Antonio Veciana 2019

[Ron Bulman]

Because of the work of Dr. John Newman, from what I've read it has come into question whether House Investigator Gaeton Fonzi  and in turn the HSCA as well as many others may have been misled by Antonio Veciana regarding his meeting of Lee Harvey Oswald with David Phillips.  

That Veciana may have instead worked for military or in particular army intelligence as opposed to the CIA.  I'm confused.  Phillips I thought had a documentable CIA pedigree going back into the 50's Though I guess that doesn't preclude him from being involved in MI. 

Then again was Veciana using them all to get out of prison?  He did get shot by somebody at one point.

[Steve Thomas]

2 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

Because of the work of Dr. John Newman, from what I've read it has come into question whether House Investigator Gaeton Fonzi  and in turn the HSCA as well as many others may have been misled by Antonio Veciana regarding his meeting of Lee Harvey Oswald with David Phillips.  

That Veciana may have instead worked for military or in particular army intelligence as opposed to the CIA.  I'm confused.  Phillips I thought had a documentable CIA pedigree going back into the 50's Though I guess that doesn't preclude him from being involved in MI. 

 

Ron,

I haven't spent a whole lot of time on Veciana, but I came to the personal conclusion that he double crossed Phillips.

 

Steve Thomas

[Larry Hancock]

I'm going repeat myself a bit here........Army contact with Veciana and Alpha 66 is nothing new, we have had documents revealing that for years,  including the ones showing he was a designated Army source.  Those documents clearly show the Army interest in him and Alpha 66 as a group was intel on Cuba and on Russia inside Cuba, including on Russian weapons. They also show that the Army was giving them some supplies including explosives and that at that point Alpha 66 trusted them more than the CIA - of course by that point most of the Cuban groups including DRE felt the same way about the CIA.   I wrote about his Army connection back in 2006. 

We also know that the CIA had sources feeding them information on Alpha 66 and we have a document with Morales stating that Alpha 66 would be surprised at the extent of the information that CIA had on their missions, they knew about them in advance and apparently chose to let them proceed without being interdicted.  They also chose not to interdict DRE missions although they appear to have been much more clueless about DRE military activities.

Then in 1963 we have a memo from an Army staff member of the SGA expressing interest in using Alpha 66 operationally (given that their missions were generally more successful than many of the CIA's own) but a response from CIA speaking against that because Alpha 66 was uncontrollable. This was in the spring of 1963 after Mongoose when everybody was stumbling around trying to reset some plan against Castro...and at a time when that was occurring in a much broader group than just CIA. It was also a period in which JFK had opened the door to DOD becoming involved in covert ops against Cuba.

Of course none of that has to do with what anybody  else did with Veciana, including years later. Nor has anybody really put all the pieces together on what Phillips did with a variety of individual exiles in what appear to have been unsanctioned efforts against Castro for over a decade. If Veciana did follow Phillips to Chile with an AID job it would seem to speak more to Phillips than the Army so I'll be interested with what John does with Veciana from 1963 on. 

 I think John has done a fine job of deconstructing Veciana's book, the book is highly sensationalized and goes way beyond anything he claimed before it came out - which was originally limited to having made contact inside Cuba with somebody he suspected to be CIA and then having also beem in contact with that person once he came out.  Given that Veciana's group was involved in an assassination attempt on Castro and the fact that Phillips admitted working, under cover and in disguise, with a group inside Cuba I don't see how we can write off at least some minimal contact inside Cuba between Phillips and Veciana.  Nor do I see how Veciana would become a key player in the Dallas conspiracy.

I had my own questions about Veciana's reliability before the book and the book demolished his credibility for me; I don't know that I would believe much of anything he would say at this point...the book itself appears to be more than a bit of scam to me, even if he did have some contact with Phillips in Cuba or later.  I'm certainly interested in what John does find out about Veciana, and about who may have manipulated Alpha 66 in general.  There is an indication that the Army focused them on Russian targets and given the successes of their missions  its always been a question if they were getting special intel from some source other than their own contacts inside Cuba.

[W. Tracy Parnell]

8 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

 He did get shot by somebody at one point.

Veciana was shot in 1979, but the assailant was never identified. Veciana always thought that Castro was behind the shooting.

[Ron Bulman]

So he didn't participate in the assassination of JFK in any way.  He didn't see Oswald with Bishop/Phillips in Dallas beforehand.  But he did participate in the coverup 15 years later regarding the HSCA.  Army or CIA, somebody owned him to get him to mislead Fonzi.  Jmo.

[W. Tracy Parnell]

8 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

So he didn't participate in the assassination of JFK in any way.  He didn't see Oswald with Bishop/Phillips in Dallas beforehand.  But he did participate in the coverup 15 years later regarding the HSCA.  Army or CIA, somebody owned him to get him to mislead Fonzi.  Jmo.

Until we get the details of Newman's new theory all of this is speculation. But you are correct-it certainly appears that Newman will be saying that Veciana was a part of the conspiracy in some manner. And Fonzi, rather than being an amazing investigator who uncovered evidence of CIA complicity in the assassination, was duped by the real killers of JFK. I predict that this will not go over well with some (perhaps many) in the research community.

[W. Tracy Parnell]

For those interested, Alan Dale has posted a summary of Newman's presentation on Facebook:

 

[W. Tracy Parnell]

Newman has now posted readable versions of the presentation slides he used in Dallas:

https://www.facebook.com/john.newman.1029770?fref=mentions