The Letelier-Moffitt Case at 50: The Verdict of History on Pinochet’s Role

https://portside.org/2026-09-21/letelier-moffitt-case-50-verdict-history-pinochets-role

Portside Date: September 21, 2026

Author: National Security Archive

Date of source: September 21, 2026

National Security Archive

Secretary of State George Shultz Raised the Issue of Indicting Pinochet in 1987

Attorney General Janet Reno Authorized “Major” Investigation in 1999

Washington, D.C., September 21, 2026 - As part of a “major case” investigation into the role of General Augusto Pinochet in an act of terrorism in Washington, D.C., the FBI interviewed former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, according to declassified FBI documents posted today by the National Security Archive. In a meeting with FBI agents on May 25, 2000, in New York, Kissinger related a private meeting he had with General Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, just three months before the assassination, according to a newly disclosed FBI summary of the interview. “Kissinger recalled Pinochet bringing up Orlando Letelier’s name when he referenced contact which was being made by Christian Democrats and opponents to the Pinochet regime with members of the US congress. Kissinger could not recall if Pinochet became angry when speaking of Orlando Letelier.”

The Archive’s posting marks the 50th anniversary of the car bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, and his young colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, in Washington, D.C. The FBI documents were obtained pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests filed more than a decade ago by the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project.

Codenamed “CHILBOM,” the renewed FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation was authorized by Attorney General Janet Reno on February 8, 1999, several months after General Pinochet was detained in London on an Interpol warrant filed by Spain under the European Anti-Terrorism Convention. “The objective of the renewed investigation is to determine whether sufficient admissible, credible evidence, exists to establish that one or more additional persons, up to and including General Augusto Pinochet was involved in the [Letelier and Moffitt] homicides,” states one FBI overview of the investigation, posted today. “There are still unsolved aspects of the case,” states another FBI report dated March 27, 2000. “The intellectual authors of the crime are still being sought, and this may lead to the highest levels of the former Chilean government, which at the time of the bombing was led by General Augusto Pinochet.”

Pinochet’s Role

Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed the morning of September 21, 1976, when a bomb planted under the chassis of Letelier’s car exploded as they drove to work along a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue known as Embassy Row. Letelier had served as President Salvador Allende’s ambassador to Washington and minister of defense before the coup and was widely recognized as the most distinguished international voice of opposition to the Pinochet regime. Ronni Moffitt, 25 years old, was a fundraiser at the Institute for Policy Studies, where they both worked. Her husband, Michael Moffitt, Letelier’s research assistant, was the sole survivor of the bombing.

Within seven days of the car bombing, the FBI attaché in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, developed a concrete lead from an Argentine intelligence source—the existence of Operation Condor, a collaboration between Southern Cone secret police agencies to track and eliminate their opponents in the region and around the world. “Chile is the center for ‘Operation Condor,’” Scherrer reported in his September 28, 1976, intelligence cable. “It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the recent assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. may have been carried out as a third phase action of ‘Operation Condor.’”

For almost twenty years, this secret Condor cable was the only publicly available document trying Chile to the Letelier assassination. It was first obtained and cited by investigative journalist John Dinges, who co-authored with Saul Landau the first book on the Letelier-Moffitt case: Assassination on Embassy Row.

Despite this early intelligence, it took almost two years for the FBI to concretely identify the Chilean secret police, DINA, as responsible for the car bombing. A break in the investigation came after photographs of two Chilean operatives who, under the Condor collaboration, had sought false visas in Paraguay for a mission to the United States in August 1976, were published on the front page of a Washington, D.C., newspaper. Within hours, the two were identified as DINA agents: American-born Michael Townley and Major Armando Fernandez Larios.

The Carter administration demanded that Townley, a U.S. citizen, be transferred into U.S. custody. After months of delay and obfuscation, the Pinochet regime finally turned him over to the FBI, but only after U.S. authorities agreed not to question him about DINA operations other than the Letelier mission. Based on Townley’s detailed confessions on DINA’s responsibility for the car bombing, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted DINA director Col. Manuel Contreras and his deputy, Pedro Espinoza, along with Armando Fernandez Larios. The U.S. filed formal requests to Chile that they be extradited to the United States to stand trial, generating what one member of Pinochet’s military junta called “a Chilean Watergate.”

At that point, General Pinochet spearheaded a major cover up of his and DINA’s role in the car bombing, according to detailed CIA intelligence reports. Pinochet planned to “stonewall” any investigation, the CIA station in Santiago advised in June 1978, using the following strategy: “A. Protect General (r) Manuel Contreras from successful prosecution; B. Stonewall any further requests from the U.S. Government; C. Continue to ‘lobby’ the [Chilean] Supreme Court justices to ensure that requests for extradition of Chilean citizens following anticipated indictments are rejected. D. Continue to exploit Chilean nationalism with a covert action campaign to portray the Letelier investigation as being politically motivated -- another pretext for destabilizing the Pinochet regime.” The CIA also reported that Contreras “admitted his culpability” for the crime to the official Chilean military investigator, but “threatened to claim he was acting on orders from Pinochet in the event he was prosecuted.” According to CIA sources, Contreras “claimed he had safely secreted documentation to support his claim. This blackmail threat worked,” the CIA station reported. “Thus, the coverup began.”

The Fernandez Larios Defection

This document and other intelligence the CIA gathered on Pinochet’s role remained secret for decades, effectively permitting successive U.S. administrations to evade public pressure to prosecute General Pinochet.But international attention to Pinochet’s criminality as the intellectual author of the Letelier-Moffitt assassination was revived by the defection, in early 1987, of one of the original DINA operatives in the case—Armando Fernandez Larios. In October 1986, U.S. authorities reached out to Fernandez Larios in Chile, using a backchannel intermediary, to offer him a deal: sanctuary in the United States in return for full and honest testimony on the car bombing. A small team of U.S. officials secretly traveled to Santiago and debriefed Fernandez for ten hours in a CIA safe house on January 14, 1987. According to two detailed debriefing reports posted by the Archive today for the first time Fernandez Larios implicated Pinochet as responsible for ordering Letelier’s assassination and orchestrating a concerted cover-up of that crime.

In face-to-face meetings with Pinochet in 1978, according to the debriefing papers, Fernandez Larios told Pinochet he was going to go to the U.S. and confess his role in the Letelier operation. “Pinochet was upset that Fernandez had developed this attitude,” according to the debriefing report. Pinochet “told him that he had to be a good soldier, to continue this struggle and this problem would have a happy end.” Twice, according to Fernandez Larios, he requested that Pinochet allow him to resign from the military; and twice Pinochet “refused to allow him to separate from the Army’s jurisdiction.”

More importantly, Fernandez Larios related details he had heard and witnessed from DINA’s former deputy director, Pedro Espinoza. Espinoza related to him that DINA Director Manuel Contreras had admitted to the official military investigator in the Letelier case, Hector Orozco, that he had “given the order” to kill Letelier. “When asked why, he stated that he (Contreras) had received an order. When asked from whom, he advised Orozco to ‘ask the chief.’ Since Contreras reported directly to Pinochet the reference to the chief is reasonably clear.”

This information became public on February 4, 1987, when Fernandez Larios appeared in the Washington District Court to plead guilty to “being an accessory after the fact” to the murder of Letelier. (He was sentenced to up to seven years in prison and released after only five months.) It was contained in a legal “proffer” of testimony Fernandez Larios provided as part of his plea-bargain agreement with the Justice Department. Although of low evidentiary value, the proffer generated news headlines around the world on Pinochet’s role in the terrorist attack, and became the catalyst, inside the Reagan administration, for a major effort to finally terminate U.S. support for his regime.

Secretary of State George Shultz, a leading advocate of breaking Washington’s ties to the Pinochet dictatorship, used the Fernandez Larios evidence to lobby President Reagan to abandon the military regime and support a return to civilian rule. To obtain ammunition for this argument, Shultz requested that the CIA do a comprehensive file review of its raw intelligence on the Letelier-Moffitt assassination. On May 1, 1987, the CIA provided the secretary of state with what remains the most consequential declassified document of thousands of records on the Letelier Moffitt case—a secret report titled “Pinochet’s Role in the Letelier Assassination and Subsequent Coverup” (reposted today).

“A review of our files on the Letelier assassination,” the CIA concluded, “has provided what we regard as convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder.” The assessment added that Pinochet later “decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement…to protect his hold on the presidency.” Pinochet had even considered murdering Manual Contreras, the head of DINA, because he was the one man who could testify that Pinochet had ordered the assassination.

Shultz then summarized the CIA’s conclusions in a forceful memorandum to President Reagan titled “Pinochet and the Letelier-Moffitt Murders: Implications for US Policy.” The car bombing was “a blatant example of a chief of state’s direct involvement in an act of state terrorism, one that is particularly disturbing both because it occurred in our capital and since his government is generally considered to be friendly,” Shultz argued. “What we now know about Pinochet’s role in this assassination is of the greatest seriousness and adds further impetus to the need to work toward complete democratization of Chile.”

Indicting Pinochet?

The Secretary of State also lofted the idea of indicting Pinochet as the mastermind of a terrorist attack on the streets of Washinton, D.C. “The CIA has never before drawn and presented its conclusion that such strong evidence exists of his leadership role in this act of terrorism,” Shultz advised Reagan. But “it is not clear whether we can or would want to consider indicting Pinochet, even if we had more public sources of evidence.”

At the time, the United States government took no steps to indict Pinochet; rather, U.S. policy focused on supporting a transition to democracy in Chile in 1990 and pressing the new civilian government in Chile to prosecute the top DINA officers, Manuel Contreras and his deputy, Pedro Espinoza. In high-profile legal proceedings in the early 1990s, they were both convicted and sentenced to seven and six years respectively in a luxury prison built especially to house them.

Only after Pinochet was arrested in London on October 16, 1998, did the Clinton Administration—under pressure from the Letelier and Moffitt families and human rights advocates—revisit the idea of prosecuting Pinochet as the “intellectual author” of an act of terrorism in Washington, D.C. With Attorney General Reno’s February 1999 authorization for a “major” investigation, the Justice Department established a special “terrorism task force” to gather evidence on Pinochet’s role over the course of an 18-month investigation. In March/April 2000, a team of DOJ lawyers and FBI investigators spent close to a month in Chile deposing former military regime officials, among them former DINA director Manuel Contreras, who was officially interrogated at the Punto Peuco luxury prison.

The declassified FBI summary of the Contreras deposition is almost entirely redacted. But one U.S. official who was there said that Contreras provided investigators with the regime’s cover story for the Letelier assassination—that the CIA was responsible for the car bombing. Pro-Pinochet reporters who Contreras had invited to the prison, then ambushed the task force team as they left, turning the deposition into a media propaganda opportunity to absolve the military regime of responsibility for the terrorist attack.

Around August 2000, only a few months after Pinochet returned from over a year of house arrest in London, the DOJ lawyers investigating him presented Attorney General Reno with summaries of evidence and recommendations on indicting the former dictator. But Reno deferred action on prosecuting Pinochet to the incoming administration of George W. Bush, who assumed the presidency in January 2001. The Bush administration appears to have shelved the Pinochet investigation. “The Letelier case disappeared down a black hole,” one U.S. official told Chilean journalist Pascale Bonnefoy in 2002.

Fifty years after the car bombing occurred on Embassy Row, none of the FBI evidentiary records or DOJ recommendations have been declassified. One December 2000 FBI memorandum identified “an investigative summary of the CHILBOM investigation” that was being filed. But that summary was withheld from declassification to the National Security Archive.

On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, the Archive called on the Department of Justice to release all remaining records on the investigation and its conclusions. “The Letelier-Moffitt case remains the most infamous and emblematic atrocity of the many heinous human rights crimes committed by the Pinochet regime,” said Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project. “The verdict of history on General Pinochet’s role as an international terrorist awaits the declassification of these final documents.”

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