RSS Feed
February 19th, 2014 
David Schulberg the 3rd ( CHRISTOPHER INGALLS HAUGH)
Ed Koch pressed the phone to his ear, trying to make sense of what he was being told.
“Listen, my agents have gotten news that there’s a contract out on your life,” CIA Director George H.W. Bush told the New York congressman. “I’m sorry, Ed. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
It was October 1976, and Koch—a four-term member of Congress who would later serve three terms as the mayor of New York—was sitting in his office in Lower Manhattan as the future president explained the threat against Koch’s life. It seemed, Bush said, that Koch’s efforts to cut off $3 million in U.S. military aid to the Uruguayan government had caught the attention of the Chilean secret police, a close collaborator of the Uruguayan regime. The secret police in Chile had put a bounty on the head of the 52-year-old lawmaker. There wasn’t much the CIA could do about it, Bush told him.
“But George,” the congressman pleaded, a hint of panic rising in his throat. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Ed, be very careful,” Bush said.
Koch had every reason to take the CIA director’s warning seriously. Days earlier, on Sept. 21, a brazen assassination in Washington had shattered the myth that the political violence roiling South America wouldn’t possibly make its way to U.S. soil. The once far-fetched notion that a sitting member of Congress could also be targeted for killing was, suddenly, quite real.
The morning air was warm and pregnant with rain as a blue Chevy Chevelle rattled down Massachusetts Avenue in northwest Washington, D.C. At the wheel that morning—a few weeks before Koch would receive his phone call from the CIA—sat Orlando Letelier, a 44-year-old Chilean exile who had once served as his country’s ambassador to the United States. Letelier’s career as a government official was ended forever when, two years earlier, he had been forced to flee Chile after a coup deposed the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and ushered Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power. An economist by training, Letelier was now ensconced at a Washington think tank, and his life in exile was devoted to criticizing Pinochet’s regime—not just its austere economic policies, but also the violence and brutality perpetrated by its secret police force, the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). Keep reading at Politico
Source Article from http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/the-plot-to-kill-ed-koch
Views: 0
Posted in 
