While you weren’t looking, the Bush administration gave Otto Reich another job last week.

For his last job with the Bush administration, Reich had to get a recess appointment -- a presidential appointment while Congress was not in session -- which meant he wasn’t subject to a Senate confirmation process he wouldn’t have cleared. Reich’s new position doesn’t require Senate approval.

Reich headed the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy during the Reagan years; he was reprimanded in 1987 by the U.S. Comptroller General’s office for "engaging in prohibited, covert propaganda activities." But that’s not the only reason senators (including some Republicans) balked at confirming him as an assistant secretary of state last year. Another reason is the fact that he lobbied -- successfully -- for the release of Orlando Bosch, a fellow Cuban exile who is widely believed to be one of the people responsible for blowing up Cubana flight 455 in 1976. Cubana 455 was a Cuban passenger airliner; this act of terrorism killed seventy-three people.

"Among the seventy-three killed aboard the Cubana jet were the twenty prize-winning athletes in their teens and early twenties who made up Cuba's national fencing team, their five coaches, and twenty-five Cubana and government employees," Ann Louise Bardach writes in her 2002 book Cuba Confidential. "There were also five North Korean passengers and eleven residents of Guyana." Bosch, a U.S. resident, was arrested in Venezuela in connection with the attack on the plane.

Bardach quotes one CIA memorandum that summarized an eyewitness account: "Meeting took place when Orlando Bosch and others discussed terrorist acts such as placing bombs on Cuban aircraft." She quotes a memo from Henry Kissinger, who was then secretary of state: "U.S. government had been planning to suggest Bosch deportation before Cubana Airlines crash took place for his suspected involvement in other terrorist acts and violation of his parole. Suspicion that Bosch involved in planning of Cubana Airlines Crash led us to suggest his deportation urgently." (Bosch had earlier been convicted of firing a shot into a Polish freighter that had traveled to Cuba in 1968.)

Orlando Bosch was jailed in Venezuela for eleven years. This is where Otto Reich comes in. He became ambassador to Venezuela in 1986. Bardach writes,

A half dozen State Department cables suggest that Reich used his position to lobby for Orlando Bosch, a man who, the [first] Bush Justice Department had concluded, had participated in more than thirty terrorist actions....

On July 21, six weeks after Otto Reich presented his credentials in Caracas, a Venezuelan judge issued a surprise ruling that Bosch was innocent of the Cubana bombing.... Former Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez ... went on to claim that "the Bosch file had been tampered with." But Reich ... eagerly cabled Washington to report that Bosch had been "absolved" and queried his superiors about Bosch's eligibility to return to the U.S.

The first President Bush went on to pardon Bosch and grant him U.S. residency -- even though his own attorney general had called Bosch an "unreformed terrorist," and even though Bosch himself, in a jailhouse interview, had told investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations, "You have to fight violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people."

In 2001, The Miami Herald reported that a source had claimed Bosch "sent 'explosive materials' to Cuba before a 1997 Havana hotel bombing." Bosch had rather cheekily denied involvement in the bombing shortly after it happened -- he told the Herald in 1997, "We had nothing to do with those attempts. Besides, even if we had, we would deny it because it's illegal to [direct bombings] from this country.''

Otto Reich, a terrorist’s champion, will soon work for the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice.

Your tax dollars at work.