Born in Cuba in , he fled the island after the communist revolution which brought Fidel Castro to power. After serving in the US army, he was recruited by the CIA in and is reported to have worked for the agency until All 73 people on board were killed when bombs exploded on the jet off the coast of Barbados - including the entire Cuban youth fencing team, which was returning from a regional competition. At the time of the bombing, Mr Posada Carriles was living in Venezuela, where according to declassified US intelligence files he was working as an informant in Venezuela's intelligence service.
An international investigation pointed to Mr Posada Carriles as being the mastermind of the Cubana airlines bombing but a military court acquitted him. However, he was jailed pending a civilian trial but escaped from prison in and travelled to Central America, where he continued his mission to fight against left-wing influence in Latin America.
Throughout his career, he gained many enemies and in , gunmen shot him in the chest and face in Guatemala.
He survived the attack, which is believed to have been carried out by Cuban government agents. In the following years he was accused of planning a string of bombings in Cuban hotels which killed an Italian tourist, and was arrested for taking part in a conspiracy to kill Fidel Castro during a summit in Panama in He spent four years in a Panamanian jail before being pardoned by then-President Mireya Moscoso.
In , he entered the US illegally and applied for political asylum. His application came back to haunt him when he was accused of lying to immigration officers about how he got into the US. He was acquitted in and spent the remaining years of his life in the US.
US court acquits Cuban militant. To many older exiles, Posada was a freedom fighter who did what was necessary to attempt to overthrow a dictatorship. Posada always publicly denied involvement in the bombing of the bombing of a Cuban airliner that had taken off from Barbados, the deadliest in-flight explosion until the Pan Am flight bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. But in a New York Times interview, he took credit for the Havana bombings, which killed an Italian tourist, before later recanting.
Posada enjoyed an official and sometimes tumultuous relationship with the CIA until Yet throughout his years living in Latin America, he retained at least some contact with U. He fled to Mexico and eventually the U. Other members of his family, including his brother and sister, remained in Cuba and he continued to send them money throughout his life through friends and other emissaries. Several years after arriving in the U. The lived apart for much of their marriage, but in his later years, Posada boasted that Nieves still did his laundry.
Through that experience, he became lifelong friends with the late Cuban exile and political kingmaker Jorge Mas Canosa, a reported benefactor and with whom he graduated from the U.
Posada claimed on a number of occasions Mas Canosa helped support him financially. The agency has refused to declassify many documents related to Posada, but official summaries of those documents released to the Archive, show U. He was running his own security firm in Venezuela by the time he was accused of coordinating the bombing of the Cuban airliner that exploded over the Caribbean shortly after taking off from Barbados.
Posada was arrested when two men who worked for his small firm confessed to planting the bombs. Posada — who still had strong ties to the then-Venezuelan government — was acquitted by a military court.
He later escaped from jail dressed as a priest while awaiting a second trial in a civilian court. He made his way to El Salvador, where he helped the Reagan administration and U. Army Col. Posada flew beneath the radar for years — moving to Guatemala, where he survived a assassination attempt that left his face and body bullet-scarred and permanently damaged his speech.
Then in , he was convicted in Panama in connection with a failed assassination attempt against Castro.
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