Flight 455[edit]
“ You have to fight violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people. ”
—Orlando Bosch, 1979 statement while jailed in Venezuela [10]
Bosch entered Venezuela in mid-September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez, according to the National Security Archive.[11] A CIA document described a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser in Caracas, Venezuela, held between 22 September and 5 October 1976, to support Bosch's activities. The informant quoted Bosch as making an offer to Venezuelan officials to forgo acts of violence in the United States when President Carlos Andrés Pérez visited the United Nations in November, in return for "a substantial cash contribution to [Bosch's] organization." Bosch was also overheard stating: "Now that our organization has come out of the Letelier job looking good, we are going to try something else." Several days later, Posada was reported to have stated that "we are going to hit a Cuban airplane" and "Orlando has the details." (Both the Bosch and Posada statements were cited in an 18 October 1976 report to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger posted by the National Security Archive on 17 May 2005.)
On 6 October 1976 Cubana Flight 455 was destroyed after takeoff by the detonation of a bomb that had been placed in the aircraft toilets. All seventy-three people on board were killed, including many young members of a Cuban fencing team and five people from North Korea.[citation needed] The bombing would have been plotted at the same meeting, attended by Luis Posada Carriles and DINA agent Michael Townley, where the assassination of the former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. in 1976, was decided upon.[citation needed]
Bosch was arrested in Caracas on 8 October 1976, and held for nearly four years while awaiting trial for his role concerning the Cubana Flight 455 bombing. He was acquitted along with three co-defendants (one of them Luis Posada Carriles) of these charges in September 1980, with the court finding that the flight had been brought down by a bomb but that there was insufficient evidence to prove the defendants were responsible.[7] Bosch was convicted of possessing false identification papers, and sentenced to 4 and a half months, set against time already served.[7] Defending himself, he would later say, infamously, "All of Castro's planes are warplanes."
When asked if he was responsible for the Cubana Flight 455 bombing in an interview for the 2006 documentary 638 Ways to Kill Castro, Bosch responded, "I'm supposed to say no", and then described the justification for such attacks as being because there existed a state of war between Castro and his opponents.[12] In his 2010 memoirs, Bosch denied having authored the bombing, stating that Castro had "accused me, without evidence, of being the intellectual author of the sabotage of Flight 455 and many other acts with which I had nothing to do."[13]
Later career[edit]
Miami area law enforcement officials linked Bosch to several dynamite bombings, including a blast in the offices of Mackey Airlines in 1977, after the airline announced plans to resume flights to Cuba.[7]
Orlando Bosch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
