,
sausage-like, into the water to drown. All told, the Argentine war against
subversion would claim an estimated 30,000 lives.

The 1976 Argentine coup d'etat allowed the pace of cross-border executions
under Operation Condor to quicken.

On May 21, gunmen killed two Uruguayan congressmen on a street in Buenos
Aires. On June 4, former Bolivian President Juan Jose Torres was slain also
in Buenos Aires. On June 11, armed men kidnapped and tortured 23 Chilean
refugees and one Uruguayan who were under United Nations protection.

A Grudge

Despite protests from human rights groups, Pinochet and his fellow dictators
felt immune from pressure because of their powerful friends in Washington.
Pinochet's sense of impunity led him to contemplate silencing one of his
most eloquent critics, Chile's former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, who
lived in the U.S. capital.

Earlier in their government careers, when Letelier was briefly defense
minister in Allende's government, Pinochet had been his subordinate. After
the coup, Pinochet imprisoned Letelier at a desolate concentration camp on
Dawson Island, but international pressure won Letelier release a year later.

Now, Pinochet was chafing under Letelier's rough criticism of the regime's
human rights record. Letelier was doubly infuriating to Pinochet because
Letelier was regarded as a man of intellect and charm, even impressing CIA
officers who observed him as "a personable, socially pleasant man" and "a
reasonable, mature democrat," according to biographical sketches.

By summer 1976, George H.W. Bush's CIA was hearing a lot about Operation
Condor from South American sources who had attended a second organizational
conference of Southern Cone intelligence services.

These CIA sources reported that the military regimes were preparing "to
engage in 'executive action' outside the territory of member countries." In
intelligence circles, "executive action" is a euphemism for assassination.

Meanwhile, Pinochet and intelligence chief Manuel Contreras were putting in
motion their most audacious assassination plan yet: to eliminate Orlando
Letelier in his safe haven in Washington, D.C.

In July 1976, two operatives from Chile's intelligence service DINA -
Michael Townley and Armando Fernandez Larios - went to Paraguay where DINA
had arranged for them to get false passports and visas for a trip to the
United States.

Townley and Larios were using the false names Juan Williams and Alejandro
Romeral and a cover story claiming they were investigating suspected
leftists working for Chile's state copper company in New York. Townley and
Larios said their project had been cleared with the CIA's Station Chief in
Santiago.

A senior Paraguayan official, Conrado Pappalardo, urged U.S. Ambassador
George Landau to cooperate, citing a direct appeal from Pinochet in support
of the mission. Supposedly, the Paraguayan government claimed, the two
Chileans were to meet with CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters.

An alarmed Landau recognized that the visa request was highly unusual, since
such operations are normally coordinated with the CIA station in the host
country and are cleared with CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Though granting the visas, Landau took the precaution of sending an urgent
cable to Walters and photostatic copies of the fake passports to the CIA.
Landau said he received an urgent cable back signed by CIA Director Bush,
reporting that Walters, who was in the process of retiring, was out of town.

When Walters returned a few days later, he cabled Landau that he had
"nothing to do with this" mission. Landau immediately canceled the visas.

The Assassination

It remains unclear what - if anything - Bush's CIA did after learning about
the "Paraguayan caper." Normal protocol would have required senior CIA
officials to ask their Chilean counterparts about the supposed trip to
Langley.

However, even with the declassification of more records in recent years,
that question has never been fully answered.

The CIA also demonstrated little curiosity over the Aug. 22, 1976, arrival
of two other Chilean operatives using the names, Juan Williams and Alejandro
Romeral, the phony names that were intended to hide the identity of the two
operatives in the aborted assassination plot.

When these two different operatives arrived in Washington, they made a point
of having the Chilean Embassy notify Walters's office at CIA.

"It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage
functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation by a
foreign intelligence service in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere in the United
States," wrote John Dinges and Saul Landau in their 1980 book, Assassination
on Embassy Row. "It is equally implausible that Bush, Walters, Landau and
other officials were unaware of the chain of international assassinations
that had been attributed to DINA."

Apparently, DINA had dispatched the second pair of operatives, using the
phony names, to show that the initial contacts for visas in Paraguay were
not threatening. In other words, the Chilean government had the replacement
team of Williams and Romeral go through the motions of a trip to Washington
with the intent to visit Walters to dispel any American suspicions or to
spread confusion among suspicious U.S. officials.

But it's still unclear whether Bush's CIA contacted Pinochet's government
about its mysterious behavior and, if not, why not.

As for the Letelier plot, DINA was soon plotting another way to carry out
the killing. In late August, DINA dispatched a preliminary team of one man
and one woman to do surveillance on Letelier as he moved around Washington.

Then, Townley was sent under a different alias to carry out the murder.
After arriving in New York on Sept. 9, 1976, Townley connected with Cuban
National Movement leader Guillermo Novo in Union City, New Jersey, and then
headed to Washington. Townley assembled a remote-controlled bomb that used
pieces bought at Radio Shack and Sears.

On Sept. 18, joined by Cuban extremists Virgilio Paz and Dionisio Suarez,
Townley went to Letelier home in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington. The
assassination team attached the bomb underneath Letelier's Chevrolet
Chevelle.

Three days later, on the morning of Sept. 21, Paz and Suarez followed
Letelier as he drove to work with two associates, Ronni Moffitt and her
husband Michael. As the Chevelle proceeded down Massachusetts Avenue,
through an area known as Embassy Row, the assassins detonated the bomb.

The blast ripped off Letelier's legs and punctured a hole in Ronni Moffitt's
jugular vein. She drowned in her own blood at the scene; Letelier died after
being taken to George Washington University Hospital. Michael Moffitt
survived.

At the time, the attack represented the worst act of international terrorism
on U.S. soil. Adding to the potential for scandal, the terrorism had been
carried out by a regime that was an ostensible ally of the United States,
one that had gained power with the help of the Nixon administration and the
CIA.

Threat to Bush

Bush's reputation was also at risk. As authors Dinges and Landau noted in
Assassination on Embassy Row, "the CIA reaction was peculiar" after the
cable from Ambassador Landau arrived disclosing a covert Chilean
intelligence operation and asking Deputy Director Walters if he had a
meeting scheduled with the DINA agents.

"Landau expected Walters to take quick action in the event that the Chilean
mission did not have CIA clearance. Yet a week passed during which the
assassination team could well have had time to carry out their original plan
to go directly from Paraguay to Washington to kill Letelier. Walters and
Bush conferred during that week about the matter."

"One thing is clear," Dinges and Landau wrote, "DINA chief Manuel Contreras
would have called off the assassination mission if the CIA or State
Department had expressed their displeasure to the Chilean government. An
intelligence officer familiar with the case said that any warning would have
been sufficient to cause the assassination to be scuttled. Whatever Walters
and Bush did - if anything - the DINA mission proceeded."

Within hours of the bombing, Letelier's associates accused the Pinochet
regime, citing its hatred of Letelier and its record for brutality. The
Chilean government, however, heatedly denied any responsibility.

That night, at a dinner at the Jordanian Embassy, Senator James Abourezk, a
South Dakota Democrat, spotted Bush and approached the CIA director.
Abourezk said he was a friend of Letelier's and beseeched Bush to get the
CIA "to find the bastards who killed him." Abourezk said Bush responded:
"I'll
see what I can do. We are not without assets in Chile."

A problem, however, was that one of the CIA's best-placed assets - DINA
chief Contreras - was part of the assassination. Wiley Gilstrap, the CIA's
Santiago Station Chief, did approach Contreras with questions about the
Letelier bombing and wired back to Langley Contreras's assurance that the
Chilean government wasn't involved.

Following the strategy of public misdirection already used in hundreds of
"disappearances," Contreras pointed the finger at the Chilean Left.
Contreras suggested that leftists had killed Letelier to turn him into a
martyr.

CIA headquarters, of course, had plenty of evidence that Contreras was
lying. The Pinochet government had flashed its intention to mount a
suspicious operation inside the United States by involving the U.S. Embassy
in Paraguay and the deputy director of the CIA. Bush's CIA even had in its
files a photograph of the leader of the terrorist squad, Michael Townley.

Yet, rather than fulfilling his promise to Abourezk to "see what I can do,"
Bush ignored leads that would have taken him into a confrontation with
Pinochet. The CIA either didn't put the pieces together or avoided the
obvious conclusions the evidence presented.

The Cover-up

Indeed, the CIA didn't seem to want any information that might implicate the
Pinochet regime. On Oct. 6, a CIA informant in Chile went to the CIA Station
in Santiago and relayed an account of Pinochet denouncing Letelier.

The informant said the dictator had called Letelier's criticism of the
government "unacceptable." The source "believes that the Chilean Government
is directly involved in Letelier's death and feels that investigation into
the incident will so indicate," the CIA field report said. [See Kornbluh,
The Pinochet File.]

But Bush's CIA chose to accept Contreras's denials and even began leaking
information that pointed away from the real killers.

Newsweek's Periscope reported in the magazine's Oct. 11, 1976, issue that
"the Chilean secret police were not involved. .. The [Central Intelligence]
agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of
experts and because the murder, coming while Chile's rulers were wooing U.S.
support, could only damage the Santiago regime."

Similar stories ran in other newspapers, including the New York Times.

Despite the lack of help from Washington, the FBI's legal attach