Title Quote: Antonio Veciana Jr.
After his Maurice Bishop revelations and a brief resumption of anti-Castro activity, by the early eighties Veciana had effectively disappeared from the national spotlight.1 Still, he remained a reliable source for newspaper, magazine and book writers interested in anti-Castro activities, Cuban American relations or good old-fashioned conspiracy theories.
The year 1988 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the JFK murder and spawned a flurry of articles with a conspiracy bent. In a typical piece, the Miami News chronicled Veciana’s Bishop story although the paper had the good sense to refer to Phillips only as the “now deceased former chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere [Division].” Unsurprisingly, Gaeton Fonzi was quoted calling Veciana “an important witness.” For his part, Veciana was said to be puzzled by the HSCA’s conclusion that they could not credit his story. “I don’t know why they said that” Veciana complained, “because I answered frankly all their questions.”2
By the nineties, Veciana had grown reluctant to talk about his Bishop allegations or the JFK case in general. Interviewed in 1992 during the hullabaloo surrounding Oliver Stone’s JFK, Veciana maintained, “The issue is very delicate. It has given me many headaches over the years and I really don’t want to address the matter ever again.”3 Veciana’s sudden reluctance to discuss the JFK case may have been due to his realization that the publicity garnered by Stone’s film could result in a new government inquiry. In fact, in the late nineties Veciana was contacted by the ARRB who sought to interview him.
The review board’s primary purpose in approaching Veciana was, according to an internal memo, to “Ensure that a complete historical record has been compiled as it relates to Veciana’s anti-Castro activities and his relationship with Maurice Bishop.” Toward this end, the memo recommended that Veciana be questioned regarding “issues that may not have been fully explored by the HSCA.” The board also sought to identify individuals that could “corroborate or rebut” Veciana’s HSCA testimony and to locate documents pertaining to his relationship with Bishop.
In anticipation of Veciana’s statement, the ARRB drafted a list of questions (included in the above linked memo) that touched on several then unresolved issues:
- Are you now in a position to provide information on the individual previously identified as “Maurice Bishop?”
- Are you currently in the possession of any materials or records relating to the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?
- Is there anyone you can identify who could possibly provide additional information on the true identity of Maurice Bishop?
- You have stated that you utilized an individual to act as an “intermediary” when you were traveling or otherwise not accessible. How much did your “intermediary” know about your relationship with Maurice Bishop? In your opinion, could this intermediary provide further evidence which could eventually identify Bishop?
- You have stated that Bishop referred you to a “Mr. Melton,” who, as part of the anti-Castro efforts sponsored by Mr. Bishop, trained you in various intelligence and operational methods. Are you aware of any information which could possibly help in identifying Melton?
- You have referred to a March 1963 press conference (Fonzi, p. 132) which was carried out at Bishop’s urging, where you announced a successful raid on a Soviet ship docked in Cuban waters. Bishop apparently made arrangements for two high-level government officials to attend the press conference. Who were these officials? Were you aware of the existence of a relationship between Bishop and these officials?
- Regarding your position with the United States Agency for International Development: how sure are you that Maurice Bishop, or elements of the U.S. intelligence community, had something to do with getting you that job? Can you detail your official responsibilities as an AID employee? Were your superiors aware that you spent much of your time conducting anti-Castro efforts while on the job?
- Why do you think Cesar Diosdado questioned various Cuban exiles after the assassination? What is your opinion as to his motivation? Sponsors?
It is reasonable to assume that Veciana would want to help the ARRB by providing answers to the questions that would confirm his story once and for all. Unfortunately, the review board never obtained such answers because Veciana completely stonewalled their efforts.
At least as early as July of 1996, the ARRB expressed an interest in interviewing Veciana.4 Staffers made plans to contact him in August of that year. But negotiations between Veciana and the review board, handled on his end by his son Tony, stalled. By April of 1997, Tony told the ARRB that his father, “really did not want to talk” to investigators. To explain his father’s reticence to cooperate, Tony implied that he might be afraid since he had been the victim of an assassination attempt in 1979. Nevertheless, Tony agreed to approach his father and again ask for his cooperation “for the sake of history.”
In early May, ARRB staffer Tom Samoluk reported that Tony Veciana had not returned phone calls for two weeks.5 Two days later, Samoluk described what was evidently the elder Veciana’s final word on the matter. “Tony Jr. reports that Tony Sr. does not want to talk to us,” Samoluk’s memo said. The elder Veciana wanted to “leave history as it is” and gave poor health as his reason.6 It should be noted that despite his “poor health” Veciana would live for twenty-three more years.7
The ARRB issued its final report and closed shop in September of 1998. Perhaps not coincidentally, Veciana quickly changed his mind about leaving history to speak for itself and consented to an interview with author María Torres that same year.8 Torres was working on a book about the Pedro Pan exodus, a joint venture between the Catholic Church and the US government that ran from 1960-1962. The program was designed to bring Cuban children, whose parents feared Castro’s authoritarian communist regime, to America.9
In furtherance of the Pedro Pan mission, Torres writes that false information was circulated in late 1960 warning Cuban parents that their children would be taken from them by Castro’s government. This propaganda initially was in the form of broadcasts from the CIA-controlled Radio Swan (headed by David Phillips) located on a small island near Honduras. Later, according to Torres, rumors were circulated by underground groups about a law taking away parental rights called Patria Potestad that was soon to be enacted by the Cuban government.10 This is where Veciana comes in. Resurrecting a claim that he briefly alluded to during his HSCA testimony, Veciana told Torres that he was one of those responsible for spreading the rumor about the phony law as well as gossip regarding a proposal to restructure the Cuban currency called Ley Monetaria.11 Like so many of Veciana’s unsupported allegations, this one would get better as time went on.
In 2011, Veciana was interviewed for an article by Saul Landau (the IPS Senior fellow who falsely accused David Phillips of being involved in the Orlando Letelier assassination back in the seventies) and Nelson Valdes for Counterpunch, a left-leaning online journal. Veciana told Landau and Valdes that Maurice Bishop recruited him to “wage psychological war—to destabilize the government.” But instead of merely spreading rumors, the CIA, in the form of Bishop’s “agents,” was distributing physical copies of a “forged” law to make affluent Cubans believe that Castro wanted to “usurp parental control.”
But by 2017, Veciana was telling an even juicier tale through his autobiography. He now claimed that Patria Potestad was his own idea rather than the CIA’s.12 Veciana wrote that he went to a friend named Andrés Cayón who created an official-looking document that Veciana distributed to the “underground.” Veciana said that he never told Bishop/Phillips about the plan but when Phillips heard about the fake law, Radio Swan began broadcasts supporting the notion of Castro seizing parental rights.13 Note that Veciana’s chronology is incorrect according to the information provided by Torres who says that the Radio Swan broadcasts were the beginning of the propaganda operation. In any case, according to Veciana, he was the primary individual responsible for the historic relocation of around 14,000 children to the United States and the CIA merely followed his lead. Veciana’s supporters, including Jefferson Morley, uncritically accepted his assertions.
There are problems with Veciana’s Operation Pedro Pan story outside of its obvious evolution. First, while CIA critics are certain that the agency had a hand in Pedro Pan, the evidence for this (beyond the Radio Swan broadcasts which may have been merely opportunistic) is less than compelling. Father Bryan O. Walsh, who created and ran the operation, commented on the CIA allegations during a 1998 oral history for Barry University:
… for a year and a half there was a blackout [regarding Pedro Pan] in the news. Which actually answers … some of the revisionist stories around today who say the whole thing was a propaganda plotted by the CIA to disrupt Cuban society. Of course, how could it be a propaganda plot when you kept it secret. It was rather self-contradictory.
In 1999, a ruling by a judge in the US District Court of Northern Illinois stated that the "evacuation of Cuban children turned out not to be a CIA operation at all.” The ruling was based on a review of over 700 pages of documents obtained from the CIA following a lawsuit by María Torres. Of course, since it is a fact that Veciana was never a CIA employee or utilized as an asset by the agency, even if the CIA had been involved in Pedro Pan, it would do nothing to prove his allegations.
Indeed, others pushing the notion of CIA involvement have claimed that someone besides Veciana and his friend Cayón authored the Patria Potestad “law.” For some time, Alvaro Fernandez, a Florida-based journalist, has asserted that his late father Angel Fernandez Varela helped create the phony directive. The elder Fernandez, who was reportedly a CIA asset, supposedly made a death-bed confession to Alvaro regarding his complicity in the Pedro Pan project. According to Landau and Valdes, the elder Fernandez was one of those responsible for “drafting the false law” while the actual printing was done by Leopoldina and Ramon Grau Alsina, the niece and nephew of former Cuban President Ramon Grau San Martin.
María Torres confirms that the Grau family was involved with spreading disinformation regarding Patria Potestad. Torres notes that Ramon Grau’s wife Polita oversaw a women’s underground group that distributed copies of the phony law to “churches and other centers.” However, according to Torres this distribution of physical copies of the law did not occur until the summer of 1961. Once again, this contradicts Veciana’s Trained to Kill narrative.14 To sum up, the evidence that Veciana had anything to do with the Pedro Pan exodus, much less that he was the mastermind behind it, is less than impressive.
In 2005, Veciana became involved in a something of a political scandal in his adopted hometown. The trouble started when Veciana, whose health had miraculously improved in the seven years since he refused to speak to the ARRB, agreed to act as treasurer for the campaign of Maurice Ferré who ran for Miami-Dade County mayor in 2004. However, Veciana was a convicted felon and as such was not a registered voter and therefore ineligible to work for Ferré. A Miami-Dade ethics department audit found that this was a violation of state law. Veciana pled ignorance of the law and stepped down as treasurer after just six days. But the audit also revealed that Veciana received $17,500 that he used to make cash payments to poll workers and to pay campaign expenses, an amount that exceeded the limits set in state law.15 Ferré’s bid for office was ultimately unsuccessful.
Veciana was occasionally called upon by the media for his expertise on political matters. Such was the case in 2007 when President George H.W. Bush made a speech indicating that the United States would be willing to give financial aid to a free Cuba. “A political maneuver is what’s behind this,” Veciana opined. “In my opinion, he wants to keep Cubans with hope so they vote Republican in the next election,” Veciana concluded.16 The left-leaning Veciana was more impressed when President Barack Obama restored diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2014. “I also have faith this [new policy] will help advance the future of democracy in Cuba,” Veciana told the Associated Press.17
In 2012 Gaeton Fonzi, Veciana’s most important advocate, died. The following year, Veciana made news in the JFK conspiracy community when he came forward 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 Fonzi (and they) had long suspected. The CIA, in the form of Phillips, had participated in dirty dealings involving the unsuspecting patsy Lee Harvey Oswald and the killing of JFK. Precisely what those dirty dealings were depended on who was telling the story, but nevertheless it was compelling in the minds of theorists.
But an article by Bill Kelly provided fuel for those who were skeptical about Veciana’s sudden “revelation.” In that piece, Kelly wrote:
… decades later, after Phillips and Fonzi had died, Fonzi’s widow Maria persuaded [emphasis added] 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. “Gaet didn’t push too far,” Marie said, “I’m a bit more pushier than Gaeton.”
In 2020, I happened upon a video of the 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, Joaquin Godoy, who was a member of the anti-Castro group MRP and a government 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 by Veciana’s daughter Ana 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, but he really shouldn’t have said that Bishop was Phillips because Veciana never did admit that.” Mrs. Fonzi went on to explain that their mutual friend Godoy interceded with Veciana on her behalf. “Every time I write a letter to Veciana, I would call Joaquin,” Mrs. Fonzi remembered, “… and then he would call him 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 Godoy that “[Veciana] never said who Maurice Bishop was.” Finally, after Godoy again interceded on Mrs. Fonzi’s behalf, the coveted letter stating that Bishop was Phillips arrived in her mailbox. Despite her frank 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.
In September 2014, Veciana appeared at the AARC’s Bethesda, Maryland conference. While Jefferson Morley has called Veciana’s turn there a “once in a lifetime experience,” most of his rhetoric could be characterized as either reiterations of his well-known Maurice Bishop story or “the CIA-killed-JFK” assertions that could have been lifted straight from conspiracy literature.18 Nevertheless, the ongoing evolution of Veciana’s story was once again on display. For more than an hour, Veciana talked about his alleged experiences with Maurice Bishop who he now claimed was Phillips. The reaction of the attendees was decidedly mixed.
Probably the most dubious assertion made by Veciana at the conference is missing from all early accounts of his story and from his book. Veciana, speaking through his interpreter, Fernand Amandi, declared “… prior to the assassination, Phillips asks Mr. Veciana directly … if one were to go to the Cuban embassy in Mexico, would one be able to get a visa to travel to [Cuba], to which the response was absolutely no.” Veciana went on to explain that from personal experience he knew it would take four to six weeks to obtain a visa. Armed with this information, Phillips could send Lee Harvey Oswald to Mexico City and “… use that foreknowledge as a pretext … through which he can stage a very public and clear event … that resulted in the Mexico City incident.”
Later, one questioner incredulously exclaimed, “I don’t know if I understood this correctly, did Mr. Veciana say that David Atlee Phillips imagined and organized the entire Mexico City scenario?” Veciana initially changed the subject but after a rambling monologue, held his ground and confirmed the statement. What is unclear is why Phillips, who had lived in Cuba and as a CIA agent would have obviously possessed knowledge of how visas were obtained, would need to ask Veciana for this type of information. It is equally unclear why Veciana never revealed this scenario to Fonzi and the HSCA who would certainly have been interested in it.
Veciana’s retellings of the Guillermo Ruiz story have remained mostly consistent through the years. As first voiced publicly by Fonzi in HSCA volume X, Bishop told Veciana that if he could get in touch with Ruiz, who was the cousin of Veciana’s wife, that he would pay Ruiz a large amount of money to say publicly that he and his wife had met with Oswald. However, Veciana expanded on the story before the conspiracy-oriented AARC audience.
Veciana now claimed that rather than simply asking Ruiz and his wife to say they had met with Oswald, Bishop wanted Ruiz to “publicly declare that Oswald came to the Cuban consulate to discuss with members of the Cuban security forces at the consulate plans to assassinate John F. Kennedy.” This new version of the story is again missing from Veciana’s book, although he has Bishop asking, “what it would take for [Ruiz] to tell us about Cuba’s involvement in Kennedy’s death.” The book also contradicts Fonzi’s HSCA writeup by saying (page 125) that rather than being a person who was “tempted with money” Ruiz was a “communist” who wouldn’t “accept any payment.”
Questioner Malcolm Blunt made the important point that the available documentation points to a Veciana relationship with Army Intelligence rather than the CIA. Blunt alleged that Veciana had a “working crypt” which was DUP-748 and this fact indicated he was working for the “902nd military group.” Veciana attempted to explain this anomaly by saying “at one point he had been approached by Army Intelligence for some activities that he was involved in the [Florida] Keys and the Caribbean.”
Veciana continued “there was a gentleman by the name of Patrick Harris from Army Intelligence that approached him in Puerto Rico.” After sending Harris to a base in the Bahamas as he had requested, Veciana had no further contact with him and disingenuously maintained that was his only experience with Army Intelligence.19 Indeed, the record shows that Veciana not only had several contacts with the Army, but that it was he who initiated the contact with that agency through Jordan Pfuntner.20 But Veciana did not answer Blunt’s original concern that the weight of the documentation favors a Veciana-Army Intelligence connection rather than any CIA affiliation. Blunt also made the excellent point that it is doubtful Veciana could have worked for the CIA and Army Intelligence simultaneously, which would have been the case according to Veciana’s own timeline.21
Veciana said that he knew Phillips was Bishop the moment he saw his photo at the Miami Public Library but remained silent because he lives by a code of “loyalty and appreciation.” Ironically, Fonzi’s book (page 159) tells a different story. Fonzi, who was present when Veciana saw the photo of Phillips in People magazine, said he looked for a reaction from Veciana and “there was none.” Fonzi also watched Phillips when he first met Veciana at the AFIO luncheon for any hint of recognition and again came up empty.
It should be noted that Veciana continued to conceal Phillips’ identity for many years even though he told the conference attendees that from “all of the conversations … [with Phillips he] formed little puzzle pieces … [which when put] together [leaves] him with no doubt that Phillips was at the center of the assassination planning …” Veciana characterized the theoretical CIA killing of JFK as “reprehensible” and claimed that he believed he was going to be arrested as a conspirator on the night of the assassination. But apparently, Veciana wanted attendees to think that since Phillips had empowered him to become “an important person who was playing an important role in the future of Cuba” that this fact coupled with his “loyalty and admiration” for Phillips superseded any concern he might have had over the CIA’s involvement in a conspiracy to kill JFK and caused him to remain silent.
As noted in the prologue of this book, the dubious statements made by Veciana at the AARC conference ironically led former HSCA investigator Dan Hardway to ask John Newman to examine his claims. Incredibly, Newman’s work, which began circa 2017, was the first critical investigation of Veciana’s assertions by a conspiracy-oriented researcher.
Veciana’s autobiography, Trained to Kill, was published in 2017. Conspiracy-oriented authors and their fellow travelers heaped praise on the dubious volume. Author David Talbot, who wrote the foreword, called it “remarkable” and “revelatory.” In a credulous piece for Newsweek that accepted Veciana’s unverified fantasies, Jefferson Morley called the book “lucid” and referred to Veciana as a former CIA “operative.” In a promotional blurb, Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University, said the book was “essential” and “chilling.” In another back-cover blurb, conspiracy author Dick Russell said it “should revise the history books.” But the honor for the most absurd blurb went to Veciana’s interpreter from the AARC conference, Fernand Amandi, who called Veciana “one of history’s most important individuals.”
The problems with Veciana’s nonsensical tome are so serious that it is impractical to list them in one place and I have chosen instead to comment on his assertions in relevant sections of this book and in the endnotes. Still, it is worth mentioning my own experience upon seeing the book for the first time. After an initial perusal, I stopped reading long enough to check for a disclaimer advising that a form of literary license had been employed. To my amazement, I found none. Veciana was presenting this fantasy as an honest-to-goodness factual version of his life. Veciana’s story now included suicide pills, disappearing ink, lie detector tests, truth serum and other spy novel clichés that are notably absent from all previous versions of his story. It is safe to assume that Fonzi and the HSCA would have been keenly interested in these details. The fact that Veciana did not tell Fonzi (or anyone else for 41 years) about these assertions is a clear indication that they are untrue.
Clearly, Veciana was aware of his book’s core audience and sought to appease them with conspiracy rhetoric. Veciana wrote that there is a “parallel power at work in empires” that exists to meet its own needs. There is, Veciana claimed, “an invisible power acting in the shadows” and these “puppet masters” are the ones who really control events. And despite elections a “hidden consortium” wields the “true power” and decides the fate of its constituents. In an obvious allusion to the JFK murder, Veciana went on to warn that this consortium is willing to destroy “political leaders” if they prove to be “inconvenient” to the secret overlords who somehow remain “forever hidden” to the outside world.22
In May of 2020, about three years after his book was published, it was reported that the 91-year-old Veciana was “beset with episodes of dementia.” The disclosure came to light because of a newspaper article on the handling of nursing home residents during the COVID-19 crisis. Veciana was reportedly confined to a wheelchair and required nursing home care since he was then ineligible to be placed in assisted living.23
On June 18, 2020, Veciana, who had been under hospice care, died in Miami. A Miami Herald article by reporter Sarah Moreno recorded the reaction of Veciana's daughter Ana. “The public sees him in a way, like the founder of Alpha 66, the Cuban who participated in attacks on Fidel Castro, but in the end he was my father,” she noted. Ana said that she "lived with [her father] and cared for him for his last 18 years, in which he suffered from dementia." “The relationship changed as he got old. I became his mother and he behaved as if he were a small child,” she recalled.
However, Moreno also repeated Veciana’s Bishop story verbatim writing that he was “trained by the CIA” to carry out military actions. “Veciana worked for the CIA in Bolivia” Moreno’s article continued, “until he fell out with the agent who was running him, David Atlee Phillips.” Moreno credulously repeated Veciana’s assertion that Phillips used the code-name of “Maurice Bishop,” and he observed Phillips talking with Lee Harvey Oswald. According to Moreno, whose source was Veciana’s daughter Ana Veciana-Suarez, Veciana did not mention the incident during congressional hearings on the assassination because he feared for his life and the safety of his family.24
It is unfortunate that a respected publication such as the Herald did not take more care in the preparation of the obituary and relied only on Veciana’s autobiography and his daughter for information. As documented by this book, there is no evidence that Veciana was employed by the CIA in Bolivia or anywhere else. Similarly, there is no proof beyond Veciana’s statements that there was a “Maurice Bishop” who met with Lee Harvey Oswald or that he was David Phillips. And Veciana certainly did mention the Bishop story in his congressional testimony which was the whole point of him appearing before Congress in the first place. You could say that by reporting his Bishop story as historical fact, the Herald gave Veciana the proverbial, if posthumous, last laugh.
The Bishop Hoax Table of Contents
Notes
1. Documents indicate that Veciana was involved with Orlando Bosch’s group CORU in 1977. The organization was evidently planning terrorist actions in Venezuela. Additionally, Fonzi reported on page 262 of his book that Veciana had undertaken a “secret mission” to Latin America to deliver an explosive device. This would have been in late 1976 or early 1977. ⏎2. The Miami News. November 19, 1988, 7.⏎
3. The Town Talk (Alexandria, LA). January 5, 1992, 33.⏎
4. ARRB Memo from Manual E. Legaspi to Jeremy Gunn et. al. July 16, 1996.⏎
5. ARRB Memo from Tom Samoluk to Manual E. Legaspi. May 5, 1997.⏎
6. ARRB Memo from Tom Samoluk to David Marwell. May 7, 1997.⏎
7. The ARRB was also interested in obtaining Fonzi’s “original note[s] and his interviews” (ARRB memo from Ned Dolan to Jeremy Gunn, December 16, 1996). Although Fonzi met with ARRB staff there is no indication he turned over documents.⏎
8. Torres, The Lost Apple, 290.⏎
9. Torres, The Lost Apple, 8.⏎
10. Torres, The Lost Apple, 89-91.⏎
11. Briefly alluded to: HSCA Executive Session Testimony of Antonio Veciana, April 25, 1978, 16. RIF 180-10116-10202; Told Torres about spreading the rumor: Torres, The Lost Apple, 91. Notably, Veciana told author Dick Russell about a second currency destabilization scheme that appears nowhere else in his numerous stories. This alleged plan occurred not in Cuba but in Bolivia during the early seventies and involved spreading rumors that “coins” would be devalued. Veciana implied that a subsequent military coup was due to his actions (Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, 149-150).⏎
12. In his book The Secret War (pp. 97, 172), Fabian Escalante claimed that Patria Potestad was a propaganda program created by the CIA as part of Operation Liborio. He does not name Veciana as one of those involved in the creation of the illicit law.⏎
13. Veciana with Harrison, Trained to Kill, 90-91.⏎
14. Torres, The Lost Apple, 136.⏎
15. Noaki Schwartz. “Audit: Ferré Camp Broke the Law.” The Miami Herald, June 2, 2005.⏎
16. Gretel Sarmiento. “Local Cubans Underwhelmed by Bush’s Speech.” The Palm Beach Post, October 25, 2007, C5.⏎
17. Christine Armario. “Think All Cuban-Americans Think Alike? Think Again.” Florida Today, December 22, 2014, A11.⏎
18. For instance, Veciana repeated the dubious assertions of Dr. Charles Crenshaw, a surgeon at Parkland Hospital where JFK was treated. He also mentioned the “mysterious” suicide of George de Mohrenschildt and the speculations of Robert Kennedy Jr.⏎
19. In the third of the original interviews with Fonzi, Veciana brought up his contact with Harris/Hubbard although he didn’t name him. Veciana told Fonzi that this individual who he said, “wanted to see the Alpha 66 camp … in the Bahamas,” was CIA. But it is almost certain that Veciana knew Hubbard was Army Intelligence rather than CIA. Hubbard reported that Veciana and his cohorts “expressed feelings of good fortune they had found an agency they could trust” (RIF 194-10003-10411). Indeed, Fonzi reported in his book that “Veciana concluded that Harris [Hubbard] was Army Intelligence …” (Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 136). Therefore, Veciana was likely trying to impress Fonzi with his CIA contacts at this early stage in their relationship.⏎
20. Newman, Into the Storm, 313. Newman says that Veciana had a dozen contacts with Army Intelligence (“The CIA, the Army and the Pentagon.” Project JFK/CSI Dallas, November 2020 Presentation by John Newman).⏎
21. Dan Hardway was another person who was skeptical of Veciana’s claims in this area. “Mr. Veciana holds a very unique status,” Hardway wrote in his blog article “A Professional Conspirator.” Hardway noted that Veciana was “one of very, very few people officially listed as both an agent of CIA and military intelligence. How did he come about having that unique status?” the former HSCA investigator logically asked.⏎
22. Veciana with Harrison, Trained to Kill, 73. Veciana, who often used his sessions promoting the Bishop tale to push conspiracy theories, told Vic Walters that he believed Oswald when he said he was a patsy and had “no doubt” that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK. Veciana also repeated the common meme that Oswald never went to Mexico City (“Statements by Veciana on WCKT-TV (Miami) Week of August 19, 1977.” RIF 180-10097-10138).⏎
23. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/coronavirus/article242778451.html (now behind a paywall).⏎
24. Sarah Moreno. “Antonio Veciana, Early Anti-Castro Fighter and Founder of Alpha 66, Dies.” The Miami Herald, June 21, 2020, A17. Now behind a paywall but available HERE.⏎
0 comments:
Post a Comment