National Committee to Free the Cuban Five

CIA patented the crimes of Posada and Bosch in Bonao

by Jean-Guy Allard
June 21, 2007
Reprinted from Granma Internacional

ON June 11, 1976, by formally sponsoring the meeting where the CORU was founded, in Bonao, the Dominican Republic, the CIA patented the long series of bloody crimes for which that terrorist organization later claimed responsibility.

Despite all the efforts later made to wash its hands of those crimes, the U.S. spy agency appears everywhere, given that the highly secret meeting included all the elements that characterize it.

The creation of the Coordinating Committee of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) was always attributed to Orlando Bosch, but while it is true that the Miami-based arch-terrorist has taken the reins of that so-called independent organization, the responsibility for its convening falls on the CIA, headed at the time by none other than George Bush Sr.

The location chosen by the agency was the equivalent of one of its typical safe houses. The 20 participants, mostly from the United States, were summoned to a place that was carefully chosen and met all the requirements: a luxurious lodge, set up for the top executives of the Canadian company Falconbridge in a remote location of the Central Range Mountains: the town of Bonao, in Monseñor Nouel province.

There, the U.S. spy authorities had – as a top executive of the company – an agent who was more CIA than its very headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

He was Alexander Vlonsky, a Romanian immigrant who became a U.S. citizen, known at the time under the name of Sacha Volman, who infiltrated the Dominican Revolutionary Party so successfully that, at the time of the U.S. invasion and occupation in 1966, he was an adviser to President Juan Bosch.

VOLMAN, THE CIA’S MAN OF CONFIDENCE

Born in 1924, in Besarabia, Romania, this son of a landowner ferociously hostile to the Soviet presence in that territory at the end of World War II, became active in anti-communist groups, and later was recruited as a collaborator, first with the British Royal Air Force, and then by U.S. military intelligence.

They say about this individual that he was short in stature, with black hair and eyes, and that he could speak eight languages, sometimes with such a strong Romanian accent that he was barely understandable.

After a visit to the United States, he appeared in Costa Rica in the 1950s as an executive with the Institute of Political Education and the International Institute of Labor Relations, two organizations later clearly identified with the CIA by former U.S. spies.

There, he met the political leader Juan Bosch, an exile from the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo dictatorship. Bosch subsequently invited him to join in his party’s campaigns and move to the Dominican Republic. After Bosch became president, Volman became his advisor, offering his supposed advantage of having numerous “contacts” in the United States.

The mysterious individual became a successful member of “good society” in the Dominican Republic, marrying Dominique Bludhorn of the United States, heiress of the U.S. magnate Richard Bludhorn.

When the U.S. invasion of June 15, 1965 occurred — 44,000 U.S. soldiers took over the country to “prevent another Cuba” — agent Volman continued to stick to Bosch, and did so until his final defeat in the 1966 elections.

In 1970, after acting as advisor to other important Dominican leaders, Volman became, under CIA instructions, the special advisor on labor relations for the Dominican affiliate of the complacent Canadian company Falconbridge, a transnational corporation that sought to protect, with its modest contributions to espionage, the nickel mines it was exploiting in Bonao in central Dominican Republic.

He was the key CIA agent whose mission on June 11, 1976 was to host and coordinate those meetings at the Falconbridge mining company’s exclusive lodge in the mountains.

WHERE DID THE BONAO PLOT COME FROM?

General Manuel Contreras (ret), former head of the Chilean national intelligence agency (DINA), recounted in a report while in prison how he traveled to the United States in August 1975 and had various “working meetings” with General Vernon Walters, deputy director of the CIA and George Bush’s right-hand man.

In the course of these meetings, Walters said he was “very interested” in Contreras visiting the political police (DISIP) headquarters in Caracas, where the seven highest officials were Cubans working for the CIA. One of them was Luis Posada Carriles, who was heading that agency’s general security division.

According to Contreras, these Cuban CIA agents in the DISIP, including Ricardo “El Mono” Navarrete, participated 10 months later in the Bonao meeting.

Logically, the other participants in the meeting, sponsored by agent Volman, also had links of collaboration with the agency.

In addition to Orlando Bosch, the psychopathic terrorist with the organization Poder Cubano, the mastermind of a veritable bombardment of devastating attacks within the United States itself, and who came out of the meeting as CORU coordinator, the meeting also included Frank Castro, director of Gulf and Western, a fake company created by the CIA in Miami.

Recruited and trained in Fort Jackson after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Eulalio Francisco Castro Paz (alias Frank Castro) was already a buddy of Rafael “Chi Chi” Quintero, a notorious, recently-deceased CIA agent, and of CIA agent Felix Rodríguez Mendigutía, who ordered Che Guevara’s execution in Bolivia. In Bonao, Frank Castro represented his own terrorist organization, the so-called Cuban National Liberation Front (FNLC).

Others there included another notorious CIA agent, Armando López Estrada. This former henchman under the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship had been recruited by the CIA after the Bay of Pigs and was already known for his participation in many different activities promoted by the agency.

Another controversial Cuban American is Felipe Rivero Díaz, a likewise Bay of Pigs “veteran,” who led the Movimiento Nacionalista Cubano, a terrorist group featuring murderers like brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll, Dionisio “Pool of Blood” Suárez Esquivel, Virgilio Paz, Alvin Ross and Eduardo Arocena.

The Novo brothers, “Pool of Blood” and Paz all participated — in one way or another — in the assassination of Orlando Letelier, by supporting U.S. CIA-DINA agent Michael Townley.

In Bonao, Rivero was accompanied by Guillermo Novo, whose long career as a terrorist would land him in a Panamanian prison in 2000, along with Posada, after an assassination attempt against the Cuban president. And by “Pool of Blood,” who later participated in Letelier’s assassination.

Townley also traveled to Bonao and participated in the conspiracy. The CIA’s man in the Chilean DINA had been in contact with the Cuban Americans since the now-notorious trip by Orlando Bosch and his hired killers to Santiago de Chile in 1974.

In an article titled “The CIA’s Dope-Smuggling ‘Freedom Fighters,’ published in December 1998, Professor Jerry Meldon of Tufts University, a journalist and researcher, notes how the Bonao meeting also included leaders of Alpha 66, created in 1962 by the CIA, and a former president of the Bay of Pigs “veterans” association, Roberto Carballo Diaz.

Two further individuals with the CIA “stain” who participated in the Bonao meeting were Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo and Aldo Vera Serafín. On August 3, 1975, Jiménez was involved with Vera in an attempt to kidnap Emilio Aragonés, Cuba’s ambassador in Argentina. That same year, Jiménez was part of a failed plot to assassinate President Fidel Castro during his first visit to Jamaica.

Another CIA man was Vera Serafín, who accompanied Michael Townley when the latter traveled to Chile to join the special services of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.

In acknowledgements he made before his own assassination this year in Puerto Rico, Vera himself affirmed that three mysterious “unknown men” were also present at the Bonao meeting. Everything points to the suspicion that they were Langley agents assigned to the case.

Crystal clear. In Bonao, the CIA patented what would later become a devastating chain of terrorist attacks propagated by individuals who have benefited, for more than 30 years, from that agency’s complete protection.