Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Newman on Veciana

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 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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