3.3 KiB
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| Extremism & Violent Networks |
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Cuban exile pediatrician trained by the CIA in 1960 who turned to bombing, lived under the protection of Pinochet's Chile, founded CORU in 1976, and was named that October in the Cubana airliner bombing. | Miami, Florida | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-21 |
Orlando Bosch was a Cuban pediatrician, trained in Toledo, Ohio, who fought briefly against Fulgencio Batista in the Escambray and then left Cuba. "In 1960 the Central Intelligence Agency had placed him and his followers in the Everglades for training." After the Bay of Pigs Invasion he denounced the agency. "We have a right to work for Cuba here or anywhere in the world," he said in 1966. "If the CIA breaks the laws, and Kennedy broke the laws, why can't we do the same?"1
Miami and Caracas
In the summer of 1967 federal officers caught Bosch and his men firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in Miami harbor. He served four years and was paroled in 1972. His next organization, Cuban Action, set out to raise ten million dollars, three of them for the killing of Fidel Castro. Arrested in Caracas in November 1974 and linked to two bombings, he was offered to the United States, which "declined Venezuela's offer to expel him to serve the rest of his sentence." The Venezuelan secret police, DISIP, was then headed by his friend Orlando Garcia, with Rafael Rivas Vasquez as deputy and Luis Posada Carriles as chief of operations. "All had received CIA training."1
Chile
In December 1974 Bosch entered Chile with Guillermo Novo and Jose Dionisio Suarez of the Cuban Nationalist Movement, who had come "to pay homage to Pinochet." He lived there for more than a year, and was reported to have met General Augusto Pinochet. In February 1976 he was arrested in Costa Rica on "a false Chilean official passport in the name of Hector Davanzo Cintolesi," with a mission to kill Andres Pascal Allende of the Chilean Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria. That June he and Frank Castro brought some twenty men to Bonao in the Dominican Republic and formed the Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations, CORU. "We were conspiring there. Planning bombings and killings," he told an interviewer from prison. "Everything was planned there."1
October 1976
Two Venezuelans arrested after the bombing of a Cubana Flight 455 off Barbados on October 6, 1976, "named Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carrilles as part of the conspiracy," and DISIP arrested both. On October 11 the Department of Justice asked Venezuela to make Bosch available for questioning in the murder of Orlando Letelier, committed three weeks earlier by DINA with members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement. Cuban exiles had complained that Chile gave haven to Bosch and Rolando Otero, "both fugitives from the FBI, only to betray them."1
Footnotes
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Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 9, 148, 246-250, quoting Bosch's interview with Blake Fleetwood, New Times, May 13, 1977. ↩︎