Where is the High Road? Who has the High Road?

Another wonderful Ben Garrison Cartoon.

For anyone born before about 1955, there is a good chance the day of the Kennedy assassination is still vividly in mind … the time and place of remembrance indelibly etched.  September 11, 2001 also brings to mind similar recollections.

For this writer, I was on the ramp at Andrews AFB in Washington D.C.  We had just finished our pre-flight check and were getting ready to taxi for takeoff.  Suddenly, we were ordered to hold while another aircraft took our spot and departed immediately.  I happened to be listening to a commercial channel on the aircraft’s radio and learned of President Kennedy’s assassination.  Later, we learned that the aircraft that had taken off before us was transporting some of the Kennedy family … and as I recall Bobby Kennedy … to Dallas.

Where was Lady Justice when Kennedy was assassinated?  What happened to The Rule of Law and Good Governance?  Who decides the Greater Good?  Does the situation determine/dictate the ethic?

Finding or rationalizing answers to the foregoing questions plague this Nation and our people endlessly.  Does the greater good justify torture?  Is there a justifiable moral and ethical rationale for taking hundreds of thousands of lives to save a similar number of lives?  When in a situation with no moral, ethical option out, how do we get out? We could argue and “game” these dilemmas “ad nauseam,” but won’t.

The purpose of this posting is simple, single and short.  For over an hour on September 26, 2014, 86-year-old Master Spy Antonio Veciana, with the assistance of an interpreter, participated in a “no holds barred” question and answer session regarding his former Spy Master and CIA handler David Atlee Phillips Chief of Operations for the Western Hemisphere, and regarding Lee Harvey Oswald, and regarding the Kennedy assassination.

We present a clip of the Veciana video wherein he passionately describes the complexities of service in the CIA and other intelligence agencies.  After viewing this clip, we then ask the reader to mentally and emotionally superimpose feelings and impressions gained from Veciana’s impassioned response … impose these feelings and impressions on the situations and circumstances unfolding around us today.  Who … today … in our current situation and circumstance … who do we trust to know the greater good for the Nation and lead accordingly?

 

This writer disbelieves the Warren Commission and does believe that Kennedy was the victim of the Deep State’s hatred of him.  We sense a distressing parallel of hate and vitriol directed at our President today.  And … there is ample evidence that faceless, nameless architects of conflict and confusion working through public proxies will, under contrived circumstances and situations, subvert the rule-of-law all-the-while ensuring greater good for themselves and not for the Republic.

We offer the appended, short Wikipedia sketches of Antonio Veciana and David Atlee Phillips merely for background.

Antonio Veciana Blanch (born October 18, 1928) is a Cuban exile who was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill Fidel Castro. He was the founder and a former leader of the anti-Castro group Alpha 66.  At the time of the 1959 Cuban Revolution Veciana was employed as an accountant by Julio Lobo, and well known as the President of the professional accountants’ association.

Veciana was recruited as a spy for the CIA by David Atlee Phillips (also known as Maurice Bishop) in 1959 to kill Fidel Castro. After the initial contact with Bishop, Veciana took a 2-3 week course in psychological warfare and sabotage. After the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, Bishop directed Veciana to help organise an assassination attempt on Castro in Havana from an apartment rented in the name of Veciana’s mother-in-law. Veciana left Cuba the day before the October 1961 attempt, his wife and children having already left some months earlier. The attempt, which involved a bazooka, failed.

1960s, Alpha 66

Veciana settled in Miami with his family, and after Bishop contacted him there, at Bishop’s direction Veciana founded Alpha 66 in mid-1962, becoming its civilian chief and principal fundraiser, and recruiting its military chief from another Cuban exile organization. Alpha 66 became one of the most active Cuban exile groups, acquiring guns and boats and launching commando raids on Cuba.

From August 1968 to June 1972 Veciana was active in Bolivia. Formally a banking adviser to the Central Bank of Bolivia on contracts financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, his office was located in the passport division of the American Embassy, and his primary activity was organising anti-Communist and anti-Castro activities. This included another assassination attempt on Castro in Chile in 1971 involving a plan to put a gun inside a television camera. Veciana’s recruiting of Cuban associates who prepared a plan to blame Russian agents for the assassination led to a falling-out with Bishop and the eventual termination of their relationship. When Bishop broke off the relationship in 1973, he paid Veciana $253,000 in recognition of his services; Veciana had previously refused payment.

1970s, and HSCA interview

In 1974 Veciana was convicted of conspiracy to supply narcotics; he served 27 months, still professing his innocence after his release.

In 1976 Veciana told the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that at one meeting with Bishop in Dallas in late-August or September 1963 he had arrived to see Bishop talking with Lee Harvey Oswald. Veciana said that several months after the assassination Bishop had offered to pay a relative of Veciana who worked in the Cuban Intelligence Directorate in Mexico City to say publicly that he had met Oswald there. On September 21, 1979 in Miami, Veciana was wounded in the head during a drive-by shooting while he was riding in his car.[5] He was initially admitted to Pan American Hospital with a small-caliber bullet imbedded above his left ear, then transferred to Jackson Memorial Hospital. Veciana’s family and friends said that agents of the Cuban government had attempted to kill him. Veciana was not active in Alpha 66 at the time of the shooting. His wife said he had received death threats eight months earlier, and Nazario Sargen, the then current leader of Alpha 66, said Veciana told a press conference a few months previously that the Cuban government was planning to kill him after he had learned about the plot from the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Later years

Veciana was briefly employed as treasurer by Maurice Ferré’s 2004 campaign for mayor of Miami-Dade. He resigned after a few days, as he did not meet the state requirement of being a registered voter.

In 2013 Veciana gave interviews saying that he believed that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was carried out by senior military and intelligence officials.  On January 16, 2016, the Assassination Archives and Research Center published a video on Youtube of a conference in which Veciana unequivocally stated that Maurice Bishop was in fact David Atlee Phillips.

David Atlee Phillips (October 31, 1922 – July 7, 1988) was a Central Intelligence Agency officer of 25 years and a recipient of the Career Intelligence Medal. Phillips rose to become the CIA’s chief of operations for the Western hemisphere.

Conspiracy allegations and lawsuit

In their 1980 book Death in Washington, authors Donald Freed and Fred Landis charged that the CIA was involved in the 1973 Chilean coup d’état and the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier.  The authors specifically named Phillips as being involved in a cover-up of the assassination and reiterated Fonzi’s claim that Phillips served as Oswald’s case officer while using the alias “Maurice Bishop”. In 1982, Freed, Landis, and their publisher were named in a $230 million libel suit by Phillips and the AFIO. A settlement was reached in 1976 with Phillips receiving a retraction and an unspecified amount of money.  Phillips donated these proceeds to AFIO for the purpose of creating a legal defense fund for American intelligence officers who felt they were the victims of libel.

After the death of former CIA agent and Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt in 2007, Saint John Hunt and David Hunt revealed that their father had recorded several claims about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. In the April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, Saint John Hunt detailed a number of individuals implicated by his father including Phillips, as well as Lyndon B. Johnson, Cord Meyer, David Sánchez Morales, Frank Sturgis, William Harvey and an assassin he termed “French gunman grassy knoll” who many presume was Lucien Sarti. The two sons alleged that their father cut the information from his memoirs, “American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond”, to avoid possible perjury charges. Hunt’s widow and other children told the Los Angeles Times that the two sons took advantage of Hunt’s loss of lucidity by coaching and exploiting him for financial gain. The newspaper said it examined the materials offered by the sons to support the story and found them to be “inconclusive.”

The complete 1hr+ Veciana YouTube video is found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY-psk_aPhU