George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

evoking the visas that he had already granted and telling the Immigration and
Naturalization Service to put the two DINA men on their watch list to be picked up if
they tried to enter the US. The two DINA men entered the US anyway on August 22,
with no apparent difficulty. The DINA men reached Washington, and it is clear that they
were hardly traveling incognito: they appear to have asked a Chilean embassy official
call the CIA to repeat their request for a meeting. According to other reports, the DINA
men met with New York Senator James Buckley, the brother of conservative columnist
William Buckley of Skull and Bones. It is also said that the DINA men met with Frank
Terpil, a close associate of Ed Wilson, and no stranger to the operations of the Shackley-
Clines Enterprise. According to one such version, "Townley met with Frank Terpil one
week before the Letelier murder, on the same day that he met with Senator James
Buckley and aides in New York City. The explosives sent to the United States on Chilean
airlines were to replace explosives supplied by Edwin Wilson, according to a source close
to the office of Assistant US Attorney Lawrence Barcella." [fn 47] The bomb that killed
Letelier and Moffitt was of the same type that the FBI believed that Ed Wilson was
selling, with the same timer mechanism.
Bush therefore had plenty of warning that a DINA operation was about to take place in
Washington, and it was no secret that it would be wetwork. As Dinges and Landau point
out, when the DINA hitmen airrived in Washington they "alerted the CIA by having a
Chilean embassy employee call General Walters' office at the CIA's Langley
headquarters. It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage
functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation by a foreign
intelligence service in Washington DC, or anywhere in the United States. It is equally
implausible that Bush, Walters, Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of
international assassinations that had been attributed to DINA." [fn 48] One might say that
Bush had been an accessory before the fact.
Bush's complicity deepens when we turn to the post-assassination coverup. The
prosecutor in the Letelier-Moffitt murders was Assistant US Attorney Eugene M.
Propper. Nine days after the assassinations, Propper was trying without success to get
some cooperation from the CIA, since it was obvious enough to anyone that the Chilean
regime was the prime suspect in the killing of one of its most prominent political
opponents. The CIA had been crudely stonewalling Propper. He had even been unable to
secure the requisite security clearance to see documents in the case. Then Propper
received a telephone call from Stanley Pottinger, Assistant Attorney General in charge of
the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Pottinger said that he had been in
contact with members of the Institute for Policy Studies who had argued that the Civil
Rights Division ought to take over the Letelier case because of its clear political
implications. Propper argued that he should keep control of the case since the Protection
of Foreign Officials Act gave him jurisdiction. Pottinger agreed that Propper was right,
and that he ought to keep the case. When Pottinger offered to be of help in any possible
way, Propper asked if Pottinger could expedite cooperation with the CIA.
As Propper later recounted this conversation: