Book Review-Assassination on Embassy Row
Dinges & Saul & Farmsworth, Elizabeth
Saul Landau and John Dinges outdo masters of the spy novel in this compelling account of the 1976 bombing assassination of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt....
...After a tortuous investigation, seven people were indicted for the murders...
...the rest of the assassins remain NACLA Reportupdate * update . update * update at large...
...intelligence agency, but they do argue that officials within the U.S...
...At the same time, though, as Isabel Letelier said at the time of the assassination, the survivors knew they "must do what is necessary to carry on...
...The stability of the Pinochet regime was judged more sacred to U.S...
...Why in Washington, D.C...
...John Dinges, a stringer for The Washington Post and Time in Santiago for six years before and after the 1973 coup, broke the crucial story in 1977 that a member of Chile's secret police-then called the DINA-was a prime suspect in the assassination...
...None of these officials tried to stop that mission, and none came forward after the assassination to tell what they knew...
...Contreras seems to have regained much of the power and influence he lost temporarily after DINA's role in the assassination became public knowledge...
...The murder was a heavy blow to the Chile solidarity movement around the world...
...The authors' tour de force is the book's epilogue, where they pose some tough questions and place the investigation and trial in a political framework...
...It had become a way of struggle...
...In the end, Dinges and Landau say, "the national security argument prevailed...
...Considering the complicated nature of the case, the book reads easily and calls to mind not only spy or detective novels but also the best of the books on Watergate...
...Published jointly by NACLA and Monthly Review Press, Agribusiness in the Americas will be available in July, so ORDER NOW...
...The authors also describe and analyze the failure of the Carter Administration to apply real pressure on Chile to extradite Contreras and the other DINA agents...
...The story follows the FBI agents as they illogically look for evidence that the assassination was the work of the Left and then-sometimes reluctantlyturn their probing to the Cuban exiles and the DINA agents who hired them...
...government to pursue its investigation of the case...
...The American DINA agent, Michael Townley, who planned the assassination and placed the bomb, became a witness for the prosecution and plea bargained his way into a 10-year prison term...
...government officials-including then head of the CIA George Bush and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger-knew before the assassination that DINA planned some sort of covert mission in Washington...
...Justice Department made a half-hearted attempt to extradite Contreras and two other DINA officers, but they are free in Santiago today...
...Ronni Moffitt died in the hospital, her carotid artery severed by shrapnel...
...Hardback edition: $16.00 Paperback edition: $6.50 (add 75C for postage and handling) tion...
...He was eligible for parole last month, but it was denied...
...In fact, the authors describe five cases of withholding, destruction or concealment of key evidentiary documents in the case and conclude: It was not DINA's cover-ups or the secretiveness of the Cuban nationalist Movement that kept the investigation off the track for almost a year...
...I knew I had to do all in my power to make Orlando's death costly to the enemy that killed him...
...Letelier, his legs severed above the knees, died before reaching the hospital...
...Michael Moffitt, Ronni's husband of only four months, was in the back seat and escaped with slight wounds...
...He had represented Chile at the preparatory meeting of the Nonaligned Conference in Algeria that year (the organization reserved Chile's seat for the UP coalition...
...his colleagues knew that the same thing could happen to them...
...For example, the book contains a surprising amount of detail on the assassination of General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires in 1974 and on the attempted murder of Bernardo Leighton in Rome in 1975...
...A sense of defeat and failure tore at them," say Dinges and Landau...
...Two Cubans, Guillermo Novo and Alvin Ross, were convicted in a 1979 trial and are serving life sentences...
...The big "breaks" in the case-like when an FBI informant reveals that Cuban exile Alvin Ross has bragged that he "built the Letelier bomb"-make fascinating reading...
...government tried to derail the investigation-direct it away from Chile and the DINA-in order to cover up past CIA ties with Michael Townley and ongoing CIA cooperation in certain areas with DINA and other Latin American intelligence agencies...
...Landau's and Dinges' book answers many of the questions NACLA readers might have about this case: Why Letelier...
...The U.S...
...The immediacy and telling details of Assassination on Embassy Row attest to the authors' close personal ties to the case and to their thorough investiga46 agribusiness corporations in Latin America...
...Why did the Pinochet government expel Townley and why did Townley talk...
...Letelier had become what the authors call "a rallying figure" in the exile resistance movement-a leader who maintained good relations not only with his fellow Unidad Popular politicians, but also with Christian Democrats and members of MIR...
...Veteran author and filmmaker Saul Landau worked with Letelier and Moffitt at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and was instrumental in pressuring a sometimes recalcitrant U.S...
...It was the actions consciously taken or willfully omitted by officials and agencies of the United States government...
...The book begins to read like a detective novel when the authors describe and analyze the FBI and Justice Department investigation of the case...
...In asking "could the murders have been prevented?," they suggest that high U.S...
...Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were killed September 21, 1976, in Washington, D.C., when a bomb placed under Letelier's car exploded...
...The assassination was conceived by Manuel Contreras, then head of the DINA, and carried out by a DINA officer and right-wing Cuban exiles...
...Dinges and Landau do not suggest that Townley or any of the assassins worked for the CIA or for any U.S...
...interests than the prosecution of terrorism on the part of that regime...
...Most important, the authors reveal an unprecedented amount of information about DINA's structure and operations...
...He had also become an effective lobbyist in Europe and in Washington, D.C., against loans and investments for Pinochet's Chile...
...Drawing on an extraordinary array of sources-from unnamed intelligence agents to official government transcripts-the authors describe in detail the planning and carrying out of the assassination and the investigation and trial that followed...
...Why did the investigation take so long...
...His assassination in the heart of Washington disrupted this work, as well as the lives of everyone, Chileans and Americans, who worked with him...
Vol. 14 • May 1980 • No. 3
