Table Of ContentLABYRINTH
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,
