Michael Townley

Michael Vernon Townley is an American electronics specialist who worked from 1974 to 1978 for the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the secret police of General Augusto Pinochet. He built and detonated the bombs that killed General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires in 1974 and Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington in 1976. Chile expelled him to the United States on April 8, 1978. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the Letelier case, was sentenced to ten years, was released after about five, and has since lived in the United States under another name in the federal witness protection program.¹

Recruitment

Townley had collaborated with the paramilitary Patria y Libertad in operations against the government of Salvador Allende. By his own written account he was recruited by senior DINA officers in 1974, given a mansion in the Lo Curro district of Santiago, told to build a chemical laboratory in its basement, and put in charge of the Agrupación Avispa, the Wasp Group, a unit of DINA's Mulchén Brigade "dedicated to elimination." He used the names Juan Andres Wilson, Hans Petersen Silva, Kenneth William Enyart, and Pablo Andres Simpon Valle. His wife, Mariana Callejas, was also a DINA agent.¹²

He was born in Waterloo, Iowa, first worked in Chile in the early 1960s as an encyclopedia salesman, and lived from 1967 in Miami, where he came to know the Cuban exiles. In December 1970 he offered himself to the CIA as an agent against the Allende government. The operations directorate asked for "preliminary security approval to use Mr. Townley in an operational capacity," and on December 21, 1971, told the Office of Security that the station had cancelled its interest. In March 1973, during a raid by Patria y Libertad on a jamming station at Concepción, he gagged and bound a homeless man sheltering there, who was found dead of asphyxiation the next day. The American consul in Santiago, Frederick Purdy, later gave him a new passport in his own name. An embassy officer, Jeffrey Davidow, wrote in June 1974 that Townley was an "AMCIT with rather unsavory past with crypto-fascist Chilean groups" and suggested "keeping him at arms length."³

Prats

In June 1974 Pinochet ordered the DINA director, Colonel Manuel Contreras, to eliminate Prats, his predecessor as army commander, who was living in exile in Buenos Aires under restrictions the CIA reported he had "faithfully carried out." The DINA station chief in Argentina, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, failed to arrange it through Argentine paramilitaries, and Contreras's deputy, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, turned to Townley. "It was a patriotic request," Townley told an Argentine judge in 1999. "So, I did it." He and Callejas arrived on September 10, 1974. He followed Prats into a park and decided against shooting him because "there were too many people around." On September 29 he entered the garage of the general's building and fixed two cartridges of C4 to the chassis of his Fiat 125. Four days before the killing the Chilean foreign ministry told its consul that it would be "inconvenient" to issue the couple passports to leave for Brazil. Prats and Sofía Cuthbert returned from visiting friends just after midnight on September 30. Callejas pressed the detonator, "but it did not function," Townley said. "I took it from her, pressed it, and it worked."²

The American ambassador, David Popper, cabled that a Radio Moscow report blaming DINA "makes no sense to us."²

Rome, Mexico, Paris

DINA gave Townley 30,000 dollars for missions in Mexico and Europe, with which he bought weapons, explosives, and remote-control devices in Miami for use against exile leaders meeting in Mexico City. In Europe he recruited Italian fascists led by Stefano delle Chiaie, who in 1975 shot the Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife on a street in Rome. Both survived. A friend of the Prats daughters had warned them weeks after their parents' deaths that the regime meant to "celebrate the coup" each September. In December 1976 Townley went to Paris on an Operation Condor mission to kill two leaders of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, which failed, he wrote, because Argentine agents had leaked it.¹²

The Laboratory

Under a project codenamed ANDREA Townley manufactured sarin in his basement and planned to make soman and tabun. He recorded that it was used to kill a DINA employee who had been arrested for car theft and had talked to the police, and who was taken from custody to the Clínica Londres, a DINA medical facility, where he died "almost instantaneously," and to kill René León Zenteno, a property registrar who had refused to transfer titles illegally to DINA. Townley suggested that the body be exhumed and tested. The Spanish United Nations official Carmelo Soria was beaten to death by Mulchén Brigade agents in Townley's front yard.¹

The equipment for the laboratory, a large microwave oven and gas canisters, was bought in Miami and paid for from an account of a fictitious DINA company, Prosin Ltd., at the Southeast First National Bank. The chemist Eugenio Berríos, code name Hermes, worked with him. An FBI report states that the nerve gas "was to be utilized against Argentina and Peru in the event of hostilities," that members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement who were shown the laboratory "requested that the Cuban Nationalist Movement be furnished a supply of nerve gas to utilize in their terrorist activities," and that Townley carried a quantity to the United States on a LAN-Chile flight in a Chanel No. 5 bottle.³

Letelier

Townley wrote that Espinoza's orders were explicit: "Find Letelier's home and workplace and contact the Cuban group to eliminate him, or use SARIN gas, or orchestrate an accident, or in the end by whatever method, but the government of Chile wanted Letelier dead." He first went to Paraguay for false documents and American visas, which the United States canceled. He entered the United States on September 9, 1976, and met the leaders of the Cuban Nationalist Movement in a hotel room in New Jersey the next day: Guillermo Novo, Alvin Ross, Virgilio Paz, and José Dionisio Suárez. Novo told him the group would cooperate but insisted that Townley take part in person. Townley, Paz, and Suárez assembled the device in Washington, and at midnight on September 18 Townley taped it to the cross member under the driver's seat of Letelier's car. It was detonated by remote control at Sheridan Circle on September 21.¹⁴

The Insurance File

In March 1978, after the American and Chilean press had named him, Townley wrote a letter to "Don Manuel" under the name J. Andres Wilson. "Once the visas were canceled by the United States the operation should have been totally canceled," he wrote, "with the understanding that the CIA had knowledge of the persons involved." He doubted that Contreras had "let his Excellency know the truth about this case" and recommended a decree controlling the press. On March 14 he wrote three reports, "Confession and Accusation," "History of Activities in DINA," and an account of the Letelier killing, put an inked thumbprint on each, and gave them to Callejas. "If there has been sufficient reason to open this envelope," the first begins, "I accuse the government of Chile of my death." After his expulsion Contreras told the Chilean press that Townley was a CIA agent planted in DINA, a claim the confession anticipates and denies. Callejas gave the papers to American authorities between 1982 and 1990. The Department of Justice sent them to Chile with its request for the extradition of Contreras and Espinoza. The National Security Archive published them in 2023.¹

Trials

Novo and Ross were convicted of murder in 1979 and Novo's brother Ignacio of lying to the grand jury. The court of appeals reversed all three convictions in 1980, because the government had used the testimony of jailhouse informants, one of whom said Ross had told him he was involved in the murder "together with generals in DINA." At the retrial in May 1981 Townley, "now serving 3½ to 10 years," admitted on the stand that he had lied to a Chilean military investigator and given a false statement of innocence to El Mercurio. In 1983 the Prats daughters came to Washington to support an Argentine request for his extradition. A federal judge ruled that his plea agreement barred it. The Argentine judge María Servini deposed him in the United States in 1999. Chilean courts convicted Contreras and Espinoza of the Letelier murder in 1993 and of the Prats murders in June 2010. Arancibia Clavel was imprisoned in Argentina for almost two decades.¹²⁴⁵