On 17 May, the United States reluctantly arrested CIA agent and terrorist Luis Posada Carriles on immigration charges. Posada entered the US illegally and lived in Miami for two months while US authorities turned a blind eye (see FRFI 185). Now the US administration is in a quandary, caught between loyalty to a man who has for decades been a faithful operative in its bloodiest operations and its self-professed ‘war on terror’. In particular, the US cannot accede to Venezuela’s request to extradite Posada to face trial for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian aeroplane in which 73 passengers were killed. For, as recently declassified FBI and CIA files reveal, Posada’s testimony could expose a vile and sordid relationship with the US intelligence services that stretches back over 40 years. Whatever crimes, including torture, murder and terrorism, Posada has committed – and he has left a trail of bloody footprints the length and breadth of Latin America – he has committed in the name of US imperialism.
Trained to kill and torture by the CIA
Cuban-born Posada, a Batista henchman, travelled to Miami after the triumph of the Revolution to join the terrorist Nationalist Cuban Movement and was soon in contact with the CIA. He was recruited into ‘Operation 40’, a group of viciously counter-revolutionary cadre who included Orlando Bosch (Posada’s mentor and co-conspirator); Felix Rodriguez (alias Max Gomez, later to murder Che Guevara in Bolivia); Francisco Fiorini (alias Frank Sturgis, CIA killer and Watergate burglar) and Guillermo Novo. Operation 40 was a key plank of the US-supported Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Its role, as Frank Sturgis put it, was ‘to assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the country that you were going to infiltrate…we were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time’. The CIA trained the 40 in ‘third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism’. Their first act was to blow up La Coubre, a Belgian ship carrying arms for Cuba, in Havana harbour in 1960.
Over the next two decades the same names crop up again and again in CIA-sponsored terror and repression: Operation Mongoose against Cuba; Operation Phoenix in Vietnam; the destabilisation of the Dominican Republic; Operation Condor, the US-co-ordinated programme of mass terror repression launched against popular movements throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.
Targeting Cuba
Meanwhile there was a parallel move by George Bush Senior, then head of the CIA and his deputy director for special operations, Ted Shackley, to focus resources specifically on Cuba. Shackley had established a reputation for training anti-Castro extremists, including Posada, for invasion, sabotage and biological warfare. In 1976, Orlando Bosch set up the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organisations (CORU), bringing together five anti-Cuban organisations into a single, murderous whole. Its mission, as again the FBI documents, was to ‘jointly participate in the planning, financing and carrying out of terrorist operations and attacks against Cuba’. Over the summer of 1976, CORU placed bombs in Costa Rica, Portugal, Jamaica, Barbados, Puerto Rico, Panama and Colombia; it also attempted to kidnap the Cuban ambassador in Mexico. In September, Posada was involved in planting the bomb that killed Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his aide. Emboldened by this cowardly murder, CORU boss Bosch stated: ‘Now that our organisation has come out of the Letelier affair looking good, we are going to try something else’. The FBI records Posada’s boast: ‘We are going to hit an airliner’. On 6 October 1976, the Cuban flight was blown out of the sky.
Declassified FBI reports from 1976 make it clear that from the outset the US was fully aware of CORU’s activities. Yet CORU continued to operate unmolested and by the end of 1977 was setting up military cells in the US to attack Cuban sympathisers.
Posada: loyal CIA henchman
After being directly recruited to the CIA in 1965, Posada became a high-ranking official in the Venezuelan secret police, apparently on behalf of the CIA, and was involved in the torture and murder of more than 60 Venezuelan civil rights activists. By 1976, as we have seen, he was an active bomber for CORU. Jailed in the US for his role in the Cubana bombing, he mysteriously escaped and fled to Venezuela, where he was jailed again. However, after eight years he escaped to El Salvador, where he became a ‘support director’ in the illegal US re-arming of the Contras, importing cocaine into the US to fund the war effort and flying supplies out to the Contras in Nicaragua. In 1997 Posada organised the planting of four bombs in Cuban hotels and tourist resorts; an Italian tourist was killed. In 2000, he and Guillermo Novo were arrested with suitcases full of explosives at the Pan-American Summit, having planned to assassinate Fidel Castro. They were convicted and imprisoned but, this year, both were released early by puppet president Mireya Moscoso.
Since then, across Latin America the voices of those who suffered at the hands of US terror, ruthlessly implemented by men like Posada, have been raised to demand Posada’s extradition to Venezuela to face justice. Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay – even in cities across the US.
But the United States protects its own. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has admitted that immigration proceedings against Posada could be drawn out for months, with no question of extradition considered until they are settled. Already the next hearing has been put off till 29 August. No doubt Posada hopes to emulate his boss Orlando Bosch, a murderer and criminal recognised as a terrorist by the US Justice Department who was granted a pardon by George Bush Senior and now freely roams the streets of Miami.
Cat Wiener
FRFI 186 August / September 2005
