The Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (English: National Intelligence Directorate) or DINA was the secret police of Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

At Villa Grimaldi, recalcitrant prisoners were dragged to a parking lot; DINA agents then used a car or truck to run over and crush their legs.

DINA officers subjected female prisoners to grotesque forms of sexual torture that included insertion of rodents and, as tactfully described in the Commission report, "unnatural acts involving dogs.

[6][3] The United States backed and supported the Fatherland and Liberty Nationalist Front, which funded and directed the first coup attempt against Allende's regime, known as the Tanquetazo.

In a confession letter dated March 13, 1978 Townley claimed that he in fact went through with the Letelier and Ronni Moffit assassinations on behalf of DINA and was "following orders from Gen.

In July 1976, two magazines in Argentina and Brazil appeared and published the names of 119 Chilean leftist opponents, claiming they had been killed in internal disputes unrelated to the Pinochet regime.

[9] The DINA worked with international agents, such as Michael Townley, who assassinated former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington DC in 1976, as well as General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974.

[8] Michael Townley worked with Eugenio Berríos on producing sarin in the 1970s, at a laboratory in a DINA-owned house in the district of Lo Curro, Santiago de Chile.

Numerous others who disappeared or were killed during that period remained unidentified, leaving thousands of families of leftist sympathizers still searching for their loved ones in Chile this day.

By that time, DINA had reached its military goals: assassinate the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) leadership and the main leaders of the Popular Unity, the coalition of the parties that had won the 1970 elections.

The Chilean government had intended to publicly display the photographs at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City to discredit British criticism of human rights abuses in Chile.

Townley wrote an undated letter to Pinochet informing him of Romero's assignment, which was subsequently intercepted by the American National Security Agency.

Senator Patrick Leahy stated that "[r]eports that NDU hired foreign military officers with histories of involvement in human rights abuses, including torture and extra-judicial killings of civilians, are stunning, and they are repulsive".