Mary's Mosaic (58 page)

Even more revealing was Burleigh’s interview with CIA wife Joanne (“Joan”) Bross. Her husband, John, had been a longtime CIA covert action specialist, coming out of the OS, another of Allen Dulles’s “dream boys.” With a Harvard blue-blooded pedigree, John Bross eventually rose to become deputy director of the Agency in 1963, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1971. The Brosses were close to all the upper-level CIA honchos, including the Angletons and the Meyers. Joan Bross and Mary were close enough that Mary, who dreaded CIA social functions and parties, would call Joan for information. “She always asked me how many people were going to be there,” recalled Joan. “She was thinking about serious things and hated small talk, I think. She was asking big questions such as, ‘Why are we here?’” Joan Bross also indicated that Jim Angleton had boasted to her that he had bugged not only Mary Meyer’s telephone, but her bedroom as well. How long this had been going on, or when it had started, was never revealed, perhaps never known. According to Bross, the wiretaps could have begun as early as 1961 when Kennedy first took office, implying that Angleton may have known of Kennedy’s interest in Mary for some time.
⁷⁶
Without question, Angleton, and every other high-level CIA official, had been aware of Mary’s undisguised contempt for the Agency. From the very beginning of Cord’s CIA tenure, she had increasingly made no secret of her loathing of Allen Dulles; after her divorce, she would have been regarded as even more dangerous.

That spymaster Jim Angleton had the means to accomplish whatever he wanted was never in question. “Angleton ran everything, controlled everything in the CIA,” said Joe Shimon, who served in the White House officially as a “Washington Police Inspector,” but revealed to his daughter he was also working undercover for the CIA, and was their principal liaison to Mafia boss Johnny Roselli.
⁷⁷
If Mary was using her telephone to discuss any of her suspicions or research into Jack’s downfall, as well as what she had come to discover and was recording in her diary, Jim Angleton knew about it.

According to Leo Damore, Angleton’s “Mary spying” escalated into a fullblown surveillance operation at the time the Warren Report was released in late September 1964. She had bought the paperback version, said Damore, and read it carefully, becoming further enraged at the cover-up taking place. According to Damore, her copy had notes in the margins, with a great many page corners turned over for future reference.
⁷⁸

S
omeone else—a man who never knew Leo Damore or his research—independently came to a nearly identical conclusion just before Christmas of
1992: former CIA contract operative Robert D. Morrow, whose 1992 book
First Hand Knowledge
largely went unnoticed when it first appeared. Damore, in fact, never mentioned Morrow, nor was there any reference to him in Damore’s notes. Several well-regarded assassination researchers had already documented Morrow’s long-standing role as an undercover Agency employee in the cesspool of the CIA-funded anti-Castro Cuban community that was determined to destabilize Castro’s government. Morrow also claimed he became part of the plot to assassinate Kennedy, though some of Morrow’s claims have also been questioned, even discredited. Nonetheless, Morrow remained, until the time of his death, a widely cited source in the assassination controversy, often consulted as an authority on various CIA operations. One of the best books ever written about the Kennedy assassination, Dick Russell’s
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, relied on several of Morrow’s accounts, which were corroborated by other books, one of which was author Noel Twyman’s book
Bloody Treason
(1997).

In
First Hand Knowledge
, Robert Morrow provides a chilling account of an event that took place prior to Mary Meyer’s murder. Shortly after the Warren Report was released, Morrow claimed, he was urgently called to Washington by his CIA boss, Marshall Diggs, who told Morrow, “There is a very prominent lady here in Washington who knows too much about the Company [the CIA], its Cuban operations, and more specifically about the President’s assassination.” Diggs went on to say the woman’s talking might open up a lot of trouble for the CIA’s anti-Cuban counterfeit money operation, an effort that Morrow himself had been running, and which Bobby Kennedy had shut down before his brother’s assassination. Not understanding the significance of Diggs’s comment, Morrow reminded his boss that the Warren Commission hadn’t found out about the counterfeiting operation, and he therefore thought himself safe.

“I wish his brother thought that,” Diggs reportedly said.

“You mean RFK?”

“Yes, RFK,” exclaimed Diggs. “Now damn it, listen. As I said, there’s a certain lady in town who has an inside track to Langley, and most importantly, to Bobby. Fortunately, an intimate friend of mine is one of her best friends.” It was at that point Robert Morrow learned the identity of the woman that Diggs was referring to: Mary Meyer.
⁷⁹

Morrow’s counterfeit money operation had been run by an anti-Castro Cuban by the name of Mario Kohly, the son of the former Cuban ambassador to Spain under the Batista regime before Castro took power in 1959. At that time, Kohly came to the United States to set up an organization known as the Cuban Liberators. He was introduced to Marshall Diggs, who eventually
recruited Morrow in 1960 as a CIA contract agent. Shortly after his recruitment, Morrow met with high-level CIA covert operative Tracy Barnes, who asked Morrow to become Mario Kohly’s CIA contact. According to one account, if the Bay of Pigs operation had been successful, the CIA was going to replace Fidel Castro as the president of Cuba with Mario Kohly.

“To get to the point,” Diggs told Morrow in 1964, “[Mary] Meyer claimed to my friend that she positively knew that [CIA] Agency-affiliated Cuban exiles and the Mafia were responsible for killing John Kennedy. Knowing of my association with [Mario] Kohly, my friend immediately called me.” Diggs urged Morrow to contact Kohly and tell him what was happening.

“So, what do I tell Kohly?” Morrow asked Diggs.

“Tell him what I told you—that as soon as the Meyer woman has the whole story, Robert Kennedy is going to be told that CIA-affiliated Cuban exiles and the Mafia killed his brother. Tell him, for God’s sake, to make sure he has us covered, or Miami and New Orleans will be down the drain, and maybe us with them.” Readers will recall, however, that Bobby Kennedy had already suspected the involvement of a CIA anti-Castro element in his brother’s demise, but he had shared that observation with just a few of his closest, trusted advisers and with members of his family.
⁸⁰

“My God, Marshall, you’re serious?” Morrow exclaimed to Diggs, realizing that his old boss was intimating that Mary Meyer should be eliminated immediately.

“Believe it. Even Tracy [Barnes] is concerned. Even though he could sanction it, he wouldn’t dare put a hit on her [Mary Meyer]. At least not now.”

Several days later, Robert Morrow met with Mario Kohly in New York and, as Diggs had instructed, relayed to Kohly the emerging problem of Mary Meyer’s knowledge.

“Just tell Diggs I’ll take care of the matter,” said Kohly to Morrow.
⁸¹

A week later, Mary Meyer was dead. Robert Morrow immediately came to suspect his meeting with Kohly had triggered Mary Meyer’s death, and that Mario Kohly had set it all up. The entire incident sent Morrow into despair.

While author Nina Burleigh chose to dismiss Morrow’s account as “rife with holes”—never identifying what exactly those “holes” were
⁸²
—further inquiry suggests his account of Mary Meyer’s death may well have been reliable. Author John Williams, professor emeritus of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin, befriended Robert Morrow in 1993, and remained close to him right up until his death in 1998. Since 2009, he has been at work on a book about Morrow, based on the four years he spent with him.
⁸³

According to John Williams, in an interview for this book, he was with Morrow at his house when Nina Burleigh called to interview him for her
A Very Private Woman
. Williams recalled his impressions of the conversation. He didn’t think Morrow and Burleigh hit it off particularly well, largely because Morrow was still protective of what he knew, and “he found Burleigh’s attitude devious.”
⁸⁴
Morrow had already shared with Williams his distress over Mary Meyer’s death. His visit with Mario Kohly right before Mary’s death had become the catalyst for her murder. “Bob was feeling deep shame around having told Kohly what he did about Mary Meyer,” said Williams in 2004. At one point, Williams told Morrow’s wife, Jeanne, that he thought Bob was more upset over Mary Meyer’s death than he was with the entire conspiracy to assassinate the president; his wife concurred.
⁸⁵

“Few people understand the kind of pressure Morrow felt during the Warren Commission,” Williams maintained. “He told me he thought about committing suicide on more than one occasion. If the Warren Commission ever got beyond Oswald, it would only be a short time before Morrow himself would be implicated, even though he wasn’t in Dallas that day. But what really impressed me was the intensity of guilt he was feeling about Mary Meyer’s death.”

John Williams had spent four years interviewing Morrow, combing everything Morrow had written and researched. The two talked intimately about all of Morrow’s undercover assignments. Morrow was not only a CIA contract agent, but for more than two years he had also been the right-hand man of Tracy Barnes, one of the CIA’s most senior covert action specialists. They had started working together early in 1961, right after Marshall Diggs had recruited Morrow into the Agency.

“After Dallas, Bob wanted to know what had exactly happened,” said Williams. “He got a lot of information from Tracy Barnes, and others in the Agency, but couldn’t get beyond Tracy to see who was involved in Mary Meyer’s murder, and why it had occurred. For years, Morrow had been riddled with guilt over what he told Kohly and the fact that Mario Kohly had said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’”
⁸⁶
Whether it was his guilt or just an obsessive need to know, Morrow continued to investigate Mary Meyer’s death. According to Williams, he “was constantly sifting through volumes of information.”

Shortly before his death, Bob Morrow’s ongoing research, as well as what Williams called “Morrow’s wonderful, intuitive sense” had changed his (Morrow’s) mind about who had murdered Mary Meyer. “Toward the end,” said Williams, “Bob told me more and more, ‘I don’t think Kohly did it, I think Angleton did it.’”
⁸⁷

2
    When first developed by Kodak in Dallas the day of the assassination, the film was still in its unslit, 16-mm wide “double 8” home movie film format, as received from the factory and as loaded into the camera. After three contact prints (copies) were struck at another lab in Dallas, the Kodak lab then slit (or split) the original and all three copies, as was normal practice, and joined the two halves of each of them together, thereby marrying the A and B sides, with a splice so that each film could then be played on a home 8-mm projector.

3
    According to Dino Brugioni, the term ‘white glove’ denoted NPIC’s highest sensitivity level used while working on all original film.

4
    The 16-mm Zapruder film delivered to Homer McMahon by “Bill Smith” was an
unslit
double 8 home movie which McMahon believed to be the original film. He vividly and independently recalled during his first (telephonic) ARRB interview that this 16-mm wide film (from which he made enlargements of individual frames for briefing boards) contained
opposing 8-mm wide image strips going in opposite directions
, the precise characteristics of an original film right out of the camera before the A and B sides had been slit to 8-mm width and spliced together. That is, what had been a slit, 8-mm wide original film on Saturday night (November 23) when it had been delivered to Dino Brugioni, had been magically transformed back into an
unslit, 16-mm wide
double 8 “original” film 24 hours later, when it was delivered to Homer McMahon. The clear implication here is that the courier from the Hawkeye facility delivered to McMahon an altered film, masquerading as a camera original. Since the film had been altered, it had to be handled by a different group of NPIC employees; therefore at the second NPIC event on Sunday night (November 24), Dino Brugioni, who was the NPIC duty officer in charge that weekend, and his crew were never notified of this event. Instead, Homer McMahon and his assistant Ben Hunter were brought in to handle the altered film, and help create a second set of (sanitized) briefing boards.

5
    A retired Veterans Administration doctor recently estimated that the number of Vietnam Veteran suicides was 200,000. The reason the official suicide statistics were so much lower was that in many cases the suicides were documented as accidents, primarily single-car drunk driving accidents and self-inflicted gunshot wounds that were not accompanied by a suicide note or statement. According to this doctor, the underreporting of suicides was primarily an act of kindness to the surviving relatives.