Mary's Mosaic (68 page)

U
p until the very end of 2011 (December 31st to be exact) when she died just shy of her ninety-first birthday, Anne Chamberlin, a former Vassar classmate and close friend of Mary Meyer’s, had remained the only person left who could have perhaps unraveled some of the impenetrable, unanswered questions surrounding the last years of Mary Meyer’s life, and
death. A known friend to Katharine Graham, regarded as an intrepid, charmingly sharp-witted commentator, who had a “distinguished and eclectic career” as a freelance journalist, Anne also maintained throughout her life an extraordinary level of physical health and vitality through a daily, grueling exercise regime.
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And yet, as adventurous and fearless as she appeared, she refused—even ran—from wanting to be associated with anything to do with Mary Meyer after her death. Her phone interviews with Leo Damore in the early 1990’s indicated she’d been a part of Mary’s Washington “LSD group” that took shape in 1962, yet she became indignant when I asked to talk with her about this. According to Damore, Chamberlin fled Washington for Maine out of fear, shortly after Mary’s murder, side-stepping being named in any of the accounts surrounding Mary’s death. Had Anne Chamberlin been privy to something so dangerous that she feared for her life, should she reveal what she knew?

J
ames Jesus Angleton had what might be called a “second career” sending newspaper reporters and journalists on never-ending wild-goose chases. Sailing on the edge, always well-oiled and three sheets to the wind, Angleton relished seeing how far he could push their limits of gullibility; and, like a Shakespearean actor, he did so convincingly, often leaving many of them awestruck, as if they had just been given the actual location of Noah’s Ark or the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body. There was a reason why former military intelligence officer and historian John Newman, author of
Oswald and the CIA
, a person with more than twenty years of experience as an analyst for U.S. military intelligence, told me during an interview for this book that he considered Angleton as “one of the most diabolical figures in all of human history.”
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What took place in 1976 after the
National Enquirer
exposé involving Mary’s relationship with Kennedy supported historian Newman’s point of view.

The 1976
Enquirer
story had opened a huge can of worms. It would take a masterful performance from the master Angler himself, along with supporting actors like Ben Bradlee, to neutralize its implications. The elite circle of Mary’s acquaintances—the people who had taken an “omertà oath” of allegiance never to reveal the facts surrounding either her diary or her murder—had to figure out how to hoodwink journalists Rosenbaum and Nobile, who were intent on writing the whole story. The two most high-profile players among them—Jim Angleton and Ben Bradlee—were forced to make a showing. For whatever reason, Cord Meyer and Anne Chamberlin would remain hidden, as would Anne Truitt, and to a large extent Tony Bradlee. Like his misleading
trial testimony in 1965, Bradlee’s 1976 selective recollections carefully excluded the most critical events. Dare it be said that had Rosenbaum and Nobile become aware of these linchpin events, the Angleton-CIA house of cards would have collapsed immediately.

But it didn’t collapse, and for several reasons. Within the hallowed halls of the Agency, the ruling leaders of America’s premier intelligence establishment had learned how to manage almost any crisis, particularly when it came to accountability to the public, or even to Congress. In CIA parlance, it’s called “a limited hang-out.” With their backs to the wall, the Agency gives up a few classified, titillating tidbits, making everyone feel as though they’ve actually come clean, when in fact they’ve done nothing of the sort, continuing to withhold what is most critical. No greater master ever demonstrated this technique more skillfully than James Jesus Angleton, the “Delphic Oracle” of counterintelligence, the chief himself. Angleton was the consummate actor and seducer. He completely dazzled Ron Rosenbaum and coauthor Phillip Nobile into thinking that they had closed the door on the case, solving everything. Alas, the authors declared, Mary’s murder, like Jack’s before her, was a random, indiscriminate, violent murder committed by a deranged, lone gunman.

So powerfully beguiling and enchanting was Angleton’s influence on Rosenbaum in 1976, it likely ignited his fascination with Angleton’s mentor, Soviet double agent Kim Philby. Philby and Angleton had met during Angleton’s stint in the OS during World War II, while Philby was ostensibly working for the British Secret Intelligence Service. Under the masterful Philby tutelage, Angleton learned all the fundamentals of the craft of intelligence, including masterminding the world of counterintelligence. Angleton came to revere his mentor just the way Philby wanted him to; it was part of Philby’s strategy. After the war, Philby would come to Washington as the chief British intelligence liaison to the fledgling CIA. The eager-beaver Angleton consulted Philby on almost everything, sharing with him all that was going on at the highest levels of American intelligence. Therein lay Angleton’s tragic fatal flaw—trusting anybody, and particularly Kim Philby. That mistake would eventually eviscerate Angleton, and he would never recover, only deteriorate. Kim Philby, as it was finally revealed in 1963, was a Russian spy, an agent allied with the KGB. So deeply had the entire arena of American intelligence been penetrated that Angleton sank even deeper into paranoia, his daily alcohol-nicotine intake dismembering his overall capacity and grasp on reality, cell by cell. Everything, and everybody, viewed through the Angleton prism, was vermin—moles, to be exact—digging relentlessly and eternally, no matter how circuitous the route,
toward Langley, Virginia, their final destination CIA headquarters. That was the footprint that “Mother” Angleton would create and leave behind.

To his great credit, in an attempt to further describe what the life of Kim Philby must have been like, journalist Ron Rosenbaum delivered a riveting, quintessential vision of the character of Kim Philby—unaware he was also describing someone he had encountered years earlier:

The mole, the penetration agent in particular, does not merely betray; he
stays
. He doesn’t just commit a single treacherous act and run; his entire being, every smile, every word he exchanges, is an ultimate violation (an almost sexual penetration) of all those around him. All his friendships, his relationships, his marriages become elaborate lies requiring unceasing vigilance to maintain, lies in a play-within-a-play only he can follow. He is not merely the supreme spy; he is above all the supreme
actor
. If, as [John] le Carré once wrote, “Espionage is the secret theater of our society,” Kim Philby is its Olivier.
⁵⁸

Indeed, for a time, Kim Philby had been “the secret theater’s” Olivier; and inevitably, that meant James Jesus Angleton had been his understudy. Angleton had successfully modeled his entire being on how Philby had shaped his own. Eventually, karma delivered fate. It was no accident that the obsessive mission of “Angleton the mole hunter,” forever protecting his beloved Agency no matter what the cost, resulted in paralyzing entire sections of the CIA’s operational directorates, and eventually gave rise to the biggest crisis the American intelligence establishment ever faced.

By the 1960s, it was well known within the highest levels that the CIA had been penetrated. During that time, Edward Clare Petty, a protégé of Angleton’s and a member of the Special Investigations Group within Counterintelligence (CI/SIG), was ordered to begin an extended study to identify who the mole was, and how he was able to operate. Angleton, of course, thought his clout would allow him to contain the study, and slant it in any direction he wanted. Such turned out not to be the case. Before his retirement in 1975, Petty turned in his report, revealing to his superiors, including CIA director William Colby, that the mole Angleton had been hunting for twenty-five years was, in fact, Angleton himself. One source confirmed that the so-called Petty Report was so explosive that it had been kept under armed guard when it was first completed. Jim Angleton had been officially fired by Colby in December 1974, ostensibly because he had violated the Agency’s charter, infringing upon
the privacy rights of certain citizens, as disclosed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the
New York Times.
While all true, Angleton’s real reign of terror had been far more nefarious.

So in 1976, when authors Rosenbaum and Nobile relied on Jim Angleton as a primary source for their seminal article “The Curious Aftermath of JFK’s Best and Brightest Affair,” their efforts to solve the mystery were immediately contaminated—they allowed themselves to be seduced by one of the greatest tricksters of the twentieth century. In addition, Rosenbaum’s own certainty about his rightness further precluded any real penetration and exposure of the evil that had been perpetrated.

In 1964, Angleton’s reputation was legendary, in and out of the Agency. Covert operative David Atlee Philips once made the comment that “Angleton was CIA’s answer to the Delphic Oracle: seldom seen but with an awesome reputation nurtured over the years by word of mouth and intermediaries padding out of his office with pronouncements which we seldom professed to understand fully but accepted on faith anyway.”
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Together with Allen Dulles, with the completion of the Warren Report in 1964, Angleton had not only just masterminded the greatest cover-up in all of American history, but had duped the entire national security apparatus, including the CIA, into believing that Oswald had been collaborating with both Cubans and the Soviet KGB during his trip to Mexico in the fall of 1963, setting up his plan to assassinate President Kennedy later that fall. President Lyndon Johnson then used “the Mexico City trump card” of a World War III nuclear confrontation that would kill 40 million Americans in the first hour to persuade people like Supreme Court justice Earl Warren to make sure the Warren Commission would establish Oswald as a lone nut assassin acting on his own.
⁶⁰
William Colby would say of Angleton in 1973: “Mr. A is an institution.” In 1980, Clare Booth Luce, wife of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, told Angleton in private communication, “There’s no doubt you are easily the most interesting and fascinating figure the intelligence world has produced, and a living legend.”
⁶¹

Every detail, however minute, had to be taken into account in an “operation” of such magnitude as Mary’s “termination,” so as to arouse as little suspicion as possible. Jim Angleton was Cord Meyer’s closest and dearest friend, and the godfather to his children. (Angleton was supposedly also a “dear friend” of Mary’s, though with friends like Angleton, who needs enemies?) And so the question still remains: Why hadn’t Jim Angleton called Ben Bradlee “just after lunch” on the day of Mary’s murder, as well as his dear friend and colleague Cord Meyer later that afternoon—particularly after his wife Cicely’s alleged
panicked call to him at CIA headquarters who believed the murdered woman might be Mary? Why not Angleton instead of Wistar Janney? The answer: Any overt involvement by “Mother” Angleton would have forever raised dangerous suspicion.

Wistar Janney, on the other hand, wasn’t officially titled in the CIA’s covert action directorate, although Victor Marchetti had made it clear: “Your father was a company man.” A respected friend to both Cord Meyer and Ben Bradlee, Wistar Janney was the ideal go-between, someone who could contact, signal, or coordinate, among all three men: Angleton, Bradlee, and Cord Meyer. The infamous Angleton had given himself another role to play—that of procuring Mary’s diary and any other artifacts, personal papers, letters, and the like that might incriminate the CIA in her murder, or President Kennedy’s assassination.

And Jim Angleton succeeded in his mission. The “Lady Livia Augustus in drag” got everything he wanted. With aplomb, he had completely erased the most important phase of Mary’s life. With the information that Jim Truitt provided to the
National Enquirer
, the master fly-fisherman Angler himself, known for designing his own special fishing lures, cast his bait into just the right pool, then hooked one of his biggest catches of all time, journalist Ron Rosenbaum, intricately steering and anchoring him to the lone gunman/Ray Crump theory. Unaware, Rosenbaum had been delicately reeled into Angleton’s nexus of deception, while the master himself then drove away in his signature black Mercedes. Darth Vader couldn’t have done it any better.

Finally invaded by the mole of cancer, the “Delphic Oracle” Angleton at last confronted the final curtain on the stage of life. Even the mercurial spymaster, stricken with lung cancer and facing imminent death, earnestly, and finally, acknowledged to his scribe, Joe Trento, that Jack Kennedy and Mary Meyer “were in love. They had something very important.”
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In another end-of-life “epiphany,” he told his faithful penman: “I realize how I have wasted my existence, my professional life,” adding “I was always the skunk at the garden party, and even your friends tire of that.”

His marriage to Cicely ruptured, and his two children estranged from him, Jim Angleton’s last paternal effort was to seek out his daughter, Truffy, who had joined Yogi Bhajan’s effort to bring Kundalini yoga to the West. Truffy had years before converted to the Sikh religion. Eventually her mother, Cicely, before her death in 2011, and her sister Lucy would find a second home there, too. According to one source who knew the family well, Jim Angleton regularly consulted with Yogi Bhajan as his “spiritual adviser” in the final years of
his life. Whether it was because he wanted to understand what had driven his daughters to renounce their former existence, or whether he wanted “spiritual absolution” as death drew near, his family had mostly abandoned him.