Michael Townley

Michael Vernon Townley (born December 5, 1942, in Waterloo, Iowa) is an American-born former agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret police of Chile during the regime of Augusto Pinochet.

In 1957, Townley moved to Chile with his father, Vernon Townley, who became head of the Ford Motor Company in Chile.

He worked as a salesman of mutual fund stocks.

In 1967, he moved to Miami with his family and worked as a mechanic in Miami's Little Havana, where he became friends with anti-Castro exiles.

In 1970, Townley moved his family back to Chile.

Townley later testified that, before leaving the US, he contacted the CIA to offer his services in Chile, however Townley said he never worked for the CIA.

Back in Chile, Townley ran a clandestine anti-Allende radio station and worked with violent opposition groups.

Enrique Arancibia is a former DINA agent who resided in unofficial exile in Buenos Aires after the assassination of Chilean Army Chief of Staff René Schneider on October 25, 1970.

Arancibia was arrested by Argentine intelligence officers shortly after the extradition of Townley to the US and charged with espionage.

He fled Chile in the months before the 1973 coup which overthrew Allende.

Townley then returned to Chile and was recruited by the DINA.

Michael Townley was responsible for the assassination of General Carlos Prats, who served as a minister in Salvador Allende's government while Commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army.

Immediately after the 1973 coup, Prats went into exile in Argentina.

DINA chief Manuel Contreras tasked Townley with the assassination of Prats.

Townley spent three weeks in Buenos Aires monitoring Prats and planning.

As part of his plea bargain, Townley received immunity from further prosecution; he was not extradited to Argentina to stand trial for the 1974 assassination of Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires.

On September 30, 1974, Prats and his wife Sofia were killed outside their apartment in Buenos Aires by a radio-controlled car bomb.

Debris reached the ninth-floor balcony of the building across the street.

Townley was convicted in the United States of the 1976 murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. During his trial, he said that Pinochet was responsible for planning the murder.

Manuel Contreras, head of the DINA, also stated that Pinochet planned the assassination of both Prats and Letelier.

Townley served 62 months in prison for the murder.

Townley confessed that he had hired five anti-Castro Cuban exiles to booby-trap Letelier's car.

According to Jean-Guy Allard, after consultations with the leadership of the anti-Castro Cuban organization Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolutionarias Unidas (CORU), including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, those chosen to carry out the murder were Cuban-Americans José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol.

According to the Miami Herald, Luis Posada Carriles was also at this meeting, which decided on Letelier's death and also about the Cubana Flight 455 bombing.

Townley was the prosecution's chief witness at the trial for Ross and the Novo brothers.

Michael Townley also stated that Arancibia had traveled to California in the autumn of 1977 on banking business for ALFA, alias Stefano Delle Chiaie.

In 1978, Townley pleaded guilty to the 1976 murders of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, Letelier's co-worker at the Institute for Policy Studies.

He was sentenced to ten years in prison, serving 62 months.

In April 1978, Chile agreed to extradite Townley to the United States, in order to reduce the tension resulting from Orlando Letelier's murder.

However, his departure from Chile did not undergo a standard extradition process and was regarded as an expulsion.

In addition, Townley also sought protection from Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza.

He arrived in the United States on April 8, 1978.

He made an agreement with the US government on April 17, 1978, which required that he only provide information relevant to violations of US law or offenses committed in US jurisdiction.

Based on that argument, he refused to provide any information concerning DINA during the trial of the three Cuban defendants in Washington, D.C. in early 1979 concerning Letelier's assassination.

In 1983, Townley entered a plea deal which would grant him immunity from prosecution.

In 1993, Townley was also convicted in absentia by an Italian court of carrying out the 1975 Rome murder attempt on Bernardo Leighton.

Townley worked in producing chemical weapons for DINA which would be used against Pinochet regime political opponents, along with Colonel Gerardo Huber and the DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos.

He has long maintained status as a protected witness.

In March 1993, Townley was convicted and sentenced in absentia in Italy to an 18-year prison sentence, with two years remission, over his role as an intermediary between the DINA and Italian neo-fascist terrorist organizations, including Avanguardia Nazionale.

However, he was still a member of the United States witness protection; at the time of Enrique Arancibia Clavel's arrest in May 2000 for murder of Carlos Prats, it was acknowledged that Townley was left as a member of witness protection following the Orlando Letelier case.