Harry Barnes and the WITSEC Shield for Michael Townley
By Desmond Okafor ·
For thirteen years, the daughters of Carlos Prats fought to name their parents' killers while the U.S. government hid the assassin in a witness protection program.
Two daughters spent thirteen years chasing the ghosts of their parents through the diplomatic corridors of Santiago and Washington. The cost of that search was a decade of silence maintained by the United States government to protect a car bomber.
In 1974, a car bomb in Buenos Aires killed Carlos Prats, the former commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army and minister under Salvador Allende who had been forced into exile, and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert. The blast was a signature of the Pinochet regime’s reach—a liquidation of the old guard carried out on foreign soil. This column is reconstructed from the archive's curated description of the record rather than the original pages.
A Visit to the Embassy in Santiago
By June 1987, the children of Prats and Cuthbert were no longer merely mourning; they were lobbying. The record shows that during a visit to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, the daughters "press their efforts to hold the murderers of their parents accountable." They were not asking for sympathy, but for access to a specific man: Armando Fernández Larios.
Larios was a top officer in DINA, the Chilean secret police under the Pinochet regime, who had participated in the 1976 car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the U.S., and Ronni Moffitt, a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies. According to the record, Larios had recently "turned himself in to U.S. officials," and the Prats daughters sought to have him questioned regarding the 1974 murder of their parents.
They also informed the embassy that the Argentine courts—the highest judicial body in a system that for decades lacked autonomy from the executive power—were seeking the testimony of Chilean officers, but that the military regime in Santiago had refused to cooperate. The daughters were attempting to bridge a gap between the justice systems of two nations and the intelligence apparatus of a third.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
The Letelier-Moffitt Plea
While the daughters looked at Larios, the U.S. government was looking at Michael Townley. Townley was the American-born agent of DINA who helped kill Letelier and Moffitt and who had also been involved in the assassination of General Prats. The connection between the two bombs is not a coincidence of timing, but a continuity of personnel. Townley was the technician of death for the Pinochet regime, a man whose passport and nationality made him a unique asset for a secret police force operating internationally.
By 1987, Townley’s legal status was a carefully managed arrangement. He had pleaded guilty to the Letelier-Moffitt murders in 1978, serving 62 months of a ten-year sentence. The public record establishes that as part of his plea bargain, Townley received immunity from further prosecution. This immunity served as a wall; it ensured that Townley was not extradited to Argentina to stand trial for the 1974 assassination of Prats and Cuthbert.
Instead of a cell in Buenos Aires, Townley was given a new identity. The record states he was "living in the United States under the witness protection program." The man who had blown up a general and his wife in Argentina was now a ward of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Larios Sequence
The arrival of Armando Fernández Larios in U.S. custody creates a jarring contrast in how the State Department handled DINA officers. Larios did not surrender to the Argentine courts, which were actively seeking his testimony; he turned himself in specifically to U.S. officials.
This sequence is telling. The record shows that Ambassador Harry Barnes, the diplomat who helped engineer the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, wrote to Washington to ask if the Argentine courts had the "legal latitude to formally interrogate Michael Townley."
On the surface, Barnes was responding to a request from the Prats family. In reality, he was probing the boundaries of a shield. The pattern suggests that the inquiry into "legal latitude" was not a genuine legal query, but a search for a diplomatic pretext to deny the Argentine courts access to Townley. By framing the issue as a question of Argentine jurisdiction rather than U.S. willingness, the State Department shifted the burden of proof away from the witness protection program and onto the legalities of a foreign court.
The Witness Protection Shield
There is a sharp disparity in the treatment of these two men. While Larios was being processed as a surrender, Townley was being preserved as an asset. If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the U.S. was managing the sequenced release of information from former DINA officers to curate the official record of U.S. involvement in Operation Condor—the campaign of political repression and state terror conducted by South American right-wing dictatorships.
Larios was a source to be squeezed; Townley was a secret to be kept. The desk's reading is that Townley's value to the U.S. intelligence community far exceeded his value as a witness for the Prats murder trial. The protection afforded to him was not a byproduct of a plea deal, but a necessity of statecraft. A man who operates as a DINA agent with an American passport knows where the lines of cooperation between Washington and Santiago were drawn in the 1970s.
This cable functions as a buffer document. It juxtaposes the grief of the Prats daughters with the technicalities of witness protection to maintain plausible deniability. By focusing on whether the Argentine courts had the "legal latitude" to act, the State Department successfully framed a security asset protection issue as a procedural hurdle.
The pattern points to a quid pro quo agreement between the Department of Justice and Townley: immunity and a new life in exchange for silence on specific U.S. intelligence assets. A full release of the files surrounding Townley's entry into witness protection would likely show that the shield was not designed to protect a witness from the Chilean regime, but to protect the U.S. government from the witness.
Ultimately, the Prats daughters were not fighting a lack of legal latitude in Argentina. They were fighting a deliberate architecture of silence in Washington. The desk's reading is that the U.S. government decided that the life of a DINA assassin was more valuable than the justice for a murdered general and his wife, ensuring that the full truth of the 1974 blast in Buenos Aires remained blacked out.