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David Atlee Phillips: The Mastermind?


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Dan Archer of Archcomix.com tells the story of the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, in comic form.

It's worth a look. Archer utilizes historical documents and cartoon versions of Dave Phillips, Henry Heckscher (often misspelled as 'Hecksher'), Helms, Nixon, and Kissinger:

Latest episode: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=98

His 3-page piece for bashmagazine.com called The First 9/11 details the 1973 Chilean coup:

Page 1: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=64

Page 2: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=67

Page 3: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=68

His next story, called The Other 9/11 is a longer version of the The First 9/11:

Page 1: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=69

Page 2: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=72

Page 3: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=73

Page 4: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=79

Page 5: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=81

Page 6: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=80

Page 7: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=82

Page 8: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=85

Page 9: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=88

Page 10: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=90

Page 11: http://www.archcomix.com/?p=98

You can start at http://www.archcomix.com/?p=64 and hit 'Next' to read all of them in order.

Steve

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AP: Obama Can't Reform FOIA Fast Enough

Contradictions Abound In Promise To Fulfill Freedom Of Information Act Requests

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/17/...in4870945.shtml

This story discusses a 1960s FBI memo written from Cartha "Deke" DeLoach to Gerald Ford about a supposed $6,500 payment from the Cuban government to Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City.

The CIA black-lined parts of the memo in 2008 before turning it over to the AP, even though it was released over 2 decades ago in full.

Jefferson Morley discusses in Our Man in Mexico that David Atlee Phillips vouched for Gilbert Alvarado, who floated this $6,500 payoff story.

Alvarado was a CIA informant, a key fact that was largely unknown to the U.S. officials who had to evaluate and act upon the payoff story's implications.

Phillips later distanced himself, "theorizing" in The Night Watch that the Alvarado story was a figment of Nicaraguan intelligence - an organization created and controlled by the CIA.

Why does the CIA consider the Alvarado story worthy of being censored today?

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This is the police artit's sketch of Maurice Bishop, the CIA operative who was seen with Lee Harvey Oswald. It was drawn from details provided by Alpha 66's Antonio Veciana, whom Bishop controlled. When Senator Richard Schweiker saw the sketch, he immediately recognized its close resemblance to David Atlee Philips.

Since we are now discussing the AFIO, I thought it appropriate to bring this thread back to life.

BK

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  • 4 years later...
Guest Robert Morrow

Phillips is obviously Bishop, that's clear. But it's possible Bishop never met with Oswald and that Veciana just made that part up to get the attention of his former backers.

I (and another JFK researcher) spoke with Antonio Veciana this summer (July) at his Marine Supply shop in Miami which he still runs. He was emphatic that the man he saw with his handler Maurice Bishop, aka David Atlee Phillips, was Lee Harvey Oswald. Veciana said that he thought, estimated, it was late August, 1963 when he saw Phillips with Oswald in Dallas. Veciana is in his 80's and he is a big fan of Gaeton Fonzi and he says the Last Investigation is the best book ever written on the JFK assassination.

Veciana says that he personally met with David Atlee Phillips 20, 25, 30 or 35 times - that is a broad range of numbers, but that is what he said. Veciana futher stated that he thought David Atlee Phillips and David Morales were both involved in the JFK assassination.

Edited by Robert Morrow
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Guest Robert Morrow

Information on the James, the brother of David Atlee Phillips: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/archives/200101/0027.html

Also: http://www.shawnphillips.com/photovideo/photogallery/PHJames.htm

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 22:32:42 +0700 From: "From the Cluttered Desktop of:" < cjade@ksc.th.com> To: jurnum@utu.fi Subject: James Atlee Phillips

Dear sir

I'd be delighted to contribute what I can about my friend James Atlee Phillips, as your list's information about him seems quite limited.

James was born in 1915 in Fort Worth to a prominent Texas family, which later fell on hard times. His first novel, THE OUTSIDERS, was an expose about the Dallas country club set and is quite hard to find (read: suppressed.) It was published in the mid-1930s. Dallas Library keeps it under lock and key to this day.

James learned to fly when quite young. He worked as a publicist in New York for Walter Winchell and Billy Rose, wrote a detective novel in 1939, and joined Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers.

After Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the US Marines. After WWII he was a senior staffer for Leatherneck Magazine, then spent some time in intelligence work. He ran Amphibian Airways in Burma between '47 and '54, under contract to the Burmese Government, and we can guess who else. His very first Joe Gall novel, PAGODA, was based on these experiences, and was published in the 50s in hardcover long before the Fawcett paperback 'Contract' series started up. It was basically autobiographical. James' photo adorned many of the back covers of the Fawcett paperbacks.

It is unclear whether or not James recruited his younger brother David into the Agency or whether it was the other way around, or unrelated (unlikely!) David was recruited in Chile c.1950 where he had emigrated to, after purchasing a printing business and an English language newspaper. He had previously been a Army Air Corps NCO and was a POW in a German luftstalag. He wrote a play about his POW experienced, which was accepted for Broadway production, but 6 weeks before opening night STALAG 17 opened, and blew David's dramatic career out of the air...David strongly resembled James.

James also wrote two succesful screenplays. One was THUNDER ROAD, which starred Robert Mitchum as a moonshine runner and Gene barry as an Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Division (IRS) agent out to nail him. There was a famous theme song to this film.

The other was BIG JIM MCLAIN, and was John Wayne's first independent production. Wayne at first employed his house writer, James Edward Grant, best remembered for THE ALAMO. However, there were problems, Grant was a natorious drunk, and Wayne was shooting this turkey of a movie entirely on location in Hawaii at a cost of $50,000 a day (big money then.) Grant climbed into his bottles, sat in the hotel bar and wouldn't budge. Wayne pleaded with him to no avail, Grant told him (rather precognitively) to get cancer. Finally Wayne sent for James Atlee Phillips. Phillips agreed to write the script, which he did in 10 days with the film being shot as it rolled off his typewriter. Afterwards James refused to accept payment; he told me this frightened Wayne's lawyers so much that they met the Honolulu flight at LAX and insisted he sign a quit-claim.

The film, which is a potboiler about a House Un-American Activities Committee investigator chasing Commies in Hawaii, was a low point in everyone's careers. Worth a mention was a very young Peter Graves as Wayne's assistant who is murdered by the sinister forces from Moscow Center.

As James related to me, he collected on the favor John Wayne owed him. A buddy from the Flying Tigers days in China ended up in a Taiwanese prison for smuggling opium. This n'eer-do-well appealed for help from James, who squeezed John Wayne, who squeezed Dwight D.Eisenhauer, who squeezed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek -- who James utterly despised. The sentence was commuted. And that's how John Wayne paid for the script to BIG JIM MCLAIN. The fellow in question was the model for 'Captain Nash', in James' novels PAGODA and THE STAR RUBY CONTRACT also set in Burma.

James had at least one child, Shawn Phillips, the folk rock singer. Shawn described his father as being a 'secret agent' on several of his album blurbs.

James lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where his wife was an executive for the phone company. He travelled a lot on tramp steamers, where he did most of his writing, often sailing out of New Orleans, and he always dropped by Mother's Restaurant when he passed through town, it's a famous USMC haunt.

We were still in touch when he quit writing the Gall novels, he felt that Joe Gall was getting 'a little long in the touth'. (His own words.) The final novel was set in South Korea.

While the Contract series was occasionally uneven, the best of the series are as good as anything James ever wrote. I once did a critique of the series and james told me it agreed uncannily with his own self-assesments. The best of the series were THE GREEN WOUND (later reissued with 'Contract' appended to the title; THE SILKEN BARONESS (likewise retitled); THE STAR RUBY CONTRACT, THE ILL WIND CONTRACT, and that great one where Gall taken on heroin addiction as part of his cover. I can't recall the name. The weakest were THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT, and that one set in Haiti with the exploding teddy bears, which James admitted was written for film but the option was never picked up. Just as well...

His two novels where Gall goes up against black revolutionaries in US and the Carribean were in between, as were the two in which he operated in Canada. THE SKELETON COAST CONTRACT was good, good enough to get the author blacklisted by South Africa's apartheid regime!

James was a hard case, just like his character Joe Gall. I always thought Lee Marvin would be the only choice to play Gall.

Edited by Robert Morrow
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Somehow two different  documents were merged into one release here: http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-Oct2017/2018/180-10110-10100.pdf The second is an account of the interview of Phillips by Hardway that Fonzi discusses in his book and that Hardway writes about here.( Phillips became nervous when he realized Hardway had proof that all of the sources pushing the "Castro did it" angle immediately after Nov.22 were directly linked to Phillips). I believe one of Phillips' sources  of disinformation linking LHO to Cubans was Salvador Diaz Verson. If I remember correctly, all five were named in a Lobster magazine article in the 1980s, "The Search for Maurice Bishop."

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10 minutes ago, Robin Finn said:

Somehow two different  documents were merged into one release here: http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-Oct2017/2018/180-10110-10100.pdf The second is an account of the interview of Phillips by Hardway that Fonzi discusses in his book and that Hardway writes about here.( Phillips became nervous when he realized Hardway had proof that all of the sources pushing the "Castro did it" angle immediately after Nov.22 were directly linked to Phillips). I believe one of Phillips' sources  of disinformation linking LHO to Cubans was Salvador Diaz Verson. If I remember correctly, all five were named in a Lobster magazine article in the 1980s, "The Search for Maurice Bishop."

Did Diaz Verson know Arcacha Smith?

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