The deadliest foreign terrorist attack in America before September 11!
In September 1978
Washington, D.C., witnessed a bloody assassination described as one of the most violent foreign terrorist attacks on American soil before the September 11 attacks.
The assassination targeted Orlando Letelier, 44
a former Chilean ambassador to the United States.
Letelier was considered the most famous Chilean immigrant in the United States, having arrived two years earlier after fleeing his country to escape persecution under General Augusto Pinochet.
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Before seeking
asylum in the United States
- Orlando Letelier spent about a year in prison
- and Chilean authorities released him under international pressure.
- At the time, he made a prophecy-like statement to the New York Times in
which he said: "They will kill me"!
He was most likely
- referring to the National Intelligence
- Agency "Dina"
- General Pinochet's secret police.
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However
the former Chilean diplomat completely ruled out that
Chilean intelligence services would dare to attack him in the United States, even though he received explicit threats thrown in front of the door of his home in Washington, where he worked for two years at the Institute for Policy Studies.
In this regard
- his assistant, Juan Gabriel Valdez, said in a press statement that
- Orlando was ignoring the concerns of those around him and that
- he was saying: "They would never dare attack me in Washington..
If they wanted to attack me, they would wait until I was in Europe
especially in the Netherlands," which he frequented regularly.
Under dictator Pinochet
- Chile was a close ally of the United States
- and it seemed unreasonable for the general to dare to get rid of
- this figure opposed to his dictatorial regime in Washington, DC.
But as the declassified documents show
that's exactly what happened.
Pinochet personally was behind the killing of the former Chilean ambassador
and even considered killing his intelligence chief to erase traces of his crime.
The day before
- the ambassador's death, Letelier told an aide that he suspected Pinochet's
- intelligence service of involvement in recent attacks on
- Chilean immigrants in other countries
noting that
he also believed he was being monitored by Chilean secret police.
On the morning of
September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier left his home in Washington
for his workplace. He was accompanied in the car by his American secretary
Ronnie Moffett, and her husband, Michael.
A severe explosive device planted under the car exploded at 09:35. The explosion threw the car into the air before it collided with a parked Volkswagen.
When the police arrived
at the scene, they found a human foot on the side of
the road, and a man lying on the sidewalk who had lost half his legs.
Minutes later
Orlando Letelier, sitting in the front seat, died, and his secretary died after being taken to the hospital, while her husband suffered only minor head injuries.
Over the following years
the FBI was
- able to identify those responsible for this crime at its lowest levels.
- The mastermind of the violent assassination turned out to be an American
- citizen named Michael Townley, an agent of the Chilean secret police "Dina".
Townley admitted that
he hired Cuban immigrants living in the United States to plant the explosive device in the car. Many assumed that the threads of the crime led to the highest levels of power in Chile, that Pinochet was holding the threads of the conspiracy as in a puppet theater, and that he directly ordered the killing.
These suspicions remained unproven
until certainty emerged in 2015
- when the administration of US President Barack Obama declassified
- intelligence documents about the assassination and handed
- hem over to the then President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet.
Documents showed that Pinochet ordered the assassination directly
and that the United States had known about it since 1978.
Pinochet died in 2006
and was never tried for murders and other serious abuses committed
during his rule of Chile with a blood-stained iron fist