Jonathan Moyle, the 28-year-old editor of the magazine 'Defence Helicopter World' and former RAF helicopter pilot, was found dead in room 1406 of Santiago'sHotel Carrera on 31. March, 1990. His purpose in Santiago was to attend a Chilean sponsored defence conference.
The circumstances
He was found hanging in a wardrobe with a pillow case over his head. But a needle mark on his leg and blood on the bed were not considered in the first police analysis. He was interested in a Bell Helicopter for civil use that the Chilean company Industrias Cardoen was converting to multi-use, especially for Third World conditions and economies. At that time, just before the Gulf War, Iraq was a potential customer for the helicopter.
The investigation
Moyle's death was considered initially by the Chilean and British authorities as suicide or death in some sort of "bizarre sex game". But in December 1991, after pressure from the Moyle family, a judicial investigation in Chile concluded he had been assassinated, but as the police couldn't identify any suspect they halted the manhunt. The United Kingdom inquest also into the death of Moyle, opened in Exeter in November, 1990. It was adjourned by forensic doctor Richard Van Oppen after a pathologist said the autopsy could not be completed due to the fact that vital organs had been removed. In 1998 the reconvened inquest found that he had been unlawfully killed and the authorities later apologised to the family for spreading the allegation of suicide. Excerpts from an apparently "un-redacted" version of a CIA report entitled Project Babylon, published in 2013 by the British magazine Lobster and in May 2014 by the newspaper Tribune, blame the murder of Jonathan Moyle on a British government agent, the late Stephan Aldolphus Kock. The "un-redacted" CIA report states: "Meantime, as we co-ordinated an MI6 set-up, alleged nuclear capacitors shipped from US by Euromac for Iraq was seized at Heathrow Airport, it led to the arrest of CEO Ali Daghir and Jeanine Speckman, Kock found that defence journalist, Jonathan Moyle, possessed evidence of UK covert deals. Consequently, Kock and eliminated him in Santiago, Chile. ."
Arms deals
The dead man's father, retired teacher Tony Moyle, said that the motive for the murder lay in Moyle's uncovering of information regarding arms shipments from Chile to Iraq. The family's claim of a concealment has been supported by a book "The Valkyrie Operation" on Moyle's death written by Wensley Clarkson. The author alleges that Moyle was killed by local hitmen hired by arms dealerCarlos Cardoen, who denies he had any participation in Moyle's death. In late 1997 a Santiago Court of Appeal reopened the investigation into Jonathan Moyle's death following representations from a lawyer representing the family.
The Editor of Lobster Magazine provided additional insight and context to the affair in a speech to the Centre for Security Analysis in London on 8 November 2000 and published in the summer 2001 edition of Lobster - issue 41. Explaining how the SIS's are "so awful to work for", he continued:
Aftermath
There are some literature and film about the circumstances of the death:
A film about the death of the British journalist who died in Chile after interviewing an arms dealer.
, about the background of the assassination by Carlos Saldivia Aravena, Santiago de Chile, Editorial Chile-América : CESOC, 1999, in Spanish Language
, by Ramon Diaz Eterovic, 2004,, crime novel, the protagonist is drawn into an investigation of Chile’s role in the international arms trade when an investigative journalist is murdered pursuing the truth about the death of a British journalist in Santiago. In Spanish Language
