David Atlee Philips: The Assassin Next Door

Lee Harvey Oswald's handler

President Truman a month after JFK’s assassination:

I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency - CIA. I would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field – and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it. (President Truman, Washington Post, December 22, 1963)

Up the street in Potomac past spy Felix Bloch’s house lived CIA officer David Atlee Phillips (1922-88), one of the masterminds of the Kennedy assassination.  Chief of Western Hemisphere Operations before his retirement in 1975 and head of Cuba operations for the Agency in the late Fifties and early Sixties, David joined forces with Antonio Veciana in 1960 to form the anti-Castro Alpha 66 paramilitary organization under the alias Maurice Bishop.  Two years after testifying to the 1977 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) describing his relationship with a Maurice Bishop, Veciana was shot in the head on September 21, 1979, but survived.  He passed away at 92 on June 18, 2020.

David Atlee Phillips & Lee Harvey Oswald

Veciana stated at a 2014 Assassination Archives and Research Center conference that upon arriving early for a September 1963 meeting with Maurice Bishop at the Southland building in Dallas, he interrupted a discussion between his case officer (Bishop) and Lee Harvey Oswald.  He also confirmed David Atlee Philips was Maurice Bishop, correcting 1977 HSCA testimony they were not the same person.  David Atlee Philips stated under oath to the HSCA on April 25, 1978 he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald.  The HSCA accused the CIA of lying to the American people about Oswald, and wanted to charge Philips with perjury.  CIA Director McCone even admitted to the HSCA there was an agent using the name Bishop, but later retracted the statement.

“A corps of researchers looking into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy say they have unearthed proof his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was involved in an operation by the CIA mere months before the killing, reigniting questions about whether Oswald truly was alone in his decision to kill the youngest man ever elected president.

In a Tuesday press conference at the National Press Club, Jefferson Morley—a veteran of the D.C. press corps and a preeminent expert on JFK's assassination with the Mary Ferrell Foundation—told reporters that he and attorneys with the foundation obtained documentation relating to a still-classified covert operation approved by senior CIA officials three months before Kennedy's death that suggested the agency used Oswald for intelligence purposes several weeks prior to the shooting.

‘This is an extraordinarily serious claim, and it has profound implications for the official story,’ Morley said Tuesday morning in Washington. ‘The CIA knew far more about the lone gunman than they are admitting even today. So this story deserves the closest possible scrutiny.’” (newsweek.com 12/6/22)

In 2014 Veciana also stated it was Maurice Bishop who ordered Oswald to Mexico City to secure visas at the Cuban and Soviet Embassies so a trail would exist to frame not only Oswald but Fidel Castro, creating a Cuban connection to the assassination. “Just as important and paramount was that there was someone that would be blamed or have the public responsibility for the assassination,” Veciana stated. “Fidel Castro was the ideal scapegoat for the murder of the president.”

He continued through translator Fernan Amandi, “Guillermo Ruiz, a member of the Cuban G2 (Dirección de Inteligencia) worked in the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City (and was married to my cousin).  Bishop proposed I ask Guillermo to seek asylum in the US where he would receive a large sum of money if he would declare Oswald visited Mexico City in September 1963 to discuss assassinating Kennedy with Castro intelligence officials.  Later, Bishop asked me to forget the whole thing involving Guillermo Ruiz.”  

Translator Amandi interpreted other incriminating Veciana statements: “But he (Veciana) happens to know that a group of officials working within the CIA got together with the clear plan to assassinate and murder the President, because they thought he was a traitor to the national interests of the US.  It is all the small details and all the small details at which David Atlee Philips is at the center of which convinces him (Veciana) of his participation in the assassination.” 

David Atlee Philips was a specialist in propaganda/misinformation and was part of the coup d’état against democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Veciana also said it was Maurice Bishop’s (Philips’) strategy to use Alpha 66 to attack Soviet ships in a Cuban harbor during delicate Khrushchev/Kennedy missile crisis discussions in order to disrupt the talks: “He (Bishop) said you had to put Kennedy against the wall in order to force him to make decisions that would remove Castro’s regime.”

He was also chief of the task force to stop the 1970 democratic election of Salvador Allende in Chile.  Having been recruited by the CIA out of Santiago where he ran a newspaper in 1950, David Atlee Philips was definitely the man for the job.  After Allende won the presidency, David worked with the Chilean military to overthrow him on September 11th, 1973.  With troops surrounding La Moneda Palace, Allende purportedly committed suicide with an AK-47 that was a gift from Fidel Castro.  Investigative journalist, Gaeton Fonzi, in his epic 1980 Washingtonian article “Who Killed Kennedy”, writes: “Veciana strongly believes that Bishop had something to do with the downfall of Allende in Chile.”

Gaeton Fonzi also quotes Church Committee member Senator Richard Schweiker (R-PA): “We don’t know what happened, but we do know that Oswald had intelligence connections.  Everywhere you look with him there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”  When the Committee discovered the CIA had worked with the Mafia to arrange assassinations, Schweiker was sickened: “That was so repugnant and shocking to me that I did a back flip on any number of things.”

Senator Richard Schweiker (R-PA)

In Part 1 of the 1988 documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy (TMWKK), Beverly Oliver, a dancer at the Cotton Club next door to Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, claims she was introduced to Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby over drinks in his club two weeks before the assassination of JFK.  “Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were linked together, I don’t know how,” she said.  One of Ruby’s dancers was also at the table.  Oliver said she kept quiet about the introduction for so many years, because the dancer Jada had spoken to newspapers of the meeting and ended up dead.  Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Station on November 24th, 1963.

In Oliver Stone’s documentary Through The Looking Glass (2021), Senator Schweiker states in a video clip: “J. Edgar Hoover writes, yes we did have a relationship with Mr. Ruby and he acted as our informant.” In the same documentary, HSCA Chief Counsel Richard Sprague outlines how all defectors to the Soviet Union who renounced their American citizenship had a “thorough debriefing” with the CIA upon returning to the US. Oswald was the exception. “That smacks of an intelligence relationship,” said Senator Schweiker.

In TMWKK Part 8, Oswald’s mistress Judith Vary Baker says during their final, emotional phone call the Sunday before the assassination, Lee said: “You know how we’ve tried and worried about who my handler was, Mr. B., Mr. Bishop or Brown, whatever, Benton, he said, I think is David Atlee Philips.  And I don’t want you to forget it.  You’ve got to remember that name.  He then told me goodbye.”  Oswald was killed by Ruby seven days later.

In September 1963 Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Senate Secretary to the Majority Leader Bobby Baker had come under investigation by the Senate Rules Committee for bribery and corruption in Texas during the 1950s.  Baker resigned in October 1963 and rumors began circulating that JFK would drop LBJ from the 1964 ticket.  In fact, on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963 the Maryland Insurance broker who wrote a life insurance policy for the Vice President, Don Reynolds, was describing to Senate investigators how he was forced by Baker to buy ads on an Austin station owned by LBJ as a kickback.  The investigation ceased when LBJ was sworn in as President later that evening.

In Part 9 of the TMWKK documentary Madeleine Brown, President Johnson’s mistress, describes a party in honor of J. Edgar Hoover (Bulldog) at oil magnate Clint Murchison’s mansion in Dallas the evening before the JFK assassination (confirmed by May Newman who worked for the Murchison family from 1962-97). Hoover flew in for the party and returned to DC the same night. In attendance were LBJ, H.L. Hunt and Richard Nixon.  Madeleine says, “They all went into a conference room and you could just feel the atmosphere.  When Lyndon came out…he whispered in my ear ‘Those blankety-blank Kennedys will never embarrass me again, that’s not a threat that’s a promise.’’ The next morning LBJ called her from the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth.  According to Madeleine LBJ repeated “the Kennedys will never embarrass me again” promise hours before JFK was assassinated.  “I’d like the entire world to know how I personally feel is the fact Lyndon Johnson knew about the assassination and was part of it,” she says.

President Johnson even had “contempt” for a plan for independent investigators to get to the bottom of Kennedy’s assassination: “The President noted with some considerable contempt the fact that certain people in the Department of Justice had suggested to him on Saturday that an independent investigation of the President’s assassination should be conducted by a high level group of attorneys and jurists, probably headed by Governor Dewey. President Johnson rejected this idea, and then heard the identical idea was to be advanced in a lead editorial in The Washington Post. The President felt this was a deliberate plant and he was exceedingly critical. He personally intervened, but failed with Mr. Al Friendly and finally “killed” the editorial with Mrs. Graham.” (Memorandum For The Record, Meeting With The President - 25 November and 26 November)

Seamstress May Newman adds, “The mood in the Murchison family home was very joyous and happy for a whole week after (the assassination), like champagne and caviar everyday of the week.”  JFK had been threatening to abolish the oil depletion allowance, estimated to cost Texas oilmen an additional $300 million in taxes each year.  LBJ continued the allowance when he became president, as did Richard Nixon.

Describing an encounter New Years Eve 1963 at the Driscoll Hotel in Austin, Madeleine Brown continues, “So I confronted Lyndon, Lyndon you’ve got to tell me, were you part of the assassination…He was very irate and angry.  He said, No, I was not, but the oil people, he called them the fat cats of Texas that I knew, and intelligence was the cause of the assassination.”  She concludes by emphatically stating: “I’m sure Lyndon did not make the plans per se, but he had the key people that he could call to actually do it”.

E. Howard Hunt

In January 2003, E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame gave his son, Saint John Hunt, handwritten notes and later sent him an audio cassette tape of what he called the “Big Event”, stating LBJ was the instigator of the assassination and David Atlee Philips, Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis and David Sanchez Morales organized it.  Although E. Howard Hunt thought he was at death’s door in 2003 he lived another four years, dying in January 2007.

On April 5, 2007 Rolling Stone published “The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt”, a piece about Saint John’s troubled life and his father’s deathbed confession: “Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a further narrative.  It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: ‘Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Philips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana.  He meets with Oswald in Mexico City…Then Veciana meets with Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there.  But LBJ changes the itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.’” 

Saint John also believes his father was one of the tramps photographed in Dallas the day of the assassination: “Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland somewhere, when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I fucking -- like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out of my head, and smoke came out of my ears. It looks like my dad. There's nobody that has all those same facial features. People say it's not him. He's said it's not him. But I'm his son, and I've got a gut feeling." He also stated his father was on a business trip the day of the assassination.

Saint John Hunt believes “tramp” #3 is his father

Nixon later advised chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on how to get the CIA director to kill the FBI’s probe of the Watergate Break-in: “‘We protected [CIA Director] Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon growled on the tape. ‘You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, [ex-CIA man and Watergate burglar Howard] Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.’

A long-overlooked White House tape provides the answers. The ‘hanky panky’ referred to CIA assassination operations in the early 1960s. The ‘whole Bay of Pigs thing’ was the Agency’s reaction to its most humiliating defeat. And the story that might blow was the connection between those events and the murder of JFK. When Nixon resigned in August 1974, Helms was relieved. In November 1977, Helms was convicted of lying to Congress about an assassination operation in Chile, making him the only CIA director ever convicted of a crime.” (Jefferson Morley, politico.com 6/5/22)

E. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Philips’ relationship went back decades in the CIA, working together on the Guatemala coup in 1954 and the Bay of Pigs in 1961.  In Gaeton Fonzi’s Washingtonian piece he states: “Wm. Harvey had been cited by the Church Committee as the CIA’s coordinator in its Castro Assassination plots with the Mafia.”  Also this: “On July 26, 1973 Bishop called and asked Veciana to meet him in the parking lot of the Flagler Dog Track.”  Antonio Veciana told Gaeton Fonzi Bishop gave him a briefcase with $253,000 in it for his past work.

In Larry Hancock’s 2010 book “Someone Would Have Talked”, David Atlee Philips’ brother James even had suspicions about his involvement.  “As David was dying of lung cancer, he called his brother.  Even at this point there was apparently no reconciliation between the two men.  James asked David pointedly, ‘Were you in Dallas that day?’  David answered ‘Yes’ and James hung up the phone on him.”  Also in Hancock’s book, David Atlee Philips told Kevin Walsh, an investigator with the HSCA that “My final take on the assassination is there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.”

“‘[JFK] learned very early on that the purpose of the CIA and the intelligence apparatus was to create a constant pipeline of new wars for them, for the military industrial complex,’ [RF] Kennedy [Jr.] noted, adding that JFK was adamant that ‘it’s not the United States’ job to dictate what kind of governments other countries have.’

RFK Jr. continued, ‘in October of 1963 he heard that some of his Green Berets had been killed… and he said I want a total casualty list from Vietnam. His aide came to him and said 75 Americans have died, he said that’s too many and he signed that day a national security directive ordering all troops out of Vietnam… the first thousand over the next month and then the rest by the beginning of 1965, and um and then a month later he was killed.’” (Joe Rogan Experience 6/14/23)

“‘Almost all of the people associated with (JFK’s assassination) were involved with the Miami Station, which was the largest CIA Station at the time and was basically the Cuban Station’, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. ‘The people who were involved were people like Bill Harvey and David Atlee Phillips, who was clearly involved in my uncle’s assassination. By all evidence, he was Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler at the CIA. E. Howard Hunt made a confession. David Morales, who was the chief hitman, ran the Operation Phoenix program in Vietnam, he killed ten thousand people, he also gave a confession of being in Dallas.’

The Cuba Station was ‘angry at my uncle for not sending in air cover during the Bay of Pigs invasion’, Kennedy said. ‘After the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, my uncle developed this friendship with Khrushchev, and he shut down all the attacks on Cuba by Alpha 66 and other groups who were harassing Cuba and sinking Russian ships. They were operating flotillas out of South Florida, and doing raids. My uncle (JFK) and father (RFK) sent the Coast Guard to confiscate their ships and weaponry and arrest those that kept doing it.’

Kennedy had ‘talked to some of the hitmen involved’, he said, including Antonio Veciana, whose handler was David Atlee Phillips, who was also Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler. ‘So Veciana met Oswald in Dallas in September 1963. I’ve talked to the people who were working for the CIA and the mob at that time to kill Castro, and some of them were pivoted to this new project’ of assassinating President John F. Kennedy, RFK Jr. said.

‘In 1979 the House Assassinations Committee met for a year and a half, and they looked at much more evidence than the Warren Commission. Allen Dulles ran the Warren Commission. He was the head of the CIA that my uncle fired. When my uncle died, (Allen Dulles) told a reporter, I’m glad the little shit is dead. He thought he was a God. Then he becomes the head of the Warren Commission. It should’ve been called the Dulles Commission. Allen Dulles was ‘communicating secretly with the people at the CIA, with David Atlee Phillips, with George Joannides, the CIA liaison, and with J. Edgar Hoover, telling them what questions they would be asked. The whole thing was a coordinated Kabuki theater. In 1980, Congress concluded this was a conspiracy’, Kennedy said. ‘Most of the people on that staff that I’ve talked to believe it was the CIA.’” (tucker on twitter 8/13/23)

“Rob Reiner, an actor and filmmaker, has a podcast dedicated to a question that has confounded history: ‘Who killed JFK?’ Reiner believes a union of rogue members of the CIA, mobsters and Cuban exiles killed Kennedy.

‘It’s not a very simple answer, but there was a confluence of rogue elements of the CIA, the Cuban exile community and the mob,’ Reiner told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo on Wednesday. ‘We found that the way in which these things are done obviously are not government sanctioned. They’re done, as they say, off the book. There’s no paper trail to any of this.’” (newsnationnow.com 1/18/24)

A car pulled over on the corner of Seven Locks and Democracy while hitchhiking home from Montgomery Mall with a friend in 1973.  “Do you know whose car this is” the hippie driver asked excitedly as we jumped in the backseat.  “This is E. Howard Hunt’s car, you know who he is, right?” After following the Watergate hearings for weeks on TV that summer we knew he was one of the burglars of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters.  Was it Saint John Hunt who picked us up?  He would have been 19 at the time.

Make that the assassins next door.

“I’m not in full control though of my entire government, I’m not in control of the CIA and I can’t speak for what’s happening there.” JFK to the French Ambassador after the failed April 21-26, 1961 coup d’etat against President Charles de Gaulle. (David Talbot paraphrasing JFK in Oliver Stone’s Through The Looking Glass, 2021)

“But I do believe there has been a coup, and it’s been taken over, and if I want to, and if I can I want to just put the date in my mind, and anybody could pick probably any date in the last 100 years, but I have picked November 22nd 1963,” Paul continued. “That was the day Kennedy was murdered by our government, you know by the CIA.” (Ron Paul

The Vigilant Fox

4/11/23)

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is lobbying for his daughter-in law to become deputy CIA director so she can get to the bottom of the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy, the Washington outlet Axios has claimed. RFK Jr. has long suspected the CIA of being behind the hit, however.

‘RFK believes that and wants to get to the bottom of it,’ an anonymous Republican source told Axios on Wednesday, suggesting this rationale might be behind the proposal to nominate Amaryllis Fox Kennedy as deputy director of the CIA.” (rt.com 12/11/24)

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