John Newman chart on Antonio Veciana claims

[Anthony Thorne]

John Newman posted this earlier today. Others might be able to glean the import of the timeline better than I can.

In November 2017 at the Lancer conference in Dallas, and again in March 2018 at the conference in San Francisco, I gave a presentation on Antonio Veciana and his claim that Bishop/Phillips recruited and trained him in Havana beginning in mid-1960. In Volume III, ("Into the Storm") coming at the end of 2018, there are a least two major chapters on the Veciana story about his relationship with David Phillips. The attached chart is worth studying; it speaks volumes about Veciana's story and how poorly our research community handled the alleged recruitment in Cuba over several decades (the person who noticed was Cuban intelligence chief, Fabian Escalante, in 1995). I am releasing this chart now because it takes a few months just to begin understanding its ramifications. I hope you enjoy working through them.

[Anthony Thorne]

A couple of Facebook questions answered by John on the above.

Was he trying to portray himself as out of the loop of events that occurred earlier than mid-1960?

No... Veciana had no idea what was happening to Phillips in or before mid-1960 because the JFK records did not begin working their way into NARA until 1993-1994. Even afterward, Veciana shows no awareness of the new documents until 2014,

Where do you stand on Veciana's claim that when he arrived early to meet his CIA contact David Atlee Phillips, Philips was meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald?

In my view that one allegation sucked the oxygen out of the air for any serious attention to be paid to the events before and after the fall of 1963. I'll write about that particular event in Volume V--sometime in 2022.

We have a penchant to go for the desert first--without eating our meat, potatoes and vegetables first. Nowhere is this poor diet more conspicuous than it is with Veciana's changing story--he has given us about five different versions over 40 years.

Just off the topic of Veciana, how useful have the recent document releases of the past several months been in putting together a closer look at what happened. Have there been any pleasant surprises or useful discoveries?

Very good stuff--too much to go into detail here but will appear in Volume III. Main thing is we need to compare the new docs with the previous 1/2 million pages--not a fun job but very worthwhile.