Plot to assassinate Castro leaked

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer

A Cuban exile implicated in several terror attacks was plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro during the Cuban president's visit to the Dominican Republic next week, three Miami exiles and two U.S. law enforcement officials say.

Luis Posada Carriles, a lifelong anti-Castro militant, and three Miami exiles who met with him at the Holiday Inn in Guatemala City last month discussed how to smuggle guns and explosives into Santo Domingo, the exiles said.

A Herald report in November identified Posada as the mastermind of a dozen bombings of Havana tourist centers last summer that killed one Italian visitor. A second Herald report in June linked him to other plots in Guatemala, Colombia and Honduras.

In the most recent conspiracy, Cuban exiles in the Dominican capital had begun gathering information about Castro's movements and stood ready to help house and transport a ``hit team that was to arrive at the last minute, exile sources and law enforcement officials said.

The hit was to have occurred between Aug. 20 and 25, when the Cuban president is scheduled to attend a summit of Caribbean leaders in Santo Domingo.

``The plan was to kill him any way we could -- explosives on the road, grenades in a meeting, shots on the street. We would have strangled him if we had to, said an exile involved in the plot.

But Posada's plot was betrayed to U.S. authorities.

FBI agents last month searched a shipping complex owned by Enrique Bassas, identified by three exiles as one of the militants who met with Posada in Guatemala City to discuss the assassination plot. The search was triggered by an informant's tip that guns and explosives for anti-Castro activities were hidden aboard a boat there.

A week earlier, the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic had issued an unusually public warning about possible terrorist threats against airliners flying between Santo Domingo and Cuba.

Dominican security officials immediately went on alert and ``urged'' two Cuban exiles living there, both close friends of Posada, to leave the country during Castro's visit, said two Miami exiles with intimate knowledge of the plot.

`Someone betrayed us'

``It's all over, a dejected plotter told The Herald. ``Someone betrayed us. Now it's a matter of waiting for the FBI to forget about this. But be assured that we or someone else will try again.

Rumors of Posada's gambit began trickling out among Miami's militant exile community almost from the day in April that Santo Domingo announced the Castro visit.

Cuban exiles have dogged Castro's foreign travels for decades in attempts to kill him. Exile hit teams shadowed him in Spain in 1992 and Colombia in 1994, and allegedly planned another approach in the Venezuelan island of Margarita last year.

Posada, 71, portrayed the Dominican plot as the best shot yet at Castro because local security was likely to be porous and he could easily smuggle in explosives and weapons from neighboring Haiti, the exiles said.

But the trickle of rumors turned into a gusher after a New York Times article July 12 quoted Posada as saying that the late exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa had ``personally supervised the financing of his terror attacks.

Posada later disavowed his statements. But some Miami militants, angry with Posada, began speaking almost openly about his Dominican plot.

By coincidence, on July 12, Posada had just finished a string of meetings with three Miami militants in Guatemala City to discuss smuggling weapons into the Dominican Republic, said two exiles with direct knowledge of the talks.

Three identified

The exiles identified them as Bassas, Ramon Font and Luis Orlando Rodriguez. Holiday Inn records seen by The Herald show that the three were registered there July 10-12, and that their tabs were all paid by Rodriguez.

Bassas, 50, the wealthy owner of several homes for the elderly, was one of the founders of the Miami Medical Team, a group of exile medical personnel that aided anti-Communist guerrillas in Nicaragua and Angola in the 1980s.

Font, 76, is a CIA-trained explosives expert, lifelong anti-Castro militant and a former military commander of Comando L, a paramilitary group that claimed responsibility for several attacks on Cuba as recently as 1993.

Rodriguez was described as being about 50, a Vietnam veteran and Miami resident, but he could not be identified because at least three militant exiles have that same name.

Font told The Herald he knew nothing about any plot. Bassas said he did not want to make any comment. The Herald could not contact Posada or Rodriguez for comment.

Shipping complex searched

FBI agents ran into Bassas when they searched a shipping complex on the Miami River on July 24.

An affidavit filed in support of the search warrant said an informant had tipped the FBI that guns and explosives for anti-Castro activities were hidden aboard a boat there. But the affidavit made no mention of Bassas.

Bassas turned out to be the owner of part of the docking facilities and of Bassas Cargo International, a firm that handles cargo for the wooden Haitian freighters that dock on the Miami River.

Bomb-sniffing dogs found nothing, and Bassas was not detained. But police seized a wooden boat of the type common among Cuban shrimpers in Miami except for one thing: a new racing motor estimated to cost about $20,000.

Law enforcement veterans saw the search as an FBI hint to Bassas to cancel any conspiracies. That's a common practice in South Florida, they said, known as ``admonishing'' or ``demobilizing'' an operation.
Who leaked plot?

Just who leaked Posada's plot to U.S. law enforcement agents remains a mystery, although law enforcement and exile veterans of the anti-Castro struggle offer three possibilities: