THE JFK ASSASSINATION: ANTONIO VECIANA AND DAVID PHILLIPS

BREAKTHROUGH, PART TWO: A PERSONAL ENCOUNTER

In July of 1976, when I was a young free-lance writer living in New York, New Times magazine sent me to Miami to research an article about a series of mysterious murders plaguing the ”Little Havana” Cuban exile community. My interest in the Kennedy assassination had already led me down some intriguing avenues when I came across the name of Antonio Veciana, co-founder of a violence-prone anti-Castro group called Alpha 66. He was identified as having participated in plots to assassinate the Cuban leader.

To my surprise, I found Veciana listed in the Miami phone book. I was apparently the first journalist to contact him in recent years. Speaking in halting English, he agreed to meet me downtown outside the Trailways bus station. He showed up with a bodyguard and emerged from the passenger side of a blue Maverick, a stocky handsome man about six feet tall and wearing sunglasses.

Inside a little coffee shop, Veciana said he’d recently been paroled from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, after serving seventeen months of what he assured me was a trumped-up narcotics conspiracy charge. He was bitter at certain American authorities about this, and had decided to break a many-years silence about his previous activities. He informed me that he was meeting regularly with an investigator for the House Assassinations Committee which I knew was looking anew at who might be behind the killing of JFK. Then Veciana asked if he could see my “government card.” After I convinced him that I was a legitimate journalist, we drove out to a beachside hotel.

I was not prepared for the remarkable story Veciana unfolded. “I know a lot of secrets,” he began. He’d been president of a Havana accounting firm when Castro took over Cuba. Angered by Fidel’s turn toward the Communists, Veciana began raising funds for an anti-Castro uprising. Shortly thereafter, in 1960, he received a visit from a man using the name ”Maurice Bishop.” This was to be the first of over a hundred meetings, in a relationship that would last thirteen years.

Veciana described Bishop as standing about six feet, two inches, with dark hair, blue eyes, a high forehead, and sunspots below his eyes. He appeared to be in his early forties at the time. He told Veciana he was part of an American intelligence service, but instructed him not to ask which one.

“Bishop inculcated into us the principles of psychological warfare,” Veciana recalled. “We spread false rumors or disinformation. We put out counterfeit bills that were similar to bank notes printed by the government, and we distributed them throughout the country. W wanted to disrupt the Cuban economy to create a spirit of resistance within the people.”

When this failed to achieve the desired result, Bishop used Veciana to coordinate assassination attempts. The first was scheduled as Castro prepared to introduce the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, but was canceled when Bishop anticipated a violent Soviet reaction. The next was planned in October 1961 during a Castro speech, using a bazooka fired from a nearby rooftop. But Castro got wind of fhts plot, and Veciana was forced to flee Cuba by boat. A month later in Miami, where Veciana had moved with his family, Bishop contacted him again. Together they laid plans to form Alpha 66. Veciana traveled to New York, where he participated in another plan to eliminate Castro should he come to speak at the United Nations.

Veciana went on to tell me that Maurice Bishop organized a series of commando attacks against Soviet merchant ships in Cuban harbors early in 1963. “As a result of the [Cuban] Missile Crisis, he believed that Kennedy and Khrushchev had made a secret pact to do nothing about Cuba. Bishop kept saying Kennedy would have to be forced to make a decision. The only way was to put him up against the wall. Three ships were attacked in different ports of Cuba. The first one was a mistake in identity; it was a British ship. The other two were Russian. To further make Kennedy reach a point, we held a press conference in Washington let him know about the commando groups. That was when Kennedy ordered that I be confined to Dade County, Florida.” Later, I would find Veciana’s statements were backed up in the New York Times’ coverage of the period.

A few days later, at a second meeting Veciana brought his beautiful daughter to assist in translating his Spanish. “Bishop had previously contacted me for other meetings in Dallas, other times,” he said. “Sometime late in August of 1963, when I arrived at the Dallas airport, Bishop had given me the address to a building, either a bank or insurance company. There I met Bishop in the company of this young guy. The three of us walked to a cafeteria. The young guy did not say one word. He was very quiet, very strange. He was with us only ten or fifteen minutes. Then when I take a cup of coffee, Bishop says to the young fellow: ‘I’ll meet you in two or three hours.’ The guy left and Bishop and I talked about the movement and plans.

I never knew why Oswald was with Bishop,” Veciana continued. “I didn’t even know Oswald was Oswald, until the assassination happened and I saw his picture on the TV. After the assassination, the FBI contacted me to ask several questions. At first I was worried, but the agent who interviewed me said it was a matter of routine, nothing important. I didn’t tell the agent anything, because I thought it would harm the movement.

“I never asked Bishop about Oswald, because Bishop always told me that in this type of work, you just do things, you don’t ask. I had a cousin, Guillermo Ruiz, who worked with the Cuban [G-2] intelligence service in Mexico City. After the assassination, sometime early in 1964, Bishop said to me: Did I think by getting my cousin a considerable amount of money, would he say he’d talked to Oswald, to make it appear Oswald was working for Castro? Because of this, I asked Bishop if it was true Oswald had been talking with Castro agents. Bishop said it did not matter if it was true, what was important was to get my cousin to make that statement. Bishop didn’t bring up the topic again. Several months later, I brought it up. Bishop said there was no need to talk about that plan any longer.”

After a pause, Veciana added: “I always thought Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination. I believe that the CIA wanted to pin the blame for the assassination on Cuba. This is why I believe that Cuba was not involved. I do not think that the agency as a whole was involved, but that certain renegade members were involved. I think that Lee Harvey Oswald, if he didn’t work directly for the agency, worked with people connected with it.”

He went on to recall another plot to eliminate Castro when he traveled to Chile in 1971. Then he reached across a little table and handed me a sketch of “Maurice Bishop” that he’d been requested to draw by congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi. When Fonzi’s then-boss, Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker, saw the sketch, he was convinced he knew who it was, a CIA official who had “retired” in 1975 to establish the Association for Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), whose purpose was to defend the CIA against what he termed the “snowballing innuendo” of its media critics.

This man was David Atlee Phillips, who operating out of Mexico City became the chief of all the CIA’s covert actions against Cuba in the summer of 1963. There were many reasons besides a close physical resemblance to why congressional investigators came to focus on Phillips as Veciana’s contact. “Bishop” and Phillips both had Texas accents, and both spoke French as well as Spanish. Phillips had been stationed in Havana when Veciana first met “Bishop” in 1960. In Phillips’ 1977 autobiography, The Night Watch, he had cited a particular Cuban restaurant as his favorite eating spot. It was the same restaurant that Veciana had mentioned to Gaeton Fonzi - more than a year before Phillips’ book came out - as being a casual meeting ground between himself and “Bishop.’

But the House assassinations Committee was never able to get a positive identification from Veciana, even after Fonzi brought the two together face-to-face at a meeting of the AFIO Ed Lopez, another HAC investigator who was aware of the encounter told me; “There was definitely a real look of recognition in Veciana. I had no doubt that Phillips was Bishop, from the way Veciana responded to questions. When Gaeton asked, ‘Is it him?,’ I remember Veciana saying, ‘Does he have a brother?’”

Sometime later, Fonzi confronted Veciana on the matter. “I would like you to tell me this one time very truthfully,” Fonzi said. “Would you have told me if I had found Maurice Bishop?” Veciana smiled, scratched his forehead, and gave the question careful thought. “Well, you know,” he said, “I would like to talk with him first.”

John McCone, who had been director of the CIA when JFK was killed, at first testified that he did recall a “Maurice Bishop” and believed he was a CIA employee. But when the Agency reviewed its files at Congress’s request and denied any such connection, McCone withdrew his statement. Ross Crozier, a CIA agent who had worked with Phillips, did recall his having used the Bishop alias.

I myself was in a delicate position. Fonzi and I had become friends; in fact, I was staying at his home in Miami the week I met Veciana. But Veciana asked that I please not tell Gaeton that he was talking to me. And he added that if I wrote anything using his name, he would be killed. So I did neither. Then, in January 1977, someone with knowledge of the House investigation leaked Veciana’s information to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. “A Mr. X enters the JFK mystery,” Anderson’s story was headlined - but it would not have been difficult for insiders to identify “Mr. X.” With the cat out of the bag, I then went ahead and published an article in New Times, calling my source “Carlos.”

Veciana went on to testify in executive session before the House Assassinations Committee. Several weeks before the House report was to be released, in July 1979
Veciana was driving home from work when someone ambushed him in Little Havana. Four shots were fired, and one ricocheting bullet hit him in the side of the head. Miraculously, Veciana survived the attempt on his life. But he went mum for years thereafter about the events of 1963.

I chronicled the Veciana-Phillips story in my book The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Fonzi published his account in The Last Investigation prior to his death in 2012. In 2014, Veciana came out and revealed that yes, Bishop was really Phillips, who had died of lung cancer in 1988. Three years later, Veciana published a book with writer Carlos Harrison, “Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots against Castro, Kennedy, and Che. He died in a Miami assisted living facility in 2020, at the age of 91.

As for David Phillips, he left behind an unpublished novel, whose main character is a CIA operative living in Mexico City who writes in a letter: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald.…We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba.…I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt."

That is what the CIA might call a “limited hangout.” It would assuredly have been a reason for even an “innocent” CIA to cover things up. But not long before he died, Phillips briefly expanded on this in a conversation with a former HAC investigator, Kevin Walsh, who quoted Phillips telling him: “My final take on the assassination is there was a conspiracy likely including American intelligence officers.”