Trained to Kill

by Antonio Veciana

  And I had just given him the thing so many suspected, and so many feared, but no one had found before—a direct link between a significant CIA figure and John Kennedy’s alleged assassin, or at least the “patsy” for the crime, as Oswald called himself.

  More than a decade had passed since the first commission to investigate Kennedy’s assassination had issued its report. That one, the Warren Commission, was born within days of the president’s death. Its purpose was ostensibly to get to the bottom of what happened. To find the truth. But its principal purpose was political—to quash any conspiracy theories before they cropped up.

  It failed miserably.

  The Warren Report only stirred up more troubling questions and heated debate. Matters got worse with the release of the famed Zapruder film in 1975. That amateur movie clip had captured the crucial seconds when President Kennedy was struck by gunfire in Dealey Plaza. Since the home movie showed JFK recoiling violently backward from a shot that struck him in the head, it seemed to clearly indicate this shot was fired from somewhere in front of the president’s limousine, such as the infamous grassy knoll, instead of the Texas State Book Depository to the rear, where Oswald allegedly had set up his sniper’s lair. This meant that more than one sniper was involved in the fatal attack on the president. The shocking Zapruder film soon spawned questions and conspiracy theories.

  With public trust plummeting, once again the government created a commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

  Fonzi certainly had the right credentials to work for the committee. He was an award-winning investigative journalist who seized on subjects tenaciously and seemed to have an inexhaustible thirst for the truth. He had a long-time interest in the Kennedy case, and as the committee began its work, he became increasingly interested in the CIA’s anti-Castro intrigue as a potential source of the plot.

  “We called him Ahab, because he was so single-minded about that white whale,” the committee’s staff director and chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, told the New York Times.

  Fonzi’s interest in the Kennedy case reached back nearly a decade, when, as a writer for Philadelphia Magazine, he interviewed future United States Senator Arlen Specter, who as a young staff attorney for the Warren Commission had developed the controversial “single-bullet theory” to explain how Kennedy could have been killed by a lone sniper firing with a faulty bolt-action rifle from the rear.

  “It is difficult to believe the Warren Commission Report is the truth,” the article began. “Arlen Specter knows it.”

  Fonzi hadn’t gone to the interview expecting to arrive at that conclusion. But over the course of nearly four hours of interviews, he was stunned by Specter’s stumbling inability to defend some of the basic premises of the “magic-bullet theory” around which the Warren Commission wrapped its final findings.

  Though Fonzi had broken in as a journalist in Philadelphia, by the time Congress reopened the Kennedy case, he was living in Florida—and he knew Miami. He turned up at my door chasing questions about Cuban exiles because they kept turning up in strange tangential associations with elements of Kennedy’s assassination. Others were doing the same with the names of various Mafia figures, including Florida godfather Santo Trafficante, Jr., the mob boss Jack Ruby reportedly visited while he wallowed in a Havana jail.

  Now, sitting in my living room, he had just heard me give evidence that indicated there might be truth to one of the most explosive conspiracy theories about Dallas—that the CIA was somehow involved in John F. Kennedy’s murder.

  My recollection of the meeting between Bishop and Oswald flew in the face of CIA Director John McCone’s sworn Warren Commission testimony that “Lee Harvey Oswald was never associated or connected, directly or indirectly, in any way whatsoever with the agency.”

  Fonzi would spend much of the next three years questioning me, pursuing the clues I provided him, doggedly attempting to prove or disprove what my simple statement suggested. In the end, he found ways to corroborate nearly every single detail of that meeting in the lobby of the Dallas skyscraper. At the heart of Fonzi’s investigation was his effort to determine the true identity of the man whom I knew as Maurice Bishop.

  I had never known Bishop’s real name. In fact, he never actually said he worked for the CIA. When Fonzi checked, the agency could find no record that it ever employed a Maurice Bishop.

  That didn’t stop Fonzi. He took me to a police sketch artist to produce a detailed drawing of Bishop he could use in his search. Ultimately, it was Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania—the man who, along with Senator Gary Hart, had originally reopened the Pandora’s Box of the Kennedy assassination while serving with the Church Committee—who told Fonzi that the image reminded him of David Atlee Phillips.

  Fonzi’s research found interesting parallels between Philips’s career in the CIA and the places and events in my story. Phillips had been in Havana when Castro took over. He had been directly involved in the Radio Swan propaganda operation and the Bay of Pigs, and had risen swiftly through the ranks as chief of covert action in Mexico City, then chief of Cuban operations, and finally as the agency’s Western Hemisphere chief before retiring. He had overseen Cuba, Bolivia, and Chile, at all the right times.

  To be sure that “Bishop” was indeed Phillips, though, Fonzi took me to Washington, D.C., to meet Phillips face-to-face. We would be meeting at a gathering of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which Phillips had founded in 1975 after retiring from the agency. Phillips didn’t know I was coming.

  When we met, Phillips acted like he didn’t know me. But I knew him. It was Bishop, my CIA case officer. I didn’t tell Fonzi, though, and I didn’t challenge Phillips right there.

  Fonzi introduced us.

  I switched to Spanish. I asked Phillips if he had been in Havana in 1960. Phillips, in Spanish, said yes. Did he know Julio Lobo? Yes. Rufo López Fresquet? Yes.

  “What was your name again?” Phillips asked.

  “Antonio Veciana.”

  “Veciana?” Phillips repeated, as if he couldn’t quite place me.

  “Don’t you know my name?”

  As Fonzi described the encounter later in his book, “Philips shook his head slowly and, with apparent thoughtfulness, said, ‘no.”’

  Phillips dedicated more than fifty pages of his memoir to his days dealing with Cuba. He waxed rhapsodic about his time on the island, about El Floridita, the watering hole for Hemingway and other Havana habitués, and a lengthy conversation he had there with El Che. He talked about needing to leave the island, and about continuing to receive intelligence reports from there after he left in preparation for the Bay of Pigs. He talked about the exiles in Miami.

  But he never mentioned me once.

  And now he was standing right in front of me, insisting he didn’t even know my name.

  “It’s strange he didn’t know my name,” I told Fonzi after the encounter with Phillips. “I was very well known.”

  “That’s funny,” Fonzi wrote, “because I was thinking exactly the same thing.”

  EVENTUALLY, BOTH PHILLIPS and I testified before the HSCA, under oath. I told the committee my story and answered their questions as honestly as I could.

  Phillips had many interesting answers to their questions, several of which led Fonzi to doubt his credibility. One was about the attempts to kill Castro. It was a story that Philips himself later recounted in his own book. And by the time that the HSCA investigation began, these plots were well known. The Church Committee had already revealed CIA plans to poison Fidel Castro with a hypodermic needle hidden in a ballpoint pen, to lace his microphone with a psychedelic drug to send him off on a hallucinogenic rant, and to expose him to a depilatory to make his beard fall out. Other plots involved booby-trapped conch shells and exploding cigars. They seemed inspired by spy novels and Hollywood screenplays.

  Yet, Phillips, who had been involved with Cuba throughout much if not most of his career, claimed not to know about a single a
nti-Castro plot.

  Phillips addressed his lack of credibility on this point in his book: “I have often been asked how it was possible that I did not know the Castro assassination schemes. The question is usually predicated on the assumption that when I became chief of Cuban operations and then head of all Latin American affairs someone would’ve told me, or I would’ve read about the endeavors and documents in my safe. The fact is that those few CIA officers involved did not discuss their participation even with senior officers not in the chain of command at the time of the plots. And highly sensitive papers are not retained in a division chief’s office.” Which sounds plausible … except I knew the truth.

  For my own reasons at the time, I chose not to expose Phillips’s lies. I never told Fonzi that Phillips was Bishop. And I didn’t identify Phillips when I was asked about Bishop’s identity under oath by the committee.

  Nonetheless, Fonzi suspected the truth. He asked me again and again. He came up with his own explanation for why he thought I was withholding the truth.

  “I was now absolutely certain I knew the reason that Veciana would not identify David Atlee Phillips as Maurice Bishop …” he wrote. “Veciana believed that Bishop was behind his being set up on the drug conspiracy charge. It was Bishop’s way of trying to put a halt to Veciana’s continuing renegade efforts to assassinate Castro.”

  Fonzi concluded that I was using him and the HSCA as “a shield against another set up. He decided to reveal just enough to let Bishop and the Agency know that if they continued to play dirty games with him, he would now have a weapon with which to fight back—the threat of Congressional and public exposure.”

  Fonzi was a brilliant and perceptive investigative journalist. I came to think of him as my friend. But when he asked me if Bishop was really David Atlee Phillips, I told him no. I felt bad lying to my friend, but he could only guess at the stakes involved when it came to breaking my vow of silence.

  “There was no need to take his revelations beyond the existence of a Maurice Bishop,” he wrote. “Veciana had nothing more to gain by identifying who Bishop really was—and perhaps a lot to lose.”

  chapter 11

  A BASEBALL BOMB AND BULLETS

  BEFORE THE HOUSE Select Committee on Assassinations finished its work, someone tried to silence me. With a bullet.

  I had testified in secret before a congressional panel. I told them about the assassination attempts against Castro and about El Che’s diary. I told them about Alpha 66 and about Oswald. And I told them how a man I knew only as Maurice Bishop had been responsible for it all.

  Fonzi and other committee investigators were able to confirm much of what I told them. The committee had also determined that, even though the CIA insisted I had never been one of its operatives, the agency’s records contained a “piece of arguably contradictory evidence—a record of $500 in operational expenses, given to Veciana by a person with whom the CIA had maintained a long-standing operational relationship.”

  The HSCA also strongly doubted the agency when it “insisted that it did not at any time assign a case officer to Veciana.” That did not seem credible, according to the committee’s final report, since I “was the dominant figure in an extremely active anti-Castro organization. The committee established that the CIA assigned case officers to Cuban revolutionaries of less importance than Veciana.”

  More than a year had passed since I had sat before committee members in a closed room in the Capitol Building. They had asked questions for two days in a row. Then they had gone about preparing their report. Meanwhile, I went home to Miami, to work with my son in the marine supply business we had bought.

  Then, as the summer of 1979 came to a close, Fonzi delivered a copy of what he called the HSCA “staff report” about me. The committee’s final findings were due any day, he said.

  Someone didn’t want me around to see the final report.

  I was driving home from work when it happened. It was a little after 7:00 p.m., and just starting to get dark. I changed my travel route between work and home often, as Bishop had taught me. But the truth is, there’s only so many ways to get home, no matter where you’re coming from.

  As I rounded a corner a couple of blocks from my house, I noticed a light brown station wagon. It was parked about three houses up the block, facing me. It had tinted windows, but I noticed a lone figure inside. Then I heard a loud popping noise, and I felt like I’d been punched in the side of the head. Hard. Then the vent window exploded.

  That’s when I realized what was happening. Someone was spraying my pickup truck with bullets. Someone was trying to kill me.

  A third shot ripped through the door, chest high. Luckily, it ricocheted off the metal inside. Instead of tearing into my ribs, it veered a life-saving couple of inches. That bullet scorched across my stomach and right arm, leaving a searing trail in my flesh before it tore through the door on the other side and off into a field. Another shot cracked the windshield.

  I hit the gas and raced for home. Nobody followed.

  At the hospital, they told me how lucky I was. The shooter wasn’t very good. And I had a hard head.

  Police said the gunman used a .45-caliber weapon with a silencer.

  The first shot had come through the side mirror, splintering on its way through. A piece of it had been what hit me. It lodged above my left ear.

  My wife said if it had gone any higher, I might have to wear a toupee.

  The doctors said the bullet that grazed my belly was the one that could have killed me.

  “You’re lucky they used a .45,” one of the cops told me. “The .45 comes out of the barrel slower. If they had used a 9 mm you’d be dead.”

  It’s probably easy to suspect Bishop and the CIA. They probably had their hands on the same assassination committee staff reports I did. They probably figured there would be a media storm when the final report came out in a couple of weeks. They might not have wanted to wait and see if the media would come asking questions. They clearly were not eager to see me tell my Bishop and Oswald story on national TV.

  But were they so worried about what I had to say that they tried to silence me once and for all? I don’t know. I think there’s another more likely suspect than the CIA. Castro.

  Before I got shot, I received a disturbing call. A source of mine told me he’d been to a meeting in Panama with some of Castro’s agents.

  “They’re planning hits on several people,” he said. “They’ve got a list. Your name’s on it.”

  Why then? Why not before? Who knows? Who can say why a snake strikes when it does?

  My oldest daughter, Ana, had recently begun working as a reporter for the Miami News. She wrote a story about the attempt on my life, and about how we had learned to live with danger.

  “But fear?” she wrote. “Never.”

  She explained that as exiles—forced to leave their homeland because a dictator stole their freedoms—we had a great appreciation of the freedom that’s taken for granted here.

  “The fear we know,” Ana wrote, “if it can be rightly called that, is the fear many others are not fortunate enough to experience.

  “I fear that we may have forgotten why we’re here.

  “I fear that we have grown complacent and smug.

  “I fear the satisfaction that comes from having three cars in the driveway and a chicken in every pot, and knowing we can say what we damn well please without valuing that freedom.

  “That’s what I fear.”

  Fonzi included her words in his book. I’m glad he did. She makes me proud.

  I was shot on September 21. I got my chance to get even the very next month. I read in a newspaper that Fidel Castro would be coming to the United Nations headquarters in New York in mid-October. I had another chance to kill him—almost exactly eighteen years since my first attempt.

  Fidel was scheduled to address the assembled body of the United Nations as the representative of the Non-Aligned Movement, speaking on behalf of the Third World n
ations that had rejected formal ties with the major powers. Security, I knew, would be exceptionally tight. In the end, it included two thousand New York police, plus the U.S. Secret Service. There would be no chance for bazookas or guns hidden in television cameras.

  I had two ideas. One was to use a radio-controlled model airplane loaded with C-4 explosive—an early version of a drone. The problem was, Fidel was expected to stay at Cuba’s U.N. mission in mid-Manhattan. I saw only a very narrow window of opportunity. He’d come out of the airport and go straight to the mission. Then, he would be driven to the U.N. for his speech, returning to Cuba soon after. The Secret Service was keeping a tight lid on his itinerary. They wouldn’t even release the scheduled arrival time for his plane.

  Still, U.S. authorities expected competing crowds of protesters and supporters at the mission. So, I thought if we could get someone in the crowd, we’d have a chance for an attack. I thought the best person for that would be a woman, to attract less suspicion. The actual remote-control operator of the plane would be at a distance. Once she was sure which car Fidel was in, she could tell the plane’s “pilot,” who would crash the weaponized aircraft into the car.

  I could foresee problems, though. The woman would have to decide which car would be the target. Then, she’d have to communicate, via some device small enough to be hidden in her coat. However, she’d be standing in the midst of a screaming crowd. That made an error in communications very likely. Plus, there was the possibility of mechanical malfunctions. The more complicated the plane, the more likely the failure.

  My other idea was infinitely simpler.

  We’d put the woman in the crowd, with the C-4 explosive under her coat. It would be shaped like a softball and be equipped with an impact detonator. She’s on the street. She has the bomb. She pulls it out. She throws it. It’s simple. The blast from a charge that large would easily take out the car and kill Castro. And there was a kind of poetic justice to it—Castro the baseball lover being taken out by a pitcher.