David Atlee Phillips - The Ultimate Spook
"Maurice Bishop" and David Atlee Phillips
David Atlee Phillips - The Ultimate Spook - Happy
Birthday - Happy Halloween - October 31, 1922 - July 7, 1988.
Whoever was the Mastermind behind the Dealey Plaza
Operation that resulted in the murder of President Kennedy, he was a veteran
who had conducted similar operations before and continued to do so after
November 22, 1963, including Guatemala (1954), the Bay of Pigs (1961), the
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and operations in the Congo (1964), Vietnam
(1965-72) and Nicaragua (1980s). He was also well versed in psychological
warfare, as the Dealey Plaza Operation included a psych-war provision that not
only framed Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder, but established a clear pattern
of blame directed against Fidel Castro and a responsibility that was laid at
the feet of Robert F. Kennedy.
David Atlee Phillips fits all of these requirements,
but others do as well including – William Harvey, David Morales, Ted Shackly,
James Jesus Angleton, Desmond FitzGerald and Cord Meyer, Jr., and oh yea, Allen Dulles, all of whom knew
and worked closely together on Cuban operations.
While I don’t think David Atlee Phillips was the “Mastermind”
of the Dealey Plaza Operation, I think he served a role very similar to the psych-war role in performed in Operation Success, the Guatemala coup of 1954, when he
manned radio stations that broadcast false news reports of an invading army
that led the president to flee.
Phillips’ similar psych-war efforts in support of
Operation Zapata – the Bay of Pigs, failed miserably, and so did the psych-war
aspect of the Dealey Plaza Operation to blame the assassination on Fidel
Castro, even though that still gets a mainstream media hearing by CIA
Mockingbird Agents and assets like Brian Latell and Phil Shennon.
As the author of a number of important books that
have a bearing on the assassination of President Kennedy, Phillips deserves
special attention, especially his books “The Nightwatch – 25 Years of Peculiar
Service,” his rare and hard to find book on Covert Cuban Operations, the story
on Texas Justice, the fictional “Carlos Contract,” and most significantly “Careers
in Intelligence.” The last book is one designed to encourage young people into
making the CIA or NSA or FBI a career, published at a time when such careers
were looked down on by liberal college students.
One thing that I learned about Phillips from “Careers
in Intelligence,” is the qualifications he felt necessary for a good intelligence agent, officer and spy. It was very similar to what Ian Fleming said he looked for in a good agent, and which
surprisingly fit Oswald to a tee. And Phillips' list of qualifications, he points out, did not include a college degree because, as he explained, he
rose to the third highest rank in the CIA – Chief of the Western Hemisphere
Division without a college degree, although he did attend two major
universities without graduating.
Phillips was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas,
not far from where a young teen age Herbert Philbrick-double-agent wanna be Lee Harvey Oswald briefly lived and
attended Arlingtion high school. He was in the same class with the twin sons of I.F. and Virginia Hale.
I.F. Hale was a senior FBI agent and security consultant for a relevant major defense
contractor (General Dynamics), while Virginia worked for the Texas Employment Commission. She arranged for Oswald to work at Leslie Welding and Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval
graphics arts firm. Oh, yea, and the twins went on to break into the LA apartment
of Judy Cambell Exner, the mob moll who was having simultaneous affairs with
Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana and the President of the United States. While the
FBI watched the twins break into her apartment, they did nothing, and nothing
came of it, though one of the twins eloped with the daughter of Texas Governor
John Connally and killed her in an accidental shooting.
But David Phillips had left the area before Oswald
and the Hale brothers arrived, but I wondered, as he did with the Cullen Davis
murder trial, return to his old roots to reminiscence?
And did Phillips give him the same advice he dishes
out in “Careers in Intelligence”? Did he encourage Oswald to enlist in the
Marines, as he did that fall as soon as he was of age?
In any case, one day after reading Gaeton Fonzi’s
extensive article on Phillips in Washingtonian Magazine, I called information
and got a phone number for him from the public directory in Bethesda, Maryland.
Phillips answered the phone and began a pleasant conversation that I taped
(with his permission), though he said he couldn’t talk about the Washingtonian
article because he was suing them for libel and it was an active case in court.
Phillips told me some interesting things however. I
told him I read “The Carlos Contract,” that is slightly disguised fiction in
which a CIA officer is called out of retirement to catch Carlos the Jackal (a
real person). The agent’s name is McClendon, which just happens to be the name
of Gordon McClendon, the Dallas radio station owner and friend of Jack Ruby.
Sure, Phillips said, he knew Gordon McClendon as a
listener of his broadcasts, especially his fake baseball broadcasts, and knew
him from when McClendon joined his Association of Retired Intelligence
Officers. They even had a connection from college days, but Phillips insists he
didn’t know or work with McClendon in the CIA.
No, he didn’t know Lee Harvey Oswald, or meet with
him in Dallas with anti-Castro Cuban terrorists Antonio Veciana, as Fonzi’s
article implies.
But, Phillips said, he found it hard to believe that
at the time the Washingtonian article appeared, where do you think he worked?
“I was working for the Washingtonian Magazine,” he
said, commissioned to write a number of articles for them, with an office just
down the hall from where Gaeton Fonzi and his editors were assembling the
article against him.
And while Fonzi had questioned Phillips under oath
for the House Select Committee on Assassiantiosn (HSCA), and accusing Phillips
of perjury, Phillips wondered why Fonzi just didn’t walk down the Washingtonian
Magazine hall and question him for the record.
I certainly would have, and just as I enjoyed our
phone conversation, I really wanted to sit down with him at a Washington Bar
and talk freely and off the record over a few drinks. And after Phillips died,
I was glad to know that my friend and colleague Kevin Walsh did just that.
Over drinks in Washingtion, Phillips told the
veteran Congressional investigator that, “My private opinion is that JfK was
done in by a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.”
When he died on 7th July, 1988, Phillips left behind
an unpublished manuscript. The novel is about a CIA officer who lived in Mexico
City. In the novel the character states: "I was one of those officers who
handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in
Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the
plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the
president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that
guilt."
I believe that David Atlee Phillips was "Maurice Bishop" as described by Antonio Veciana, and they met with Lee Harvey Oswald at the Southland Building Lobby in September 1963, but I don't believe that Phillips was the "Mastermind" behind the Dealey Plaza Operation, as he was set up and exposed much in the same way as Oswald.
In the end, Phillips is an important piece to the puzzle, and he fits all of the key characteristics required for the ultimate "Mastermind," and he knew all of those actually responsible, but he just didn't do it.
3 comments:
E. Howard Hunt would later admit that Alpha 66 was handled for the CIA by his good friend and publicity expert, David Atlee Phillips. Phillips was in charge of the propaganda/psychological operations element at JMWAVE and Hunt the political action effort with Cuban exiles.
If the truth be known there probably was no mastermind to the Dealy Plaza OP but rather compartmentalized pieces of the puzzle that formed the final picture of November 22, 1963.
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