Orlando Bosch Ávila (18 August 1926 – 27 April 2011) was a Cuban exile militant, who headed the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), described by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation as a terrorist organization. Born in Cuba, Bosch attended medical school at the University of Havana, where he befriended Fidel Castro. He worked as a doctor in Santa Clara Province in the 1950s, but moved to Miami in 1960 after he stopped supporting the Cuban Revolution.
Between 1961 and 1968 Bosch was arrested several times in the United States for attacks directed at the Cuban government, and briefly collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency. He was jailed in Florida in 1968 for a bazooka attack on a Polish freighter, but violated parole and fled to Venezuela in 1974 at the invitation of fellow exile militant Luis Posada Carriles. Arrested for a bombing, he was released in exchange for surrendering his munitions, and moved to Chile. The U.S. government considered him to have been involved in multiple bombings while there. In 1976 he was arrested for an assassination attempt in Costa Rica; the U.S. declined an extradition offer, and he was sent to the Dominican Republic.
Bosch founded CORU in 1976 along with Posada and other Cuban exiles. The group was responsible for a number of attacks in 1976, including the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. as a part of Operation Condor. CORU is also considered to be responsible for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455, a Cuban civilian airliner, on 6 October 1976 in which all 73 people on board were killed. Bosch, Posada, and two others were arrested and tried for the bombing in Venezuela. Posada escaped from prison, while Bosch was acquitted by a Venezuelan military court in 1986. The other two men, both employees of Posada, were sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Upon his return to the U.S. in 1988, Bosch was arrested for parole violations. The Justice Department, which considered him a terrorist, sought to deport him. He was allowed to stay, and later granted residency, by U.S. President George H. W. Bush after a widespread lobbying campaign that included Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the president's son Jeb Bush. In his later years Bosch raised money to support resistance to the Cuban government, and died in Miami aged 84. He remains a controversial figure, with former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh describing him as an "unreformed terrorist".
Personal life Orlando Bosch Ávila was born on 18 August 1926 in the village of Potrerillo, east of Havana. His mother was a school teacher, and his father owned a restaurant. In 1946 Bosch enrolled in the University of Havana medical school, where he befriended the future Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Bosch was president of the medical school student body while Castro was head of the law school student body. Castro was only five days younger than Bosch. Bosch would later state that the two were close friends who frequently smoked cigars together. While they were students, both men worked against the government of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. According to a classmate of his, Bosch's fiery temperament earned him the nickname "Piro", meaning pyromaniac.
After graduating, Bosch moved to Toledo, Ohio for a paediatric internship, beginning in 1952. He then returned to Cuba to work as a doctor in Santa Clara Province. His activities included vaccinating children against polio. He also covertly organized for Castro's guerilla war against the Batista government. In 1960, however, less than one-and-a-half years after Castro overthrew Batista, Bosch stopped supporting the Cuban Revolution, and moved to Miami with his wife Myriam, a fellow medical school graduate. They took their four children with them, and soon had another child. The couple divorced ten years later, when Bosch was in prison. Bosch began working for a hospital in Coral Gables, Florida, where he held the position of assistant director.
While in Chile in the early 1970s, Bosch met Adriana Delgado, whom he married in February 1975. Adriana, his second wife, was 20 years younger than him. In 1976, the couple had a daughter. Bosch would return to the United States in 1988, despite being wanted for parole violations, saying "I have a loving wife who resides in the United States and five American children with whom I want to share the last years of my life." He died in 2011 aged 84 in a hospital in the suburbs of Miami.
Career Bosch had left Cuba in July 1960 after helping to organize a failed anti-Castro rebellion in the Escambray Mountains, and continued participating in anti-Castro activities after moving to Miami. Bosch helped organize the Movimiento Insurreccional de Recuperacion Revolucionaria (Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recovery, MIRR), which conducted attacks on factories and sugar mills in Cuba, and claimed to be responsible for 11 bombing attacks against government property. From January to November 1962, and again in November 1963, Bosch was in contact with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). On the first occasion, Bosch was intended to help plan infiltration efforts into Cuba, and obtained supplies and safe houses for the team; on the second, Bosch sought funding for airstrikes against Cuba, which the CIA refused. A CIA memorandum from 1976 described Bosch as "General Coordinator" of the MIRR at the time of his contact with the CIA. In 1963 Bosch published the pamphlet The Tragedy of Cuba, wherein he argued that President Kennedy had betrayed the exiles.
Arrests in Florida and Venezuela
Bosch was soon fired from his job for keeping explosives on the hospital property, and was arrested several times for his involvement in a series of plots. The first of these was in 1964, when he was caught towing a radio-operated torpedo through rush-hour traffic. The next year, Bosch and five others were charged with smuggling bombs out of the U.S., after a raid by police on a house close to Orlando. In April 1966 a police roadblock found Bosch transporting bombs made with dynamite; he told them he was taking them to a "secret base where there was a boat we could use to bomb Castro." In December of the same year, he was charged with extortion. According to a report by the United States Department of Justice, Bosch was involved with 30 incidents of terrorism between 1960 and 1968.
Bosch was not convicted for his activities until 1968, when he launched an attack on a Polish freighter. Standing on a bridge over Biscayne Bay, he fired a shell at the ship from a 57 mm homemade bazooka. Bosch was also charged with sending telegrams to the governments of Britain and Mexico, threatening to destroy ships from those countries. During his defense, Bosch stated that he believed the ship was headed to Cuba. Bosch was sentenced to ten years in prison; delivering the judgement, the judge stated that Bosch had "long professed the use of violence to achieve his aims in flagrant disregard of the laws of the United States". In the trial, the government described Bosch as a member of the terrorist organization Cuban Power, that claimed responsibility for "dozens of bombings and assassination attempts". Eight others, all described as members of the same group, were also convicted. Among those testifying against Bosch was FBI informant Ricardo Morales.
Bosch served four years of his sentence before being released on parole in 1972. Claude Kirk, then the Governor of Florida, was among those who advocated for Bosch to receive early parole. In June 1974 he told The Miami News that he was the head of a group called Accion Cubana, and that the organization was responsible for a series of bomb attacks on Cuban consulates in Latin America since August 1973. On 12 April 1974, he violated parole and fled to Venezuela, shortly after he was served a subpoena in a case involving a murder. He had been invited to Venezuela by Luis Posada Carriles, another Cuban exile militant who was then serving as the head of DISIP, the Venezuelan intelligence service. The same year, Bosch detonated bombs at a cultural center and at the Panamanian embassy in Caracas, in both cases just before representatives of the Cuban government were supposed to be there. The date of the attack, 12 October, was Cuba's independence day. He was released in exchange for surrendering his arsenal, and was seen soon after in Curaçao, where he said to a newsman, also a Cuban exile: "We will invade the Cuban embassies and will murder the Cuban diplomats and will hijack the Cuban planes until Castro releases some of the political prisoners and begins to deal with us."
Bosch moved to the Chilean city of Santiago, where the government of Augusto Pinochet provided a safe haven to Bosch and other anti-communists. According to a memo sent to the U.S. by the Chilean government, he arrived on 3 December 1974, going by the alias Pedro Pena. He stayed in a military safe house, and "lived quietly as an artist". While the Cuban government stated that Bosch did not conduct anti-Castro activities while in Chile, the U.S. government found him responsible for postal bombings of Cuban embassies in Lima, Madrid, Ottawa, and Buenos Aires. The U.S. also accused Bosch of involvement in the August 1975 attempted assassination of Emilio Aragones, the Cuban ambassador to Argentina, and the September 1976 bombing of the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala City. In February 1976, he was arrested by the police in Costa Rica, where he was traveling under a fake Chilean passport using the alias Hector Avanzo. After his arrest, the U.S. media reported that he had been involved in a plot to kill Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State. The arrest resulted from Bosch's former and future colleague Posada passing information about Bosch's intentions to the CIA. When questioned, Bosch stated that his target was Andrés Pascal Allende, nephew of previous Chilean President Salvador Allende. The Costa Rican authorities offered to extradite him to the U.S., but the U.S. declined.
CORU and Flight 455
Bosch was deported to the Dominican Republic, where he founded the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), along with Posada, Gaspar Jiménez, and other Cuban exiles. The group, led by Bosch, first met in the Dominican Republic town of Bonao in June 1976, and laid plans for more than 50 bombings over the next year. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) described CORU as "an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization." CORU was responsible for a number of attacks in 1976. These included a machine gun attack on the Cuban embassy in Bogotá, the assassination of a Cuban official in Mérida, the kidnapping of two Cuban embassy employees in Buenos Aires, the bombing of a Cubana airlines office in Panama City, the bombing of the Guyanese embassy in Port of Spain, and the assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, a staunch critic of the Pinochet government, in Washington, D.C. Subsequently, declassified documents showed that Letelier's assassination, part of a series that occurred during Operation Condor, was directly ordered by Pinochet. Michael Townley, an agent of Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the Chilean secret Police, was also involved in the killing.