Luis Posada Carriles sat back and relaxed in the plush Biscayne Bay apartment rented for him by his friends Rafy and Chaffy. His pals and fellow members of GAS (Geezers Assassination Society) had gone through several ordeals together, plotting unsuccessfully, but with great pleasure, to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro with guns, bombs and poison.
Other Posada supporters and GAS members in Miami had offered to supply him with a young woman who would “help revive youth.” Posada allegedly replied to their offer by telling the old joke about the man who sends his father a present for his 80th birthday. A gorgeous young woman knocks on Papa’s door and announces: “Hi, cutie pie, I’m your birthday present. I’m here to give you super sex.” The old man squints through his thick glasses and replies: “I think I’ll take their soup.”
Posada’s friends agreed that a young woman should be sent anyway and they would all “see what developed.”
As they sipped their Cuba Libres -- made with Bacardi rum, not Havana Club -- they reminisced. In 1985, Posada recounted his “escape” from a Venezuelan jail. “Mas Canosa,” he told his chuckling friends, referring to the former leader of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) “worked with Ollie North [Lt. Col. Oliver North of Iran-Contra infamy, was a National Security Council staff member] and got me a job in El Salvador. He paid me $3,000 a month, not bad for those days, living in El Salvador. I had enough for good rum, a classy puta and some extra for a decent suit and hat,” he recalled.
The men asked the scantily clad young woman to refill their drinks. “Felix [Felix Rodriguez of the CIA had trained with Posada and Mas at Fort Benning after the Bay of Pigs failure] hugged me when I arrived. It was a riot, using money they got from dealing drugs to buy arms and send them to the Contras.” [This reference is backed by entries from North’s diary, published by Senator John Kerry: July 12, 1985, “$14 millions to finance [arms] Supermarket came from drugs.” August 9, 1985: “Honduran DC-9 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.” CIA drug dealing appears in 250 diary entries.]
“I laugh when I read the statements that Bush and the others make about terrorism and morality. Our job was always the same. Get rid of the Commies or anyone else that stood in the way of life as it used to be in the good old days.” The men toasted and drank.
Posada knew that he had lived an exciting life. He talked about his youth in Cienfuegos, Cuba, how he had briefly studied medicine and chemistry at the University of Havana, and later worked for the Cuban branch of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.
“I met Fidel,” he told his buddies. We were students and we both saw that politics is violence. But Fidel was so righteous, thinking he could take on Washington, the Mafia and making honest profits in business. He took all the fun out of life.” They drank a toast to the good old days.
“You know who trained me?” he inquired of no one. Before the [April 1961] Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA taught me sabotage and explosives at the School of the Americas. They put me on Nino Diaz’s ship that was supposedly designed to lure Castro’s forces away from the invasion site. But I was trained to be like the Waffen SS in World War II, to clean up the Castroites village after village once the invading battalion had won. Few people know about this.” He sighed.
By early evening, the GASSERS had begun to feel the rum and told the young woman she could go home, so they could talk more freely. She said she had been paid for the whole evening and didn’t understand what they were talking about anyway.
Posada put her on his lap and told her about the late 1960s and early 1970s when he was operations chief of Venezuela’s secret police. “I had fun with the Venezuelan Fidelistas,” he laughed. “The few that left my office wouldn’t forget me.” [He had built a reputation as a master torturer, one who truly liked his work].
“Those were good days,” he announced. He had to leave that job when Carlos Andres Perez became president. He opened a detective agency, supposedly to catch shoplifters at supermarkets.
“I always told my CIA pals what I was doing and they helped me with information and other things I might need, if you know what I mean.” They laughed, thinking of the C 4 plastic explosives hidden in a toothpaste tube on the Cuban airliner that exploded over Barbados in October 1976.
“But Fidel had friends in the police force in Caracas. I was surprised when they raided my detective office right after the airplane bombing. I should have gotten rid of the documents I had about security at Cuban embassies and airline offices and all those schedules and route maps for their planes in the Caribbean. I even recognized some of my old pals in the raid. They said they were sorry, but orders came down from above. Fidel is one clever son of a bitch, getting his agents to organize a raid under the auspices of the Caracas police.”
As night fell the men became somber. Posada recalled how after the heady days of the Contra supply mission, North helped get him a job as a security advisor to the Guatemalan government.
“You know,” he slurred, “I was working on a new plot to get Fidel. This was in February 1990. I was sitting in my car and some guy pulls up beside me and lets me have one right in the face. I still can’t talk right and my cheek still hurts. My buddy Mas Canosa paid for the surgeon and hospital, but the wound still hurts.”
The others offered sympathy. “Look at the injustice. I sat in jail in Venezuela. I got shot. I got arrested and sat in jail in El Paso fucking Texas last year and part of this one and I never laid a glove on Fidel,” he complained.
“I did scare people from going to Cuba as tourists,” he boasted. While I was still leaking puss from my cheek, I organized more than 41 bombings in Cuba. That’s something.” Chaffy put on “Quimbo Quimbumbia” Celia Cruz sang. Tito Puente played. “I thought we had them on the run in 1997,” Posada reminisced, “when that stupid Italian tourist got killed and a dozen people got wounded and that dopey Raúl Cruz León admitted he did it and I hired him.” A tear dripped from his eye. Sadness or the cheek wound?
As the music played, the young woman slipped off his lap and onto the rug behind a chair where no one noticed her. Posada changed the conversation to Panama, November 2000, when police arrested him with 200 pounds of explosives and said he was planning to use them to kill Castro, who was visiting Panama. “I worked with three great guys.” [referring to Gaspar Jiménez, Pedro Remón and Guillermo Novo, all GASSERS who had won their stripes through failed attempts to kill Castro. But they had killed others.]
After his sixth rum and coke, Posada announced: “I don’t hate Bush. After all, he helped me get out of jail in Panama when they paid past President of Panama Mireya Moscoso all that money.” He meant the alleged bribe of $3 million she received in August 2004 before she pardoned Posada and the other three convicted assassins. She denied any U.S. pressure and scoffed at the idea that money deposited in her foreign account had anything to do with the pardon. Strong rumors in Miami had Florida governor Jeb Bush playing a key role in the deal.
“You know what disillusioned me?” he asked his pals rhetorically. “When I came here in April 2005, and asked for political asylum, they didn’t just give it to me.”
His pals agreed. “But,” said Posada, “I think Bush will do the right thing. You notice no one has charged me with the airliner bombing or the Cuba hotel bombings or the assassination plots? You know what kind of courage that takes from a man who has sworn that he who harbors a terrorist is as guilty as the terrorist?”
The men didn’t notice the young woman turn off her mini tape recorder and quietly leave the apartment.
