Michael Townley
| Michael Vernon Townley | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 5, 1942 Waterloo, Iowa |
| Occupation | Assassin |
Michael Vernon Townley (born December 5, 1942 in Waterloo, Iowa) is an American professional assassin currently living under terms of the US federal witness protection program. An operative of the Chilean secret police, known as the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), Townley confessed, was convicted, and served 62 months in prison in the United States for the 1976 Washington, D.C., assassination of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States. 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 1993 Townley was also convicted, in absentia, by an Italian court for carrying out the 1975 Rome murder attempt on Bernardo Leighton. Townley worked in producing chemical weapons for Chilean dictator General Pinochet's use against political opponents along with Colonel Gerardo Huber and the DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos.
According to head of DINA Manuel Contreras, Townley returned to Chile at the end of 1973, working for the CIA, with the intent of receiving from the "Highest National Authority, in agreement with what had already been planned by the CIA ... the order to act in direct, personal and exclusive form, without intermediaries, against General Prats in Buenos Aires". Prats and his wife were killed with a car bomb in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974. Contreras also said that Townley traveled with a false passport provided by the CIA under the name of Kenneth Enyart. Contreras stated Townley was aided by CIA agents, as well as Argentine and Chilean agents, and paramilitary groups such as the Triple A and the Grupo Milicias. Contreras said he thought the CIA planned the assassination because it feared Prats would try to overthrow Pinochet's dictatorship with the help of the Argentine Army, thus leading to a war between Chile and Argentina which would constitute "a difficult problem for the United States in the Cold War era".
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