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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Of course, the U.S. overtly and covertly supported efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro in the 1960s, including some that might today be considered "terrorism." But since those days, the American government has tried to keep some distance between itself and violent anti-Castro extremists, occasionally prosecuting some of them, and trying to direct their ire into lawful political activism. By most accounts, Bosch has resisted such entreaties, maintaining his ties with terror even while residing in the U.S.
But the State Department flatly denies that Reich helped Bosch. Secretary of State Colin Powell himself told the Senate in October that Reich is getting a bum rap.
"I went over all of his past history," Powell said. "I looked at the documentation. I looked at some of the accusations that were made against him. I note that he has never been charged with anything -- lots of speculation and rumors."
Yet at the end of December, Dodd and Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., wrote to the White House and urged Bush not to make the recess appointment. "Many of our colleagues have quietly supported our efforts to prevent this nomination from moving forward," they wrote. "To appoint an individual who does not have the support of the Senate for such an important post would seriously set back progress that has been made on hemispheric issues."
Reich began his government career in Latin America, as a young U.S. Army officer serving his adopted country in the Panama Canal Zone from 1967 until 1969. During that time, his fellow Cuban exile, the Miami-based Bosch, was involved in a different type of gun-toting operation: terrorism.
According to law enforcement authorities, Bosch and Accion Cubana, the group he founded, were responsible in 1968 for more than 50 bombings in the United States, of foreign ships and freighters headed to Cuba, and businesses sending medical supplies there as well. In October 1968, Bosch was convicted of both conspiring to plant mines on foreign vessels and of standing at the Port of Miami and firing a bazooka at a Cuba-bound Polish freighter. Sentenced to 10 years at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, he was paroled four years later.
Around that time, a renewed round of terrorist activities began against Cuban targets. In testimony before the Senate's internal security subcommittee in 1976, Lt. Thomas Lyons, chief of the anti-terrorist squad in Miami-Dade County, discussed "a small number of individuals whose hatred of Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro and Communism has led them to engage in extralegal actions and to violate the laws of the country which gave them sanctuary." These individuals, Lyons said, "use Dade County as a base for international terrorism." Some of these terrorists, including Bosch, had been trained by the CIA in the 1960s to conduct anti-Castro operations.
Bosch fled the United States in 1974 after he was subpoenaed in the murder investigation of another anti-Castro militant, with whom he'd had a falling out. He hopped around Latin America, working with other anti-Castro terrorist groups and allegedly committing dozens of terrorist acts against Cuban targets, though he was never formally charged with any crime in those years.
Hours after the explosion of Flight 455 in October 1976, authorities arrested Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo, two Venezuelan men who had boarded the plane in Trinidad and checked their baggage to Cuba, but had exited the plane at a stop in Barbados and flown back to Trinidad. Lugo and Ricardo confessed, and their testimony, along with other evidence, implicated Bosch and another man, Luis Posada Carilles. Evidence supposedly implicated Bosch as the mastermind of the attacks.
At the end of October, legal representatives from Barbados, Cuba, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela, met in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to discuss where the anti-Castro terrorists should be tried. The United States on Oct. 15 had asked the authorities in Venezuela, where Bosch was known to have relocated, to put him on a plane to the United States for violating the terms of his 1974 parole. The U.S. was notably not invited to the conference. Castro announced that Cuba was withdrawing from its one agreement with the United States, a February 1973 accord in which Cuba agreed to stop harboring hijackers in exchange for a U.S. promise to keep anti-Castro militants in the United States in check. The United States hadn't kept up its end of the bargain, the dictator charged.
