U.S. Accused of Backing Air Attack on Castro Foes

Three years after two small aircraft were shot down over the Straits of Florida by Cuban MIGs, the leader of the anti-Castro group that piloted the planes has compiled what he says is evidence that Clinton administration officials were criminally negligent in failing to stop the attack.

Four people died in the incident, which led to a tightening of the U.S. trade embargo of the communist island and remains an emotional flash point for many Cuban exiles who oppose the regime of Fidel Castro.

“We were led into a trap by the U.S. government, a trap in which Castro was allowed to act against us,” charged Brothers to the Rescue president Jose Basulto, the pilot of a third plane that escaped the Feb. 24, 1996, missile attack. “These deaths were preventable.”

In a voluminous report, Basulto has woven radar records, transcripts of communications between pilots and air traffic controllers and U.S. government documents into a detailed timeline that indicates Castro was given a de facto green light to shoot down the planes in international airspace, he said.

Basulto has asked Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to investigate. Florida Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, both Cuban-born Republicans, also have urged the Defense Department to share classified information on the incident.

Central to Basulto’s case is the testimony of a U.S. Customs officer who watched the attack unfold on a radar screen at March Air Force Base in Riverside, Calif. While monitoring a section of the Caribbean for suspected drug smugglers, Maj. Jeffrey Houlihan told a National Transportation Safety Board judge that he spotted two Cuban MIGs heading north toward the Florida coast seven minutes before the first Cessna was destroyed.

Houlihan said he notified U.S. Air Force command of the MIGs and kept a detailed log “to have some proof of what I saw as cold-blooded murder.”

A Defense Department spokesman said jets at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida were not scrambled because the Cuban planes never entered U.S. airspace.

In recent weeks, the Miami FBI office again has questioned Basulto and others about the shoot-down, apparently in connection with the arrests last fall of 10 members of a Cuban spy team. One of the alleged spies, Rene Gonzalez, 42, is a former Brothers pilot.

Formed in 1991 to fly over the Straits in search of Cubans fleeing the island in small rafts and boats, Brothers to the Rescue had been warned repeatedly not to stray into Cuban airspace. But seven months before the missile attack, Basulto buzzed Havana to drop anti-government leaflets.

That violation of international law, Basulto said, may have convinced Cuban and U.S. officials that the group had become an impediment to normalizing relations between the two nations.

After the Russian-built MIGs shot down the two unarmed Cessnas, each with a pilot and observer aboard, Basulto said his own plane was trailed by two other MIGs to within 37 miles of Key West. But no more missiles were fired. “It is an act of God that I am here,” the 58-year-old Basulto said.

A veteran of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Basulto said he is unburdened by guilt over the incident. “We all knew it was dangerous,” he said.

With refugee traffic from Cuba much reduced, the group has scaled back its flights from daily to weekly. And after being grounded for two years following the shoot-down, Basulto has regained his pilot’s license.

“We are as careful as we can be out there,” he said of the group’s missions just north of the Cuban coast. “But we are perfectly aware, that with the government of Cuba, and with this U.S. administration, it is not a very safe situation.”

On Tuesday, a Miami federal judge heard arguments that a $187-million judgment awarded to the families of the four victims should be paid from Cuban assets impounded since the 1960s and from funds paid to the Cuban government each year for telephone access to the island. Attorney Aaron Podhurst said that U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King was expected to rule within weeks.

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.