Phillips was repeatedly accused of involvement in the JFK assassination. He was named by assassination researchers and even by family members of another Agency operative. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigated a claim made by Cuban exile Antonio Veciana that Phillips (while using an alias) was meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months prior to November 1963. In 1980, Donald Freed and Fred Landis published a book accusing Phillips of being Oswald’s case officer, and of having a hand in the 1976 assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier. Phillips sued them for libel. In 1986, they settled for an undisclosed amount and retracted the allegations.[2][3]
In 1950, Phillips joined the CIA as a part-time agent in Chile, where he owned and edited The South Pacific Mail, an English-languagenewspaper that circulated throughout South America and several islands in the Pacific. The CIA initially paid him a $50-a-month retainer.[5] One of his first assignments was to pose as a high-level U.S. intelligence agent who might be interested in defecting. He recalled in a 1975 interview: "I was to be a 'dangle'. Sure enough, a KGB agent soon began to cultivate me."[5]
He became a full-time CIA operative in 1954, working as E. Howard Hunt’s deputy in the major psychological warfare effort in Guatemala during the U.S. coup and its aftermath.[6][7] In the weeks prior to the coup, Phillips was credited with devising a brilliant radio disinformation campaign to encourage defections within the Guatemalan military, and to create an impression among the populace that "rebels were everywhere in Guatemala" and that the Liberation forces were arriving imminently.[8]
He attempted a similar radio campaign in the first years of Fidel Castro's rule by broadcasting from tiny Swan Island between the Honduran and Cuban coasts. Phillips reportedly coined the phrase, "Castro betrayed the revolution", which was a key part of the messaging used by the anti-Castro movement.[9] Phillips assisted in planning the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in April 1961.[5] Throughout the 1960s, he was believed to be an important member of the CIA's top-secret counterintelligence group, code-named Operation 40, that sought to destabilize the Castro regime.[10]
While investigating Lee Harvey Oswald's possible ties to pro- and anti-Castro radical groups prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an HSCA staff investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, reported hearing a significant anecdote from Antonio Veciana, founder of the anti-Castro paramilitary organization Alpha 66. The latter said his organization's training, funding and planning had been handled by an intelligence agent he knew as "Maurice Bishop". Veciana recalled a meeting with Bishop in a downtown office building in Dallas, Texas in early September 1963.[12] When Veciana arrived at the meeting, he saw Bishop in a corner of the lobby talking to a "pale, slight" young man.[13] The three of them exited the lobby, and Bishop and the young man continued talking out on the sidewalk. Then the young man gestured farewell to Bishop and walked away.[14] On the day of the JFK assassination, Veciana immediately recognized the news photographs and TV images of Lee Harvey Oswald as being the same young man he saw that day with Bishop in downtown Dallas.[15]
After a former CIA officer, who had worked with Phillips at the JM/WAVE station south of Miami, told investigators that Phillips sometimes used the "Bishop" alias,[16] the HSCA subpoenaed Veciana to testify about Phillips as "Bishop". Gaeton Fonzi and Church Committee Senator Richard Schweiker were convinced that Phillips and Bishop were one and the same, but Veciana would not confirm it when shown photos of Phillips.[15] And when Veciana testified to the HSCA, he stated under oath that Phillips was not Bishop although they bore a "physical similarity".[17][18][19] On 25 April 1978, Phillips testified before the HSCA, and he denied ever using the name Maurice Bishop.[20] He insisted he had never met Veciana until a recent encounter arranged by Sen. Schweiker's office.[15] Then, years later at a 2014 conference entitled "The Warren Report and the JFK Assassination: Five Decades of Significant Disclosures", Veciana reversed his HSCA statements and asserted unequivocally, albeit not under oath, that he believed the agent he knew as Bishop was in fact David Atlee Phillips.[2][3]
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 in Washington, D.C.[21] The authors specifically named Phillips as participating in a coverup of the Letelier assassination, and reiterated Gaeton Fonzi's claim that Phillips served as Oswald's case officer while using the alias "Maurice Bishop".[22] In 1982, Phillips and the AFIO brought a $230 million libel suit against Freed, Landis, and their publisher.[21][22] A settlement was reached in 1986 with Phillips receiving a retraction and an undisclosed amount of money.[23] He donated the proceeds to the AFIO for the purpose of creating a legal defense fund for American intelligence officers who felt they were the victims of libel.[citation needed] In the aftermath of the lawsuit, Phillips wrote an article in Columbia Journalism Review questioning journalistic due process.[24]
Following the death of former CIA agent and Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt in 2007, two of his sons, Saint John Hunt and David Hunt, revealed that their father had recorded several "deathbed" admissions about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.[25][26] In the April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, Saint John Hunt detailed a number of individuals implicated by his father, including David Atlee Phillips along with 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.[26][27] The two sons alleged that their father removed the controversial information from his autobiography, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, in order to avoid possible perjury charges.[25] 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."[25]
Later life
Phillips wrote and lectured frequently on intelligence matters. He authored numerous books, among them his CIA memoirThe Night Watch, plus Careers in Secret Operations: How to Be a Federal Intelligence Officer, The Terror Brigade, The Carlos Contract, The Great Texas Murder Trials: A Compelling Account of the Sensational T. Cullen Davis Case, Secret Wars Diary: My Adventures in Combat Espionage Operations and Covert Action, and Writing For Pleasure and Profit in Retirement: How to Enjoy a Second Career as a Professional Writer.
He also compiled the David Atlee Phillips Papers, 1929-1989 and had his wife submit them to the Library of Congress after his death. These papers include manuscripts, correspondence, drafts of books, articles and other material relating to Phillips' career.
Secret Wars Diary: My Adventures in Combat, Espionage Operations and Covert Action. Bethesda, MD: Stone Trail Press (1988).ISBN9780932123046. OCLC20936502.
^ abVeciana, Antonio (September 26, 2014). Admissions and Revelations. The Warren Report and the JFK Assassination: Five Decades of Significant Disclosures. Bethesda Hyatt Regency, Bethesda, Maryland: Assassination Archives and Research Center.
^Max Holland, "Operation PBHISTORY: The Aftermath of SUCCESS", International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 17(2), 2004, p. 305. "At one time an aspiring actor, David Atlee Phillips was fluent in Spanish and fresh from working under contract to the CIA during PBSuccess. Under the pseudonym 'Paul D. Langevin,' Phillips had been the Agency's chief liaison and advisor to 'La Voz de la Liberación', one of the most effective tools in the psychological warfare waged against Árbenz."
^Schlesinger, Stephen; Kinzer, Stephen (1999). Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Harvard University Press. p. 114. ISBN978-0674019300.
