The Tale of Two Assassination Plots http://consortiumnews.com/2011/10/14/the-tale-of-two-assassination-plots/

President Barack Obama vows to punish Iran for a dubious assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador, but an actual murder of a diplomat in Washington in 1976 – carried out by right-wing allies in Chile – was followed by three decades of obstruction, Robert Parry reports.With Official Washington abuzz over a bizarre U.S. accusation that Iran’s Quds spy agency plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, it might be worth recalling how American authorities responded to an actual terror bombing in Washington 35 years ago that killed a former Chilean foreign minister and an American co-worker.

Because that 1976 assassination was carried out by an allied intelligence agency, Chile’s DINA, against a perceived “leftist,” Orlando Letelier, the CIA – then run by George H.W. Bush – hid evidence of Chile’s guilt and circulated false cover stories of Chile’s innocence that were picked up by the major U.S. news media. Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier.Shortly after Letelier and a female co-worker, Ronni Moffitt, were killed by a bomb planted under his car, Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship, misinformation that was spread through Newsweek magazine, the New York Times and other U.S. news outlets.

The CIA disseminated the exonerating report despite later admissions that the CIA was aware in 1976 that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and despite the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind Letelier’s murder, the first terrorist bombing of its type in Washington D.C.’s history.In a report to Congress in September 2000, the CIA officially admitted for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA