In 30-Year-Old Terror Case, a Test for the U.S.

Venezuelan officials later accused him of masterminding the Cubana bombing, which claimed the lives of 57 Cubans, as well as passengers from Guyana and North Korea. But he escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 while prosecutors were appealing his acquittal in a military trial.

Since then, he has survived a 1990 assassination attempt, which scarred half his face, and has managed to wriggle out of legal trouble while on the run in Central America. He was arrested in 2000 in Panama for allegedly plotting to set off 30 pounds of explosives during a speech by Castro at the University of Panama, but the charges were dropped.

Posada Carriles's attorney has said that his client, who has a heart condition, no longer plans violence against the Castro government.

"The Cuban government is in a very deteriorated condition, inexorably reaching its end, and I sincerely believe that nothing would help to go back to the past with sabotage campaigns," Posada Carriles said in a statement released by his attorney.

U.S. officials see the aging Castro opponent as a more sinister figure. A field officer at the Department of Homeland Security who follows Posada Carriles's case described him as a "present danger to the community" whose "propensity to engage in terrorist activities poses a national security risk to the United States."

All of which makes the actions of the U.S. government in the case puzzling to critics, who say Posada Carriles should be prosecuted or at least confined to prison. Even some Cuba hard-liners in the United States confide privately that the case has turned into an embarrassment for the United States.

"They're just dancing around," Wayne Smith, a former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and vocal critic of the Bush administration's Cuba policies, said of prosecutors. "They have all kinds of evidence against him."

It's clear that the U.S. government would prefer to make Posada Carriles someone else's problem. According to court documents, the Department of Homeland Security failed to persuade seven countries to take him -- Canada, Mexico, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica. The magistrate in Posada Carriles's case said that the Justice Department could have legally held him for a longer period if it had officially certified him as a terrorist, but that prosecutors did not do so.

"The problem is that the American government created him, it taught him, and now it's hard for the government to punish him," Camilo Rojo Alvarez, son of a crew member who died in the 1976 attack, said in an interview.

Much of the evidence against Posada Carriles has been drawn from the U.S. government's own files, including declassified FBI and CIA documents. One declassified CIA intelligence report, citing information from informants, said Posada Carriles attended a $1,000-a-person fundraising and planning dinner for anti-Castro activities in September 1976 along with Orlando Bosch, another prime suspect in the Cubana bombing.

Not long afterward, the report stated, Posada Carriles said, "We are going to hit a Cuban airplane. Orlando has the details."

Bosch was once in a position similar to that of Posada Carriles, and the outcome of his case unnerves Cubans now focused on Posada Carriles. In 1990, the administration of George H.W. Bush released Bosch from prison after he, like Posada Carriles, was caught entering the country illegally. Cuba had been the only country willing to take him, and the U.S. refused to send him to the island.

Bosch, an 80-year-old retired physician who now lives in a Miami suburb, has stopped just short of claiming that his and Posada Carriles's group was responsible for the Cubana bombing.

Earlier this year, he told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia that the Cubana flight was a "legitimate target." And in an Atlantic Monthly interview with "Cuba Confidential" author Ann Louise Bardach that is to be published this week, Bosch said: "We were at war with Castro, and in war, everything is valid."

Declassified documents state that the two men who placed the bomb on the Cubana flight worked for Posada Carriles. After getting off the plane in Barbados, one of the men called his girlfriend, who was also a Posada Carriles employee, and delivered a coded message to report the attack was successful. The message: "The bus was fully loaded with dogs."