Forty years ago, an assassin's bomb exploded under a car driving on Sheridan Circle, at the heart of Washington's Embassy Row. The blast killed Orlando Letelier, a 44-year-old former Chilean diplomat and an enemy of the country's military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Also killed was Letelier's 25-year-old colleague Ronni Moffitt. The man responsible for orchestrating the attack? A hired hit man named Michael Townley.
The conspicuous murders, which evidence showed were ordered by Pinochet's government, became infamous. But if a journalist or historian interested in talking to the perpetrator of that bloody crime (or a killer seeking vengeance) tried to locate him today, they would discover it to be a nearly impossible task — and that is by design. He is one of thousands of people given a new life and new identity under the U.S. Marshal Service's storied but little-known Witness Security Program, or WITSEC for short.
That a foreign power would order an assassination to be carried out on U.S. soil, much less one that took place on Massachusetts Avenue less than 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the White House, haunted the minds of many in the business of protection and counterterrorism. As a cop and agent, you focus on locations of notorious attacks, visualizing the hit man and thinking about the modus operandi. During quiet moments while on patrol, standing watch or conducting surveillance, your mind replays the scene. You think about the victims, the actors and the plot. For me, the Letelier case literally hit home. I had grown up in Bethesda, Maryland, the D.C. suburb where the bomb had been planted under the victim's vehicle. According to roll-call lore, a police patrol car was in the neighborhood on the night the bomb was placed, but the killer hid from sight. Even if that's not true, it's a good story.
The killer who arranged the Letelier hit had done his homework, but he was eventually caught. He traded the information he had for a relatively short jail sentence followed by a new life in the WITSEC program, where he could have confidence that he would be safe from reprisals by his masters. In the 45-year history of the program, no participant who adhered to the WITSEC guidelines has been harmed or killed while under the active protection of the U.S. Marshals Service, a remarkable accomplishment.
WITSEC, according to the U.S. marshals, provides for the security, health and safety of government witnesses, and their immediate dependents, whose lives are in danger as a result of their testimony against major criminals. The program, authorized by the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, has supplied new identities to more than 8,600 witnesses and 9,900 of their family members since the program began in 1971.
When an informant enters the program, he or she gets a complete identity change, and the government issues new official documents, providing a new Social Security number and driver's license. Then, the witness is moved to a state far from their previous home to reduce the chances of running into a familiar face. Other arrangements, such as a government stipend and rent payments, are made. But their new life comes with a heavy price.
Once in the program, protectees can never turn back. There are no trips home, no contact with anyone from their past. They cannot attend longtime friends' weddings or loved ones' funerals. There are no homesick calls to Mom or Uncle Joe. Participants vanish from the face of the Earth, and if they do not follow the rules, they are kicked out of WITSEC and left to fend for themselves. Some witnesses have been killed after leaving the program, and others were gotten to before entering the program.
Some, however, take their chances and live. After Henry Hill, the gangster informant who was the inspiration for the 1990 film "Goodfellas," was kicked out of the witness protection program for repeatedly violating its rules, he traded on his celebrity and later died of heart failure in a Los Angeles hospital bed. Mob turncoat Sammy "The Bull" Gravano eschewed government protection altogether and is now serving time in an Arizona prison.
My first encounter with WITSEC came in the summer of 1987 while working on a threat case. I needed to interview a former drug cartel hit man in the program, who in his white leisure suit looked like a character from "Miami Vice" or "Saturday Night Fever." The logistics behind the scenes were amazing, and I was a nervous young agent, worried about my own back, and not too sure how to question a hit man.
In another case I worked, I had the privilege, or perhaps misfortune, of placing a source in the program. That person failed to follow the rules and was booted out. The zero-tolerance policy for rulebreakers ensures that people stay alive in the very deadly business of compromises, vengeance and retribution.
In reflecting on the tremendous success of the program, I'm struck by the challenges the U.S. Marshals Service faces today, with the widespread potential for protectees to be exposed on social media, not to mention being targeted by identity thieves, data breaches and facial-recognition software. WITSEC must squarely be in the crosshairs of high-priced hackers hired by organized crime, intelligence services of rogue nations and state sponsors of terrorism in an effort to unearth the new identities of informants from the service's computers and servers.
I'm not sure how one lives a normal life in a program like WITSEC, but I realize that it's a necessary tool for the government to bring mobsters, terrorists and hit men to justice.
