WASHINGTON, September 22 — The National Security Archive has published newly declassified FBI documents from the investigation into the 1976 car bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt, releasing the material on the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination. The bomb detonated on September 21, 1976, planted under the chassis of Letelier’s car as he and Moffitt drove to work along Massachusetts Avenue, the stretch of the capital known as Embassy Row.
Letelier had served as President Salvador Allende’s ambassador to Washington and as minister of defence before the 1973 coup, and was by then a leading international opponent of the Pinochet regime. Moffitt, twenty-five, was a fundraiser at the Institute for Policy Studies, where both worked.
Her husband, Michael Moffitt, Letelier’s research assistant, was the sole survivor.
The CHILBOM file
The documents, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests filed more than a decade ago by the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project, show that the renewed investigation, codenamed CHILBOM, was authorised by Attorney General Janet Reno on February 8, 1999. That authorisation came several months after General Augusto Pinochet was detained in London on an Interpol warrant filed by Spain under the European Anti-Terrorism Convention.
An FBI overview states the objective plainly: to determine whether sufficient admissible, credible evidence exists to establish that one or more additional persons, up to and including Pinochet, was involved in the homicides. A report dated March 27, 2000 notes that unsolved aspects remain and that the intellectual authors of the crime were still being sought, possibly reaching the highest levels of the former Chilean government led by Pinochet.
Kissinger interviewed in New York
As part of the major case investigation, FBI agents interviewed former secretary of state Henry Kissinger on May 25, 2000, in New York. According to a newly disclosed FBI summary, Kissinger recalled a private meeting with Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, just three months before the assassination, during which Pinochet brought up Orlando Letelier’s name in reference to contacts being made by Christian Democrats and opponents of the Pinochet regime with members of the US Congress. Kissinger could not recall if Pinochet became angry when speaking of Letelier.
The documents also indicate that Secretary of State George Shultz raised the issue of indicting Pinochet in 1987. Under the hood, the paper trail is as much about institutional memory as it is about the bombing itself.
Within seven days of the attack, FBI attaché in Buenos Aires Robert Scherrer developed a concrete lead from an Argentine intelligence source about Operation Condor, the collaboration between Southern Cone secret police agencies to track and eliminate opponents. That lead, and the decades of follow-up it generated, is the technical reality behind a case that has never fully closed. The Archive’s posting is edited by Peter Kornbluh.
Its related publications include Assassination on Embassy Row by John Dinges and Saul Landau; The Pinochet File by Peter Kornbluh (The New Press, updated edition September 11, 2013); Pinochet desclasificado by Peter Kornbluh (Un Dia en La Vida/Editorial Catalonia, August 2023); The Condor Years by John Dinges (The New Press, August 1, 2012); and Los años del Cóndor by John Dinges (DEBATE, June 1, 2021).
What to watch next is whether the remaining CHILBOM material — the unsolved aspects the Bureau flagged in 2000 — yields further releases, and whether the question of the intellectual authors, as ever, the detail that matters, is answered by anything still sitting in the file.
