David Atlee Phillips

David Atlee Phillips (October 31, 1922 – July 7, 1988) was a Central Intelligence Agency officer of 25 years and a recipient of the Career Intelligence Medal. Phillips rose to become the CIA's chief of operations for the Western hemisphere. In 1975 he founded the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), an alumni association comprising intelligence officers from all services.[1]

Early life and military career

Phillips was born in Fort Worth, Texas[2] and attended The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.[2] Phillips was an actor prior to World War II.[2] During the war, he served as a nose gunner in the United States Army Air Forces. He was shot down over Austria and captured by the Germans, but was somehow able to escape and make it back to Allied lines.[2]

CIA career

Phillips joined the CIA as a part-time agent in 1950 in Chile, where he owned and edited "The South Pacific Mail", an English-language newspaper that circulated throughout South America and several islands in the Pacific. He became a full-time operative in 1954, and operated a major psychological warfare campaign in Guatemala during the US coup and its aftermath.[3] He rose through the ranks to intelligence officer, chief of station and eventually chief of Western hemisphere operations, serving primarily in Latin America, including Cuba, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.[4] Phillips retired from the agency in 1975 and founded the Association of Former Intelligence Officers in the same year.[5]

House Select Committee on Assassinations

While investigating Lee Harvey Oswald's possible ties to certain radical groups around the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the HSCA obtained statements from Alpha 66 founder Antonio Veciana that Oswald had met on several occasions with a CIA operative known as "Maurice Bishop".[6][7][8] After one former CIA case officer (who had been assigned to the JM/WAVE station in Miami) stated to investigators that Phillips had been known to use the alias,[9] the commission attempted to see if Veciana could identify Phillips as being "Bishop". Veciana insisted that he was not the same person and moreover that he had never met Phillips before either. Some committee members (and also lead investigator Gaeton Fonzi) doubted Veciana, reasoning that he should have at least recognized Phillips, a high-profile officer so heavily involved in Cuban operations.[10][11][12]

In 2014, at a conference named The Warren Report and the JFK Assassination: Five Decades of Significant Disclosures, Veciana reversed his previous statements, asserting unequivocally that he believed that the agent he knew as Bishop had in fact been David Atlee Phillips. [13]

Conspiracy allegations and lawsuit

In their book Death in Washington, authors Donald Freed and Fred Landis[14] charged that the CIA (and in his capacity as a senior officer, Phillips) had been involved in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier, and the Kennedy assassination. Further, they asserted that Phillips had positively served as Oswald's case officer while using the alias "Maurice Bishop".[15] In 1982, Freed, Landis, and their publisher were named in a $230 million libel suit by Phillips and the AFIO.[15][14] A settlement for an undisclosed amount was eventually reached with Phillips receiving a full retraction from the defendants.[15]

Later life

Phillips wrote and lectured frequently on intelligence matters. He authored five books, including his CIA memoir The Night Watch, Careers in Secret Operations: How to Be a Federal Intelligence Officer, The Terror Brigade, The Carlos Contract, and The Great Texas Murder Trials: A Compelling Account of the Sensational T. Cullen Davis Case.

Phillips died at his home in Bethesda, Maryland from complications of cancer on July 7, 1988; at the age of 65.[2]

Family

In 1948, Phillips married Helen Hausman Haasch.[16] They had four children,[17] then divorced in 1967.[16] In 1969, he married his second wife, Virginia Pederson Simmons,[16] who had three children from a previous marriage.[17] Together, the couple had one other child.[17]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "About Us". Afio.com. 2009-08-26. Retrieved 2017-05-29.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Saxon, Wolfgang (July 10, 1988). "David Atlee Phillips Dead at 65; Ex-Agent Was Advocate of C.I.A.". The New York Times. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
  3. ↑ 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 Arbenz."
  4. ↑ Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation, (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), pp. 263-266. ISBN 1-56025-052-6
  5. ↑ AFIO Copyright 2006 (2009-08-26). "About Us". AFIO. Retrieved 2017-05-29.
  6. ↑ "Antonio Veciana and "Maurice Bishop" : House Select Committee on Assassinations". Jfk-online.com. pp. 37–56. Retrieved 2017-05-29.
  7. ↑ Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation, (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), pp. 141-142. ISBN 1-56025-052-6
  8. ↑ Summers, Anthony. Not in Your Lifetime, (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998), pp. 250-251. ISBN 1-56924-739-0
  9. ↑ Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation, (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), p. 396. ISBN 1-56025-052-6
  10. ↑ United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979), HSCA Report, page 136, footnote 23
  11. ↑ Fonzi, Gaeton. The Last Investigation, (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), p. 266. ISBN 1-56025-052-6
  12. ↑ Phillips, David Atlee. The Night Watch. New York: Atheneum, 1977 (113).
  13. ↑ The Warren Report and the JFK Assassination: Five Decades of Significant DisclosuresAntonio Veciana (September 26, 2014). Antonio Veciana - Admissions and Revelations (Conference). Bethesda Hyatt Regency, Bethesda, Maryland: Assassination Archives and Research Center.
  14. 1 2 UPI (March 5, 1982). "CIA critic arrested after Cuba visit". UPI.com. UPI. Retrieved October 15, 2015.
  15. 1 2 3 Bugliosi, Vincent (2007). Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 1201. ISBN 0-393-04525-0.
  16. 1 2 3 Library of Congress (1 April 2010) [2004]. "David Atlee Phillips Papers; A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress" (PDF). Loc.gov/. Prepared by Bradley E. Gernand (Revised and expanded by Karen Linn Femia). Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. LCCN mm88075637. Retrieved October 15, 2015.
  17. 1 2 3 Barnes, Bart (1988-07-09). "CIA OPERATIVE, DEFENDER DAVID PHILLIPS, 65, DIES". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2017-05-29.

Bibliography

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