73 Dogs and the FBI's Informant in Caracas
By Theo Marchetti ·
An FBI source identified the men who bombed a Cuban airliner and murdered a diplomat in Washington, yet the files moved to the State Department instead of a courtroom
Seventy-three people died when a Cubana Airlines flight vanished into a hillside, a massacre that began as a cold calculation in Caracas. The cost of that flight was not just the lives on board, but the subsequent decades of silence that protected the men who pulled the trigger on the bomb.
Because the available record is a curated archival description rather than the original pages, I am reporting what that summary establishes. The record is a letter dated November 5, 1976, sent from Clarence M. Kelly, director of the FBI, to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It is a report that functions as a ledger of atrocities, linking a plane crash in Venezuela to a car bomb in the heart of the American capital.
73 Dogs
The record is blunt about the planning of the Cubana Airlines bombing. It "relays information from a confidential FBI source that the bombing of the Cubana Airlines flight was planned in Caracas, Venezuela by Luis Posada Carriles, Frank Castro, and Ricardo Morales Navarrete."
Luis Posada Carriles was a Cuban exile militant and CIA agent whom the FBI eventually classified as a terrorist. Frank Castro was an anti-communist revolutionary and arms dealer who spent decades as a pillar of Miami's Little Havana community. Ricardo Morales Navarrete, known as "El Mono" or "Monkey," was a Cuban exile and CIA agent who operated as a multifaceted asset for the FBI, the DEA, and the DISIP, the Venezuelan intelligence service established in 1969 to secure the state's internal security.
These three men did not stumble into mass murder. The record establishes a pattern of persistence, noting that "the group had made previous unsuccessful attempts to bomb Cuban aircraft in Jamaica and Panama." When the Cubana flight finally went down, the celebration was clinical. The record quotes a phone call from Hernan Ricardo Lozano, a bombing suspect, to a man named Bosch, whose identity the record does not elaborate upon. Lozano described the deaths of seventy-three human beings in the language of livestock: "a bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed."
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
A Car Bomb in Washington
The letter to Kissinger does not stop at the Venezuelan border. It connects the Cubana bombers to a second, more intimate hit on American soil. The record states that "anti-Castro Cuban exiles working with the Chilean National Directorate for Intelligence (DINA) carried out the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC on September 21, 1976."
Orlando Letelier was a Chilean Marxist and diplomat who had fled the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. DINA was the secret police of that Pinochet regime, an agency specialized in the extraterritorial liquidation of political dissidents. Letelier was killed by a car bomb in the middle of the capital, a brazen act of foreign state terrorism that occurred only weeks before Kelly wrote to Kissinger.
The line here is not a coincidence of timing. The anti-Castro exiles mentioned in the Letelier hit belong to the same operational orbit as Carriles, Castro, and Morales Navarrete. The record binds them together—the bombers of the airline and the bombers of the diplomat—into a single briefing for the Secretary of State. The same hands that coordinated with DINA to kill a Marxist in Washington were the ones planning the slaughter of seventy-three passengers in Caracas.
The Asset in the Room
There is a staggering irony in the identity of Ricardo Morales Navarrete. While the FBI source was identifying him as a primary planner of the Cubana bombing, Navarrete was simultaneously serving as an informant for the FBI. He was, in the eyes of the law, a mass murderer; in the eyes of the Bureau, he was a source.
This is where the record's silence becomes loud. The FBI possessed a "confidential source" that could name the conspirators and their previous failed attempts in Jamaica and Panama. They had the names. They had the timeline. They had the proximity. Yet the FBI director did not send this information to the Department of Justice for the purpose of making arrests. He sent it to the Secretary of State.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the FBI was not operating as a law enforcement agency in 1976. The desk's reading is that the Bureau had transitioned into a diplomatic liaison, treating domestic terrorism and international mass murder as geopolitical variables to be managed by the State Department rather than crimes to be prosecuted by the courts. The priority was not the seventy-three dead on the Cubana flight or the murdered diplomat in DC; the priority was the management of the assets who committed the crimes.
Kissinger's Inbox
The fact that the FBI director felt the need to relay this intelligence to Kissinger—a man who spent his career balancing the scales of power through secret channels—suggests a specific kind of utility for this information. The record identifies Posada Carriles as a terrorist, but it does not describe any move to apprehend him. Instead, the information is filed away in the State Department's intelligence stream.
This suggests a structural hypocrisy. The FBI's formal classification of Carriles as a "terrorist" serves as a political hedge rather than a legal precursor. By labeling him a terrorist while refusing to arrest him, the government creates a paper trail of disapproval that allows them to maintain distance from his actions while continuing to benefit from the networks he manages.
Furthermore, the pattern suggests that the "confidential source" mentioned by Kelly is a structural fiction. By attributing the names of the bombers to an unnamed source, the FBI shields itself from the legal consequences of harboring a known mass-murderer like Morales Navarrete as an asset. If the Bureau admitted that its own informant was the one planning the bombing, the agency would be complicit in the eyes of the law. By framing the knowledge as "information from a source," the FBI converts a liability into an intelligence win.
The desk's reading is that this document is an exercise in plausible deniability regarding the broader architecture of Operation Condor—the campaign of political repression and state terror coordinated among the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone. The record identifies the DINA-exile nexus in the Letelier hit but avoids naming the systemic alliance that made such coordination possible. It reports the mechanics of the hit without acknowledging the framework.
By funneling this data to Kissinger, the FBI ensured that the knowledge of these atrocities remained in the hands of the one man capable of deciding which crimes were acceptable for the sake of regional stability. The seventy-three passengers on that Cubana flight were not victims of a rogue cell of exiles; they were the collateral damage of a managed relationship between the U.S. intelligence community and the most violent actors in the hemisphere. The redacted gaps and the redirected reports were not accidents of bureaucracy; they were the shield that allowed the "dogs" to keep killing while the men who paid them remained in the shade.