By WILL WEISSERT
The Associated Press

EL PASO, Texas -- The jury in a federal perjury trial heard tapes Thursday of a former CIA operative and anti-communist militant recounting under oath how he illegally entered the U.S. in 2005. Luis Posada Carilles also said Fidel Castro spread lies about his journey to get him in trouble with American authorities.

Prosecutors played tapes of Posada testifying at an immigration hearing in 2006 that he paid a smuggler $6,000 to drive him from Honduras to Houston, where he took a bus to Miami.

The 82-year-old Posada faces 11 counts of perjury, obstruction and immigration fraud for lying during citizenship hearings in El Paso. Prosecutors dispute Posada's story, accusing him of travelling on a shrimp boat converted into a yacht from Isla Mujeres, near the Mexican resort of Cancun, to Miami - and of lying about it while seeking U.S. naturalization.

"I was brought by a coyote, a person who, you know, does that," Posada was heard saying at the hearing, referring to the people smuggler whom he identified as a Honduran with a mustache named Roberto Lopez.

Posada said the blue pickup with American plates that he was riding in went through U.S. Customs at the Texas-Mexico border but that he never got out nor produced an ID, but let the smuggler do the talking.

"We drove into customs, but he took care of the problem," Posada says on the recording.

Asked about newspaper reports that said he had been in Isla Mujeres, Posada responded that "Castro says that every day," implying that Cuba's then-leader had been spreading misinformation about his trip.

Little known in the U.S., Posada is public enemy No. 1 in his native Cuba, even featured on billboards likening him to Hitler. He is Castro's nemesis - the two are almost the same age and clashed for decades during the Cold War.

Posada's story has changed slightly since that 2006 testimony; Defense attorneys now say Posada did indeed travel to Isla Mujeres and made contact with the converted yacht, the Santrina, but only to pick up cash to pay a people smuggler before heading back to Guatemala and eventually sneaking into the U.S. by land.

There are other inconsistencies in the recordings the jury heard.

Posada said during questioning that the smuggler took him as far as a Greyhound bus station in Houston and bought him a ticket for Miami. He said an immigration official doing spot-checks boarded the bus in Fort Lauderdale and asked to see his papers. Posada said, "I told him I didn't have papers. I lied."

"I said, 'My papers are in my house. I am very old,'" he is heard recounting. Posada said that was enough for him to be let go.

Those details differ from Posada's accounts during a spate set of immigration hearings in 2005, when he said the bus was stopped outside Houston. He also indicated that it took about two hours to drive from the border at Matamoros, Mexico - across from Brownsville, Texas - to Houston. The trip is actually about 400 miles.

Posada said during the hearing that he crossed the U.S. border around March 17, 2005. Immigration officials produced a bus ticket for him dated March 26.

In playing the tapes for the jury, prosecutors have chosen excerpts of hearings that stretched over two days. Posada's lead attorney, Miami-based Arturo Hernandez, complained that the court is only hearing the "greatest hits."

Much of the 2006 hearing was spent with investigators asking Posada about the many aliases he used while crisscrossing Latin America for decades, attempting to destabilize communist governments.

Posada participated in the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion, though he was not among the fighters who made it to Cuban soil. In the 1980s, he helped support U.S.-backed "contra" rebels in Nicaragua. Posada also was arrested in Panama amid a plot to kill Castro during a visit there in 2000. He went to prison, but eventually received a presidential pardon - then turned up in the U.S., prompting the current charges against him.

On the tapes, he is heard answering many questions in English or mixing English and Spanish. Defense attorneys say Posada's poor English skills may have muddled his answers during immigration hearings.

In a series of more than half a dozen exclusive interviews over the past year with The Associated Press in Miami, Posada spoke mostly in Spanish but clearly understood English as well, though sometimes he appeared hard of hearing.

Also at issue is his role in a series of explosions that rocked Havana hotels and a popular tourist restaurant in 1997, killing an Italian tourist and wounding about a dozen others. Prosecutors say Posada lied during immigration hearings about planning the bombings, even though he admitted responsibility in a 1998 interview with the New York Times.

The recordings Thursday included questions about Posada's interviews with journalist Ann Louise Bardach. Posada was heard responding, "I tried to lie to her," noting that Bardach "interviewed Castro six times" and that her stories were "part of her propaganda."

"She distorted it," he said of Bardach's accounts, even though she taped the interviews and has been called to testify in the case.

Cuba and Venezuela accuse Posada not only of the hotel bombings, but also of organizing an explosion aboard a Cuban airliner in 1976 that killed 73 people. He is not charged in either matter in the U.S., however, and an immigration judge has previously ruled he can't be deported to Cuba or Venezuela because of fears of torture.

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Associated Press writer Laura Wides-Munoz contributed to this report from Miami.