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NY Times Reporter Says Former CIA Operative Viewed '97 Bombings in Cuba as 'Heroic'.

UNITED STATES, March 17, 2011.- A reporter who interviewed an ex-CIA agent about masterminding a series of 1997 bombings in Cuba says he viewed those attacks as heroic.

Ann Louise Bardach wrote for the New York Times when she travelled to Aruba in 1998 and interviewed Luis Posada Carriles.

Posada is an anti-Cuban terrorist on trial in Texas for perjury, obstruction and immigration fraud, but not for the attacks in Havana that killed an Italian tourist, or in connection with the downing of a Cuban jet in 1976 that killed 73 people.

Bardach has spent years teaming with Times lawyers to battle subpoenas in the case, saying her testimony will make sources less likely to talk to reporters.

But she was compelled to testify Wednesday, and said that in interviews, Posada described "the heroic nature, in his view" of the Cuba bombings.

In her testimony, Bardach described how she had arranged a meeting with Posada in Aruba after he left a mysterious message on her answering machine while she was researching a series on Cuban exiles for The Times.

Posada was unhappy with how he was portrayed in articles published in The Miami Herald at the time and wanted to shed light from his perspective on “the heroic nature of what he was doing in Cuba with the campaign,” Bardach said, referring to the bombings in Havana.

The lead prosecutor, Timothy J. Reardon, played tape recordings from the interviews — much of which was referred to in the articles in The Times — in which Mr. Posada discussed the bombings with Ms. Bardach at a cafe in Aruba.

Bardach and The Times had initially fought a subpoena seeking her interview tapes as part of a 2007 investigation into whether Posada had received financing for terrorist attacks from Cuban exiles in New Jersey. But a federal judge ruled against the newspaper. That investigation never led to an indictment.

Declassified F.B.I. documents placed Posada at planning meetings for the bombing of the Cubana jet in 1976. He was held in a Venezuelan prison for nine years on charges of conspiring with the bombers and escaped disguised as a priest.

In 2000, Posada was arrested in Panama in connection with a plot to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Later released from prison, before sneaking into the United States on a shrimp boat in 2005 and prosecutors say he lied during subsequent immigration hearings. (Cubaminrex-RHC)