Branch, Taylor and Propper, Eugene M. Labyrinth. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. 623 pages.

On September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier was assassinated in Washington. He had been Minister of Defense in Chile in 1973, when President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier by the Chilean people, was murdered during a CIA-supported coup. After a year in a concentration camp, Letelier was released and moved to the U.S., where he began organizing against the Chilean junta out of offices at the Institute for Policy Studies. Agents of Chile's intelligence service DINA placed a bomb in Letelier's car, which killed him and IPS co-worker Ronni Moffitt.

Some of the assassins were convicted, and some are still wanted. As of 1991, the U.S. was still seeking to extradite three suspects from Chile, including former DINA head Gen. Manuel Contreras and his chief aide Col. Pedro Espinoza. The most notorious plotter is Michael Townley, an American expatriate who was extradited from Chile in 1978 to take the heat off of junta leader Augusto Pinochet. Townley served five years of his sentence before being released into the U.S. witness protection program. Some of us coup watchers had already heard about Townley. Two years before the assassination, NACLA described him as a Peace Corp volunteer turned right-wing terrorist and CIA advisor in pre-coup Chile. Microcomputers were invented to keep track of people like him.
ISBN 0-14-006683-7

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