Mary's Mosaic (59 page)

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How It Went Down: The Anatomy of a CIA Assassination – Part I

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.

—Abraham Lincoln

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.

He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

W
ITH NEW ENGLAND
blanketed by a winter blizzard in early 2004, I found myself stranded in Santa Monica, California, when my return flight to Boston was canceled. Rescheduling at a local travel agency, I ran into Hollywood actor Peter Graves. Graves, readers may recall, was one of the stars of the 1966 television series
Mission Impossible
. The show was a fictionalized chronicle of an ultrasecret team of American government agents known as the Impossible Missions Force. Peter Graves played the part of Jim Phelps, the team leader who began each episode selecting a cadre of skilled contract agents to accomplish the assigned clandestine mission. Each week a new episode followed the exploits of the elite Impossible Missions Force as it employed the latest technological gadgets and state-of-the-art disguises in an effort to
sabotage unfriendly governments, dictators, crime syndicates—any enemy of American hegemony. The organization that masterminded these covert operations was never revealed, yet a little imagination led to the doorstep of the CIA. So successful was
Mission Impossible
, it has currently (as of 2011) spawned four blockbuster Hollywood action films starring Tom Cruise.

As Peter Graves and I waited in line, I introduced myself, then started regaling him with how I had watched the show with my father, who had been instantly enamored, never wanting to miss an episode. Mentioning my father’s CIA career, and how he’d been such a fan of Graves’s character, Jim Phelps, I shared with him the memory of one particularly exciting episode, filled with intricate disguises, duplicity, and intrigue. At the end of the episode, my father had abruptly chortled, intriguingly smiling, finally blurting out, “We do it better.”

“I’m not at all surprised,” Peter Graves shot back. “We had several ex-CIA people who worked with the writers for the show. We could never have thought a lot of that stuff up on our own.”

The serendipity of this encounter eluded me for months. For years during my research, the “Rubik’s Cube” of the murder of Mary Meyer had remained impenetrable—until a mysterious linchpin was uncovered and further corroborated. It was only then that I began to understand the ingenious design that had been employed—one that created the illusion of something very different from what had actually occurred.

T
hroughout the three years Leo Damore spent interviewing attorney Dovey Roundtree, the two were unequivocally convinced that Ray Crump Jr. could never have murdered Mary Pinchot Meyer. The seasoned defense attorney, imbued with an instinctive, gut-level feeling for who people really were—saints and murderers alike—never forgot her impressions upon first meeting Crump. “He was,” Roundtree said in her 2009 autobiography, “incapable of clear communication, incapable of complex thought, incapable of grasping the full weight of his predicament, incapable most of all, of a murder executed with the stealth and precision and forethought of Mary Meyer’s [murder].”
¹

Yet tow truck driver Henry Wiggins Jr. had, in fact, seen
somebody
standing over Mary’s corpse within fifteen seconds or so right after the second, final shot rang out. Whoever it was, he might well have been approximately “5 feet 8 inches” in height and weighed “185 pounds.” But it couldn’t have been Ray Crump. Indeed, the most intriguing aspect of Wiggins’s testimony during the
trial concerned the appearance, clothes, and demeanor of the man he saw standing over the body. Wiggins had described the color and style of the clothes in some detail—dark trousers, black shoes, a beige-colored, waist-length, zippered jacket, and a dark-plaid brimmed golf cap—all of which matched what Crump had been wearing that day. Prosecutor Alfred Hantman had explicitly asked Wiggins about the appearance of the man he saw standing over the body:

Nor had Wiggins mentioned seeing any stains—blood or anything else—on the zipped-up, light-colored beige jacket worn by the man who supposedly, just seconds before, had been engaged for more than one minute in a violent, bloody struggle during which the first gunshot, according to the coroner, had produced “a considerable amount of external bleeding.”
³
In fact, Wiggins never indicated anything about the man’s appearance being in any way disheveled, given the murder that had just taken place. Neither his demeanor nor his clothes had ever, according to Wiggins’s testimony, indicated the man had been in any struggle just seconds before. His golf cap was perfectly in place; his jacket, clean and zipped.

Also intriguing was the demeanor of the man. Upon looking up and seeing Wiggins staring at him, he was composed and unconcerned—certainly not at all agitated or anxious that Wiggins had spotted him.

The man then, Wiggins added, “turned around and
walked
[author’s emphasis] over straight away from the body, down over the hill [embankment].”
⁵
It was as if he
wanted
Wiggins to see him before he, according to Wiggins, calmly walked away over the embankment. His unflustered demeanor appeared to contrast sharply with that of a trembling, petrified Ray Crump, only because they weren’t the same person.

Nearly thirty years later, in 1992, Leo Damore interviewed Henry Wiggins. The government’s star witness still vividly remembered, Damore said, the man standing over the woman’s body. “He wasn’t afraid,” Wiggins recalled to Damore. “He didn’t appear to be worried that he’d been caught in the act. He looked straight at me.” Ray Crump’s acquittal, however, had come as a surprise to Wiggins. He confided to Damore that he felt “strung along” by the prosecution and had been “used” to present their case. After Wiggins testified, Hantman told him that he “hadn’t done well as a witness.” Wiggins told Damore, “I just told the truth as I saw it. That’s all. The police didn’t do a damn thing to support it.”
⁶

As the interview came to an end, Henry Wiggins proffered one last reflection about what had happened that day. “You know, sometimes I’ve had the feeling I was kinda set up there that morning to see what I saw.”
⁷
It was the kind of remark that wouldn’t have been lost on a crime sleuth—someone like Sherlock Holmes, or Leo Damore.

A
lmost from the moment Lieutenant William L. Mitchell, USA, had appeared at D.C Metropolitan Police headquarters the day after Mary’s murder, attorney Dovey Roundtree’s suspicions had been aroused. Mitchell told police he not only believed he had passed the murder victim as he ran eastward toward Key Bridge from Fletcher’s Boat House that day, but also that he was sure he had passed a “Negro male” following her. His description of the man and his clothes closely matched Wiggins’s.

In an effort to convict Crump, neither the police nor the prosecution team had bothered to investigate William L. Mitchell’s story. Carefully and methodically during the trial, Mitchell additionally described how he had passed “a couple walking together twice,” as well as another runner, also passed twice, someone that he thought “was a young student … about twenty, wearing
bermuda [
sic
] shorts.”
⁸
Mitchell said he first came upon the couple “on the road leading down to the canal [towpath] near Key Bridge.” Having run out to Fletcher’s Boat House, Mitchell claimed to have passed the couple a second time “half way between Key Bridge and Fletcher’s…. And this time I was running back from Fletcher’s and they were walking West at the time.” Mitchell said he twice passed the other runner “wearing bermuda shorts,” both times “close to Fletcher’s Boat House.” All of this took place, he testified, before he stopped at the westward end of the narrow footbridge to allow the westwardheaded Mary Meyer to cross.
⁹
Nobody, however, had corroborated Mitchell’s story, or ever testified to seeing Mitchell on the canal towpath the day Mary Meyer was murdered.

The reader will recall that police officer Roderick Sylvis, having raced to Fletcher’s Boat House to close off the exit within minutes after the murder, had himself encountered a white couple, “a young man and woman … in their thirties” walking westward about “fifty feet” from Fletcher’s Boat House approximately ten to fifteen minutes after he and his partner, Frank Bignotti, arrived. However, the officers, in a peculiar lapse of procedure, had neglected to get the couple’s names. Moreover, no matter in which direction the “bermuda shorts” runner was headed, at some point he, too, would have run into the murder scene, either before or after the police had arrived. But his identity, like that of the young white couple, would remain unknown. With such an intense, all-encompassing, citywide—even national—media blitz taking place, why hadn’t the “bermuda shorts” runner and the young white couple come forward to police, as William L. Mitchell had? Why hadn’t the police broadcast a request for them to do so?

T
hroughout their many hours of tape-recorded discussions that began in 1990, both Dovey Roundtree and Leo Damore independently reached the same inevitable conclusion: the personage of William L. Mitchell was highly suspicious. Roundtree had tried in vain to speak with Mitchell before the trial, she told Damore, but he would never return her phone calls. During several years of intense research, Leo Damore did what he did best: doggedly and exhaustively chased down any lead in order to get what he wanted. His signature tenacity took him on a journey that began with Mitchell’s listing in the
Department of Defense Telephone Directory
[DoD Directory] in the fall of 1964. Upon giving his account to police the day after the murder, William Mitchell said he was stationed at the Pentagon. His listing in the DoD Directory read: “Mitchell Wm L 2nd Lt USA DATCOM BE1035 Pnt.” It included a telephone
extension of 79918.
¹⁰
Mitchell also gave his address as 1500 Arlington Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia—a building known as the Virginian. According to the Arlington telephone directory in 1964, Mitchell lived in apartment 1022, and his telephone number was (703) 522-2872. His name would remain listed until 1968, and then vanish.

During Damore’s extensive search, William L. Mitchell was nowhere to be found. He had left no forwarding address. Neither the directories of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point nor of the Army itself produced any identification or record of any William Mitchell stationed at the Pentagon in 1964. No record was ever located. At the time of Mitchell’s trial appearance,
Washington Star
reporter Roberta Hornig identified Mitchell as “a Georgetown University mathematics teacher.”
¹¹
But no one at Georgetown University could ever locate any record of any “William L. Mitchell” having ever taught there. If Mitchell had been employed by Georgetown University, Damore reasoned, he might have been using a different name, or the record had been intentionally removed.

Sometime in 1992, Damore interviewed former CIA contract analyst David MacMichael, who still lived in the Washington area. The two soon became friends. “Leo wanted to know who this guy [William L. Mitchell] really was,” said MacMichael in 2004 during an interview for this book. He was sure he [Mitchell] had misrepresented himself as to his real identity.” On one occasion, MacMichael recalled, he and Damore drove out to Mitchell’s former address, the apartment building at 1500 Arlington Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia. There, MacMichael confirmed to Damore that the address had been a known “CIA safe house.”
¹²
That observation was further corroborated by another former CIA operative, Donald Deneselya, who added that during his employment at the Agency in the early 1960s, the CIA regularly used faculty positions at Georgetown University as covers for many of its covert operations personnel. That fact was further substantiated by former disaffected Agency veteran Victor Marchetti, whose books—
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
and
The Rope Dancer
—the CIA had tried to suppress from publication.
¹³
Any trail of Mitchell’s identity or subsequent whereabouts, however, appeared to have vaporized.