Luis Posada Carriles ~2004
It is little wonder that US security forces have been unable to track down Osama bin Laden in the forbid-ding mountains of Pakistan. It took them two months to find a prime terrorist suspect in Miami, and he was only detained after he popped up on local television.
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Luis Posada Carriles ~2004 |
But in the case of Luis Posada Carriles, the Bush administration was not really looking. Venezuela demanded his extradition in connection with the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner with 73 people aboard, but the immigration authorities did not respond. Even after Posada declared his arrival in the US through a Miami lawyer and applied for political asylum, the state department insisted there was no evidence he was in the country.
A Cuban exile, Posada stands at the point where the clear black and white of George Bush's campaign against terrorism starts turning patchy and grey.
Posada denies downing the Cubana Airlines plane. He was convicted once, then acquitted twice for the bombing, but escaped from a Venezuelan prison before the matter could be settled. Since then, newly declassified FBI documents have quoted a source placing Posada in a Caracas hotel room where the bomb attack was being planned.
Furthermore Posada once boasted to a New York Times reporter of his role in a string of bombings of Cuban tourist sites, in which an Italian holidaymaker was killed in 1997. In an interview with the Miami Herald this week, he did not deny his involvement in those bomb attacks, saying only, "Let's leave it to history."
If the fugitive involved was an Arab Muslim, the department of homeland security would surely have been on full alert. But in this case the Bush administration is in a fix. Posada is an anti-Castro activist with extensive support in Miami's Cuban exile community, the mainstay of the conservative coalition of Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida.
He has also been trained in the use of explosives by the CIA and is documented as having worked for the agency from the glory days of the Bay of Pigs — Posada's boat never made it to the landing site — until the mid-70s.
His career gets even more interesting after his escape from Venezuela. He turned up in El Salvador, where he quickly got a job supplying the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in an operation run from the Reagan White House by Colonel Oliver North.
After spending some time kicking around Central America and the Caribbean with a bagful of forged passports masterminding attacks on the Cuban tourist industry, he materialised in 2000 in Panama, where he was jailed for a conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro. His good fortune prevailed again last year when he and three co-conspirators were abruptly pardoned by the outgoing Panamanian president, Mireya Moscoso.
After a stay in Honduras, he slipped into the US through Mexico and soon afterwards hired a Miami lawyer, Eduardo Soto, to apply on his behalf for political asylum. It was a cheeky gambit at a time when President Bush has declared war on terrorists and all those who provide them haven.
It is easy to see why Posada might believe he would be granted a sympathetic hearing. Orlando Bosch, who also served time with Posada for the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing — and still calls the plane "a legitimate tar-get" — fled to the US in 1987. Bosch was initially arrested and described by the attorney-general, Richard Thornburgh, as an "unreformed terrorist". But President Bush Sr, father of the current president and of the Florida governor, overruled the FBI and the justice department and ordered his release in 1990. Bosch now lives comfortably in Miami.
With Jeb Bush's help, the exile conspirators convicted of the 1976 Washington car-bomb murder of a Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American aide, Ronnie Moffitt, have also won early pardons and retirements in south Florida.
The Bush administration is well populated with other veterans of the Iran-contra scandal, in which money from the sale of weapons to Iran were channelled, with Posada's help to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, whose operations were also perceived by some as acts of terrorism. Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty in 1991 to misleading Congress over Iran-Contra, is back in the driving seat, coordinating the Bush administration's policy in the Middle East. John Negroponte, who helped coordinate the Contra effort as ambassador to Honduras, now holds one of the most powerful jobs in America, as the country's first director of national intelligence.
In declaring war on terrorism, the Bush administration has targeted, not a cause, but a tactic, and it is a tactic used by its ideological allies. "This is a test of George Bush's true colours on fighting terrorism, and it also opens up a huge can of worms on the CIA's involvement in anti-Castro violence in the 70s," said Peter Kornbluh at the National Security Archive, an independent watchdog group that has secured the declassification of much of Posada's record.
At the time of going to press, it seems Posada over-reached himself. When no one appeared to be looking from him, he boasted to the press about how he was able to walk the streets freely. He has been detained and had had to withdraw his asylum plea. But Posada may yet have the last laugh. The immigration and customs department announced it does not normally deport people "to countries believed to be acting on Cuba's behalf' an apparent reference to Venezuela. He could be allowed to settle in another country without close Cuban links.
It remains to be seen whether the war on terror applies to everyone, even Cuban exiles.
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