Antonio Veciana was a “skinny, asthmatic” CPA in Cuba when he was approached in September 1959 by a man calling himself Maurice Bishop.
Bishop handed him a business card from a Belgian mining firm, then spent an hour rattling off every aspect of Veciana’s life and beliefs. On the subject of the accountant’s “feelings of opposition to [Cuba’s] revolutionary government,” he was especially well-informed.
“Cuba is going through challenging times — dangerous times,” Bishop said.
“It’s important for intelligent and determined people to be willing to help prevent it from continuing on its current path.”
Bishop was no mining executive but rather was there “on behalf of a US intelligence agency,” and asked Veciana if he would “cooperate” with US intelligence in taking on Fidel Castro.
Veciana, stunned, mumbled something about it being “too soon” and said he would need time to think.
“I assure you it’s not too soon,” Bishop replied. “The time has come to act. Your time.”
Thus begins a tale with all the twists, turns and action sequences of a “Bourne” film. As he details in a new book, “Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots Against Castro, Kennedy, and Che” (Skyhorse Publishing, out now), Veciana became a counterrevolutionary, spending the next few decades attempting — first at Bishop’s direction, then on his own — to sabotage the Cuban government and kill its leader.
Veciana was trained on everything from how to send messages in invisible ink to the use of firearms and explosives, including “C3, C4 . . . firebombs the size of cigarette packs, [and] how to arm and set off a bomb.”
He was also given a special pill. “If your capture is inevitable, take this,” Bishop told him. “It’s poison. Deadly in seconds. We’ll take care of your family.”
From then on, he carried the pill everywhere he went.
Being an accountant, his first attempts at destabilizing Castro’s government took the form of economic sabotage.
First, he contacted an attorney friend who worked for the Finance Ministry.
“I need you to create a law that says the government is going to confiscate people’s money,” he told him. “And that the money that’s on the street is going to be exchanged.”
His friend wrote the law, printed it on government stationery — “the only thing missing was a signature and official seal” — and gave it to Veciana, who distributed copies as the draft of a law about to be approved by Castro.
The result was predictable chaos, as millions of Cubans withdrew their money from banks.
Veciana used this tactic again soon after, with a fake law declaring Castro was suspending parental rights, placing all Cuban children in the government’s control.
This again caused a panic, leading to unforeseen consequences.
“The impact was enormous,” he writes. “It sparked ‘Operation Pedro Pan,’ the exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied children sent out of Cuba by their parents.”
Veciana justifies his decision by claiming many went on to lead successful lives in America, but notes that a considerable amount “never saw their parents again.”
“It had not been my intention to divide families,” he writes. “I am sorry for those who were hurt.”
By 1960, Veciana had abandoned propaganda “in favor of more direct means,” building “small cells of resistance fighters” to carry out “violent disruptions.”
Early that year, he coordinated a series of firebombings using cigarette-pack-size bombs he made and handed off to others to plant.
A blaze at Havana’s central aqueduct “knocked out water throughout most of the capital for two full days.” Another fire, this one at a major department store, spread faster than intended, and a security guard was killed.
At a meeting in March 1960, Veciana says, Bishop told him, “I have this theory that if Fidel died, the revolution would be over.” Soon after, he writes, he received a message in invisible ink from Bishop informing him that a local asset had “what I needed to give Cuba its simple solution.”
He sent his family to Spain for their protection and went “underground,” living in safe houses.
In September 1960, he rented an apartment 120 yards from the Presidential Palace with a view of its north terrace — from which Castro occasionally spoke — and moved his mother-in-law in for cover. He recruited a group of assassins and secured a cache of weapons including everything from .30-caliber M1 carbines to a 60mm mortar.
Preparation took a year. When, in October 1961, he learned Castro was scheduled to speak from the terrace, Veciana brought his team a bazooka disguised as a gift-wrapped lamp, intending for it to be fired at Castro as he spoke.
The morning of the operation, he put himself and his mother-in-law on a boat to Miami and waited for the news that would shock the world. It never came — the assassins got spooked and bailed.
In 1967, he received an urgent message from Bishop that his cover had been blown. He began carrying a gun, and while promoting a wrestling match — he had become a sports promoter in Puerto Rico — he miraculously escaped with his life when two bombs exploded in the stadium’s locker rooms. He was thrown against a door by the first blast, but was uninjured.
He engineered another attempt on Castro’s life in 1971, this time by way of a gun smuggled into a press conference in a small camera, but this failed for the same apparent reason as the first — the would-be assassins lost their nerve.
This was the final straw for Bishop. Meeting with Veciana, an enraged Bishop ordered him to kill the men who chickened out. Veciana refused, and their working relationship ended.
In 1973, Veciana was arrested for bringing a large amount of cocaine into the US from Bolivia, a crime he says he did not commit. Bishop met with him one last time, paying him $253,000 for all the work he had done, and washed his hands of Veciana, who wondered if Bishop set him up. Veciana was sentenced to seven years in prison, serving 26 months before being released.
In February 1976, he was called to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He told them everything about his time with Bishop, including what he suspected was a possible tie between US intelligence and JFK’s assassination.
In 1963, 11 weeks before President Kennedy was murdered, Bishop asked Veciana to meet him in Dallas. Veciana claims that when he arrived, Bishop was meeting with a shy, quiet man who didn’t speak in his presence and left after five minutes. When Kennedy was killed and Lee Harvey Oswald’s picture was shown on the news, Veciana says, he remembered him as the man Bishop met with in Dallas.
When Kennedy was killed and Lee Harvey Oswald’s picture was shown on the news, Veciana says, he remembered him as the man Bishop met with in Dallas.
After sharing this information with the committee, Veciana spoke with investigator Gaeton Fonzi numerous times over the next three years. Fonzi had him meet with a police sketch artist in an attempt to identify Bishop, and later, Sen. Richard Schweiker told Fonzi that the sketch “reminded him of David Atlee Phillips,” an officer in the CIA.
Fonzi arranged for them to meet, but Phillips and Veciana claimed they didn’t know each other. Fonzi wrote that Phillips was Bishop in his 1993 book about the inquiry, “The Last Investigation,” but Veciana didn’t publicly confirm this until 2014, when he did so at a conference held by the Assassination Archives and Research Center for the 50th anniversary of the release of the Warren Commission Report. This book marks the first time Veciana, who lives in Miami, has shared the story in its entirety.
In 1979, just days before Congress was due to issue its final report on the matter, Veciana was shot several blocks from his home, suffering minor injuries.
Later that year, when Castro was scheduled to speak at the UN, Veciana coordinated another attempt on his life, this time involving C4 that would be tossed into the crowd. The plan fell apart when the FBI got wind of it, but it turned out to have a potentially more devastating complication.
As it happens, Veciana’s daughter, Ana, was a reporter for the Miami News. As he tried to determine a way to salvage the mission, she called, telling him that she was being sent to New York to cover Castro’s speech.
“I’ll be just a few feet from him when he arrives,” she said.
“There was a chance that, in my blind obsession to kill Fidel Castro, I would have killed my own daughter,” he writes. “I decided then, I would try no more. My secret life was over.”