Cuban organizations based primarily in the neighborhood of Miami called Little Havana. With
CORU, we are back in the milieu of Miami anti-Castro CubaBush had been since very early in the 1960's. CORU was at that time working together with thens whose political godfather George
intelligence services of Chile's Pinochet, Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner, and Nicaragua's Somoza
for operations against common enemies, including Chilean left-wing emigres and Castro assets.
Soon after the foundation of CORU, bombs began to go off at the Cuban Mission to the United
Nations in New York.
During this period a Miami doctor named Orlando Bosch was arrested, allegedly because he had
been planning to assassinate Henry Kissinger, and that ostensibly because of Kissinger's
concessions to Castro. During the same period, the Chilean DINA was mounting its so-called
Operation Condor, aMilton Friedman, Chicago school economic policies. [fn 45] plan to assassinate emigre opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship and its
It was under these circumstances that the US Ambassador to Chile, George Landau, sent a cable to
the State Department with the singular request that two agents of the DINA be allowed to enter the
United States with Paraguayan passports. One of these agents is likely to have been Townley. Thecable also indicated that the two DINA agents also wanted to meet with Gen. Vernon Walters, the
outgoing Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, and so the cable also went to Langley. Here the
cable was read by Walters, and also passed into the hands of Director George Bush. Bush not only
had this cable in his hands; Bush and Walters discussed the contents of the cable and what to do
about it, including whether Walters ought to meet with the DINA agents. The cable also reached thedesk of Henry Kissinger. One of Landau's questions appears to have been whether the mission of
the DINA men had been approved in advance by Langley; his cable was accompanied by
photocopies of the Paraguayan passports. (Later on, in 1980, Bush denied that he had ever seen this
cable; he had not just been out of the loop, he claims; he had been in China. (The red Studebaker
hacks, including Bush himself in his campaign autobiography, do notabout the Letelier case; they simply omit it. [fn 46] bother denying anything
On August 4, on the basis of the conversations between Bush and Walters, the CIA sent a reply
from Walters to Landau stating that the former "was unaware of the visit and that his Agency did
not desire to have any contact with the Chileans." Landau responded by revoking the visas that hehad already granted and telling the Immigration and Naturalization Service to put the two DINA
men on their watch list to be picked up if they tried to enter the US. The two DINA men entered the
US anyway on August 22, with no apparent difficulty. The DINA men reached Washington, and it
is clear that they were hardly traveling incognito: they appear to have asked a Chilean embassy
official call the CIA to repeat their request for a meeting. According to other reports, the DINA menmet with New York Senator James Buckley, the brother of conservative columnist William Buckley (^)
of Skull and Bones. It is also said that the DINA men met with Frank Terpil, a close associate of Ed
Wilson, and no stranger to the operations of the Shackley-Clines Enterprise. According to one such
version, "Townley met with Frank Terpil one week before the Letelier murder, on the same day that
he met with Senator James Buckley and aides in New York City. The explosives sent to the UnitedStates on Chilean airlines were to replace explosives supplied by Edwin Wilson, according to a
source close to the office of Assistant US Attorney Lawrence Barcella." [fn 47] The bomb that
killed Letelier and Moffitt was of the same type that the FBI believed that Ed Wilson was selling,
with the same timer mechanism.
Bush therefore had plenty of warning that a DINA operation was about to take place in Washington,
and it was no secret that it would be wetwork. As Dinges and Landau point out, when the DINA
hitmen airrived in Washington they "alerted the CIA by having a Chilean embassy employee call
General Walters' office at the CIA's Langley headquarters. It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is
so lax in its counterespionage functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation