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<b>THE POSADA FILE <br>
by Peter Kornbluh<br><br>
</b>The Nation<br>
June 1, 2005<b> <br><br>
</b>A declassified dossier on Luis Posada can be found on the archive's
website located at the following URL: <br>
<br>
</font><font size=3 color="#003399"><b><u>
<a href="http://www.nsarchive.org">http://www.nsarchive.org</a><br>
<a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm</a></u></font>
<font size=3> <br><br>
</b>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." <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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." <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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
<br>
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." <br><br>
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<br>
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<br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br>
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