died on September 21, 1976 in the explosion of a car bomb on Sheridan Circle, in the
heart of Washington's Embassy Row district along Massachusetts Avenue.
Relatively few cases of international terrorism have taken place on the territory of the
United States, but this was certainly an exception. Bush's activities before and after this
assassination amount to one of the most bizarre episodes in the annals of secret
intelligence operations.
One of the assassins of Letelier was unquestionably one Michael Vernon Townley, a CIA
agent who had worked for David Atlee Philips in Chile. After the overthrow of Allende
and the advent of the Pinochet ditatorship, David Atlee Philips had become the director
of the CIA's western hemipshere operations. In 1975 Phillips founded AFIO, the
Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which has supported George Bush in every
campaign he has ever waged since that time. Townley, as a "former" CIA agent, had gone
to work for the DINA, the Chilean secret police, and had been assigned by the DINA as
its liaison man with a group called CORU. CORU was the acronym for Command of
United Revolutionary Organizations, a united front of four anti-Castro Cuban
organizations based primarily in the neighborhood of Miami called Little Havana. With
CORU, we are back in the milieu of Miami anti-Castro Cubans whose political godfather
George Bush had been since very early in the 1960's. CORU was at that time working
together with the 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, a plan to assassinate emigre opponents of the
Pinochet dictatorship and its Milton Friedman, Chicago school economic policies. [fn 45]
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. The cable 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
the desk 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