Chief of Pinochet's Secret Police Worked for CIA

by Gustavo Gonzalez

The document reveals that Contreras, a retired general serving out a seven-year sentence in a Chilean prison since 1993, was a CIA informant from 1974 to 1977, and that he even received payment for his services in 1976.

Contreras served as head of the Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) secret police since its creation in 1973, directly answering to army chief Pinochet. When DINA was dissolved in 1977, Contreras was named head of the body that replaced it, the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI).

The report, drafted on a request by Congress and based on declassified CIA documents, throws new light on the September 1976 assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.

Contreras, who is in prison for planning Letelier's murder, insists that he is innocent, and says the car bomb that killed the former minister and his U.S. assistant Ronni Moffit was part of a CIA operation aimed at destabilizing the Pinochet regime while doing away with Letelier, who he claims was a double agent.

The report indicates that the CIA turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses committed by DINA, and that Contreras himself told the U.S. agency of the existence of Operation Condor, under which the de facto regimes ruling the nations of the Southern Cone of the Americas in the 1970s and 1980s carried out a coordinated crackdown on real or suspected opponents.

The attack that killed Letelier and Moffit was planned by DINA with the support of anti-Castro Cuban mercenaries, according to the investigations that led the Chilean Supreme Court to sentence Contreras to seven years in prison in 1993, and his second-in-command Brig. Gen. Pedro Espinoza to six years.

The report states that Contreras received a lump-sum payment for his services in 1976, although it does not specify how much he was paid.

The CIA claimed the payment was made in "error," and that it had already warned Contreras that it did not support his repressive activities. However, it did not demand that the money be refunded, while the head of DINA continued working with the U.S. agency.

Pinochet dissolved DINA and created the CNI in 1977, when the first accusations implicating Contreras, Espinoza (a colonel at the time) and Capt. Armando Fernandez Larios in the Letelier assassination began to surface in the United States.

In 1978, Chile's Supreme Court denied a U.S. extradition request for Contreras, Espinoza and Fernandez Larios. But the latter deserted the army in 1991 and flew to the United States under FBI protection to testify against his former superiors.

Although Espinoza's jail term ended this year, he is facing charges for other human rights violations that could put him back behind bars. Contreras, who will serve out his sentence by year's end, faces the same possibility.

The evidence gathered by the U.S. justice system since 1977 on DINA's role in the murders of Letelier and Moffit reportedly led to the rupture of the ties between the CIA and Contreras.

The former head of DINA has never budged from his claim that he had no ties with the United States, and that Letelier was assassinated by the CIA because he was a "double agent" working for the United States as well as the intelligence services of the now-defunct Soviet Union.