TARGET: KOCH
Warned in ’70s he was on dictators’ hit list
WASHINGTON — Ed Koch might not have lived to become mayor if several Latin American despots had their way.
A year before his 1977 election to City Hall, Koch was targeted for death because of his campaign as a congressman to reduce U.S. military aid to dictatorships in South America, according to an account published Tuesday.
The CIA took the threat so seriously, its director at the time, future President George H.W. Bush, called Koch to warn him.
“Listen, my agents have gotten news that there’s a contract out on your life,” Bush told Koch, according to an account by former Koch aide Charlie Flynn published by Politico Magazine.
Bush added, “I’m sorry, Ed. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
When a worried Koch asked what he should do, Bush supposedly re- plied, “Ed, be very careful,” according to Politico.
Koch had reason to be worried: Several Latin American despots, led by agents of the Chilean secret police under dictator Augusto Pinochet, had already carried out four assassinations in four countries.
And just weeks before Bush’s call, a dissident Chilean economist was killed by a car bomb as he drove to work at a Washington think tank.
As a member of the House Foreign Relations and Appropriations committees, Koch had sponsored a law that cut $3 million in aid to Uruguay — a party to Operation Condor, an unholy alliance of seven nations that joined forces to eliminate opposition at home and abroad.
The threat against Koch had been reported before — a 2004 book claimed that it supposedly was relayed to a CIA operative by a drunken Uruguayan intelligence officer at a party in Montevideo. But the previous accounts had suggested it was not taken seriously by the State Depart- ment or the CIA.
The story in Politco Magazine was the first to claim that Bush himself had called Koch to issue a warning.
Longtime aide George Arzt said Tuesday that Koch remarked to him several times about the Uruguayan threat.
“I think at the time he was told about it he did feel threatened, but Koch was against the military junta and he wasn’t going to change his stance, certainly over threats,” Arzt said.
Koch faced the threat of violence years earlier, in the 1960s, in Mississippi, where he represented blacks and civil rights workers intimidated and assaulted over civil disobedience and voter registration drives, Arzt noted.
Koch, who died last year, remained stoic based on his Jewish faith that events are preordained, or “beshert,” Arzt said. “I think he believed that everything is fated,” Arzt said.