Arturo Poire and the 1976 'Phase Three' Hit on Orlando Letelier
By Theo Marchetti ·
Two people died in a Washington D.C. car bomb while a secret intelligence war played out in Buenos Aires, kept secret for over four decades.
Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt were vaporized by a car bomb on a Washington D.C. street, a murder that turned the American capital into a hunting ground for a foreign dictator. This execution cost the world a leading voice of Chilean resistance and signaled that no border was far enough to escape the reach of the Southern Cone's killing machines.
The specifics of this case survive today in a curated archival description of an FBI cable rather than the original pages of the dispatch. The record identifies the document as a "Secret" communication dated September 28, 1976, titled "[Condor: Chilbom]"—a clinical shorthand for the "Chilean bombing" that had occurred eight days prior.
Condor: Chilbom
Orlando Letelier, a Chilean Marxist and former ambassador who had become a primary target of the regime he once served, was not killed in a random act of terror. He was a high-value target for General Augusto Pinochet, the army officer who overthrew the Chilean government in 1973 and ruled as a dictator until 1990. The public record establishes that Pinochet personally ordered the assassination to silence Letelier's international campaign against the military junta. To execute the hit, Pinochet utilized DINA, the Chilean secret police that functioned as the regime's primary instrument of torture and disappearance.
Letelier did not die alone. Ronni Karpen Moffitt, his professional colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, was killed in the blast. Her death was the collateral cost of a geopolitical calculation made in Santiago. The murder was not a standalone hit but was linked to Operation Condor, the campaign of political repression coordinated by the right-wing dictatorships of South America to hunt down left-wing dissidents across national borders. The public record shows that Condor was formally created in 1975 when Pinochet's spy chief gathered intelligence officers from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay to coordinate their purges, a project financed by the United States.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
A Leak in Buenos Aires
The "Chilbom" cable was drafted by Robert S. Scherrer, the FBI’s legal attaché in Buenos Aires. The cable does not rely on American surveillance or a confession from the killers; instead, it points the finger of responsibility at Pinochet and DINA based on a tip from a foreign intelligence officer. The record identifies this source as Arturo Horacio Poire, an official within the Secretaria de Inteligencia del Estado (SIDE), the presidential intelligence service of Argentina.
This is where the record earns its irony. Poire was a member of the same murderous ecosystem as the men who planted the bomb. SIDE, like DINA, was an arm of a brutal military junta, and Argentina was a founding partner of Operation Condor. Yet, Poire chose to feed the FBI the architecture of the crime. He provided the link between the car bomb in Washington and the orders issued in Santiago, essentially outing his partners in the Condor network to the Americans.
Phase Three
Within the cable, the assassination is described as a "phase three" mission. This terminology is the most critical piece of the record. It suggests that the murder of Letelier was not an improvised act of vengeance or a rogue operation by DINA agents, but a codified step in a strategic plan.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the "Phase Three" designation implies a systemic architecture of extraterritorial assassination. The pattern suggests a standardized operating procedure where "Phase One" and "Phase Two" likely involved the surveillance and localization of targets, culminating in the "Phase Three" execution. The desk's reading is that the FBI cable treats this as a specific case of murder, but the terminology reveals it was a standardized industrial process of state-sponsored killing. The document reports a crime; the language describes a manual.
SIDE vs. DINA
The fact that a high-ranking Argentine official like Poire would hand this information to Robert S. Scherrer suggests a deeper, hidden friction. The public record places SIDE and DINA as sibling agencies in the Condor network, but the cable masks a strategic rift. The desk's reading is that Argentina used the FBI to signal dissatisfaction or exert leverage over Chile. By leaking the "Phase Three" details of the Letelier hit, SIDE effectively weaponized the U.S. government to punish DINA for an operation that may have been too loud, too reckless, or too unilateral.
Furthermore, there is a deliberate silence in the cable regarding prior U.S. intelligence awareness of these protocols. The record frames the information as a fresh tip from Poire rather than a confirmation of known capabilities. If the FBI and the CIA were already aware of Operation Condor's funding and organizational structure, the "Chilbom" cable serves as a firewall. It isolates the criminal act—the bombing of a street in D.C.—from the geopolitical calculation of the State Department, treating the event as a law enforcement discovery rather than a diplomatic failure.
This separation allowed the U.S. to maintain a distance from the very machinery it had helped finance. The cable treats the assassination as a foreign-directed event, ignoring the domestic logistical trail and the security lapses within the U.S. that allowed DINA agents to operate on American soil. The record focuses on the source in Buenos Aires because that source provides the most convenient narrative: a foreign dictator acting alone, rather than a networked system of terror that the U.S. had endorsed.
The pattern suggests that the still-withheld pages of the Condor files would show that the U.S. intelligence community did not just discover "Phase Three" through Arturo Poire—they had likely watched the phases unfold in real time. The desk's reading is that the "Chilbom" cable was not an investigation into a murder, but a diplomatic management tool. It allowed the U.S. to appear shocked by a crime that was the logical conclusion of the policies they had funded in the Southern Cone.
Ultimately, the victims of this systemic architecture—Letelier and Moffitt—were the price paid for a Cold War stability that favored dictators over diplomats. The record shows the machinery of the hit, but the silence in the file protects the architects of the system. A full release of the Condor communications would not just identify the killers; it would expose the American signatures on the blueprints of the "Phase Three" protocol.