‘This was not an accident. This was a bomb.’

Secret police, hired killers and a former Chilean diplomat’s brazen murder in the streets of D.C.:

The assassination of Orlando Letelier, as told by those who knew him and found his killers

Story by Karen DeYoung, David Montgomery, Missy Ryan, Ishaan Tharoor, Jia Lynn Yang

On a muggy autumn morning four decades ago, a car exploded in Washington. It had motored along Massachusetts Avenue NW, rounding the bend at Sheridan Circle, when a remote-controlled bomb taped beneath the vehicle was triggered.

A driver in a car nearby would later describe the fiery impact of the blast: “I saw an automobile actually coming down out of the air.”

The smoldering wreck lurched to a halt in front of the Romanian Embassy, its windows blown open and entire floor panel gone. A police officer who arrived on the scene remembered welling up with nausea. There was blood and debris everywhere and a human foot in the roadway. A fatally wounded man lay on the pavement; his legs were missing from above the knees.

This was Orlando Letelier, a 44-year-old former Chilean diplomat who had been driving to work at a D.C. think tank along with his colleague, Ronni Moffitt, 25, and her husband, Michael.

Letelier died within minutes. Shrapnel had pierced Ronni Moffitt’s throat, and she drowned in her own blood a half-hour later. Michael, who had been sitting in the back seat, tumbled out largely unscathed. He was beside himself in grief and shock.

“Assassins, fascists!” he exclaimed amid the carnage.

They were victims of a brazen, perhaps unprecedented plot, the target of a foreign regime that had sent agents into the United States to kill Letelier. Here was a case of state-sponsored terrorism in the heart of the American capital. Only in this instance, the state was a close Washington ally in the Cold War.

CONTINUE READING AT THE WASHINGTON POST

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SECRET CIA REPORT: Pinochet “Personally Ordered” Washington Car-Bombing

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB532-The-Letelier-Moffitt-Assassination-Papers/

George H.W. Bush, the CIA and a Case of State Terrorism

Cool Justice: RFK Jr. points to forensic evidence of second gunman in his father’s assassination

By Andy Thibault | Thursday, September 08, 2016

Photo courtesy of Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund Robert F. Kennedy flanked by union organizers Dolores Huerta, left, and Paul Schrade, right. Huerta co-founded what would become the United Farm Workers. Schrade, also a union organizer, was one of five others wounded when RFK was assassinated in 1968.

Buried on page 271 of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book on the Skakel murder case in Greenwich is a quick, but telling reference to his father’s assassination.

As part of my summer reading I highlighted the passage. I had a visceral sense it was important.

Kennedy family members rarely have spoken publicly about the assassinations of either President John Kennedy or U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, much less criticized the official findings. The passage is noteworthy for the simple fact it is memorialized in a book. It is not just a comment in an interview.

This angle deserves serious attention, and so it wasn’t shoehorned into the column published Aug. 5 on the Greenwich murder case, “COOL JUSTICE: RFK Jr. attacks prosecutors, cops, courts for willful misconduct as he asserts cousin Skakel’s innocence.” www.countytimes.com/articles/2016/08/05/opinion/doc57a4c5e193ae3223250821.txt?viewmode=fullstory

Some of Kennedy’s claims and his book investigating the murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich in 1975 have been panned by the state Judicial Department and other authors who chronicled the case. A state Supreme Court ruling on whether Skakel will face a retrial or be sent back to prison is expected this fall. A senior judge ruled in 2013 that Skakel did not receive a fair trial when he was convicted of the Moxley murder in 2002. Skakel was freed on bond after serving 11 years of a sentence of 20 years to life in jail.

That covers a lot of ground, and the next court decision will be big news. It seems to me the “footnote” on page 271 also is big news.

Following are two paragraphs from Kennedy’s book, “Framed, Why Michael Skakel Spent Over A Decade In Prison For A Murder He Didn’t Commit,” leading up to the clincher paragraph on the RFK assassination:

“I sympathize deeply with Dorthy Moxley [Martha’s mother]. I have seen up-close the agony of a mother’s grief over the loss of her child. my mother lost her husband to murder and two of her sons to violent, untimely deaths in the bosom of their youth. I was with her when my father died. I stood beside her 29 years later as my little brother Michael died in her arms.

“My mother told us that we needed to let go of our impulse for revenge and allow the cycle of violence to end with our family. This, she said, was the lesson of the New Testament, which swapped the savage eye-for-an-eye tribalism of the Old Testament for the ethical mandate that we turn the other cheek. But forgiveness wasn’t just ethics. It was salutary. Revenge and resentments, my mother said, are corrosive. Indulging them is like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die. By opposing the death penalty for Sirhan, we diluted these poisonous passions.

“And what if, God forbid, the object of our revenge turns out to be innocent? For several decades, my father’s close friend Paul Schrade, who took one of Sirhan’s bullets, has argued that Sirhan Sirhan did not fire the shot that killed my father. Recent forensic evidence supports him. How would we have felt now, if our family had demanded his execution?”

CONTINUE READING AT LITCHFIELD COUNTY TIMES

Related:

RFK Jr. Supports A New Investigation of His Father’s Murder

Sirhan Denied Parole: It’s a Broken Criminal Justice System

Book Review: Spies in the Congo by Susan Williams

Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II

Author: Susan Williams
Publisher: Public Affairs Books | 9 August, 2016

An important new book has just been published by Susan Williams, author of the 2011 work “Who Killed Hammarskjöld?” that has led to the United Nations reopening the investigation of the death of Dag Hammarskjöld. Williams’ new book is titled “Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War 11”. It reveals previously little known information about the US atomic bomb project, the Manhattan Project. The story opens with Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning of a possible Nazi program to build an atomic bomb. Einstein, writing also on behalf of other atomic scientists, alerted Roosevelt to the three potential sources of uranium ore for a bomb- small and less concentrated deposits in Canada and Czechoslovakia, and the best source for almost unbelievably concentrated uranium ore, in the Belgian Congo.

Williams describes how FDR soon established U.S. bases in West Africa, as well as air and sea routes from the U.S. to the region. Gen. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, designated obtaining the uranium from the Congo mines a top priority. Williams describes the Manhattan Project as a secret ‘state within the state’, known to a select few government officials and financed through secret accounts.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the CIA, was assigned a highly secret task of preventing smuggling of uranium from the Congo to Germany. OSS opened offices in West Africa, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese East Africa, and operated under a cover story of preventing the transfer of industrial diamonds to Germany for its war effort. Williams had access to released OSS records, which tell a previously unknown story of top priority U.S. intelligence activity in Africa during World War II.

It may not surprise students of Cold War struggles in the Congo to learn that the uranium mine in the Congo was located in the Katanga province. Katanga was the site of prolonged and violent clashes backed by the Cold War adversaries, not to mention its relevance to the murder of Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba on January 17, 1961. Control of the uranium mine is a likely cause of these events.

Williams writes of OSS personnel who are virtually unknown even to students of intelligence, and may have as yet unknown significance. An emerging story is that of Huntington Harris, who served as the head of OSS in West Africa, as well as its principal in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). In 1945 he was sent to Rome by OSS as part of a ‘special Vatican project’. James Angleton was chief of station for OSS in Italy at this time and involved in Vatican projects.

According to released OSS records available at the National Archives, in Portuguese East Africa, Huntington Harris was case officer for Werner von Alvensleben, a German who was a valued double agent for OSS, and a subject of a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the federal court in Washington D.C. Harris tried mightily to get von Alvensleben and wife admitted to live in the U.S. after the war, but was blocked by the U.S. Department of State. Von Alvensleben’s personal history included serving as an assassin for the Nazis in 1933 in the Austrian Tyrol while he was a member of the Bavarian Military Police headed by Heinrich Himmler. Von Alvensleben remained in Portuguese East Africa after World War II where at first he worked for the U.S. consulate and later established the largest big game hunting operation in Africa, Safarilandia.

Of interest to Americans in particular is that von Alvensleben journeyed to Dallas, Texas in late 1963 as the guest of D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building. Byrd was reported to be at Safarilandia on the date in November 1963 on which President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, allegedly as a result of shots fired from Byrd’s Texas School Book Depository building. Byrd, an oil producer and defense contractor, is also a subject of a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Werner von Alvensleben was widely known in big game hunting circles for his proficiency with the Mannlicher-Schoenauer rifle, described by firearms experts as the “World’s Finest Rifle”. Kennedy was said to have been assassinated by shots from a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle which used ammunition virtually identical to that fired in the Mannlicher-Schoenauer. Warren Commission member (and former High Commissioner for Germany) John McCloy, in the official investigation of Kennedy’s assassination, questioned the FBI’s firearms expert as to whether the ammunition of the two rifles could be fired interchangeably. The FBI expert said he did not know the answer as he was unfamiliar with the Mannlicher-Schoenauer rifle.

“Spies in the Congo” is a major work that significantly broadens our understanding of World War II and the Cold War in Africa, and opens up the possibility of other major breakthroughs in our knowledge and understanding of the period.

– Review by Dan Alcorn, AARC Board member

Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic mission in World War II may be ordered HERE.

U.N. Chief Presses to Unlock Mystery of Dag Hammarskjold’s Death

By ALAN COWELL SEPT. 6, 2016

LONDON — A few days from now, the anniversary of one of the most enduring international mysteries will slide by, hardly likely to be marked by those in Britain and the United States accused of withholding the secret clues to its resolution.

On the night of Sept. 17-18, 1961, an airplane carrying Dag Hammarskjold, the United Nations secretary general, crashed near the airport in Ndola in what was then called Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Mr. Hammarskjold was on a mission to end a secessionist war next door in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. All 16 people aboard the plane perished.

Judge rules FBI unlawfully refused to comply with information act requests

Court finds FBI policy is ‘at odds’ with the Foia statute in ruling in favor of plaintiffs who contend government was trying to shield itself from scrutiny

The FBI unlawfully and systematically obscured and refused to answer legitimate requests for information about how well it was complying with the Freedom of Information Act (Foia), a Washington DC court found last week.

US district judge Randolph D Moss ruled in favor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD student Ryan Shapiro, finding that the government was flouting Foia, a law intended to guarantee the public access to government records unless they fall into a protected category. Moss found that the FBI’s present policy is “fundamentally at odds with the statute”.

Shapiro has, with his attorney Jeffrey Light, provided documents obtained using Foia requests in the past.

The bureau shot down requests for information so regularly and thoroughly – sometimes saying that records were unavailable, sometimes that they didn’t exist, sometimes that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of records – that Shapiro and his co-plaintiffs asked for more information about the process by which they had been so often refused.

And those requests for clarifying information were categorically denied on the grounds that any information about the FBI’s reasons for denying previous Foia requests were by their very nature secret.

Shapiro and his fellow plaintiffs contended that the government often acts in bad faith and was trying to shield itself from scrutiny as broadly as possible. In doing so, they said, it had stretched the law to breaking point by including harmless documents in the broad categories of material it refuses to hand over or discuss.

“As the plaintiffs correctly observe, dissatisfied Foia requesters are often required to take the government at its word in Foia litigation, where the government has access to the disputed records and knowledge of how a search and response was conducted,” wrote Moss in a 63-page opinion.

There are at least three categories of records the FBI simply refuses to part with:

“Search slips,” which document the efforts of analysts to find files requested.
Case evaluations of the analysts supposedly looking for the records in question, which could detail whether an individual analyst has a history of errors or overapplication of the nine Foia exemptions.
Case processing notes, which provide further detail of individual searches.

“The FBI does nearly everything within its power to avoid compliance with the Freedom of Information Act,” Shapiro said. “This results in the outrageous state of affairs in which the leading federal law enforcement agency in the country is in routine and often flagrant violation of federal law.”

The main argument the FBI made was that the documents detail law enforcement techniques and procedures that are not generally known to the public – an established exemption from Foia. The plaintiffs provided examples of each kind of document obtained by Foia before the FBI adopted its policy of nondisclosure.

Moss agreed that even if individual documents were protected by that Foia exemption, the entire categories of document the FBI withholds were emphatically not. “[The FBI] concedes that the vast majority of [the records in question] are not protected at all,” he wrote. “It is only arguing that by withholding all search slips, even those not protected by Foia, it can amass a haystack in which to hide the search slips that are protected (emphasis his).”

“The FBI’s exercise of its statutory authority to exclude documents from Foia’s reach is not the kind of ‘technique’ or ‘procedure’” to which the necessary exemption refers, wrote Moss.

Shapiro and Light sued alongside Jeffrey Stein and nonprofit group Truthout, who were represented by Kel McClanahan of co-litigant group National Security Counselors.

There is little love lost between Shapiro and the government. Shapiro boasts the unusual distinction among graduate students of having his dissertation work challenged in court on the creative grounds that it constitutes a dangerous “mosaic” of individually legal parts that, were it released, could “significantly and irreparably damage national security”, in the words of the FBI.

It’s an argument that Shapiro finds interesting and would very much like to hear in detail, but he can’t. “We can’t even read most of the FBI’s argument to support this contention, because the FBI submitted it in the form of an ex parte, in camera declaration,” Shapiro said. “This is essentially a secret letter to the judge from the deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division.”

Shapiro may be the single most prolific Foia requester in the history of that law, so when he says the FBI is particularly difficult to work with, it’s because he has worked with many government agencies. “While Foia with some agencies can be akin to a protracted business meeting or an attempt to get telephone customer support from a telecom over a holiday weekend,” he said. “Foia with the FBI is a street fight.”

“The US attorney’s office is reviewing the ruling and has no further comment on this matter,” Justice Department spokesman Bill Miller said. Miller did not say whether the DoJ would appeal the ruling.

Justice department ‘uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests’

Lawsuit accuses DoJ of ‘failure by design’ through use of decades-old system
DoJ refuses to use new $425m software on freedom of information requests

A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner ‘fundamentally at odds with’ the Freedom of Information Act. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images

A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public.

Freedom of Information Act (Foia) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The Foia law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”.

In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”.

Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage this month.

Foia requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year.

Not only are the records indexed by ACS allegedly inadequate, Shapiro told the Guardian, but the FBI refuses to search the full text of those records as a matter of policy. When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds “sorry, we tried” without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors.

“The FBI’s assertion is akin to suggesting that a search of a limited and arbitrarily produced card catalogue at a vast library is as likely to locate book pages containing a specified search term as a full text search of database containing digitized versions of all the books in that library,” Shapiro said.

The DoJ has contended to Shapiro and others that only one of ACS’s three search functions, the Universal Name Index (Uni), is necessary to fulfill the law. The Uni search does not include the text of the files in the ACS, merely search terms entered – or not – by the FBI agent handling the case in question.

Shapiro told the Guardian that the reason the DoJ gave for refusing to use its $425m Sentinel software to process Foia requests after ACS had failed to recover records was that a Sentinel search “would be needlessly duplicative of the FBI’s default ACS UNI index-based searches and wasteful of Bureau resources”.

CONTINUE READING AT THE GUARDIAN