David Atlee Phillips

David Atlee Phillips (October 31, 1922 - July 7, 1988) was a CIA officer who specialized in propaganda and covert action, serving in key roles in Operation PBSUCCESS (the 1954 Guatemala coup), Cuba operations at JM/WAVE and the Mexico City station, and ultimately as head of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division before his 1975 retirement. Phillips was identified by Alpha 66 founder Antonio Veciana in 2013, after decades of denial, as the CIA officer who operated under the alias "Maurice Bishop" and whom Veciana had seen with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in late summer 1963 - approximately two months before the Kennedy assassination. Phillips denied the identification under oath before the HSCA in 1978, but CIA officer Ron Crozier independently confirmed that Phillips had used the "Maurice Bishop" alias at JM/WAVE.¹

Early Career and PBSUCCESS

Phillips served as an Air Force nose gunner during World War II and joined the CIA in 1950. Early assignments included Mexico City and undercover work in Cuba beginning in 1959, where he monitored the emerging revolutionary government. He published one novel under his own name, The Carlos Contract (1978), and also wrote the memoir The Night Watch (Atheneum, 1977) covering his CIA career.

For Operation PBSUCCESS in 1953-1954, the CIA-organized coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, Phillips ran the psychological warfare component alongside Tracy Barnes (the Washington coordinator) and Howard Hunt (chief of political action). Under the pseudonym "Paul D. Langevin," Phillips directed La Voz de la Liberacion (Voice of Liberation), the CIA's clandestine black radio network broadcasting from Honduras that fabricated reports of the Liberation Army's military progress and falsely attributed atrocities to the Arbenz regime. He distributed approximately 100,000 pamphlets titled "Chronology of Communism in Guatemala" and produced three films for cinema distribution.

The PBSUCCESS radio campaign - combined with the cultivation of Guatemalan military officers to induce their defection from Arbenz - was the primary mechanism that induced Arbenz's resignation on June 27, 1954, despite the Liberation Army's modest actual military performance on the ground. Phillips later cited PBSUCCESS as a defining formative experience, and its propaganda model informed his subsequent Cuba work.¹

Cuba Operations: JM/WAVE and Mexico City

After undercover work in Havana in 1959-1960 and involvement in Bay of Pigs planning, Phillips worked at JM/WAVE, the CIA's large Miami station, on anti-Castro propaganda operations and directing exile organizations, including Alpha 66, during Operation Mongoose.

In September 1963, Phillips was appointed Chief of Cuban Operations at the CIA's Mexico City station, working under station chief Win Scott. This appointment placed Phillips in charge of CIA operations targeting the Cuban consulate and Soviet Embassy in Mexico City at precisely the time Oswald (or someone representing himself as Oswald) visited both installations in late September and early October 1963, seeking Cuban and Soviet visas. The HSCA's 350-page Lopez Report, which investigated CIA operations in Mexico City in this period, documented that information "was not reported to CIA Headquarters in an accurate and expeditious manner prior to the assassination" and that "all information in the possession of the CIA Mexico City Station was not reported to CIA Headquarters in an accurate and expeditious manner." The Lopez Report was completed in 1979 and remained classified until a 1996 partial release; a more complete version was released in 2003 and is available at history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/lopezrpt/.²

Chile, 1970

After President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA on September 15, 1970, to prevent Salvador Allende from taking office in Chile, the agency formed a task force under its deputy director for plans, Thomas Karamessines. Phillips ran it from day to day with William Broe, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division. The operation had the cryptonym Project FUBELT.³

On October 16 headquarters cabled the Santiago station: "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup." The work was to be done "clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden." The cable added: "There is great and continuing interest in the activities of Tirado, Canales, Valenzuela, et al, and we wish them optimum good fortune." The releasing officer named at its foot is David A. Phillips.⁴

On October 18 the station asked for "three .45 calibre machine guns (grease guns) with 500 rounds of ammo each" within 48 hours. Broe and Phillips approved the request, and in the same exchange raised and dropped the idea of "bomb drops in areas not likely to cause casualties." They instructed the station chief, Henry Hecksher, to tell neither the army attaché nor Ambassador Edward Korry of the "impending coup," and if it came to "appear surprised and stonewall any and all queries." General René Schneider, the army commander, was shot on October 22 and died on October 25. The Senate committee's 1975 report on the episode quotes the task force's officers without naming Phillips or Hecksher, and their names were attached to the cables only when the documents were declassified.³⁵

As head of the task force Phillips cabled the station on September 21, 1970, that "the first and fundamental task is to induce Frei to take action which will produce desired results," and on October 7 instructed the station chief, Henry Hecksher, who had argued against a coup, that his cables "should not contain analysis and argumentation but simply report on action taken." After Schneider was shot he and Broe cabled that if the agency's part were exposed "absolute denial will be the order of the day even with Ambassador and other embassy colleagues." He returned to Chilean operations as chief of the Western Hemisphere Division in June 1973. On September 11, as the coup was under way, he sent Kissinger a memorandum reporting that an officer of the group planning it had asked "if the U.S. government would come to the aid of the Chilean military if the situation became difficult." On October 3 he cabled Santiago that "Agency operational activities in Chile are now prime target for Congressional investigations" and that the agency "cannot assist Junta." He also described the financing of a "small network" of media outlets "instrumental in mounting a propaganda campaign to popularize the Junta's programs."⁶

Phillips gave his own account in 1977. "Early on the morning of October 22 a cable flashed into Langley from Santiago. General Rene Schneider, Allende's military chief and a strict constitutionalist, had been killed. I immediately assumed that CIA was involved somehow with the assassination, because the Santiago station had passed three machine guns the night before to a cabal of military officers who considered Schneider the principal stumbling block." When later reports said the killers had carried handguns and belonged to a group the agency had contacted and then dropped, he wrote: "Thank God, I said to myself, for at least that small favor." He went with Karamessines to tell Helms "that it was all over." He added: "when CIA backed a foreign group plotting against an incumbent regime, as in the case of the Dominican Republic when Trujillo was killed, or in Chile when General Schneider died, it was not always possible to put limits or on and off buttons on the cabal being dealt with."⁷

The Maurice Bishop Controversy

Antonio Veciana founded Alpha 66, an aggressive anti-Castro exile organization, in 1962 at the direction of a CIA case officer he knew only as "Maurice Bishop." Veciana met with Bishop more than 100 times over approximately 13 years, from mid-1960 through mid-1973, at the conclusion of which Bishop paid Veciana $253,000 in cash. Bishop had directed Alpha 66's provocative attacks on Soviet ships in Cuban ports in 1963 - attacks Veciana understood were designed to prevent any diplomatic accommodation between Kennedy and the Soviet Union.

Veciana's central claim regarding Oswald: In late August or early September 1963, he met with Bishop in the lobby of a downtown Dallas office building. Bishop was accompanied by a young man Veciana later recognized as Oswald. Veciana stated: "If it was not Oswald it was his 'exact' double."

HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi was convinced Phillips was Bishop. He arranged a face-to-face meeting between Veciana and Phillips at an Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) conference in Reston, Virginia, in September 1976. After the meeting, Veciana told investigators that Phillips was not Bishop - a denial he maintained under oath before the HSCA in April 1978, before reversing it publicly in 2013.²

HSCA Testimony (April 25, 1978)

Phillips testified before the HSCA on April 25, 1978 - the same day as Veciana's testimony - in executive session. He denied ever using the name "Maurice Bishop" and denied ever meeting Veciana. The CIA's formal responses to HSCA inquiries (dated March 31, 1978 and a September 8, 1978 follow-up) reported finding no "Maurice Bishop" in agency records.

However, CIA officer Ron Crozier - who had worked with Phillips at JM/WAVE - told HSCA investigators that Phillips sometimes used the code name "Maurice Bishop." This direct confirmation from a CIA colleague was documented in HSCA investigative files.

HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey stated the committee was "less than satisfied with [Phillips'] candor." Former HSCA chief counsel Richard Sprague stated in 1980 that Phillips' testimony "would not bear thorough examination." Blakey later publicly acknowledged the committee had been "misled by the CIA" and described the agency as having a culture of "prevarication and dissimulation."²

Retirement and AFIO

Phillips retired from the CIA in 1975 as head of the Western Hemisphere Division at GS-18 rank, the highest CIA position not requiring executive appointment. That year he founded the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), which became a platform for publicly defending the CIA against the reform pressures generated by the Church Committee investigations.

The Libel Suits

The writers Donald Freed and Fred Landis, authors of Death in Washington, on the murder of Orlando Letelier, held a press conference in Washington in 1980 with the journalist John Cummings. They alleged that Phillips and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers had been involved in the killing, and that Phillips had been Lee Harvey Oswald's case officer under the name Maurice Bishop. Phillips sued them, the publisher Lawrence Hill, and William Pepper in the federal court in Washington (Civil Actions 81-1407 and 81-2578), asking more than 90 million dollars. The litigation was paid for in part by Challenge, Inc., "An Intelligence Officers' Legal Action Fund," which also supported the libel suit brought by three former embassy officials in Santiago against the makers of the film Missing, on the death of Charles Horman.⁸

After almost five years four of the five defendants settled in February 1986 for an undisclosed sum. Pepper could not be found. The retraction filed with the court said the authors and publisher "had no intention of charging or suggesting that Mr. Phillips played any role in the assassination of Orlando Letelier, that he was an accessory before or after the fact of that murder, or that he had any connection with Lee Harvey Oswald." Phillips said: "I certainly am satisfied because I believe it is a vindication." Of his former employer he said: "I have a feeling that the reaction of the CIA to former agents who file lawsuits is that they consider them something, perhaps, a cut above a gun smuggler or a narcotics smuggler." At the same press conference he said he had examined photocopies of papers from Letelier's briefcase showing that Letelier "had been cooperating with the Cuban DGI intelligence service." "They existed," he said, though the FBI "has claimed none exist."⁸

Later Statements and Death

Phillips died of cancer on July 7, 1988. HSCA investigator Kevin Walsh reported that Phillips told him before his death: "My final take on the assassination is there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers." Reports attributed to Phillips' nephew Shawn Phillips indicated that Phillips' brother James reported a deathbed exchange in which David answered "Yes" when asked "Were you in Dallas that day?" An undated manuscript passage attributed to Phillips states he "handled" Oswald with a mission involving Castro - though the provenance of this text has been treated with varying skepticism by researchers and cannot be verified as authentically from Phillips.¹

Veciana's Eventual Admission

After more than 35 years of denial, Veciana wrote a letter to Marie Fonzi (widow of Gaeton Fonzi) in November 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, confirming: "Maurice Bishop, my CIA contact agent was David Atlee Phillips. Phillips or Bishop was the man I saw with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on September 1963."

In his 2017 memoir Trained to Kill (co-written with journalist Carlos Harrison, Skyhorse Publishing), Veciana made the identification public and permanent, describing Fonzi's book The Last Investigation as "the best book that has been written" on the Kennedy assassination.¹