Newman on Veciana
FEBRUARY 5, 2019 | JOHN M. NEWMAN
ANTONIO VECIANA, MYSTERY MAN IN JFK ASSASSINATION,
PART 1
More than 50 years after President John F. Kennedy’s
death, details relating to his assassination have accumulated like snowflakes
in a blizzard. Hundreds of names, thousands of alleged facts, millions upon
millions of words competing for our attention and requiring our judgment: Is
this important? Is this true? Who would know?
John M. Newman, PhD is unique in what he knows. He
is a retired US Army intelligence officer who served for two years as military
assistant to the director General William Odom at the National Security Agency.
He has testified before various subcommittees of the US House of
Representatives, and has been a consultant for various US and foreign media
organizations including PBS Frontline, the History Channel, C-Span, and
NBC. (He is also an adjunct professor of Political Science at James Madison
University.)
His expertise as a strategic intelligence
cryptologic analyst makes his credentials unique among those who delve into the
hidden histories buried within America’s military and intelligence
bureaucracies. For the past quarter century his works have overturned
orthodoxies, introduced new facts, and produced revelations about America
during the Cold War.
His past publications include Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the
Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK(2008);
Where Angels Tread Lightly: The Assassination of
President Kennedy, Volume I(2015); Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination of President
Kennedy, Volume II(2017); JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue and the
Struggle for Power 2nd Ed (2017).
His latest book — Into the Storm: The Assassination of President
Kennedy Volume III (2019) — was described by Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. as a “groundbreaking work that finally illuminates the dark places
where democracy goes to die.”
Here we present the first of two excerpts from that
book. They reveal the intricate web of claims, contradictions, and complexities
relating to the former leader of the murderous anti-Castro paramilitary group
Alpha-66, Antonio Veciana. Veciana made the explosive claim that he was present
in Dallas two months before the Kennedy assassination, with Lee Harvey Oswald
and an agent/handler whom he knew by the name of Maurice Bishop (eventually
identified by Veciana as CIA officer David Atlee Phillips).
Introduction by Alan Dale.
Chapter Three. When Fiction is Stranger Than Truth:
Veciana and Phillips in Cuba — 1959-1960
Antonio Veciana Blanch was born on 18 October 1928
in Havana, Cuba. In 1960, he was a public accountant working as an assistant
manager at Banco Financiero, the bank owned by Cuban sugar magnate and CIA
asset Julio Lobo. Veciana was also president of the Cuban Certified Public
Accountants Association. The Veciana story is ubiquitous among researchers of
the Kennedy assassination, but views vary considerably about which events did
or did not take place in his life. The lengthy and byzantine history of
Veciana’s activities with the U.S. Military and the CIA is dominated by his
claim that he had a meeting with Dave Phillips [David Atlee Phillips] — who was
using the pseudonym Maurice Bishop — in Dallas, Texas, in September 1963; and,
further, that a man Veciana later recognized as Lee Harvey Oswald was also
present at that meeting. For nearly four decades, that single assertion has
sucked the oxygen out of attention to the less sensational but necessary
research into the rest of Veciana’s story and the documentary record
surrounding it, such as it is.
Veciana’s accounts have radically changed over the
four decades leading up to the appearance of his 2017 book Trained to
Kill. His first account on 2 March 1976 was given to Gaeton Fonzi, an
investigator then working for Senator Schweiker of the Select Committee on
Intelligence Activities (SSCIA). That interview occurred while he was
incarcerated for cocaine trafficking, an offense for which he still claims he
was innocent. Three months after his parole, Veciana was interviewed by
journalist Dick Russell. Veciana gave his third account in a 25-26 March 1978
deposition to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The fourth
phase of his story took place during the numerous lengthy sessions he had with
Gaeton Fonzi during the fifteen years between the HSCA’s final report (2
January 1979) and the 1993 appearance of Fonzi’s book, The Last
Investigation.
Gaeton Fonzi passed away on 30 August 2012. Two
years later, on 26 September 2014, Veciana gave his fifth account at the
Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) symposium in Bethesda,
Maryland. At the time, Veciana was already at an advanced stage of preparation
for his book, Trained to Kill. In that work, he offered his sixth and
final version of the events that took place between 1959 and 1961.
There are many minor differences among Antonio
Veciana’s versions of the Bishop-Phillips saga. But there are also significant
structural and existential changes to his story. Among these, the two most
important are the date that Phillips first approached Veciana in
Cuba, and the true identity of the person using the name Maurice
Bishop. The vast majority of the relevant intelligence documents in the
available record were not released until late in this epic tale — not until the
mid-1990s as a result of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.
As such, they were not available to Veciana until then. In the late 1970s, the
HSCA did get access to significant amounts of pertinent classified records.
However, many CIA records were not shared with the committee. The committee and
its researchers were bound by secrecy oaths not to publicly reveal classified
information gained during their investigation.
Minor differences in Veciana’s various accounts may,
in some cases, be excused as resulting from confusion or faulty memory.
However, there is no getting around this unwelcome problem: major structural
and existential changes to Veciana’s story indicate deception — if not in one
place, then inescapably in another. The principal task facing researchers today
is to decide which accounts are true — or partly true — and which are not. If
we are to rescue any pieces of this puzzle that were true, we must
first strip away many pieces that were false.
This job is made more difficult by the accounts of
American and Cuban intelligence officers whose experiences bear upon this
mission, most notably CIA staff officer David Phillips and Cuban intelligence
chief Fabian Escalante. Escalante’s Washington-based officers from the Cuban
Interest Section were naturally researching the new records as they poured out
in 1994.1 And
as far as I can determine, in his 1995 book, The Secret War, Fabian
Escalante was the only author who immediately discovered the most
glaring problem with Veciana’s chronology — the date Phillips allegedly
recruited Veciana in Cuba. In 1995, Escalante made the forced
readjustment of that date from mid-1960 to mid-1959, two decades
before Veciana followed suit in 2014!
The release of CIA documents left Veciana with a
difficult choice. He realized that he had to give up the entire story of his
recruitment by Phillips in Cuba oradjust the date to the time when
Phillips really was in Cuba. Veciana decided to preserve his Phillips
story and therefore was forced to change the date of the recruitment.
Why he waited until 2014 to do that raises problems that I will address in
future volumes. Veciana’s unfortunate decision ended up causing more problems
than it solved. I will mention them later in this chapter. In Chapter Eleven, I
will show what happens when Veciana’s Cuban story is moved forward in time into
his original chronology — back where it belongs — when
Phillips was not in Cuba.
I hope the reader will not be disappointed that I
will not start my examination of Veciana’s history with his alleged
meeting with Oswald and Phillips in Dallas during September 1963. For reasons
that will become obvious, I will get to that shiny object in Volume V. In this
chapter, I will only mention the claim about 1963 in connection with a caper
Veciana pulled off with his best friend, Zabala in 1976.
And so, in this chapter, I will begin my examination
of Veciana by taking the reader back to the point in time where he now claims
he was recruited in Cuba by a man he knew as Maurice Bishop. In Veciana’s final
two accounts at the 2014 AARC conference and in his 2017 book, Trained to
Kill, he forcefully and unequivocally contended that Maurice
Bishop was Dave Phillips. For this reason, in this chapter I will be
using the name Phillips instead of Bishop. When I mean the true Phillips, I
will use the appellation “Phillips”; when I mean Bishop, I will— for the most
part — use the appellation “notional Phillips.” Only in instances where
clarity demands it will I use the pseudonym Bishop.
The 38-Year-Long Wrong Date — Mid-1960 — for Phillips’
First Approach to Veciana in Cuba
When did Phillips first approach Veciana in Cuba?
Veciana’s six accounts of that event have left us — with only the
slightest permutations — with three different periods of time. While the dates
of those six accounts moved forward in time, the date of their first
encounter in Cuba moved backward in time. The start of those three time
periods are first, mid-1960; then, the end of 1959; and, finally, mid-September
1959.
In the table below, I have assembled the dates given
by Veciana to congressional investigations and in his book, as well as the
dates given by other American and Cuba investigators and researchers:2
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