Jeb Bush interfered with FBI murder investigation while in Caracas by Wayne Madsen

 Jeb Bush interfered with FBI murder investigation while in Caracas

by Wayne Madsen
Knowledgeable FBI sources have told WMR that while Jeb Bush was the vice president for Texas Commerce Bank's operations in Caracas, Venezuela from 1977 to 1979, he provided the Central Intelligence Agency with high-level interference against an FBI investigation of two right-wing Cuban exile leaders for their roles in the September 21, 1976 terrorist car bombing in Washington, DC. The car bomb killed former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American adviser Roni Moffitt on Sheridan Circle in broad daylight.

WMR previously reported, for the first time, that Jeb Bush received a top-level security and operational briefing from the CIA in 1977, prior to his two-year stint in Caracas in a job that is normally reflective of a CIA non-official cover (NOC) posting. 

When the FBI sought to interview Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile who ran a private investigative CIA front company in Caracas called Company of Commercial and Industrial Research CA, a front for CIA anti-Cuba terrorist activities in the region, and his colleague Orlando Bosch, Bush pressed the government of President Carlos Andres Perez and Venezuela's intelligence agency, DISIP, to provide interference against the FBI's wish to interview both Cubans. Although the CIA, at the time, was headed by President Jimmy Carter's friend and Annapolis classmate Admiral Stansfield Turner, George H. W. Bush, the previous CIA director, counted many loyalists among the CIA ranks, who symied the FBI's investigation of Carriles and Bosch. Eventually, the FBI did manage to collect enough evidence to have three Cuban-Americans in the employment of the Chilean intelligence service DINA and the CIA -- Alvin Ross Díaz and two brothers, Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll, indicted for the murders of Letelier and Bosch. The FBI was also investigating Carriles and Bosch for ordering the bombing of Cubana flight 455, which was blown up by two time bombs on October 6, 1976, after taking off from Bridgetown, Barbados.


Jeb Bush thanking CIA security director for his 1977 pre-Caracas intelligence briefing. Jeb's tasking in Caracas included covering up the 1976 murders of Orlando Letelier and Roni Moffitt and running interference for the CIA is stymieing the FBI's investigation of two Caracas-based Cuban CIA agents.

A U.S. CIA agent, Michael Townley, the son of John Vernon Townley, a veteran CIA agent in Chile and Venezuela, was found guilty of placing the car bomb that killed Letelier and Moffitt. However, after his 62 month prison sentence, Townley was released into the Federal Witness Protection Program. The three Cuban-Americans found guilty later saw their convictions overturned on a technicality and they were released into the Cuban-American community of Miami-Dade where Jeb Bush has received much of his political support over the years. Another wanted fugitive in the murder of Letelier and Moffitt, Virgilio Paz Romero, was captured in 1991 in Boynton Beach, Florida where he lived under an assumed name. He was given a 12 year prison sentence after pleading guilty but was paroled after just six years.


Wanted for accessory to murder: One-time CIA NOC agent Jeb Bush.

After blocking the FBI's probe of the CIA's Cuban exile CORU (Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations) operations in Caracas in the 1976 car bombing in Washington and the downing of the Cubana airliner, both accomplished with the knowledge and support of then-CIA director George H W Bush, Jeb started up his various businesses in Miami with the assistance of the city's wealthy Cuban-American elite. However, Jeb Bush's political career in Florida was built on the graves of Letelier, Moffitt, and the passengers and crew of Cubana flight 455.

There are open homicide cases against the Cuban murderers of Letelier, Moffitt, and the 73 passengers and crew of Cubana flight 455 before Argentine, Chilean, Venezuelan, and Spanish courts. Jeb Bush faces potential extradition to all four countries to answer questions under oath about his participation in the cover-up of CIA assassination squads operating out of Caracas in the late 1970s.

Will U.S. finally pay reparations for its act of terrorism? by Wayne Madsen

Will U.S. finally pay reparations for its act of terrorism?

by Wayne Madsen
For the people of Cuba, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela, October 6, 1976 will always be remembered as the day international terrorism paid a deadly call on the Caribbean region. It was on that day that a Cubana airlines DC-8 aircraft was blown out of the sky by a bomb placed on the aircraft by right-wing Cuban exiles. The bombing of the plane, Cubana flight 455, which had just departed from Seawell Airport in Barbados and was en route to Jamaica, killed 73 people, including children. The chief terrorist technician was Luis Posada Carriles, however, the mastermind was the then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, one George H. W. Bush. Carriles lives today a free man in Miami where he supports a number of right-wing Cubano groups, all of which are closely linked to GOP 2016 presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.

Carriles and three other Cuban exiles, Freddy Lugo, Hernán Ricardo Lozan, and Orlando Bosch, were arrested in Venezuela for bombing the plane. Bosch was acquitted and he moved to Miami where he lived until his death in 2011. Lugo and Lozan received 20 year sentences in Venezuela and Posada Carriles was jailed for eight years prior to his escaping to Florida before his final sentencing hearing. Carriles carried out his acts of terrorism in the Caribbean region from his base in Caracas, where he operated a security company called Investigaciones Comerciales y Industriales C.A. (ICICA). In addition to the CIA, Carriles worked closely with Miami- and Las Vegas-based Jewish mobster Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal.

1976 saw the CIA under then-director George H. W. Bush carry out a number of terrorist acts against Cuba and companies and countries that did business with Havana. Bush's Cuban associates also bombed the offices of British West Indies Airlines in Bridgetown, Barbados, the Guyanese embassy in Port of Spain, Trinidad; the Air Panama office in Colombia, the Iberia office in Costa Rica, and the Venezuelan mission to the UN in New York. They also committed an arson attack on Cuban-supplied fishing equipment in Guyana and assassinated Cuban officials in Mexico and Argentina. Carriles, Bosch, and their associates also planned to bomb Cuban ships in Mexican ports. They actually helped to carry out bombings of a number of hotels in Cuba in 1997, one of which killed an Italian tourist, and were behind the September 21, 1976, car bombing in Washington, DC that killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt.

The role of the CIA in the Cubana 455 bombing is detailed in both the confession of Lugo to Dennis Randwar, the Trinidad and Tobago deputy police commissioner, and declassified U.S. Justice Department documents. For years, as governor of Florida and as a "private businessman" linked to CIA drug smuggling and money laundering, Jeb Bush, who arrived in Caracas in a year after the Cubana bombing for a two-year stint as a vice president for the CIA-linked Texas Commerce Bank, protected Posada Carriles and Bosch from answering for their acts of terrorism. During the Iran-contra scandal, Posada Carriles and Bosch assisted Vice President Bush's illegal contra supply operation in Central America.


Just as with the 9/11 attacks, for which there were prior warnings, the U.S. took no action to prevent a terrorist attack on a civilian airliner in 1976. And just as with 9/11, the Bush family was up to their eyeballs in both acts of aviation terrorism.


The above FBI memo indicates that the "IC" (U.S. Intelligence Community") was well aware that Posada Carriles and Bosch, both friends of Jeb Bush, "engineered the bombing of the airplane." Jeb Bush later defended both terrorists after they took up permanent residence in Miami.



FBI admits that it maintained contact with Posada Carriles as late as June 1976, well after he had been involved in carrying out terrorist bombings and began planning the bombing of Cubana 455.


Confession to the Trinidad and Tobago police by Ricardo Lozan, Posada Carriles's associate, that he was a member of the CIA. At the time, George H. W. Bush was CIA director and he would have undoubtedly authorized the bombing of Cubana 455.

As the U.S. continues to normalize its relations with Cuba, Posada Carriles, Jeb Bush, George H. W. Bush, and their murderous associates should be required to make an final accounting for their crimes, especially those of 1976, the year the CIA proved that it was never brought under control after the Watergate scandal. Rubio, the son of right-wing Cuban immigrants, has proven by his close and unapologetic association with the terrorist elements that largely make up Florida's Cuban exile community that he requisite "good citizen" credentials -- respect for the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, and a traditional appreciation for the popular "commonwealth" -- to serve as President of the United States, let alone a U.S. senator.

Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and Venezuela should also require the U.S. to pay full reparations for its repeated acts of terrorism and the costs involved in conducting official investigations of those heinous acts.