Cuban Nationalist Movement
Cuban exile group in New Jersey whose leaders supplied the men who helped the Chilean secret police agent Michael Townley kill Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976.
The Cuban Nationalist Movement was an anti-Castro exile organization based in New Jersey, whose leaders in the 1970s included Guillermo Novo. The Chilean secret police, DINA, used it as the "Cuban group" in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt on September 21, 1976.12
The Letelier Operation
Michael Townley testified that in the summer of 1976 DINA assigned him to go to the United States and arrange the murder, and told him to get in touch with the movement. The orders of Colonel Pedro Espinoza, as Townley recorded them in 1978, were to "contact the Cuban group to eliminate him, or use SARIN gas, or orchestrate an accident." He arrived on September 9 and the next day met Novo, Alvin Ross, Virgilio Paz, José Dionisio Suárez, and other members in a hotel room in New Jersey. Novo told him the following day that the movement would cooperate but insisted that Townley take part himself. Townley, Paz, and Suárez went to Washington and built the bomb, and Townley fixed it under the driver's seat at midnight on September 18. It was set off by remote control at Sheridan Circle.12
Trials
Novo and Ross were convicted in 1979 of murder, murder of a foreign official, and conspiracy, and Novo's brother Ignacio Novo of lying to the grand jury. Part of the evidence came from jailhouse informants working with the government. One of them, Sherman Kaminsky, testified that Ross "told me that he was involved in the murder of Orlando Letelier together with generals in DINA, Sepulveda, Michael Townley, and other members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement in this country." In 1980 the Supreme Court held such testimony inadmissible in United States v. Henry, and the court of appeals reversed the convictions of Novo and Ross and ordered a new trial. It reversed Ignacio Novo's for the failure to try him separately.1
At the retrial in May 1981 the defense undertook to prove "that Townley and DINA alone plotted to kill Letelier." Townley, the government's witness, admitted that he had lied to a Chilean military investigator and had given El Mercurio a false statement that he had nothing to do with the killing. Paz and Suárez were not tried with them.3
Sources
- United States v. Novo Sampol, 636 F.2d 621 (D.C. Cir. 1980). ↩
- Kornbluh, Peter, ed. "The Pinochet Dictatorship Declassified: Confessions of a DINA Hit Man," National Security Archive, November 22, 2023. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2023-11-22/pinochet-dictatorship-declassified-confessions-dina-hit-man ↩
- Kiernan, Laura A. "Townley Admits Lying to Chilean Questioners," The Washington Post, May 17, 1981, CIA Reading Room document CIA-RDP90-00552R000606730006-5. ↩
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