Mary's Mosaic (53 page)

Immediately after Dallas, there were a number of suspicions swirling around Washington that Mary, given her position, would unquestionably have accessed. According to some accounts, there were direct accusations leveled at the CIA almost immediately, and from within the Kennedy family itself. In his 2007 book
Brothers
, David Talbot recounts the fact that Bobby Kennedy, upon learning that his brother had been killed, placed a telephone call to a ranking official at CIA headquarters in Langley—reportedly less than an hour after the shooting—demanding to know, “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?”
¹⁵
Bobby’s question was confounding and staggering. What would have led the attorney general of the United States to suspect that the nation’s
premier intelligence apparatus—the Central Intelligence Agency—might be involved in assassinating the president?

Whether it was at the prompting of Bobby’s phone call, or on his own initiative, CIA director John McCone arrived at the Kennedy compound in McLean a short time later that afternoon. For three hours on that November 22 day, the two walked together on the grounds of the Hickory Hill estate. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Bobby directly confronted Mc-Cone about whether the Agency had assassinated his brother. Schlesinger claims that Bobby later reported: “You know, at the time I asked McCone … if they [the CIA] had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.”
¹⁶
That may have been Bobby’s feeling at the time, but it would very quickly change.

While Bobby’s fears and concerns may have initially been assuaged that afternoon, he knew that McCone, “a wealthy Republican businessman from California with no intelligence background, was not in control of his own agency.”
¹⁷
Bobby Kennedy’s own monitoring of the Agency right after the Bay of Pigs had acquainted him with many of the CIA’s operational plans and methods; in fact, Bobby himself knew more about many of these things than McCone. John McCone had replaced Allen Dulles, the infamous father of American intelligence whom Jack had fired. But the elite of the Agency—people like Dick Helms, Jim Angleton, Cord Meyer, Tracy Barnes, Bill Harvey, even Bob Crowley—still “carried the flag” for Allen Dulles behind the scenes. Their loyalty to Dulles kept McCone in the dark, ostensibly because his strict Catholic religious principles might have been offended by many of the CIA’s covert operations. “Bobby would realize that while he had taken his question to the very top of the CIA,” Talbot concluded, “he had asked the wrong man.”
¹⁸

There would be more whispers—above and beyond the O’Donnell-Powers eyewitness account—from those accompanying the presidential entourage in Dallas that day, some of whom Mary Meyer knew well. They were either too scared or too shocked, but several knew from contacts within the Secret Service that there had been more than one shooter, that there had, in fact, been a conspiracy to assassinate the president.
¹⁹

Four days after Dallas,
Life
magazine published its November 29 issue, which featured thirty-one selected poor-quality black-and-white frames from Abraham Zapruder’s famous home movie, the film that would become legendary for revealing to the world the “kill shot” that exploded President Kennedy’s head. Carefully scripted,
Life
’s presentation would reinforce the
manufactured narrative of disinformation that only three shots had been fired, all from
behind
the motorcade, and all from the Texas School Book Depository.
Life
’s publisher, C. D. Jackson, was a former CIA asset and a friend of Allen Dulles’s. It wasn’t an accident that the “carefully edited” photos showed up so quickly. Likely, Mary would have seen the issue of
Life
, though it’s not known whether it became part of her collection of “clippings of the JFK assassination” that she kept in “the bookcase in her bedroom” next to her diary. For the first time, however, the public became aware that something called “the Zapruder film” was in existence, though it would be barred from the public until 1975.

B
ut though many, including Mary, were suspicious, only a few people were directly aware that immediately following the events in Dallas, an elite group within the National Security apparatus were moving quickly to contain anything that might reveal a conspiracy. Nowhere was this chicanery more evident than what took place with Abraham Zapruder’s infamous 8-millimeter home movie during the weekend following the assassination. For years, controversy has surrounded the alleged chain of custody of the original Zapruder film, and the three copies that were processed later in the afternoon of November 22. What remained unknown until 2009—not just to Mary, but to the rest of us—was that the original (not a copy) 8-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder was, in fact, delivered to the CIA’s most secretive facility, the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington. The film was delivered by two Secret Service agents at approximately ten o’clock on Saturday evening, November 23, the day after the assassination.

CIA director John McCone had called NPIC director Arthur Lundahl several hours earlier and told him to prepare for the delivery of a film—not yet known publicly as “the Zapruder film”—that had captured the assassination. McCone told Lundahl he wanted a full briefing on the film’s contents early the following morning—Sunday, November 24. Lundahl immediately called his chief assistant, Dino Brugioni, to make preparations for the film’s Saturday evening arrival.

“I was the duty officer at NPIC that weekend,” Brugioni recalled in early 2009 in an interview for this book. “Lundahl called me and told me to assemble a crew and get into work. He told me it was going to involve pictures and that the Secret Service wanted support. I called Ralph Pearce, our best
photogrammatist, and then Bill Banfield. We were there when the film arrived. It was 10 or 11 [
P.M
.] in the evening.”
²⁰

In placing the Zapruder film in the hands of the NPIC, McCone was enlisting the help of the man who was arguably the world’s foremost photo analyst. Known as the father of modern imagery analysis and imagery intelligence, Arthur C. Lundahl had been recruited by the CIA in 1953 to head the agency’s Photographic Intelligence Division (PID); he would be designated the first director of NPIC when it was formally created in 1961. Lundahl, in his capacity as NPIC’s first director, expanded the center into a national, multidepartmental component of the intelligence community, hiring over a thousand employees drawn from the CIA and the Department of Defense. NPIC was, indeed, as one former employee referred to it, “Lundahl’s Palace.” Starting with President Eisenhower, Art Lundahl’s presidential briefings became legendary during an era when aircraft such as the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, and satellite imagery reconnaissance programs were made operational. A “Lundahl briefing” was considered the gold standard by which all other intelligence briefings to presidents were judged. Serving Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, all of whom had nothing but the highest praise for his knowledge and expertise, Art Lundahl retired in 1973, having received a personal letter and a silver memento of the Cuban Missile Crisis from President Kennedy, as well as the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II eventually named Lundahl a Knight of the British Empire.

Equally impressive was Art Lundahl’s chief assistant and “right-hand man,” Dino Brugioni, who later established himself, subsequent to his career at NPIC, as a highly acclaimed author in the field of photo intelligence and analysis (
Eyeball to Eyeball
,
Photo Fakery
, and recently (2010)
Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA and Cold War Aerial Espionage
). Prior to entering the intelligence world, Dino Brugioni had distinguished himself as part of a World War II bomber crew that flew sixty-six successful missions. Highly trained and thoroughly competent in all aspects of photographic imagery and analysis, Brugioni regularly accompanied his boss to the White House and all “seventh-floor” classified briefings at NPIC and CIA headquarters.

That Saturday, however, the day after the assassination, Dino Brugioni and his crew were caught off guard by what arrived late that evening: an already-developed 8-millimeter home movie film that was, according to Brugioni, the
original
film that Abraham Zapruder had taken of the Kennedy assassination the day before. The film had been developed the day before on Friday
afternoon in Dallas right after the assassination.
²
The world’s foremost photographic intelligence center, however, didn’t have an in-house, 8-millimeter film projector. Despite the late hour, crew member Bill Banfield called the manager of Fuller & d’Albert, a local photo supply store in downtown Washington at his home, and arranged to pick up a brand-new 8-millimeter projector that night. While Banfield was procuring the projector, Dino Brugioni and Ralph Pearce examined the film with a microstereoscope.

“The film arrived in a reel which was inside a box,” Brugioni recalled. “We went ‘white glove’
³
all the way. I’m sure it was the original. Everything pointed [that] we were working with the original. We viewed the film at least three or four times. We ran it first at the regular speed, then ran it at various different speeds. The Secret Service pointed out what they wanted.”

Brugioni and his crew weren’t prepared for what they were about to see. The assembled team in the NPIC briefing room gasped in horror. “What grabbed us all were his [JFK’s] brains flying through the air,” Dino told me solemnly. “We counted all the frames in the briefing room and told the two Secret Service agents what we could do, and what we couldn’t.”
²¹
One of the major concerns Brugioni remembered was whether the president had been hit by gunfire while he passed the Stemmons Freeway sign, which blocked the view in the film. “Do you remember seeing the motorcade slowing down or stopping before the fatal head shot?” I asked him. “How many different shots, and from what directions, do you remember discussing or analyzing?” Brugioni said he didn’t remember.

Under the vigilant eyes of the two Secret Service agents, the NPIC crew worked through the night, printing various frames on two identical sets of briefing boards. When Director Lundahl arrived at NPIC early next morning, he reviewed the notes that Brugioni had prepared, and took the two sets of identical briefing boards to his meeting with Director John McCone at CIA headquarters in Langley. The Secret Service also left early the next morning,
taking with them the film, and a list of all the people who had been present for the night’s work, which included “at least seven support staff” in addition to Dino Brugioni, Ralph Pearce, and Bill Banfield.

Sometime between November 24 and December 9, McCone told Bobby Kennedy that he thought “there were two people involved in the shooting [of President Kennedy],” despite the FBI’s and the media’s attempt to maintain Lee Harvey Oswald as the only assassin. McCone’s remark to Bobby Kennedy likely had been engendered by Lundahl’s NPIC early morning briefing on Sunday, November 24. McCone’s disclosure was subsequently noted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in his diary on December 9, after he had spent the previous evening with Bobby Kennedy.
²²

In the days ahead, Bobby Kennedy turned to a close group of trusted friends and advisers as he attempted to make sense of what had happened in Dallas. If the head of the CIA had privately shared with him the fact that there were at least two shooters (by definition, a conspiracy), that detail was likely shared by Bobby with people in his inner circle, as it had been with Arthur Schlesinger. Certainly, it underscored an undeniable reality: the director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, had let it slip that there had, in fact, been, a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. How close Mary Meyer was to anyone in Bobby’s entourage wasn’t definitively known, but she was very likely acquainted with some of them. Given her relationship with Jack, she had to have known some of what was being revealed.

Meanwhile, unknown to anyone—even to Dino Brugioni, who was the weekend duty officer at NPIC—on Sunday night, November 24, hours after Brugioni and his crew had concluded their work for Lundahl’s briefing Sunday morning, a second, ultra-classified Zapruder film event took place at NPIC. That Sunday night, a lone Secret Service agent showed up at the NPIC with a
different
Zapruder film. Identifying himself as “Bill Smith,” he was met by the NPIC’s deputy director, Captain Pierre Sands, USN. Sands escorted “Smith” into a room with two NPIC employees: Morgan Bennett (“Ben”) Hunter and Homer McMahon. McMahon years later said that the session that night was so sensitive and classified, even his own supervisor was not informed of the event. The two employees—Hunter and McMahon—were sworn to secrecy. “There was no record of this event,” McMahon stated in a lengthy interview to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in July 1997. “There was no codename attached to this operation. I was sworn to secrecy and it could not be divulged.”
²³

Secret Service agent “Bill Smith” told Homer McMahon that he had just come from Rochester, New York, where the 16-millimeter film now in his possession had been “processed” earlier that day at the CIA’s “Hawkeye” facility (sometimes referred to as “Hawkeyeworks”).
⁴
Classified and designated top secret, known for its state-of-the-art “clean facility,” the CIA Hawkeye facility in Rochester required all technicians to wear full body suits of special fabric to avoid contamination.