Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. This date is seared into the mind of every conspiracy theorist around the world; the day when Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly squeezed the trigger and assassinated American president John F. Kennedy. For more than 50 years, the disgruntled and the suspicious have questioned the narrative presented by the Warren commission, which determined that Oswald was the lone gunman, and that his killer, Jack Ruby, also acted independently. Incumbent Republican president Donald Trump has now announced his intention to release classified government documents regarding the assassination; documents which could confirm the allegations made by an elderly Cuban man who claims he knows the truth.

Former CIA recruit and anti-Castro insurgent Antonio Veciana has alleged that Kennedy's death was a hit ordered by military officials and intelligence agents at the highest echelons of power. In 1959, CIA agent David Atlee Phillips (also known as Maurice Bishop) recruited him to assassinate Castro personally, and in the 60s Veciana was the founder of CIA-backed Alpha 66, a guerrilla movement which aimed to depose the communist regime in Cuba. Thus, Veciana was privy to the agency's most clandestine operations in Latin America.

Now 88 years old, Veciana claims that he witnessed a rendezvous between the top CIA operative and Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggests that Oswald was recruited to carry out the killing on the agency's behalf. "Maurice Bishop" apparently met Oswald and Veciana in Dallas in August/September 1963, and it was here that the assassination was apparently arranged. It would be easy to dismiss Veciana's claims were it not for the fact that there are other pieces of evidence that corroborate his statement.

For example, in 2014 and 2015, a man named Wynne Johnson, who was 15 years old in 1963, uploaded three videos to YouTube alleging that he and a girlfriend witnessed the meeting between Veciana, Bishop and Oswald at the Southland Centre in Dallas. Johnson's account of the meeting matches Veciana's very neatly indeed. Furthermore, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which dedicated itself to a thorough investigation of the Kennedy assassination, forced Veciana to testify that he had indeed witnessed a meeting between Bishop and Oswald.

In a 1979 report, the HSCA determined that there was a probable conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy partially based on acoustic analysis of Dictabelt recordings of a motorcycle police officer's radio microphone at the scene of the incident. Furthermore, an investigation carried out by Gaeton Fonzi, one of the HSCA's congressional investigators, determined that Maurice Bishop was indeed David Atlee Philips after arranging a meeting between him and Veciana.

Lastly, in Miami, in 1979 Veciana was shot by unknown gunmen in the head in a drive-by shooting, not long after the HSCA published their report which contradicted the Warren commission. Were these pro-Castro operatives? Or was the CIA tying up loose ends?

But why would the CIA have employed Oswald to shoot Kennedy? Veciana believes that hardliners within the military-industrial complex thought that Kennedy was too soft. His apathetic support of the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs Invasion, refusal to attack Cuba directly during the Missile Crisis, and his diplomatic relationship with USSR First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev convinced them that Kennedy had to be removed from power by use of lethal force.

Five million pages worth of related intelligence regarding the incident have already been publicly released, and yet none of these have satiated the appetites of conspiracy theorists, who remain convinced of foul play. Veciana's testimony certainly is detailed, and if anyone would have insider knowledge of the dark and shady side of American espionage, it would be him. Trump's release of declassified documents may expose him as a whistleblower, or as a fraud. We will simply have to wait and see.