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LABYRINTH ALSO BY TAYLOR BRANCH NON-FICTION Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest (with Charles Peters) Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (with Bill Russell) FICTION The Empire Blues LABY THE VIKING PRESS NEWYORK RINTH TAYLOR BRANCH AND EUGENE M. PROPPER COPYRIGHT © 1982 BY EUGENE M. PROPPER AND TAYLOR BRANCH All rights reserved First published in 1982 by The Viking Press 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Branch, Taylor. Labyrinth. Includes index. 1. Letelier, Orlando—Assassination. 2. Assassination—Washington (D.C.). 3. Townley, Michael Vernon. 4. Chile—Foreign relations—United States. 5. United States—Foreign relations—Chile. I. Propper, Eugene M. II. Title. F3101.L47B73 364.1'524'0924 81-52149 ISBN 0-670-42492-7 AACR2 Printed in the United States of America Set in Video Century Expanded Designed by Ann Gold For Christy and our daughter Macy T.B. For my parents E.M.P. I AUTHORS'NOTES During my career as Assistant United States Attorney, I investigat ed and prosecuted scores of cases, but none was as intriguing or pro fessionally challenging—and none involved me as deeply on a personal basis—as the car-bombing murders of former Chilean Am bassador Orlando Letelier and his American aide Ronni Moffitt. The brutality of the crime itself would have motivated me or any other prosecutor to go to extraordinary lengths to solve it. But a po litically motivated bombing in the nation’s capital involves more than the lives of the victims. It is also a crime against the United States and its citizens, because it strikes a blow against our country’s com mitment to maintain an open and safe capital for people with differ ent values and political beliefs. All the investigators working on the case felt a strong desire to make terrorists aware that the United States will not tolerate such acts. The Letelier case would not have been solved without the ingenu ity and tireless dedication of FBI Special Agents L. Carter Cornick, Robert W. Scherrer, and Larry Wack. They, and I, were also fortu nate in having the help of Ambassador George W. Landau, without whose diligence and active participation all other efforts would have gone for nothing. No one cared more about the case or worked more diligently on it than Assistant United States Attorney E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr., and the cause of justice was served by many others whose names appear in the book. As prosecutor on the case from the day the murders occurred, I ix authors’notes X had a unique opportunity to work with all these people—to be- an ac tive participant in the investigation as well as in the prosecution. I worked on the Letelier investigation for more than two and a half years. When my official duties ended in July of 1979,1 realized that I had gained an unusual perspective on the way the United States re sponds to terrorism. When terrorists are directed by a foreign gov ernment and operate on territory where the United States has no authority, their deeds are extremely difficult to investigate—espe cially if the foreign government is itself a potential suspect. I believed then, and still believe, that the public interest would be served by telling the story of our investigation so that readers could see in detail how terrorism works and what investigators can and cannot do in such cases. There is no government manual that tells how to proceed. We encountered many obstacles that we did not an ticipate, and we invented many of our tactics along the way. We also made mistakes. I believed that other prosecutors and criminal inves tigators might benefit from our experience. I hoped that the record of the Letelier case would prove instructive to both official and non official readers. At the same time, I wanted to see the story told be cause I am proud of what we accomplished. In telling that story, I wanted to work with someone who cared about the case and who would venture into areas even beyond the Letelier-Moffitt murders. Taylor Branch knew and had written about the case, cared about it deeply, and agreed with my view that this book should be based on the recollections and opinions of as many people connected with the investigation as possible. Taylor and I in terviewed numerous people, and Taylor spoke to many more on his own: some of what he found was news to me. We spent almost half our working time on the book doing research. Two and a half years later, Taylor and I are more than co-authors; we are friends. As a former prosecutor, I have special obligations and restraints that do not apply to most authors. Many agencies of the United States government provided information to me as an official of the Justice Department, and I felt a duty to handle that information in a way that would not hamper the operations of those agencies or make it less likely that they would cooperate with future prosecutors. For these reasons, I felt we could not include certain incidents in the book that would reveal classified information or harm intelligence sources. I insisted that we submit six chapters of the completed manuscript to the Central Intelligence Agency for review, to ensure that we had not inadvertently disclosed classified information. Also,
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