Michael Vernon Townley (born December 5, 1942) is an American-born former agent of Chile's Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret police created by the government of Augusto Pinochet.Summary of Investigation, January 21, 1982, gwu.edu. Accessed July 31, 2023. A U.S. citizen who spent much of his youth in Chile, Townley became one of DINA's principal international operatives during the 1970s, working alongside DINA chief Manuel Contreras and operations chief Pedro Espinoza in a campaign against opponents of the Pinochet government abroad.
In 1978, Townley pleaded guilty in the United States to the 1976 car-bomb murders of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States and foreign minister under Salvador Allende, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, Letelier's colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, in Washington, D.C. He was sentenced to ten years in prison but served 62 months. As part of a plea agreement, Townley received immunity from further U.S. prosecution and became a protected government witness; he was not extradited to Argentina to face trial over the 1974 car-bomb assassination of Chilean Army commander Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires, a killing U.S. prosecutors and Townley's own later confessions identified him as having carried out.
In 1993, an Italian court convicted Townley in absentia for his role as an intermediary between DINA and Italian neo-fascist militants in the 1975 attempted assassination of Chilean politician Bernardo Leighton in Rome. Townley has also confessed to building a chemical-weapons laboratory for DINA and manufacturing the nerve agent sarin, along with DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos, for use against the regime's opponents, including a plan (ultimately not used) to kill Letelier with the gas rather than a bomb. He has remained in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program since the late 1970s, and his location has since been withheld even from civil litigants holding a multimillion-dollar judgment against him.
Contreras and other former DINA officers have long asserted that Townley acted as a CIA agent, and that responsibility for the killings lay with DINA leadership and the CIA rather than Townley individually; Townley denied any CIA employment and disavowed the claim in his own confessions, and U.S. and Chilean investigations have found no evidence of CIA involvement in the Letelier assassination.
Early life Townley was born on December 5, 1942, in Waterloo, Iowa. In 1957 he moved to Chile with his father, Vernon Townley, who ran the local operations of the Ford Motor Company there. As a teenager he was active in the youth group of Santiago's American Methodist community and attended Saint George's College, which he left owing to difficulty with Spanish. He later worked selling mutual-fund shares and married Chilean-born Mariana Callejas.
In 1967, Townley moved with his family to Miami, where he worked as a mechanic in Little Havana and became close to anti-Castro Cuban exiles. He later testified that before returning to Chile he approached the CIA to offer his services there, but maintained he never became a CIA employee; a 1978 sworn statement by Robert W. Gambino, the CIA's director of security, acknowledged that in February 1971 the agency's Directorate of Operations had sought preliminary security approval to use Townley as an operative, but stated that the agency's interest in him ended in December 1971.
Townley returned to Chile in 1970. There he ran a clandestine radio station opposing the government of Salvador Allende and assisted right-wing paramilitary groups, including the ultranationalist Patria y Libertad, for which he trained members in mobile radio broadcasting and the manufacture of Molotov cocktails. He also organized a group of arsonists responsible for a series of fires in Santiago and ran a defamation campaign against Army commander Carlos Prats, who resigned his post in August 1973 and was succeeded by Pinochet. Townley fled to the United States in the months before the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, returned to Chile afterward, and was recruited into the newly formed DINA.
Service with DINA
After the coup, Townley became a DINA operative in close contact with the agency's director, Manuel Contreras. According to Townley's own later confessions to U.S. investigators, he was formally recruited by DINA officials in 1974 and went on to lead a unit known as the Agrupación Avispa ("Wasp Group"), which operated under DINA's Mulchén Brigade and which he described as "dedicated to elimination" of the regime's opponents. DINA gave Townley a house in the upscale Lo Curro district of Santiago, where he built a chemical-warfare laboratory in the basement; he and DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos there produced the nerve agent sarin and other toxins used against political opponents and detained prisoners. He confessed to using sarin to kill two Chileans: real-estate registrar Renato León Zenteno in 1976 and Army corporal and DINA agent Manuel Leyton in 1977. The aliases Townley used as a DINA operative included Juan Andrés Wilson, Hans Petersen Silva, Kenneth William Enyart, and Pablo Andrés Simpon Valle.
Colleagues described Townley's standing within DINA in modest terms; his secretary at the time, Alejandra Damiani, later called him in court testimony "a mercenary, but a very poorly paid one," while Callejas said he liked to visit DINA headquarters "to be among comrades." Townley and Callejas's Santiago home, where she hosted literary evenings during curfew hours while he used the basement as a detention and torture site, is portrayed fictionally in Roberto Bolaño's novel By Night in Chile (2000), whose narrator recognizes a character, Jimmy Thompson, as based on Townley.
Assassinations and attempted assassinations Carlos Prats (1974)
After the 1973 coup, Prats, who had served as a minister under Allende while commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, went into exile in Buenos Aires. According to several accounts, Contreras assigned Townley the task of assassinating Prats; Contreras later claimed instead that Townley had acted as a CIA agent. Townley spent several weeks in Buenos Aires surveilling Prats before, on September 30, 1974, Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert were killed by a remote-detonated car bomb outside their apartment, with debris reaching the ninth-floor balcony of the building across the street.Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. p. 326. New York: The New Press, 2003.O'Shaughnessy, Hugh. Pinochet: The Politics of Torture. p. 87. New York: New York University Press, 2000.Declassified documents, 2, 3, National Security Archive.
Townley later gave a detailed account of the bombing to Argentine judge María Servini de Cubría, describing how Espinoza first raised the idea that Prats "could become a threat," how he was given money by Espinoza for materials and travel, and how the device—two blocks of C-4, detonating caps, and a modified CB radio receiver—was built and tested before being planted under Prats's car. As part of his 1978 U.S. plea agreement, Townley received immunity from further prosecution over the killing, and Argentine requests for his extradition were denied by U.S. courts on the grounds that his testimony had been given under the terms of the Letelier case plea deal.
Bernardo Leighton (1975)
On October 6, 1975, Christian Democrat politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife were shot outside their Rome apartment by Italian neo-fascists linked to Stefano Delle Chiaie. In March 1993, an Italian court convicted Townley in absentia and sentenced him to 18 years, minus two years' remission, for acting as an intermediary between DINA and Italian far-right groups, including Avanguardia Nazionale, in planning the attack. Townley identified Raúl Iturriaga Neumann as responsible for organizing the attempt; Iturriaga has disputed the account, arguing it is unsupported by independent evidence and noting that Townley provided it only after his own conviction.
Orlando Letelier (1976)
Townley was convicted in the United States of the September 21, 1976, car-bomb murder of Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's account of the case, Contreras ordered the killing in mid-1976 and dispatched Army officer Armando Fernández Larios to surveil Letelier in Washington while Espinoza directed Townley to carry out the attack. Townley traveled to New York on a false Chilean passport aboard a LAN-Chile flight, carrying a quantity of sarin nerve agent concealed in a Chanel No. 5 perfume atomizer, along with lead trinitrate and blasting caps; the sarin, intended as a possible alternative method of killing Letelier, was ultimately not used and was returned to Chile. Townley then recruited members of the New Jersey-based Cuban Nationalist Movement, including Virgilio Paz Romero and José Dionisio Suárez, to help build and detonate the bomb, which was attached to the underside of Letelier's car; the device was set off by remote control as the car entered Sheridan Circle on the morning of September 21, killing Letelier instantly and fatally wounding Moffitt.
In March 1978, while still in Chile and aware that U.S. investigators had identified him, Townley wrote a letter to Contreras—later published as the "Dear Don Manuel" letter—warning that concealing the affair from Pinochet risked the government's collapse and urging that "his Excellency" be told the truth of the matter. In a separate document written around the same time and addressed to be opened only in the event of his death, Townley stated that if he were killed, responsibility should be attributed to the Chilean government and to Contreras as the "intellectual author."
In April 1978, facing mounting diplomatic pressure, Chile agreed to hand Townley over to the United States. Contreras and General Odlanier Mena met with the ruling military junta, at which Contreras falsely denied any connection to Townley and claimed he had at most acted as an informant; based on those assurances, the junta approved his transfer. Townley's departure from Chile was carried out as an expulsion rather than a formal extradition. He arrived in the United States on April 8, 1978, and, under an agreement signed April 17, 1978, agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to murder Letelier in exchange for a reduced sentence and immunity from prosecution for matters outside U.S. jurisdiction; on that basis he refused to answer questions about DINA's internal operations during the 1979 trial of the Cuban defendants. Townley served as the prosecution's central witness against the American-based conspirators, José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol, several of whom he said had been selected for the operation after consultations involving Cuban exile figures Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch.Posada and his accomplices, active collaborators of Pinochet's fascist police , Granma, 26 March 2003 Townley was sentenced to ten years in prison but was released after serving 62 months, and entered the federal witness protection program.
The United States has continued to seek the extradition of Pedro Espinoza, and Contreras—later convicted in Chile for the killing—died in Santiago in 2015 without having been extradited to the United States. In December 2016, a Chilean court ruled that Townley and Fernández Larios could be tried in Chile in connection with the Letelier and Moffitt killings, and Chile's Supreme Court unanimously voted to request their extradition from the United States.
Disputed CIA involvement