Pinochet and the 'Good Soldier' Who Wanted to Betray the Secret Police

By Theo Marchetti · September 14, 2026

Kept under Top Secret/Eyes Only markings for decades, a Roger Channel cable describes a ten-hour interview with an assassin the U.S. deemed credible but never prosecuted

Two people died in a fireball on a Washington street in 1976, and for a decade, the evidence required to fully punish the architects of that blast was treated as a diplomatic bargaining chip. The cost of this calculation was the absolute denial of justice for the families of the victims and the continued sanctuary of a military dictator.

This account is drawn from the archive's curated description of the record, rather than the original pages. The record is a 1987 Top Secret/Eyes Only cable sent via the Roger Channel—a secure, restricted line used to bypass standard bureaucratic scrutiny—from the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, the diplomatic outpost tasked with managing the volatile relationship between Washington and the military junta. The cable summarizes a secret ten-hour interview with Armando Fernandez Larios, a man who participated in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt.

A Ten-Hour Confession

According to the record, Fernandez Larios spent ten hours speaking with U.S. officials, including staff tasked with monitoring arms trades and human rights. He did not speak in vagaries. He recounted his direct role in the 1976 car bombing that killed Orlando Letelier, a Marxist diplomat who had become the most prominent voice of the Chilean resistance in exile, and Ronni Moffitt, a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies who was killed alongside him.

By 1987, the public record established that Michael Townley, an American-born agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA)—the secret police of Chile—had already pleaded guilty to these murders. Townley had served a truncated prison sentence and received immunity from prosecution in Argentina for his role in the 1974 assassination of General Carlos Prats. But Fernandez Larios represented something the U.S. government did not have: a living, breathing admission of the chain of command that led directly to the presidential palace in Santiago.

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

The Command to be a 'Good Soldier'

The most damning portion of the record does not concern the mechanics of the bomb, but the mechanics of the cover-up. Fernandez Larios revealed that he had attempted to turn himself over to the United States, an act of surrender that would have shattered the regime's plausible deniability. He was blocked by General Augusto Pinochet, the army officer who seized power in a 1973 coup and spent seventeen years erasing his political enemies through torture and execution.

Pinochet did not merely stop the surrender; he attempted to psychologically re-bind the assassin to the state. The record quotes Pinochet as being "upset that Fernandez had developed this attitude," telling him that "he had to be a good soldier, to continue the struggle and this problem would have a happy end."

There is a cold irony in the phrasing. To Pinochet, a "happy end" was the silence of the graveyard and the preservation of the regime. To the U.S. officials listening to the interview, the "happy end" was a different kind of utility. The record states that U.S. officials deemed Fernandez Larios "credible" and concluded that "what he has to offer as a witness is of substantial impact from both a law enforcement and foreign policy standpoint."

The Roger Channel

The existence of this information in a "Roger Channel" cable is the key to the story. In the world of diplomatic cables, the Roger Channel is not for routine reporting; it is for the most sensitive, restricted communications, designed to keep the circle of knowledge small. The fact that a credible witness to a mass murder on U.S. soil was processed through a "Top Secret/Eyes Only" channel rather than through the Department of Justice suggests a deliberate diversion of evidence.

According to the public record, the U.S. was well aware of the DINA's reach and Pinochet's personal involvement in Operation Condor, the cross-border campaign of political assassination. By linking Fernandez Larios to Pinochet, the record closes the loop. The witness provided the direct line from the trigger to the dictator. Yet, this credibility did not trigger an immediate extradition request or a public indictment. Instead, it was filed away in a restricted channel.

The Strategic Asset

This is where the record ends and the pattern begins. If this file is shaped the way it looks, the U.S. government did not view Armando Fernandez Larios as a criminal to be prosecuted, but as a strategic asset to be held in reserve.

The desk's reading is that the U.S. prioritized the "foreign policy standpoint"—using the witness as diplomatic leverage over Pinochet—over the "law enforcement standpoint" of bringing an assassin to trial. When the record describes the witness as having "substantial impact," it is not talking about the impact of a courtroom testimony. It is talking about the impact of blackmail. A witness who can tie a head of state to a car bomb in Washington is a leash. As long as the witness remains a secret, the leash can be pulled whenever the U.S. needs a concession from the junta.

The use of the Roger Channel was intended to bypass the standard legal machinery. Had this interview been processed through normal law enforcement channels, it would have triggered mandatory judicial processes and public extradition requests. By keeping it "Eyes Only," the executive branch ensured that the evidence remained a tool of statecraft rather than a tool of justice.

Furthermore, the pattern suggests that the withheld portions of the record—the gaps in the "highlights" of that ten-hour meeting—contain the terms of a non-prosecution agreement. The record tells us Fernandez Larios was credible; it does not tell us where he went after the interview or what he was given in exchange for his silence. The desk's reading is that he was bought or buried in a way that served the interests of the State Department, ensuring he would not testify in a venue where the public could hear the details of the U.S.-Pinochet relationship.

In the end, the U.S. government treated the murder of Letelier and Moffitt as a diplomatic variable. They found a man who could prove the dictator's guilt, and then they hid him in a secret cable. They chose the leverage of the secret over the legitimacy of the law, and in doing so, they became partners in the very cover-up Pinochet had demanded of his "good soldier."

Pinochet and the 'Good Soldier' Who Wanted to Betray the Secret Police

A Ten-Hour Confession

The Command to be a 'Good Soldier'

The Roger Channel

The Strategic Asset

Sources