Juan Gabriel Valdés, Chile’s ambassador to the United States. Valdés was Letelier’s assistant at the Institute for Policy Studies and was nearly in the car that was bombed.

Valdés: We had seen strange cars stopping in front of our office, at Dupont Circle, and Orlando had received threats, under his door. But Orlando always dismissed our concerns, saying: “They would never dare to attack me in Washington. If they want to attack me, they will wait for me to be in Europe, particularly in [the Netherlands],” where he traveled a lot. Therefore, he dismissed the issue. He was never concerned about it.

The night before, he called me at around 10 o’clock telling me that he wanted to pick me up the next morning either at my home, or on the way coming down Massachusetts Avenue from Wisconsin Avenue, because he wanted me to give him a draft of a paper I had been writing with another assistant. The Chilean dictatorship had stripped him of his nationality, and Orlando had decided that he wanted to answer the military in the New York Times, and we prepared a draft.

I said to him, “Look, Orlando, why don’t we wait until 9:30, because my wife is going to the supermarket in the morning.” I had to stay with my two small children at the time. Orlando didn’t like the idea. He said to me: “Why don’t you tell Antonia to go another day to the supermarket? I mean, I need that paper.” We have to remember that at the time, there were no faxes and no emails. I said to him: “Why don’t you wait until 9:30? I mean, it’s just half an hour and I will be with the paper at your office.” He said okay. We said goodbye. And that was the main reason why he didn’t pick me up in the morning.

He was with Michael and Ronni Moffitt in the car. Michael had his car in the garage, so he needed a car and borrowed Orlando’s. Life is curious. If Michael had been driving the car, it would have been Michael who would have died with the bomb. But Orlando decided to drive himself.

Francisco Letelier, 57, an artist based in Venice, Calif., is one of Orlando Letelier’s four sons.

Letelier: I was in 11th grade at Walt Whitman High School when this happened.

We lived in a split-level house in Bethesda. The driveway was very close, at a lower level. My window was right there. After the assassination, I would dream about seeing and hearing something outside the window.

I think I was in geometry class, and I got called down to the office. My aunt Cecilia, my mother’s sister, was waiting for us. And she told us there had been an accident and really couldn’t tell us anything. We were curious but not too concerned, except that we drove past Sheridan Circle, and I saw the rescue squad emergency vehicles at the circle. That was a little bit of a foreshadowing of what we learned upon arrival at the hospital: that my father had been killed.

Valdés: I was at home. I was finishing the draft. And then I received a call from Orlando’s assistant telling me that “Orlando had a terrible accident.” I believed it was a car accident, and then I received a call telling me, “You have to go to the hospital and then to the house, because the FBI is going to call and somebody has to talk to them.” I said, “What, the FBI?” I mean, this was an accident. And the response was: “This was not an accident. This was a bomb. Orlando has been murdered.”

It was one of the greatest shocks in my life. Probably the most important one.

Letelier: We immediately knew that he had been killed by the junta, Pinochet or agents of Pinochet. He had received death threats before. A short time before the assassination, we had actually had a family meeting. He had told us that he had received threatening letters and threatening phone calls. All of us essentially said, “You have to continue this struggle.”

Valdés: Of course, my first reaction was, Pinochet murdered Letelier. Each September, Pinochet tried to kill somebody. Therefore, our first reaction was to tell the FBI and to tell everybody, this was the DINA, this was the secret police of Pinochet.

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