Copyright © 2017 by Antonio Veciana and Carlos Harrison
Foreword copyright © 2017 by David Talbot
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Brian Peterson
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1356-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1357-4
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1: A Bazooka in the Night
Chapter 2: An Unlikely Terrorist
Chapter 3: The Bearded Ones
Chapter 4: A Conspirator’s Commandments
Chapter 5: Patience and Time Do More Than Violence
Chapter 6: Change of Strategy
Chapter 7: Alpha 66 and a Man Named Lee
Chapter 8: The Myth of El Che
Chapter 9: Operation Condor
Chapter 10: Is That You, Mr. Bishop?
Chapter 11: A Baseball Bomb and Bullets
Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
“SOMEONE WOULD HAVE talked.” That’s the argument the lone gunman crowd has always fallen back on whenever confronted by the growing evidence of a conspiracy in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The truth is, numerous people with knowledge about the dark operation in Dallas more than half a century ago have talked. But few in Washington or in the mainstream media were listening.
The list of those who talked and were either ignored or silenced begins with JFK intimates who rode with him in the fateful Dallas motorcade, including First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and White House aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers—all of whom immediately reported that the president’s limousine was caught in a lethal cross fire that day in Dealey Plaza. Jack Ruby, the Mafia hit man who conveniently muzzled the self-proclaimed “patsy” Lee Harvey Oswald, also began to talk to government investigators—until he was shut up.
The line of eyewitnesses and co-conspirators who had much to say about the Kennedy assassination stretches into the current century, with CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, leader of the Watergate burglary team, confessing late in his life to playing at least a peripheral role in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, along with such other notorious agency operatives as William Harvey and David Morales.
Now we have the remarkable, revelatory memoir of Antonio Veciana, a legendary leader of the anti-Castro underground whose shadowy exploits were sponsored by the CIA. Robert F. Kennedy, who served as his brother’s attorney general, became convinced immediately after the gunfire in Dallas that the plot against JFK had grown out of the CIA’s secretive Cuba operation. In Trained to Kill, Veciana finally and definitively confirms that RFK’s suspicions were true. Veciana recounts that shortly before President Kennedy’s assassination, he witnessed his CIA handler, David Atlee Phillips—a rising star in the agency’s Latin America division—meeting with Oswald in Dallas.
This is a mind-blowing revelation because it’s the only credible eyewitness account to connect Oswald—the accused assassin and likely scapegoat—directly to an important CIA official. Phillips emerged as a key suspect in Kennedy’s murder during the House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings in the 1970s. He squirmed and stonewalled and chain-smoked under interrogation by committee members and staff.
Phillips was no rogue agent—he was a prized member of the core team built by CIA spymaster Allen Dulles to fight the spread of Communism and left-wing movements in South America and the Caribbean. He consistently received promotions and commendations throughout his twenty-five-year career at the CIA, which in addition to his involvement in the agency’s Castro assassination plots also included his leadership of the covert operation against Chilean President Salvador Allende, who died during a CIA-instigated coup in 1973. After retiring in 1975, when the agency was under sharp attack from Congress and the press for its subversive excesses, Phillips founded the CIA’s first overt lobbying group, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
Veciana too led a colorful and violent life, and his memoir is filled not just with gripping insights into the Kennedy assassination, but with inside stories about the relentless crusade to kill Fidel Castro and to track down the other hero of the Cuban Revolution, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Veciana’s intimate portraits of these charismatic men and their murderous antagonists in the CIA and the Cuban underground put the reader squarely inside some of the most dramatic episodes of twentieth-century history.
Starting off his career in Havana as a mild-mannered banker and devoted family man, Veciana found himself sucked into the whirlwind of events that placed Castro’s Cuba in the bull’s-eye of U.S. imperialism. Though he remained a dedicated anti-Communist partisan through most of his life, Veciana had the integrity and courage to finally question the ruthless methods and mentality of his CIA sponsors. His growing disenchantment with the agency put not only his own life but that of his family at risk, and for years he wrestled with the decision to go public about the Lee Harvey Oswald-David Atlee Phillips connection.
Now, in old age, Antonio Veciana has finally unburdened himself of the secrets of his life. His story sheds light on some of the darkest corners of American history. Trained to Kill should be read by all of those who wonder and worry about our country’s incessant imperial adventures and how they have tragically undermined our democracy.
—David Talbot,
February 2017
PREFACE
I DON’T KNOW who killed John Kennedy. I know who wanted to. He was with the CIA. He introduced me to Lee Harvey Oswald. In Dallas. Two months before JFK died.
By then, he had already taught me to be an agent, in Cuba. By then, I had already tried to kill Fidel Castro, the first time.
The man I knew as Maurice Bishop supplied the training. He supplied the money. He supplied the weapons.
I found the men. I found the place. I failed.
But I didn’t give up. Neither did Bishop.
The CIA has repeatedly denied that one of its highest-ranking officials used the cover name of Maurice Bishop. Confessing that David Atlee Phillips used that pseudonym would connect the agency—or at least one of its most important functionaries—with Oswald. And that, by extension, would link it to Kennedy’s death.
The very fact that they do deny it proves to me they know something. There’s no need for a cover-up when you’re innocent.
David Atlee Phillips rose to be the CIA’s chief of Western Hemisphere operations. He hadn’t reached that level yet when I met him, but he was clearly powerful. He could order Castro’s death and supply the means to do it.
When it came time to spirit me out of Cuba, he provided me with a job, working for the United States government in Bolivia. But still, even there, my target was Castro.
Again, the man I knew as Bishop—and years later by his real name�
�supplied the money. He supplied the intelligence. But I have no idea how he would’ve reacted if I had been caught when I smuggled the weapons he provided into Chile. I didn’t tell him that I had piled my three children and my wife into the car for the trip. For them it was a vacation. For me it was cover—what border guard would ever suspect a family on a road trip? With three small children squealing excitedly, and a young wife in the passenger seat.
That was the first time I unthinkingly—perhaps selfishly, or blindly—put my family’s lives at risk in my zeal to kill Castro. It wasn’t the last.
Bishop knew I was responsible for the arsons that destroyed some of Havana’s best-known department stores, which led to something I could never forgive myself for, the death of an innocent mother of two. Bishop knew I was the one responsible for sparking the mass exodus of thousands of Cuban children known as “Operation Pedro Pan”—disguised as orphans, and with the help of the Catholic Church. Bishop knew I came close to collapsing Cuba’s economy with a rumor campaign meant to sow panic.
And even though I know there are those who suspect it was Bishop, not Castro, who hired the hit man who tried to put the bullet in my head, and even though I know it might have been Bishop, not Castro, who set me up and sent me to prison, I defended him. When I was called before the House committee reinvestigating the Kennedy assassination, I said nothing. When I met him face-to-face in the hall outside a CIA luncheon, I said nothing.
Now I will.
I have been written about. I have been questioned. This is the first time I tell the story for myself. The whole story.
Why now? In the past, I knew that Castro, and others, wouldn’t hesitate to do away with their enemies by putting a bomb under their car. I was well aware of what could happen as I traveled with my wife and children. Now I’m old. My wife is gone. My children are grown. I have survived cancer and a heart attack. Now I can reveal the truth about my double life.
My name is Antonio Veciana. I am an accountant by training, a banker and a businessman by trade. Some call me a patriot. Some call me a terrorist. Only one knew I was a spy, with a single mission—destroy Castro. My CIA handler, the man I knew as Maurice Bishop. The man whom congressional investigators later identified as master spy David Atlee Phillips. The man whom I saw meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.
chapter 1
A BAZOOKA IN THE NIGHT
THE MAN WITH the bazooka watched and waited. The apartment he was in looked out over the plaza where the crowd was gathered. Among the people, he knew, were some of his confederates, about twenty, with pistols and hand grenades. He knew none of them by name. They had never met. Had he been in the crowd himself, under the sparkling stars of the Havana sky, he could have stood right next to one of the gunmen and not known it. It was done that way on purpose. For safety. You can’t reveal what you don’t know.
They were there to kill Castro. They were there because of me.
It was October 5, 1961. Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós had just returned from a tour of Iron Curtain countries. His itinerary bore witness to Cuba’s newfound prominence in the pantheon of global players. He had been to Belgrade to attend the inaugural Summit of the Non-Aligned Nations, a group formed largely on the vision of leaders who stand among history’s giants—India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno; Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser; and Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito—and consisting of countries that supposedly stood separate from either of the superpowers. Of course, Dorticós almost immediately demonstrated how ludicrous that presumption of independence really was by heading to Moscow for a ten-day visit and a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. Then he flew directly from there to meet Mao in Red China.
Returning to Havana after his high-profile globetrotting, Dorticós was greeted by Castro at José Martí International Airport. That night, they were due to address a welcoming rally from the north terrace of the Presidential Palace. It was a victory lap. And it was an opportunity. Apartment 8-A, on the eighth floor of the building at No. 29 Avenida de las Misiones, sat exactly 120 yards away from the palace, in the corner of the top floor closest to it, with a clear and unobstructed view of that north terrace. I know, because that’s why I had rented it almost a full year before.
The building was a modernist gem, a Mondrian rectangle with a brightly colored façade patterned in distinctive squares and repeated rectangles. But, as they always say with real estate, what made it most valuable was location, location, location.
The three-bedroom apartment had come available because the American man who owned it was going back to the United States. Bishop told me how lucky I was to have found it, and I agreed. What he didn’t tell me was that the man was a spy and the apartment had been a meeting place for CIA operatives. I don’t know if he knew that the Cubans knew that. I don’t know if he knew they had been watching the place. They had even seen David Atlee Phillips, the man I knew as Bishop, there.
I didn’t know any of that when I got my mother-in-law to sign the lease and moved her in, in October 1960. I didn’t know that Castro operatives were still watching now, a year later, and had seen me come there twenty days earlier, on September 15, to go over final details of the plan with the core group of assassins. There was no sign of the surveillance the night before, either, when I had come to the apartment at 11:00 p.m., carrying a long, gift-wrapped package with a lamp jutting out of the end.
I had seen uniformed men on the street, as was increasingly common in Havana in those days, but none of them seemed to pay any special attention to me. And none of them stopped me to check the package.
If they had, they would have discovered a standard U.S. military issue M20 shoulder-mounted antitank rocket launcher—known to everyone the world over as a bazooka. Its 3.5-inch warhead could supposedly pierce a three-inch armor plate and stop a rolling tank at four hundred yards. That was well over what we needed.
If all went according to plan, Fidel and Dorticós would stand in plain view on that terrace just a football field away, unmoving and unprotected, surrounded by top cabinet members and government officials. With a little luck, our attack would not just eliminate Fidel, it would take out a significant chunk of Cuba’s revolutionary hierarchy. And, knowing Fidel’s predilection for long-windedness, our shooter would have hours to aim and wait for just the right shot, if he wanted.
The regime’s increasingly repressive security apparatus didn’t stop me as I carried what appeared to be a gift-wrapped lamp, and they didn’t pay any particular attention to the middle-aged woman with me. They didn’t follow us as we stepped into the rectangular building facing El Prado, the wide, tree-lined walk that led from the Presidential Palace to the statue of Máximo Gómez. Gómez was a national hero, the brilliant military commander who invented the “machete charge” that sparked terror in the hearts of the Spanish troops during Cuba’s fight for independence. His statue overlooked the entrance to Havana Bay. None of that was really on the minds of the lovers sneaking kisses and surreptitious touches in the long shadows beneath the oak trees lining the path. They were oblivious to the other shadowy intrigue unfolding nearby.
Maybe the police and the regime’s watchmen were more interested in catching a glimpse of the lovers on the lane, or too busy cadging cigarettes off the passersby they could intimidate. Whatever the reason, they didn’t join us as we stepped into the elevator and rode up the eight floors, or as we walked down the hall to the apartment the woman with me called home.
Inside, the team of assassins was already waiting. They had been since September 25, quietly waiting for Dorticós’s return. When I arrived nine days later with the bazooka, they were stir-crazy and anxious. But I had the weapon they had been waiting for, and news—Dorticós had finally arrived in Havana, and he and Fidel would be addressing a crowd in the plaza the following evening, at the end of the workday.
The plan had been months in the making. Bishop knew. In fact, he had convinced me to call off an earlier attempt, in midsumm
er, when the first man in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, triumphantly toured Havana after touching back down on Earth.
The idea then had been similar. We had known Gagarin was coming for weeks. After the Soviet Union stunned the world with its unexpected launch and put the first human into outer space, the Communists surely would want to thumb their noses at the United States. What better place than Cuba? Losing the tropical island that was my homeland to an openly disdainful “revolutionary” regime already served as a thorn in the yanquis’ side, or lower. The embarrassingly disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, just days after Gagarin and his Vostok 1 spacecraft circled the Earth, only served to pour salt in the wound. Bringing the successful and photogenic young international celebrity to appear (as he later would) hugging Fidel Castro—just in time for the eighth anniversary of the uprising that gave name to the revolution—that was too delicious an opportunity for both Castro and Khrushchev to let pass.
And I knew it. So I prepared.
That was when I first started gathering weapons and moving them into the apartment my dear mother-in-law lived in.
Finding weapons in Havana in the wake of the Bay of Pigs was not hard. Despite its desire to eliminate any internal threats, Castro’s regime was still in its infancy. It did not have a KGB or the capacity—hardly even the knowledge—for such repressive machinery. It was learning rapidly, and the nascent G2 apparatus that would eventually eradicate nearly every perceived and potential enemy was already starting to spread its tentacles into every corner of Cuban life. But this was early on. Castro’s power still came more from popular support than it did from totalitarian control. He needed to be careful not to rouse the people’s suspicions or provoke their ire. Politically—and logistically—it was one thing to move against an open menace, another entirely to storm through the homes of the entire citizenry.
With Bishop’s help, and using contacts I had developed with his help and on my own, I rounded up .30-caliber M1 carbines, a couple of Czech 9 mm automatic pistols, some .45-caliber Tommy guns, hand grenades, and what I thought would be perfect for what I had in mind, a 60 mm mortar.
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