Between 1961 and 1968 Bosch was arrested several times in the United States for attacks directed at the Cuban government, and briefly collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency.

He was jailed in Florida in 1968 for a bazooka attack on a Polish freighter, but violated parole and fled to Venezuela in 1974 at the invitation of fellow exile militant Luis Posada Carriles.

The group was responsible for a number of attacks in 1976, including the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. as a part of Operation Condor.

[3][4] CORU is also considered to be responsible for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455, a Cuban civilian airliner, on 6 October 1976 in which all 73 people on board were killed.

[6] In 1946 Bosch enrolled in the University of Havana medical school, where he befriended the future Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

[6][9] In 1960, however, less than one-and-a-half years after Castro overthrew Batista, Bosch stopped supporting the Cuban Revolution, and moved to Miami with his wife Myriam, a fellow medical school graduate.

[14] In the trial, the government described Bosch as a member of the terrorist organization Cuban Power,[14] that claimed responsibility for "dozens of bombings and assassination attempts".

[3] In June 1974 he told The Miami News that he was the head of a group called Accion Cubana, and that the organization was responsible for a series of bomb attacks on Cuban consulates in Latin America since August 1973.

[3][9] He had been invited to Venezuela by Luis Posada Carriles, another Cuban exile militant who was then serving as the head of DISIP, the Venezuelan intelligence service.

[18] The same year, Bosch detonated bombs at a cultural center and at the Panamanian embassy in Caracas, in both cases just before representatives of the Cuban government were supposed to be there.

The US also accused Bosch of involvement in the August 1975 attempted assassination of Emilio Aragones, the Cuban ambassador to Argentina, and the September 1976 bombing of the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala City.

[9] Bosch was deported to the Dominican Republic, where he founded the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), along with Posada, Gaspar Jiménez, and other Cuban exiles.

[9][20][21] The group, led by Bosch,[1] first met in the Dominican Republic town of Bonao in June 1976, and laid plans for more than 50 bombings over the next year.

These included a machine gun attack on the Cuban embassy in Bogotá, the assassination of a Cuban official in Mérida, the kidnapping of two Cuban embassy employees in Buenos Aires, the bombing of a Cubana airlines office in Panama City, the bombing of the Guyanese embassy in Port of Spain, and the assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, a staunch critic of the Pinochet government, in Washington, D.C.[3][23] Subsequently, declassified documents showed that Letelier's assassination, part of a series that occurred during Operation Condor, was directly ordered by Pinochet.

[8] Bosch was invited to return to Venezuela by Orlando García, the head of security for Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez.

On 6 October 1976, two time bombs variously described as dynamite or C-4 planted on the Douglas DC-8 aircraft exploded, killing all 73 people on board, including all 25 members of the 1975 Cuban national fencing team.

[20][23][26][27] Investigators from Cuba, Venezuela and the United States traced the planting of the bombs to two Venezuelan passengers, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano,[20][28] who had taken the first leg of the flight from Trinidad to Barbados.

[29] According to an FBI informant, Bosch received a phone call on 6 October, in which he was told "A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed.

[16] Journalist Ann Louise Bardach described the arrests as becoming "a cause célèbre" for politicians in Miami, who lobbied the US government to press for Bosch and Posada's release.

[3][6][9] Some years later, Otto Reich, a fellow Cuban exile and US Ambassador to Venezuela from 1986 to 1989, also lobbied the US government to push for Bosch's release.

Bosch and Ricardo were convicted of using false identity papers, and sentenced to four and a half months in prison, which were set against the time they had already been held.

[9] In 1985, during this delay, Posada escaped from prison after bribing a guard using funds raised by the Cuban American National Foundation.

[3][32] A large campaign began demanding Bosch's release, among the leaders of which was Jorge Mas Canosa, head of the Cuban American National Foundation.

In making his decision, Joe Whitley, at the time the Associate US Attorney General, stated that Bosch had been "resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence", and that he had "demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death.

[3][5][33] He was allowed to return to his home in Miami, where he was required to have his phone tapped, his whereabouts monitored, to keep a visitors' log, and to not associate with militants.

[33] After his release Bosch began working for Alberto Hernández, who succeeded Mas Canosa as chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, earning $1,500 a month.

[8][34] He also formed an organization, named "Protagonist Party of the People", to raise money to buy weapons for the anti-Castro movement, violating the terms of his release in doing so.

[33][35] In his 2010 memoirs, Bosch denied having planned the bombing, stating that Castro had "accused me, without evidence, of being the intellectual author of the sabotage of Flight 455 and many other acts with which I had nothing to do.

"[33] The Cuban diplomat and historian Jesús Arboleya and the American journalist John Dinges state that Bosch was responsible for the bombing.

[1] US diplomat Wayne Smith, an expert on Cuban affairs, also called Bosch a terrorist,[33] and stated that he "did a disservice to the cause of democracy and freedom".