THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON

...Behind her, on the wall, was a photograph of her husband...

...There's nothing like a crime wave to arouse civic excitement and get the blood moving...

...What angers us," Isabel Letelier said of the Reagan Administration's "quiet diplomacy" tactics, "is that no American would accept living under conditions that exist in Chile...

...Both fires struck a home on Hugel's property owned by brothers Thomas R., Samuel F., and Dennis McNeil...

...Isabel Letelier heads the Chilean Committee for Human Rights, and she is busy—even though the Reagan Administration insists that the situation in Chile has "improved" enough to resume U.S...

...Radio Waves The Reagan Administration has leaked plans to set up a "Radio Free Cuba" beamed at Havana, but a similar, privately financed operation headquartered in Washington has already been broadcasting for several years...

...There were four expulsions following Kirkpatrick's visit in August...

...The first two brothers disappeared last July after spilling the beans to The Washington Post about Hugel's questionable stock manipulations, in which they took part...

...If more police were the answer, surely a night-time stroll six blocks north of the White House would, by now, be as safe as a noontime schuss down the Swiss alps...

...Dennis McNeil died about a week after his brothers first contacted The Post, as doctors were preparing to operate on his ruptured spleen...

...The mayor of Washington, Marion Barry, will dedicate a modest stone monument displaying the words Justice, Peace, Dignity...

...In a fund-raising circular, Western Goals claims its file-building efforts were made necessary by reforms of the FBI and the CIA—reforms which, it asserted, had crippled national security...

...It was in a small Vietnamese hamlet...

...11 Jimmy Carter, 1971: "I have...

...McDonald has been named chairman of Western Goals...

...MCDONALD'S FARM If there were no Larry McDonald, Congress would have to invent him...

...Why should we make something like that available...

...After the September 20 memorial service at Sheridan Circle, the fourth annual Le-telier-Moffitt human rights awards are to be presented...

...One day this summer, an officer had a hard time getting his scooter started after the others had left...

...War Without End A disturbing pattern of attacks is emerging in the Vietnamese community in the United States, suggesting that right-wing elements are forming hit squads along the lines of the Cuban exile organization "Omega 7." Several months ago, a molotov cocktail was tossed at Harvard scholar Ngo Vinh Long, considered sympathetic to the Hanoi government...

...It's a great performance...

...Each week in his Capitol Hill office, Portell-Vila prepares five news and commentary tapes which are then duplicated at the ASC's Boston, Virginia, headquarters and provided free to twenty-three domestic and foreign radio stations...

...After the Marines left, I suppose there were some who wept...

...Providing research will be John Rees, a one-time FBI and police informant, who publishes a rap sheet on the Left called Information Digest and is an editor of the John Birch Society's Review of the News...

...financial aid...

...She did not move...

...It's said that he's signed up to make a commercial for American Express travel cards: "You may not remember me, but I used to be President of the United States...

...Rees, in a short telephone interview, wasn't as firm...

...Many will remember that the Kennedy Administration's early commitment to South Vietnam began with the rhetoric of nation-building...

...The director is a part-time assistant in McDonald's Congressional office...

...Yankee Spy Plots The police chief in the tiny resort town of Bridgton, Maine, had a suspicious eye on onetime CIA spymaster Max Hugel long before the scandal surrounding his stock dealings surfaced last summer...

...For most of the summer, police in Washington played hide-and-seek with dope-pushers and prostitutes...

...Marines from throwing another hand grenade through the door...

...Article 24 of the Chilean constitution, drawn up by the Pinochet government, allows for arbitrary detention" or expulsion from the country for "illicit associations," she noted...

...For several years, the Georgia Democrat (who boasts of his John Birch Society membership in his official biography) has played the time-worn Washington role of regaling his colleagues and constituents with tales of vast, shadowy left-wing conspiracies...

...Every President has looked to the District of Columbia as his special little laboratory for demonstrating how to combat crime...

...There is some history behind these new, new proposals: f John F. Kennedy, 1963: "We have passed seven major crimcbills...

...On the sidewalk, a coffee-colored woman stood with a small child in her grip, watching the white helmet and revolver bob up and down as the cop pumped his foot on the starter pedal...

...Michael Moffitt, who was riding with his wife in the Letelier car, will offer a few words...

...In a departure from that cautious practice, McDonald has stepped out from behind his cloak of Congressional immunity to help establish computerized files of American left-wing organizations and individuals in an Alexandria, Virginia, company called "Western Goals, Inc...

...It occurred to me that I had seen her face before-r-or, rather, the look on it...

...The Viet Cong were "criminals," so it was a "War on Crime," foreign style...

...11 Gerald Ford, 1974: "Today, I am sending to the Congress a special message spelling out in concrete terms the program for curbing crime...

...His wife Sheila, also a former informant, is a research assistant to McDonald...

...I had seen that look thirteen years ago on another woman holding a child...

...Requests for the extradition of top Chilean secret police officers indicted here for the murders have been refused in Santiago...

...After that, they dug up the hidden guns...

...You could see their teeth grinding...

...Jimmy Carter made news when he visited China, but he has so thoroughly vanished from the national political scene that a joke about it has begun to make the Washington rounds...

...The huts were set on fire, but still the people hardly moved...

...The FBI is searching for them...

...Building on a reputed capitalization of $1.5 million raised from corporations, foundations, and direct-mail solicitations, the company plans to create a bank of dossiers rivaling the FBI's...

...MIKE KONOCACKI All of which makes Washington look somewhat like Saigon, circa 1973...

...Marines poked through their huts on a "pacification" mission...

...October Briefing Jimmy Who...

...There's one good reason: Internal FBI reports on Rees's activity while he tried to peddle intelligence to Government agencies during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago describe his information as highly unreliable...

...It sounded like one big "model cities" program...

...Portell-Vila also broadcasts a twice-daily program to Cuba from WQBA radio in Miami, a station with close ties to Bay of Pigs veterans...

...Most of the time, McDonald is considerate enough to confine these ruminations to the back pages of the daily Congressional Record, where they enjoy immunity from libel suits that might otherwise be filed by those he names as communist dupes and terrorist agents...

...But since everyone now knows that you can't solve problems merely by throwing money at them, the new, new Commission has also called for pre-trial confinement of suspects, the use of illegally obtained evidence, and the expansion of computer dossiers...

...According to the police chief, Hugel was listed as of April 1 as the owner of lakeshore properties which suffered two "suspicious" fires, one of which, in 1977, was "definitely arson...

...When that didn't work, the killing began in earnest...

...That comes out to one Federal or city police officer for every eighty citizens in the District of Columbia...

...Much of the year she spends in Europe, where her press conferences are heavily attended and her remarks get prominent attention in the newspapers...

...His wife, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, then twenty-five, a researcher for Letelier, died of shrapnel wounds she received in the bombing...

...The tax assessor in the small town, meanwhile, has had difficulty straightening out the ownership of the lakefront properties, believing that Hugel may have deeded them back to the McNeils since April 1. "It's bounced back and forth between them so often, I can't keep track," said Janice Chadbourne...

...During a recent Latin American trip, U.N...

...f Lyndon B. Johnson, 1967: "The Safe Streets and Crime Control Act is fundamental to the safety of the individual...

...She works out of a cramped fourth-floor office provided by the Institute for Policy Studies...

...FBI investigators have reportedly learned that Dennis McNeil was abducted and beaten twice this year in connection with his brothers' dealings with Hugel...

...I walked on past the bodegas and the knots of winos in the dusty noontime heat until it came to me a few minutes later...

...Rees was asked whether individuals would be able to check their files for accuracy...

...Sleuth Noted in Dossier, a Washington society magazine: "Spike author Arnaud de Borch-grave revealed at a recent party . . . that he made secret guarded visits to black ghettos in search of material for his latest book...

...If I controlled it, certainly not," he answered...

...The total does not include Secret Service agents (there are 1,500 nationwide, but no figures are given out for the number in Washington), nor does it include the squads of military police now patrolling the sidewalks near a gay bar on Capitol Hill to keep U.S...

...The director, Linda Guell, insists that contrary to news reports, "we don't keep names of individuals" in the files...

...Washington has eight police agencies of one kind or another—almost 9,000 men and women cruising streets, guarding buildings, and arresting people for one offense or another...

...The third brother's body was ordered exhumed from a Bridgton grave in August by New York City's Chief Medical Examiner, who suspected foul play...

...in response to a question, he chuckled, "Well, if that's what she said, that's what's happening...

...A couple of assistants are usually around to help sort the mail, tend to telephone calls, and arrange speaking tours...

...That woman and others, along with old men and children, watched with blank, expressionless eyes as U.S...

...Set up by the American Security Council (ASC) in 1967, "Radio Free Americas" is directed by Herminio Por-tell-Vila, an eighty-year-old Cuban-born expatriate lawyer who worked previously for the Voice of America...

...Now comes the new, new War on Crime, this year's version courtesy of the Reagan Administration's bipartisan Blue-Ribbon Commission, which has recommended that the Federal Government spend $2 billion to build prisons...

...Letelier searched through a pile of clippings on her desk and handed one to me as we began to talk...

...This year's recipients will be Ja-cobo Timerman and a representative of Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan, the four Catholic missionaries murdered by security forces in El Salvador...

...H Richard M. Nixon, 1969: "I have stressed the urgent need for more police, more judges, more prosecutors...

...directed my Reorganization Project staff at the Office of Management and Budget to review all Federal activities designed to improve the system of justice in this country...

...That was followed by the mysterious death of a Vietnamese student at Cornell University, and an aborted attack on a professor there, both of whom were regarded as leftists by right-wing Vietnamese exiles...

...A Vietnamese newspaper in Arlington, Virginia, Van Nghe Tien Phong, has applauded militant activity against "communist sympathizers...

...In this familiar ritual, everybody can get into the act: The mayor makes pronouncements, the police ask for pay raises, the hookers cry foul, and letters flow to the newspapers...

...WORKING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS It was a long time since I had seen Isabel Le-telier, the widow of the Chilean diplomat murdered here five years ago, so I dropped in for a chat...

...On September 20, a small ceremony will be held at the spot a few blocks from her office where her hsuband's bombed-out, smoldering car rolled to a rest five years ago...

...Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was quoted by the Associated Press as saying the case "is solved, and what remains to be dealt with is not important whatsoever to improving relations with the United States...

...The clipping reported the arrest by Chilean authorities of two physicians who had been treating torture victims...