Carter Cornick

L. Carter Cornick Jr. was a special agent of the FBI from 1967 to 1988.¹ He was a former Marine,² described in 1978 as "descended from several generations of Virginians,"³ and held a bachelor's degree in Asian history from the University of Virginia.⁴ He spent sixteen of his twenty-one bureau years on terrorism.⁵ In San Juan in 1972 and 1973 he received informant reports for the bureau's file on the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño; from September 1976 he was case agent of the investigation code-named Chilbom into the murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt; in the 1980s he worked in the counterterrorism section at FBI headquarters; and in August 1988 he and the case's prosecutor, Eugene Propper, formed Counter Terrorism Consultants, Inc.¹⁵⁶

San Juan, 1972 to 1976

The FBI's San Juan field office kept the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño under file 100-4014. Cover sheets for informant reports (form FD-306) in that file record Cornick as the receiving agent on at least eight occasions between November 1972 and October 1973. A report of November 1972 described planned activity of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, a planned demonstration in Washington, D.C., and a party meeting set for November 24, 1972, and was routed to a further file on the Committee for the Defense of Puerto Rican Political Prisoners. A report of July 24, 1973 consisted of a "mailing-membership list" of the Casa de la Amistad. One of September 28, 1973 covered activities of the group the cover sheet abbreviates as NPPR, including the September 12 celebration of the birth of Pedro Albizu Campos and of the Grito de Lares. Each cover sheet carried the printed notations that persons marked with an asterisk "only attended a meeting and did not actively participate" and that "violence or revolutionary activities were not discussed," and each instructed that information from the source, when disseminated, be paraphrased and classified to protect the source's identity.⁶

Cornick also served as the San Juan office's media coordinator and completed the FBI's first media in-service training, at which the columnist Jack Anderson was the keynote speaker.¹ He investigated bombings in Puerto Rico and, by the account of the journalist Zach Dorfman, armed robbery cases.²³ He was transferred to the Washington field office several weeks before September 21, 1976, and placed on a newly formed criminal squad that handled bombing matters.¹

Sheridan Circle

Cornick reached Sheridan Circle about ten minutes after the bomb under Letelier's car exploded on the morning of September 21, 1976. Michael Moffitt, who had been in the back seat, was shouting about DINA, a name that meant nothing to Cornick.² His first questions were whether further devices remained and whether the FBI had jurisdiction. The jurisdiction rested on the Protection of Foreign Officials statute, whose coverage of former ambassadors had been added at the suggestion of a junior State Department attorney; without it the case would have gone to the homicide squad of the Metropolitan Police Department.¹ The special agent in charge, Nick F. Stames, assigned Cornick because of his availability, his Spanish and his experience with the Puerto Rico bombings.³ "It's your case. Do it," Stames told him at the scene.⁷ Stuart Case, chief of the FBI explosives unit, directed the forensic search, which extended to the roofs of neighboring embassies and wire mesh over the storm drains. When another official moved to reopen part of the circle to traffic, Cornick refused: "The crime scene is here once."¹²

Letelier had worked at the Institute for Policy Studies, which, Cornick wrote, had been "formerly investigated by the FBI"; the Washington Post reported in 1978 that the institute had been "infiltrated and spied upon by informants for the FBI" during the Vietnam War. Its staff resisted the evacuation and search of their building, which was ordered after a dog reacted to a car parked in front; Cornick wrote that he learned thirty years later that the dog had reacted to marijuana residue.¹³ Saul Landau wrote that he met Cornick at Isabel Letelier's house on the night of the murder, that the institute's staff accused Cornick personally of having tapped their telephones, opened their mail and gone through their garbage, and that Cornick answered: "I don't know anything about that, but I'll tell you one thing. We're on the same side in this one."⁷ John Dinges and Landau wrote that some senior FBI officials referred to Letelier and the institute as "pinkos" and "commie perverts" and suggested that Cornick direct the investigation at the American left and Chilean exiles, and that Cornick, "a staunch anticommunist," resisted.⁷

The United States Attorney, Earl Silbert, assigned a prosecutor from his major crimes unit at once, which Cornick attributed to the loss of evidence in the early "Watergate" investigation.¹ The prosecutor was Eugene Propper. Cornick recalled telling Stames the next morning: "I have no intention of working with the Justice Department. I don't want some assistant U.S. attorney telling me how to run a case."² The two had never met; they worked together for the next eighteen months before arrests were made in April 1978.³ The bureau designated the case a special, with major case status and the code name Chilbom.¹ Cornick's plan was to rule out every motive other than the obvious one, including a Venezuelan mistress, a disgruntled colleague and a personal enemy abroad. His first report, written after three weeks, ran to more than 1,300 pages with a 50-page administrative section asking every receiving office and legal attaché for comment.¹ He had the FBI interview every person in Letelier's address book, and some agents, by the account of Dinges and Landau, probed for leftist activity and suggested that the left had a motive.⁷

Caracas and the Cuban exiles, 1976 to 1977

Because the Cuban exile side of the investigation would involve intelligence information, Propper, Assistant Attorney General Stanley Pottinger and the director of central intelligence, George Bush, met to determine to what extent the CIA could help.³ Within two days of the bombing Ricardo Morales, an informant for the CIA, the FBI, the DEA and the Miami police who was also an officer of the Venezuelan intelligence service DISIP, told the FBI that the Novo brothers of Union City, New Jersey, had done it, citing Orlando Bosch.² On November 5, 1976, Assistant Attorney General Richard Thornburgh asked the State Department to arrange interviews of four men then held in Caracas in connection with the bombing of Cubana Flight 455: Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano. Thornburgh named the investigators to be sent: Propper and FBI special agents Carter Cornick and Raul Salinas. Harry Shlaudeman relayed the request to the embassy in Caracas on November 11 in a cable sent under Henry Kissinger's name.⁸ Venezuelan officials kept Propper from Bosch for months.²

Cornick later said that the CIA had placed Cuban exiles "recruited by the agency to fight the good war against Castro" in DISIP. "The agency put them down there!" he told Dorfman in 2015. Dorfman put the claim to Jack Devine, a retired CIA officer stationed in Chile from 1971 to 1974, who answered: "Go show me. Prove it."² Cornick repeated the claim in 2016: "the CIA inserted many anti-Castro Cubans into its intelligence service (DISIP) while still on friendly terms."¹

Propper brought Guillermo Novo and Ignacio Novo of the Cuban Nationalist Movement before the grand jury.²³ The State Department gave Propper and Cornick photographs and background on two Chileans, Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral, who had entered the United States through Miami in August 1976 on official Chilean passports. In July 1977 the informant Ricardo Canete and the jailed militant Rolando Otero identified the Williams photograph, Otero in Cornick's presence. In December 1977 Cornick and a team of agents found immigration forms showing that both men had entered in August and left on September 2, 1976.² An investigative clerk of the Washington field office found them after more than six weeks of searching forms by hand in a warehouse in Suitland, Maryland.¹

Santiago, 1978

The Chilean foreign ministry announced that it would answer only formal letters rogatory. The letters were sent with only the questions sealed, and Propper told courthouse reporters that they might find something in the clerk's office; the next day's front pages reported that the investigation was focused on members of the Chilean government. Cornick wrote that within several days the Chilean press identified "the individual with blond hair" as an American, Michael Townley, "who also worked for the CIA," and the second man as a DINA captain, Armando Fernandez Larios.¹ Propper and Cornick arrived in Santiago on March 19, 1978.² At the headquarters of DINA's successor, the CNI, Cornick saw two soldiers feeding books into a fire in an oil drum; inside, the general in charge admitted for the first time that Townley had worked for DINA.¹

Propper, Cornick and the legal attaché Robert Scherrer questioned two Chilean army captains that month about their roles. One said under questioning on March 24 that the purpose of their August 1976 mission to the United States had been to see Vernon Walters. Walters gave the FBI a deposition in June 1978 denying any knowledge of the case or contact with the officers.⁹ One evening members of the Chilean National Police told Cornick and Scherrer that a warrant required them to appear before a magistrate; Cornick wrote that both held diplomatic passports accrediting them to Chile, cited immunity, and that the police backed down.¹ Chile expelled Townley on April 8, 1978, and Cornick escorted him to the United States; the FAA ordered the plane to land at Baltimore short of New York.¹¹⁰ On May 9 Ambassador George Landau cabled from Santiago that Chilean courts were investigating the expulsion, that the press had named Scherrer and Cornick as Townley's escorts, and that lawyers for Townley and his wife wanted them called before the investigating judge. Scherrer held a diplomatic passport; "in order to preserve same option with respect to Carter Cornick," Landau recommended "strongly" that Cornick be issued one for future visits, and likewise Propper.¹⁰

Townley's plea agreement, signed on April 18, 1978, capped his sentence at ten years. "We did not have, in my opinion, a prosecutable case," Cornick told Dorfman. "So what we did was we made a deal with the worst possible guy."¹² Townley implicated DINA's commander, Manuel Contreras, its chief of operations, Pedro Espinoza, and Fernandez Larios, and told the investigators that President Augusto Pinochet began every working day with a briefing from Contreras.¹ A CIA report dated April 28, 1978, while Cornick was working in Santiago, stated that "Contreras told a confidant he authorized the assassination of Letelier on orders from Pinochet." Shown that report and others in 2015 by John Dinges, Cornick said: "As you may suspect, none of this was new to us at the time." He called the information hearsay from people who would never testify, and said that "the interests of the U.S., according to [the Department of] State, were that Chile was a non-Communist country in Latin America and therefore no further punitive action against them was warranted."¹¹

The test bomb

Cornick proposed a replication test: a second car of the same model, a bomb built by Townley from the same components, and a comparison of the damage. The prosecutors feared that a failed test would reach the defense in discovery, and the request went for approval to the bureau's deputy director.¹² An agent in Detroit obtained the car from General Motors. Townley, escorted by deputy marshals, was taken to each place where he had bought parts, including a Radio Shack on E Street behind FBI headquarters, and built the device with Stuart Case.¹² On July 20, in the summer of 1978 by Cornick's account, the bomb was detonated at the FBI explosives range; the electronics expert Bill Koopman wired the modified Fanon-Courier transmitter to the car's cigarette lighter. A search of the test site turned up a brass spacer post that matched one recovered at Sheridan Circle.¹ A photograph Cornick supplied to Dorfman is captioned "Aftermath of controlled FBI bombing, 1979."²

Indictment and trial, 1978 to 1979

On August 1, 1978, three Chilean officers and four Cuban exiles were charged with conspiracy to murder a foreign official and with murder.¹ On October 17 the prosecutors stated in a court filing that Townley had made "two unrelated contacts" with the CIA in Florida "a number of years ago," one of them in 1970 or 1971.⁹ That fall a bomb exploded at the home of the Chilean Supreme Court judge considering the American extradition request, and eleven days later another at the home of the judge investigating the first.¹

After a New York Times magazine feature that summer, the producers of the CBS program "60 Minutes" asked for a segment with Mike Wallace. Cornick favored it as a platform to describe the Cuban Nationalist Movement as "a group of criminals, not super patriots, who regularly extorted the anti-Cuban exile community for personal gain"; CBS agreed to let a prosecutor censor any question that could affect the trial. Afterward, Cornick wrote, "according to public, police and FBI sources, CNM funding sustained a major blow," and the program entered the curriculum for FBI media coordinators at Quantico.¹

The trial opened on January 9, 1979. The lead defense attorney, Paul Goldberger, told the jury that the murder "was carried out by Michael Townley . . . working as an agent of the CIA." Propper concluded that the defense had taken on DINA's case because DINA was funding the defendants, "which turned out to be the case," Cornick wrote, and the CIA's chief personnel officer testified that Townley had never worked for the agency.¹

During the trial Townley was held in the offices of the Major Crimes Unit of the United States Attorney, and with the knowledge of Propper and Barcella he telephoned people in Chile, including his Chilean lawyer and Gustavo Etchepare, to gather information on the extradition case. Etchepare was a former member of Patria y Libertad with connections to DINA. On January 30, 1979, locked alone in Propper's office, Townley called Etchepare without authorization. Defense attorneys and relatives of the Cuban defendants told reporters that Contreras's Chilean lawyer, Sergio Miranda Carrington, had brought from Chile a cassette on which Townley threatened to kill the trial judge, Barrington Parker; according to Miranda Carrington, Etchepare had recorded the call and given it to him, and he had passed it to the Cuban defendants' lawyers. A transcript was distributed to reporters at the courthouse by people connected with the defendants.¹² The FBI's translation of the cassette has Townley saying: "the fact is that this was one of the things which were discussed like so, among friends, with people from the FBI, that is, have as many friends as we all have call . . . make threatening calls to the Judge for him to withdraw from the case."¹² Scherrer and Cornick interviewed Townley about it on February 6, 8 and 9, 1979. On February 8 Townley denied asking anyone to threaten the judge and denied that any FBI agent or federal official had ever suggested or implied it. In a later interview with the same agents he said the remarks were a deliberately provocative "diatribe" meant to persuade Etchepare that the FBI was not taping their calls, that the transcript had been altered, and that DINA's electronics section had doctored recordings of Contreras's enemies when he worked for it.¹² The FBI Laboratory reported on March 30, 1979, in a report captioned Chilbom, that the cassette showed six bursts of noise consistent with the recorder being stopped and restarted and "characteristics indicating that segments of one or more previously recorded conversations were copied onto" it.¹²

The jury asked for two exhibits, the photographs of the two cars and the telephone records linking Townley to Guillermo Novo, and convicted Guillermo Novo and Alvin Ross on all counts; Ignacio Novo received eight years on lesser charges.¹² Dorfman reported that in May 1979 Pinochet's former press secretary, Federico Willoughby, traveled secretly to Washington with a message that Pinochet would hand over Contreras if the charges against Fernandez Larios and Espinoza were dropped.² About three months after the verdict Chile denied extradition, ruled the Townley evidence inadmissible, and sent the remaining evidence to a military tribunal. At the end of November 1979 the United States announced diplomatic sanctions without trade or commercial measures.¹

Leaks and the Director of Central Intelligence, 1979 to 1980

In early December 1979 Cornick met the Director of Central Intelligence on leaks. A memorandum to the director of March 10, 1980 states: "I have scheduled Carter Cornick (FBI) to call on you at the EOB tomorrow (Tues) at 1500. This is a follow-up to his meeting with you in early Dec on leaks."¹³ The director's schedule for Thursday, March 13, 1980 lists, at 1500, "Carter Cornick (FBI), re Leaks."¹⁴ Cornick later wrote that "capricious media leaks by both Field and Bureau officials were harmful, but not fatal to the case," and that the intervention of Deputy Associate Director Jim Adams prevented "stove piping" between the bureau's intelligence and criminal divisions.¹

In September 1980 the Court of Appeals reversed the convictions on the authority of United States v. Henry, and the Solicitor General's office declined to seek review.¹ On May 30, 1981 a second jury acquitted Guillermo Novo and Ross of the murder counts.¹ A week later Joe Trento reported that Canete, then in the witness protection program, said he had deliberately made his testimony less convincing for fear of anti-Castro Cubans, and that Barcella said Townley "understood that the politics of the situation had changed. The Reagan people had a lot of support in the Cuban community." Trento quoted an unnamed high Justice Department official who expected an order to put the case "on the shelf," and an unnamed CIA official who had helped train the Cubans: "when you implicate the Chilean secret police, you implicate our own CIA." The same official said that Contreras had "recently participated in security exercises with U.S. intelligence." Barcella and Cornick, whom Trento described as the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, told him that the most humiliating part of the case was having to go to the CIA "hat in hand" to ask how large a role American intelligence had played in training the Cubans and the Chileans. "It is very possible the CIA lied to me and withheld information from me on these cases," Barcella said.¹⁵

Headquarters, 1980 to 1988

Cornick became a supervisor in the terrorism section at FBI headquarters, where, he wrote, he found reports from the Letelier case that had been marked for dissemination to the legal attaché in Argentina still in a file cabinet.¹ On November 27, 1984 the executive secretary of the Intelligence Information Handling Committee of the Director of Central Intelligence sent "FBI/L. Carter Cornick" and the other members of its Geographic Information Systems Subcommittee a draft of standards for video disc maps, to be produced under a Defense Mapping Agency contract.¹⁶ A memorandum of March 11, 1985 called the subcommittee to a meeting on March 22 to discuss the contracts; its membership list gives Cornick's office as Room 4445 of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.¹⁷ In April 1985 he attended, as a supervisory special agent, the tenth annual symposium on the role of behavioral science in physical security, "Outthinking the Terrorist," at Springfield, Virginia.¹⁸ Townley was paroled in May 1983 after 62 months, and Fernandez Larios, who in early 1986 had approached the American government through Willoughby and the embassy's Chilean lawyer, Alfredo Etcheberry, met State Department, United States Attorney and FBI representatives in Santiago on January 14, 1987; because of fears that he would be recognized there, Cornick worked with a secondary team in Buenos Aires.² Cornick wrote that Fernandez Larios agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to murder; Dorfman wrote that he pleaded guilty to one count of accessory after the fact and served seven months.¹²

A resume packet that Counter Terrorism Consultants circulated in 1990 describes Cornick's last years in the bureau. It states that he spent sixteen of his twenty-one FBI years in the counterterrorism program, the last eight at headquarters; that he had headed the FBI's Terrorist Research and Analytical Center and, at his retirement, the section's computer center; that he had supervised the investigations of the 1983 bombings of the American embassy and the Marine compound in Beirut and of the 1984 seizure of American hostages in Lebanon, and in 1985 had supported the investigations of the TWA Flight 847 hijacking and the Achille Lauro case; that he had created the FBI's crisis management protocol for special events and held posts in security for the 1980 Winter Olympics, the 1984 Summer Olympics, the 1984 party conventions, the 1986 rededication of the Statue of Liberty and the 1987 Pan American and World Games; and that he had helped create logistical, operational and computer support for the Hostage Rescue Team. It also states that he "was the FBI representative to the Hostage Locating Task Force at the White House, the inter-agency group coordinating American policy on U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and to the State Department's Persian Gulf Threat Working Group," and that he received the FBI Director's Award in 1986.⁴

Counter Terrorism Consultants

Cornick retired in May 1988 by his own account, and on June 1, 1988 according to the company's resume packet.¹⁴ In early August 1988 he and Propper, then with the Washington law firm Lane and Edson, announced Counter Terrorism Consultants, Inc., to sell foreign "democratic" governments, airlines, shipping companies and sponsors of events such as the Olympic Games "pro-active" strategies against terrorism and the management of kidnappings and hijackings. Cornick was president; Propper said he was a full partner without a title. Scherrer, recently retired as the FBI's records chief, joined as a consultant, and Barcella, then with Laxalt, Washington, Perito & Dubuc, was to advise on extradition. The company's services included "amassing in-depth intelligence files for a client," "liaison programs with national and international law enforcement and intelligence agencies," hostage negotiation and "media leak investigations." It was seeded with about $500,000 from "a lot" of investors whom the founders declined to name, and they said their success would not depend on classified information. Cornick said he would draw on fifteen to twenty part-time consultants retired from the Secret Service, the State Department, the Justice Department, the FBI and the Defense Investigative Service, and had developed "artificial intelligence" computer models of terrorist behavior. "This is the first time anyone has retired from the FBI's terrorism section" to sell such services, he said. Jeff Stein of United Press International reported that the four men had also worked together on the investigation of Edwin Wilson, and listed Cornick's direction of the FBI investigations of the Beirut bombings, the TWA 847 hijacking and the Achille Lauro seizure and his management of security at the Lake Placid Games.⁵

By 1990 the firm was CounterTerrorism Consultants, L.P., at 2300 M Street NW in Washington, with Cornick as co-founder and chief executive officer. A copy of its resume packet, bearing a fax header of 1990, is among the papers of the journalist Danny Casolaro. Besides Cornick, Propper and Barcella, the associates listed were an unnamed former senior CIA operations officer described as a former chief of counterterrorism for the agency and its representative on White House, State Department and National Security Council counterterrorism committees, who had retired in 1987 and had earlier been chief of the agency's air and maritime elements from 1974 to 1977; Frank McNeil, ambassador to Costa Rica from 1980 to 1983 and later senior deputy for intelligence and research at the State Department; James B. Motley, vice president for national security studies and programs at Wackenhut Advanced Technologies Corporation since September 1987, who had appeared before the Vice President's Task Force on Combatting Terrorism in 1985; and a former foreign service officer, Nudell, who had served in Nicaragua and in the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism.⁴

After the bureau

After Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998, the Justice Department approved Cornick's testimony before the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón at the federal courthouse in Washington, and he was deputized as a deputy United States marshal so that he could review the case files, then still on manual index cards.¹ On September 19, 2001, in Washington, he gave a statement to United States judicial authorities in the presence of the Italian prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo for the Rome investigation of Operation Condor; he described Scherrer's contacts with the Argentine SIDE and with DINA, said that Scherrer had received his information on Condor from an Argentine SIDE officer, and said that Contreras was known as "Condor One."¹⁹ A letter of May 18, 2005 from twenty members of the House of Representatives to President George W. Bush, placed in the Congressional Record by Dennis Kucinich, quoted Cornick as having said in an interview that the Cubana bombing and the Letelier bombing were both planned at a June 1976 meeting in Santo Domingo attended by Posada, who was involved "up to his eyeballs."²⁰

Cornick wrote in 2016 that the Letelier case, more than the assassination of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, the Beirut embassy and Marine bombings, or the kidnapping and murder of the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, was the culmination of his career as an investigator.¹