The Miami Herald first linked Luis Posada Carriles to the 1997 Havana bombings in a story Nov. 16, and followed up last month with a report naming him as the mastermind behind a 1994 attempt to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro and other plots.

Posada refused Herald requests for comment on those stories. But a person who spoke to him in May near his home in El Salvador said he denied at that time receiving money from the Cuban American National Foundation or its late chairman, Jorge Mas Canosa, for his armed operations.

Most of his operational money came from donations from Cuban exiles in the United States, which were collected by one friend in Miami and then sent to him at his home in El Salvador, the person quoted Posada as saying.

Posada confirmed that CANF's current chairman, Alberto Hernandez, had sent him money throughout most of the 1990s, but only for his personal living expenses, the person also quoted him as saying.

Posada claimed he had no job and little money of his own, and lived from his work as a consultant on weapons deals around Central America and by selling his oil paintings and his 1994 autobiography, the person said.

The Herald obtained copies of a fax in which Posada listed four donations of $800 each for the Havana bombings as coming from Cuban exiles in New Jersey, via Western Union wire transfers to other plotters in Guatemala.

Posada has often given dramatically different versions of his many activities, sometimes admitting and other times denying the charge that he plotted the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people.

-- HERALD STAFF