In 1976, Armando Fernandez Larios slipped into the United States to help plan an assassination.
He mapped the target’s routes to work, and collected details about his car, home and office in Washington. On Sept. 9, 1976, he passed the information to a Chilean intelligence agent in a bathroom at Kennedy International Airport in New York and then flew out of the country the same day to return to Chile.
Less than two weeks later, a car bomb exploded on the streets of Washington, killing Orlando Letelier, a former ambassador from Chile and a vocal critic of the country’s dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Letelier’s American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, also died in the attack.
In 1987, Mr. Fernandez returned to the United States and confessed, at least in part, to his role. He spent five months in prison before U.S. officials helped secure his release. Since then, he has lived in Florida.
Then last October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents knocked on his door.
For years, the U.S. government regarded Mr. Fernandez as a helpful Cold War ally of sorts, even as its relationship with Chile deteriorated. But by last fall, he was viewed as a criminal who needed to be deported, underscoring how profoundly U.S. alliances and priorities can change.
On Oct. 27, 2025, ICE agents took Mr. Fernandez to a detention center in Miami. In January, the Department of Homeland Security listed him as among the “worst of the worst,” and noted that his crime was homicide.
Unlike many of the people detained by ICE, Mr. Fernandez qualifies as “truly the worst of the worst,” said Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group that has worked to get documents related to the case released publicly.
“Here is a real criminal, a real human rights violator, somebody who participated in a plot of international terrorism,” Mr. Kornbluh added.
But Mr. Fernandez did not accept the effort to deport him. He filed a lawsuit arguing that the United States was violating its original agreement with him, and that the court should order the Trump administration to uphold it.
A Turning Point
Beginning in the 1960s, the United States and the C.I.A. regularly tried to meddle in Chile’s elections, intent on preventing communism from spreading.
In 1970, Salvador Allende, a Marxist, won a plurality in Chile’s presidential election, and the C.I.A. unsuccessfully attempted to prevent him from taking power.
Still, Mr. Allende’s government was short-lived. In 1973, General Pinochet, an ardent anti-Communist, took power in a coup blessed by the C.I.A. Despite terrible human rights abuses, support for General Pinochet continued through the Nixon and Ford administrations.
But the deaths of Mr. Letelier and Ms. Moffitt were front page news in The New York Times and other major newspapers, and their deaths would eventually be seen as a turning point in how Americans viewed General Pinochet.
In 1978, two years after the bombing, a Washington grand jury indicted Mr. Fernandez for his role in the killing, along with the Chilean intelligence chief, Manuel Contreras, and five others.
That year, the Chilean government agreed to turn over Michael Townley, an American-born Chilean intelligence agent who had met Mr. Fernandez in the airport. But it refused to send Mr. Fernandez or Mr. Contreras to the United States.
In 1985, U.S. officials reached out to Mr. Fernandez, and by the following year, he began considering whether to give himself up, either to clear his conscience or as revenge for his shabby treatment by the Chilean government, according to a government document.
In January 1987, he left Chile.
In interviews with the F.B.I. in Brazil, Mr. Fernandez claimed he was in Washington in 1976 merely to surveil Mr. Letelier. But he failed a polygraph test, with F.B.I. agents finding “consistent signs of deception” and concluding that he knew the mission was to kill Mr. Letelier.
The statement Mr. Fernandez finally offered the U.S. government also sought to minimize his role, but outlined General Pinochet’s involvement.
Mr. Fernandez recounted a conversation between Mr. Contreras and an investigator about who gave the order to kill Mr. Letelier. According to Mr. Fernandez, the intelligence head said to “ask the chief,” a reference to General Pinochet.
The testimony was good enough for the U.S. government. On Feb. 4, 1987, Mr. Fernandez pleaded guilty to “accessory after the fact” on the murder of a foreign official. The judge had initially rejected the plea deal, saying Mr. Fernandez could face 10 years. But Mr. Fernandez was sentenced to between 27 and 84 months in prison.
By July of that year, senior State Department officials were writing the parole commission seeking leniency for Mr. Fernandez, who served only five months.
U.S. government officials concluded that Mr. Fernandez’s statements had provided “no irrefutable smoking gun” linking General Pinochet to the assassination. But the testimony nevertheless helped move the United States toward breaking ties with the Chilean dictator.
George P. Shultz, then the secretary of state, requested a C.I.A. assessment of General Pinochet’s role in the assassination. The document, dated May 1, 1987, concluded that General Pinochet had given the order to kill Mr. Letelier, and had led a cover-up.
In his own memo on Oct. 6, 1987, Mr. Shultz used the history and the “significant new information” that Mr. Fernandez revealed about General Pinochet’s role in the attack to help convince President Ronald Reagan to shift U.S. policy.
‘Caravan of Death’
But Mr. Letelier and Ms. Moffitt were not the only people Mr. Fernandez helped kill.
In 1973, Mr. Fernandez had joined a secret mission for General Pinochet and his right-wing government.
“In the early days after the coup, Pinochet gathered the big guys and decided to put a team together with a helicopter to go up and down, to the north and the south to kill people,” said Almudena Bernabeu, the chief executive of Guernica 37 Centre, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human rights and international criminal law. “They called it the Caravan of Death, they were going town after town. They were killing the local and national leaders of the socialist party.”
In 1999, family members of one of the victims of the death squad, Winston Cabello, filed suit against Mr. Fernandez in Florida.
Ms. Bernabeu was part of the legal team. The case went to trial in September 2003. Three weeks later, a jury found Mr. Fernandez liable for extrajudicial killing, torture and crimes against humanity. It awarded Mr. Cabello’s family $4 million in damages, although Mr. Fernandez never paid.
“He is one of the remaining heavy, nasty, ideologically-committed-to-the-coup people,” Ms. Bernabeu said. “He is one of the big ones.”
During the trial, Ms. Bernabeu said that Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, sent a letter to the court vouching for Mr. Fernandez. But the judge ignored it.
Despite Mr. Kissinger’s outreach, support for Mr. Fernandez was fading inside the U.S. government.
In 2005, Mr. Fernandez sought a special visa for people who serve as a witness or informant for law enforcement, according to The Miami Herald. While he was allowed to remain in the country, the government never gave him the special visa, amid opposition from U.S. human rights officials.
Twenty years later, immigration officials showed up at his door.
By then, the U.S. government apparently believed it owed little to a former death squad member.
Then He Was Freed
But Mr. Fernandez believed the United States had agreed in 1987 not to deport him, and he filed a writ of habeas corpus to compel the U.S. government to keep its word.
The government never responded to the substance of Mr. Fernandez’s legal filing. The answer was due March 19. Instead, the government released Mr. Fernandez, according to court records first obtained by the National Security Archive.
It is not clear why the government decided not to respond, and instead let him go. But one reason, said a U.S. official, was that Mr. Fernandez, now 76 years old, was suffering from dementia — though there is no mention of that in the judge’s ruling.
The lawyer for Mr. Fernandez, Steven Goldstein, declined to answer questions about the case.
Mr. Fernandez has another court date on Aug. 5 before an immigration judge.
In the end, Mr. Fernandez’s ICE detention lasted more than four months. Mr. Kornbluh, the researcher, said that was almost as long as he had served for “an act of terrorism on the streets of Washington that cost the lives of two beautiful people.”
Hamed Aleaziz, Frances Robles and David C. Adams contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
