[News] The Posada File

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THE POSADA FILE
by Peter Kornbluh

The Nation
June 1, 2005

A declassified dossier on Luis Posada can be found on the archive's website 
located at the following URL:

<http://www.nsarchive.org>http://www.nsarchive.org
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm

The CIA document, stamped Secret, is dated June 22, 1976, and titled 
"Possible Plans of Cuban Exile Extremists to blow up a Cubana airliner." A 
"usually reliable" source, described as a "businessman with close ties to 
the Cuban exile community," reports that an extremist group led by an 
anti-Castro terrorist named Orlando Bosch "plans to place a bomb on a 
Cubana airline flight traveling between Panama and Havana."

The source says that the original plan for the attack called for two bombs 
to be placed on Cubana flight 467 on June 21. (This did not take place.) 
This intelligence report is disseminated to multiple US agencies, including 
the FAA, but there is no indication any action is taken, or that a warning 
is provided to Cuban authorities.

Less than four months later, on October 6, two bombs explode on Cubana 
Flight 455, which has just taken off from Barbados. The plane is carrying 
seventy-three people, including Cuba's teenage fencing team and eleven 
Guyanese citizens, most of them students on their way to Havana to attend 
medical school. All aboard perish when the plane crashes into the sea. A 
CIA source subsequently reports that sometime around the last week of 
September, another renowned anti-Castro exile in Caracas, Luis Posada 
Carriles, was overheard stating: "We are going to hit a Cuban airliner."

This past March, Posada sneaked into the United States using a false 
passport and requested political asylum. Despite repeated demands for his 
arrest and extradition to Venezuela, where the crime was planned, US 
authorities made no move until May 17. Homeland Security officials finally 
detained him after he gave an interview to the Miami Herald in which he 
discussed the relative ease with which he'd been able to move around 
Florida and then held a press conference.

The international community is now waiting to see what the Bush 
Administration will do with him. Posada's case not only forces the question 
of whether, in the opinion of Washington, there are "good" terrorists and 
"bad" ones but also refocuses attention on the cozy relationships that 
existed in the 1970s between violent anti-Castro Cubans and US intelligence.

Declassified documents raise issues about what kind of advance warnings the 
CIA and FBI had about the attack on Flight 455 and what actions they 
took--or failed to take--to stop it.

Shortly after the bombing, the Castro government accused the CIA of 
"directly" participating in the atrocity. Not only were the leaders of the 
likely responsible exile group, CORU, known to have past ties to the agency 
but the name and phone number of the FBI legal attaché (Legat) in Caracas, 
Joseph Leo, was found among papers of one of the two Venezuelans arrested 
in Barbados and charged with placing the bombs on the plane.

On October 8, 1976, two days after the bombing, Leo filed a teletype to FBI 
headquarters in which he admitted multiple contacts in the two years 
leading up to the bombing with one of the bombers, Hernan Ricardo, whom he 
described as a photojournalist passing intelligence on Cuban Embassy
officials to the FBI "in the personal service of Luis Posada." During one 
meeting, "Ricardo suggested Legat might wish to make some suggestions 
regarding courses of action that might be taken against the Cuban Embassy 
in Caracas by an anti-Castro group of which he formed part," Leo wrote. His 
response, Leo claimed, had been to tell Ricardo that this was not part of 
the function of his office, and that in any event he "abhorred terrorist 
activities."

Just tapping Ricardo's phone might have revealed the entire terrorist plot 
against the plane. But no such investigation was contemplated, let alone 
undertaken. Instead, when Ricardo returned to Leo's office at the end of 
September and asked for an expedited US visa, Leo took his application. In
reviewing Ricardo's passport, Leo noted that Ricardo had been in Trinidad 
on September 1--the day the Guyanese consulate in Port-of-Spain had been 
bombed--"and wondered in view of Ricardo's association with Luis Posada, if 
his presence there during that period was coincidence." Yet when Ricardo
returned October 1 with a letter signed by Posada attesting to his 
employment in Caracas, Leo raised no concerns with the vice consul, and the 
visa was provided. The last thing Leo remembers Ricardo saying was that "he 
might also be visiting Barbados" on this trip.

These CIA and FBI documents are part of a massive file on Posada and the 
Cubana plane bombing, which has been only partly declassified. What is 
available so far does not indicate that the United States covertly 
orchestrated or supported the attack. But the files do indicate that the 
close ties between CIA and FBI officials and allies inside the Cuban exile 
movement enabled the bombing to go forward--despite ample intelligence 
that, if acted upon, could have prevented it. When the entire file is made 
public, as it should and must be, the degree of US responsibility will be 
more apparent. Now that the Bush Administration has detained Posada, how 
that information is used, as well as what happens to Posada, will say much 
about whether those cozy ties of the past have survived into the post-9/11 
present.

The Freedom Archives
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