Luis Carriles

The CIA paid Luis Posada Carriles $300 a month in the 1960s, and the anti-Castro Cuban worked for the CIA at least from 1965 until June 1976, according to documents made public May 10 by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington.

An FBI document from November 3, 1976 quotes an informant as saying Mr. Posada Carriles was in a group that discussed the bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane, in which 73 persons died. And another FBI document from October 7, 1976, a day after the attack, cited an informant as practically admitting that Mr. Posada Carriles and another man, Orlando Bosch, planned the Cubana bombing.

In mid-April, an attorney for Mr. Posada Carriles, a staunch foe of Cuban President Fidel Castro, said that his client was seeking asylum in the United States. However, the United States has denied knowledge of his whereabouts, while Cuba and Venezuela said they want him extradited.

Pres. Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have railed at President George Bush, arguing his “war on terror” is a farce if the United States gives asylum to the fugitive Posada Carriles.

On May 9, State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters in Washington: “In terms of where he presently is, I think it’s fair to say we don’t know.”

“That is a big lie,” Pres. Chavez said May 11 in Brasilia. “One of the biggest terrorists in the world is living in the United States. That is Posada Carriles,” he added. “We have requested his extradition and they should turn him over.”

Caracas has already issued an international arrest warrant for Mr. Posada Carriles, in connection with the bombing of the Cubana jetliner. Venezuelan courts had jailed the chemist, but he escaped while awaiting trial in 1985.

Mr. Posada Carriles, 77, had been convicted in Panama and imprisoned for attempting to kill Pres. Castro at a 2001 summit in Panama. However, Panama’s then-president Mireya Moscoso pardoned him in 2004.

Panamanian prosecutors opened investigations May 11 against the ex-minister of justice and former heads of the police, immigration and prisons for having released Mr. Posada Carriles and three others convicted in the plot.

Cuba has also sought his extradition in connection with other crimes over the past 40 years, including the 1997 bombings of hotels in Havana, one of which killed Italian tourist Fabio de Celmo. He had admitted to plotting those bombings, according to The New York Times, although he later recanted the admission elsewhere.

Mr. Posada Carriles denies involvement in the deadly Cubana downing, according to his lawyer, Eduardo Soto, who has said he slipped into the United States through Mexico and deserves asylum because of his work with the CIA.

The “slip in” would be a security embarrassment to the United States if true, unless he entered with the knowledge of a U.S. authority.

Pres. Castro, in a May 11 address in Havana, called a mass protest march against the U.S. handling of the Posada Carriles case. He has charged U.S. authorities with protecting Mr. Posada Carriles.

“It is a disgrace. They cannot just ignore it. They have 15 intelligence agencies and 180,000 men” working to safeguard U.S. territory from terrorist attacks “and they aren’t even aware of the presence of Posada Carriles? This is a lie to the whole world—an infamy,” Pres. Castro said.

urged the United States, in a May 10 editorial, not to give Mr. Posada Carriles asylum in the interest of a “single standard for terrorists.”

“He should be arrested and extradited for trial, not only for the airliner attack, but also for other terrorist attacks that he has acknowledged planning, including one in 1997 that killed an Italian businessman visiting Havana,” the daily said.