Charles Horman

Charles Horman was an American writer and filmmaker living in Santiago who was detained by the Chilean army six days after the coup of September 11, 1973, and executed. He and Frank Teruggi, detained days later, were both shot at the National Stadium. His case was the subject of the 1982 film Missing by Costa-Gavras, and of a Chilean prosecution that in 2011 indicted the former head of the United States military group in Chile.¹

Viña del Mar

On the day of the coup Horman was in Valparaíso and Viña del Mar with a friend from New York, Terry Simon. Over that day and the next four they met officers and contractors of the United States Military Group, all of whom were enthusiastic about the coup. A Navy contractor, Arthur Creter, said more than once that "it had gone smoothly." An American officer gave them a ride back to Santiago. Simon kept notes of the conversations with names and addresses. After Horman's death she dictated them to the American academic Stephen Volk, who typed them on onion skin and carried them out of the country in an empty Chapstick tube.¹

A month before his death, on a visit to New York, Horman had persuaded four friends to give him money to buy weapons for the cordones industriales, the belts of worker-run factories that supporters of Salvador Allende expected to resist a coup. A few days before September 11 he and his wife, Joyce, moved to a house in the Vicuña Mackenna industrial district.¹

September 17

An army unit took Horman from the house in the late afternoon of September 17. Neighbors saw the arrest, and two callers reported it to the United States consulate, where the calls were entered on the note cards kept on the case. Less than 24 hours later his body and those of six labor leaders from a nearby factory were delivered to the morgue. He had been shot at the stadium on September 18. A Chilean official stopped the morgue from completing a fingerprint comparison, even after the family supplied prints from FBI records. In mid October two Chilean military intelligence sergeants, Raúl Meneses and Jaime Ortiz, who had been assigned to find him, pressed the morgue to make the comparison, which identified body 2663. They told his father that the body had been "interred in the wall of the Santiago Cemetery on October 3."¹

The Embassy

An embassy cable of September 25, number 4565, reported that the embassy had "no firm info on his detention." Edmund Horman arrived on October 5 and with his daughter-in-law saw Ambassador Nathaniel Davis, who "said that the Embassy feeling was that Charles probably was in hiding." When the father mentioned the two telephone calls, the ambassador asked the consul, Purdy, whether he knew of them. "No sir," Purdy said. The vice consul handling the case, James Anderson, was a CIA officer under diplomatic cover.¹

The junta told the embassy that Horman and Teruggi had been killed by leftists in stolen army uniforms. A foreign ministry official, Enrique Guzmán, told an embassy officer that "we may never know" how they died, that both had been deeply involved in "Communist Industrial areas," and that they "perhaps had been shot by their own comrades." The embassy gave this account to journalists for years. Three American diplomats later acknowledged that no real pressure was put on the junta, on instructions from Henry Kissinger. Edmund Horman wrote of the embassy's conduct: "Whether it was incompetence, indifference, or something worse, I find it shocking, outrageous and perhaps obscene."¹

The Man Who Knew Too Much

In June 1976 Rafael González, a Chilean civilian intelligence agent who had taken asylum with his family in the Italian embassy, told American reporters, among them Frank Manitzas of CBS and Lewis Diuguid of The Washington Post, that he had seen Horman interrogated with an American in the room and had heard that he "had to disappear" because "he knew too much." Senator Edward Kennedy and others wrote to the State Department.¹

Inside the department Rudy Fimbres wrote to Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman that "we 'withheld' for almost two years any reference to a Chilean memorandum which accused Teruggi, and Horman, of leftist activities," that "we have done nothing about it," that the public claim to be pursuing every lead "is overdrawn," and that Anderson's employer would eventually come out. A memorandum by Fimbres, Robert Driscoll, and William Robertson stated that "this case remains bothersome," that the junta "sought Horman and felt threatened enough to order his immediate execution," that it "might have believed this American could be killed without negative fall-out from the USG," and that the CIA's "lack of candor with us on other matters only heightens our suspicions." Fimbres said later that the language was meant to force an inquiry: "I was trying to smoke something out." Frederick Smith Jr. then spent five months in the files. He concluded that the Chilean military "deliberately killed" both men, that its denials were "difficult to credit," and that there was "no evidence" of an American role "apart from Gonzalez's statements," and recommended "high level inquiries" of the CIA as to whether it had done anything "that may have led the Junta to believe it could, without serious repercussions, kill Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi." Embassy officers interviewed González on tape in January 1977 and reported that he "is not reliable."¹

In March and April 1987 Meneses approached the embassy four times, offering what he knew in return for help leaving Chile. He said that "to his knowledge, no U.S. official played any role in the death of Charles Horman since he was dead before anyone in the Embassy would have known of his detention." The embassy suspected that he and Mariana Callejas, who visited at the same period, were "plants," turned him away, and later reported that it could not find him.¹

On August 25, 1976, three State Department officers wrote to Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman: "This case remains bothersome. The connotations for the Executive are not good. In the Hill, academic community, the press, and the Horman family the intimations are of negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman's death." They concluded that the Chilean government "sought Horman and felt threatened enough to order his immediate execution," and that "U.S. intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death. At best, it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder." The passage was withheld from the family and released intact in October 1999. At the time of the coup Horman had been looking into the killing of General René Schneider in 1970. Assistant Secretary Jack Kubisch raised the case with Chile's foreign minister in February 1974 "in the context of the need to be careful to keep relatively small issues in our relationship from making our cooperation more difficult."²

The Chilean Case

Judge Jorge Zepeda indicted Navy Captain Ray Davis, the former head of the Military Group, on November 29, 2011, as an accomplice who had known of the detentions and not prevented the deaths "although he was in a position to do so." The documentary evidence he cited for foreknowledge was cable 4565, which he placed "at the very moment when the victim was still alive." The cable is dated a week after the body reached the morgue. Davis died in a Santiago nursing home in 2013. In 2015 Zepeda convicted Pedro Espinoza, who had been in charge of interrogations at the stadium, and González as an accomplice. González had filed an affidavit in 2003 calling his 1976 statement "an absolute falsehood" made to get his family out of Chile, and saying that he took the phrase about knowing too much from an article by William Shawcross that Italian diplomats had shown him. The ruling did not address it. The journalist John Dinges, who read the 6,976-page court record, named as responsible for the arrest Colonel Fernando Grant Pimentel, Lieutenant Enzo Cadenasso, and Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Soto Mackenney, and found no evidence in it of American involvement in the killings. In 2025 the National Security Archive added a note to its 2000 publication of the State Department documents stating that the theory of an American role was now in doubt.¹³