2023-11-23 23:21:05
“First of all, if there has been sufficient reason to open this envelope, I accuse the Government of Chile of my death” wrote Michael Townley (Waterloo, Iowa, United States, 1942) on March 13, 1978 in Santiago, Chile, before point out the names of the five senior army officers who, on behalf of the then director of the Chilean Gestapo, the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Manuel Contreras, would fulfill the mission of executing him. As he, in turn, had fulfilled, along with those who would now be his possible executioners, when he was the international assassin of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet between 1974 and 1978. Townley, 81 years old, managed to survive and after spending five years in an American prison for the murder of Orlando Letelierformer Minister of Foreign Affairs of the government of Salvador Allende, in Washington DC, in 1976, lives under the umbrella of the program United States Federal Witness Protection Agency.
The National Security Archive (NSA), a non-governmental entity within the framework of George Washington University, published on November 21, six handwritten letterss (typed by the North American Department of Justice) of Townley in which he describes the activities he carried out together with two operational groups of the Chilean Gestapo based in the house provided to him by the regime in the high society neighborhood of Lo Curro, where he and his wife, Mariana Callejasa writer and DINA agent, held meetings with right-wing intellectuals and politicians, washed down with pisco sour, whiskey and caviar, while in the basement they were tortured and investigated in a laboratory set up by the explosives expert who was Townley the future. use of sarin gasa neurotoxic, odorless and invisible substance discovered in Germany in 1938, which the DINA was studying to apply in the repression of opponents of Pinochet.
In the first of the letters (see reproduction), Townley relates how the members of the so-called Mulchén Brigade of the DINA They kidnapped the person in charge of publications at ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America-United Nations), the economist Carmelo Soria (1921-1976), grandson of the Spanish urban planner Arturo Soria (1844-1920), designer of the so-called line city in Madrid that had been member of the Communist Party of Spain before leaving for Santiago.
“Lacking anywhere else, they brought this man to my house and killed him in the front garden of my house using physical methods the night they kidnapped him and then took him in a vehicle [al que] They cleared the road from Pirán to Concholi. The kidnapping was done using uniforms of police from Chile“, writes. He omits the terrible torture to which Soria was subjected.
We had to wait many years until Carmelo Soria’s crime was finally tried in Santiago in 2019 and his six murderers were convicted, thanks to the tireless fight of Laura González-Vera, daughter of the National Literature Prize winner José Santos González-Vera, and his daughter Carmen Soria. Townley was in turn sentenced to three years in prison in the District of Columbia, in New York and an indemnification that he never paid. The Supreme Court of Chile confirmed –47 years after the events – the 2019 ruling last September 2023.
In the other letters, Townley narrates the murder of the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, where he participated to the point of place the bomb under the car, which would explode on Embassy Avenue, in the North American capital, on September 21, 1976.
There is a hole between the big crimes. It is from the former commander in chief of the Chilean army, Carlos Prats Gonzalezin Buenos Aires in 1974. Townley, was proven in the trial that took place against him in Argentina, planted the bomb under Prats’ car and when his wife, Mariana Callejas, failed to activate the remote control, it was he who was in charge of ensuring the explosion in a second try.
What can be gathered from the letters is that this operation was narrated by Townley in another letter that he gave to his father, Vernon Townley, the man who arrived with his family to Chile in 1957 to direct the multinational. Ford Motor Company. Its content has never been known.
“It’s true. “We don’t know that letter,” tells El Periódico de Catalunya, of the Prensa Ibérica group, the person responsible for the project to declassify NSA documents, Peter Kornbluh, who emphasizes “that this is the first time that Townley’s complete handwritten letters have been known.”
These letters were requested from the Biden Government, but lo and behold, Kornbluh commissioned the Chilean journalist Pascale Bonnefoy the task of finding them in Chile. They remained in the archive of the Chilean president who took office after the first Chilean elections of democracy, Patricio Alwyn. “They in no way belonged to what we could call the private archive,” explains Kornbluh.
For his part, the Chilean ambassador in Washington, Juan Gabriel Valdes, emphasizes what is pending. “Janet Reno, general counsel of the Clinton Administration, authorized an investigation into Pinochet’s role in the assassination of Orlando Letelier. I have submitted my government’s request to the Biden Administration for the 50th anniversary of the military coup, but I did not get them. That investigation took place in the spring of 2000, after Pinochet’s arrest in London and in parallel with his release. The recommendation, it seems, was prosecute Pinochet in the United States, but it did not materialize. Through Chilean judge Alfredo Etchebere and a Chilean lawyer, an FBI team interrogated 42 personas, among them army generals. This material remains unknown.”
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