A plot to kill Fidel Castro failed because a bazooka did not fire. This was revealed by a Cuban underground leader now in Miami.

In October of 1960 Antonio Veciana, 33, rented a three-bedroom apartment (No. 8-A) at Residencial Misiones No. 29 in downtown Havana. Veciana was a bank official. But Veciana had another responsibility: He also was head of the action and sabotage section of the Revolutionary Movement of the People, one of the major anti-Castro clandestine movements.

Veciana wanted the apartment for a very special reason. It provided an unobstructed view of the north terrace of the Presidential Palace, about 120 yards away.

Veciana moved his mother-in-law into the apartment and he set about preparing his plans. He and hid co-conspirators planned to assassinate Castro. But hitches, government vigilance and a lack of proper weapons caused endless delays.

Not until October of this year was the plan ready to be carried out. Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticos had been touring the Iron Curtain countries, and he was due back in Cuba Oct. 5. Castro would greet him, and they would address a welcoming rally from the north terrace.

At 11 p.m. on Oct. 4 Veciana entered Apartment 8-A with his mother-in-law. He carried a gift-wrapped package from which could be seen protruding a lamp.

Although the area around the palace is heavily patrolled, none of the guards was suspicious of the package and no one stopped Veciana.

But inside the package was a bazooka with a range in excess of the 120 yards between the apartment and the terrace, where Castro would be standing.

The next day the welcoming rally was held as scheduled. But the assassination attempt did not take place. The bazooka failed to fire.

It was my case officer, Maurice Bishop, who had the idea to attack the Soviet ships. The intention was to cause trouble between Kennedy and Russia. Bishop believed that Kennedy and Khrushchev had made a secret agreement that the USA would do nothing more to help in the fight against Castro. Bishop felt - he told me many times - that President Kennedy was a man without experience surrounded by a group of young men who were also inexperienced with mistaken ideas on how to manage this country. He said you had to put Kennedy against the wall in order to force him to make decisions that would remove Castro's regime.

A former leader of the militant anti-Castro organization Alpha 66 was wounded in the head Friday.

Antonio Veciana was in good condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital with a small-caliber bullet imbedded just above his left ear.

He was conscious upon arrival at Pan American Hospital, from which he later was transferred, said his wife, Sira Veciana.

Veciana, who is a nonactive member of Alpha 66, served time in federal prison in Atlanta several years ago on drug charges.

Miami police said Veciana was turning a corner at NW 19th Street and 29th Avenue when a brown 1971 Buick station wagon pulled alongside him. Four shots were fired, police said, one striking Veciana near his left temple, the rest striking his car.

Police said they do not know how Veciana reached Pan American Hospital.

Friends and family of Veciana theorized that the shooting was an attempt by agents of the Cuban government to kill him.

"The only enemy my husband had in the world was Fidel Castro,"said Mrs. Veciana. "This must have been done by infiltrators living in Miami."

Mrs. Veciana said her husband had received threats against his life by phone about eight months ago, but had received none recently. She said he usually followed the same route from his office to his home at 811 NW 30th Ct.

Nazario Sargen, current head of Alpha 66, said Veciana had said at a press conference several months ago that the Cuban government planned to kill him.

"THE FBI had told him that the attempt on his life was prepared, that it was a plan of the Cuban government, and that's exactly what he said at the conference," Sargen said.

According to Sargen, Veciana planned an attempt against the life of Fidel Castro during the Cuban president's visit to Chile in 1971. But, Sargen said, the plot to put a gun inside a television camera never materialized.

Antonio Veciana rested Saturday, amid stringent hospital security measures, convinced he was the victim of an assassination attempt by agents of Cuban President Fidel Castro.

A former activist of the Miami-based Alpha 66, a militantly anti-Castro group, Veciana said he thinks the attempt was made with the acquiesence of U.S. officials. The only proof he could offer, however, was that he was warned by FBI agents last October about the possibility of such an attempt on his life.

Veciana was shot from a passing auto Friday night. Miami police are investigating. They will not yet say, however, whether they believe the shooting was politically inspired.

Veciana maintained that a "band of Castro spies" has been permitted to operate in Miami to supply the Cuban government de-tails of anti-Castro activity in South Florida.

He said the attack on him was part of a Castro-inspired campaign which included drug charges that sent him to prison for 18 months several years ago.

Veciana, 50, spoke to reporters, sitting up in his Pan American Hospital bed Saturday. Hospital officials routinely told callers he had been transferred to an unnamed hospital. They insisted on having Veciana's wife, Sira, accompany all visitors to his room.

Like a stage play, the Friday shooting of Veciana repeated a scene played out in Puerto Rico five months ago. In that case, the victimwas not an anti-Castro militant but a sympathizer with attempts to ease tensions between exiles and the Cuban government.

And in the Puerto Rican shooting, the victim died.

In late April, Carlos Muniz, operator of a travel agency that offered trips for exiles to Cuba, was shot to death by attackers who drove up alongside his car and fired .45-caliber bullets into his auto. One struck him in the head and he died.

Friday evening, a brown station wagon pulled up along Veciana's pick-up truck and fired four .45-caliber bullets at him. A slug shattered the side mirror of the truck, and a piece of the bullet struck him in the head, according to Miami police.

Neither Veciana nor those in favor of dialogue by Cuban exiles with the government of Fidel Castro think the shootings are necessarily linked. But both sides expect more attacks.

Bernardo Benes, one of the principal negotiators with the Castro government concerning prisoner re-lease, said, "I don't think the shootings represent increasing terrorism, although there are elements on all sides which want to use violence to force their ideas on others."

But Cuban exile sources in Puerto Rico say attempts to kill Cuban leaders favoring eased tension with the Cuban government will be made this fall. Close associates of Muniz have reportedly fled into hiding in Miami.

"I think the U.S. government is cooperating with Castro police," Veciana said. `"In effect, I have no protection."

David Philips suspected by the House Select Committee on Assassinations of doubling as the shadowy "Maurice Bishop" CIA overseer of the Cuban Alpha 66 anti-Castro brigade. The same David Philips in charge of spinning the Oswald-Mexico City incident in the CIA's favor may have engineered the "Mexico City scenario" in the first place. Lane, who has made a legal and literary career out of blaming the CIA for JFK's death, says he did.

Alpha 66's Cuban leader Antonio Veciana claimed that at one of his hundred or so meetings with Bishop, Oswald was there not saying anything, just acting odd.

"I always thought Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination," Veciana told Russell.

Veciana's cousin worked for Castro's intelligence service and after the assassination Bishop wanted Veciana to bribe his cousin into saying that he met with Oswald, in order to fabricate an Oswald-Castro connection.

Investigators never established for sure that Bishop and Philips were one and the same, but descriptions of Bishop's appearance and mannerisms mirrored Philips'. Veciana drew a sketch of his old controller and Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the assassination committee, recognized it as Philips. When the select committee's star investigator Gaeton Fonzi finally brought Veciana and Philips together, the two started acting weird around each other. After a short conversation in Spanish, Philips bolted. Witnesses to the encounter swear that a look of recognition swept Veciana's visage, but Veciana denied that Philips was his case officer of more than a decade earlier.

During the Church committee hearings, Senator Richard Schweiker's independent investigator Gaeton Fonzi stumbled onto a vital lead in the Kennedy assassination. An anti-Castro Cuban exile leader named Antonio Veciana was bitter about what he felt had been a government setup leading to his recent imprisonment, and he wanted to talk. Fonzi asked him about his activities, and without any prompting from Fonzi, Veciana volunteered the fact that his CIA handler, known to him only as "Maurice Bishop," had been with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas not long before the assassination of Kennedy. Veciana gave a description of Bishop to a police artist, who drew a sketch. One notable characteristic Veciana mentioned were the dark patches on the skin under the eyes. When Senator Schweiker first saw the picture, he thought it strongly resembled the CIA's former Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division-one of the highest positions in the Agency - and the head of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO): David Atlee Phillips.

In 1978, exile leader Antonio Veciana added a disturbing postscript to his account of meeting "Bishop" in Oswald's company shortly before the Mexico episode. After the assassination, Veciana told me "Bishop" made a strange request. "He asked me to get in touch with a cousin of mine who worked in the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, Guillermo Ruiz. Bishop asked me to see if Ruiz would, for money, make statements stating that Lee Harvey Oswald had been at the embassy a few weeks before the assassination. I asked him whether it was true that Oswald had been there, and Bishop replied that it did not matter whether he had or not - what was important was that my cousin, a member of the Cuban diplomatic service, should confirm that he had been."

Veciana did have a cousin by marriage called Ruiz, and he worked, fronting as a diplomat, in Castro's intelligence service. Veciana says, though, that he could not immediately contact Ruiz following "Bishop's" request. Before he could do so, "Bishop" told him to "forget the whole thing and not to comment or ask any questions about Lee Harvey Oswald."

It must be stressed that, for all the imponderables about the "Bishop" allegation. Committee staff were able to make this report on Veciana's character: "Generally, Veciana's reputation for honesty and integrity was excellent." A former associate who worked with him when Veciana was chief of sabotage for the MRP in Havana said, "Veciana was the straightest, absolutely trustworthy, most honest person I ever met. I would trust him implicitly."

"Bishop," Veciana has said, "did work for an intelligence agency of this country, and I am convinced that it was the CIA... The impression I have is that the Mexico City episode was a device. By using it, 'Maurice Bishop' wanted to lay the blame for President Kennedy's death fairly and squarely on Castro and the Cuban government."

Alpha 66's Cuban leader Antonio Veciana claimed that at one of his hundred or so meetings with Bishop, Oswald was there. "I always thought Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination," Veciana told Russell. Veciana's cousin worked for Castro's intelligence service and after the assassination Bishop wanted Veciana to bribe his cousin into saying that he met with Oswald, in order to fabricate an Oswald-Castro connection.

Investigators never established for sure that Bishop and Phillips were one and the same, but descriptions of Bishop's appearance and mannerisms mirrored Phillips'. Veciana drew a sketch of his old controller and Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the assassination committee, recognized it as Phillips.

When the select committee's star investigator Gaeton Fonzi finally brought Veciana and Phillips together, the two started acting weird around each other. After a short conversation in Spanish, Phillips bolted. Witnesses to the encounter swear that a look of recognition swept Veciana's visage, but Veciana denied that Phillips was his case officer of more than a decade earlier.

Veciana's reluctance to make the ID, Fonzi theorized, was related to two unfortunate events that had befallen him of late: one, he was convicted of running drugs and suspected that Bishop set him up to silence him; two, he was shot in the head. Veciana's desire to clear his drug rap and avoid absorbing another bullet may have had something to do with the fact that he would not rat on his old benefactor.

A long-secret government document released this week lends credence to a favorite theory of conspiracy advocates on President John F. Kennedy's assassination: the contention that Lee Harvey Oswald was seen in Dallas with a U.S. intelligence agent about two months before the murder.

That issue has long been connected with unproved reports that a violent Cuban exile group - perhaps with the help of an American intelligence agency - was involved in the assassination. The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the reports but said in 1978 it was unable to substantiate them.

However, the document obtained yesterday by Newsday provides a previously lacking measure of credibility to the reports. Those reports center on a shadowy figure called Maurice Bishop - likely a pseudonym - said to have been an intelligence agent during the early 1960s.

Antonio Veciana, founder of the Alpha 66 Cuban exile group that launched repeated guerrilla raids against Fidel Castro's regime, testified before the House committee that he considered Bishop his US intelligence contact; that he met with Bishop more than 100 times over a 13-year period; that Bishop had directed him to organize Alpha 66 and had paid him $253,00. Moreover, he said, he had met briefly in Dallas with Bishop and Oswald sometime around September, 1963, two months before Kennedy's Nov. 22 assassination. G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel to the House committee, said: "After careful analysis, we decided not to credit Veciana's claim" because, among other things, there was no proof that Maurice Bishop existed.

But the document, released by the US Assassination Records Review Board, supports the contention that Bishop existed and otherwise backs Veciana's story. Government sources said the document - a US Army intelligence report dated Oct. 17, 1962 - describes a man who fits the profile of Maurice Bishop. "He used a different name, but we believe this man fits Bishop's profile very closely," one official said.

The document is a report from an Army intelligence officer, Col. Jeff W. Boucher, to Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and a controversial figure in the Vietnam War. It said the intelligence operative described as fitting Bishop's profile "has contact with the Alpha 66 group" and that Alpha 66 "was going to conduct raids against Cuba."

Alpha 66 leaders, the document said, had told the operative they "desired support of the US Army in the action phase," including funds, equipment and arms. "In return the group would provide intelligence information, would furnish captured equipment, and could land agents in Cuba. The group estimated it would require $100,000 to complete the balance of its program, consisting of four more raids on Cuba."

The document said a unit of Army intelligence had approved debriefing Alpha 66 frogmen who had conducted underwater operations against Castro; exploring the possibility of buying captured Soviet equipment from Alpha 66 and briefing Lansdale on the Alpha 66 proposal to furnish intelligence information and material for financial support.

During a long conversation with the investigator Gaeton Fonzi in Havana, we discovered a story that, given its content, it is worth reproducing. Fonzi is not just any common or garden investigator. He had devoted much of his life to working for various congressional committees, including those responsible for investigations into the covert activities of the CIA and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A few years ago, and after much effort, Fonzi managed to get a private interview with Antonio Veciana, the same old buddy of Jorge Mas in the "New Orleans group," where the two of them became close friends while fulfilling CIA missions. Veciana had been interrogated by the Grand Jury charged with investigating the assassination of President Kennedy, and years later, had had some drug-related problems; but he vehemently affirmed to Fonzi that these difficulties were nothing more than a "trap" set up by somebody.

"I have a lot of information, but I am keeping that to myself because it is my life insurance," Veciana told Fonzi."

Antonio Veciana Blanch was a public accountant who worked for the Cuban sugar magnate Julio Lobo. He rapidly opposed the Cuban Revolution and, in 1960 was recruited by the CIA in Havana. He received his initial training in an English Language Academy supervised by the U.S. embassy in the Cuban capital. In October 1961, after the failure of a plot he devised to assassination Prime Minister Fidel Castro with a bazooka during an event at the former Presidential Palace, Veciana fled Cuba.

In the interview that he gave to Fonzi he related that, once in Miami, he was looked after by a CIA official who used the pseudonym of Maurice Bishop. Among other tasks, this "Bishop" ordered Veciana to promote the creation of the ALPHA 66 organization.

"Bishop" had frequent contact with Veciana from 1962-1963 in the city of Dallas. Veciana recalled that, at one of those meetings in a public building, he saw Lee Harvey Oswald.

Fonzi noted that various acts of disinformation were organized as part of the operation that cost the life of President Kennedy: one in Dallas, another in Miami and a third in Mexico City. The objective of the disinformation was to manufacture the image of a "revolutionary" Oswald, a "defender of the Cuban Revolution."

Hence the ex-marine was filmed in acts of solidarity with Cuba, demonstrating in a very aggressive manner. But the most daring act of disinformation was effected in Mexico City. There, Lee Harvey Oswald turned up at the Cuban embassy to ask for an entry visa to the island. All of that was filmed from a surveillance post that the CIA had opposite the Cuban embassy, so that it would be documented.

The strange thing is, as Veciana told Fonzi, in one of his contacts with "Bishop" in early 1963, the latter said that he knew that he (Veciana) had a cousin in Cuban Intelligence, who was located at the Cuban embassy in Mexico. "Bishop" stated that if it suited his cousin to work for them in a very specific action, he would pay him whatever he wanted. Veciana commented to Fonzi that he had never spoken of this cousin to "Bishop" and also, at that time, "Bishop" was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and even went directly from the Mexican capital to some contacts in Dallas.

In fact Veciana was the cousin of the wife of the then Cuban consul in Mexico City, Guillermo Ruiz, and in the days following the assassination of Kennedy, that woman was the victim of a recruitment attempt in the same city, with the clear proposition that, once in the United States, she would testify as to Oswald?s "complicity" with the Cuban secret services.

Questioned by Fonzi as to the existence of renewed contacts with "Bishop" after the Dallas homicide, Veciana answered that there had been, particularly in 1971, when he received an order to leave for Bolivia and work in the U.S. embassy in that country, where he would appear as an official for the Agency for International Development (USAID) and should wait for a visit from a known person. Fonzi checked the USAID archives in Washington and found an application form to enter the USAID in the name of Antonio Veciana, handwritten in letters distinct from those of Veciana and unsigned.

The "known person" who contacted him in Bolivia was "Bishop," at that time located in the U.S. embassy in Chile. "Bishop" immediately incorporated him into a team plotting an attempt on the life of President Fidel Castro, who was to visit the South American country.

Fonzi told us that he interviewed Antonio Veciana again, but this time accompanied by a specialist with the aim of composing a photofit of "Maurice Bishop" so as to determine his real identity.

Veciana gave a detailed description and the photofit was made. Fonzi spent weeks trying to identify the character, and one Sunday, suddenly received a call at home from a Republican senator for Pennsylvania for whom he was working at the time, and whom he had consulted on the identity of the man in the drawing.

The senator assured him that the he was absolutely sure that the man using the pseudonym of Maurice Bishop was none other than David Atlee Phillips. He was a veteran CIA officer who was in Havana on a working visit in 1958 as a specialist in psychological warfare, participated in the creation of Operation 40 and later, as part of the same, organized the Radio Swann transmitter. With time, Phillips would become head of the Western Hemisphere Division of the Agency.

However, at the end of 1993, in the documentary Case Closed, the former chief of Cuban Security, Divisional General (ret) Fabián Escalante, revealed a secret report from one of his agents, which spoke of a meeting between Antonio Veciana and David Phillips in a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the early 70s.

"Veciana told me," said the Cuban agent, "that he was a CIA agent and it was the CIA that assassinated Kennedy and that senior CIA officials including David Phillips, the official attending to him, were behind it all. Veciana never wanted to give me any details of that affirmation, but recently, I have been able to confirm it, because once when I was in a hotel with Veciana, I heard a conversation that he had with his officer, David Phillips, in which Veciana swore that he would never talk about what happened in Dallas in 1963."

General Escalante guarantees that the source has direct access to Veciana, and was in his total confidence:

"I believe," Escalante affirmed, "that that is very important information because I have to say that, in 1973, when Antonio Veciana was liquidated by the CIA; in other words, when the CIA took him off their books, he received a compensation payment of $300,000."

But there is more. According to Cuban State Security investigations disclosed by General Escalante in the abovementioned documentary, various witnesses quoted by the Warren Commission described two Cubans, one of them black, leaving the Daley Plaza Book Deposit in Dallas, a few minutes after the assassination was effected. In parallel, through secret information and public testimony (the statement by Marita Lorenz, ex-CIA agent to a congressional committee), Cuban Security knew that two days before the assassination various Cubans were in Dallas with weapons and telescopic sights, including Eladio del Valle and Herminio Díaz, two paid killers and expert sharpshooters linked to the Mafia and Batista politics. The physical characteristics of Del Valle and Herminio Díaz matched the descriptions that various witnesses gave to the Warren Commission of the two Cubans seen leaving the building seconds after the president had been assassinated.

The really curious fact is the final fate of both of them: Eladio del Valle was brutally murdered in Miami when Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney initiated his investigation into the Kennedy assassination; Del Valle was chopped into pieces with a machete. Even more interesting was the end of Herminio Díaz, who died near the Havana coast in 1965, when he collided with a patrol boat while trying to infiltrate the island with the mission of assassinating Osvaldo Dortícos and submachine gunning the Riviera Hotel

In order to fulfill the mission on which he was sent, Díaz had to infiltrate the island right in the capital via Monte Barreto in Miramar (where a number of hotels are currently going up) at a time when, because of an incident at the Guantánamo naval base, the Cuban army was on combat alert, and aerial and coastal vigilance was been reinforced to the maximum. In the eyes of experts, and the Cuban Security, the operation was a veritable suicide mission.

The financial organizer and planner of such "a strange mission" was none other than Jorge Mas Canosa.

But the history of the CIA?s links with its Cuban agents and the Kennedy assassination has not only been explored by Fonzi. Many other authors and investigators, and even the film studios that gave origin to the U.S. movies Executive Action and JFK, have covered the subject.

In an article published in The Realist magazine, the investigator Paul Kangas affirms:

"Among other members of the CIA recruited by George Bush for the (Bay of Pigs) invasion) were Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero. On the day that JFK was assassinated, Hunt and some of the subsequent Watergate team were photographed in Dallas, as well as a group of Cubans, one of them with an opened umbrella as a signal, alongside the president?s limousine, right where Kennedy was shot? Hunt and Sturgis fired on JFK from a grassy knoll. They were photographed and seen by 15 witnesses."

On May 7, 1990, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Frank Sturgis acknowledged:

"The reason why we robbed in Watergate was because (Richard) Nixon was interested in stopping the news leaks related to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

Another of Bush?s recruits for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rafael Quintero, who was also part of this underworld of organizations and conspiracies against Cuba, stated:

"If I was to tell what I know about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the greatest scandal that has ever rocked to nation."

Up to here are certain details of one of the existing theories on the above-mentioned event but, will the whole truth come out some day? Will Antonio Veciana, former member of the "New Orleans group," decide to reveal his "life insurance" or Rafael Quintero, to tell what he knows and thus, "rock the nation?"