The Foreign Service Journal, September 2013

30 SEPTEMBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL do every week for people on official business going back and forth, and gotten them the visas without your being any the wiser.” FSJ: So what did you do? GWL: I was in a quandary because if I said no, I knew he’d simply wait a week or two and submit them with legitimate applications. I didn’t even have their names, after all. So I decided to issue the visas myself, take photographs of the passport pictures and forward them to Washington immediately. As it turned out, the Chil- eans smelled a rat, so those fellows never went to the U.S. on the Paraguayan passports. Instead, several weeks later they went on Chilean pass- ports under different names and hired anti-Castro Cubans to place the bomb on Letelier’s car that killed him and an American passenger in September 1976. (Letelier had been Chile’s ambassador to the U.S., then was foreign minister and defense minister under President Salvador Allende before going into exile.) After my arrival in Chile, we moved to get our hands on the principal culprit, whom we were able to identify from the passport photo I’d taken in Asunción. He turned out to be an American citizen who was in plain sight in Santiago, yet the police couldn’t find him. Nothing happened until I talked directly to Pres. Pinochet. I told him, “If you want better rela- tions, you’d better consider this.” Soon thereafter, the Chileans arrested him. One Saturday morning I received a call from the Foreign Office asking me to get an aircraft ready because the suspect would be released into our custody. I contacted our legal attaché and within the hour, he had the plane ready. The Chileans drove him right to the aircraft’s door, and we bundled him on board. There were no papers exchanged or anything. He was an American, identified as Michael Townley, and the Chileans were happy to get rid of him. In the U.S. he was convicted, but then entered the witness protection program. His accomplice, Armando Fernández Larios, a Chilean Army officer, later turned himself in, but never went to jail because he cooperated with the investiga- tion into the bombing. We had proof that Townley and Fernández Larios were agents of Miguel Contreras, chief of the Chilean secret police. Ambassador George W. Landau, right, in conversation with Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist and winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, at an Americas Society reception in New York City, November 1986. Miguel Rajmil “Some non-career people have been excellent ambassadors. … But today, we have nothing but bundlers. And the trouble is that bundlers are often bunglers.” —Ambassador George W. Landau