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Revelations by The Washington Post
The Posada file, destroyed by the son of Héctor
Pesquera
BY
JEAN-GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma International—
THE order to destroy Luis Posada
Carriles’ file, kept under lock and key in the FBI’s
evidence room in Miami, was given by its agent Ed
Pesquera, the son of Héctor Pesquera, the former
chief of the FBI in South Florida who arrested the
Five.
The information was revealed this
Sunday in The Washington Post by Ann Louise
Bardach, the U.S. journalist who, some years ago,
published an interview with Posada in which he
confessed his links with the Cuban American National
Foundation.
In an article entitled “Why the
FBI Is Coming After Me,” the reporter recounts how
Homeland Security agents turned up at her home while
she was absent with a warrant to revise the
documents she possessed relating to the terrorist’s
case. Alerted to what was occurring, Bardach advised
the investigators to speak to lawyers at the
newspaper, who immediately intervened in the case.
The reporter had already revealed
during an interview with Amy Goodman on her radio
show “Democracy Now!” how the file had suddenly been
thrown into the paper shredder “in 2003.” This time,
she prints additional details in which she specifies
that the destruction of the dossier, which brings
together a variety of original documents, took place
in August of that year. The date is important:
Posada was at that time in Panama, where the
district attorney tried to obtain documents from
U.S. authorities that certified his criminal past.
Although they were forced to
cooperate fully in this way with the Panamanian
judicial system, in virtue of an agreement signed
between the two countries, the U.S. embassy in
Panama only handed over photocopies of obsolete
declassified reports on the case.
Among the documents that were
destroyed in Miami was a fax that Posada had sent to
certain accomplices located in Guatemala in 1997,
complaining that the U.S. media was reluctant to
believe reports about the attacks he was planning to
carry out in Havana.
“I had shown him a copy of that
fax during my interviews with him,” revealed
Bardach, recalling her meeting with Posada on the
Caribbean island of Aruba. “The fax had been
intercepted by Antonio Álvarez, a Cuban exile and
businessman, who shared office space with Posada in
Guatemala in 1997. Alarmed, Alvarez had advised
agents at the FBI’s office in Miami, but when they
took no action, he sent it to the (New York)
Times.”
In his fax, Posada asked his
interlocutors for “all the information about (the
bombing of) the discotheque in order to try to
confirm it.” He then signed the name “Solo,” another
one of his nicknames.
"ED PESQUERA, SON OF HÉCTOR"
Bardach reminds her readers how –
according to her sources - Héctor Pesquera, then
chief of the FBI’s office in Miami, showed little
interest in the Posada case.
“He enjoyed socializing with
Miami's hard-line exile politicians, and denied
agents’ requests for wiretaps on Bosch, known as the
godfather of the paramilitary groups, as well as
other militants suspected of ongoing criminal
activity.”
According to agents, reveals
The Washington Post article, Pesquera “shuttered
investigations” into Cuban-American terrorists
before retiring in December 2003.
Héctor Pesquera is the same FBI
agent from Miami who, in September 1998, brought
about the arrest of the five anti-terrorist fighters
who were falsely accused of “espionage” and
sentenced to exceptionally long jail sentences after
a trial which the same investigator and mafia
accomplice made sure was rigged.
Bardach then indicated that FBI
spokeswoman Judy Orihuela confirmed to her
that “the approval to dispose of
the evidence was given by the case agent on Posada,
who happened to be Ed Pesquera -- Hector's son.”
THE “POLITICAL” OFFICIALS DECIDE
In her article, the journalist
comments that “The FBI and
the Justice Department are filled with dedicated
public servants, but it is the political appointees
who make the final decisions. And for them, Posada
may be a man who knows too much.”
Other “thorny” details appear in
this case, confesses Bardach. “The
Miami-Dade Police Department's liaison to the FBI's
Joint Terrorism Task Force has been a well-regarded
detective named Luis Crespo Jr. -- who is the son of
Luis Crespo, one of the most famous anti-Castro
militants, known as El Gancho, or The Hook, because
of the hand he lost to an ill-timed bomb.”
She then reveals that one of
Crespo’s assistants is Detective Héctor Alfonso,
whose father is another anti-Cuba terrorist by the
name of Héctor Fabián. “Assigned
to the MDPD intelligence unit, Alfonso's son has
access to the most sensitive information on homeland
defense, including on Cuban exile militants.”
“Before the government starts
tampering with the Constitution's protections of the
press, it needs to do some housecleaning,” concludes
Bardach. “A good start would be a special prosecutor
to look into who ordered the removal of the Posada
evidence, and why. If it then decides that it wants
to go further, it might peruse the 45 years' worth
of CIA and FBI files on Posada that detail his
paramilitary career. And there are a dozen or so
comrades of Posada's in Miami and New Jersey who
know a great deal more than I do,” writes the
reporter.
Besides showing that, although
informed by Álvarez, the FBI did not act when Posada
led the attacks on Havana and that he sabotaged
legitimate events by the Panamanian judicial system
to incriminate him and his accomplices in Miami, the
revelations by Ann Louise Bardach published in
The Washington Post confirm the direct link
between the Posada case and the arrest of the Five.
By persecuting the Cubans who had
infiltrated terrorist groups, Héctor Pesquera gave
cover and protection to his friends in the terrorist
mafia who were financing and directing Posada, such
as has been confessed by the terrorist himself and
also recent statements by Antonio “Toñin” Llama.
More than ever before, with these
revelations from the influential Washington daily,
the innocence of the five Cubans imprisoned in the
United States, whose liberation has been demanded by
a panel of UN jurists, remains proven.
(Translated by Granma International)
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