135 (2) Antonio Veciana Blanch.--The committee devoted a significant portion of its anti-Castro Cuban investigation to an alleged contact with Oswald that had been reported by Antonio Veciana Blanch, the founder of Alpha 66 which, throughout 1962 and most of 1963, was one of the most militant of the exile groups. (61) Its repeated hit-and-run attacks had drawn public criticism from President Kennedy in the spring of 1963, to which Veciana replied, "We are going to attack again and again." Veciana claimed to have had the active support of the CIA, and in 1976 he reported to a Senate investigator that from 1960 to 1973 his adviser, whom he believed to be a representative of the CIA, was known to him as Maurice Bishop. (62) Veciana stated that over their 13-year association, he and Bishop met on over 100 occasions and that Bishop actually planned many Alpha 66 operations. (63) He also said that he knew the man only. as Maurice Bishop and that all of their contacts were initiated by Bishop. (64) Veciana said that Bishop had guided him in planning assassination attempts of Castro in Havana in 1961 and in Chile in 1971; that Bishop had directed him to organize Alpha 66 in 1962; and that Bishop, on ending their relationship in 1973, had paid him $253,000 in cash for his services over the years. (65) Veciana also revealed that at one meeting with Bishop in Dallas in late August or early September 1963, a third party at their meeting was a man he later recognized as Lee Harvey Oswald. (66) Veciana also indicated to the committee that subsequent to the as- sassination, he had been contacted by Bishop, who was aware that Ve- cigna had a relative in Cuban intelligence in Mexico.(67) Bishop, according to Veciana, offered to pay Veciana's relative a large sum of money if he would say that it was he and his wife who had met with Oswald in Mexico City.(68) Veciana said he had agreed to con- tact his relative, but he had been unable to do so. (69) The committee pursued the details of Veciana's story, particularly the alleged meeting with Oswald. It conducted numerous file reviews and interviews with associates and former associates of Veciana, to try to confirm the existence of a Maurice Bishop or otherwise assess Ve- ciana's credibility. On a trip to Cuba, the committee interviewed Ve- ciana's relative, the Cuban intelligence agent. While the committee was unable to find corroboration for the con- tacts with Bishop, it did substantiate other statements by Veciana. For example, he did organize an attempted assassination of Castro in Havana in 1961, (70) and he probably did participate in another plot against Castro in Chile in 1971. (71) That Veciana was the principal organizer of the militant Alpha 66 organization was a matter of record. (72) The committee went to great lengths in its unsuccessful effort to substantiate the existence of Bishop and his alleged relationship with Oswald. It reviewed CIA files, but they showed no record of such an agent or employee. It circulated a sketch via the national news media, but no one responded with an identification. (73) It pursued a lead orig- inating with the Senate investigation that a former chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division of the Directorate of Operations bore a resemblance to the Bishop sketch.(74) The committee arranged for 136 a chance meeting between Veciana and the CIA officer, who had since retired. (75) Veciana said he was not Bishop. (76) In an executive ses- sion of the committee, the retired officer testified under oath that he had never used the name Maurice Bishop, had never known anyone by that name and had never known Veciana. (77) Veciana, also before a committee executive session, testified the officer was not Bishop al- though he bore a "physical similarity."23 (78) A former Director of the CIA, John McCone, and an agent who had participated in covert Cuban operations, each told the committee they recalled that a Maurice Bishop had been associated with the Agency, though neither could supply additional details.(80) Subsequently, McCone was interviewed by CIA personnel, and he told them that his original testimony to the committee had been in error. (81) The agent did confirm, however, even after a CIA reinterview, that he had seen the man known to him as Maurice Bishop three or four times at CIA headquarters in the early 1960's. (82) He did not know his organiza- tional responsibilities, and he had not known him personally. (83) The agent also testified that he had been acquainted with the retired of- ficer who had been chief of the Western Hemisphere Division and that he was not Bishop. (84) The committee also requested flies on Bishop from the FBI and Department of Defense, with negative results.(85) It did discover, however, that Army intelligence had an operational interest in Ve- ciann as a source of information on Alpha 66 activities, and that Ve- ciana complied, hoping to be supplied in return with funds and weap- ons. (86) Veciana acknowledged his contacts with the Army, but he stated that the only relationship those contacts had to Bishop was that he kept Bishop informed of them. (87) The CIA's files reflected that the Agency had been in contact with Veciana three times during the early 1960's, but the Agency main- tained it offered him no encouragement.(88) (The committee could discover only one piece of arguably contradictory evidence--a record of $500 in operational expenses, given to Veciana by a person with whom the CIA had maintained a longstanding operational relation- ship. (89)) The CIA further insisted that it did not at any time assign a case officer to Veciana. 24 (90) The committee was left with the task of evaluating Veciana's story, both with respect to the existence of Maurice Bishop and the alleged meeting with Oswald, by assessing Veciana's credibility. It found several reasons to believe that Veciana had been less than candid: ------------------------------- 23 The committee suspected that Veciana was lying when he denied that the retired CIA officer was Bishop. The committee recognized that Veciana had an interest in renewing his anti-Castro operations that might have led him to protect the officer from exposure as Bishop so they could work together again. For his part, the retired officer aroused the founder of Alpha 66, committee's suspicion when he told the committee he did not recognize Veciana as the founder of Alpha 66, especially since the officer had once been deeply involved in Agency anti-Castro operations. Further a former CIA case officer who was assigned from September 1960 to November 1962 to the JM/WAVE station in Miami told the committee that the retired officer had in fact used the alias, Maurice Bishop. The committee also interviewed a former assistant of the retired officer but he could not recall his former superior ever having used the name or having been referred to as Bishop. (79) 24 The committee found it probable that some agency of the United States assigned a case officer to Veciana, since he was the dominant figure in an extremely active anti-Castro organization. The committee established that the CIA assigned case officers to Cuban revolutionaries of less importance than Veciana, though it could not draw from that alone an inference of CIA deception of the committee concerning Veciana, since Bishop could well have been in the employ of one of the military intelligence agencies or even perhaps of some foreign power. 137 First, Veciana waited more than 10 years after the assassina- tion to reveal his story. Second, Veciana would not supply proof of the $253,000 pay- ment from Bishop, claiming fear of the Internal Revenue Service. Third, Veciana could not point to a single witness to his meet- ings with Bishop, much less with Oswald. Fourth, Veciana did little' to help the committee identify Bishop. In the absence of corroboration or independent substantiation, the committee could not, therefore, credit Veciana's story of having met with Lee Harvey Oswald.