While thousands of people languish in the ICE gulag under abhorrent conditions and are kidnapped off American streets and subject to deportation, a CIA-linked foreign terrorist is being given preferential treatment in a stark reflection of the double standard and corruption of the U.S. criminal justice system.
On July 16, The New York Times spotlighted the case of Armando Fernandez Larios, a former Chilean intelligence agent who plotted a car bombing in Washington, D.C., in September 1976 that killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, a staff member of the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank for which Letelier also worked.
Written by Julian E. Barnes,[1] the Times piece noted that, in 1987, Mr. Fernandez, now 76, returned to the U.S. and confessed to his role in the terrorist car bombing attack that was carried out near Sheridan Circle in Washington near Embassy Row.[2]
After pleading guilty to being an “accessory after the fact,” he was sentenced in May 1987 to between 27 and 84 months in prison by Judge Barrington Parker, though he was released after spending only five months in prison.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other senior State Department officials wrote letters to the judge praising Fernandez’s character and lobbying for his release, and the Justice Department intervened to protect him.[3]
After U.S. officials secured his release from prison, the Times piece noted that Mr. Fernandez went to live in Florida where he has been ever since.
However, last October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents took Mr. Fernandez to a detention center in Miami and the Department of Homeland Security listed him as “among the worst of the worst,” noting that his crime was homicide.[4]
Mr. Fernandez subsequently filed a lawsuit arguing that the U.S. was violating its original agreement with him and that the court should order the Trump administration to uphold it.
Though the Trump administration never responded to the substance of Mr. Fernandez’s legal filing, it released Mr. Fernandez from ICE custody in March, according to a court record obtained by the National Security Archive.
Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at the National Security Archive, told The New York Times that Mr. Fernandez’s ICE detention lasted around four months, which was “almost as long as he had served for an act of terrorism on the streets of Washington that cost the lives of two beautiful people.”
One of those beautiful people, Orlando Letelier, was the target in the car bombing attack because of his critique of neo-liberal economic policies and association with the Socialist regime of Salvador Allende, who was ousted in Chile’s 1973 CIA-backed fascist coup.
A lawyer and economist, Letelier started his career working in Chile’s Department of Copper when he developed his support for Allende’s nationalization policy—which threatened the Anaconda and Kennecott companies, that controlled 80% of the Chilean copper industry.
Allende was willing to pay compensation, though Anaconda and Kennecott wanted millions more than what the Chilean government believed was just.
Even before Allende’s inauguration following his victory in Chile’s democratic 1970 election, President Richard Nixon ordered a massive covert intervention in Chile code-named FUBELT, whose end goal was regime change.
In collaboration with Chile’s upper-middle and upper classes, the CIA was committed to sabotaging Chile’s economy by fomenting strikes and “creating a coup climate by propaganda, disinformation and terrorist activities to provide a stimulus and pretext for the military to move.”
When the coup was carried out on September 11, 1973, Allende was murdered. The Chilean military subsequently carried out hundreds of executions extending internationally.
Barnes’s New York Times article emphasizes that Mr. Fernandez was among those who joined secret missions for Chile’s fascist leader Augusto Pinochet after the 1973 coup by which he traveled by helicopter into small towns in Chile seizing municipal officials—mayors, council members, police chiefs, and others—who had supported Allende.
According to the National Security Archive, approximately 72 individuals were summarily executed as part of these missions; many of them then disappeared.
Multiple witnesses identified Fernandez Larios as one of the most ruthless members of the military death squads that operated as part of the CIA-backed Operation Condor.
Fernandez plotted the Letelier-Moffitt car bombing with Michael V. Townley, a CIA agent who worked as part of a network run by Theodore Shackley, the head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division in the early 1970s, who coordinated the murderous Phoenix Program in Vietnam as CIA Saigon Station Chief from 1968 to 1972.[5]
Orders for Letelier’s assassination were allegedly given by General Pinochet through the DINA [Chilean intelligence agency] deputy director, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, who instructed Townley that he and Fernandez were to travel to Paraguay to obtain false passports and U.S. visas and then on to Washington, D.C.
When he arrived in Washington, Fernandez conducted advance surveillance on Letelier’s movements and then rendezvoused with Townley in a men’s bathroom at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on September 9, 1976, to provide him with a surveillance map, notes on Letelier’s home and office addresses, as well as cash for the operation.
Townley subsequently recruited members of the violent anti-Castro Cuban exile group, the Cuban National Movement, to assist him in building, placing and detonating the car bomb that killed Letelier and Moffitt in broad daylight.
In a “Factual Proffer” provided to U.S. officials in early February 1987, Fernandez claimed he had been excluded from all discussions on eliminating Letelier, though conceded that he “understood that the true purpose might be other than the limited surveillance mission described to him, [and] that the outcome to the object of the mission, Orlando Letelier, might very well be harm or even death.”
A polygraph test administered to Fernandez in Brazil, as U.S. officials sought to determine his credibility, showed “consistent signs of deception in [his] disclaimers that he did not know the true intention of his DINA mission.” Fernandez “now acknowledges that his surveillance contributed to the death of Letelier and Moffitt,” according to a secret summary of his polygraph results.[6]
According to Almudena Bernabeu, the chief executive of Guernica 37, a non-profit organization dedicated to human rights and international criminal law, Fernandez was part of the infamous “Caravan of Death” death squad that targeted Socialist Party leaders in Chile as part of the Operation Condor.
In 1999, family members of death-squad victim Winston Cabello, former regional planning director in the northern town of Copiapó, filed suit against Fernandez in Florida.
The case went to trial in September 2003 and a jury found Mr. Fernandez liable for extrajudicial killing, torture and crimes against humanity, awarding Mr. Cabello’s family $4 million in damages, although Mr. Fernandez never paid.
Witnesses identified Fernandez as a participant in the torture and executions of prisoners in multiple municipalities, including in Copiapó, where a witness testified that Fernandez had slashed Cabello to death with a curved knife known as a corvo that Fernandez carried on his military uniform as an ornament.[7]
Ms. Bernabeu, who was part of the Cabello family’s legal team, told The New York Times that Fernandez was “one of the remaining heavy, nasty, ideologically committed to the coup people. He is one of the big ones.”
During the Cabello civil trial, the jury heard testimony about another human rights crime Fernandez committed—the kidnapping and disappearance of the former manager of Chile’s largest copper mine, David Silberman.
On October 4, 1974, a team of DINA agents arrived at the Santiago penitentiary where Silberman was being held as a political prisoner and carried him away in an unmarked pick-up truck; he was never seen again.
The warden at the jail testified that the leader of the DINA unit that took him was Fernandez Larios—the same man who had Henry Kissinger and top State Department officials praising him and preventing him from being properly punished for his crimes, and who was more recently released from ICE custody as a protected “asset” of the U.S. government.
CovertAction Magazine has previously been critical of Barnes’s reporting, though in this article he did a good job. ↑
See CovertAction Magazine article on the Letelier-Moffitt car bombing here. See also a review of a book by Letelier’s sister in CovertAction Magazine here. ↑
State Department legal adviser Michael Kozak wrote to the U.S. Parole Commission in July 1987 that, in his judgment, “Mr. Fernandez Larios is a remarkably stable and responsible individual who poses no danger to society.” ↑
Fernandez appeared on the Department of Homeland Security’s “worst of the worst” list as one of several Trump administration publicity stunts from January 2026 meant to demonstrate that ICE was rounding up immigrants with actual criminal backgrounds. ↑
Shackley’s connection to terrorist activity in South America is detailed by Joseph J, Trento in Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005). Shackley, incidentally, was also the CIA operative assigned to track Philip Agee after he became a CIA whistleblower. ↑
According to documents released to the National Security Archive, in the aftermath of the assassination, Fernandez Larios participated in an extensive cover-up orchestrated by high DINA officials—and by General Pinochet himself. Fernandez Larios admitted to deceiving official military investigators, testifying falsely before the Chilean Supreme Court (after he was identified in the U.S. and Chilean press, along with Townley, as a lead suspect in the car bombing), and lying to U.S. investigators from the FBI and Justice Department. After the Carter administration demanded his extradition in 1978, Fernandez Larios was confined to a military hospital in Santiago for 14 months, along with former DINA Director Manuel Contreras and Deputy Director Pedro Espinoza. When he let it be known that he wanted to go to the U.S. “to resolve this matter,” he was called to a meeting with General Pinochet, who ordered him to stay put. “Be a good soldier, tough it out,” Pinochet told him, “and this problem will have a happy end.” A comprehensive CIA review of its intelligence on the Letelier-Moffitt case, conducted a few months after Fernandez Larios defected, concluded that there was “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder.” The assessment added that Pinochet later “decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement and, ultimately, to protect his hold on the presidency.” ↑
During the trial, Fernandez testified that he was the only member of the military unit that carried that weapon as an “ornament” on his uniform. Fernandez’s case was the first time that any Pinochet operative had been tried in the U.S. for human rights abuses in Chile. For more on the case, see Zita Cabello-Barrueto, In Search of Spring: A sister’s quest to unearth the truth about her brother’s assassination by Chile’s Caravan of Death (Create Space Independent Publishing, 2014).
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of eight books, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025), and Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Excellent well written article. Almost everything is factual and correct.
Allende was not murdered. He committed suicide.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/20/salvador-allende-committed-suicide-autopsy