DINA

The Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional was the secret police of the government of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Colonel Manuel Contreras directed it from 1974 to 1977, and Pedro Espinoza was its director of operations. It was the organizing service of Operation Condor.¹

Killings Abroad

General Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, were killed in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974, by a bomb built by the American-born agent Michael Townley. The National Security Archive describes it as the service's first assassination outside Chile. On October 6, 1975, the Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife were shot and gravely wounded in Rome by Italian fascists led by Stefano delle Chiaie, whom Townley had recruited. In July 1976 agents of the Mulchén Brigade beat to death Carmelo Soria, a Spanish official of the United Nations in Santiago, in the front yard of Townley's house. On September 21, 1976, Townley's bomb, placed with members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement, killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington.²

Passports

Humberto Álvarez Johannsen, sub-director of the consular directorate of the foreign ministry in 1976 and 1977, testified in March 1978 that for DINA officers "there existed a request, as far as I understand an official one, that the passport registry ledger not record any data concerning the actual holder of the passport issued," omitting photograph and identifying details, so that "the Consular Department kept no record whatsoever of the issuance of the passport to these officials," and the number given "approximated whatever was current on the day." The service kept its own office of tickets and freight, whose clerk Luis Humberto García González and his junior Sergio Molina described the mechanics of issuing false-name passports and buying tickets through the agency Exprinter. The two official passports carried to Washington in August 1976 by René Riveros and Rolando Mosqueira were, Riveros said, "handed to us ready by the passport staff at DINA"; the foreign minister, Admiral Patricio Carvajal, denounced them to the Supreme Court on March 7, 1978, as passports 527/76 and 528/76, the civil registry reported on March 10 that no persons of those names existed, and the military prosecutor Héctor Orozco ordered the international police on May 1 to establish "what system the former DINA followed, in general, to obtain documentation to travel abroad."³

The CIA

The CIA reported to Congress in 2000 that it had kept up liaison with Contreras from 1974 to 1977. By April 1975 its own reporting called him "the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy" within the junta. An interagency committee directed that the relationship continue. A proposal to put Contreras on the payroll was overruled, and one payment was made to him in 1975 all the same. He met the deputy director, General Vernon Walters, that August. The Archive's summary of the report was that "the head of Chile's feared secret police, DINA, was a paid CIA asset in 1975," and that contact went on after his agents had been to Washington to kill Letelier. It ended in November 1977.⁴

Townley pleaded guilty in Washington in August 1978 and testified against Contreras, Espinoza, Armando Fernández Larios, and five Cubans. He served 62 months and entered the witness protection program. Argentina's request for his extradition in the Prats case was not granted. Contreras was convicted in Chile in 1995 and died in a military hospital on August 7, 2015, under sentences that came to more than 500 years.²⁵