The Condor Years (14 page)

Altamirano also received information from French intelligence with a similar warning about Prats, adding that another Chilean exile, Orlando Letelier, was also in danger. Letelier had recently been released after a year in Pinochet’s Dawson Island concentration camp for high-ranking prisoners from the Allende government. He was in Caracas.

As days passed, Altamirano and Wolf put a plan in motion to try to rescue Prats. Wolf provided a false but perfectly crafted Chilean passport in Prats’s name. He also turned over enough money for Prats and his wife to travel comfortably and to establish themselves in another country. “He has got to stop being silly,” Wolf said.

Altamirano summoned a young Socialist Party member, Waldo Fortín, who had the documents and clean record to allow him to travel freely in Latin America. Altamirano instructed Fortín to get on a plane immediately to Caracas and Buenos Aires. “I was going to offer Prats every possible kind of support to get him to Europe, to fly him to Paris or wherever he wanted to go. I would offer him money if he needed it,” Fortin said in an interview.

At DINA headquarters in Chile, realizing that the assassins hired by Arancibia were not going to deliver, Contreras moved to plan B—Michael Townley. When Townley finally confessed to his role twenty-five years later, he said DINA operations chief Pedro Espinoza gave him the assignment, but he didn’t want to call it an “order.”

“I would use a term more like inveigled . . . hoodwinked, tricked. . . . I eventually said, well, I’ll try.”

Townley was working as a car mechanic in Santiago in June 1974 when Pedro Espinoza began the process of recruitment. Townley knew Espinoza slightly from past years in the struggle against Allende. They talked, they had drinks, Espinoza hired him to do small electronics jobs for DINA. Espinoza brought up the subject of Prats. He dangled the possibility of working full time for DINA. Townley was drawn in:

Espinoza turned Townley over to Exterior Department chief Iturriaga, who provided him with two chunks of C4 explosive, the clay-like “plastique” that was a favorite of assassins and terrorists in the 1970s. He built a remote-control bomb from a CB radio transmitter, primacord blasting caps, and what he called “a tone device buzzer thing.”

Townley flew to Buenos Aires in early September, taking his wife Mariana Inés Callejas. The bomb mechanism was hidden in a portable radio. Claiming he couldn’t locate Prats, he returned to Santiago. Iturriaga sent them back to try again, and this time he joined them. He met Townley and his wife and led them to Prats’s apartment on Malabia Street, just a block from Libertador Avenue, a major thoroughfare in the Palermo neighborhood.

Townley and his wife kept an eye on the apartment, and the following Friday evening spotted Prats driving into the parking garage under the building. Townley waited until about 9:30
P.M.
, when the building’s janitor opened the garage door and left it open for a few minutes. Townley slipped into the garage with the bomb in a satchel. He quickly realized he had made a serious mistake—he had his passport and identification papers on him. He hid them inside a pipe that served as a railing. He found Prats’s car and slid underneath. He tied the bomb to a bar supporting the transmission, almost exactly in the middle of the car. Carefully he set the switch connecting the batteries to the blasting cap. Now armed, the bomb was ready to be detonated by a radio signal from Townley’s modified CB transmitter.

By the time he finished, the door was closed and Townley had to spend most of the night hiding in the garage.

On Sunday night, September 29, Prats and his wife spent the afternoon and
evening with former Chilean ambassador to Argentina, Ramón Huidobro. Just before midnight, the couple drove home, turning off Libertador a block from the apartment building. As Prats turned left to drive the last one hundred feet to the driveway of his building, he passed a Renault parked at the corner, lights off, with a man and a woman inside.

Townley and Mariana had been waiting for hours. He saw that Prats was not alone, but he thought it was now or never. “The car turned, it came around, it slowed at the intersection and then sped on to enter the garage. All I could see was the back of the car. We’re talking near midnight. The illumination down the street I think was bad,” he testified.

Mariana had the detonator. “I’m sitting at the steering wheel, she’s sitting on the other side. It’s sitting in her lap. She picks it up and says what do I do. . . . She’s fumbling with it, she’s pushing it, whatever. It wasn’t even turned on.”

Prats’s car had turned in and stopped. The man who dared to challenge Pinochet by writing the true story of the coup got out to open the garage door just as Townley grabbed the device from his wife, quickly switched it on, and pressed the button.

Nearly two pounds of explosive incinerated the car with such force that the roof of the car was found on the roof of a nearby building. Carlos Prats González and Sofia Cuthbert de Prats were dead within seconds.

Michael and Mariana Townley returned to the Hotel Victoria, on Calle Florida, in the main business district. In the morning they caught a plane to Montevideo, and from there returned to Chile the same day. Enrique Arancibia also arrived in Santiago that day, staying at his mother’s house. A friend of the family testified she was talking to Arancibia’s mother by phone, commenting on the assassination. She heard Arancibia shout in the background,
“Así mueren los traidores”
—“This is how traitors die.”

In Caracas, Socialist Party member Waldo Fortín got up early and caught the first plane to Buenos Aires. He was carrying the false passport, the money, and the offer to help the Prats family relocate to Europe. Fortín got off the plane in Buenos Aires and heard the news. Prats had been assassinated only a few hours before. He was too late. (Fortín had stopped first in Caracas to give a similar offer of help to Orlando Letelier, who would move a few months later to work in Washington, D.C.)

News of the assassination also brought a sickening realization to a Chilean embassy official, Guillermo Osorio, who had been trying to help Prats get his
passport. The requests had been tied up for months, and now Osorio and other consular officials knew the delay was no mere bureaucratic tangle. A message from a military officer at the Chilean Foreign Ministry, received the day of the murders, settled the matter in a single cold sentence:
“Inconveniente otorgar pasaportes a personas indicadas
. . . .”—“It is inconvenient to grant passports to these persons.” In a conversation with his brother, Renato, a few days after the murder, Osorio said he knew the order had been intended to prevent Prats and his wife from leaving Argentina. When his brother asked who he thought was responsible for the murder, Osorio said, “The hand of Pinochet is very long.”

Guillermo Osório was well on his way to becoming the man who knew too much. Posted in Chile in 1976, he was the man in the Foreign Ministry in charge of acquiring false official documents for DINA, including the passports used in the plot to assassinate Orlando Letelier in Washington. In October 1977, as FBI investigators were closing in on Chile, Osorio was found dead of a gunshot wound at his home. Osorio’s brother, Renato, pleaded with the U.S. embassy to investigate the case, which he said was a murder disguised as a suicide.

The Argentine investigators gathered voluminous evidence for the conspiracy to kill Prats, linking military and police officials in Argentina and Chile and civilian terrorists from both countries. Townley claimed in his long-delayed confession that he had no contact with Argentine co-conspirators as he was carrying out his assignment, but investigators think he is concealing what he knows about those contacts. Evidence of Argentine involvement cited by investigators includes: multiple phoned death threats to Prats; withdrawal of police from the street outside Prats’s home; darkening of street lights near the Prats’s apartment in the hours prior to the assassination; the fact that Townley and his wife could park for hours waiting for Prats’s car to return without fear of detection; and the presence of other DINA agents in Buenos Aires, including Iturriaga, his deputy José Zara, and Arancibia.

Moreover, Townley talked specifically about the involvement of SIDE and Milicia in conversations with U.S. investigators, including FBI agent Robert Scherrer. A former Italian terrorist and friend of Townley said Townley told him the operation against Prats could not have been carried out without prior approval by Argentina.

Townley and Arancibia were rewarded for their work in the Prats assassination. Both were promoted from sporadic collaborators to full-time employees
of DINA. Contreras bought a sprawling house in the hills above Santiago and turned it over to Townley and his family. Townley would continue to work on electronic and radio operations, and he would be asked to carry out more assassinations.

Arancibia returned to Buenos Aires within a week and began a new career as DINA’s clandestine liaison to the increasingly active military and civilian operational groups—death squads such as the infamous Triple A—waging undercover war against leftists. On October 10, he sent his first report, consisting largely of newspaper clippings on the crisis in Argentina. He used the false name Luis Felipe Alemparte Díaz. Arancibia kept meticulous files of his correspondence with his DINA superiors in Santiago. The letters and reports were kept in boxes at his office at the Buenos Aires branch of Chile’s Banco de Estado, his cover job. His sloppy tradecraft was to preserve a bonanza for investigators.

In the correspondence, Arancibia said little openly about Prats but clearly was well plugged in. In a December 6 dispatch he notes that he has been in contact with Martín Ciga, a Triple A operative working as head of security at Buenos Aires University—one of those later indicted for involvement in the Prats murder. Then he adds: “The group that eliminated Prats is said to have a list of eight more Chileans, one of whom is [former ambassador Ramón] Huidobro.” Huidobro, a close friend who was with Prats the evening of his death, had fled Argentina after receiving death threats.

Arancibia’s boss in DINA sent instructions, always signed “Luis Gutiérrez”—a pseudonym for Iturriaga, but also used for whoever was in charge of the Exterior Department. He urged him to be careful in making contacts. “They are of maximal interest, but take appropriate caution not to awaken even the most minimum suspicion and not to compromise yourself.” Two weeks later, he instructed Arancibia to investigate a MIR pamphlet, presumably published in Argentina. And he informed his agent that DINA was expanding its operations in Argentina and sending a new officer:

Arancibia’s reports showed DINA’s early preoccupation with coordination with other intelligence agencies. “There is an idea to create an anti-Communist information community at the continental level with Uruguayan and Argentine military and they are interested in making contact with Chileans,” he wrote in his memorandum number 2.

The CIA and U.S. military intelligence in Argentina also were monitoring developments in the Prats murder and the move toward greater coordination. Defense Attaché Colonel Samuel Stapleton reported within hours that Prats’s murder was surprising because he appeared to be living in Buenos Aires “with the blessing of Pinochet,” and that he “had faithfully carried out his restrictive instructions” to refrain from public statements. The CIA report was better informed. It cited “official Argentine government circles” as attributing the assassination to “the work of Chileans.” Another CIA source had visited General Prats a few days before the assassination and gave an account of one of the phone calls warning Prats. “The caller warned Prats that a team was preparing to assassinate him, the caller adding that he opposed the assassination. According to Prats, the caller suggested that Prats hold a press conference to announce this threat. . . . The caller also suggested that Prats should carry out his planned trip to Brazil. Prats told [redacted] that he had not contemplated such a trip but that he had used alleged travel to Brazil as a pretext with Chilean consul General Alvaro Droguett to obtain a passport.”

The document suggested a motive: “Prats had nearly completed his memoirs which strongly condemned many non-Popular Unity politicians and military officers.”

The CIA also put the Prats assassination in the context of the soon to be created Operation Condor, according to the Hinchey Report: