Ricardo Morales Navarrete

Ricardo Morales Navarrete, called El Mono, gave his birth as Havana, June 14, 1939, in his 1981 deposition. In 1968 he helped Orlando Bosch with instruction in bombs "and then suddenly surfaced in court as an FBI informant and as the chief witness against the baby doctor, who went to jail." By 1976 he was a comisario of DISIP, the Venezuelan security police, in charge of Section D-54, its counterintelligence section, under the code name Comisario Moises.¹²

Caracas

On September 8, 1976, he, Luis Posada Carriles, and Orlando García Vásquez met Bosch at Maiquetía airport and dined with him that night. Morales lived at the Anauco Hilton. In late October he told Detective Raúl Díaz of the Dade County organized crime bureau, who had come to persuade him to testify at the trial of Rolando Otero, that the bombing of the Cubana airliner had been discussed at the hotel bar by Frank Castro, Gustavo Castillo, Posada, and himself, and again in his apartment, and that after the second meeting he "had nothing more to do with this matter." "Some people in the Venezuelan government are involved in this airplane bombing," he said, "and if Posada Carriles talks, then Morales Navarrete and others in the Venezuelan government will 'go down the tube.'" He passed on Bosch's claim that Orlando Letelier's death "was the result of an agreement between Guillermo Novo and the Patria y Libertad organization," and named Castillo's group, "Youth of the Star," for four Miami bombings of 1975. After the strategy meeting of October 15 he signed the DISIP arrest warrant for Bosch and went with the party that escorted him to prison. On October 27 the government announced that there was no Morales in DISIP. He telephoned a friend in Miami and told her not to call, since "he does not exist." In January 1977 he was replaced by Mario Jiménez Rojo.²³⁴

Miami

An FBI source reported in December 1977 that Morales, back in Miami, was the go-between for Frank Castro and Rafael Villaverde in negotiations over the release of Bosch and Posada until the two fell out, and that he was seeking explosives to retaliate for attacks on Venezuelan interests. In January 1978 he was linked by an informant to the young CORU cell of Alvin Ross and Raciel Rodríguez. When the writer Taylor Branch tried to reach Bosch in Venezuela in 1976, "at five o'clock in the morning, Branch had been dragged out of bed and thrown out of the country by none other than Ricardo Morales." His deposition in Dade County criminal case 81-17247 ran to nine volumes. He was shot dead in a bar in Key Biscayne on December 20, 1982.¹⁴⁵