FORMER AIDE SAYS PINOCHET AND A SON DEALT IN DRUGS

SANTIAGO, Chile -- Gen. Augusto Pinochet's former intelligence chief,
now one of his bitterest enemies, has implicated the disgraced
dictator and one of his sons in a cocaine manufacturing and smuggling
scheme and contends that it was one of the sources of General
Pinochet's illicit $28 million fortune.

Gen. Manuel Contreras, who ran the Directorate of National
Intelligence, the Chilean secret police, during the 1970's, made the
charges in a document submitted last week to an investigating
magistrate here. He also accused General Pinochet of embezzling money
from secret government accounts that the dictator controlled during
his 17 years in power, which ended in 1990.

According to General Contreras's account, the cocaine was processed
with General Pinochet's authorization at a Chilean Army chemical plant
in Talagante, south of here, during the 1980's. General Pinochet's son
Marco Antonio and one of his business partners then arranged for the
drugs to be transported to Europe and the United States, with payoffs
going into secret bank accounts the Pinochet family held abroad,
General Contreras's account said.

The accusations were first reported Sunday in the Chilean newspaper La
Nacion. General Contreras has been in jail since January 2005 in
connection with human rights abuses and was not available for comment.
But his lawyer, Fidel Reyes, and judicial officials confirmed Monday
that the account published Sunday accurately reflected the written
statement General Contreras supplied to the magistrate.

During the 1970's, when the worst of the military dictatorship's human
rights abuses occurred, General Contreras was one of General
Pinochet's closest and most trusted associates. But the two men have
fallen out in recent years, with General Contreras contending that he
is being made the scapegoat for human rights violations for which
General Pinochet should take responsibility.

In 1993, a Chilean court sentenced General Contreras to seven years in
prison for his role in the 1976 assassination in Washington of Orlando
Letelier, a former foreign minister of Chile. He has also been
convicted of kidnapping a Socialist Party leader in 1974, and
convicted in Argentina of the 1974 bombing assassination of a former
Chilean Army chief opposed to General Pinochet.

General Contreras said, according to the account, that the drug
manufacturing effort was overseen by a secret police chemist named
Eugenio Berrios, accused by human rights groups of developing poisons
to kill General Pinochet's political opponents. Mr. Berrios
disappeared in 1991, as he faced questioning about the making of the
bomb that killed Mr. Letelier, and was found dead on a beach in
Uruguay four years later.

Spokesmen for General Pinochet, who is now 90, ailing and reviled even
by many who once supported him, and Marco Antonio Pinochet, on Monday
angrily denied General Contreras's accusations, which the Chilean Army
said it would investigate. A lawyer for Marco Antonio Pinochet said he
would file a libel suit on Tuesday.