Jose Jesus Basulto Leon

Born August 8, 1940, in Santiago de Cuba, and moved to the United States in 1957.After a short stay in Cuba in the first few days of January 1960, he returned to the United States where the CIA recruited him.

Jose Basulto, from May 1960, was part of one of the most secret and criminal operations of the CIA. It consisted of smuggling into Cuba, weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, a group of terrorists charged with creating favourable operating conditions for that criminal attack.

Between these missions, he was involved in the search for information on our military capacity, the recruitment and training of new terrorists in the country, uniting the dispersed terrorist groups and training them in ambushing, attacks, the use of arms and explosives, the perpetration of criminal acts of sabotage and terrorism as well as internal propaganda.

The training of Jose Basulto into the “infiltration team” of the CIA began on an island called Ussepa, located in Fort Mayers, Florida, in May 1960.

This place, part of a recreation installation equipped by the CIA, constituted the first phase of a process of training, consisting of classes of cryptography and guerrilla warfare.

Later, Basulto received training in other specialized matters in the bases of "Fort Peary" in Virginia, U.S., and "Camp Trax,, the Helvetia property in Retalhuleu, Guatemala, where he met U.S. Colonel Napoleón Valeriano, of Philippine origin, a graduate of West Point.

There the agents received training in different military armaments, high power explosives, demolition, communications, guerrilla warfare, basic survival, parachuting, intelligence, psychological warfare, maps and marine and aerial reception.

Basulto concluded this preparation in February 1961, at a training base in Panama, becoming the permanent radio operator of a "team of infiltrators," whose missions would be determined by the characteristics of the zone where they were operating in Cuba.

As an agent of one of these CIA terrorist teams, he travelled by air to Havana, with a false identity using name Ernestino Martinez, weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

According to testimonies, Basulto was one of the five infiltrators sent by the CIA to the city of Santiago de Cuba, to organize clandestine terrorist groups ordered to support the mercenary invasion.

When the invasion failed, according to the same source, he was the only one of his group that managed to flee from the country through the fence of the Guantánamo Naval Base in June 1961. There he was immediately received and sent back to the United States. On returning to that country he actively took part in the terrorist organization called the Anti-communist Liberation Army (ELA), being accused years later (1969) of the “mishandling” of the funds of that organization.

He also had links with counterrevolutionary organizations in Miami, like the Revolutionary Students Directorate and the 2506 Brigade, in which group he had the serial number 2522. This Brigade was created with the finance of the CIA in 1962. Their members were mercenaries of the Bay of Pigs invasion and other terrorist organizations in Miami.

On August 24,1962, he took part as an artilleryman on a pirate boat that set out from the United States and fired on the old Blanquita (Karl Marx) Theater and then at the Rosita de Hornedo Hotel in Miramar, Havana. According to Basulto, this action was directed against supposed Soviet advisers. With hindsight, he adjudged that to be a terrorist act on the instructions of the CIA.

In the year 1963, the U.S. government offered a group of terrorists of Cuban origin, mainly members of the 2506 Brigade, one of whom was Basulto, a special course of training in the military school of Fort Benning, in the State of Georgia.

Among the “distinguished” course companions of Basulto, many of whom were advanced students of the U.S. instructors, were a large group of criminals who for years later, and many of them still today, continue to plot against Cuba.

This explains the close links between many of them and the complicity of those who trained them from the beginning of this dirty war that has lasted more than 40 years.

On November 21, 1963, after completing his training in Fort Benning, Basulto joined a group of armed terrorists who infiltrated the Santa Cruz del Norte area.

In the 70s, Basulto appears actively tied into the counterrevolutionary Catholic University Students Association in the United States. He also joined the leadership of 2506 Brigade, promoting different actions against Cuba in the city of Miami.

Basulto, when subordinate in Miami to the CIA official, Carl Jenkins, announced in August of 1982 that together with the terrorist Oscar Alfonso Carold Armand, he had prepared an explosive device for an attempt against Fidel Castro, and was studying the chances of smuggling it into Cuba.

Carold Armand, was a former air force captain in Batista’s army and left the country in 1959. In 1960 he was recruited by the CIA, receiving special training in the U.S. on the Panama Canal and the bases at Fort Benning, San Antonio and Pensacola, Miami. He was one of the heads and instructor of the 2506 Brigade before the invasion and took part in the CIA special operations related to the landing at the Bay of Pigs.

In the city of Miami Basulto in 1983 joined the terrorist organization the Cuban Patriotic League, and recruited other people in that country to join paramilitary groups.

In August 1983, he accompanied the terrorist Antonio “Tony” Varona, (deceased), on a journey to the borders of Honduras in order to offer support to the Nicaraguan counterrevolution, which they had already provided with medicines and money. During this era he became linked with the drug business.

In that period he also appeared tied to a CIA “front” company called the Ransom Committee of Central-America. In addition, he worked for a construction company in Miami and on the death of his father inherited a part of his wealth, dedicating himself to the business of paving streets.

Basulto founded the Brothers to the Rescue organization on May 15, 1991, together with the terrorist William “Billy” Shuss, who together with Basulto organized the counterrevolutionary organization named the Veterans of Special Missions, in memory of the early days of the dirty war in the service of the CIA.

The growth of this terrorist organization and its later development were also closely related with the CANF, whose ringleader at that time was Jorge Mas Canosa. However, many in Miami attribute the idea of their creation as a screen for their criminal activities against Cuba, as has already been explained.

It is a fact that from then on the CANF became one of their main patrons, although its ringleaders never objected to using other funds raised by means of the well-known “Marathons” and other public or secret collections in Miami.

Coincidently with this, in March of 1993, Basulto commented privately that due to the high cost of the flights of the organization, he had tightened his links with Jorge Mas Canosa, so that the Cuban American National Foundation would offer him systematic economic support.

Alleging a supposed “humanitarian” activity to rescue “boat people,” under the direction of Basulto, Brothers to the Rescue made studies of the operational situation of the Cuban coasts, adjacent keys and of the movement of ships, as well as tracking the communications of ships and Cuban facilities.

During this period, Basulto conceived many subversive plans against Cuba. He planned to sabotage high-tension towers in San Nicholas de Bari and the smuggling in of arms for an attempt against President Fidel Castro.

Throughout these years, Brothers to the Rescue worked continuously to stimulate illegal exits from the country.

In October of 1993, Jose Basulto increased the aggressiveness of his political rhetoric in the Miami press and used the counterrevolutionary phonies to promote violence in Cuba and attacks against the leaders of the Revolution.

Also, he tried to fly through the Giron aerial corridor to take photos of sensitive areas, with the intention of sabotaging them later.

In the month of October, 1994, Basulto tried to train up a member of the terrorist organization Military and Professionals for Democracy, to sabotage the Refinery at Cienfuegos with him.

In January of 1995 he tried to promote the so-called "Agreement Operation," by means of which he would bind together the terrorist organizations and smuggle arms and explosives into Cuba.

In his obsession to try to subvert the internal order in our country, to add new political tensions between the governments of Cuba and the U.S. and to cause provocations that might trigger a possible U.S. military aggression, the airplanes of Brothers to the Rescue staged dozens of provocations and violations of Cuban airspace and were directly responsible for the incident that happened with the light planes on February 24, 1996.

In August, 1996, the U.S. authorities temporarily revoked his license, prohibiting him from flying planes, but six months later it was given back to him. Basulto had been the object of strong criticism by relatives of the downed pilots who considered him responsible for the incident.

Over the years, he continued participating in the provocative actions of the air flotillas, incursions near the north Cuban coast, offering material, and financial support to small groups of counterrevolutionaries within the country.

From the arrival of the boy Elian Gonzalez in Miami in November 1999, Basulto participated actively in his kidnapping together with other people of the Mafia.

In that same year, 1999, he took on his new disguise as a "pacific fighter." Basulto brought into the country nine copies of a book produced by the Albert Einstein Institute, located in the United States. The title was From Dictatorship to Democracy. The books were given to the ringleader of a small counterrevolutionary group.

It is a manual produced by a U.S. institution that receives donations from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It maintains close links with the Miami Mafia, in particular with Brothers to the Rescue. The book contains 198 methods of provocation to try to subvert the internal order of a country, by means of strikes, boycotts, riots, vigils, protest meetings, false information, hunger strikes and air incursions to spread propaganda, all extracted from the counterrevolutionary experience of East Europe.

This is the new strategy of the supposed “pacific battle” that this well-known terrorist is trying to assume.

It would have been impossible for the terrorist Basulto to perform all these crimes over so many years without counting on the support of the U.S. authorities, which have allowed him to act with total impunity.