Guillermo Novo

Guillermo Novo led the northern zone of the Cuban Nationalist Movement from Union City, New Jersey. He "was not a refugee from the Castro government, having left Cuba in 1952, seven years before Castro took power. Also, he had never worked for the CIA." Investigators met "a rather dapper man, given to three-piece pinstripe suits." An agent of the FBI's Newark office knew him as "an accomplished fund raiser and public speaker, a man of considerable philosophical knowledge, who would blow out a store window or dent the hull of a Russian ship, but who was not a killer."¹

The Bazooka

In December 1964 Novo fired a bazooka at the United Nations building while Che Guevara was speaking inside. The shell "had been a semidud, aimed poorly, and had plopped harmlessly into the East River."¹²

Chile

In December 1974 the movement's leader, Felipe Rivero, sent Novo and Jose Dionisio Suarez to Chile "to pay homage to Pinochet." They entered the country with Orlando Bosch. When Michael Townley of DINA and his wife, Mariana Callejas, first came to a Union City motel, Novo, Suarez, and Armando Santana "drew guns and ordered the couple to sit down," searched the luggage, and found an American passport in the name Kenneth Enyart and a Chilean identity card in the name Andres Wilson. "Finally, Novo put away his pistol and extended his hand to Townley." The movement lent Townley Virgilio Paz for a DINA mission to Mexico and Europe. A communique in the name of "Zero," a label used by Novo, his brother Ignacio, and Suarez, claimed the shooting of Bernardo Leighton in Rome in October 1975. The FBI credited it "because it provided details of the attack that only the assassins could know."²

A card of the Chilean CNI records that Novo entered Chile on December 3, 1974, "together with Orlando Bosch Ávila," on American passport E-2.380.607, from Venezuela. Townley told the Chilean prosecutor in 1978 that Novo's nom de guerre was Santiago Otero, that they met at the restaurant La Estrella in Union City in September 1976, and that the movement's directorate asked him for "a quiet place, preferably in the countryside," in Chile where its people could train. A Chilean admiral recalled a letter signed by Novo to the consul in New York declining to attend the visit of the training ship Esmeralda in July 1976 because Chile had handed Rolando Otero to the Americans.³

Letelier

On September 10, 1976, at Union City, Townley "outlined my DINA mission to assassinate Letelier and requested the assistance of the Cuban Nationalist Movement." Novo demanded a full explanation and argued that "DINA should have killed Otero rather than turn him over to the FBI," a reference to the surrender of Rolando Otero to Robert Scherrer. After a meeting at the Chateau Renaissance Motel he sent formal word that the movement would help. He introduced Townley to Alvin Ross, once a blackjack dealer at the Tropicana in Havana. On September 15 "Novo handed Townley a paper bag" holding detonating cord, C-4, and TNT. Paz and Suarez went with Townley to Washington, where Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were killed on September 21.²

Asked by the prosecutor Eugene Propper and the agent Carter Cornick where he had been the night before the bombing, Novo said: "That is my trump card. That is the ace up my sleeve." The informant Ricardo Morales, then an officer of the Venezuelan DISIP, had planted a story that Bosch was telling associates the "Novo brothers" had killed Letelier. "Bosch is a liar and a traitor to freedom," Novo said.¹

An undated memorandum to Contreras from Washington, written after the second Carter-Ford debate of October 1976 and enclosing photocopies of Letelier's diary then in the hands of the Washington Star reporter Jeremiah O'Leary, reported: "Some friends from over there tell me again that the FBI reached the conclusion that the perpetrators of the attack on Letelier were 4 members of Brigade 2506, whose names are as follows: Roberto Carvallo, Carlos Pascual, Vicente Vásquez, and Guillermo Novo. They would have been deceived and paid by a Castro agent."⁴

Trials

Indicted on August 1, 1978, Novo was tried with Alvin Ross and his brother Ignacio Novo from January 8, 1979. Michael Townley, who had pleaded, testified that DINA "ordered him to secure assistance from the CNM" so as to isolate itself, and that Novo had insisted Townley take part personally. A jailhouse informant, Antonio Polytarides, testified to Novo's admissions. The defense argued that Townley "was in fact an agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency which had planned the assassination of Letelier." On February 14, 1979, the jury convicted all three. On March 23 Judge Barrington Parker sentenced Novo and Ross to concurrent life terms for conspiracy, for killing a foreign official, for the murder of Letelier under District of Columbia law, and for destroying a vehicle in interstate commerce, and a consecutive life term for the murder of Moffitt under District law; the judgment on the third count was vacated on March 27. Novo received five years, concurrent, on each count of false declarations; Ignacio received eight years. Polytarides's evidence was one sentence Novo spoke to him in mid-December 1978, when Polytarides was reporting to a customs agent on gun purchases: "I have been betrayed by some persons in my case, but we will pay them back." On September 15, 1980, the court of appeals reversed under United States v. Henry, decided that June, which barred testimony from informants cultivated by the government among pretrial detainees; Ignacio's conviction fell for want of a separate trial. The government's petition for rehearing was denied on December 9, 1980. Novo, held at Leavenworth, and Ross, at Marion, were moved to Washington for the retrial; Parker refused on December 23, 1980, to hand the case to another judge and let their bail applications lie for weeks. At the retrial of May 1981 the jury acquitted Novo and Ross of the murders and convicted Novo of the false declarations. On June 26, 1981, his lawyer asked that another judge sentence him, since Parker "sentenced this defendant to two life sentences in the first case"; Parker refused and gave him 54 months with credit for the three years served, recommending a minimum-security prison near New York. In October 1981 he was released from federal prison by mistake, officials having confused him with his brother. An FBI informant had reported in January 1978 that he was organizing CORU cells in Union City "for military action in the U.S. and against the country of Venezuela."⁵⁶

The CIA Defense

Defense counsel told the jury in opening that "the CIA and not the Chilean government masterminded the Letelier assassination." Parker ruled: "I'm not going to let you put the CIA on trial in this case," and barred cross-examination of government witnesses on the subject, so that the prosecutor could ask Senator George McGovern what Letelier had said to him about the agency ("Nothing that I can recall") while the defense could not follow. The appeal brief rested the theory on "Townley's admissions that he had had several contacts with the CIA," on discovery material showing he "had been interviewed by the CIA and had been given 'operational status,'" on the absence from the agency's folder on Townley of any indication that he had worked for DINA, and on "a CIA front organization" in Florida said to have "attempted to establish an alibi for Townley on the day of the Letelier assassination." The organization was Audio Intelligence Devices of John Holcomb in Fort Lauderdale, where Townley, by his own testimony, spent several hours on the morning of September 21, "signing in and out as was required," while the bomb went off in Washington. The government answered that Townley had twice telephoned the agency's public office in Miami, in 1970 and 1973, and "never did any work whatsoever for the CIA"; that its director of security, Robert Gambino, had testified he did not know whether there were agents in Chile in the early 1970s; and that Audio Intelligence Devices "has never been a 'front,' proprietary, or any other type of sub-organization owing allegiance to the CIA," while quoting a study of freelance operators to the effect that Holcomb "won't talk about any connections he may have to the CIA, but creates the impression that the ties are there, and binding." Newspaper clippings the defense filed to show prejudicial publicity reported that Propper, Assistant Attorney General Stanley Pottinger, and the director of central intelligence, George Bush, had met to decide how far the agency could help, under "a carefully worded agreement placing the Letelier case in a 'national security' status."⁷⁸