U.S. probe is based on Cuban data

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer

Cuba on Thursday accused the Cuban American National Foundation and one of its top members of being the driving forces behind a string of terror bombings in Havana and an alleged attempt to kill President Fidel Castro.

Havana's allegations were passed on to the FBI several months ago and form part of the background for a U.S. grand jury in Puerto Rico that has been investigating several other reputed conspiracies by Miami-based exiles, U.S. officials said.

Cuba's Interior Ministry made the charges public Thursday in a lengthy report detailing a secret three-year duel between Cuban security forces and bombers sent from abroad by Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles.

The report identified Posada's key financier as Arnaldo Monzon Plasencia, a rich clothing manufacturer and retailer who owns homes in New Jersey and Miami-Dade and has been a member of CANF's 28-member executive board.

It also charged that CANF as a group had directly supported the terror bombings, but gave only a hazy description of that involvement.

CANF spokeswoman Ninoska Perez denied any foundation involvement in the terror attacks and dismissed the report as ``just another circus of the Cuban government. The Herald tried unsuccessfully to reach Monzon at his New Jersey office and his Bal Harbour condo.

In a cryptic comment at the end of its report, Havana said Cuban ``organs,'' a euphemism for state security agencies, ``have shared this information with specialized services of other countries.''

Knowledgeable U.S. officials said that was a reference to the FBI, whose Puerto Rico office is continuing to work with a federal grand jury that indicted seven Cuban exiles in a plot to kill Fidel Castro in Venezuela last year.

The grand jury has been considering fresh indictments against Cuban exiles in the United States in at least two anti-Castro plots in addition to the Venezuela case, the officials added.

The Venezuela case ``led us to a string of other plots that appear to have been financed from the same pot of money,'' said one law enforcement agent who has testified before the grand jury. ``We're still working on those.''

Cuba's report, which takes up four typed, single-spaced pages, said security agents have arrested and will soon bring to trial five suspects who ``participated in terrorist actions . . . and were members of a network, based in Central America, directed and financed by the terrorist organization CANF.

Three are Guatemalans arrested in March who identified Monzon, Posada and another ``man from New Jersey as ``leaders and financiers of their plot to smuggle explosives into Cuba, the report added.

Monzon and Posada have been friends since their childhood in Cuba, according to exiles who know both men. But the two grew especially close around 1995, soon after Monzon, who has been battling prostate cancer for years, began closing or selling some of his enterprises.

Nicknamed ``The Jeweler and now in his early 60s, Monzon once owned several clothing factories in New Jersey and a string of some 40 retail shops under the name of Arnolds, friends and other exiles said.

Big donor

He helped found CANF's New Jersey branch and remains one of the biggest donors to the anti-Castro lobby's campaigns, the sources added. Perez said he joined CANF around 1990, but the Cuban report said he joined in 1980.

Perez added that Monzon ``is a businessman, not a terrorist, and added that the Castro government had picked on a scapegoat after CANF founder Jorge Mas Canosa died last year.

``This is the same pattern we have endured from the Cuban government for the last 17 years, she said. ``In the absence of Jorge Mas Canosa, they have to come up with other names.

Havana's report alleged that Monzon began in 1995 to ``channel significant resources into recruiting foreign criminals for a campaign of terror bombs against the Cuban tourism industry, its single largest source of hard currency.

Monzon ``organized, supplied and financed the first attempted bombing in a Varadero beach resort hotel in March 1995, the report said. It said the bomb was dismantled and police captured two Cuban exiles who had returned to the island with false Costa Rican passports, Santos Armando Martinez Rueda and Jorge Enrique Ramirez.

The next bomber was Francisco Chavez, 26, a Salvadoran car thief and armed robber who placed two bombs in ``tourist installations in April 1997, the report said. That appears to be a reference to a bomb that exploded and another found intact that month in Havana's luxury Melia Cohiba Hotel.

Chavez also may have been responsible for the May 25, 1997, bombing of a Cuban tourism agency in Mexico City because ``available information shows he was in the Mexican capital May 22-25, the report added.

A Posada agent

The Herald identified Chavez last November as a Posada agent who recruited another Salvadoran, Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, 27, seized in Havana Sept. 4, 1997, on charges of detonating six other bombs around Havana in 1997.

Posada, a CIA-trained explosives expert, has lived in semi-hiding, mostly in El Salvador, since he escaped from a Venezuelan jail in 1985 while awaiting trial in the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people.

Posada pressed on with his bombing campaign in March of this year when he sent two Guatemalans to Cuba with one pound of explosives in bottles of shampoo and deodorant, and the makings for four bombs, the Cuban report said.

Maria Elena Gonzalez Meza, 54, and Nader Kamal Musalam Barakat, 28, were arrested when they landed in Havana on a flight from Guatemala. Gonzalez's husband, Jazid Ivan Fernandez, 28, was arrested two weeks later when he flew to Cuba to find out what had happened to her, the Cuban report said.

Havana's report indicates that it was the Guatemalans, rather than the Salvadorans, who gave Havana security agents the bulk of the information implicating Monzon.

``The three jailed Guatemalans . . . admit the participation of Chavez in the operation and identified the leaders and financiers as CANF Director Arnaldo Monzon, Posada, and ``a man from New Jersey, the report said.

Another Salvadoran

A third Salvadoran, Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, 40, a security guard and former army explosives expert during the 1980s, was responsible for a bomb that exploded Aug. 4, 1997, in the Melia Cohiba hotel, the report said.

Rodriguez got away but was arrested in Havana when he returned in June of this year on a flight from Guatemala carrying 3.3 pounds of plastic explosives and two detonating caps, the Cuban report added.

Rodriguez has now confessed that Posada offered to pay him to smuggle bombs into Cuba, set them off ``in hotels and museums and cause panic among foreign tourists, the report said.

Each of the mercenaries was offered $1,400 to $1,500 per bomb, plus the expenses of flying into Cuba and staying at tourist hotels, the report said. It did not say how much money was actually paid.

Cuba claimed to have obtained signed confessions from two of the Guatemalans ``in which they give details of the role played by Posada Carriles and Monzon Plasencia in the organization and preparation of these events.

Careful wording

Although the Cuban report repeatedly blamed CANF as an organization for the terror campaign, the wording of its specific allegations against the group appeared to have been carefully chosen:

``Since its beginning . . . CANF has provided financial and other resources that allow different terrorist organizations to carry out activities aimed at stimulating internal subversion in Cuba and destabilizing the country through violence.

``From 1994, the foundation's hierarchy began to recruit people . . . to send them to countries in Central America, with the goal of increasing the number of people hostile to Cuba and using them as a base of support for the violent actions, it added.

``It has been conclusively proven that [Monzon] was assigned by CANF to direct the actions from El Salvador and Guatemala, and was involved in prior acts of a violent nature against Cuba, the report said.

Havana's report noted that in August 1997, in the middle of the Havana bombing campaign, CANF issued a statement supporting the attacks as a legitimate tool of the Cuban people for attacking the Castro government.

The report noted that a second member of CANF's executive board, Jose Antonio Llama, was among the seven exiles indicted in Puerto Rico in a plot to kill Castro during a Latin American summit meeting in Venezuela last year.

Llama owns the yacht Esperanza, intercepted off Puerto Rico by the U.S. Coast Guard in October 1997 after one of the four Cuban exiles on board, Angel Alfonso, 58, of Union City, N.J., blurted out that they were on their way to Venezuela to kill Castro.

FBI agents from Puerto Rico have been in Guatemala twice in recent months as part of a continuing investigation by the same federal grand jury that indicted the seven exiles, U.S. officials said.

Alfonso was a longtime employee and personal aide to Monzon, said one of Monzon's nieces and an employee of one his remaining stores in Union City. Cuban exile sources say Alfonso and another Cuban exile visited Posada last summer in Guatemala City.

The Herald reported in May that Posada had used an office in Guatemala City in the fall of 1997 to experiment with the possibilities of smuggling gel-like high explosives in shampoo bottles and adult diapers.

The Cuban report pointed out that one of the two high-powered sniper rifles found hidden aboard the Esperanza had been purchased in 1994 by CANF President Francisco ``Pepe Hernandez.

Investigation continues

Lawyers for Hernandez told reporters in August that they expected he would be indicted in the Puerto Rico case within a matter of days. Hernandez was not indicted, but prosecutors in Puerto Rico have said the grand jury investigation is continuing. Herald staff writer Maria A. Morales contributed to this report.