Former CIA operative and Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles died Wednesday in Miami, Florida, at the age of 90. Posada Carriles is best known as the suspected mastermind of the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airline jet. For decades, the U.S. refused demands by Cuba and Venezuela for Posada Carriles’s extradition to face terrorism charges. This is Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive, speaking about Luis Posada Carriles on Democracy Now! in 2011.
Peter Kornbluh: “While he was in Caracas, in October of 1976, according to CIA and FBI declassified secret documents, he was one of the two masterminds of one of the most heinous acts of international terrorism in the Western Hemisphere before our own 9/11: the bombing of a Cubana flight, mid-air, killing 73 men, women and children on October 6, 1976. He has a long history beyond that. He went on to orchestrate a series of hotel bombings in Cuba in the late 1990s. He was arrested in Panama in November of 2000 with a car full of C-4 explosives and dynamite in an effort to blow up Fidel Castro during a Iberian-American summit. I mean, the list goes on and on and on.”