Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (39 page)

As far as Fonzi was concerned, the important conclusion was that Sylvia Odio was telling the truth. What the incident proved, Fonzi concluded, was not that Oswald himself had visited Odio’s apartment, but that a conspiracy was involved to assassinate JFK. “Validating Silvia Odio’s report that Oswald, or someone who closely resembled him (it matters not), appeared at her door in Dallas with two associates, one of whom would link Oswald to the assassination before the assassination, confirms—no, cries out without a shadow of a doubt—that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy,” Fonzi concluded.
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In 2007 St. John Hunt, the son of E. Howard Hunt, began making public the deathbed confessions of his father. He released a 2004 audio file of revelations Hunt taped before his death that was broadcast nationally on George Noory’s nationally syndicated nightly
Coast-to-Coast AM
radio show. St. John Hunt then was interviewed for an article in
Rolling Stone
magazine, started a website, and self-published a book called
Bond of Secrecy: My Life with CIA Spy and Watergate Conspirator E. Howard Hunt
.

Hunt’s deathbed confession must be evaluated cautiously. If the deathbed confession is truthful, then Hunt had been lying since 1963 and was not in Washington D.C. on November 22, 1963, and did have something to do with JFK’s murder. Conceivably, the deathbed confession represents Hunt’s last effort to come to grips with the truth, or perhaps his first effort to gain notoriety by confessing his guilt when it was too late to bring him to justice. The problem is that Hunt could have still been lying, trying as his last public act to bring calumny and doubt on enemies he had battled for years within the CIA. What Hunt’s deathbed confession manages to accomplish then is not to solve the case, but to confirm the CIA’s involvement from the beginning, and highlight the failure of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations to investigate thoroughly the CIA’s role in the JFK conspiracy.

E. Howard Hunt claimed he was a “benchwarmer” on the CIA operation to assassinate JFK, a mission Hunt called “the big event.” By
so characterizing his role, Hunt implies he played a role in the JFK assassination, but that he was not the first team on the field, and/or that he may have had organizational responsibilities but more qualified players had been assigned the operational roles.

Hunt claimed Vice President Lyndon Johnson enlisted the help of Cord Meyer in the CIA to prepare the operational plan and organize the team of co-conspirators. This was not the first time that Hunt had fingered LBJ as the prime mover in the JFK assassination. “Conspiracy nuts say that the person who had the most to gain from Kennedy’s assassination was LBJ,” E. Howard Hunt wrote in his 2007 book,
American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond
. “There was nobody with the leverage that LBJ had, no competitor at all. He was the vice president, and if he wanted to get rid of the president, he had the ability to do so by corrupting different people in the CIA.”
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Hunt knew that LBJ would never be satisfied being dumped from the 1964 ticket and that LBJ was sufficiently ruthless to do whatever it took to become president. With LBJ in the White House,
Life
magazine would have little to gain pressing ahead with the Bobby Baker scandal. LBJ could have reasonably calculated a grieving nation would rally behind him as JFK’s successor. On this point, Hunt was right. LBJ had ample motives to remove the sitting president, motives LBJ shared with many other powerful people, including Allen Dulles, who equally had come to want to see JFK’s presidency come to an end.

E. Howard Hunt explained Meyer was another person with motive since John F. Kennedy had been having an affair with his wife, Mary Pinchot. JFK first met Mary Pinchot in 1936. A then-young JFK spotted Pinchot on the dance floor at Choate Rosemary Hall, in Wallingford, Connecticut, where JFK had attended prep school. That weekend, JFK returned to Choate to attend the Winter Festivals Saturday Night Dance. JFK tapped her date, William Attwood, on the right shoulder to cut in so he could dance with Mary. The incident occurred when JFK was spending his brief time as an undergraduate at Princeton, before his father had him transfer to Harvard. JFK’s relationship with Meyer, however, did not become intimate until many years later, after Jack was in the White House.

Mary Pinchot met Cord Meyer, a Yale graduate, in 1944, when he was a Marine Corps lieutenant. During World War II, Meyer distinguished himself in combat, losing an eye from shrapnel wounds suffered in the Pacific when a hand grenade rolled into his foxhole on Guam and exploded in his face. His twin brother died fighting on Okinawa. Cord emerged from World War II determined that those who died in combat, including his twin brother, would not have died in vain. Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and became “part of a wave of idealistic, anti-Communist liberals who enlisted in the CIA after the war.”
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As Cord Meyer’s anti-Communist fervor intensified, he and the more free-spirited Mary Pinchot Meyer drifted apart. The couple split apart in 1958, two years after their middle son, nine-year-old Michael, was killed in an auto accident outside their home in McLean, Virginia. “Mary threw herself into the Washington art scene, starting an affair with a younger artist—the rising abstract painter Kenneth Noland—and embracing a pre-hippie lifestyle that included a wardrobe of peasant blouses and blue tights and a round of Reichian therapy, which promised enlightenment through orgasmic release,” explained David Talbot in his 2007 book,
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
.
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When Mary Pinchot Meyer and JFK got back together again in late 1961, with Jack now in the White House, it was easy to see why they got together. She was “the same blond beauty with sparkling green-blue eyes” that JFK met when they were both teenagers; but now, “her mischievous and witty personality promised something deeper, an earthy and wry wisdom that must have matched his own acute sense of life’s tragedy.”
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In 1962 Mary Meyer became involved with Harvard University psychology lecturer Timothy Leary, noted for his experimentation with psychedelic drugs and for leading a cultural revolution in the 1960s distinguished by phrases such as, “Turn on, Drop out.” In 1962 and 1963 Pinchot reportedly brought marijuana and LSD into the White House to enhance her sexual escapades with JFK. CIA spymaster James Angleton leaked to reporters that Mary Meyer and JFK experimented with drugs, smoking marijuana and dabbling with LSD. Reporter David Talbot picked up on Angleton’s story, writing: “According to the spy, Meyer and Kennedy took one low dose of the hallucinogen, after which, he noted with a cringe-inducing delicacy, ‘they made love.’”
⁵⁶⁶
Angleton knew his
information was reliable because he had been bugging the telephones and various rooms of Meyer’s Georgetown home. David Talbot reported that Mary Meyer consulted Timothy Leary about JFK. “[Mary Meyer] wanted Leary’s advice about how to guide him on a psychedelic journey,” Talbot wrote. “Though Mary didn’t name her powerful friend she left little doubt who he was. ‘I’ve heard Allen Ginsberg on radio and TV shows saying that if Khrushchev and Kennedy would take LSD together they’d end world conflict,’ she told Leary. ‘Isn’t that the idea—to get powerful men to turn on?’”
⁵⁶⁷

Certainly JFK found Mary Pinchot Meyer intriguing; what he thought of marijuana and LSD, if he actually did experiment with the drugs, is unrecorded.

Mary Pinchot’s sister, Antoinette, better known as “Tony,” married Ben Bradlee, the managing editor of the
Washington Post.
He is best known for publishing the Watergate stories investigated and published by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. When JFK was a US Senator from Massachusetts, the Kennedys’ and Bradlees’ homes were literally across the street from one another in Georgetown. In those years, the Kennedys and Bradlees were close friends, prominent Georgetown socialites, and frequent dinner companions. Mary Pinchot reconnected with Georgetown after she divorced Cord Meyer and moved into a studio behind the Bradlees’ home on N Street in Georgetown, determined to focus her energies on her emerging career as an artist.

Hunt had discussed Cord Meyer’s role in the assassination not only in his deathbed confession, but also in his 2007 book,
American Spy
. “[Cord Meyer] was a high-level CIA operative whose wife, journalist Mary Pinchot, was having an affair with John F. Kennedy,” Hunt wrote. “Meyer was the Yale-educated, blue-blooded son of a wealthy diplomat, who had once been elected the president of the United World Federalists—an organization supported by many intellectuals, such as Albert Einstein—which worked with the United Nations to build a ‘just world order,’ hoping to prevent another world war.” Hunt noted Allen Dulles recruited Meyers to the CIA in 1951, placing him under Frank Wisner in what was then known as Operation Mockingbird, a CIA operation in which journalists were secretly paid by the CIA to report on world affairs with a CIA perspective, all unbeknownst to the American public. “The
theorists suggest Cord would have had a motive to kill Kennedy because his wife was having an affair with the president,” Hunt continued. “In 1954, the Kennedys bought an estate outside Washington, D.C., where they became neighbors of the Meyers. Cord’s wife and Jackie apparently became rather friendly and went on walks together.”

The rivalry with JFK was not only that both shared a love interest in Mary Meyers, but also that each had contrasting views about foreign policy. Meyer believed that JFK’s view of foreign policy was dangerously set on pre-World War II ideas of US national interests. JFK was suspicious of the CIA based on his experience in Cuba and, as we will see in the next chapter, with his experiences with the CIA in Laos and Vietnam. Meyer aligned with Dulles and believed in an internationalist “one-world government” view that transcended nationalism. Because of their rivalry Cord Meyer would have been ripe for LBJ to recruit into organizing a JFK assassination plot.
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On October 12, 1964, less than a year after JFK was killed, Mary Meyer was attacked as she left her painting studio to take a walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. In what police judged to be an apparent rape attempt, Meyer fought for her life, only to be killed by two bullet shots, one to the head and the other to the heart, both fired at close range. Within minutes of the assault, Raymond Crump, an African-American, was arrested near the murder scene. Failing to find any gun or forensic evidence, such as hair, clothing fibers, blood, semen, skin, urine, or saliva, that linked Raymond Crump to either the murder scene or the body and clothing of Mary Meyer, the jury voted to acquit Crump.
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The case has never been solved. Longtime Pinchot family friend Peter Janney accused the CIA of murdering Pinchot and of setting Crump up to be the patsy.
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On the morning after Mary Meyer’s death, Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, Mary’s sister, talked to one of Mary’s closest friends, Anne Truitt, who was in Tokyo at the time of Mary’s death. She encouraged the Bradlees to go to Mary Meyer’s home to recover her diary. When Ben and Tony Bradlee got there, they found high-ranking CIA official James Jesus Angleton inside. After a search, the three of them failed to find the diary. After Ben Bradlee realized they had not searched Mary’s studio, he and his wife returned to the house, only to run into Jim Angleton again.
This time Angleton was in the process of picking the padlock. According to Ben Bradlee, after Angleton left, he and his wife found the diary and took it home with them. They claimed they found a few phrases that confirmed the relationship between Mary Meyer and JFK, and that they were stunned. “Tony, especially, felt betrayed, both by Kennedy and by Mary,” wrote Ben Bradlee in his 1991 book,
A Good Life
.
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Other than establishing the fact of Mary’s affair with JFK, Bradlee maintained the diary included little of interest to assassination researchers, with most of the diary discussing Mary’s artwork.

Still, there is a second, more sinister version of what happened to Mary’s diary. Author Peter Janney argued that Ben and Tony Bradlee could not have recovered the diary because Angleton recovered Mary’s diary on the night of her murder. Janney wrote that the night of Mary’s murder, the Bradlees were unable to find the diary, and that Anne Truitt called Angleton to tell him where in the house to find the diary. According to Janney’s reconstruction of events, after getting the phone call from Anne Truitt, Angelton returned to Mary’s home a second time on the night of her murder and found the diary. Angleton destroyed the diary, Janney argued, because it contained information “highly incriminating of Angleton himself and the CIA’s role in orchestrating what had happened in Dallas.” Angleton was back in the house the morning after Mary’s murder, Janey argued, to “take into his possession and eliminate any
other
documents, papers, letters, or personal effects that might further jeopardize the Warren Report and the public’s acceptance of Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt.” Janney concluded that Angleton returned to Mary’s home a third time and that is when Ben and Tony Bradlee walked in on him searching through Mary’s belongings, because Angleton “wanted to be seen searching for the diary so that no one would suspect that it was already in his possession.”
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The only ones who really knew what had happened in Mary’s death, Janney insisted, were “the mastermind,” Jim Angleton, and “his colleague,” Cord Meyer, and to a lesser extent Ben Bradlee.

Remember, within the CIA the Executive Action program involved the mob, and specifically Sam Giancana in Chicago through the urging of Johnny Roselli, to provide assets to work with the CIA in assassinating JFK.
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William Harvey headed the Executive Action program and E. Howard Hunt in his deathbed confession named William Harvey as
an operative recruited to participate in the JFK assassination. It strains credibility to believe that a mature woman such as Mary Pinchot, with her access to the smug Georgetown elite of the early 1960s, would have confided intimate details of her relationship to JFK to a diary. Angleton was not interested in Mary because of Mary’s affair with JFK or because of what Mary might have written in her diary about that love interest. Angleton was interested in Mary and her diary because of what Mary knew and might have written about Angleton himself.