Marie Fonzi and Veciana's "Revelation"

When is a “revelation” not really a revelation? One answer is when it is “solicited.”

Antonio Veciana made news in the JFK conspiracy community when he came forward in 2013 to say that his mysterious CIA mentor, Maurice Bishop, was really David Atlee Phillips despite previously denying that “fact” since 1976. Veciana’s “revelation” was much ballyhooed by the conspiracy community as “proof” of what Gaeton Fonzi (and they) had long suspected. The CIA, in the form of Phillips, had participated in dirty dealings involving that unsuspecting patsy Lee Harvey Oswald and the killing of JFK. Precisely what those dirty dealings were depended on who was telling the story, but, in general, it wasn’t a good thing.

However, I have suspected for a while now that Veciana’s “revelation” was less than such, mostly due to an article by Bill Kelly. In that piece, Kelly states:

… decades later, after Phillips and Fonzi had died, Fonzi’s widow Maria [sic] persuaded Veciana to come clean and issue a public statement that David Atlee Phillips was indeed “Maurice Bishop” – the mysterious spymaster who directed Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of the president, and he agreed. “Gate didn’t push too far,” Marie said, “I’m a bit more pushier than Gaeton.”

Then today, I came across a video of a presentation Mrs. Fonzi gave at the 2014 AARC conference. To my astonishment, Mrs. Fonzi admitted that she had “solicited” Veciana to release the statement implicating Phillips as Bishop. Beginning at the 31:30 mark of the video, Mrs. Fonzi unashamedly describes how she accomplished this with the help of a mutual friend, Juaquin Godoy, who was a member of the anti-Castro group MRP and an FBI informant in the sixties.

“We were reissuing The Last Investigation in 2013,” Mrs. Fonzi explained, “and I wanted to put Antonio Veciana’s letter [in the book] saying that he respected Gaeton’s search for the truth.” Mrs. Fonzi wrote Veciana asking for his permission to do this and a mail correspondence between the pair resulted. During this exchange, Mrs. Fonzi, who has served as an adjunct professor at two universities, got on Veciana’s good side by saying that she always shared the newspaper articles of Veciana’s daughter Ana (who has written for the Miami Herald) with her students as “examples of fine writing.” “So, I thought let me get Ana with me too” Mrs. Fonzi told the audience with a chuckle.

“… I always reminded him of the friendship [between himself and Fonzi],” Mrs. Fonzi continued, “and then I would say, but you know that Gaet really needs to be vindicated because people who criticize his book say, ... he really shouldn’t have said that Bishop was Phillips because Veciana never did admit that.” Mrs. Fonzi goes on to explain that their mutual friend Godoy interceded with Veciana on her behalf. “Every time I wrote a letter to Veciana, I would call Juaquin,” Mrs. Fonzi remembered, “… and then he would call [Veciana] and speak Spanish to him and repeat my message and my solicitation.”

Mrs. Fonzi’s gambit went on for “about a year” before yielding results. Godoy called Mrs. Fonzi with the news that “Antonio has written [a letter about] what you want.” However, Mrs. Fonzi was still not satisfied with Veciana’s letter and told Gadoy that “[Veciana] never said who Maurice Bishop was.” Finally, after the persistent Godoy again interceded on Mrs. Fonzi’s behalf, the coveted letter stating that Bishop was Phillips arrived in her mailbox.

Despite the admission that she had worked behind the scenes to manufacture Veciana’s statement, not one conference attendee thought to ask Mrs. Fonzi if a “revelation” obtained in such a manner is really a revelation at all.