The Washington Post
By Associated Press, Thursday, March 24, 7:17 PM
See article on its original Website
EL PASO, Texas — The U.S. government rested its much-watched perjury case against a former CIA agent from Cuba on Thursday after an 11-week parade of 23 witnesses, and the defense immediately began presenting its version of key events.
Luis Posada Carriles, 83, is an anti-communist militant considered the nemesis of former Cuban President Fidel Castro. He was born on the communist island but now is Public Enemy No.1 there, featured on propaganda billboards.
Posada spent decades working to destabilize leftist governments throughout Latin America and was often supported by Washington . He now faces 11 counts of perjury, obstruction and immigration fraud, however, after sneaking into the U.S. in 2005 and undergoing citizenship hearings in El Paso .
Prosecutors say he lied about how he made it into the country, and about having a false Guatemalan passport. They also accuse him of failing to acknowledge under oath that he masterminded a wave of explosions at some of Cuba ’s finest hotels and Havana ’s iconic Bodeguita del Medio restaurant between April and September 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and wounded about a dozen other people.
Before calling its first witness, the defense asked U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone to acquit Posada on all charges, saying prosecutors failed to provide sufficient evidence for the jury even to consider them.
After three hours of arguments from both sides without jurors present, Cardone said eight counts will stand. But she withheld ruling on three counts pertaining to Posada’s alleged lying about his role in the Cuba bombings, saying she wanted more time to decide.
How much prison time Posada could face if convicted depends on federal sentencing guidelines — but it could be dramatically reduced if Cardone eventually dismisses the three counts she is still mulling.
As part of concluding its case, the prosecution read for jurors a series of stipulated facts that contained new details about Posada’s links to the U.S. government.
The CIA first made contact with him in 1961, before he indirectly participated in the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion. Posada was a paid asset between 1965 and 1967, and then again from 1968 to 1974.
For two years after that, the CIA had intermittent contact with him, but in 1976, Posada signed a secret agreement terminating his agency employment. It is still unclear how much he was paid for his years of service.
During 1976, Posada was arrested in Venezuela for planning the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. He was acquitted by a military court, but escaped from prison while still facing a civilian trial.
Also stipulated was that in 1993, the CIA contacted Posada in Guatemala to warn him that the Cuban government was planning his assassination. The white-haired defendant speaks with a pronounced slur after being shot in the face during an attempt on his life in Guatemala in 1991.
Posada and three others were arrested in Panama in connection with a plot to kill Castro during a summit there in 2000. They were pardoned by Panama ’s president four years later.
The FBI contacted Posada after his release from prison and warned him that Cuban authorities were again planning to kill him. He turned up in the U.S. the following March, prompting the current charges against him.
Once those stipulations were in evidence, assistant U.S. attorney Timothy Reardon said the United States “at least for now, will rest.”
The defense plans to have about 10 witnesses testify. It is attempting to discredit top prosecution witnesses while also presenting its own version of the events in the case.
The prosecution concluded after testimony by Ann Louise Bardach, who was a contract writer for the New York Times in 1998 when she interviewed Posada from Aruba , where he was hiding. She then co-wrote stories saying Posada planned the 1997 Cuba bombings.
The jury heard hours of Bardach’s interview tapes, and she said Posada spoke to the Times because he was angry that the blasts had not gotten enough attention in the U.S. press and wanted to clarify that, while they were meant to scare tourists into not visiting Cuba , no one was supposed to get killed.
Bardach’s testimony was vital to the prosecution, as was that of two other witnesses, Antonio “Tony” Alvarez and Gilberto Abascal.
Alvarez shared an office in Guatemala City with two Posada associates and testified that, after finding bomb-making materials there, he secretly listened to Posada and the two others discussing shipping explosives to Cuba in August 1997 — during the height of the bombing campaign.
Abascal is a paid U.S. government informant who said he was a mechanic on a yacht called the Santrina that sailed to the Mexican resort of Isla Mujeres and picked up Posada in March 2005. He told the jury the ship then went to Miami , where Posada slipped ashore without contacting proper immigration authorities.
Posada has maintained that he paid a people smuggler to drive him through Mexico and into Texas , as he said during the El Paso hearings. He also says he never actually accepted responsibility for planning the 1997 Cuban bombings, and was instead simply detailing the blasts for Bardach as a spokesman for the Cuban-American exile community.
Posada was arrested by U.S. authorities in 2005 and spent about two years in immigration detention before being released in 2007. He has since been living in Miami .
