Mary's Mosaic (65 page)

J. Michael Kelly never forgot what Corson had told him. Within two months after Corson’s death, Kelly contacted Corson’s executor, Roger Charles, whom he knew well from their days together at Annapolis. They discussed the matter and agreed the next step was to approach Corson’s attorney, Plato Cacheris, whose office was in the same building as Joseph Trento. Cacheris had been a well-known figure in Washington power circles for years, first defending Nixon attorney general John Mitchell of Watergate fame, then representing Fawn Hall, who worked with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra scandal. His clients included the infamous CIA spy Aldrich Ames, as well as the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, both of whom were able to avoid the death penalty, thanks
to Cacheris’s legal prowess. Of course, in exchange, both had to reveal everything they had given the Soviets, before Cacheris brokered the deal.

So Kelly got together with Cacheris over lunch at a restaurant called Morton’s on a Thursday. He told Cacheris what Corson had said to him, and that he had Corson’s permission to open his safe-deposit box, all of which was supported by Corson’s executor, Roger Charles. Cacheris seemed to play along with the request at the time, said Kelly, and was actually enthusiastic about it. He told Kelly he would get back to him on the Monday of the following week. But when Cacheris called, he abruptly stepped back, saying something to the effect that he didn’t have “written authorization” to allow Kelly to open Corson’s safe-deposit box. It would never happen. Kelly has since always suspected that after his lunch with Cacheris, the lawyer had contacted Joe Trento. No doubt Trento regarded whatever was in Corson’s safe-deposit box as a part of Corson’s papers that had been legally bequeathed to him. Thus Trento was able to secure the contents of Corson’s safe-deposit box. According to Kelly, Trento knew the contents were highly incriminating of the CIA.

Though Plato Cacheris would admit he knew Bill Corson, in an interview for this book he said he didn’t think he had ever “represented him.” He wouldn’t say for sure whether he remembered having lunch with J. Michael Kelly, but he affirmed unequivocally that he and Joe Trento never went into Bill Corson’s safe-deposit box. Despite writing a blurb for the back of Trento’s book
Secret History,
Cacheris said he only knew Trento “very superficially,” though he admitted they did work in the same building at one time.
¹⁷
However, Roger Charles, Corson’s executor, was adamant that “Plato was Bill’s attorney during the
The Betrayal
flap. It was definitely a good move on Bill’s part to use Plato, who beat the military brass and LBJ down when they were after Bill’s scalp.” Furthermore, Bill Corson’s son, Chris, was sure “he [Plato Cacheris] was dad’s attorney” during his parents’ divorce. Chris then conferred with his mother and asked her what she recalled about Plato Cacheris. “Plato Cacheris
was
dad’s attorney,” said Chris to Roger Charles after talking with his mother. “He settled the divorce in 1966 in Washington, D.C. and [it] was stated in court that he [Cacheris] was also dad’s retained attorney for matters above and beyond that.”
¹⁸

For whatever reason, it seems that Cacheris wanted to distance himself not only from Bill Corson
and
Joe Trento, but also from having facilitated Trento’s procurement of the contents of Corson’s safe-deposit box. The importance of this event will soon become clear.

I
n the end, it was not Joe Trento who precipitated Bob Crowley’s most critical revelations of Agency secrets, but a relatively obscure, unknown writer calling himself Gregory Douglas. “Douglas”—whose real name is Peter Stahl and whose email alias is sometimes “Walter Storch”—captured the attention of both Corson and Crowley in 1995, at which point the Crowley saga took a critical turn. It was Corson’s former student, senior FBI agent Tom Kimmel, who brought to his mentor’s attention Douglas’s recently published
Gestapo Chief: The 1948 Interrogation of Heinrich Müller
(volume 1, 1995). Gregory Douglas, it appeared, had a vast knowledge of Nazi Germany, including the Gestapo, an abbreviation of the German word for “Secret State Police,” of which Heinrich Müller had been director during World War II. In the first volume of
Gestapo Chief
, Douglas documented the fact that Heinrich Müller and a number of other high-level Nazi officials, scientists, and the like had all become covert CIA assets at the end of World War II. They were smuggled into the United States under new identities to join America’s Cold War against the Soviets. The undertaking was finally revealed as the CIA’s Operation Paperclip and has been well documented since, although there is still debate as to whether Heinrich Müller was part of it. Douglas claims that he met Müller in California and the two became instant friends, with Müller eventually giving Douglas some of his personal diaries.

For some reason, both Corson and Crowley were immediately smitten with the Douglas book; they believed the Douglas account was accurate, and they thought the author had been courageous for stepping forward to write such an account. In fact, they were so enamored that they contacted him and began a collegial relationship. Two years later, in 1997, Corson and Crowley, the two biggest intelligence titans of the Cold War, each contributed a short, highly favorable foreword to Douglas’s second volume of what would become a trilogy about Müller and his life in the United States. Crowley in particular, it seemed, gave Douglas an unqualified stamp of approval: “Where possible, each revelation has been challenged and examined using all available resources to include: individual military records, released US communication intercepts and captured documents. To date, the Müller documents have met every challenge.”
¹⁹

In early 1996, Bob Crowley and Gregory Douglas began an intense telephone relationship that lasted nearly three years.
²⁰
Often speaking with Douglas in substantial detail as frequently as twice a week, Crowley allegedly started to reveal intimate details about people and operations he had been involved with during his CIA career, including the Kennedy assassination.
Intrigued by what he was hearing, Douglas allegedly began, apparently unbeknownst to Crowley, tape-recording and transcribing many of the calls.

By the end of 1996 Crowley and Douglas, who had still not met face-to-face, finally scheduled a luncheon for Monday, December 9, 1996, at the University Club of Washington. Tom Kimmel and Bill Corson were also invited to the lunch. Crowley’s plan, according to Douglas, was that he and Douglas were first going to meet alone before noon. Crowley wanted to personally deliver to Douglas a collection of CIA documents relating to the Kennedy assassination, in particular a lengthy document that Crowley himself had written and typed, entitled “Operation Zipper.” This document, reprinted in Douglas’s 2002 book,
Regicide
, was Crowley’s “personal insurance policy, should someone start to point the finger at him,” said Gregory Douglas in 2007 in an interview for this book. “He would take down everyone if this should happen. He considered the Zipper document to be his most important paper.”
²¹
Douglas was also aware that Crowley had made a copy of the document for Bill Corson, and that Corson was keeping it in his safe-deposit box.

Unfortunately, the day before the University Club luncheon, Crowley was hospitalized with an acute case of pneumonia. Crowley’s wife Emily recalled, “Bob was so looking forward to meeting this guy, but he never did. He felt very bad about it.”
²²
Douglas showed up in Washington anyway and had lunch with Bill Corson and Tom Kimmel, a fact Kimmel subsequently confirmed.
²³

The Crowley-Douglas telephone relationship resumed in earnest shortly thereafter, and Douglas allegedly continued to record their conversations, transcribing each of them. But Douglas has never produced any of the actual recordings on which Crowley’s voice might be confirmed. This, among other things—including Douglas’s history of shady dealings and trouble with the law—has led to skepticism regarding the journalistic credibility of “Gregory Douglas,” now considered a pariah within the JFK assassination research community. But it turns out that Gregory Douglas’s material, which precisely matches the sworn testimony of principals in the diary caper, may in fact hold several “master keys.”

Throughout the mid- to late 1990s, Crowley’s evolving admiration of Douglas continued to baffle Tom Kimmel, the senior FBI man. “The guy [Gregory Douglas, a.k.a. Peter Stahl] was obviously enormously bright,” Kimmel recalled in 2007. “But I could never understand why Corson and Crowley embraced Stahl so unequivocally. I just couldn’t understand it because Corson and Crowley were introspective, very accomplished intelligence officers, especially Crowley—not one to go off half-cocked at all. They didn’t
raise any objections or doubts, and that was not the way they approached anything. I mean, these guys doubted everything and everybody, but not Stahl. I could never figure that out.”
²⁴

Pressured by his family in late 1997, Bob Crowley would again be admitted to the hospital for exploratory surgery for lung cancer. Again, as legend had it, fearing he wouldn’t come out alive, he packed up two footlockers of documents and sent it all by mail to Gregory Douglas before going to the hospital. The deal was that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. Crowley, unfortunately, came back from the hospital with severe dementia, remained mostly bedridden, and died in October 2000.

Shortly after receiving the cache of Crowley documents, Douglas mentioned the transaction to Tom Kimmel. Increasingly concerned by the national security implications, and knowing something of the enormity of Crowley’s involvement in CIA covert operations, Kimmel started pressuring Douglas to reveal what Crowley had given him. But Douglas wouldn’t break his agreement with Crowley.

“Crowley knew Stahl [Gregory Douglas] was crazy enough to publish whatever he gave him,” Kimmel revealed in an interview for this book. Did he, Kimmel, believe Crowley wanted the real story of the Kennedy assassination to be revealed? I asked

“That’s why he gave it all to Stahl as opposed to Trento or someone else,” replied Kimmel. At the time, so alarmed had Kimmel finally become, he ordered an FBI team to investigate the matter, even dispatching a female agent to Crowley’s house. “It was Bob’s relationship with him [Gregory Douglas] she was investigating,” recalled Crowley’s wife, Emily, in 2007. “The FBI lady was very down on him. I’m not sure why, but she was.”
²⁵

It’s not clear whether anyone has ever seen, or verified, the documents Crowley allegedly sent to Douglas, other than what Douglas included in his 2002 book
Regicide,
which highlighted Crowley’s Operation Zipper record. Nor has anyone ever been able to listen to any of the Crowley-Douglas conversations that Douglas allegedly recorded. When I asked Douglas to produce the tapes, he said he had destroyed them, but later contradicted himself. However, the transcriptions of these alleged calls were available. I reviewed many of them in detail, traveling to Chicago to meet with Douglas on several occasions. Some of the transcripts remain not only intriguing, but also fascinating in terms of certain pieces of information—including specific details about Mary and Cord Meyer that Douglas, in my opinion, could never have fabricated.

In January 1996, Douglas began asking Crowley for specifics about the Kennedy assassination. Point-blank, he asked Crowley: “Was Oswald a patsy?” Crowley’s answer was simple and complete: “Sure. He worked for us once in Japan at Atsugi and also for ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence]. Not high level, but he was a soldier after all.” Crowley then mentioned what a “first class bitch” Oswald’s wife, Marina, had been to deal with when she finally realized the impasse she was in. “No wonder she did what we told her,” he said.

The two men then chauvinistically ruminated about “the mystery of women,” with Crowley finally blurting out, “Most company [CIA] wives are a pack of nuts. Did I mention Cord’s wife?” Douglas vaguely remembered the name Cord Meyer from somewhere, but he wasn’t sure. He appeared to know nothing in 1996 about Mary Meyer.

Crowley then described Cord’s wife as a “very attractive woman but her sister [Tony] was even better. She married Bradlee who is one of the company’s [CIA’s] men. He’s on the
Post
now. Cord’s wife was what they call a free spirit, liked modern art, ran around naked in people’s gardens and so on. Pretty, but strange and unstable. She and Cord got along for a time but time changes everything. They do say that, don’t they? They broke up and Cord was so angry at being dumped, he hated her from then on. She took up with Kennedy. Did you know that?”

“No,” replied Douglas.

“Oh yes. After Mary—that was her name, Mary. You haven’t heard about her?”

“No,” Douglas said again.

“After Kennedy bought the farm,” Crowley continued, “ex-Mrs. Meyer was annoyed. She had become the steady girlfriend and he was very serious about her. Jackie was brittle, uptight and very greedy. Poor people usually are. Mary had money and far more class and she knew how to get along with Jack. Trouble was, she got along too well. She didn’t approve of the mass orgies and introduced him to pot and other things. Not a good idea. Increased chances for blackmail or some erratic public behavior. But after Dallas, she began to brood and then started to talk. Of course she had no proof but when people like that start to run their mouths, there can be real trouble.”

“What was the outcome?” asked Douglas.

“We terminated her, of course,” Crowley told him.