A “chilling” insider exposé from a CIA-backed leader of the anti-Castro movement in Havana, written with a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (Mark Crispin Miller, author of Cruel and Unusual).
Antonio Veciana fought on the front lines of the CIA’s decades-long secret war to destroy Fidel Castro. The 1960s and 1970s was a time of swirling intrigue, involving US spies with license to kill, Mafia hit men, and ruthless Cuban exiles. The leaders in the crosshairs of all this dark plotting: Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara—and President John F. Kennedy.
Veciana transformed himself from an asthmatic banker to a bomb-making mastermind, who headed terrorist attacks in Havana and assassination attempts against Castro, while building one of the era’s most feared paramilitary groups—all under the direction of the CIA.
In the end, Veciana became a threat—not just to Castro, but also to his CIA handler. Veciana was the man who knew too much. Suddenly he found himself a target—framed and sent to prison, and later shot in the head and left to die on a Miami street. When he was called before a Congressional committee investigating the Kennedy assassination, Veciana held back, fearful of the consequences. He didn’t reveal the identity of the CIA officer who directed him—the same agent Veciana observed meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas just weeks before the killing of JFK.
In Trained to Kill, Veciana tells all, detailing his role in the intricate game of thrones that aimed to topple world leaders and change the course of history.
