A formal agreement between DINA and CORU was made in November 1975. Michael Townley was selected as liaison between the groups.

In July 1976 Cuban terrorists and Michael Townley met in Bonao in the Dominican Republic at the executive lodge of the Falcondo Mining Company to plan joint ventures: both the Cubana bombing and the Letelier killing. Sacha Volman, the veteran CIA agent, and Cuban exile Frank Castro, another CIA man working with Gulf and Western, hosted the meeting. Volman had been a key CIA-labor operative in the Dominican Republic under David Phillips.

In 1977, Ambassador George Landau entered the case as a principal and revealed the circumstances of the Paraguayan passports. The false names and photographs of the two men had been lost by the CIA. Now, after Landau remembered them, they reappeared. "Juan Williams Rose" would later be identified by Chileans as Michael Vernon Townley, and the Department of Justice had no choice but to call the Cuban exiles identified in Penthouse before a grand jury. But it was too late to call Aldo Vera.

Researchers working on this book have learned that, by October 1976, only days after Letelier was murdered, the FBI was pressing Aldo Vera for information and that Vera was co-operating. Vera had been expelled from Accion Cubana in June 1976-according to FBI documents newly discovered-because of his informant activity. On October 25, 1976, he was murdered in San Juan. He and Townley had started out together in the SAO and P y L. Then Vera had helped to set up Cruz in France. Now he was dead, and Townley and his wife feared for their lives.

Eulalio Francisco "Frank" Castro is one bad hombre. Although he is a well-known terrorist and drug smuggler, his rap sheet shows only one conviction-for carrying a weapon in Miami in 1981. That same year, he was charged with four counts of importing, delivering and selling marijuana. The case was later dismissed.

Then, in 1983, he was indicted for conspiracy and smuggling 425,000 pounds of marijuana into Beaumont, Texas, as a spin off of the Drug Enforcement Administration's "Operation Grouper." (Some of the Grouper targets' drug money was laundered through Marvin Warner's ComBanks in Florida.) These charges against Frank Castro were also dropped, in June 1984.

From July 1983 to January 1984 - the same time period in which he was under indictment for drug smuggling - Castro was providing food, equipment and weapons for a secret military training camp for Nicaraguan Contras in the Everglades near Naples, Florida. Castro told FBI agents that he provided food, ammunition and an M-14 rifle to the camp. He would go to the camp almost weekly to take supplies, Castro told the FBI.

Castro also traveled to Costa Rica and met with John Hull and a Contra leader. "Castro went to Costa Rica in order to assist [Rene] Corvo and the Cubans fighting there," said an FBI report. Castro tried to tell the FBI agents that John Hull "does not work for the Central Intelligence Agency but funnels information to them."

That statement is laughable. John Hull not only worked directly for the CIA, he worked for Rob Owen, who was a gofer for Oliver North, who was a cutout for the CIA. More important, according to the CIA's official pronouncements, its primary work is the funneling of information. Perhaps Castro didn't realize that stated purpose when he has worked for the CIA. Perhaps he perceived its work to be the elimination of foreign politicians it doesn't like.

A Cuban exile, Frank Castro was a member of the famous Brigade 2506 that participated in the CIA-supported Bay of Pigs invasion to oust Fidel Castro. The head of the National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, Frank Castro was also a top dog in CORU, an alliance of anti-Fidel Castro Cuban terrorist organizations that was connected to and partly financed by Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya. Castro, who owned the Golden Falcon Skydiving Club in the Florida Everglades, shuttles between Miami and the Dominican Republic, where he is lives with his wife, the daughter of an admiral close to the president of the republic.'

"Frank Castro is a very dangerous individual. He's CIA trained," according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Cassidy, who prosecuted some of Castro's associates involved in drug smuggling and control of a bank.

In the mid 1970s when Castro's compadres Orlando Bosch and Rolando Otero were going around blowing up all sorts of things, like post offices and passenger airliners, Castro told the Miami Herald, "I believe that the United States has betrayed freedom fighters around the world. They trained us to fight, brainwashed us how to fight and now they put Cuban exiles in jail for what they had been taught to do in the early years."

The CIA-trained Cuban exile Frank Castro, a significant figure in the Costa Rican-based Southern Front, has received scant mention by any of the official congressional investigations of the Contras, including the Kerry subcommittee's. Yet he brought together the intelligence, terrorist, and criminal forces in the Contra movement.

A veteran of the CIA's abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, Castro later trained at Fort Jackson to continue the war against communism. He then joined the guerrilla camp of Manuel Artime, political head of the Bay of Pigs operation, in Central America.' With CIA support, Artime's group attacked Cuban economic targets, including sugar mills and freighters. From these efforts, it was only a small step to outright terrorism. As head of the Cuban National Liberation Front, Castro became one of the most militant of the exile terrorists. In 1976, he helped found a new terrorist front uniting the most extreme organizations. Known as CORU, it unleashed a wave of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations throughout the Americas in the late 1970s.

Castro also apparently began another line of work on the side: trafficking in drugs. According to federal prosecutors, he joined some of the biggest cocaine and marijuana rings of the mid- and late 1970s. Castro was indicted for smuggling more than a million pounds of marijuana into the United States.

Despite - or because of - Castro's narcoterrorist record, he found a significant role with the Contra movement in Costa Rica, with the knowledge of the National Security Council and the approval of the CIA station chief, Joseph Fernandez. Oliver North's personal representative on the scene, Robert Owen, reported back to Washington in November 1984 that "several sources are now saying [Southern Front Contra leader Eden] Pastora is going to be bankrolled by former Bay of Pigs veteran Frank Castro, who is heavily into drugs. It was Castro who gave Pastora the new DC-3 and has promised the planes. The word has it Pastora is going to be given $200,000 a month by Castro."Less than a year later, Owen told his boss that the CIA's Fernandez believed Castro and his fellow Cubans "can be helpful."" Castro visited the Costa Rican farm and Contra staging area of CIA agent John Hull, with another former drug defendant in tow, to assist other Cubans fighting on the Contras' behalf.

In early June, Miami buzzed with rumors about a large group of exile heavies converging on Bonao, a mountain resort town in the Dominican Republic. The alleged organizers of the meeting were Bosch and Frank Castro, a Cuban exile who had married into an influential Dominican-based family (Frank Castro's wife was the daughter of retired Admiral Cesar de Windt, an intimate of then President Balaguer). The meeting ended in mid-June with a consensus for action and the formation of a new group, CORU, the Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations.

Word reached Miami that CORD-which sounds in Spanish like a rooster's crow-had an impressive membership. Although Bosch's minuscule Cuban Action group was listed first, CORU included the leaders of the Bay of Pigs veterans' Brigade 2506, the largest and most respected of the exile groups, with almost a thousand active members; Frank Castro's Cuban National Liberation Front (FNLC) and Felipe Rivero's CNM-groups that claimed adherents with long action records.

CORU patterned itself on the Palestine Liberation Organization: ideologically undefined, but united in support of the tactics of world-wide terrorism to focus attention on their struggle to recover their homeland. CORU members accepted the CNM strategy of "war throughout the roads of the world." Reports filtered through to Miami that CORU had reached a tacit "understanding" with United States authorities. Some informants claimed that CORU had agreed not to carry out any acts of terrorism in the United States; others said the agreement simply restricted CORU from claiming credit for acts of terrorism in the United States. There was no dispute about one fact: the FBI had "covered" the meeting, meaning its informers had penetrated the meeting and the organization. Some sources in Miami said the Bonao gathering and the creation of CORU had the active support of the CIA and at least the acquiescence of the FBI, and that CORU was allowed to operate to punish Castro for his Angola policy without directly implicating the United States government.

A wave of bombings, killings, and kidnappings swept North and South America, most of which were claimed by CORU or eventually traced to its operations. Up to October 6, the attacks had cost the lives of three Cuban diplomats. On that day, CORU's toll rose to seventy-six dead. With Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, seventy-eight had died in less than four months.