Mary's Mosaic (64 page)

My pick is James Jesus Angleton for who he was, who he knew, and because [Lee Harvey] Oswald was his creature from cradle to grave.

—Professor John M. Newman
Historian and author of
Oswald and the CIA
¹

C
OMFORTED BY HIS
CIA colleague Richard Helms and his close friend Jim Angleton, Cord Meyer had wept openly at Mary’s funeral. His former wife, the love of his life and the mother of his three children, had again departed,
this time forever. The finality had to have evoked a myriad of emotions for Cord. Sixteen years later, in his book
Facing Reality
, Cord starkly concluded the following: “I was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by a single individual and that she had been killed in her struggle to escape.” Cord then proceeded to insist that in spite of unspecified “journalistic speculation that Mary’s death was the result of some complicated Communist plot,” he was absolutely sure there “was no truth whatever to these stories” and “never suspected the tragedy of having any other explanation than the one the metropolitan police reached after careful investigation of all the evidence.”
²

Cord’s defense of the official story was nothing less than a ploy—a deflection away from the stubborn facts that have forever haunted this case and remained unexplained until now. It was no coincidence he was out of town on the day of Mary’s murder. His absence had to have been part of the operation, designed to create an appearance of innocence for Cord. Removing him physically from Washington had diverted any suspicion of his involvement. If Mary confronted Cord with her accusations of CIA involvement in Kennedy’s assassination after she had read through the Warren Report—as Leo Damore maintained from having read her diary—Cord’s complicity would have been inevitable. How could one of the highest-ranking CIA covert operatives
not
know about such an undertaking? Indeed, E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession—that Cord was part of the ‘mastermind’ behind Dallas—might have contained some kernel of truth. Yet there would never be proof, at best only scant evidence—except possibly for the contents of Mary’s diary.

Cord Meyer died in the spring of 2001. To my knowledge, after the release of his book
Facing Reality
in 1980, he never said anything further publicly regarding the death of his former wife. Two years later, however, Cord’s former research assistant and Meyer family friend Carol Delaney was quoted in C. David Heymann’s book
The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club
as saying the following: “Mr. Meyer didn’t for a minute think that Ray Crump had murdered his wife or that it had been an attempted rape. But being an Agency man, he couldn’t very well accuse the CIA of the crime, although the murder had all the markings of an in-house rubout.”
³
The statement was breathtaking, particularly coming from someone so close to Cord. The only question was, had Ms. Delaney actually said it?

Provocative as it was, the statement was never confirmed by Carol Delaney on the record. Yet in the last seven years, I’ve seen nothing indicating that she ever repudiated it. When I first questioned Ms. Delaney in 2004, she wouldn’t
give me an answer. Instead, she immediately called Cord’s widow, Starke Meyer, informing her of the book project I was undertaking. Starke then took it upon herself to “sound the alarm,” calling Mary Meyer’s sons, Quentin and Mark, as well as other members of the Pinchot-Meyer clan, even calling my mother, not only to complain (“What does he think he’s doing?”), but to urge everyone to remain silent. The attempted stonewalling replicated author Nina Burleigh’s experience when she first began her own research for
A Very Private Woman
in the mid-1990s. The CIA’s community of former operatives, their wives and families, secretaries and research assistants, adhered to a Mafia-like code of silence. To challenge their version of events was to call into question the entire edifice of the secretive house of cards within which they lived.

Six years after my first attempt to interview Ms. Delaney, I called her again in 2010, asking her a second time to confirm or deny her account of Cord Meyer’s statements, attributed in Heymann’s book. Hostile, Ms. Delaney wanted to know, “Are you a friend of the Meyer family?” “Yes,” I said, “I’ve known the family for more than fifty-five years.” But she still wouldn’t answer the question. “Why don’t you send me an email, and I’ll think about it,” she finally said, then abruptly hung up. Her statement was just code for cowardice; she never said anything further, at least not to me.
⁴

The other Cord Meyer tidbit in Heymann’s undocumented book was what the author alleged Cord himself had said to him shortly before his death. Heymann claims he managed to sneak into Cord’s nursing home to ask him about Mary’s murder—specifically, who Cord thought had committed “such a heinous crime”? According to Heymann, Cord “hissed … the same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”
⁵
However titillating the statement, Heymann’s credibility has been seriously called into question over the years.
⁶
Visiting his New York residence, I gently inquired whether he had taped his interview with Cord. He hadn’t.
⁷
When I finally confronted him, he became defensive and insulting. Several days later he left me a voice mail, saying, “I’m beginning to think you’re working for the CIA …”
⁸

I
t is perhaps inevitable, given Jim Angleton’s ubiquitous CIA presence, that my journey should reach some finality with him. So overpowering was his influence that after his unceremonious dismissal by CIA director William Colby in 1974, two of Angleton’s closest comrades conspired to preserve his reputation and reign by gathering up his files and cultivating sympathetic writers to rehabilitate his tattered legacy. In so doing, they set in motion a complex chain of events that shone the bright light in unexpected ways upon some of
the most significant questions surrounding Mary Meyer’s murder. That chain of events bears the most careful scrutiny, not because it is conclusive in and of itself, but because, in the aggregate, and viewed in context of other statements and documented facts, it moves us ever closer to the horrifying truth.

The chief architect of the mission to burnish Angleton’s controversial career was one of the Agency’s most formidable covert action specialists, Robert T. Crowley. A Chicago-born West Pointer who’d served in Army intelligence during World War II in the Pacific, Crowley joined the Agency at its inception and rose quickly through the ranks despite the fact that he lacked the Ivy League pedigree of most of his associates. As assistant deputy director for operations, he was second in command in the clandestine services directorate until his retirement in the mid-1980s. Nicknamed “the Crow,” he was one of the tallest men to ever to work at the Agency, and his career was legendary. Crowley was the chief go-to guy in the CIA’s liaison with multinational corporations—the largest of which was International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT)—which the Agency often used as fronts for moving large amounts of money to fund international covert operations. Intimately involved with the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1973, Crowley had earned the highest regard from his colleagues.

In
Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA
(1992), author David Wise referred to Crowley as “an iconoclast, and a man of great wisdom with a gift for metaphor.”
⁹
Within the Agency, and particularly within covert operations and counterintelligence activities, mutual loyalty and trust among operatives were always the gold standard of conduct. In evaluating personnel for any covert operation, Crowley’s quintessential question, a reference to the intricate teamwork required in deep-sea diving, inevitably came down to this: “Would I want this guy on my air hose at two hundred feet?”
¹⁰

Two Crowley colleagues who most definitely wanted “the Crow” on their “air hose” were William R. Corson and the already well-known, mercurial James Jesus (“Jim”) Angleton, the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence chief. Bob Crowley and Bill Corson were “bosom buddies,” the closest of friends and colleagues, and together coauthored a book in 1985 entitled
The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power
. While Bill Corson was never officially titled in the Agency, his close ties to both Crowley and Angleton, as well as his many covert operations for U.S. intelligence, were well known. Corson was a brilliant strategist, an intellectual powerhouse in his own right, and a man who didn’t want to be ultimately tied to anybody or anything. On the verge of being promoted to
brigadier general in 1968, Corson had literally walked away in disgust from his Marine Corps career by doing the unthinkable: exposing in his book
The Betrayal
President Lyndon Johnson’s White House lunacy and the venality of America’s entire Vietnam War effort.
¹¹
As Cold War intelligence historian Fletcher Prouty once quipped to author Joseph Trento, “For Bill Corson, the CIA was support staff. He needed to know; they didn’t.”
¹²

“The Three Musketeers”—Corson, Crowley, and Angleton—thus formed a unique phalanx of “intelligence intelligentsia,” and while it might not have been exactly “all for one” or “one for all,” their commitment and loyalty to each other and, of course, the Agency were legendary, as was their alcohol consumption. When William Colby finally sacked Angleton in 1974, it was Corson and Crowley who devised a plan to secretly squirrel away Angleton’s most highly classified, top secret files out of Langley. The cache allegedly included Mary Meyer’s real diary.

Toward the end of their careers, the Three Musketeers appeared to have decided it was time for the world to know their true history, or at least some of it. It was Bill Corson who initially started to court newspaper reporter Joseph Trento in 1976.
⁶
Forcing Trento to jump through any number of hoops to prove his trust, Corson one day told him it was time he met Jim Angleton. “You’ve got to know him before he drinks and smokes himself to death,” announced Corson, who was far along the same path himself. A few days later, Trento met Angleton for the first time. Sometime after Bob Crowley’s CIA retirement, it would be Angleton who closed the circle and introduced Trento to Crowley. Once a lone pyramid protecting America’s most dastardly deeds, the Musketeers had chosen a scribe, or so it appeared. They were going to reveal to Joe Trento some of “the secret history” of the CIA.

Somewhat reluctantly, Bob Crowley went along with the plan, at least for a while. Crowley, it turns out, may not have trusted Trento in the end. After Angleton died in the spring of 1987, Corson and Crowley began volunteering to Trento some of Angleton’s most cherished secrets, files they had kept “in trust for their old friend.” The deal was that nothing could be published until 1997, ten years after Angleton’s death. When Bill Corson died in 2000, Joe Trento managed to come “into possession of all of his files, tapes, and writings.” When Bob Crowley passed away several months later that same year, “his extensive files—and those of James Angleton—were also turned over to me,” wrote Trento in the preface of his 2001 book,
The Secret History of the CIA.
¹³

But very possibly not everything was turned over. At least six years before his death and well before the onset of his final health crisis, Crowley had become a bit disenchanted with Trento. According to this account, Crowley had decided he wanted the truth to come out about the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination. Whether this had Angleton’s and Corson’s blessing wasn’t entirely known. For years, Corson had met regularly and held court with a group of his former students from the Naval Academy. The group enjoyed long lunch discussions together, coupled with a generous intake of alcohol. One favorite topic was the Kennedy assassination, and the flap that Oliver Stone’s film
JFK
had been creating since its release in 1991. J. Michael Kelly, a former student of Corson’s at Annapolis, gave two interviews for this book in which he stated definitively that Corson had told him in 1998 that he had in his possession, in his safe-deposit box,
the
critical Crowley document that outlined the CIA’s engineering of the Kennedy assassination “from soup to nuts.”
¹⁴

Michael Kelly clearly recalled he had asked Corson in 1998, “Bill, don’t you think Oliver Stone did a disservice to America by implicating the Armed Forces and the Joint Chiefs of Staff?” Corson was already into his second lunch martini. At that moment, Corson reached over, said Kelly, and slapped him on the arm, saying, “Michael, I’ll tell you, you’ve got my permission when I die to take my attorney, who is Plato Cacheris, go to my safe-deposit box with Plato—he’ll let you in there—and you’ll find out who
really
killed John Kennedy.”
¹⁵

Two other former students of Corson’s were aware of this exchange and vouched for it: Roger Charles, who had assisted me in the identification of William L. Mitchell, and who became the executor of Corson’s estate; and a senior FBI agent named Tom Kimmel, the grandson of four-star Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
¹⁶