Frederick Smith and the Secret Admission that the Junta Murdered Two Americans

By Theo Marchetti · September 14, 2026

For years, the State Department told the world the Chilean military denied killing Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi; an internal probe kept secret for decades found those denials 'dubious.'

Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were executed by the Chilean military to ensure they never spoke of what they had seen in the wake of a coup. The cost of their silence was their lives, and the cost for their families was a decade of curated lies maintained by the United States government.

What survives of this story in the archive is a curated description of the record rather than the original pages, a limitation that defines the boundaries of the evidence. But the summary of that record—a secret report dated December 10, 1976—strips away the diplomatic veneer. It reveals that while the public face of the American government was echoing the denials of a murderous regime, an internal investigator had already concluded that those denials were a fiction.

The Shlaudeman Assignment

The contradiction began with a directive from Harry Shlaudeman, a seasoned diplomat who had served as Ambassador to Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Nicaragua. Shlaudeman authorized a deep dive into the bureaucracy, assigning Frederick Smith Jr., an investigator tasked with scrubbing the internal files of the diplomatic corps, to conduct a full probe. Smith spent five months combing through internal State Department and Embassy files to find out why two Americans had disappeared into the Chilean machinery of death.

Charles Horman, an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, had been executed in Chile in the days following the 1973 coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet. Frank Teruggi, an American student and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, was murdered by the military shortly after that same September 11 coup. Both men were targets of a military junta that had systematically liquidated the socialist government of Salvador Allende.

Smith’s investigation was not a public inquiry; it was a closed-loop exercise in internal auditing. The public record shows that the State Department spent years giving credence to the denials issued by the Chilean military, the unified force of the Army, Air Force, and Navy that had seized power. The State Department told the world that the Chilean military denied any responsibility for the deaths of Horman and Teruggi. Smith’s internal report, however, tells a different story.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

"Dubious" and "Difficult to Credit"

The record is blunt. Smith concluded that the Chilean military "deliberately killed" the two Americans. He went further, characterizing the official denials provided to the Embassy as "dubious" and "difficult to credit."

This is where the line between diplomacy and deception becomes a canyon. On one side of the canyon, the State Department was issuing public statements that essentially validated the Chilean military's innocence. On the other side, Smith had delivered a secret report stating that the military had intentionally murdered U.S. citizens. The State Department did not update its public narrative to match Smith's findings. It chose to maintain the lie.

Smith’s report did not find evidence that U.S. government officials had pulled the trigger, but it identified a critical lead in the form of Gonzalez, a source whose statements regarding the killings led him and his family to seek asylum in the Italian Embassy. Smith recommended that the Embassy re-interview Gonzalez, suggesting that the man in asylum held pieces of the puzzle that the official record was ignoring.

The irony is that the State Department possessed a definitive internal answer—that the killings were deliberate—yet continued to act as a mouthpiece for the junta. The public record is a study in coordinated dissonance: the internal report confirmed the crime, while the public office denied the evidence.

The Signal of Impunity

Smith’s most explosive conclusion was not about who killed Horman and Teruggi, but why the killers felt safe doing it. He recommended that "high level inquiries" be made of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to determine if they had taken any action "that may have led the Junta to believe it could, without serious repercussions, kill Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi."

This is the heart of the record. Smith was not suggesting the CIA ordered the hits; he was suggesting the CIA had provided a signal of impunity. He suspected that the Chilean military had received a wink and a nod from Langley, a guarantee that the murder of "troublesome" Americans would be overlooked in the interest of maintaining a stable, anti-communist dictatorship in Santiago.

The record shows that the CIA subsequently produced documents specifically denying any such actions. But there is a glaring gap here: Smith’s five-month investigation covered only internal State Department and Embassy files. He did not have access to the CIA's operational cables or its station logs in Santiago. He had to request that the high-level inquiries be made because the evidence he needed was held by an agency that operated outside his purview.

The Desk's Reading

The pattern suggests that the "high level inquiries" Smith recommended were either blocked entirely or resulted in curated denials that were never integrated into the official State Department narrative. If this file is shaped the way it looks, the CIA withheld its operational files from Smith’s probe, forcing the investigator to guess at the nature of the impunity signal from the outside. The subsequent CIA denials are not evidence of innocence; they are the expected response of an agency protecting a sensitive relationship with a client state.

The desk's reading is that the public denials issued by the State Department were not mere errors in judgment, but a coordinated policy of plausible deniability. By supporting the military's lies, the State Department shielded the CIA from the consequences of the impunity it had signaled to the junta. The contradiction between Smith's internal findings and the public line was a feature, not a bug, of the relationship between Washington and Pinochet.

Furthermore, the chronological overlap of these events with the broader regional framework of Operation Condor—the clandestine campaign of political assassination and intelligence sharing among South American dictatorships—suggests that Horman and Teruggi were not isolated casualties. They were integrated into a wider continental system of erasure. The gap in the record, the missing operational files from the CIA, is where the truth of that integration lives.

In the end, the State Department's silence protected the architects of the impunity signal. Frederick Smith Jr. did his job, and Harry Shlaudeman authorized the probe, but the findings were buried in a secret report while the families of the dead were told the military's denials were credible. The pattern reveals a government that valued the stability of a murderous regime more than the lives of its own citizens, and more importantly, more than the truth of its own internal investigations.

Frederick Smith and the Secret Admission that the Junta Murdered Two Americans

The Shlaudeman Assignment

"Dubious" and "Difficult to Credit"

The Signal of Impunity

The Desk's Reading

Sources