Chile’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA)
National Security Archive on agent Michael Townley case
Co-edited by Peter Kornbluh (author of The Pinochet File) and John Dinges (author of The Condor Years), this posting marks the first time the Townley confessions have been reproduced in full and published together.
“Fifty years after the creation of DINA, Townley’s papers constitute a stark reminder of the dark, sinister and repressive history of the Pinochet regime,” notes Kornbluh, who directs the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive.
According to Dinges, “This collection of Townley documents makes a major contribution to the historical record."
ACCESS to READ THE DOCUMENTS HERE
Washington D.C., November 22, 2023 - “[I]f there has been sufficient reason to open this envelope, I accuse the government of Chile of my death,” wrote Chilean intelligence agent Michael Townley in March 1978, as FBI agents pursued him for the September 1976 car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C. If Townley himself were found murdered, he wrote, his superior, General Manuel Contreras, the commander of Chile’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), should be considered the “intellectual author.” Townley also identified a team of DINA assassins—his own colleagues—as the people likely to have committed the hypothetical crime of his own killing.
Titled “Confession and Accusation,” the document is one of several detailed reports from Townley on DINA’s criminality published as a collection for the first time today by the National Security Archive—45 years after they were written. Townley drafted these dramatic admissions as a calculated and desperate effort to deter his DINA superiors from attempting to permanently silence him rather than turn him over to U.S. authorities.
Townley’s confessions record his four-year career as an American-born DINA assassin — how he was recruited by top DINA officers in 1974, given a mansion in an upper-class neighborhood of Santiago, and appointed to lead a special DINA unit “dedicated to elimination” of Pinochet regime opponents, some with chemical warfare agents that he manufactured in his home laboratory.
Another of Townley’s reports details his covert mission to assassinate former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., with support from the “Red Condor” — the Operation Condor network of Southern Cone security services. “The government of Chile wanted Letelier dead,” according to the confession.
THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.
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