and realized how serious it was, and what it meant.
A lot of people apparently paid no attention to it whatsoever, and didn't "waste time" taking it seriously, if it registered with them at all.
Here's a great article from the Washington Post:
‘This was not an accident. This was a bomb.’
Secret police, hired killers and a former Chilean diplomat’s brazen murder in the streets of D.C.:
The assassination of Orlando Letelier, as told by those who knew him and found his killers
On a muggy autumn morning four decades ago, a car exploded in Washington. It had motored along Massachusetts Avenue NW, rounding the bend at Sheridan Circle, when a remote-controlled bomb taped beneath the vehicle was triggered.
A driver in a car nearby would later describe the fiery impact of the blast: “I saw an automobile actually coming down out of the air.”
The smoldering wreck lurched to a halt in front of the Romanian Embassy, its windows blown open and entire floor panel gone. A police officer who arrived on the scene remembered welling up with nausea. There was blood and debris everywhere and a human foot in the roadway. A fatally wounded man lay on the pavement; his legs were missing from above the knees.
This was Orlando Letelier, a 44-year-old former Chilean diplomat who had been driving to work at a D.C. think tank along with his colleague, Ronni Moffitt, 25, and her husband, Michael.
Letelier died within minutes. Shrapnel had pierced Ronni Moffitt’s throat, and she drowned in her own blood a half-hour later. Michael, who had been sitting in the back seat, tumbled out largely unscathed. He was beside himself in grief and shock.
LEFT: Ronni Moffitt, who was a development associate at the Institute for Policy Studies at the time of her death in the 1976 car bombing. (Family photo) MIDDLE: Isabel Letelier, right, and Michael Moffitt embrace after placing roses at the site where Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were killed in 1976. (UPI) RIGHT: Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the U.S., is pictured in April 1975. (Associated Press/AS)
Letelier was a prominent opponent of the military rule of Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who rose to power in a 1973 army coup that ousted and led to the death of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. Letelier had served as Chile’s ambassador to the United States in Allende’s socialist government, which the CIA spent millions of dollars undermining through covert operations. On the day of the coup, Letelier was arrested and sent, with other ministers of Allende’s government, to a string of concentration camps. For months, he was kept at Dawson Island in the extreme south of Chile near the South Pole. He was released only after concerted international diplomatic pressure.
. . .
These regimes were complicit in the murder and disappearance of tens of thousands of people. In the case of Letelier, the Pinochet government had used an American expatriate and a shadowy network of anti-communist Cuban exiles to carry out the strike. These men would eventually be arrested in the United States and Chile, and some were jailed. Manuel Contreras, the head of the secret police known as DINA, was indicted by a U.S. grand jury, but Chile refused to extradite him. Pinochet, who stepped down from power in 1990, died in 2006 without facing trial.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/09/20/this-was-not-an-accident-this-was-a-bomb/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a79f38bff833
~ ~ ~
You may recall, Richard Nixon used some other Cuban "exile" right-wing mercenaries as operatives in the Watergate burlary of the Democratic Party headquarters not that long after.
Any politician who would do the things Richard Nixon did fully deserves all the jaundiced eyes he provokes. The evil he did will surely live so very long after this, as the world awakens, ultimately, to how much damage to the human race he inflicted.
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