Product Code Database
Michael Vernon Townley (born December 5, 1942, in Waterloo, Iowa) is an American-born former agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret police of Chile during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. Summary of Investigation, January 21, 1982, gwu.edu. Accessed July 31, 2023. In 1978, Townley pleaded guilty to the 1976 murders of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, Letelier's co-worker at the Institute for Policy Studies. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, serving 62 months. As part of his plea bargain, Townley received immunity from further prosecution; he was not extradited to Argentina to stand trial for the 1974 assassination of Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires.
In 1993, Townley was also convicted in absentia by an Italian court of carrying out the 1975 Rome murder attempt on Bernardo Leighton. Townley worked in producing chemical weapons for DINA which would be used against Pinochet regime political opponents, along with Colonel Gerardo HuberManuel Salazar Salvo, Roto el pacto de silencio en la inteligencia militar , Punto Final, n°611, 24 March – 6 April 2006 and the DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos. Michael Townley fue interrogado por muerte de Frei Montalva, Radio Cooperativa, 30 March 2005 He has long maintained status as a protected witness.
In 1970, Townley moved his family back to Chile. Townley later testified that, before leaving the US, he contacted the CIA to offer his services in Chile, however Townley said he never worked for the CIA. Back in Chile, Townley ran a clandestine anti-Allende radio station and worked with violent opposition groups. He fled Chile in the months before the 1973 coup which overthrew Allende. Townley then returned to Chile and was recruited by the DINA.
DINA chief Manuel Contreras gave Townley the task of assassinating Prats. Townley spent three weeks in Buenos Aires monitoring Prats and planning. On September 30, 1974, Prats and his wife Sofia were killed outside their apartment in Buenos Aires by a radio-controlled car bomb. Debris reached the ninth-floor balcony of the building across the street.Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. p. 326, New York: The New Press, 2003.O’Shaughnessy, Hugh. Pinochet: The Politics of Torture. p. 87, New York: New York University Press, 2000. Declassified documents, 2, 3 published by the National Security Archive Contreras dice que Pinochet dio orden "personal, exclusiva y directa" de asesinar a Prats y Letelier , La Tercera, May 13, 2005, mirrored on CC.TT. website In 1983, Townley entered a plea deal which would grant him immunity from prosecution.
Michael Townley also stated that Arancibia had traveled to California in the autumn of 1977 on banking business for ALFA, alias Stefano Delle Chiaie. Declassified documents, 2, 6 published by the National Security Archive Enrique Arancibia is a former DINA agent who resided in unofficial exile in Buenos Aires after the assassination of Chilean Army Chief of Staff René Schneider on October 25, 1970. Arancibia was arrested by Argentine intelligence officers shortly after the extradition of Townley to the US and charged with espionage. Declassified documents, 2, 7 and 2,8, published by the National Security Archive
Townley confessed that he had hired five anti-Castro Cuban exiles to booby-trap Letelier's car. According to Jean-Guy Allard, after consultations with the leadership of the anti-Castro Cuban organization Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolutionarias Unidas (CORU), including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, those chosen to carry out the murder were Cuban-Americans José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol. Posada and his accomplices, active collaborators of Pinochet's fascist police , Granma, 26 March 2003 According to the Miami Herald, Luis Posada Carriles was also at this meeting, which decided on Letelier's death and also about the Cubana Flight 455 bombing. Townley was the prosecution's chief witness at the trial for Ross and the Novo brothers.
In April 1978, Chile agreed to extradition Townley to the United States, in order to reduce the tension resulting from Orlando Letelier's murder. However, his departure from Chile did not undergo a standard extradition process and was regarded as an expulsion. In addition, Townley also sought protection from Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza. He arrived in the United States on April 8, 1978. He made an agreement with the U.S. government on April 17, 1978, which required that he only provide information relevant to violations of U.S. law or offenses committed in U.S. jurisdiction. Based on that argument, he refused to provide any information concerning DINA during the trial of the three Cuban in Washington, D.C. in early 1979 concerning Letelier's assassination. Townley was then freed under an unofficial Witness Protection Program. The United States is still waiting for Pedro Espinoza Bravo, a former Chilean military and DINA operative also involved in the assassination of Letelier, to be extradited. DINA chief Manuel Contreras died in Santiago in 2015, without having been extradited.
In an interview with authorities on October 20, 1981, Townley declared that Castro opponent Virgilio Paz Romero brought with him a Colt .45 caliber automatic pistol when he visited Chile in the spring of 1976. According to Townley, Romero said that the weapon had recently been used in a "hit" by the Cuban Nationalist Movement and that his purpose in Chile was to use it again. Townley then said that Romero had broken the weapon in pieces and scattered the pieces throughout Santiago.
In 2005, DINA chief Manuel Contreras also told the Chilean judge responsible for trying the case that Townley had been supported for Letelier's assassination by CIA agents, as well as the Cuban Nationalist Movement and members of the Venezuela's National Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP), for which Luis Posada Carriles worked. General Vernon Walters, CIA deputy director from 1972 to 1976, informed Pinochet that Letelier represented a threat to the U.S. and was preparing a Chilean government in exile, according to Contreras. Contreras wrote in the document that "the Chilean President disposed in personal, exclusive and direct manner of the action of CIA agent Michael Townley against Mr. Orlando Letelier".
Contreras also stated that Chile's National Information Center (CNI) handed out monthly payments between 1978 and 1990 to the persons who had worked with Townley in Chile, all members of Patria y Libertad: Mariana Callejas (Townley's wife), Francisco Oyarzún, Gustavo Etchepare and Eugenio Berríos. Assassinated in 1992, Berríos worked with drug traffickers and DEA agents. El coronel que le pena al ejército , La Nación, September 24, 2005
In December 2016, a Chilean court ruled that both Townley and former Chilean Major General Armando Fernandez Larios could be tried in Chile for these murders.
Questioned in March 2005 by Judge Alejandro Madrid about former Chilean Christian Democrat President Eduardo Frei Montalva's death, Michael Townley acknowledged links between Colonia Dignidad, led by Paul Schäfer and DINA on one side and the Laboratorio de Guerra Bacteriológica del Ejército (Bacteriological Warfare Laboratory of the Army) on the other. It is suspected the toxin that supposedly killed Frei Montalva in a Santa Maria clinic in 1982 was created there. This new laboratory in Colonia Dignidad would have been, according to him, the continuation of the laboratory the DINA had in Via Naranja de lo Curro where he worked with DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos; despite this claim, Townley previous acknowledged that the laboratory where he based his production of toxins was located in the basement of his home. Townley would also have testified on biological experiments made upon prisoners in Colonia Dignidad with the help of the two above mentioned laboratories. However, the allegation that Montalva was a murder victim was later dismissed in Chilean court.
In 1992, Townley testified that the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria, assassinated in 1976, had been detained at his home on Via Naranja in the sector of Lo Curro.Albert Vallejo, Chile indemniza a la familia de Soria 26 años después de su asesinato, El Mundo, 24 December 2002 There he was tortured and, since he did not speak, subjected to sarin (which had been made by Berríos). Jorge Molina Sanhueza, El último secreto del crimen de Soria abre la puerta para condenar a brigadier (R) Lepe , La Nación, 21 August 2006 Soria was then detained and tortured again in the Villa Grimaldi and his case was included in Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon's indictment of Pinochet. Senado aprobó indemnización para familia de Carmelo Soria, Radio Cooperativa, 18 July 2007
In May 2016, Chile's Supreme Court asked the United States to extradite Chilean Armando Fernandez Larios, Townley and Cuban Virgilio Paz, all three of whom were linked to the September 21, 1976, car-bombing murders in Washington, D.C. In November 2002, Soria's widow, Laura Gonzalez-Vera, along with the personal representative of Soria's estate, sued Townley seeking damages for Soria's torture and killing. When Townley defaulted, the district court entered a $7 million judgment against him.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the foreign ministry of Chile should file an extradition request to the United States for Michael Townley and Armando Fernández Larios. Chile can seek extradition of agents wanted in 1976 U.S. attack, court rules. The Guardian, December 6, 2016.
In May 2016, the Supreme Court of Chile asked for the extradition of Townley, Virgilio, and Armando Fernández Larios for their alleged roles in the murder of Soria in 1976. Townley remained in the U.S. Witness Protection Program and his whereabouts were unknown. In August 2023, however, it was reported that a recent conviction which was given to six former DINA agents and two former army officers would be the "final conviction" issued by the Supreme Court of Chile for Soria's murder.
In a letter from March 14, 1976, Townley noted how he received the order to assassinate Orlando Letelier from Pedro Espinoza. When updating the letter after the assassination of Letelier was carried out on September 21, 1976, Townley noted how he recruited the team of American-based Cuban exiles after traveling to the United States after obtained phony visas in Paraguay. Townley also claimed he received assistance from a network of individual Southern Cone secret polices known as Red Condor.
On November 8, 2013, the test results were released, with head of Chile's medical legal service Patricio Bustos stating that "No relevant chemical substances have been found that could be linked to Mr. Neruda's death". "Forensic tests show no poison in remains of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda", Washington Post, November 8, 2013. However, Carroza said that he is waiting for the results of the last scientific test conducted in May 2015, which found that Neruda was infected with the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, which can be highly toxic and result in death if modified.País, Ediciones El (2015-11-06). "Chile believes it "highly likely" that poet Neruda was murdered in 1973", elpais.com. Retrieved 2015-11-06.
The Chilean government suggested in 2015 that it was "highly probable that a third party" was responsible for Neruda's death, and a forensics test taken through samples of Neruda's remains in 2017 rejected Neruda's "official cause of death," which had been listed as prostate cancer.
However, scientists who exhumed Neruda's body in 2013 had backed claims that he was suffering from prostate cancer. It was also acknowledged that Neruda's driver was the one who claimed he was poisoned.
|
|
