Raúl Iturriaga Neumann

Raúl Iturriaga Neumann was an officer of DINA, the secret police of Augusto Pinochet's Chile, and by 1975 head of its foreign operations. The prosecutors of the Letelier case knew him as Eduardo Iturriaga.¹²

The 1978 Statements

Townley told the Chilean military prosecutor in 1978 that he had met "then-Major Eduardo Iturriaga" in 1974 to "coordinate the information I had on anti-Castro organizations in the US" and build "a coherent network of informants and sub-informants," and that early in 1975 Iturriaga took a telephone call in his presence and asked whether he knew Orlando Bosch, Guillermo Novo, and Dionisio Suárez. Espinoza testified that for the 1976 mission to General Vernon Walters "the name of the second man was suggested by then-Major Iturriaga, under the name Andrés Wilson." On April 10, 1978, the prosecutor ordered Iturriaga re-examined with Espinoza and Townley on the code names Quetropillán and Avispa.³

In his own statement of April 1, 1978, Iturriaga said he had met Townley "in late 1974 or, more probably, in the first months of 1975," and that their contacts increased when he took charge of the exterior department, where "I necessarily had to make contact with foreigners, among them Americans and Cubans. Of the latter, many Cubans came to the country unofficially but with the aim of making anticommunist contacts." He "especially" recalled "a group linked to the M.N.C., which presented a well-drafted, printed and illustrated pamphlet containing a kind of draft proposal for future relations between them and Chile, covering topics such as the possibility of their having a headquarters in Chile and Chile's recognition of the Cuban Government in exile. This did not materialize." The names Bosch, Novo, and Suárez "certainly sound familiar, since I believe they all came to Chile." He had met the group at a downtown hotel, "I believe I consulted Townley about the background and trustworthiness of the Cubans behind the pamphlet," and had a second meeting; the scan breaks off there. On June 1 he described Townley as a secondary informant and denied knowing the names Quetropillán and Avispa.⁴

Buenos Aires

In late July 1974 he "traveled to Buenos Aires with a bag of cash to hire assassins and to coordinate the operation with the Argentine service, SIDE." The station chief, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, paid 20,000 dollars to men who did nothing; "the Argentines didn't have the guts to kill them," Michael Townley said. Townley's own bomb killed General Carlos Prats and his wife on September 30. In 2010 the Chilean courts convicted Iturriaga, Manuel Contreras, Pedro Espinoza, and José Zara of the murders.¹⁵

Rome

In 1975 he "added a new name to Townley's hit list: Bernardo Leighton, the grandfatherly Christian Democrat who was working in Rome to forge an alliance between his party and the remnants of Allende's forces," and ordered Townley to enlist the organization of Stefano Delle Chiaie. Leighton and his wife were shot on October 6, 1975, and lived. An Italian court later convicted Iturriaga in his absence on Townley's testimony; he has said that Townley is the only accuser and that he never met the Italians.¹⁵

Washington

Iturriaga briefed Townley on the mission against Orlando Letelier in 1976 and approved his taking Virgilio Paz of the Cuban Nationalist Movement. When the Chilean police came for Townley in 1978, Iturriaga led the search party into his house. On June 15, 2026, Judge Paola Plaza sentenced him, Espinoza, and Zara to fifteen years each for the death of Ronni Moffitt. He was then 88 and serving cumulative sentences of 500 years.²⁶