Former General and political figure Carlos Prats, who had become a vocal opponent of the Pinochet government,[10] was killed in Buenos Aires by a radio-controlled car bomb on September 30, 1974, in an assassination planned and executed by members of DINA.

[14] Later that day, in a speech delivered at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden, Letelier proclaimed: Today Pinochet has signed a decree in which it is said that I am deprived of my nationality.

Because we are the true Chileans, in the tradition of O'Higgins, Balmaceda, Allende, Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Claudio Arrau and Víctor Jara, and they – the fascists – are the enemies of Chile, the traitors who are selling our country to foreign investments.

He then saw his wife stumbling away from the car and, assuming that she was safe, went to assist Letelier, who was still in the driver seat,[17] barely conscious and appearing to be in great pain.

[citation needed] Diego Arria intervened once again by bringing Letelier's body to Caracas, Venezuela, for burial, where it remained until the end of Pinochet's rule.

A United States Department of Justice affidavit from August 23, 1991 detailed the efforts of the Pinochet regime to cover up its role in the assassinations of Letelier and Moffitt.

The bomb was attached by wires or magnets to the car's underside, and blew a "circular hole, 2 to 2½ feet in diameter" in the driver's seat.

[5] A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said that this was the first incident of violence against Chilean exiles on American soil, according to agency records.

[5] The FBI eventually uncovered evidence that Michael Townley, a DINA US expatriate, had organized the assassination of Orlando Letelier on behalf of Chile.

According to Jean-Guy Allard, after consultations with the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) leadership, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, those elected to carry out the murder were Cuban-Americans José Dionisio Suárez Esquivel,[20] Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol.

[citation needed] According to the Miami Herald, Luis Posada Carriles was at this meeting, which formalized details that led to Letelier's death and also the Cubana bombing two weeks later.

Townley also agreed to provide evidence against these men in exchange for a deal that involved his pleading guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to commit murder and being given a ten-year sentence.

In later time, it was acknowledged that Townley intended to leave Chile so he could seek protection from Manuel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza.

In 1987, Larios fled Chile with the assistance of the FBI, claiming he feared that Pinochet was planning to kill him because he refused to co-operate in cover-up activities related to the Letelier murder.

In 2000, 16,000 documents that were previously secret were released by various United States government departments and agencies as part of an effort to declassify materials related to political violence and human rights violations from the late 1960s to early 1990s in Chile.

The Chilean government pushed back against efforts by the Letelier and Moffitt families for judicial determinations of civil liability to be made in the United States.

[23] According to John Dinges, author of The Condor Years (The New Press 2003), documents released in 2015 revealed a CIA report dated April 28, 1978 that showed the agency by then had knowledge that Pinochet ordered the murders.

[24] However, documented Michael Townley confessions which were published by the National Security Archive in November 2023 indicated that DINA head Manuel Contreras was in fact the one who ordered the assassination.

According to Dinges, documents released in 1999 and 2000 establish that "the CIA had inside intelligence about the assassination alliance at least two months before Letelier was killed, but failed to act to stop the plans."

[citation needed] Kenneth Maxwell claims that U.S. policymakers were aware not only of Operation Condor in general, but in particular "that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States."

A month before the Letelier assassination, Kissinger ordered "that the Latin American rulers involved be informed that the 'assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad ... would create a most serious moral and political problem."

[30] The documents purportedly show Letelier was working with Eastern Bloc Intelligence agencies for a decade and coordinating his activities with the surviving political leadership of the Popular Unity coalition exiled in East Berlin.

[32][35] Fellow IPS member and friend Saul Landau described Evans and Novak as part of an “organized right wing attack”.

[33] Around the time he was identified as a murder suspect in the U.S. and Chilean press in March 1978, Townley, using the alias J. Andres Wilson, sent a letter to Contreas where he issued a series of bitter complaints about the operational mistakes in the Letelier assassination mission that had led to his public identification.