Michael Townley

Michael Vernon Townley is an American electronics specialist who worked from 1974 to 1978 for the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the secret police of General Augusto Pinochet. He built and detonated the bombs that killed General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires in 1974 and Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington in 1976. Chile expelled him to the United States on April 8, 1978. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the Letelier case, was sentenced to ten years, was released after about five, and has since lived in the United States under another name in the federal witness protection program.¹

Recruitment

Townley had collaborated with the paramilitary Patria y Libertad in operations against the government of Salvador Allende. By his own written account he was recruited by senior DINA officers in 1974, given a mansion in the Lo Curro district of Santiago, told to build a chemical laboratory in its basement, and put in charge of the Agrupación Avispa, the Wasp Group, a unit of DINA's Mulchén Brigade "dedicated to elimination." He used the names Juan Andres Wilson, Hans Petersen Silva, Kenneth William Enyart, and Pablo Andres Simpon Valle. His wife, Mariana Callejas, was also a DINA agent.¹²

He was born in Waterloo, Iowa, first worked in Chile in the early 1960s as an encyclopedia salesman, and lived from 1967 in Miami, where he came to know the Cuban exiles. In December 1970 he offered himself to the CIA as an agent against the Allende government. The operations directorate asked for "preliminary security approval to use Mr. Townley in an operational capacity," and on December 21, 1971, told the Office of Security that the station had cancelled its interest. In March 1973, during a raid by Patria y Libertad on a jamming station at Concepción, he gagged and bound a homeless man sheltering there, who was found dead of asphyxiation the next day. The American consul in Santiago, Frederick Purdy, later gave him a new passport in his own name. An embassy officer, Jeffrey Davidow, wrote in June 1974 that Townley was an "AMCIT with rather unsavory past with crypto-fascist Chilean groups" and suggested "keeping him at arms length."³

The 1978 Statement

In a sworn statement of March 29, 1978, in the file of the military prosecutor Héctor Orozco in Santiago, Townley gave his profession as electronics technician and expert in hydraulic mechanics and said that on joining DINA he had met "then-Major Eduardo Iturriaga": "we first tried to coordinate the information I had on anti-Castro organizations in the US, and then look at how to use this information and my contacts to expand them and build a coherent network of informants and sub-informants." In late January or early February 1975, in Iturriaga's office, "he received a phone call in connection with which he asked me if I knew Orlando Bosch, Guillermo Novo and Dionisio Suárez. I told him I only knew of Orlando Bosch by reference and that I didn't like him," because "his group had been infiltrated by the CIA, the FBI, and specifically by a certain 'Mono' Navarrete. My final recommendation was that the service not make contact with this group." He had obtained an American passport as Kenneth Enyart in October 1973 "to return safely to Chile" after the Concepción affair; the real Enyart, a memorandum of the American prosecutors recorded, "knew Michael Townley only because Enyart took his car to be repaired at the shop where Mr. Townley worked in 1973" and did not know Townley had briefly taken his driver's license. In December 1974 Townley went to the United States as Enyart "to explore the possibility of acquiring electronic countermeasure equipment"; Jack Holcomb of Audio Intelligence Devices identified his photograph to American investigators as the "Enyart" who had presented a purchase authorization "purportedly signed by Enrique Montero" and given the name of General Washington Carrasco as a reference. Callejas testified that she had seen the document in her husband's office "bearing stamps and a signature but otherwise blank," meant "for purchasing electronic equipment whose sale in the US was restricted to governments and their security departments," and had helped him fill it in. Of September 1976 he said he met Novo, "whose nom de guerre is Santiago Otero," at the restaurant La Estrella in Union City, and that the movement's directorate asked "What can you give us in Chile," wanting "a quiet place, preferably in the countryside," to train; his conversation with Felipe Rivero "was short and quite cold," his contacts with Ignacio Novo in Miami "very friendly." Contreras told the same prosecutor: "I know this individual as Andrés Wilson and only recently learned from the press that he had this other name. Wilson was a good informant of my Service and acted as an informant to one of my Officers."⁴

A CNI secretary, Alejandra Damiani, who had joined DINA on May 1, 1976, described him as "a paid DINA informant, whose duties, though secondary, consisted of listening to shortwave and longwave radio, as well as monitoring ham radio operators," and said that on visiting his house at Vía Naranja 4925 she saw only his wife, "who devoted herself to literary activities." Eugenio Berríos, who worked with him on boldine and plastics, said the nickname Hermes "was simply the jocular result of a conversation with Michael Townley, in which we spoke of him being Andrés [the name is read uncertainly in the scan], which struck me as odd, that someone would have two names, and I would then be Hermes, referring to the great god of Alchemy," and "that under these conditions we would both come to dominate the world." An army intelligence memorandum of March 1978 from Valdivia reported a salesman who said he had known "Williams Rose," the name on Townley's Paraguayan passport, in Valdivia from 1971 to 1973, when he had a yacht built at his brother's shipyard, and had seen in 1972 a passport in a name the scan renders as "Maik Tolowy"; the man thought "Chile should try to help Williams Rose, since he did a lot for Chile during the Unidad Popular, if he really is involved in that assassination."⁵

Prats

In June 1974 Pinochet ordered the DINA director, Colonel Manuel Contreras, to eliminate Prats, his predecessor as army commander, who was living in exile in Buenos Aires under restrictions the CIA reported he had "faithfully carried out." The DINA station chief in Argentina, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, failed to arrange it through Argentine paramilitaries, and Contreras's deputy, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, turned to Townley. "It was a patriotic request," Townley told an Argentine judge in 1999. "So, I did it." He and Callejas arrived on September 10, 1974. He followed Prats into a park and decided against shooting him because "there were too many people around." On September 29 he entered the garage of the general's building and fixed two cartridges of C4 to the chassis of his Fiat 125. Four days before the killing the Chilean foreign ministry told its consul that it would be "inconvenient" to issue the couple passports to leave for Brazil. Prats and Sofía Cuthbert returned from visiting friends just after midnight on September 30. Callejas pressed the detonator, "but it did not function," Townley said. "I took it from her, pressed it, and it worked."²

The American ambassador, David Popper, cabled that a Radio Moscow report blaming DINA "makes no sense to us."²

Rome, Mexico, Paris

DINA gave Townley 30,000 dollars for missions in Mexico and Europe, with which he bought weapons, explosives, and remote-control devices in Miami for use against exile leaders meeting in Mexico City. In Europe he recruited Italian fascists led by Stefano delle Chiaie, who in 1975 shot the Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife on a street in Rome. Both survived. A friend of the Prats daughters had warned them weeks after their parents' deaths that the regime meant to "celebrate the coup" each September. In December 1976 Townley went to Paris on an Operation Condor mission to kill two leaders of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, which failed, he wrote, because Argentine agents had leaked it.¹²

The Laboratory

Under a project codenamed ANDREA Townley manufactured sarin in his basement and planned to make soman and tabun. He recorded that it was used to kill a DINA employee who had been arrested for car theft and had talked to the police, and who was taken from custody to the Clínica Londres, a DINA medical facility, where he died "almost instantaneously," and to kill René León Zenteno, a property registrar who had refused to transfer titles illegally to DINA. Townley suggested that the body be exhumed and tested. The Spanish United Nations official Carmelo Soria was beaten to death by Mulchén Brigade agents in Townley's front yard.¹

The equipment for the laboratory, a large microwave oven and gas canisters, was bought in Miami and paid for from an account of a fictitious DINA company, Prosin Ltd., at the Southeast First National Bank. The chemist Eugenio Berríos, code name Hermes, worked with him. An FBI report states that the nerve gas "was to be utilized against Argentina and Peru in the event of hostilities," that members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement who were shown the laboratory "requested that the Cuban Nationalist Movement be furnished a supply of nerve gas to utilize in their terrorist activities," and that Townley carried a quantity to the United States on a LAN-Chile flight in a Chanel No. 5 bottle.³

Letelier

Townley wrote that Espinoza's orders were explicit: "Find Letelier's home and workplace and contact the Cuban group to eliminate him, or use SARIN gas, or orchestrate an accident, or in the end by whatever method, but the government of Chile wanted Letelier dead." He first went to Paraguay for false documents and American visas, which the United States canceled. He entered the United States on September 9, 1976, and met the leaders of the Cuban Nationalist Movement in a hotel room in New Jersey the next day: Guillermo Novo, Alvin Ross, Virgilio Paz, and José Dionisio Suárez. Novo told him the group would cooperate but insisted that Townley take part in person. Townley, Paz, and Suárez assembled the device in Washington, and at midnight on September 18 Townley taped it to the cross member under the driver's seat of Letelier's car. It was detonated by remote control at Sheridan Circle on September 21.¹⁶

The Insurance File

In March 1978, after the American and Chilean press had named him, Townley wrote a letter to "Don Manuel" under the name J. Andres Wilson. "Once the visas were canceled by the United States the operation should have been totally canceled," he wrote, "with the understanding that the CIA had knowledge of the persons involved." He doubted that Contreras had "let his Excellency know the truth about this case" and recommended a decree controlling the press. On March 14 he wrote three reports, "Confession and Accusation," "History of Activities in DINA," and an account of the Letelier killing, put an inked thumbprint on each, and gave them to Callejas. "If there has been sufficient reason to open this envelope," the first begins, "I accuse the government of Chile of my death." After his expulsion Contreras told the Chilean press that Townley was a CIA agent planted in DINA, a claim the confession anticipates and denies. Callejas gave the papers to American authorities between 1982 and 1990. The Department of Justice sent them to Chile with its request for the extradition of Contreras and Espinoza. The National Security Archive published them in 2023.¹

Trials

Novo and Ross were convicted of murder in 1979 and Novo's brother Ignacio of lying to the grand jury. The court of appeals reversed all three convictions in 1980, because the government had used the testimony of jailhouse informants, one of whom said Ross had told him he was involved in the murder "together with generals in DINA." At the retrial in May 1981 Townley, "now serving 3½ to 10 years," admitted on the stand that he had lied to a Chilean military investigator and given a false statement of innocence to El Mercurio. In 1983 the Prats daughters came to Washington to support an Argentine request for his extradition. A federal judge ruled that his plea agreement barred it. The Argentine judge María Servini deposed him in the United States in 1999. Chilean courts convicted Contreras and Espinoza of the Letelier murder in 1993 and of the Prats murders in June 2010. Arancibia Clavel was imprisoned in Argentina for almost two decades.¹²⁶⁷

The Telephone

During the trial persons connected with the Cuban defendants gave reporters a cassette, brought from Chile by Sergio Miranda Carrington, the lawyer for Contreras, of a call Townley had made on January 30, 1979, from the office of the prosecutor Eugene Propper to Gustavo Etchepare in Santiago, "a former member of 'Patria y Libertad'" with "connections with DINA." Interviewed by Robert Scherrer and Carter Cornick on February 6, 8, and 16, Townley denied threatening Judge Barrington Parker or asking anyone to, and denied that any agent had suggested it. He said he had made the call without authorization, by direct dialing from Propper's desk while the prosecutors were in court, and that Propper on returning "ordered him to terminate his conversation." He had made other calls to Chile from the same office with Propper's or Barcella's consent, to Etchepare for information on the extradition proceedings against Contreras, Espinoza, and Fernández, and to his Chilean lawyer Manuel Acuña about his property and the civil suit brought by Letelier's widow, reimbursing the government for the personal ones, since the marshals' safe house could not dial Chile direct. He recalled telling Etchepare that Miranda Carrington's actions on Contreras's behalf might be read in Washington as an attempt by the Chilean government to discredit him for the Cubans' benefit, and that "Contreras' free-wheeling activities had to be curtailed," since they "would severely damage the credibility and image of the Chilean Government." The defendants' appeal quoted his own account of the tape: "That was one of the things that was talked about confidentially with people from the FBI ... how many friends we all had who could ... make threatening phone calls to the judge to get him to withdraw from the case."⁸

In its brief on appeal the government gave its account of his dealings with the CIA: before leaving for Chile in late 1970 "he called the public office of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Miami," an employee came to his workplace, Townley offered to supply information, and "he heard nothing further"; in 1973, in Miami between March and September, he called again "at the request of people he had been working with in Chile who wanted CIA help in their opposition to Allende," and "no further relationship developed." The defense had argued from discovery material that he "had been given 'operational status.'"⁹