´THE CIA KILLED LETELIER´ & Ronni Moffit, too?

[Chris Brady <chris_brady@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

´THE CIA KILLED LETELIER´
Sources: THE SANTIAGO TIMES; LA TERCERA
SANTIAGO de CHILE, September 22, 2000
http://www.santiagotimes.cl/news/2000/09/22/n1.asp

A simmering feud between Gen. Manuel Contreras, leader of
Chile's feared DINA secret police during the first four years of
Gen. Augusto Pinochet's regime, and the Central Intelligence
Agency erupted Thursday with Contreras saying the CIA
killed many regime opponents and urged the military
government to bribe U.S. senators.

 "The CIA is making up documents, not declassifying them, in
an effort to discredit me for having passed on information
about their activities to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
FBI," Contreras said Thursday.

He spoke from a prison cell where he is serving a seven-year
sentence for his role in the 1976 car-bomb assassination of
Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.
Contreras' feud with the CIA was fueled by a CIA report
released earlier this week naming him as an informant for the
U.S. intelligence agency.

The document, called the Hinchey Report, responded to a
special request by the U.S. Congress joint Intelligence
Committee, tasked with reviewing CIA operations.

Contreras said he was confident the FBI "was working to find
out the truth" behind the Letelier assassination and other
homicides attributed to him by bringing pressure "on the real
assassin, the CIA." FBI agents interviewed Contreras in Chile
last April as part of their investigation into the death of
Letelier and his U.S. assistant Ronnie Moffit. At that time,
Contreras gave the FBI 64 documents that he said, "clearly
showed that the CIA was responsible" for the assassination
of Letelier and several other important opponents to the
military government led by Pinochet.

Contreras this week acknowledged that the DINA secret
police agency consulted regularly with the CIA from 1974
through 1977, "as did all other Latin American military
governments during the Cold-War era." He said he met twice
in Washington, D.C. - in 1974 and in 1975 - with Vernon
Walters, who was second in charge at the CIA then, but that
relations between the two intelligence agencies soured when
the DINA refused to permit a special CIA presence in Chile.

Contreras added that Walters recommended that Chile bribe
five U.S. senators, at a yearly cost of US$2 million, to create
an effective lobby on the military regime's behalf.

"Walters gave me the example of the Uruguayan military
regime, which used the same methods to overcome its
problems with the U.S. government within two years,"
Contreras said. He added that Walters' suggestion was
considered in Chile but never put into effect.

While Letelier family members discounted most of Contreras'
denials, they hailed the Hinchey Report for establishing a
direct link between the CIA and the DINA between 1974 and
1977.

"What is of greatest concern for us just now," said Juan
Pablo Letelier, son of the slain diplomat and now a deputy in
Chile's Congress, "has to do with the subsequent covering up
of information related to my father's death. Everything
suggests that between September 1976, when my father was
killed, and sometime in 1977, when the CIA and the DINA
severed relations, someone (in the CIA) could have had
information but did not come forward." Letelier added that the
most important information developed about his father's
homicide has come from investigations conducted by the FBI.