Asked whether he participated in the bombing of the Cuban jetliner, which killed 73 people, including a fencing team from Cuba, Posada said:

"They accused me of being the intellectual author of fabricating a weapon of war and of treason to the homeland. No one saw me make a bomb."

Venezuelan courts acquitted him twice in the explosion. Posada escaped from prison in 1985 while awaiting an appeal by government prosecutors.

"The only way for me to gain freedom was to escape, " he said. "I'm the only prisoner in the world who has had to escape after being acquitted."

In recently declassified documents from the CIA and FBI, informants alleged that he attended at least two planning meetings for the airliner attack - but Posada said those accusations were false and made by unreliable sources.

He sought to discredit one of those informants, Ricardo "Monkey" Morales Navarrete.

Before he was fatally shot in a Key Biscayne bar in 1982, Morales admitted a role in the bombing. In conversations with at least two Miami detectives, he also implicated Posada, according to the papers and an interview with The Herald. But in an interview with an exile journalist in 1982, Morales said Posada played no role.

"I never would have participated in any conspiracy with Monkey Morales, " Posada said. "I'd have to be crazy, my God! Everything Monkey said had a double intention. He was not credible."

Former Miami police Detective Diosdado Diaz told The Herald recently that in a private conversation Morales told him that Posada prepared the explosives to blow up the plane.

In the interview, Posada decried Diaz's recollection, calling him "un farsante y un sin verguenza" (a phony and shameless one).

Diaz later shot back: "He's a pimp and a liar."

For years, Posada has maintained that Morales told him he had masterminded the bombing. He told The Herald that a spy inside the Cuban Embassy in Caracas told him that Morales had been working for the Cuban government after its agents paid him $18,000 at a Mexico City hotel in early 1976.

He refused to identify that source, saying that the person was still working for the Cuban government.

HIS ASYLUM BID

Posada's asylum bid will largely depend on whether an immigration judge believes he was involved in any terrorist attack. Immigration law bars asylum for any foreign national believed to have committed a serious crime.

Posada's connection to a string of about a dozen explosions at Cuban tourist spots in 1997 is also an issue. In the interview, Posada did not confirm or deny a role in the bombings, which killed an Italian national and injured about six.

In an interview in July 1998, The New York Times reported that Posada had said he "organized a wave of bombings in Cuba last year at hotels, restaurants and discotheques" and also that his chief supporters were leaders of the Cuban American National Foundation, including its founder, Jorge Mas Canosa, who died in 1997.

After the story appeared, The Times clarified that CANF did not fund the bombings.

Posada told The Herald last week that in his Times interview he had implicated dead exile leaders in funding the attacks as a way to deflect attention from the real conspirators.

"I wanted to play a trick on The New York Times, but it backfired, " he said.

Asked whether he denied organizing the bombings, Posada shook his head and said, "Let's leave it to history."

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