As we put the plan in motion, assembled the materials, reviewed maps and embassy schedules, and went through the myriad other preparations necessary for success, I got a call from Bishop. I was in Caracas. He was, too. He wanted to see me, right away.
He asked me to meet him at the restaurant at the Rinconada racetrack. It was an ideal location. Neither of us was known there, and the rest of the patrons were more concerned with their bets and watching the races than they were with what two men having lunch at another table were up to.
I could tell immediately how annoyed he was, and how hard he was trying not to show it. He was dressed well, as always, in sports clothes. He wore dark sunglasses. He didn’t take them off. I suspected he was trying to hide his eyes as he studied my reaction to his words.
“You really got me in hot water,” he said. “What made you think you could get away with trying to pin the blame for the assassination on the Soviets?”
He caught me off guard. It wasn’t a question I was expecting. More than eighteen months had gone by since the failed assassination attempt in Chile. I thought of it as something, if not forgotten, certainly in the past.
“Who told you such a stupid thing?” I asked.
“Stupid was trying to do it,” he said. “You know I’m not joking. And, believe me, if you think I’m upset, you should see the people I work for. They’re seething.”
From what I could see, he was, too. Bishop could barely contain his anger.
“I know everything,” he said. “I know you got someone in DISIP [the Venezuelan intelligence agency] to doctor the police records to lay the blame on the Soviets.”
“Maurice,” I said. “Seriously, I don’t understand what you’re suggesting.”
“Tony, you can drop the act. You know full well what I’m talking about. Do you know the damage you could’ve done?”
He looked like he was trying hard not to pound the table.
“I can’t trust you anymore,” he continued. “You went off on your own. Let me tell you something. The private doesn’t set the strategy. He follows orders.”
He shook his head.
“It’s my own fault,” he continued. “My people have suspected you for a while. They warned me about you. And I stupidly defended you. You betrayed me.”
He could barely contain his anger. I could understand it. If things had gone my way, it would look like he did not have proper control over his asset, like the student had betrayed his master. And if, somehow, the CIA ended up implicated in trying to pin the blame on the Soviet Union, he could be held responsible for a major diplomatic crisis.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to be disloyal. I wasn’t trying to go against your wishes.”
“Then why did you?”
“Because of Cuba,” I said. “You do what you do for money. I do it for Cuba.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ever since the Bay of Pigs, we’ve been on our own,” I said. “I’ve been on my own.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “What do you think Chile was about? We want him gone as bad as you do.”
“No,” I said. “Not we. You, maybe. Me, yes. But not the United States. They don’t care. I do. And if they won’t do something about it, I will.”
“That’s what this is all about?”
“Yes. That’s what this is all about.”
I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but I could see his jaw tense.
“You signed a contract,” he said. “You signed a loyalty oath. Do you know what that means?”
“I wasn’t being disloyal,” I said.
“What do you call it?”
I tried to find words for the answer. They didn’t come. It didn’t matter. Bishop was done listening.
“Go home, Tony,” he said. “Go home.”
“What about you?” I asked. “What happens now?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I WAS BACK in Caracas again the following month on business. I hadn’t heard from Bishop since that day at the racetrack. I had been busy. Fidel was planning a stopover in Georgetown, Guyana, on his way to the meeting of nonaligned states in Algiers. I was going over the details of his scheduled visit, looking for another opportunity to make it his last. I was moving forward on the Paris plan against Ramiro Valdés. And I was also trying to do something for my family. I had set aside time to relax at home in Miami during the month of July. My parents were coming back from visiting Spain. Other relatives, too, were wrapping up vacations in other places. We scheduled a family get-together once everybody got back.
So, on July 7, 1973, I left Caracas on a Viasa airline flight and headed home to Miami. We made a brief layover in Maracaibo before finally touching down at Miami International Airport at 2:00 p.m. I was thinking about vacation. Somewhere else, other people were thinking about me.
I spent the next two weeks trying my best to focus solely on my family and getting a tan relaxing on the beach in Miami. There were occasional brief interruptions as I dealt with some detail or other connected to de la Cruz’s imminent trip to Paris, but, for the most part, I was able to enjoy what I thought was some well-deserved time off. The final days of my vacation coincided with the international CPA convention. It was being held that year at the Everglades Hotel in downtown Miami from the 19th to the 22nd of July.
The day before it ended, Juan Felipe de la Cruz boarded a plane to Paris. Three days later, I was under arrest.
It was the last day of our Miami Beach vacation. I loaded the family in the car and headed for home. The police were waiting when we got there. I thought it had something to do with the Paris plot or any one of the other plans in the works, so I was surprised when the police said they were with the narcotics squad.
“Mr. Veciana,” one of them said, “you’re under arrest for the illegal transportation of narcotics.”
“What?”
My mind was racing. It all seemed surreal. Of all the things they might have said that I was under arrest for, drug smuggling was the last I would have expected.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “It’s a mistake.”
“You have the right to remain silent. If you choose to waive your right, anything you say …”
They asked if it was okay if they looked around inside the house.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I have nothing to hide.”
They found weapons, and the credentials and passports that had been used in the attempt on Fidel in Chile.
Then they led me away.
I spent two days in jail while my wife arranged bail. I found a lawyer in the phone book.
In what may have been some kind of transcendental irony, I was released on July 26, twenty years to the day from when Fidel Castro launched his fateful attack on the Moncada Barracks. I got a call from Bishop that very same day. At my home. The phone rang at 6:00 p.m. I remember, because he had never called me at home before. Again, he wanted to see me. And again, right away.
He told me to meet him at the Flagler Dog Track at eight o’clock on the dot. The track was close to my house at the time, and clearly the races were in session. The parking lot was crowded. Bishop was sitting in a car waiting when I got there. He got out, carrying a briefcase. Two young men wearing suits stood nearby, just out of earshot.
“Mind if I pat you down?” Bishop asked.
“For what?”
“You watch TV, don’t you? I want to see if you’re carrying a gun,” he said. “Or a tape recorder.”
When he was satisfied I had neither, he spoke again.
“What’s happened to you, Tony? Drug smuggling?”
“I didn’t do it,” I protested. “You know me.”
“I used to,” he said. “At least I thought I did.”
“I’ve been set up,” I said. And then an uncomfortable question popped into my mind. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Tony, you’ve made some pretty serious mistakes lately
. I think it would be wise not to make another one. The penalties in narcotics cases can be very severe.”
“I’m innocent,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure you know that. I think you might have something to do with this.”
His brow furrowed.
“You’re irrational. What’s worse for you is that no one would ever believe that,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do for you, Tony. Everything is over between us.”
I said nothing.
“I trust you won’t reveal anything you swore to keep secret, under any circumstances,” he said. “There is never a reason that would justify breaking your vow. That’s a piece of advice.”
“That’s advice?” I asked. “Or a threat?”
“Take it any way you like,” he said.
He held out the briefcase.
“This is for you. I’m paying you for your work, to the last penny.”
“I never asked for money to fight for Cuba,” I said.
“Take it,” he said. “You’ll need it. You’ve got enough to worry about right now, without having to worry about money.”
He didn’t shake my hand. He just said good-bye and walked away. The men followed him back to his car. I watched the taillights fade as they drove away.
I opened the briefcase after I got home. It was filled with tight bundles of $100 bills held together with rubber bands. There was a note on top. It read: “Antonio Veciana. Honorarium. $253,000.”
I was alone. The kids were asleep. Sira was in the other room. I took the wooden statues we had brought back from Bolivia off the shelf. Hardly anybody realized they were hollow. I packed the bills inside. They’d be waiting for me when I came back for them, I figured. Whenever that might be.
I WENT TO see my attorney a couple of days later to discuss my case.
“I’m innocent,” I told him.
“That’s good,” he said with a smile. “I’m glad. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is if we can convince a jury that you are.”
His smile disappeared.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he continued. “You’re facing twenty years in a federal penitentiary. It doesn’t look good.”
He flipped through some papers in front of him.
“How well do you know Augustin Barres?” he asked.
“Not well, really,” I said. “A business associate introduced us. In Puerto Rico. He was involved in some baseball games we handled. Why?”
“He’s the one they busted. Selling coke to undercover agents. Seven kilos,” he said. “Stupid.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I said when they told me what the charges were while I was in jail.”
“He says you’re the one who brought the coke into the country. From Bolivia.”
“That’s ridiculous! That’s a lie,” I said. “I told them that at the jail.”
“He says there were other shipments. A total of twenty-five kilos.”
I opened my mouth. He stopped me.
“I know,” he said. “It’s a lie. You told them that at the jail.”
He smiled. I did, too.
Still, he said, it didn’t look good. Barres was cooperating with the government. He had given a full statement. So had the third person they charged, Ariel Pomares. He was accused of setting up the sales in the United States, once the cocaine arrived.
My attorney said we’d have time before the trial to examine the government’s evidence, and to prepare our defense. Then he stood and held out his hand. We shook.
“There’s really not a lot to do until we know more, Mr. Veciana,” he said. “Go home. Try to relax.”
I couldn’t. Even if I weren’t facing trial and the possibility of two decades behind bars, I couldn’t. Juan Felipe de la Cruz had arrived in Paris.
Up to that point, everything had gone according to plan. De la Cruz had flown to Madrid, then made his way to Paris. He checked into a small hotel on the outskirts of the city, the Oasis, and carefully went about gathering up the materials he needed for the bomb.
He had been shown the process repeatedly and performed it countless times himself under his tutor’s watchful eye. On August 2, he did it again, carefully assembling the explosive device in the comfort of his hotel room.
Only this time, something went wrong. Something terrible.
The newspapers gave scant details. Somehow the bomb had gone off. The room was destroyed. Juan Felipe died instantly. He was twenty-eight years old.
It took time to get his body home. He was buried on the 18th of the month. There were a lot of people I knew there, but nowhere near what I expected. I came home disappointed and dejected, and wrote a letter to a friend:
Dear Enrique:
I just got home from Juan Felipe Cruz’s funeral feeling tremendously disheartened. The promotion this got on radio and in the press should have got the whole community to turn out on a Saturday. Three hundred of us went, all anti-Castro people who knew each other. The rest of the community rested from their work in the factories and went shopping. Even though they announced this was a hero of the exiles.
It was true. And it was sad. A twenty-eight-year-old man—a boy still, really—was dead. He had given his life for Cuba. For them. So that the friends and families they had left behind on the island could live free. So that they could go home again, if they wanted, to be with them.
And they couldn’t even give up a couple of hours on a Saturday to thank him.
SOON, THOUGH, I too was focused on other things. As my trial drew closer, my attorney had more questions. He went through the government’s accusations with me, point by point.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Augustin Barres had been arrested in New York. He began cooperating immediately. He said he had put up the money for the drugs. I arranged the shipment. One of his employees, Ariel Pomares, arranged the sale here.
The way it worked, Barres said, was that I would go to Bolivia, buy the drugs, then give them to Bolivian diplomats who brought them into the United States.
Barres elaborated at the trial. He said he had met me in 1970, while I was organizing the assassination attempt against Castro in Chile. He said we stayed in touch, and did business together after I moved to Puerto Rico. He also said that many people in Puerto Rico told him I was with the CIA. Barres said he hadn’t wanted to get involved, at first, but I had convinced him to do it.
I remember thinking how curious it was that someone would conspire to smuggle drugs with someone they thought worked for the government—especially someone with the CIA.
Barres said more. He said there had been three successful shipments before the one where he was arrested, dealing with the undercover agents.
I said nothing.
I was convicted on all three counts on January 14, 1974. The judge sentenced me to two concurrent terms of seven years, plus three years of probation.
We stood as he left the courtroom. Then my attorney turned to me.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m innocent. I don’t want my children to think I’m not.”
He said that there was a possibility we could appeal.
“It’s a long shot,” he said. “But we might be able to convince an appellate judge to overturn the conviction, by showing that they made a mistake.”
“They did make a mistake,” I said. “I’m innocent.”
WE APPEALED. WE lost.
They sent me to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. They give you a rulebook when you get there. They give you a uniform. They give you a cell.
People ask me all the time what it was like. They almost always have an intensely expectant look on their face, or a soft, compassionate one—like they’re expecting to hear about gangs and fights and terrifying nights. I think they see too many movies. The truth is, if you mind your own business, it’s mostly just boring. The days all seem the same, and you just wait for them to end. That’s what I did. I read, and I waited, and I tried to understand ho
w an innocent man could end up behind bars.
Later, after my sentence was done, my friend Gaeton Fonzi once asked me, “Why didn’t you take the stand? At trial. Why didn’t you tell your story, and try to prove your innocence?”
I showed him a letter I had written to the presiding judge in the case, Dudley Bonsal, after I got out of prison.
“I did not testify during the trial for fear that something could happen to my family,” I wrote, “because several ‘political agencies’ of this country wish to keep me quiet.”
I explained to Fonzi that I waited until after I got out of prison to send it, so that the judge would know that I wasn’t trying to say I was innocent so that he’d set me free. I was trying to tell him I was innocent because I was.
I don’t remember if I told Fonzi about an odd coincidence I had noticed in the case. Judge Bonsal came from a prominent and successful family. He was a respected federal judge. His brother had been the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, while I was working with Bishop.
I WAS SENTENCED to seven years. They released me after twenty-six months. I got home in February 1976, just as the House Select Committee on Assassinations was beginning its work. Soon after my return, committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi started calling my house, asking to see me. We met for the first time at the beginning of March. He didn’t mention the Kennedy assassination. He said he wanted to ask about connections between groups like Alpha 66 and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I ended up telling him about Bishop. The whole story. About Cuba and the attempt to kill Castro with the bazooka, about Bishop telling me to found Alpha 66, about Chile. And I told him about meeting Lee Harvey Oswald.
Gaeton tried not to look surprised. He tried not to let his excitement show in his voice. But as he himself told it later, “In my mind, I fell off my chair.”
That’s because he hadn’t been fully honest with me when he introduced himself. He was investigating links between anti-Castro groups and the CIA. That was true. But he was actually interested in the assassination. As an HSCA investigator, he was precisely charged with looking into whether U.S. intelligence agencies had anything to do with Kennedy’s death.
Trained to Kill Page 20