Did anti-Castro activist Antonio Veciana really see Lee Harvey Oswald with CIA man David Atlee Phillips just weeks before the assassination of JFK? My new eBook—The Bishop Hoax: Fonzi, Veciana and the Making of a Conspiracy Myth—seeks to answer that question for all time.
In 1976, Veciana met with Congressional researcher Gaeton Fonzi for a series of three interviews. During those meetings, Fonzi reported that Veciana said that he met with a case officer code named Maurice (Morris at first) Bishop for thirteen years. It was Bishop who directed the anti-Castro efforts of Veciana and Alpha 66. Most significantly, before one of his meetings with Bishop, Veciana claimed he saw the mysterious mentor in the company of Oswald.
For twenty-five years, David Atlee Phillips was one of the most distinguished agents in the history of the Cold War CIA. In 1975, he retired to defend the agency from what he believed were unfounded accusations fueled by a media frenzy in the wake of Watergate. An unfortunate side-effect of the publicity Phillips garnered during his crusade was the accusation, based on Veciana’s statements, that he was “Maurice Bishop,” ran a secret campaign to assassinate Fidel Castro and was the “handler” of Oswald.
For over a decade, Phillips denied the charges and won two out of three lawsuits against individuals who promoted the Bishop story and related theories. But after Phillips died in 1988, a book was published by Fonzi titled The Last Investigation that popularized the Bishop story and became a classic JFK conspiracy text. Consequently, Phillips became one of the most popular suspects of CIA-did-it theorists who scrutinized every aspect of his career and added to the body of “facts” impeaching him. The notion that Phillips was Bishop became accepted by both JFK researchers and the public even though Veciana repeatedly denied that Phillips was Bishop over a nearly forty-year period.
The story underwent a demonstrable evolution from those initial interviews through Fonzi’s HSCA writeup, to his infamous 1980 article in the Washingtonian to his 1993 book. Finally, after Fonzi’s death in 2012, Veciana began a final revision of the narrative beginning with his 2013 claim that Bishop was Phillips after all and culminating with his dubious 2017 autobiography Trained to Kill. In that tome, Veciana abandoned all restraint and included virtually fictionalized accounts of the Bishop saga and supporting events.
Highlights of The Bishop Hoax include:
- A biography of Veciana that shows what he really was doing during key periods of his life. Includes the formation and early history of Alpha 66, the 1961 and 1971 Castro assassination plots, the truth about his drug conviction, the “ambush in Reston” when Veciana and Phillips came face to face, the post Fonzi years and much more.
- Why neither of Veciana’s stories about how he met Bishop could be true if Phillips was Bishop.
- How Veciana tried to insert himself into historical events such as the Pedro Pan exodus.
- Who was really running Alpha 66 in the years 1961-1965?
- A profile of David Phillips focusing on the real human being rather than the caricature of him that has been popularized in conspiracy literature.
- Phillips and Mexico City.
- Phillips’ battles with conspiracy authors.
- How Gaeton Fonzi deceived theorists for years by changing facts to fit his theories.
- An analysis of the alleged Bishop-Oswald meeting.
- Repudiations of numerous conspiracy theories, some of which come from other conspiracists.
- An extensive summary of the book’s conclusions.
The Bishop Hoax makes a powerful case that the shadowy Maurice Bishop never existed. It was a narrative promoted by those that wanted to believe in a CIA conspiracy to kill JFK. That notion was then marketed to others with the same proclivity—including a former Washington Post editor. The resulting disinformation campaign went on for over forty years and sullied the reputation of a respected public servant and family man. The Bishop Hoax sets the record straight and finally puts one of the most enduring JFK myths to rest.
