Newly declassified documents released by the Obama administration confirm the long-held suspicion that in 1976 the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was responsible for killing two people on American soil. Other evidence had long pointed to Pinochet’s culpability, but these new documents leave the question of guilt beyond doubt. On September 21, 1976, a car bomb went off in Washington, D.C., killing Orlando Letelier (an exiled Chilean diplomat and critic of the Pinochet dictatorship) and his assistant Ronni Moffitt, whose husband, Michael, was badly wounded in the attack.

Pinochet directly ordered the attack and was so eager to make sure that his guilt never be known that he even contemplated killing his own spy chief, Manuel Contreras, in order to cover up the crime. Pinochet wasn't alone in wanting the truth of the Letelier assassination to be hidden. The American conservative magazine National Review played a major role over many years to whitewash and obscure Pinochet’s guilt. They did this during a period when they were actively in cooperation with Pinochet’s regime.

As John Judis notes in his invaluable biography of William F. Buckley, National Review’s ties to the Pinochet’s political fortunes even preceded the 1973 coup that brought the dictator to power. In the early 1970s, National Review editor William F. Buckley hired Nena Ossa to report from Chile. Ossa was politically close to the right-wing movement that overthrew a democratic government in 1973. After Pinochet seized power, Ossa was rewarded for her loyalty by being made head of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chile. Even after her ties to the Pinochet regime were made public, she continued to cover Chile for National Review.

In 1975 Buckley and his friend Marvin Liebman set up the American-Chilean Council (ACC) to promote Pinochet’s interests in the United States. Short of funds, the organization took money from the Chilean government, funneled by Ossa, although Liebman didn’t list himself as director with the Justice Department. ACC funding went to pay for National Review writers like William Rusher, Robert Moss, John Chamberlain, and Jeffrey Hart to take luxurious junkets to Chile, which often resulted in articles defending Pinochet.

In a letter to Liebman in July 1975, Ossa praised Robert Moss for writing a National Review article that fulfilled the political agenda of the Pinochet regime. “Fortunately he seems to be enough to the Right to understand that he cannot possibly write all he sees and hears,” Ossa enthused. “His fight against Marxism is much more important than being a journalist.” Ossa wanted propaganda, not journalism. National Review was happy to fulfill that mandate.