Mary's Mosaic (69 page)

During one of Angleton’s final meetings with author Joseph Trento, the frail, emaciated, cancer-ridden “Ichabod Crane” surrendered more secrets. The man whose all-encompassing power “had struck fear into most of his colleagues, the man who had been able to end a CIA career with a nod or a phone call,” Trento wrote, was finally crumbling. Jim Angleton would tell his scribe, “You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed…. We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We—I—so misjudged what happened.”
⁶³

“You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence?” Angleton blurted out to Trento. “I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends. They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the Russians would discover it all.” Later in the same conversation, Angleton added, “There was no accountability. And without real accountability everything turned to shit.”
⁶⁴

How had it all gone so wrong, Trento wanted to know? Weak and trembling, a cup of one of his beloved exotic teas now his most treasured companion, James Jesus Angleton gave the author his final parting reflection:

Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it…. Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.

Then, as he slowly sipped his tea, he added, “I guess I will see them there soon.”
⁶⁵

R
on Rosenbaum’s final observation about the murder of Mary Meyer was a “Postscript” to his original 1976 article that was included in his 2000 anthology
The Secret Parts of Fortune
. There, he described an encounter one night
in the late 1980s in the Hollywood Hills of California with “a well-known West Coast figure,” an obvious attempt for some reason to camouflage the identity of Timothy Leary.

Lampooning Leary’s assertions that Mary Meyer had been killed “because of what she knew about the CIA plot to kill JFK,” then ridiculing Leary’s view that “Nixon had planned to expose the CIA’s role in JFK’s death—which was really what was erased from the eighteen minute gap on the Watergate tape”—Rosenbaum continued to brag of how thoroughly he had read the Crump trial transcript, how meticulously he had “reinvestigated the whole case,” how he had “interviewed most of the principals,” and that “no evidence was ever adduced that gives the slightest hint there was a conspiracy behind Mary Meyer’s murder—or that her death had any relation to her secret liaison with JFK.”
⁶⁶

Just as egregious, Rosenbaum’s parting reflection to his readers was that Nina Burleigh’s
A Very Private Woman
was what he termed “a recent careful reinvestigation” that further supported his overall opinion that Mary’s death had been “a random assault by a stranger.”
⁶⁷
And yet in the fall of 1995, three years before Nina Burleigh published her book, five years before Ron Rosenbaum’s final statement on the matter would appear in his 2000 anthology, Ben Bradlee had dramatically coughed up what Cord Meyer had only cryptically mentioned in 1980: the phone call “just after lunch” from Wistar Janney. Nina Burleigh, in particular, knew exactly who Wistar Janney was, having spent many hours interviewing me, starting in 1996, two years before her book was published. Simply put, both Cord Meyer and Ben Bradlee had, however inadvertently, revealed “the master key” that proved conspiracy—a fact that neither Rosenbaum nor Burleigh had even bothered, or possibly dared, to consider.

“
N
o lie can live forever,” Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked. In the sacrosanct halls of the CIA, where such kingpins as Jim Angleton, Richard Helms, Cord Meyer, Wistar Janney, and others lied professionally and with impunity, a decision had been made. They may have agonized a bit—after all, Mary Pinchot Meyer was well bred, beautiful, and of the same class, one of ‘their own.’ But the stakes were too high. If she talked and told what she had come to understand about what really had taken place in Dallas, what had been done to her beloved ally, the president, and the country, and by whom, people with influence would have listened to her, people such as Philip L. Graham of the
Washington Post
, had he still been alive. That made Mary Meyer very dangerous.

These imperious CIA men lived in a world that answered to no authority; they knew exactly what they were doing, and how it had to be done. Engraved in the floor of the lobby at the CIA’s Langley headquarters is the Agency’s motto: “Ye shall know the truth and it shall set you free.” But it was nothing more than window-dressing, camouflage for “the ends justify the means”—the CIA’s true, unwritten code for dealing with anything, or anyone, that happened to inconveniently get in its way. And so it would be with Mary Pinchot Meyer.

And yet their fatal flaw, no matter how much water would pass under the proverbial bridge, was to underestimate something much more forceful and compelling than their corrupted, villainous power. It was, in its purest form, the supreme force of truth itself, and the human need to pursue and know it, no matter what the cost.

6
    Author Joseph Trento refused to be interviewed for this book.

7
    Both Joe Trento’s and Gregory Douglas’s email address have been purposely withheld. Having received email from both in previous years, I can verify that the email addresses above were valid and still in use.

P
ART
F
OUR

“
N
ERO IS MAD
,” said Claudius. “He will destroy the empire. His excesses will demand the return of the republic and you, my son, will return to restore it. The republic will live again!”

“I don’t believe in the republic,” said Britannicus, son of Claudius. “No one believes in the republic anymore! No one does, except you. You’re old, father, and out of touch. I want my chance to rule. And rule Rome as it should be ruled. If you love me, give me that chance.”

“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out,” mumbled Claudius alone to himself. “Write no more Claudius, write no more. I have told it all, as I said I would. And as the Sybil prophesized, I have told the truth. I have set the record straight. It is all here for remote posterity. Come death, and draw the final curtain. I am tired, oh so tired.”
¹

1
    From the 1976 BBC Masterpiece Theatre production of
I, Claudius
.
(Based on:
I, Claudius: from the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius born 10 B.C. murdered and deified A.D. 54.
and
Claudius The God,
both authored by Robert Graves. New York: Vintage International Edition, 1989, originally published by Random House, 1935.

14

E
PILOGUE

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: Not going all the way, and not starting.

—The Buddha

The American people live in a country where they can have almost anything they want.

And my regret is that it seems that they don’t want much of anything at all.

—Eugene Debs

D
URING
THE
JOURNEY
of writing this book, many people asked me whether Leo Damore really committed suicide. Of course he did, I told them. He shot himself in the presence of a nurse and a police officer in October 1995. There was no conspiracy here, I maintained; the facts spoke for themselves. But I soon reckoned those weren’t the only “facts” that surrounded Leo’s demise.

For two years, Leo’s former wife, June Davison, graciously allowed me to read all of Leo’s private diaries. I wanted to know anything that might further offer clues, particularly about the last few years of his life. While Leo purposely never mentioned any of his most secretive research in his journals, he did recount some of his battles with panic attacks, anxiety, and depression—all of which started to emerge several months after his telephone conversation with William L. Mitchell at the end of March 1993. Yet in my own dealings with Leo during 1993, he appeared to be generally optimistic after our visit
in April of that year and the subsequent phone contact we shared during that summer. Leo made no secret of the fact that he had met with the person who, he believed, was Mary’s assassin, the same man who had testified at the trial, but I didn’t press him for further details, as I was preoccupied with grief over a broken marital engagement. That fall, however, he was still working on the manuscript for “Burden of Guilt,” though he was increasingly agitated and upset.

Another of Leo’s closest friends, who asked to remain anonymous, agreed to be interviewed for this book. She and Leo had talked many times after his 1993 telephone interview with Mitchell, as well as after Leo’s subsequent in-person interview with Mitchell. That meeting, the friend said, was even more definitive because Leo had learned, she said, about some of the other people who had assisted in the operation. Some weeks later, however, Leo told his friend he was sure he was being followed, “watched,” and he was growing increasingly alarmed. In early 1994, he believed he’d been “poisoned,” she said. He wasn’t sure how, or when it happened, but he knew something was wrong. He had also taken a number of precautions with his tapes and transcriptions, his manuscript, and what she remembered as “some other material.” It was all well-hidden, the friend said, and couldn’t be found. Leo was becoming more frantic, more anxious, agitated, and unable to focus. Increasingly paranoid, under financial pressure, he apparently consulted not one but two different psychiatrists, both of whom were giving him different psychotropic medications.

About a month before he shot himself in October 1995, Leo called me, desperately pleading for a place to live, and threatening suicide. Not having heard from him for months, I realized at that point how serious his deterioration had become. I pleaded with him to immediately check into a hospital, even offered to accompany him, should he need assistance. Later on, I would discover his friend Jimmy Smith had received a similar plea, again shortly before Leo took his life. Following his death, Leo’s former wife told me his autopsy had revealed an undiagnosed brain tumor. Had Leo Damore, I wondered, been poisoned in such a way that he was driven to suicide?

Starting in the 1950s, under the direction of the CIA’s Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency’s MKULTRA program had developed an arsenal of undetectable elixirs for getting rid of people when it became necessary. For the CIA, murder became ‘standard operating procedure,’ as demonstrated by CIA Director William Colby in his testimony before the Church Committee in 1975.
¹
In April 1953, James Speyer Kronthal, a brilliant, young Allen Dulles protégé
and deputy, who was in line for a high-level job at the Agency, was found dead in his Georgetown home in what police said was a suicide. The night before, Kronthal had been confronted by his boss Dulles for his sexual orientation. His “crime” was that he was gay. Years later, it was revealed that Soviet intelligence had identified Kronthal as a homosexual through its review of captured Nazi files from World War II. Then, while working for the CIA in Switzerland, Kronthal had been secretly filmed with young boys by the Soviets before blackmailing him into becoming a spy.

“Allen [Dulles] probably had a special potion prepared that he gave Kronthal should the pressure become too much,” the CIA’s Robert Crowley told author Joseph Trento. “Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and the medical people produced all kinds of poisons that a normal postmortem could not detect. Kronthal, from a powerful family in New York, could not bear having his secret homosexuality become a new case for Senator Joseph McCarthy.”
²
Nor could Allen Dulles allow anyone, or anything, to threaten his intelligence empire.

Leo Damore’s “suicide” had become all the more disturbing, not only to me, but to his dear friend Jimmy Smith as well. Smith became convinced that Leo had been driven to take his own life. “Leo didn’t know anything about guns,” said Smith. “Where in hell did he get a gun?” For years, Smith had warned his friend to “take precautions.” He was sure Leo was becoming involved in dangerous matters. “For Christ’s sake, Leo, be careful,” said Jimmy at the end of almost every phone call. And so, in the wake of Leo’s death, trailing my own journey’s conclusion, Bill Corson’s echo kept dogging me at every turn: “Anybody can commit a murder, but it takes an expert to commit a suicide.”

T
here comes a time when every journey approaches a conclusion. It took me by surprise, when I met a kindred soul whose father, too, had been a CIA officer. There’s a kind of unwritten, sometimes unacknowledged, bond among those of us whose fathers were involved with the fledgling CIA during the Cold War era. Author Nina Burleigh’s interview with Jane Barnes, daughter of the elite CIA covert operative Tracy Barnes—who Robert Morrow believed was part of Jim Angleton’s inner circle that decided Mary’s fate—underscored not only the experience of living within the “shadowy” world of never really knowing what our fathers were doing, but the fantasy life we as children invented to compensate for this emptiness.