Bernardo Leighton
Founder of Chile's Christian Democratic Party and former interior minister, exiled in Rome, who was shot with his wife on October 6, 1975, by Italian fascists engaged by DINA's agent Michael Townley.
Bernardo Leighton was a founder of the Christian Democratic Party of Chile and minister of the interior under President Eduardo Frei Montalva. After the coup of 1973 the Italian Christian Democrats invited him to live in Rome, where he worked for an understanding between his party and the exiled left.1
In the fall of 1975 Michael Townley, his wife Mariana Callejas, and Virgilio Paz of the Cuban Nationalist Movement were in Europe on a mission for DINA that Townley called "Operation Open Season." To the Italian fascists he put the case this way: "In Rome, right now, there lives a Chilean exile who embodies that threat of left-center alliance. Behind this incipient Christian Democratic-leftist alliance is Bernardo Leighton. His elimination would prove of immeasureable benefit to anticommunist movements all over the world." Paz proposed the cover: "The Italians would kill the Chilean target, and the Cuban exile movement would claim credit."1
On October 6, 1975, a gunman shot Leighton in the back of the head with a 9mm Beretta. The bullet came out above his left ear. A second shot passed through his wife at the shoulder and grazed her spine, and she did not recover the full use of her legs. Both lived. On November 4 a Cuban exile group calling itself Zero sent the Associated Press in Miami a communiqué naming the weapon. "The FBI gave credence to the Zero communique about Leighton because it provided details of the attack that only the assassins could know." Its agents "reasoned that the Leighton attack had been a 'contract' from the Chilean military government and that Zero had served as Chile's hired gun." The members of Zero included Guillermo Novo, his brother Ignacio, and Jose Dionisio Suarez, three of the men later charged in the murder of Orlando Letelier.1
The name had been added to Townley's list by Major Raúl Iturriaga of DINA, who ordered him to enlist the organization of Stefano Delle Chiaie. Delle Chiaie advised against exiles such as Carlos Altamirano, who were too well protected. "Leighton was a better, and easier target." The gunman was Pierluigi Concutelli. "Townley and the Italians celebrated with dinner at Delle Chiaie's apartment, thinking that the Leightons were dead." A few weeks later General Augusto Pinochet flew to Madrid for the funeral of Francisco Franco. "Delle Chiaie was given a private audience with Pinochet in his hotel room. Contreras also presented Delle Chiaie with the $5,000 payment."2
An Italian court convicted Townley in his absence in 1993.3
Sources
- Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 152, 158-162, 240. ↩
- Dinges, John. The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. New Press, 2004, pp. 130-133. ↩
- Kornbluh, Peter, ed. "The Pinochet Dictatorship Declassified: Confessions of a DINA Hit Man," National Security Archive, November 22, 2023. ↩
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