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Assassination
on Embassy Row -out of print
(Edgar Allen Poe Award Winner)
Title:
PUBLISHING: THE LETELIER CASE
Author: Herbert Mitgang
Source: The New York Times, 18 July 1980 REVIEW OF ASSASSINATION
ON EMBASSY ROW
Working independently, two authors discovered they were investigating
the same story - the assassination in Washington of Orlando Letelier,
former Chilean Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the United States
in the Government of Salvador Allende Gossens. On September 21,
1976, a bomb was set and exploded in Mr. Letelier's car, killing
him and an American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Instead of
trying to win the race to publication, the two authors met, agreed
they were both interested in pursuing the case to its roots in Chile
and Washington, and decided to team up. The result is Assassination
on Embassy Row' by John Dinges and Saul Landau, published by Pantheon
Books. Mr. Dinges, who reported on Chile for more than five years
for Time magazine, The Washington Post and ABC radio, now works
on The Washington Post's foreign desk. Mr. Landau, who has written
documentary films, is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies
in Washington. He worked with Letelier at the Institute. The book
attempts to reconstruct the chain of events that led to the assassination,
the inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the subsequent
trial, which ended with the conviction of three Cuban exiles and
Michael V. Townley, an American agent of DINA, the Chilean secret
police, who recruited the Cubans. Mr. Townley, a witness for the
prosecution as part of a plea-bargaining arrangement, was given
a sentence of up to 10 years, but will be eligible for parole at
the end of next year. Mr. Landau says that he pusued the story in
Washington while Mr. Dinges returned to Chile for more information.
In separate interviews, the authors said that all their requests
under the Freedom of Information Act had been turned down by the
State Department, the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency on
the ground of national security. Former Secretary of State Henry
A. Kissinger declined to talk with them. Mr. Dinges maintains that
warnings from the CIA and American Embassy officials in South America
about a plot to kill Mr. Letelier had been sent to Mr. Kissinger's
office in Washington. The Augusto Pinochet Government in Chile perpetrated
a terrorist attack on United States soil', the authors say, but
the Carter Administration did not see that as sufficiently serious
to punish his regime. General Pinochet got away with murder'. André
Schiffrin, managing director of Pantheon Books, had been discussing
a book with Mr. Letelier, but it was never written. The authors
decided that Pantheon was the proper publisher for 'Assassination
on Embassy Row', and Mr. Schiffrin agreed.
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