U.S. harboring two CIA tortures who assassinated Cuban diplomats

Jean-Guy Allard

TWO CIA agents who participated in Argentina in the torture of Cuban diplomats Jesús Cejas – whose remains were recently returned to Cuba – and Crescencio Galañena, have been living untroubled for a number of years in the United States, protected by the country’s authorities.

Michael Townley, a U.S. agent loaned by the CIA to the DINA (the secret police of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile) and Guillermo Novo Sampol, an old Cuban-American accomplice of CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles, are protected by the FBI, with which they always cooperated, and the CIA, for which they executed dirty tasks, and the State Department, which ignores their presence in U.S. territory.

It is documented that Townley and Novo played an active part in the torture of Cuban diplomats Jesús Cejas Arias and Crescencio Galañena Hernández, who disappeared in Argentina during the military dictatorship (1976-1983).

José Luis Mendéz Méndez, a Cuban historian and researcher, has spent years following the search for the remains of the two men, considered as martyrs by the Cuban Revolution.

In the course of his meticulous investigations, Méndez interviewed Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, chief of the Chilean DINA, on July 19, 2004.

"Contreras disclosed that on August 11, 1976, his U.S. agent Michael Townley and the international terrorist living under protection in Miami, Guillermo Novo Sampol, traveled to Argentina to interrogate and torture Cuban diplomats Jesús Cejas Arias and Crescencio Galañena Hernández."

The remains of the two Cuban diplomats were discovered in Virreyes, 28 kilometers outside of Buenos Aires, an area where excavations were underway in the search for victims of that period of Argentine history. Cejas and Galañena were kidnapped on August 9, 1976 in the Belgrano district of Argentina.