CIA Was Warned of 1976 Cuba Airline Bomb Plot
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — An anti-Castro militant now in a Texas jail warned the CIA months before the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that fellow exiles were planning such an attack, according to a newly released U.S. government document.
The document shows that Luis Posada Carriles — who had worked for the CIA but was cut off by the agency earlier that year — was secretly telling the CIA that his fellow far-right Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro’s communist government were plotting to bring down a commercial jet.
The document does not say what the CIA did with Posada’s tip. A CIA spokesman said he had no comment on Monday, a federal holiday. The CIA had extensive contacts with anti-Castro militants and trained some of them, but has denied involvement in the bombing.
The documents were posted online Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research institute at George Washington University that seeks to declassify government files through the Freedom of Information Act.
The Cubana Airlines plane, on a flight from Venezuela to Cuba, blew up shortly after taking off from a stopover in Barbados on October 6, 1976, killing all 73 aboard, including Cuba’s Olympic fencing team.
The bombing remains an open wound in Cuba. Weeping relatives of the victims met in a Havana cemetery on Friday, the 30th anniversary of the bombing. They demanded that Posada — who is now 78 and in a Texas detention center on an immigration violation — be put on trial.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is seeking the extradition of Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan who served as the country’s counterintelligence chief. He accuses the U.S. government of protecting a terrorist.
The National Security Archive’s Peter Kornbluh urged the U.S. government to tell everything it knows about Posada.
“Now is the time for the government to come clean on Posada’s covert past and his involvement in international terrorism,” Kornbluh said. “His victims, the public, and the courts have a right to know.”
Separating deception from truth in the intelligence world is notoriously difficult, and the newly released documents contain mixed messages about Posada. Much remains murky.
