DISIP

The Dirección de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención (DISIP) was the political police and intelligence service of Venezuela, created on March 19, 1969, under the government of Rafael Caldera.¹

Origins

With the end of the dictatorship of the 1950s, the Seguridad Nacional, the last integrated national police force, was dissolved, and the new police apparatus separated the investigation of crime from the security of the state. Criminal investigation went to the Cuerpo Técnico de Policía Judicial. State security went to the Dirección General de Policía (DIGEPOL), created in 1959 to hear "crimes against public order and the security of the nation." Under Caldera's policy of pacification, which brought guerrilla leaders back into legal politics, DIGEPOL, which "for ten years had been the protagonist of grave episodes in the struggle against the guerrillas," was replaced by the new DISIP. The new service was assigned "a preventive function with regard to intelligence and counterintelligence work, and repressive functions with regard to the order and security of the nation."¹

Luis Posada Carriles

Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile who had joined the CIA's Brigade 2506 in 1961, was recruited by the CIA while in the United States military between 1963 and 1965 and trained in demolitions. A CIA file search of June 1966 stated that he had "been of operational interest to this Agency since April 1965."² A CIA Personal Record Questionnaire compiled on April 17, 1972, when Posada was a high-level official of DISIP in charge of demolitions, recorded reports that he had taken CIA explosives equipment to Venezuela and had ties to a Miami mafia figure, Lefty Rosenthal, and listed "Bambi Carriles" among his aliases.³

After the bombing of Cubana Flight 455, the CIA told the FBI that it "had a relationship with one person whose name has been mentioned in connection with the reported bombing." The uncensored retransmission of that trace report described Posada as "a former agent of CIA," briefly terminated in the summer of 1967, reinstated that autumn, and kept on as an asset while a high-level DISIP official until 1974, with "occasional contact with him" continuing until June 1976.² According to still-classified CIA documents cited in a later file review, the Agency assigned Posada the cryptonym AMCLEVE-15 in 1965, gave him "a new crypt CIFENCE-4" in 1972, and later referred to him as WKSCARLET-3, by then as an informant based in DISIP.⁴

The 1976 Leadership

In 1976 DISIP was directed by Orlando García Vásquez, a Cuban exile. According to the journalists John Dinges and Saul Landau, his deputy was Rafael Rivas Vásquez and Posada was chief of operations, and "all had received CIA training."⁵ Ricardo Morales Navarrete, a Cuban exile and FBI informant, worked for DISIP in Caracas; according to Taylor Branch and Eugene Propper, he headed Section D-54, its counterintelligence section, under the code name Comisario Moises.⁶⁷

Cubana Flight 455

On June 22, 1976, a CIA report titled "Possible Plans of Cuban Exile Extremists to Blow Up a Cubana Airliner" circulated advance intelligence of a plot against a Cubana aircraft. A CIA source later reported having heard Posada say, in late September 1976, "We are going to hit a Cuban airliner," and "Orlando has the details"; the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research relayed the remark to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a memorandum of October 18, 1976. The source was described in the CIA report as "a former Venezuelan government official" who "is usually a reliable reporter." The FBI's attaché in Caracas had multiple contacts with one of the two Venezuelans who placed the bomb and gave him a visa to the United States five days before the bombing.⁴⁸⁹

On October 6, 1976, Cubana Flight 455 exploded after takeoff from Barbados, killing all 73 people aboard. The two Venezuelans arrested in Barbados, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano, who traveled as José Vázquez García, both worked for Posada's private security firm in Caracas. On October 7, an FBI report from Venezuela recorded that a confidential source "all but admitted that Posada and Bosch had engineered the bombing of the airline"; the passage that appears to describe DISIP arranging for Bosch and Posada to leave Caracas is censored in the released copy.¹⁰

On November 2, 1976, the FBI reported the account of a source who had spoken with Morales. Morales described two meetings at which the bombing was planned, one at the Hotel Anauco Hilton in Caracas and another in his own room at the Hilton, both attended by Posada. He said "some people in the Venezuelan government are involved in this airplane bombing, and that if Posada Carriles talks, then Morales Navarrete and others in the Venezuelan government will 'go down the tube,'" and "if people start talking 'we'll have our own Watergate.'" He also said that after the plane went down, one of the men who had placed the bomb called Bosch and reported, "A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed."⁷ A Venezuelan judge issued arrest warrants for Posada, Bosch, Lugo and Ricardo; the FBI reported them on November 3.¹¹

CORU

An FBI report of January 24, 1977, on the exile umbrella group CORU, which had been founded at a meeting in Santo Domingo on June 11, 1976, attributed to García, "then head of the Venezuelan intelligence service, DISIP," orders for attacks meant to divert attention from the prosecution of Bosch and Posada in Caracas. García later lived in Miami.¹² An FBI overview of CORU dated August 16, 1978, described how Bosch had been met in Caracas on September 8, 1976, by Posada and other exiles, and a deal struck on what activities he could organize on Venezuelan soil.¹³

Posada escaped from prison in Venezuela in September 1985 and went to El Salvador, where, as "Ramon Medina," he worked under Felix Rodriguez on the contra resupply operation run by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council.²