In his 1992 book Profits of War, Ben-Menashe wrote that Israeli Mossad director Nachum Admoni approached Gates in 1985 seeking help in shutting down unconventional weapons, especially chemicals, moving through the Chilean arms pipeline to Iraq.
Ben-Menashe wrote that Gates attended a meeting in Chile in 1986 with Cardoen present at which Gates tried to calm down the Israelis by assuring them that U.S. policy was simply to ensure a channel of conventional weapons for Iraq.
Though Gates denied Ben-Menashe's and Babayan's allegations in 1991 -- when Gates underwent confirmation hearings to be CIA director -- he has never been asked to publicly respond to Teicher's affidavit which was filed in a Miami court case in 1995.
Investigative Disinterest
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were aware of the discrepancies between the Teicher and Gates accounts when Gates appeared at a Dec. 5, 2006, confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense, but no one asked Gates to respond to Teicher's sworn statement.
Other potential avenues for understanding Pinochet's covert role in supporting anticommunist strategies in the Reagan-Bush era also opened in 2006, as former DINA chief Contreras turned on his old boss.
In a court document filed in early July 2006, Contreras implicated Pinochet and one of his sons in a scheme to manufacture and smuggle cocaine to Europe and the United States, explaining one source of Pinochet's $28 million fortune.
Contreras alleged that the cocaine was processed with Pinochet's approval at an Army chemical plant south of Santiago during the 1980s and that Pinochet's son Marco Antonio arranged the shipments of the processed cocaine. [NYT, July 11, 2006]
At the time of this alleged cocaine smuggling, Pinochet was a close ally of the Reagan administration, providing help on a variety of sensitive intelligence projects, including shipping military equipment to Nicaraguan Contra rebels who also were implicated in cocaine smuggling to the United States. [For details on the contra-cocaine scandal, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Contreras said Eugenio Berrios, a chemist for Chile's secret police, oversaw the drug manufacturing. Berrios also was accused of producing poisons for Pinochet to use in murdering political enemies. Berrios disappeared in 1992. [For details on the Berrios mystery, see Consortiumnews.com's "Pinochet's Mad Scientist."]
As this drip-drip-drip of evidence accumulated implicating Pinochet and his American allies in serious crimes and international intrigue, it fell to the second generation of George Bush presidents to put a finger in the dike.
Near the end of the Clinton presidency in 2000, an FBI team reviewed new evidence that had become available in the Letelier case and recommended the indictment of Pinochet. But the final decision was left to the incoming Bush-43 administration -- and George W. Bush, like his father, chose to protect Pinochet. In doing so, the younger George Bush also protected his father's reputation and the legacy of the Bush Family.
Freed from Washington's legal pressure, Pinochet was able to fend off intermittent attempts in Chile to bring him to justice during the last half dozen years of his life.
"Every day it is clearer that Pinochet ordered my brother's death," human rights lawyer Fabiola Letelier told the New York Times on the 30th anniversary of the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations. "But for a proper and complete investigation to take place we need access to the appropriate records and evidence." [NYT, Sept. 21, 2006]
Ultimately, Pinochet escaped a formal judgment of guilt for his many crimes, dying on the afternoon of Dec. 10, 2006, at the Military Hospital of Santiago from complications resulting from a heart attack.
The negligence (or complicity) of the CIA and other branches of the U.S. government in enabling and then shielding the well-connected perpetrators of the Letelier assassination stands in stark contrast to the over-the-top outrage aimed at Iran regarding bizarre allegations that its Quds intelligence agency plotted with an Iranian-American car salesman and a Mexican drug cartel to kill Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the United States, Adel A. al-Jubeir.
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