Bombing of Cuban Jetliner 30 Years Later National Security Archive ElectronicBriefing Book No. 202 Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Yvette White UNITED STATES , October 5, 2006 - On the 30th anniversary of the first and only mid-air bombing of a civilian airliner in the Western Hemisphere, the National Security Archive today posted on the Web new investigative records that further implicate Luis Posada Carriles in that crime of international terrorism. Among the documents posted is an annotated list of four volumes of still-secret records on Posada's career with the CIA, his acts of violence, and his suspected involvement in the bombing of Cubana flight 455 on October 6, 1976, which took the lives of all 73 people on board, many of them teenagers. The National Security Archive, which has sought the declassification of the Posada files through the Freedom of Information Act, today called on the U.S. government to release all intelligence files on Posada. "Now is the time for the government to come clean on Posada's covert past and his involvement in international terrorism," said Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive's Cuba Documentation Project. "His victims, the public, and the courts have a right to know." Among the documents posted today are four sworn affidavits by police officials in Trinidad and Tobago, who were the first to interrogate the two Venezuelans--Hernan Ricardo Lozano and Freddy Lugo--who were arrested for placing the bomb on flight 455. (Their statements were turned over as evidence to a special investigative commission in Barbados after the crime.) Information derived from the interrogations suggested that the first call the bombers placed after the attack was to the office of Luis Posada's security company ICI, which employed Ricardo. Ricardo claimed to have been a CIA agent (but later retracted that claim). He said that he had been paid $16,000 to sabotage the plane and that Lugo was paid $8,000. The interrogations revealed that a tube of Colgate toothpaste had been used to disguise plastic explosives that were set off with a "pencil-type" detonator on a timer after Ricardo and Lugo got off the plane during a stopover in Barbados. Ricardo "in his own handwriting recorded the steps to be taken before a bomb was placed in an aircraft and how a plastic bomb is detonated," deputy commissioner of police Dennis Elliott Ramdwar testified in his affidavit. The Archive also released three declassified FBI intelligence reports that were sent to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger after the bombing. The updates, classified "secret" and signed by director Clarence Kelly, focused on the relations between the FBI legal attaché in Caracas, Joseph Leo, Posada, and one of the Venezuelans who placed the bomb on the plane, to whom Leo had provided a visa. One report from Kelly, based on the word of an informant in Venezuela, suggested that Posada had attended meetings in Caracas where the plane bombing was planned. The document also quoted an informant as stating that after the plane went into the ocean one of the bombers placed a call to Orlando Bosch, the leading conspirator in the plot, and stated: "a bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed." The first report to Secretary of State Kissinger from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research on the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 details Cuba's allegation that the CIA was involved in the bombing and provides an outline of the suspects' relationship to the U.S. The report notes that a CIA source had overheard Posada prior to the bombing in late September 1976 stating that, "We are going to hit a Cuban airliner." This information was apparently not passed to the CIA until after the plane went down. (This document was originally posted on May 18, 2005.)
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