“Like a broken doll,” an eyewitness would recall. The orange fireball that rose from the powder-blue Chevelle sedan had torn apart Orlando Letelier’s body, severing his legs below the hips and hurling one foot, still cased in its sock, five metres from the car. The shrapnel had severed the carotid artery of his colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, slowly drowning her in her blood. The explosion was heard across the city, at the State Department’s buildings in Washington DC.
The long-forgotten 1976 bombing—the largest terrorist attack in Washington before 9/11 that was carried out by an intimate ally—echoed in the United States capital again last week. Prosecutors alleged that an Indian intelligence officer sponsored an assassination campaign targeting ‘Khalistani’ terrorists.
Even though the US and India have committed to insulating their relationship from the coming prosecution, strains will inevitably mount as criminal proceedings unfold. The lessons learned during the Letelier case provide a useful map to avoid the pitfalls ahead.
Threats and sanctions, American policymakers learned, couldn’t compel Chile’s government and courts to extradite or prosecute the intelligence officials alleged to be responsible for the assassination. The regime understood that protecting its security institutions was key to its survival. As historian Vanessa Walker notes, there are limits to a superpower’s influence—even with its clients, let alone significant powers like India.
The military in Chile also learned lessons. The Generals could reach beyond borders to silence their enemies—but doing so came with a big price tag.
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Friends and enemies
Little is similar between Cold War-era Chile and democratic India. Yet, the intelligence services of both countries found themselves trapped in similar dilemmas. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped birth General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s military regime in 1973. The US, however, also provided asylum to Pinochet’s opponents—just the way it has done for ‘Khalistan’ supporters and other anti-India secessionists.
As journalist John Dinges has written, Letelier posed a real threat to the Pinochet regime. The exiled former diplomat, with deep ties to both Democrats and Republicans, had successfully lobbied for military sanctions against his homeland. The Generals feared a Democratic victory in the looming 1976 elections would intensify this pressure.
Late in August 1976, declassified documents have revealed, the US became aware of plans to assassinate opposition figures overseas. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Harry Schlaudeman, noted in a secret memorandum the urgent need to try “to head off a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved”.
The Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, asked ambassadors in the regions to warn their host governments against proceeding with the assassination plots. For reasons that have never become clear, though, Kissinger rescinded his instructions just days before the Letelier murder.
Kissinger’s vacillation, the work of scholar Alan MacPherson suggests, was likely linked to the need to push back against the influence of the Soviet Union in South America. The US could not raise the curtain on murderous secret warfare across borders—but did not want to alienate trusted allies either.
The Pinochet regime had killed thousands of its opponents under the benign gaze of the US. It is conceivable Kissinger and the CIA thought one more would not significantly magnify the sin.
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The logic of covert action
Although popular historians sometimes attribute a venerable lineage to this kind of covert action, the organised use of clandestine killing was a product of the Second World War. Facing defeat in 1939-40, the United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill set up the Special Operations Executive (SOE)—an organisation the writer Damien Lewis has memorably described as “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”
For all the colour and courage of the SOE’s operatives, historians have been divided on its actual achievements. The eminent historian John Keegan saw the SOE as an expensive failure, which needlessly cost the lives of thousands of courageous individuals. In Poland, one study by EDR Harrison shows, the SOE never achieved its military ends and eventually abandoned its cadre to the advancing Soviet Union.
The US, though, embraced Churchill’s ideas with enthusiasm. This was in part, historian Bradley Smith writes, because spymaster William Donovan harboured the mistaken belief that the Nazis were especially adept at subversive operations. This led Donovan to underestimate the significance of conventional military power, and the sheer economic might of the US, in securing the defeat of Germany.
Following the end of the war, the US sponsored anti-communist covert action programmes not just against the Soviet Union but also in China, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. As an investigation led by Senator Frank Church would document in 1975, these operations often failed and brought opprobrium to the US.
The Church investigation led President Gerald Ford to issue an executive order in 1976, barring the US government from engaging in acts of assassination. Even though frustrated presidents repeatedly considered targeting individuals for killing, political scientists Andris Banka and Adam Quinn write that they were restrained by this norm until 9/11.
For the US’ allies in South America, this was a source of considerable frustration. Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, South America’s authoritarian Generals argued, routinely executed dissidents to protect his socialist revolution. To deter it, the same language needed to be spoken.
Leaders of the political system in the US, though, instinctively understood what Kissinger had failed to grasp. Allowing transnational assassination campaigns would undermine the norms on which the international order rested, and open the doors to unrestrained bloodletting. From 1976 on, the US embargoed military supplies to Chile, making future sales contingent on Congressional approval.
The sanctions, however, proved ineffective in securing justice. In 1978, Chile expelled Michael Townley, a US citizen employed by its intelligence services, after a secret deal limiting the legal impact of his testimony. Further convictions followed in 1979. The Chilean government, however, doggedly refused to extradite or prosecute its own intelligence officers and other high officials.
Chile’s economy proved resilient in the face of sanctions, and General Pinochet was able to retain a solid core of support among the public. The US proved reluctant to deliver on threats to cut off Chile’s access to private-sector credit, fearing pushing too hard would create anarchy and empower Left-wing extremists.
The sanctions regime, ironically, proved a blessing in disguise for Chile’s indigenous arms industry, John Bawden has written. The UK, France, and Israel, in turn, stepped in supply advanced military technologies the US was unwilling to share.
As President Ronald Reagan’s government revisited the Chile issue in 1981, it discovered it lacked tools to influence the Generals. The military would eventually push Pinochet aside—but on its own terms.
The hidden costs of killing
Frustrated by terrorism flowing from Pakistan, India’s security establishment has long considered unleashing covert action as a deterrent. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval argued in a 2012 essay for Indian intelligence to develop “proactive and interventionist operational actions”. His predecessor, MK Narayanan, bluntly told journalists: “Talk-talk is better than fight-fight, but it hasn’t worked.”
The Letelier case, though, makes clear that covert action can have hidden costs. The Generals survived sanctions, but Chile earned no real benefit from killing the diplomat. Like in Peru and Argentina, military supremacy eventually collapsed. General Manuel Contreras, accused of organising Letelier’s killing, died in 2015 while serving a prison sentence for the murder.
Eventually, the historian David Rudgers has noted, the US did succeed in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union—but not because of covert action. The cost of military competition with the US proved too high for the Soviet Union to sustain. For the most part, Rudgers argues, covert action served as “a sort of narcotic for policy-makers, carried out as an end in themselves merely because they could be”.
As scholar Daniel Byman has argued, killing might be a necessary tool in the arsenal of democracies—but has to be exercised with caution and high standards of oversight.
The long shadow cast by Letelier’s murder illuminates just how easily the relationship between allies can be derailed by misjudgement—and how hard it can be to repair the damage. Leaders in both New Delhi and Washington must proceed mindfully.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)