American exceptionalism and Michael Townley

In any presidential election year, we grow weary of the bombast that pours forth from the candidates, Democratic and Republican alike. For sheer volume of hot air, 2016 seems excessive compared to any election year in memory. As November 8 nears, I expect several more emissions on the topic of "American exceptionalism" - the idea that the U.S. is special, different, superior, a "shining city upon a hill" whose virtues and achievements are unique in the world.

For non-exceptional American behavior, it seems hard to find worse than the actions of certain Americans in connection with the murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt on the gray rainy morning of Sept. 21, 1976, 40 years ago, in Washington, D.C. The basic facts are recounted in Judge Joyce Green's memorandum opinion in Letelier v. Republic of Chile, 502 F.Supp. 259 (D.D.C. 1980). Three people in a blue Chevrolet Chevelle rounded Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue, on D.C.'s Embassy Row. One, the driver, was an exiled Chilean diplomat, Orlando Letelier. Unbeknownst to him, taped to the frame underneath his seat was a bomb. It was made of TNT, plastic explosive, an eight-inch baking pan, and a switch purchased at a local Radio Shack. The bomb detonated at about 9:30 a.m. The explosion blew Letelier's legs off. He bled to death in the ambulance on his way to the hospital. His passenger and colleague, Ronni Moffitt, stumbled out of the wreck onto the sidewalk. A piece of shrapnel had cut her carotid artery. She bled to death too. The second passenger, Ronni Moffitt's husband, Michael Moffitt, had been sitting in the back seat. He was injured but survived. Who could be responsible for such a brazen and bloody crime?

One of our own, of course. He was American citizen Michael Townley, a native of Iowa. That day, Townley was working for the Chilean secret police, DINA, whose superiors considered Orlando Letelier a threat from abroad to the government of Chile's dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Letelier had been Chile's ambassador to the U.S. and minister of defense to Pinochet's predecessor, Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet (with the covert help of the Nixon White House) had overthrown in a military coup in 1973. After incarcerating Letelier, Pinochet's government had exiled him. Letelier had wound up in Washington, working for a think tank, the Institute of Policy Studies, and speaking and writing in opposition to the Pinochet regime. Ronni Moffitt was his colleague, who worked as a development associate. She was 25 years old. She and Michael Moffitt were newlyweds.

Operation Condor was a Chilean government operation meant to kill Letelier and other foes of Pinochet's junta. To conceal Pinochet's role in the plot, DINA employed foreigners. Chief among them was Townley, who was living in Chile in 1973. Townley hired and led five anti-Castro Cuban exiles to help him murder Letelier. He reconnoitered Letelier's home. He tailed Letelier from his home to his office. He bought the components for the bomb, and then built the bomb in a motel room. He went to Letelier's home in Bethesda one night, crept into the driveway, crawled under Letelier's car, and taped the bomb to the frame. By the time it blew up, Townley was safely back home in Chile.

In 1978, Chile agreed to extradite Townley to the U.S. (Townley also had committed at least two other murders at DINA's direction, including that of Carlos Prats, a Chilean general, in Buenos Aires.) Townley struck a deal with the U.S. attorney. The terms called for him to be an "unindicted co-conspirator," plead guilty, receive immunity from further prosecution, and testify against the Cubans at trial. The ensuing criminal trial resulted in convictions of some of the Cubans. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned the convictions, citing improper use of testimony of jailhouse snitches and the trial court's refusal to grant one of the defendants a separate trial.

Twenty years after the murders, the man who ordered them, Augusto Pinochet, died at the ripe old age of 91, while under house arrest in Chile in 2006. U.S. authorities never managed to indict him for the murders. This was despite President Ronald Reagan himself having been told in 1987 by his then-Secretary of State George Shultz in a memo that the CIA had "convincing evidence" of Pinochet's having ordered the killings.

In the end, Townley wound up serving 62 months in federal prison - just over five years. The Bureau of Prisons released him in 1982.

Today, Michael Townley is 73 years old. He lives somewhere among us, a beneficiary of the state-sponsored largesse of the Federal Witness Protection Program. By any definition, he is a terrorist no less brutal and whorish than Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, the chief bomb-maker for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Think of it - a murderer who killed two people using a bomb on the streets of our nation's capital, at liberty, free to enjoy all the privileges of a free man in America. There are men in federal prison today serving sentences far longer than Townley's whose crimes were non-violent or resulted in less harm. There are men who have been incarcerated without charges Guantanamo Bay for longer than the time that Townley served. If Townley were a member of al-Qaida, what presidential candidate would dare defend our government's decision to allow him to walk around at large?

As November nears, I will cringe when I hear Ted Cruz (echoing many others, including Mitt Romney) boast that he will "never apologize for America." To the Letelier and Moffitt families, this narcissistic jingoism could be restated this way: "As a nation, we don't apologize for helping to install a military dictator who employed one of our own citizens as a terrorist to murder your loved ones in cold blood. Also, we're not sorry for helping the terrorist to live as a free man using your taxpayer dollars after giving him immunity from prosecution for his other crimes. Finally, we're not sorry that we never indicted the man ultimately responsible for the murders, Augusto Pinochet, despite having had evidence in our hands for many years that showed his personal culpability."

Today, a small round memorial graces the spot where Michael Townley's bomb cruelly ended the lives of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt that terrible morning 40 years ago. It sits next to a ginkgo tree on the sidewalk on the outer south rim of Sheridan Circle. At the top is a bronze disk featuring the sculpted faces of the two. Inscribed into the bronze are these words: "JUSTICE - PEACE - DIGNITY." The Letelier and Moffitt families and others will gather at the spot this year, as they do every year, on September 21, to remember what happened. The Institute for Policy Studies gives an award in their name each year for achievements in human rights.

If there really is such a thing as American exceptionalism, maybe it lies in this: the stubborn efforts of some Americans to make justice, peace, and dignity real things in our lives despite the indifference and dumbness of the unaccountable men of our federal government.