The year was 2014 and the place was the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the Washington DC suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. The event was a conference of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), a group founded in 1984 to “acquire, preserve, and disseminate information on political assassinations.” An old man moved gingerly toward a waiting conference room table amid a warm round of applause. But to reach the table where he would address the attendees, he had to negotiate a pair of steps. The first was no problem for the 86-year-old, but when he tried to get past the next, he stumbled. Instantly, two younger men grabbed him and held on until he was safely settled. As the old man peered into the crowd, he saw many familiar faces. Anthony Summers, Jefferson Morley and James DiEugenio were just a few of those whom he recognized as experts in their field. He must have felt a sense of pride in knowing that they were there to hear him speak.
One of the individuals who had assisted the old man approached a podium located next to the conference table. “Good afternoon, everyone,” he announced boldly. “My name is Fernand Amandi. I'm going to be translating for Mr. Veciana. He is prepared to answer every question on every subject that has to do with this case,” Amandi assured the audience, “and is honored and proud to do so today.” After Amandi concluded his remarks, Veciana’s son Carlos took his turn at the dais. “Now, what you guys all came here for,” Carlos said as he began to read a prepared statement from his father. “On November 22nd, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. In reality, what happened that day was a coup d’état,” he argued.
Then Carlos got to the “red meat”:
I want to unequivocally state that Maurice Bishop was David Atlee Phillips. Here are the factors that point to a conspiracy. I traveled to Dallas at the end of August or beginning of September of 1963 to meet with Maurice Bishop, my CIA handler. We had agreed to see each other in the lobby of a downtown Dallas bank. There, I observed Bishop with a young man I later identified without a doubt as Lee Harvey Oswald.
But Antonio Veciana likely did not know that a significant number of the audience members were already skeptical of his narrative and others would follow suit after hearing the latest version of a story he had been telling since 1976. One such emerging cynic was Dan Hardway, a West Virginia attorney who had served as a researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late seventies. The committee had been authorized to reinvestigate the assassinations of JFK, his brother Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Hardway’s primary area of research for the HSCA involved the possibility of a relationship between Lee Harvey Oswald and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with a focus on Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in late September and early October of 1963.1
Three years after the AARC presentation, Hardway asked John Newman, one of the most respected conspiracy researchers, to investigate Veciana’s story.2 What Newman and other investigators eventually uncovered would cast doubt on Veciana’s claims and create a schism in the JFK conspiracy community.
Go to Chapter 1
The Bishop Hoax: Table of Contents
Notes
1. Declaration of Dan L. Hardway, 1-2, Morley v. CIA.⏎2. Newman, John. “The CIA, the Army and the Pentagon: The Veciana Misdirection 3.0.” 2020 Global JFK Virtual Research Conference.⏎
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