George Landau
American ambassador to Paraguay who in July 1976 copied the photographs in the false passports of two Chilean agents bound for Washington and sent them to the CIA, weeks before the murder of Orlando Letelier.
George Walter Landau was the United States ambassador to Paraguay from 1972 to 1977, to Chile from 1977 to 1982, and afterward to Venezuela.1
The Passports
Landau testified in February 1979 that the Paraguayan chief of protocol, Conrado Papalardo, told him in "a bizarre conversation" in July 1976 that Chile wanted to send two army officers to the United States on Paraguayan documents "to be less conspicuous." "Papelardo told me the Paraguayan government had decided to give them the passports and that he had told them to contact Walters in the U.S. He said that would give Walters full control over their visit." General Vernon Walters, deputy director of the CIA, had been in Paraguay shortly before. Landau tried to telephone Walters, failed, let the visas issue, had the passport photographs copied, and sent the copies to CIA headquarters with a full report to Walters. On July 27 or 28 he was told that Walters had left the agency and that Director George Bush had the report. On August 4 Walters told him "he knew nothing of the matter and did not want to get involved in it." Landau revoked the visas and demanded the passports. They came back with the photographs removed. The men were Michael Townley and Armando Fernández Larios of DINA. Two men using the same names entered the country in late August on Chilean passports, and Orlando Letelier was killed on September 21.23
The New York Times reported that Landau had told the FBI that Papalardo said the request "had come directly from General Pinochet." By agreement of both sides, and at his own request, he was not asked about this in court and said only that the request came from a "high level" in Chile. He was by then ambassador in Santiago, and he was called as a witness by the defense of the Cuban Nationalist Movement members on trial, which hoped his exchange with Walters would tie Townley to the CIA.2
The Agent in Asunción
The request came a few weeks after Walters had been in Asunción. He had come in June 1976 to remove the CIA station chief, who "had deceived Landau, putting him in the embarrassing position of having denied to the Paraguayan government that a certain Paraguayan was a CIA agent, then being proved wrong," and to try "to convince the Paraguayans not to kill the unfortunate CIA agent who had been arrested." The agent, who had been tortured, was still in prison when Walters left. Landau told Walters in his cable that the visas appeared to be "the quid pro quo that Paraguay was demanding in exchange for sparing the CIA agent's life." The cable went by the State Department's "Roger Channel," reached the offices of Henry Kissinger and Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman, and at the CIA, Walters being on leave, was handled by Bush. Landau telephoned Pappalardo ten times before the passports were returned in the middle of September. The Paraguayan intelligence chief, Colonel Benito Guanes, recorded that on August 6 Landau asked him to "contact his friend Manuel Contreras" to demand them back. The CIA did not give the prosecutor Eugene Propper the cable, and "almost a year had passed since the pictures came into the possession" of the ambassador when they were first shown to a witness on July 12, 1977.4
In 1978, with Landau now ambassador in Santiago, the CIA reported that Contreras "plans to base his defense on the premise that Michael Townley and the Cuban exiles implicated were all under CIA control, and that the Agency ordered Letelier's assassination to throw blame on Pinochet and thus topple him. He also plans to implicate Ambassador Landau in this scheme." The report went on: "While this defense is of course fabricated completely of whole cloth, it could cause us embarrassment." The State Department recalled Landau for consultations on May 16, and he said at the airport that "if these men walk the streets" the reaction of his government would be severe.5
Sources
- Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, "'The First Terrorist Attack in the U.S.': The Letelier-Moffitt Assassinations," February 2014. https://adst.org/2014/02/the-first-terrorist-attack-in-the-u-s-the-letelier-moffitt-assassinations/ ↩
- O'Leary, Jeremiah. "U.S. Envoy's Testimony Puts CIA Twist in Letelier Case," The Washington Star, February 9, 1979, and Burnham, David, The New York Times, February 9, 1979, CIA Reading Room clipping. ↩
- Radio TV Reports, "Interview with Dinges and Landau," June 30, 1980, CIA Reading Room document 05535911. ↩
- Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 242-243, 297, 309-311, 383-384. ↩
- Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. New Press, 2003, pp. 343, 397, 401-405. ↩
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