Michael Townley

Michael Vernon Townley (born December 5, 1942) is an American-born former agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret police of Chile during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. In 1978, Townley pleaded guilty to the 1976 murders of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, Letelier's co-worker at the Institute for Policy Studies. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, serving 62 months. As part of his plea bargain, Townley received immunity from further prosecution; he was not extradited to Argentina to stand trial for the 1974 assassination of Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires. In 1993, Townley was also convicted in absentia by an Italian court of carrying out the 1975 Rome murder attempt on Bernardo Leighton. Townley worked in producing chemical weapons for DINA which would be used against Pinochet regime political opponents, along with Colonel Gerardo Huber and the DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos. He has long maintained status as a protected witness.