Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace

by Peter Janney

  Two of the four pallbearers—William (“Bill”) Walton and Kenneth Noland—were artists, like Mary herself. Bill Walton had formerly been a journalist and a war correspondent. He was a close, discreet confidante to both Jack and Bobby Kennedy, as well as to Jackie. Divorced, and reportedly more inclined to the same sex, Walton had functioned as Mary’s escort to many White House social functions where she and Jack often captured a few intimate, stolen moments together. Ken Noland had been a progenitor of the Washington Color School of art in the late 1950s. He and Mary had been intimately involved immediately after her separation and divorce from Cord. New York art dealer André Emmerich, who did not attend the funeral, recalled that Noland had told him that “the art world in Washington was buzzing with rumors that Mary’s murder was in some way connected with her love affair with JFK.” On that day, however, secrets for the most part were being kept.

  Was it mere coincidence or irony that Mary’s two other pallbearers were high-level CIA officials Jim Angleton and Wistar Janney, both longtime close friends of Mary’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer, who was also a high-ranking Agency operative? Of course, the mercurial, almost emaciated and ghostlike presence of James Jesus Angleton wasn’t at all surprising. A close friend of Cord’s since Yale, their friendship had endured and deepened as CIA colleagues. Angleton’s outward proclivities and hobbies—photography, poetry, orchid growing, and fly-fishing, including designing and crafting his own fishing lures—suggested a modern-day Renaissance man of considerable talent and interest. Early on, he had ingratiated himself with Mary. She appreciated what appeared to be a man of unusual complexity and knowledge—so much so, in fact, that Jim Angleton had been designated as the godfather to the three Meyer children.

  But Mary’s close friendship with Angleton’s wife, Cicely, had long ago made her aware of the shadows that lurked beneath Jim’s exterior, nurtured by the endless rivers of gin and bourbon that spawned a kind of paranoia that demanded control and domination. Nonetheless, in 1964 Angleton was at the top of his game, and had already become something of a legend. A former member of the elite Office of Strategic Services (OS) during World War II, Jim Angleton had distinguished himself early in his career; and for some unknown reason, Allen Dulles had handpicked him in 1954, when Angleton was only thirty-seven, for the position that he would hold for the duration of his career: chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence division in the Directorate of Plans. Angleton would head the Agency’s most secretive department. Colleagues, including many who feared him, often called him by such names as “Mother,” “the locksmith,” even “the CIA’s answer to the Delphic Oracle.” Angleton’s reputation within the world of intelligence would remain epic during his entire life, and would extend even after his death in 1987. No one at Mary’s funeral, however—except Angleton’s titular boss, Richard Helms, and possibly one or two other Agency honchos—was aware that with the recently released Warren Report, Jim Angleton and his former chief, Allen Dulles (a Warren Commission member), had just masterminded possibly the greatest cover-up in American history.

  Mary Meyer had come to disdain the work of the intelligence establishment. It was one of the reasons why she had finally initiated her divorce from Cord. In 1951, Cord had succumbed to the recruiting tactics of Allen Dulles, seeing no possibility for the fledgling United World Federalists to keep the tenuous peace in an emerging Cold War. Seduced into betraying the vision that had originally united Mary with him in 1945, Cord’s entrance into the CIA would eventually foreshadow a rupture in their union that would never heal. The Dulles inner circle soon surrounded Mary’s life, complete with its lordly Ivy League sense of entitlement. No law, and certainly no moral compass, would be allowed to stand in the way of American hegemony, she soon learned. Her fights and pleadings with the man to whom she had pledged her deepest trust were to no avail. Mary’s eventual escape in 1957, followed by divorce a year later, had been final, or so she thought.

  Yet now, even in death, she was once again encircled. Mary’s fourth pallbearer was my father, Wistar Janney. Like Cord Meyer and so many others who joined the CIA in its infancy, Wistar Janney was part of an idealistic group of World War II veterans that never again wanted to see the possibility of a world at war. A strong, centralized post–World War II intelligence apparatus seemed like an almost ideal solution, and a good career for a group of men who were already, by birth, financially well endowed and secure. In the aftermath of World War II, America had come out on top. They wanted to keep it that way.

  The youngest of six children of a wealthy, prominent investment banker, my father was raised in Bryn Mawr on Philadelphia’s Main Line. His given name at birth, resembling an almost royal title, was Frederick Wistar Morris Janney. To his close friends, immediate colleagues, and family, he was “Wistar,” or “Wis.” To his CIA subordinates, he was known as Fred Janney. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Wistar Janney graduated from Princeton in 1941. About to be drafted, he enlisted in the Navy to become a naval aviator, allegedly after viewing the movie Flight Command, starring Robert Taylor—in addition to having had yet another fight with his aloof, investment banker father. Piloting a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber off the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific theater, Wistar was not expected to survive by anyone in his family, including his father.

  “When I strapped a Grumman Avenger to my ass, it was do or die,” he murmured late one night, not wanting to recall the death of his fellow pilot and close friend Eddie Larkin during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. He had not had the chance to reconcile with his father, who died unexpectedly just a few days before the largest naval battle in history. The father-son duo had remained estranged, in spite of the fact that Wistar’s father—Walter Coggeshall Janney—knew his time was near. At the end of the summer of 1944, “Lord of the Manor” Walter elected to return to Bryn Mawr from his summer estate on Cape Cod in the station wagon driven by his caretaker-gardener John Martin, not in his customary chauffeur-driven Packard. Midway across the Bourne Bridge, which connected Cape Cod to the mainland, he ordered Martin to stop the car, whereupon he got out and took one last gaze at the Cape Cod panorama where his family and beloved progeny had, since the late 1920s, thrived amid the bounty and fortune he had amassed. At that moment, he told Martin that he would not live through another winter. Asking Martin “to stay on and take care of the estate and Mrs. Janney,” he resumed his journey to Bryn Mawr.4 The father-son schism, however, remained—passing through invisible ethers into the next generation and beyond.

  Wistar Janney made sure that Eddie Larkin would be awarded the Navy Cross posthumously. Finally emerging victorious from battle, Janney himself came home with his own, and a slew of other medals. Every workday, he proudly wore his Navy Cross pin on his suit jacket’s left lapel, sometimes along with his naval aviator necktie. Awarded one of Yale’s first master of arts in Russian area studies in 1948, my father was soon recruited into the CIA by Allen Dulles, also a Princeton graduate. Technically, he was for many years a Soviet analyst in the Agency’s Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), but it wasn’t ever clear what Wistar’s job(s) actually entailed. There were periodic trips to Europe, and then Iran. “Your father was a company man,” said disaffected former CIA staffer and author Victor Marchetti in an interview for this book in 2005. More time would pass before I finally began to understand what that might mean.

  At Mary’s funeral, Wistar’s pallbearer assignment had been requested by Cord in his hour of need. Wistar himself was never fond of Mary, particularly after she jettisoned Cord, devastating him, by all accounts. Moreover, what infuriated Wistar even more was the fact that over the years Mary had become increasingly outspoken about her displeasure with what the CIA was doing in the world. No other CIA wife had ever dared such public bluntness, certainly not Wistar’s. But that hadn’t stopped Mary Meyer, even if my father’s well-oiled temper might be the kind of assault any civilized person would want to avoid. His signature point of view was that if you didn’t work for the
Agency, you really didn’t know anything; furthermore, “opinions were like assholes—everyone had one,” he would say as one of his favored retorts. Any discussion would quickly turn into what one friend in the late 1960s once called a kind of unending “Tet Offensive” with Wistar inevitably asserting at some point that the CIA had the only key to a treasure called “the truth.” They (he, the CIA) knew; you didn’t. End of conversation. How dare you think otherwise.

  Seated immediately adjacent to Mary’s casket was her ex-husband and their two remaining sons: Quentin, eighteen, and Mark, fourteen. Cord, habitually imperious, sobbed uncharacteristically throughout the ceremony. He had been away in New York on Agency business when Mary was murdered. Comforted by his CIA colleagues, as well as by Mary’s mother, Ruth Pickering Pinchot, Cord was the recipient of a magnanimous show of support that included Ben and Tony Bradlee, Mary’s younger sister and only sibling. Cord’s grief, however, appeared to be purely ceremonial and ephemeral. After the funeral, he would “advise” his two remaining sons that there were to be no more tears over the loss of their mother.

  Bishop Paul Moore Jr., suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, conducted the burial service from the Book of Common Prayer. A close friend of both Ben Bradlee and Cord Meyer, the bishop, like Cord himself, had gone to St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire, and then Yale, graduating in the class of 1941, a year and a half ahead of Cord. “I was away at a convention when the murder happened,” Moore told author Leo Damore in 1991. “Benny [Ben Bradlee] called me and I flew in for the funeral.”5 Moore didn’t have a pastoral relationship with Mary. “I knew her much better earlier [in her life]. She and Cord and my first wife and I were very close friends when Cord came back from overseas the same time I did, around the time they were married. I didn’t see much of Mary in later years, so I wasn’t close to her,” he recalled. Even so, Moore was glad to officiate. “Over the years I’ve done weddings and funerals for the family. They weren’t members of my parish or anything. I was, in an informal way, their official pastor. Most of those folks don’t have any clergy friends they’re close to. It’s just that we’re old friends, so it was natural for them to turn to a priest or bishop when they needed somebody.”6

  In his eulogy, Moore referred to “Mary’s honesty, her friendship, her rare sensitivity, that beauty which walked with her and which flowed from her into each of our lives.” But he could not answer the question that no doubt plagued many of those in attendance, although not all of them. “We cannot know why and how such a terrible, ugly, irrational thing should have happened. We can only sense that it was, in some way, bound up in this sin and sickness of the entire world.”7

  Perhaps at the time publicly oblivious, the suffragan bishop wasn’t about to speak to any “pattern,” invisible or not, among those who thought it possible to play God for the purposes of a well-ordered world. While Moore, like most Americans, may have been initially seduced into believing that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the president, a few years later his personal awakening would impel him to champion civil rights for African Americans, stridently oppose the Vietnam War, and ordain an openly gay woman as a priest in the Episcopal Church. But that afternoon, Moore only requested prayers “for that poor, demented soul who has brought about this essentialist tragedy.”8

  “I remember catching a little criticism for that,” Moore recalled. “Some folks thought it was inappropriate to pray for the person who had killed Mary. They were a little uneasy about it. This didn’t come from the family. In fact, they thought it was okay—even positive.” Moore’s highest priority, he said, was “my relationship with the Pinchot family, which goes back to my parents. I didn’t want to do anything that would in any way offend them.”9

  But even in the elite, affluent neighborhoods of Georgetown, home to many of Washington’s global power brokers, the rumbling of rumors had already begun. There was talk, too, of some kind of cover-up, links to the Kennedy White House, perhaps even some CIA involvement, and even possibly “Soviet complicity” in her murder—this last from CIA counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton himself.10

  Bishop Moore had not intended to presume guilt on the part of Ray Crump Jr. “On the contrary,” Moore said in 1991, “I’m fascinated, obviously, because it’s always bothered me. I never felt the police really put this case to bed. There was a lot of paranoia surrounding Mary’s murder. And you know, you still hear a lot of rumors about it.”11 Moore’s uncertainty, however, even in 1991, nearly thirty years after the murder took place, was not unique. There were a number of facts—and stories—that didn’t add up, and were even contradictory, with more to come, leaving loose ends that inevitably “bothered” a lot of people, including me.

  In the wake of Mary Meyer’s murder on that October 12 afternoon, who among her close friends and family first knew that she was dead? And how did they come by that knowledge? The answers to these questions, depending on whom you ask, are riddled with confusion and ambiguity that persist to this day. The truth—elusive though it has been—about when and how Mary’s friends and family learned of her death is part of the key to unraveling the mystery of who killed her, and why.

  To begin, the first public revelation that Mary Meyer had been romantically involved with President Kennedy came through a story in the National Enquirer in its March 2, 1976, edition.12 The details of the story had been given to the Enquirer by James Truitt, a close friend of Mary’s (along with his wife, Anne), who had been a vice president of the Washington Post before he was abruptly fired by Ben Bradlee in 1969. The Enquirer story was strangely, even remarkably, well-documented, because Mary Meyer had confided her affair with President Kennedy to her friends, the Truitts. Jim Truitt, a seasoned journalist himself, had kept a record of everything Mary had shared with him. The Enquirer exposé revealed the fact that Mary had been keeping a diary of her affair, as well as the fact that she and the president had smoked marijuana in the First Family’s residence in the White House. It also disclosed, for the first time, the fact that following her death, Mary’s diary was found by her sister, Tony, in Mary’s studio, and that this diary—labeled by Mary’s closest intimates as just an “artist’s sketchbook”—along with “several love letters” from JFK and other “private papers” belonging to Mary, had been given to the CIA’s counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton to be burned, which he never did. The Enquirer story became an overnight bombshell that rocked Washington, already roiling and swirling through post-Watergate congressional hearings on illegal CIA activities, as well as further investigation into the Kennedy assassination.

  Rightly sensing that there might be more to this story, Yale-educated journalist Ron Rosenbaum and his colleague Phillip Nobile went to work interviewing a number of principals close to Mary Meyer, including Jim Angleton and Ben and Tony Bradlee, as well as continuing to draw upon the input of Jim Truitt. In July, several months after the National Enquirer article appeared, Nobile and Rosenbaum published “The Curious Aftermath of JFK’s Best and Brightest Affair” in the investigative weekly magazine New Times. The article has remained a seminal account of what allegedly took place during the immediate aftermath of the murder. The two journalists spent considerable time researching and interviewing their article, finally conceding the story was “immensely complex,” and incomplete, primarily because many of Mary’s friends and relatives “understandably drew back from the public controversy. Many refused all comment, others misled and misspoke.”13

  In their account, based on information gleaned from Jim Angleton himself, Rosenbaum and Nobile contended that the first person to realize that Mary Meyer was dead was Angleton’s wife, Cicely. At some point during the afternoon of October 12, Cicely Angleton allegedly heard a radio bulletin about a murder on the C & O canal towpath. It is not known what level of detail the bulletin included—perhaps only that the victim was a middle-aged white female—but the location of the murder seemed enough to supposedly cause Cicely to fear the worst for her friend, who she kne
w was in the habit of daily walks on the towpath. In response to the broadcast, Cicely reportedly called her husband, the forty-six-year-old counterintelligence chief at the CIA. Jim Angleton was in “a big conference at CIA headquarters” when his wife’s urgent call reached him. He was said to have been irritated by the interruption and told her that he thought her fear was a “silly fantasy.” Reminding her of their plans to attend a poetry reading with Mary Meyer that same evening, he dismissed her paranoia and hung up.14

  More than three decades later, Cicely Angleton would be the only close woman friend of Mary Meyer willing to talk with author Nina Burleigh, whose book, A Very Private Woman, was published in 1998. In interviews with Burleigh, it appeared that Cicely never mentioned the alleged radio bulletin on the day of Mary’s murder—nor her alleged panicked call to her husband at CIA headquarters.2 Simply incomprehensible was that Ms. Angleton might have forgotten such a detail, and that Burleigh—who acknowledged Rosenbaum’s groundbreaking work—would not have asked her about it. “News of the murdered woman on the towpath traveled fast in white Washington,” Burleigh wrote in A Very Private Woman. “And some of Mary’s friends suspected immediately the victim might be their friend.”15 Other than Cicely Angleton, the so-called friends that Burleigh referred to were never identified. In addition, it also appears that Cicely Angleton may have revealed another layer of her husband’s deceit, which her three children would inadvertently make public after their mother’s death in the fall of 2011.

  Even more perplexing, and certainly no less disturbing, was Ben Bradlee’s account of who first learned the tragic news about Mary Meyer. More than thirty years after her murder, and twenty years after being interviewed by Rosenbaum and Nobile (to whom he never revealed the following event), Bradlee finally offered his own answer to the question of who first learned about the murder. According to Bradlee, it was he.