H-Diplo REVIEW ESSAY 336 23 April 2021

Alan McPherson. Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-4696-5350-1 (hardcover, $34.95).

https://hdiplo.org/to/E336 Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Michael E. Neagle | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Kristina Mani, Oberlin College

On 21 September 1976, Chile’s former ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, and his American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, were killed in a car bombing ordered by Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate, the DINA. Even in the era of the military dictatorship run by Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989), the act was particularly brazen because it occurred outside of Chile, in Washington, D.C. – an act of international, state-led terrorism. For nearly two decades following the killings, U.S. investigators and prosecutors pursued the case, indicting and eventually prosecuting at least some of the perpetrators, and pressuring the Chilean government to extradite the others. It was not until the 1990s that the former director of the DINA, Gen. Juan Manuel Contreras and its Director of Operations, Gen. Pedro Espinoza, were tried and convicted in Chile for the murders. At the time, these were Chile’s only human rights violators who were brought to justice for the massive, state-led repression orchestrated during the Pinochet years.

Alan McPherson’s Ghosts of Sheridan Circle comes at a time that Chile is again much in the news after mass protests in 2019 opened the door to eliminating one of the most powerful vestiges of the Pinochet era: Chile’s 1980 constitution. The book re-explores the Letelier-Moffitt case with new interview-based evidence. It also paints a vivid picture of Chilean-U.S. relations during the Cold War, of Chile’s brutal dictatorship, and highlights some of the workings of Operation Condor, the international surveillance and assassination ring that Pinochet created via the DINA in order to eliminate leftist rivals abroad. Not least, however, Ghosts also highlights the human dimensions of an infamous crime that affected not only the families of the victims, but their colleagues, defenders, and opponents, as well as the prospects for Chile’s future as a democracy.

As the most internationally prominent and outspoken “leader of the exile resistance to Pinochet” (178), Orlando Letelier was also the man who might have posed the greatest challenge to Pinochet’s dictatorship, had he been able to unite a notoriously disparate opposition-in-exile. Although McPherson never raises the question directly, it is a subtle undercurrent of the book: what if Letelier had lived and had been able to rally a unified, democratic opposition to the dictatorship, before Pinochet burned the voter rolls and drafted a new political and economic order that has largely stood its ground even since Chile’s 1990 transition to democracy? With over 200,000 Chileans forced or fleeing into exile in the 1970s, Pinochet tasked the DINA to establish Operation Condor, one of the most outrageous international surveillance and assassination projects of the twentieth century. Condor produced the assassination plots against all three of Pinochet’s most significant political opponents: Gen. Carlos Prats, a “constitutionalist” officer who had commanded the Chilean Army during the Allende Government, was assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1974; Bernardo Leighton, a prominent Christian Democratic politician, was shot and permanently disabled in Rome in 1975; and Letelier met his death in Washington the next year. In each case, the Chilean-American operative working for the DINA, Michael Townley, coordinated the logistics of the hits. As McPherson writes, “Letelier was seen as one of the three who could organize a government in exile” (69) and he was actively engaged in persuading governments in Europe and the Americas to limit trade and resources to the military regime. Eliminating the likes of Letelier was a necessary, if not sufficient, requirement for the dictatorship to survive.

McPherson comes at his subject as a scholar of U.S.-Latin American relations rather than as a specialist on Chile. Written as a narrative history, the book draws from an extensive collection of public and private archives, declassified government documents, legal testimony, and secondary sources. What sets it apart from previous books on the Letelier-Moffitt case1 are the oral history interviews McPherson conducted between 2015 and 2017 with members of the Letelier family, and Letelier’s associates in Washington and Chile; he is also able to draw on more recently declassified U.S. government documents turned over to Chile on the fortieth anniversary of the murders, and publicly available through the independent Page | 2 National Security Archive;2 these include a CIA report from 1987 (not released until 2016) finding that there was “convincing evidence” that Pinochet had personally ordered Contreras to organize the assassination of Letelier (223). This CIA-known revelation is significant, because after DINA leaders Contreras, Espinoza, and others had been prosecuted for the crime in the 1990s, the missing link in the case remained the one connecting the DINA hit to Pinochet.

The book progresses in 18 thematic chapters, some of which center on individual protagonists and some on the larger context (e.g., the U.S. investigators, the legal proceedings in Chile). McPherson’s biographical accounts serve to bring the reader closer to his subjects. For instance, we learn that Letelier, who was a Socialist like Chile’s Marxist president Salvador Allende, was by the CIA’s own account in 1971, “a reasonable, mature democrat” (20), and a deeply determined progressive humanist. He was adept as a lawyer in the 1950s, as a development economist at the Inter-American Development Bank in the 1960s, and as a diplomat serving as the Chilean ambassador to the United States during the Allende government (1970- 1973). Similarly, we learn that Ronnie Moffitt and her husband Michael, both of whom worked with Letelier at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington D.C., were deeply dedicated to advancing economic equity, democratic political change, and human rights protection. Yet we learn all this later, as the book opens with a chilling account of the assassination, when a car bomb planted under the driver’s side in Letelier’s car was triggered by a team of right-wing Cuban exile pro-Pinochet operatives hired by the DINA. Letelier instantly lost his legs and bled out, while Moffitt, who was hit in an artery by shrapnel from the blast, died more slowly. Why the gruesome detail? Even though the assassination is duly mentioned whenever Chile’s dictatorship era human rights violations are recounted, McPherson details the facts to remind readers of the horrific nature of this crime.

Given McPherson’s expertise in U.S.-Latin American Cold War relations, a guiding theme of the book is the importance of the assassination in shaping U.S.-Chile relations during both the Carter and Reagan administrations: the issue continued to raise tensions and limit further cooperation. As a U.S. embassy official in Santiago emphasized, “it couldn’t go away…. It was too important” (214). Certainly, the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter as U.S. president cooled relations with Chile substantially, as Carter had elevated human rights to a stature unprecedented in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Pressed in 1978 to extradite the Chileans under U.S. indictment for the murder, Chile stonewalled. According to the U.S. Ambassador to Chile, George Landau, Pinochet even challenged him directly: he would rather “turn to the Soviet Union” or China than be pressured to turn over Chilean nationals to the U.S. (204). Still, Pinochet did make one notable concession: the Letelier killing was explicitly exempted from the 1978 Amnesty Law that protected security forces from prosecution for crimes committed until that year.

Moreover, the assassination revealed divides within policy-making circles on both sides. McPherson cites CIA memos from 1978 relating views held within the Junta that the Letelier case would be a “Chilean Watergate” (215). In fact, that was not the result. The Carter administration balked and issued only mild sanctions that were far short of real diplomatic pressure. Despite steadfast efforts by human rights organizations and progressive Democrats in Congress to hit Chile with tough sanctions, U.S. business and financial interests that had benefitted from Pinochet’s free-market policies were pressuring

1 Most prominent are early accounts, including Donald Freed, Death in Washington: The murder of Orlando Letelier (Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1980); John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981); and Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Labyrinth: How a stubborn prosecutor penetrated a shadowland of covert operations on three continents to find the assassins of Orlando Letelier (New York: Viking Press, 1982).

2 The National Security Archive’s full “Chile Documentation Project,” https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/chile- documentation-project.

against this, and the Defense and State departments did not want to lose leverage in Chile by reducing military or diplomatic relations. McPherson also shows that human rights concerns were clearly secondary to the other affront the Letelier-Moffitt murders reflected: a violation of U.S. sovereignty, by a professed Cold War partner. Therefore, although the U.S. wouldn’t hit Chile hard, it also wouldn’t cede any ground to it. As a result, with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, there was no reprieve but instead a growing recognition that Pinochet was “becoming an obstacle” to Chile’s eventual evolution to democracy (221). This is hard to dispute, given McPherson’s account as well as a much wider literature and documentation3 Page | 3 by human rights organizations and in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. But more than anything else, readers can conclude from McPherson’s book that the Letelier assassination “evoked U.S. policy makers’ fear of losing control over the Cold War” (224).

McPherson also recounts other important elements from the historical record. One is CIA knowledge of Operation Condor, which was an international network of South American intelligence agencies coordinated to surveille and repress their regime opponents in Latin America and abroad. Condor was the brainchild of Pinochet, and U.S. officials in the CIA and State Department knew about these “disturbing developments”4 by mid-1976; as a result, they could have signaled to their South American partners that no operations should take place on U.S. soil, which might have unraveled the Letelier plot. As it turned out, the violation of U.S. sovereignty became the leading logic for pursuing the perpetrators regardless of who held the White House, from Carter to Reagan and Bush. Moreover, CIA reports suggest that the agency had an accurate understanding of DINA’s links to terrorist groups operating in the United States at the time: a now-declassified memo to the CIA director, George H.W. Bush, just two days after the assassination, reported that “if [the] Chilean Gov[ernmen]t did order Letelier’s killing, it may have hired Cuban thugs to do it” (109). Indeed, that is exactly what had happened, as U.S. federal prosecutors would demonstrate over the next two years, leading to indictments of three Chilean and five Cuban conspirators in the murders. Yet what the CIA might have known about Operation Condor apparently was not transmitted to the investigators in the Justice Department.

Another aspect of the case that McPherson details is the role of the militant right-wing Cuban exiles who were involved in the assassination. Although Chile refused to extradite its nationals, it agreed to turn over Michael Townley, who had built the car bomb and hired a group of Cuban exiles to carry out the rest of the mission. Townley confessed and agreed to testify as a witness for the prosecution; corroborating other evidence that investigators had gathered, his testimony became a crucial piece for the federal criminal indictments of DINA generals Contreras and Espinoza, as well as the trials of the Cuban exiles. Even Latin Americanists knowledgeable about the Cold War period may be curious to recall that among the Cuban exiles involved in the Letelier plot, all were members of a militant anti-Communist organization and several had previously been charged with crimes – including a failed attempt to bomb the United Nations, and the successful bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that killed 73 people aboard. McPherson relates that several of those involved in the Letelier plot had previously been on the CIA payroll and actively involved in attacks on the Cuban regime, including at Bay of Pigs. Pinochet’s hardline anti-Communism had gained the fervent admiration of many militants in the Cuban exile community, so it was a practical move for the DINA to recruit them along with Townley for the task of killing Letelier on U.S. soil.

Ghosts also looks beyond the assassination plotting and trials, to paint a picture of Chile from the 1940s through the return of democracy in 1990. Particularly vivid is the portrait of the dictatorship, and the longing of Chilean exiles to return to their homeland. McPherson portrays this often through the lens of the Letelier family, beginning with Orlando’s imprisonment at Dawson Island following the military coup in 1973. Later, two years after Orlando’s murder, his widow,

3 See, for instance, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations, Human rights in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay: Hearings before the Subcommittees on Human Rights and International Organizations and on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 98th Cong., 1st sess., 4 and 21 October 1983; National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Human Rights, Scientists and Human Rights in Chile: Report of a Delegation (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1985).

4 See the declassified Department of State memorandum, “ARA-CIA Weekly Meeting – 30 July 1976,” available from the National Security Archive at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB125/condor04.pdf.

Isabel, returned to Chile under a selective amnesty program issued by the Pinochet regime. She was hounded by the press and its pro-regime questioning and subjected to ongoing and visible surveillance by the intelligence service (184-185). At that point in 1978, the regime was at the height of its hubris: it had already succeeded in securing majority support for a new national constitution through a plebiscite held earlier that year. This contrasts with Ms. Letelier’s later accounts from 1983, when she witnessed the growth of an emboldened protest movement and national strikes to demand political dialogue (242). Page | 4

Ghosts has been written to reach a broad audience. It is well-researched, and grounded in 59 pages of footnotes, but avoids jargon and theoretical or methodological statements. In fact, the book frequently reads like a political thriller. This has both limitations and advantages. McPherson sometimes provides a play-by-play account of unfolding events, which can result in the relatively obvious. For instance, the account of Guillermo Osorio’s death (121), may be riveting, but the significance is simply that a major potential witness had just been knocked off. The author’s more straightforward narrative, which generally moves the story forward, is the book’s larger strength. Still, direct quotations by U.S. and Chilean officials, and much of the courtroom testimony, seem indispensable for characterizing the tone of the times and change across the decades. The words of Letelier’s widow, an activist defender of human rights, are in particular not only powerful but splendidly insightful. McPherson often uses her words to capture the importance of the events and frame their significance for Chile. In doing so, his narrative history gives voice to its subjects and revives the relevance of the historical record for our times.

While decades have passed since the killing of Letelier and Moffitt, the legacies of that act remain. Chile was deprived of a significant opposition leader to the Pinochet regime. The U.S. was forced to reckon with the monsters it had unleashed in welcoming the military coup of 1973. Although U.S. officials during the Carter administration discovered the assassination plot and prosecuted its henchmen with determination, this is little solace to the thousands of Chileans who were disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship, the more than 40,000 who were illegally detained and tortured, and the more than 200,000 who were forced into exile until a constrained and “protected” democracy was instituted in 1990.

It is all the more relevant, therefore, that McPherson’s book has appeared at an unsettled time for both Chile and the United States. After years of social movement action, Chileans are preparing to draft a new, post-Pinochet national constitution. And the viability of a “benign” U.S. hegemony in the Americas is more than ever in question, as the U.S. struggles to reassert its own international integrity, while prominent centrist Latin Americans are calling for non-alignment. In such unsettled times, it is particularly useful to explore the details of past points of inflection, and perhaps learn to do better from them.

Kristina Mani is Associate Professor of Politics and Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at Oberlin College. The author of Democratization and Military Transformation in Argentina and Chile: Rethinking Rivalry (Lynne Rienner, 2011), she holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and studies Latin American regional security issues, civil- military relations, and the political economy of the military. Her articles have been published in Armed Forces and Society, Bulletin of Latin American Research, and Latin American Politics and Society. She has consulted and produced papers for organizations including Transparency International, the United Nations Development Programme, Providing for Peacekeeping, RESDAL, and the Christian Michelsen Institute.