Orlando Bosch Ávila was a
Cuban exile militant, former
Central Intelligence Agency-backed operative, and head of
Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, which the
FBI has described as
"an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization".
[2] Former U.S. Attorney General
Dick Thornburgh called Bosch an "unrepentant terrorist".
[3] He was accused of taking part in
Operation Condor and several other terrorist attacks, including the 6 October 1976
bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner in which all 73 people on board were killed, including many young members of a Cuban fencing team and five
North Koreans. The bombing is alleged to have been plotted at a 1976 meeting in
Washington, D.C. attended by Bosch,
Luis Posada Carriles, and
DINA agent
Michael Townley. At the same meeting, the assassination of
Chilean former minister
Orlando Letelier is alleged to have been plotted. Orlando Bosch was pardoned in 1990 by President
George H. W. Bush, who in 1976 as head of the CIA had declined an offer by Costa Rica to extradite Bosch.
(18 August 1926 — 27 April 2011)
Background and personal life
Bosch was born on 18 August 1926 in the village of Potrerillo, 150 miles east of
Havana. "Bosch's father was first a policeman in Potrerillo and later a successful restaurant owner in the same village. His mother was a teacher."
[1] In 1946 Bosch enrolled in the
University of Havana medical school, where he first met
Fidel Castro;
[1] Bosch was president of the medical school student body while Castro was head of the law school student body.
[4] After graduating, Bosch moved to
Toledo, Ohio for a
paediatric internship.
[4]
Bosch's first wife, Myriam, was a fellow medical school graduate and moved with him to Miami in July 1960, along with their four children, which soon became five. They divorced ten years later, when Bosch was in prison.
[4] In 1976 he had another child with his second wife, Adriana.
[4] He returned to the United States in 1988, despite being wanted for parole violations, saying "I have a loving wife who resides in the United States and five American children with whom I want to share the last years of my life."
[4]
Career
After meeting Castro at the
University of Havana, Bosch went on to play a part in underground cells that later carried out the
Cuban Revolution of 1959.
[1] Bosch himself did not take part, being forced to flee to
Miami to escape arrest. He returned to Cuba after the Revolution, but rapidly became disillusioned, leaving Cuba in July 1960 after helping to organise a failed anti-Castro rebellion in the Escambray mountains.
[1] In his autobiography, Bosch wrote that he had refused to participate in the 1961
Bay of Pigs Invasion because the US had refused to help the Escambray rebellion.
[1]
Bosch was in contact with the
CIA in 1962 and 1963, as the agency itself admitted, as recorded in the
National Security Archive.
[5] At this time, Bosch was the General Coordinator of the
Movimiento Insurreccional de Recuperacion Revolucionaria (Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recovery, MIRR), which in 1967 became
Poder Cubano (Cuban Power). He was a member of the anti-Castro
Operation 40.
In 1968 Bosch was arrested in
Florida for an attack on a
Polish freighter with a 57 mm
recoilless rifle and was sent to prison for a ten year term.
[6] He served four years before being released on parole in 1972, and fled the country,
[7] leaving on 12 April 1974.
[4] He moved to Venezuela, where later that year "he was arrested and jailed for two weeks by Venezuela authorities after admitting to two bombings of Cuban and Panamanian buildings in Caracas. He was mysteriously released and turned up in Curacao where he told a Cuban exile radio newsman from Miami:
"We will invade the Cuban embassies and will murder the Cuban diplomats and will hijack the Cuban planes until Castro releases some of the political prisoners and begins to deal with us."[7] He told
The Miami News in June 1974 that he was the head of Accion Cubana, and claimed the organization was responsible for a series of bomb attacks on Cuban consulates in Latin America since August 1973.
[8]
Bosch moved to
Santiago, Chile on 3 December 1974, staying in a military house. According to the government of
Augusto Pinochet, Bosch "lived quietly as an artist", while the US government held Bosch responsible for postal bombings of Cuban embassies in four countries. The US also accused Bosch of involvement in the August 1975 attempted assassination of Emilio Aragones, the Cuban ambassador to Argentina, and the September 1976 bombing of the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala City.
[4] After an arrest in
Costa Rica which saw the US decline an offer by the authorities to extradite Bosch to the United States,
[9] he was deported to the
Dominican Republic, where June 1976 saw the founding of the
Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Bosch returned to Venezuela on 23 September 1976, aged 50.
[4]
Flight 455
Bosch entered
Venezuela in mid-September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan president
Carlos Andres Perez, according to the National Security Archive.
[11] A CIA document described a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser in
Caracas, Venezuela, held between 22 September and 5 October 1976, to support Bosch's activities. The informant quoted Bosch as making an offer to Venezuelan officials to forgo acts of violence in the United States when President Carlos Andres Perez visited the
United Nations in November, in return for "a substantial cash contribution to [Bosch's] organization." Bosch was also overheard stating: "Now that our organization has come out of the Letelier job looking good, we are going to try something else." Several days later, Posada was reported to have stated that "we are going to hit a Cuban airplane" and "Orlando has the details." (Both the Bosch and Posada statements were cited in an 18 October 1976 report to Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger posted by the National Security Archive on 17 May 2005.)
On 6 October 1976
Cubana Flight 455 was destroyed after takeoff by the detonation of a bomb that had been placed in the aircraft toilets. All seventy-three people on board were killed, including many young members of a Cuban fencing team and five people from
North Korea.
[citation needed] The bombing would have been plotted at the same meeting, attended by
Luis Posada Carriles and
DINA agent
Michael Townley, where the assasination of the former Chilean minister
Orlando Letelier in
Washington, D.C. in 1976, was decided upon.
[citation needed]
Bosch was arrested in Caracas on 8 October 1976, and held for nearly four years while awaiting trial for his role concerning the Cubana Flight 455 bombing. He was acquitted along with three-codefendants (one of them
Luis Posada Carriles) of these charges in September 1980, with the court finding that the flight had been brought down by a bomb but that there was insufficient evidence to prove the defendants were responsible.
[7] Bosch was convicted of possessing false identification papers, and sentenced to 4 and a half months, set against time already served.
[7] Defending himself, he would later say, infamously, "All of Castro's planes are warplanes." In his 2010 memoirs, Bosch denied having authored the bombing, stating that Fidel Castro had "accused me, without evidence, of being the intellectual author of the sabotage of Flight 455 and many other acts with which I had nothing to do."
[12]
Later career
Miami area law enforcement officials linked Bosch to several dynamite bombings, including a blast in the offices of
Mackey Airlines in 1977, after the airline announced plans to resume flights to Cuba.
[7]
In 1987, almost a decade after the Flight 455 incident, Bosch was freed from Venezuelan charges and went to the United States, assisted by then-U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela
Otto Reich. In the U.S. he was arrested on a parole violation. Bosch was detained in the United States for six months until all charges were dropped and he was able to live in the United States freely after Cuban-Americans pressured
Jeb Bush to have his father intervene on Bosch's behalf.
[13] This release came despite objections by the then President's own defense department that Bosch was one of the most deadly terrorists working "within the hemisphere."
[13] The political pressure to grant Bosch a pardon began during the congressional campaign run by
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, herself a Cuban American.
[14]
A June 2009 edition of the Cuban state newspaper
Granma expressed anger at the lack of criminal charges, stating "months after the administration change in Washington, nothing seems to have changed in the banana republic where the monstrous Orlando Bosch, the pediatrician killer, sleeps peacefully in his bed."
[15]
To see more of who died in 2010 click here
