Michael Townley and the American-Sourced Sarin Gas
By Theo Marchetti ·
A death squad’s quest for nerve gas utilized American suppliers and targets; the FBI’s record of the plot remained internal for decades, shielding the names of those who sold the precursors.
Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt died in a fireball on a Washington street in 1976, but they were nearly erased by a colorless, odorless vapor first. The cost of that near-miss was the secret establishment of a chemical weapons program that turned the United States into a procurement office for a foreign death squad.
I am writing this from an archival description of a December 9, 1981, FBI memorandum, as the original pages are not provided. The record establishes a chilling intersection between American commerce and Chilean state terror. At the center was Michael Townley, an American-born agent for DINA, the secret police of the Pinochet regime, who supervised the creation of toxic nerve agents in a secret laboratory. Townley was the bridge between the industrial capacity of the United States and the murderous intent of the military dictatorship that had overthrown the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.
The Basement in the Safehouse
The public record identifies Project Andrea as the code name for the Pinochet regime's effort to manufacture sarin gas for use against its opponents. This was not a theoretical research project; it was an operational capability. According to the record, DINA scientists and operatives "constructed a secret laboratory in the basement of a DINA safehouse provided to one of its leading international agents, Michael Townley."
Townley was not merely a technician. He was an international operative who understood how to navigate the American market to arm a dictator. The record states that "Townley purchased equipment and chemicals for the lab on trips to the United States." This is where the line of the story thickens. Townley did not smuggle these items through clandestine tunnels; he bought them, likely in plain sight, using the legitimacy of his American birth and the porous nature of export controls to furnish a nerve gas lab for a regime known for its torture chambers.
Townley’s utility to DINA was his ability to acquire the forbidden. He didn't just procure glassware and precursors; he supervised the resulting synthesis. The record is blunt: "Along with a DINA team, he supervised the creation of highly toxic nerve agents, including SARIN gas." This was the realization of Project Andrea, a weapon designed for the quiet liquidation of dissidents.
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
A Change in Method
The human target for this gas was Orlando Letelier, a Chilean Marxist and diplomat who had become a leading voice of resistance in exile. The public record shows that the Pinochet regime's leader personally ordered Letelier's assassination to silence him. The record notes that the nerve gas was used to murder several targets, and that "Townley considered using SARIN gas for his mission to assassinate Orlando Letelier."
Townley eventually pivoted from chemistry to combustion. On September 21, 1976, he and his DINA collaborators used a car bomb to kill Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, a colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies. The shift from sarin to a car bomb was a tactical decision, but the intent remained the same: the extraterritorial execution of a political opponent on American soil.
Townley’s arrogance, or perhaps his need for leverage, eventually landed him in a United States prison. He pleaded guilty to the murders and received a plea bargain that granted him immunity from further prosecution, including the 1974 assassination of General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires. But while Townley was behind bars, he continued to communicate with his former handlers. The record shows that he "wrote a series of letters to his DINA colleagues, referencing ‘Project Andrea’—the codename for the nerve gas operations."
The Propper Briefing
The intelligence regarding Project Andrea did not reach the FBI through the usual channels of the CIA or the NSA. Instead, it arrived via the corridors of the legal system and the publishing world. The letters Townley wrote from prison were intercepted and obtained by Eugene Propper, the former U.S. prosecutor who had handled the Letelier-Moffitt case, and Taylor Branch, a writer who was co-authoring a book on the assassination.
Propper and Branch briefed the FBI on the contents of these letters, which provided the catalyst for a memorandum from FBI Director William Webster. Webster, who headed the bureau during the Reagan administration, authored the memo "concerning the manufacture and projected utilization of nerve gas by components of the Chilean government."
The timing of this memorandum is precise and suspicious. It is dated December 9, 1981. Just five days earlier, on December 4, President Ronald Reagan had signed Executive Order 12333, which overhauled the conduct of United States intelligence activities.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the desk's reading is that this memorandum was a liability-clearing exercise. By documenting the knowledge of Project Andrea immediately following a new regulatory framework for intelligence, Webster was not just recording a threat; he was closing a loop. He was ensuring that the FBI had a formal record of the "discovery" of the nerve gas program, effectively scrubbing the bureau's hands of any prior silence or failure to interdict Townley's procurement trips.
The Architecture of Silence
The most glaring gap in this record is the absence of the suppliers. We know Townley "purchased equipment and chemicals for the lab on trips to the United States," but the record does not name the companies, the distributors, or the salesmen. The pattern suggests that the document suppresses the identities of these US-based chemical suppliers to avoid exposing a systemic failure in export control or, more likely, to hide the complicity of American firms in the proliferation of nerve agent precursors.
Furthermore, the fact that the FBI received this intelligence through a prosecutor and an author, rather than through primary intelligence channels, is an indictment of the US intelligence apparatus. The desk's reading is that a deliberate 'firewall' existed. The US intelligence community likely tolerated Townley's procurement trips as a means of mapping DINA's operational network. They chose to prioritize the surveillance of the network over the interdiction of the weapons. They watched the sarin gas be built so they could see who was helping build it, gambling with the lives of targets like Letelier.
Finally, the redacted or withheld sections of such a file almost certainly contain the technical data Townley provided. When a foreign government successfully manufactures sarin gas using American components, the US intelligence community does not simply delete the formula. The pattern suggests that the US sought to acquire the technical specifics of DINA's manufacture for its own weapons research, turning a record of a crime into a manual for capability.
In the end, the record of Project Andrea shows a cycle of calculated negligence. The US government allowed the tools of mass murder to be bought in its markets, watched the agent who bought them move freely, and then documented the horror only when a prosecutor and a writer forced their hand. The people who paid for this strategic patience were Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, whose deaths served as the only tangible result of a system that preferred a map of the enemy to the prevention of the kill.