The Argot of Dealey Plaza

The Argot of Dealey Plaza  - How to define and talk about what happened at Dealey Plaza. 
By Bill Kelly 

It now should be established and accepted as a fact that the Modus Operandi (MO) of the assassination of President Kennedy was not that of a deranged loner, but rather that of a covert intelligence operation. 

According to the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a covert operation (also as CoveOps or covert ops) is "an operation that is so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor."

Just as David Maurer learned the peculiar language of the confidence men and con artists before he understood the inter working mechanisms of the Big Con "Sting," we have to decipher and learn the intelligence terminology of the covert action operators to come to an understanding of the Dealey Plaza Operation.

David Maurer: “Over a period of years I have explored the secret and semi-secret communications system of professional criminals…Very early I discovered that the technical language of criminals, which is called ‘argot,’ cannot be studied in terms of language alone. These speech-systems have to be viewed in light of the subcultures which produced them….In other words, before one can write about criminal argot, he must learn how professional criminals live…”

[http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-american-confidence-man-and-big-con.html ]

One of the unique attributes of covert intelligence tradecraft is to give the mission an operational code name - the 1954 Guatemalan coup was Operation Success, and while those few who planned it used another name, I refer to it as the Dealey Plaza Operation (DPO).

Because, as we have learned from Joseph Smith and Paul Linebarger, some of the psych war and covert intelligence operational techniques developed by the Army and CIA came from the criminal underworld, whose argot was chronicled by linguist David Maurer, some of the terminology as well as techniques are interchangeable.

[ http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2017/07/joe-smith-on-paul-linebarger-and-david.html ]

Just as the Big Con games had the Inside Man, the star of the show, the covert operators had their Inside Men, Outside Men, Spotters, Ropers, Fixers and the Big Store itself.

As in the Big Con Sting, the Inside Men are the best of the lot and run the show. CIA men such as Allen Dulles, Ted Shackley, Desmond Fitzgerald and Richard Helms were the best Inside Men, and they had their Big Store - JMWAVE.

The largest CIA station in the world at the time - at the University of Miami, went by the cover of Zenith Technological Enterprises, as US Army Ranger Bradley Ayers describes in his books "The War that Never Was" and "The Zenith Secret."

[ http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-resurrection-of-bradley-ayers.html]

As Ayers describes it, they set it up just like the Big Con artists set up a Big Store as a fake gambling joint or broker's office.

 "Monday morning we met the station chief, Ted Shackley," Ayers wrote. "As we sat in his outer office, waiting a little nervously, I saw they had missed no detail in setting up the false front of Zenith Technological Enterprises."

"There were phony sales and production charts on the walls and business licenses from the state and federal governments. A notice to salesman, pinned near the door, advised them of the calling hours for various departments. The crowning touch was a certificate of award from the United Givers' Fund to Zenith for outstanding participation in the annual fund drive."

The Inside Man, like Paul Newman's Gondorf in "The Sting," must be a good actor and polished professional with charisma, as Ted Shackley and Dez Fitzgerald clearly fit that persona.

The Inside Men seldom leave the office, and handle administrative and bureaucratic affairs as well as devising the game plans and pulling the strings of the street operators, that he does through his Outside Men - the covert operators, case officers and their agents and assets.

Gordon Campbell, the mysterious JMWAVE chief of Maritime activities (until he died), once told Ayers, "The fewer people out there (at a remote training base) the better....My Outside Man Karl will help you with logistics..."

The Outside Men are a bit more crude and street wise than the prim and polished Inside Men. Guys like William Harvey, David Morrales and George Joanedes dealt directly with the Cubans and mobsters, and utilized many of the same techniques as well as the lingo of Con artists. 

Codes, ciphers, false flags, black propaganda and putting in the fix are utilized by both the con artists and covert operators, so an understanding of one gives insight into the other, as Paul Linebarger taught his psych war students.

Acronyms, aliases, pseudonyms, code names and ciphers are all keys that must be deciphered and understood before you can even begin to read many of the CIA cables and memos that use them.

Lists of such items that have been deciphered by veteran researchers like John Newman, Bill Simpich, Malcolm Blunt, Larry Hancock, Jerry Shinley and Rex Bradford are filed at the Mary Farrell web site where many of the released records are also posted on line for easy access.

CIA Cryptonyms at Mary Ferrell:  https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php

Glossary and Acronyms: Glossary and Acronyms — Central Intelligence Agency

Spy Museum Language of Espionage: Language of Espionage · International Spy Museum

Urban Dictionary: CIA Urban Dictionary: CIA

As Malcolm Blunt recently noted: “Better we should look at the documents being released and work on what I’m sure to most is irrelevant minutiae. Although most of these releases are going to be absolutely meaningless to Post and Times reporters, really we are being given missing pages from an incomplete dictionary. Agency cryptonyms, pseudonyms, internal systems and management. Very valuable.”

Harvey's Itiniary

HARVEY'S ITINIARY



In his book "The Devil's Chessboard" David Talbot recounts the careers of Allen Dulles and his deputies including Tom Braden, Richard Helms, Cord Meyer, Desmond Fitzgerald and William Harvey. Harvey was described as "America's James Bond." lethally armed and licinsed to kill.

When President Kennedy asked to meet him, William Harvey gave his weapons to the Secret Service agent at the door.

After exposing Kim Philby as a Soviet doubleagent and running the Berlin Tunnel Harvey ran the Cuban Task Force in the basement of CIA Headquarters until he lost that job when he sent a commando team into Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis againt the orders of RFK. Harvey was replaced by Desmond Fitzgerald, though Harvey's official biographer, in Flawed Patriot, says that Fitzgerald was not informed of all of the operations Harvey had started that continued on unimpeded.

Assigned to Rome as chief of the CIA station, Harvey knew Clare Booth Luce as a former Ambassador to Italy, where James Jesus Angleton also served in the OSS during World War II.

After learning from an associate that Harvey traveled to America sometime before the assassination, Talbot sought Harvey's itiniary, and a March 1963 document relates that Harvey received official permission to return home from his post in order to meet with Clare Booth Luce.

Wife of Time Life publisher Henry Luce, and Allen Dulles' mistress, Clare Booth Luce was the keynote speaker at the AFIO conference where Gaeton Fonzi introduced Anthomy Veciana to David Atlee Phillips.

Luce told reporter Vera Glasser that on the night of the assassination she received a phone call from Julio Fernandez, one of her Cuban "boys" who she wrote about and financially supported in their commando raids against Cuba. Fernandez was in New Orleans, and said that he had a tape recording of Lee Oswald the accused assassin of the president and other evidence.

The HSCA investigated but the CIA could not come up with this "Julio Fernandez," and Gaeton Fonzi concluded Luce made up the name.

But there was a Julio Fernandez and he did lead a maritime team at JMWAVE according to US Army Ranger Captain Bradley Ayers, who wrote about his experiences there in two books - "The War that Never Was" and "The Zenith Secret."

While Ayers and former Havana embassy officer Wayne Smith were discredited, possibly intentionally, by their false identificaion of two CIA officials in a film, Ayers was an Army Ranger assigned by General Krulack to the CIA to train anti-Castro Cuban commandos at JMWAVE and he gives us a window into what happened there.

Captain Ayers and Major Roderick were tasked with training the Cubans, and the team Ayers was assigned was led by Julio Fernandez, while the team Roderick trained was supported by a "Colonel Rosselli," who Roderick said was well-connected to mobsters in Vegas and Havana.

As we have seen with Frank Sturgis being under Air Force Intelligence control, and Alpha 66 being monitored and possibly controlled by Army Intelligence, not every operative and operation is under CIA control. And now we know that the officially National Security Council approved JMWAVE commandos were also financially supported by others besides the CIA. So who were they working for - the US government (CIA) or Clare Booth Luce, William Pawley and "Colonel" Rosselli?

While Ayers trained his team in small boat tactics at Pirates Lair in the Everglades, Major Roderick trained "Colonel  Rosselli's sniper team at Point Mary off Key Largo.

As Brad Ayers recalls in The Zenith Secret:

"I was looking forward to having dinner with Rod. I'd been out of circulation at the station for several weeks and was eager to bring myself up to date. Rod had been drinking before he got to the house that night. In fact, he confided, he and the recently arrived Colonel Rosselli were working on plans to ambush Fidel Castro and had been on a weekend binge together. They'd become close friends as they spent time together, their drinking friendship was a natural extension of their on-duty relationship."

"While we ate I discussed my training activities and made a point of bringing up the matter of case officers and their lack of attention to training. I hoped that, through Rod, word would get back to operations. When we finished dinner, I turned up the sterio to cover our conversation as Rod began to tell me about the new things 'in the air" at the station. It seemed that the administrtaion was ready to begin making an even more concerted effort to unseat Castro. The election year 1964 was rapidly approaching, and President Kennedy's Cuban policy critics were putting on the heat. The Special Group had already removed a number of targets from the restricted list, and there were more to go. It was up to the CIA, specifically the Miami station, to plan the new missions, recruit and train exiles, and mount operations to strike the Communist dictator where it really hurt. Other espionage activities were being carried out to coincide with this paramilitary effort, and still and more attempts to eleminate Castro were being devised. Then he dropped it. He told me Rosselli had high level Mafia and Havana connections. I was speechless. The American government collaborating with organized crime? I couldn't believe it. I was anxious to meet this guy."

"With Russian help - including the delivery of a new, faster, better equipped coastal patrol craft - Cuban defenses had been tightened and sophisticated. The last American attempts to penetrate with larger craft such as the Rex and Leda had ended in near disaster. Though Rod didn't know about my trip to Cuba, I was tempted to vounch for that revelation."

There are two independent sources that confirm or coincide with Ayers' JMWAVE stories, including a defense contractor's order to design and develop a fast motor boat for use in Cuba, that eventually got more use in Vietnam. A former Nazi aeronautical engineer was brought in from Project Paperclip to work on the craft design.

Also, among the recently released records in the JFK Collection at the National Archives is a John "Rosselli chronology" file that includes a typewrnitten article by Jack Anderson that describes his exclusive interview with Rosselli immediately after he testified in secret congressional session.

Rosselli told Anderson that he was first recruited into the Cuban project by Robert Mahu in Las Vegas in 1960 during the Eisenhower administration, and his first case officer was "Big Jim" O'Connell. After the Bay of Pigs his case officer was "a man named William Harvey."

At first they tried to poison Castro, but later they planned on using high-powered rifles. There were four attempts in all.

Rosselli wouldn't tell the Congressmen where he lived and shortly there after he was found floating in a 50 gallon oil drum, a cold case murder directly related to the assassination of President Kennedy that remains unsolved. Sam Giancana is another.

Because Captain Ayers was U.S. Army and not an employee of the CIA, he didn't sign a CIA security statement and was not obligated to have his memoirs previewed by the Agency.

Coincidently, or ironically, the first publisher of Ayers' book "The War That Neve Was" the Indiana based Bobbs-Merrell, hired William Harvey as legal counsel after he retired from the CIA, and he proof read the book prior to publication, eleminiting key characters and events.

Bobbs-Merrell also leased officers on the fourth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

And they also considered publishing some of Peter Dale Scott's early work on the assassination.

To compliment Rosselli's Chronology file, and Ayerss' books, there are a few outstaning records that could shed more light on these matters - including William Harvey's travel itiniary, Clare Booth Luce's Life Magaizine article on Julio Fernandez, Vera Glasser's original article about Luce and her Cuban "boys" and a transcript of her Keynote speech before the AFIO.

A feather for your cap for anyone who can come up with any of those items.

New NARA Releases

As I was notified by a National Archives Media Advisory at 8 a.m this morning that they have begun to release some of the previously with held government records under the JFK Act that mandates all government records related to the assassination of President Kennedy by October 26, 2017.

Rather than release all the remaining records all at once the NARA staff has been working hard to release what they can before the sunset date, provided agencies don't request their continued postponement in an official request to the National Security Agency and President Trump's acquesence, something he is not expected to do.

The hard copy of these new records are not available at the Archives II yet and are only available on line, via a very compressed zip filing system, a computerized system that crashed after a few hours, so only the first few users could download the records before the system went down.

Before their server crashed I only got a chance to review the spread sheet subject matter of some of the zip files and was sent one downloaded CIA file on Collins Radio that I was interested in, that I review at JFKCountercoup2.blogspot.com.

Thats just one of more than 3,000 such records, so you can see that we will be busy reading for a long time, if they get the system up and running again.

This day has been a long time coming.

Jim Garrison, before he died, knew he wouldn't be around when this day rolled around, and he asked his son to be there at the Archives when the secret records were released, and today, anyone with a computer on line will be able to read the nation's most precious secrets, as soon as they fix it.

To get NARA's link go to CAPA-US.org or Jeff Morley's JFKFacts.org.

Better yet - Go to Black Vault where the good people have downloaded the batch and posted direct links to each document so you don't have to wade through the whole zip to find what you want.

So far I have only gone through the first group of previously released with redactions and found quite a few significant ones I had not seen before, and will soon begin posting my Top Ten Records from each grouping.

More to come - stay tuned.

Fonzi's Two Faults

Fonzi's Two Faults

JFK and Clare Booth Luce 

Gaeton Fonzi was a really good reporter and ethical journalists who exposed the bad journalists and publishers, but he wasn't perfect.

In regards to the JFK case I believe Fonzi was wrong on two counts.

For one, he should have walked down the hall and talked to David Phillips when they were both working at Washingtonian at the same time, before he published the article implicating Phillips in the assassination. 

When I met Fonzi on the Grassy Knoll one anniversary, we talked for a while and I asked him why he didn’t. Fonzi said that Sprague’s approach was to question everyone around a suspect before you question the suspect, and he did question Phillips in Congress, when Phillips lied under oath. They had prepared a request for his indictment for perjury. Still, when the man you were looking for is in an office right down the hall, and you are writing about him, you should say hello and give him the opportunity to give his side of the story. Fonzi didn’t.

And Gaeton Fonzi got it wrong when he decided Clare Booth Luce made up the name "Julio Fernandez," who called her on the night of the assassination from New Orleans saying he had audio tapes of Oswald and other evidence.

Luce said she - along with William Pawley and others - financially supported an anti-Castro commando team that ran motor boat raids against Cuba from Florida, and wrote an article about them for Life Magazine. 

Clare Booth Luce was the featured Keynote speaker at the conference of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) when Fonzi introduced Veciana to Phillips, and Veciana knew for certain Phillips was "Bishop," but denied it wanting to reestablish report with his former spymaster to resume their anti-Castro activities.

Veciana knew Phillips was "Bishop" because of his voice, as "Bishop" had taught him the tradecraft - "the voice seldom changes." Fonzi too knew that Phillips was Bishop despite Veciana's denials and the cryptic, "But he knows."

Veciana was only one of many Cubans Fonzi chased - "Clare Booth Luce's Julio Fernandez was another. 

She said he was one of her Cuban "boys" she financially supported who ran a commando boat out of Florida that attacked Cuba. 

When the HSCA requested the CIA files on Cubans named "Julio Fernandez" they sent a list of over a dozen Cubans they had files on but not a mention of the anti-Castro Cuban commando team leader who Clare Booth Luce financially supported. 

Fonzi decided that Luce made up the name and there was no such person, but there were - three such persons named Julio Fernandez.

Two of them - Julio Fernandez Sr. and Junior, were known to the Warren Commission, who published the FBI and Pennsylvania State Police reports from Martinsburg, Pa.., where nosey neighbor Mrs. Margaret Hover had told her brother about the Cuban next door.

JFKcountercoup: Julio Fernandez

She said she found some trash that the neighbor was burning in his back yard - a train ticket and a trailer advertisement with the names “Ruby” and “Lee Oswald” and the “Silver Slipper” written on the back of it.

She showed it to her daughter saying that “Ruby” and “Lee” were probably women her recently divorced husband was seeing, and told her brother about it.

After the assassination Mrs. Hover's brother notified the State Police and the FBI from the Pittsburg office investigated.

After interviewing Mrs. Hoover and her daughter, who confirmed her mother's story, the FBI investigators went next door and met Julio Fernandez, Sr., a former Cuban newspaper publisher in exile, whose son Julio Jr. was an art student at Penn State University. 

Fernandez taught Spanish at the local high school and had probably been relocated there by the Cuban Aide Relief (CAR), an organization out of Philadelphia that assisted anti-Castro Cuban professionals in exile, an organization that in turn was supported by the CIA conduit Catherwood Find. Fernandez said he was an avid anti-Communist and didn't know Ruby or Oswald. The FBI didn’t ask him why he was burning his trash in his backyard.

While he couldn't explain the trailer advertisment with the “Ruby” and “Lee” names on back, Fernandez said the train ticket was an AMTRACK to Florida. He said his son Julio, Jr. used it in August to attend a conference of Cuban journalists in exile at the University of Miami (JMWAVE), that was sponsored by the Pan Am Society and the Catherwood Foundation. 

David Phillips' media asset Virginia Prewett, who Veciana’s secretary connected with “Maurice Bishop,” covered this conference and wrote about it in an article entered into the Congressional Record. 

Then there's a third Julio Fernandez who US Army Ranger Bradley Ayers writes about in his book "The Zenith Secret."

JFKCountercoup2: Excerpts from The Zenith Secret

Ayers, a U.S. Army Ranger captain, says that he was assigned, with another Ranger named Roderick, to the CIA's JMWAVE station by General Krulack, to train anti-Castro commando teams - one of which was led by Julio Fernandez, the most likely candidate for Clare Booth Luce's "boy."

So there were three Cubans named Julio Fernandez who come into play and one of them was the one who called Luce on the night of the assassination with evidence on Oswald.

And Fonzi and the HSCA should have located him and interviewed him. Julio, Jr. may still be alive.

Of key interest in this is the financial assistance Clare Booth Luce and William Pawley gave to the CIA backed Cuban commandos operating out of JMWAVE. If they were backed by the CIA, and operating under orders from the National Security Council, why would they need additional financial assistance? And who were they really working for?

Besides Clare Booth Luce and William Pawley, Bradley Ayers says that while he taught his team, led by Julio Fernandez, small boat handling and firearms training, his Ranger Counterpart, Major Roderick, led another, different team that practiced sniper training at Point Mary, off Key Largo. That team was occasionally assisted by a “Colonel” Rosselli, - John Rosselli, the mobster whose case CIA case officer was William Harvey, who was replaced by Desmond FitzGerald and sent to Italy as CIA station chief there.

It appears, that a number of officially approved JMWAVE commando teams were financially and otherwise supported by a number of prominent individuals, - Clare Booth Luce, William Pawley and John Rosselli. And one of them, led by Julio Fernandez, had an audio of Oswald and other evidence on the night of the assassination.

And Gaeton Fonzi should have gotten to the bottom of it. 

Now we have to. 

Gaet - at the bar - where the sign read: "A jury consists of twelve people chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."

Dick Russell on Veciana - Summer 1976

Dick Russell – From “On the Trail of the JFK Assassins” (Skyhorse Press, 2008)

Chapter 22. The Village Voice, August 14, 1978.

“This Man Is a Missing Link”

Early last week, the House Select Committee on Assassinations released photographs of four men, one a man named “Maurice Bishop.” 

The committee, which is about to begin open hearings into the possibility that President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were victims of conspiracies, asked if anyone could identify either Bishop or the other three mystery figures it sought for questioning in the probe. I do not know Maurice Bishop, but I know someone who does….

Maurice Bishop is a more proved story. My knowledge of him begins in the summer of 1976 when, in the course of researching a book on the assassination, I spent a week in Miami’s Cuban exile community. One of the men I hoped to interview was Antonio Veciana, a founder of an anti-Castro group called Alpha 66. In the early 1960s – before Kennedys curtailed commando raids (to) Cuba – Veciana helped raise $100,000 to support such paramilitary attacks. Reportedly, he had also been involved in at least one assassination plot against Castro.

I found Veciana’s name in the telephone book and called him. He spoke halting English but agreed to meet me down-town across from the Trailways bus station. He was a stocky Cuban, about six feet tall, and he looked to be about 40. After an hour of small talk in a nearby grill, we drove to one of the big hotels along Miami Beach and found an isolated corner in the lobby. There, I learned that Schweiker’s staff was protecting him as its key witness. There, I learned too about Maurice Bishop.

Veciana had been president of a Havana accounting firm when Castro took over Cuba. Embittered by Castro’s turn towards Communism, he began to secretly raise funds for an anti-Castro uprising. 

Shortly thereafter, in 1960, he received a visit from the gentleman who called himself Maurice Bishop. It was to be the first of more than 100 meetings, in a relationship that would last 12 years.

Bishop, who stood about 6’2” and appeared about 45, dressed expensively and had sunspots below his eyes. He told Veciana he was part of an American intelligence service, but instructed him not to ask which one. He wanted to train Veciana to lead a group of anti-Castro Cubans in sabotage and psychological warfare inside Cuba. Another American, whom Veciana knew only as “Melton,” assisted with his instruction.

The initial strategy was to spread false rumors among the population about the economic instability of Castro’s regime – a CIA tactic later used against Salvador Allende in Chile. When this failed to create a stir, Bishop used Veciana to coordinate an assassination attempt. The first was scheduled as Castro prepared to introduce the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, but was cancelled when Bishop feared a violent Soviet reaction. 

The next was planned for October 1961 during a Castro speech, using a bazooka fired from a nearby rooftop. But Castro got wind of the plot and Veciana was forced to flee Cuba by boat. Bishop, who spoke French and possessed a fake passport from Belgium, stayed on undetected.

A month later in Miami, Bishop contacted Veciana again. Together they laid plans to form the group Alpha 66. Veciana traveled to New York, where he worked on another plan to eliminate Castro should he come to speak at the United Nations. Then, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Veciana says that Bishop organized a series of commando attacks on Russian merchant ships in Cuban harbors. Bishop’s plan, he adds, was to force another confrontation.

“Bishop kept saying Kennedy would have to be forced to make a decision,” he remembers. “The only way was to put him up against the wall. Three ships were attacked in different ports of Cuba. The first one was a mistake in identity; it was a British ship. The other two were Russian. To further make Kennedy reach a point, we held a press conference in Washington to let him know about the commando groups. That was when Kennedy ordered that I be confined to Dade County, Florida.”

In response to the terrorist raids, the Justice Department restricted a number of Cuban exiles to Dade County in the spring of 1963. But that summer, Veciana’s meetings with Bishop resumed. In August, Bishop had him fly to Dallas.

“When I arrived there,” says Veciana, “Bishop had given me the address to a building, a bank or insurance company. Bishop was waiting there with a young guy, an American, and the three of us waked to a cafeteria. The young guy did not say one word. He was very quiet, very strange. When I take a cup of coffee, Bishop says to him, ‘I’ll meet you in two or three hours.’ Bishop and I then talked about the movement and our plans, but not when this guy was there. This was Lee Oswald. I didn’t know until November when I saw his picture. But this means Oswald was working with Bishop.”

“After the Kennedy assassination,” Veciana continues, “the FBI contacted me to ask several questions. At first I was worried but the agent who interviewed me said that it was a matter of routine, nothing important. I didn’t tell the agent anything, because I thought it would harm the movement.”

After the assassination, Veciana says he waited a year before going back to Dallas. “I never asked Bishop about Oswald,” he says, “because Bishop always told me that in this type of work, you just do things, you don’t ask.”

Then, early in 1964, Bishop himself raised the subject. Veciana’s cousin was then a leading official in Castro’s intelligence service. Many times, Bishop had beseeched Veciana to try to glean information from the cousin.

“Now Bishop asked me if I thought that by getting my cousin a considerable amount of money, would he say he’d talked to Oswald so make it appear that Oswald was working for Castro? Because of this, I asked Bishop if it was true that Oswald had been talking with Castro agents. Bishop said it did not matter if it was true, what was important was to get my cousin to make that statement.

“I always thought that getting Cuban agents to say Oswald was working for them was a cover for Bishop himself,” adds Veciana. “I always believed Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination. About five months later, I brought up the topic about giving money to my cousin. Bishop said there was no need to talk about that plan any longer. He never brought up the topic again, and I never asked.” 

Over a year passed. With Kennedy’s death, the anti-Castro commando raids began to wind down too. Veciana worked to slowly infiltrate some of his people into Cuba and set up internal guerrilla warfare. He was in Los Angeles when Bishop asked for a rendezvous in Las Vegas.

Veciana then moved to Puerto Rico where, using the cover of a sports promoter, he worked for Bishop training people to infiltrate the local Communist movement. In 1968, he went on to Bolivia as a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year banking specialist for the State Department. His other job was to destroy the image of the recently murdered Cuban leader Che Guevara. According to Veciana, three Cuban CIA agents had been involved in Guevara’s murder.

While in Bolivia, Veciana also sought to undermine the leftist government of Juan Torres. “I secretly started a campaign to inform the public that the coins would be devalued. There turned out to be a military coup (August 21, 1971). Torres fled to Argentina and was killed.” Veciana also maintains that Bishop twice tried to kill Bolivia’s Minister of the Interior, a Communist, but the man fled to Cuba. 

Veciana’s next project centered around Castro’s 1971 visit to the Marxist Allende government in Chile. “Once Allende was voted in, we knew Castro would go to Chile. A lot of the officers of the Chilean Army were very cooperative with me and Bishop. They knew everything, when Castro would arrive and where he was going to be. The plan was to have TV cameras with machine guns inside them. We had two agents ID’d as pressmen. All this was planned directly by Bishop.”

“Perhaps it was very similar to the Kennedy assassination. Because the person that Bishop assigned to kill Castro was going to get planted with papers to make it appear that he was a Moscow Castro agent and then he would himself be killed. So he would have been seen to be a traitor to Castro.”

“It never got off the ground. One of the agents had an appendicitis attack, and had to be rushed to the hospital. The other said he wouldn’t do it alone. We had all gone to Chile as diplomats, by car through Peru.”

After this, says Veciana, “A lot of differences began to come up. I was tired of waiting so long. So many lives being lost, and Castro still alive.”

“On July 24, 1973, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) arrested me and accused me of trafficking in cocaine. Two days after the accusation, I was given my money. At the end of 15 years, they paid me. All Bishop had ever paid was traveling expenses, he said this was cumulative salary. Before I went to the Atlanta prison, I told Bishop what my family needed. After that Bishop never contacted me again. I do not know where he is now. But I am sure the trial was a set-up because of my previous activities. I was sentenced to seven years, paroled in 17 months – out very, very quickly. There the Senate started its investigating.”

A few months after our meeting, Schweiker’s people brought Veciana to Washington. He was taken secretly to a monthly meeting of the CIA’s Association of Retired Intelligence Officers, where it was hoped he might provide a positive identification of Maurice Bishop. Apparently, the House has now ruled out that possibility. Curiously, sources close to committee say that Veciana is not expected to be called to testify when the JFK hearings begin on September 6. 

At last report, Antonio Veciana still lives in Miami. Although I originally agreed not to use his name, he has since appeared on a TV documentary with a portion of his story.

If Maurice Bishop can be found, perhaps the tangled web that surrounds the Kennedy assassination and related events of the ‘60s may yet find its way into the history books.