Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile militant and Central Intelligence Agent, died at the age of 90 on Wednesday. He has been accused of committing numerous atrocities in the United States’ name—and on the CIA’s dime—throughout Central America and the Caribbean. Among his alleged crimes was his intimately involvement with the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane in which 73 people where killed, including the entire Cuban fencing team.
Posada fled Cuba soon after Castro came to power in 1959 and was among the exiles trained for the Bay of Pigs invasion, but the CIA-backed operation fell apart before Posada’s plane could take off. He was later accused of organizing a string of bombings in Havana that killed an Italian tourist and wounded 12 people. The New York Times writes in 1998 that Posada took credit for the Havana bombings, before later recanting. In 2009, when asked by the AP about the Times interview and the bombings, Posada said he didn’t hear or understand the Times’ questions, then stopped, laughed and shrugged.
Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project, told the New York Times that Posada “was an international terrorist of the first order.” He went on to say that the “CIA created and unleashed a Frankenstein.”
In 2004, Posada was convicted and jailed in Panama for his role in a failed assassination attempt on Castro. He was pardoned in 2005.
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