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.

"But," the anti-Castro crusader added cryptically, "he knows."

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, Fonzi believes, may have had something to do with the fact that he would not rat on his old benefactor. In Fonzi's opinion, it was the only lie Veciana ever told him.

Later Fonzi put the question to Veciana in a more comfortably roundabout way.

"Would you have told me if I had found Maurice Bishop?" he asked. "Well, you know," said Veciana with a smile, "I would like to talk with him first."

Russell interviewed a retired Army Colonel named, coincidentally, Bill Bishop who claimed to be a CIA-employed hit man (in his talk with Russell, Bill Bishop took credit for pulling the trigger on Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo). Bill Bishop said that he worked for the CIA's Mexico station with Philips and that he and Philips ran Veciana together. He later produced a tape recording of a phone call between Veciana and himself in the mid 1980s. The two clearly know each other.