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05/20/2005:

"Cuban Exile Is Charged With Illegal Entry"

Homeland Security Department officials said Thursday that they had charged Luis Posada Carriles, the violent anti-Castro militant, with illegally entering the United States.

The charge could be the first step in the deportation of Mr. Posada, 77, who resurfaced outside Miami and was arrested on Tuesday after 45 years of shadowy combat against Fidel Castro.

It also represents a legal and political dilemma for the Bush administration.

Mr. Posada, who served both the Central Intelligence Agency and Venezuela's spy service in the 1960's and 1970's, is wanted in Venezuela in connection with the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner off the coast of Barbados that killed 73 people. The government of Venezuela wants to extradite him under international law.

United States officials have not said whether or not they want to deport Mr. Posada. They have indicated that they would not willingly send him to Venezuela, Cuba's closest ally in the Western Hemisphere.

"This is a case that the Department of Homeland Security now will handle," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday. "The issues here concern understanding the record of Mr. Posada and then making judgments about what that means about his request" for asylum. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security said Mr. Posada had been charged with illegally entering the country, was being held without bond and would see an immigration judge on June 13.

A Cuban exile who signed up with the C.I.A. before the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and received training in espionage and explosives from American military and intelligence officers, Mr. Posada joined the Venezuelan intelligence service in 1969 and left it as a senior official in 1974, according to declassified United States government documents.
Full: nytimes.com