by Peter Janney
Within seventy-two hours after the events in Dallas (and one day after the president’s funeral), President Lyndon Johnson signed a new National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM 273) that initiated the escalation of America’s involvement in Vietnam. The reader will recall from the previous chapter that President Kennedy had created a strategy for America’s extrication from Southeast Asia, which was formalized by the then top secret policy document National Security Action Memorandum 263 (NSAM 263), issued on October 11, 1963, ordering the removal of a thousand troops before the end of 1963, and the rest by the end of 1965.69 On the afternoon of Kennedy’s funeral, however, Johnson met in a closed-door session with Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA director John McCone, and Vietnam ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge (whom President Kennedy had already planned to fire). “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” Johnson declared. “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”70 A month later at a White House Christmas Eve reception, meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Johnson told them, “Just let me get elected [in 1964], and then you can have your war.”71
As 1964 unfolded, Mary, along with the rest of the country, would witness a horrific sea change taking shape. In January, the Joint Chiefs sent their new president a memo urging him to formally increase the U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia, as well as to consider a bombing campaign against North Vietnam, ostensibly as a strategy to win the war more quickly. Johnson willingly complied. By year’s end, there would be more than twenty-three thousand troops in the region, well more than the sixteen thousand advisers present when Kennedy was assassinated. To get the bombing campaign against North Vietnam started, something else was needed: the perception by congressional leaders that it was warranted.
The so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident became the pretext to do just that—a contrived event during a stormy night in August in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. On August 2, the destroyer USS Maddox, then operating within the framework of a program of joint U.S.–South Vietnamese covert operations against North Vietnam—the kind of covert actions encouraged and justified by NSAM 273—was attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats that were reacting to these covert operations by defending the territorial integrity of North Vietnam. This first of two reported events in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam was a light and inconclusive skirmish that inflicted no serious damage on the USS Maddox.
Two days later, the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy reported a second socalled torpedo boat attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. Following initial confusion on board the two ships, as well as in Washington, D.C., it was later ascertained that the event reported on August 4 was a “phantom attack,” a nonevent in which the reporting vessels had mistaken low-lying clouds on their radar scopes during bad weather for enemy warships, and in which jumpy U.S. Navy sonarmen had imagined that they heard as many as nine torpedoes being launched against them by the “enemy.” President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara exaggerated the nature of the second “attack,” and falsely claimed U.S. Navy vessels, innocently operating on the high seas, had been attacked by Communist forces. This nefarious plan worked like a charm, to their everlasting discredit, and ultimately to America’s misfortune. A manipulated Congress, once again led to view the reported incident as an escalation in the global Cold War between East and West, responded with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—a blank check for President Johnson’s unlimited proliferation of a hot war in Vietnam. Sadly, a nonevent had been used as a casus belli to justify the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from a so-called technical advisory effort into a U.S.-led shooting war. With the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, President Kennedy’s 1963 policy of disengagement and withdrawal from Vietnam had irrevocably been overturned, just eight months after his assassination. Until its repeal in May 1970, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution provided the “legal” basis for all subsequent escalation and continuation of the Vietnam War by both President Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon.
Where was Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara—the ally who had so steadfastly stood with Jack Kennedy the previous October to formulate the end of such a senseless military debacle? What had happened to the brilliant, loyal tactician of Kennedy’s dream of peace in Southeast Asia? And why was he, McNamara, now walking obsequiously behind Johnson in his macho warmongering? McNamara, even in later life, when he realized it had all been so very wrong, would never answer that question. In an 2006 interview, author David Talbot confronted McNamara with the most singularly important question ever articulated regarding the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964 and thereafter: “Why did he [McNamara] allow himself to become the brains of the war under LBJ after plotting with JFK to disengage from it?”
Despite a superficial public “mea culpa,” Robert McNamara would forever avoid any real accountability or responsibility. His answer to Talbot—”Oh, I don’t want to talk about that”72—revealed once again his patronizing chief executive arrogance, as if the deaths of 3.8 million Vietnamese,73 as well as the deaths of more than 58,000 American combat soldiers (and an estimated 200,000 subsequent suicides of Vietnam veterans5) had no meaning in his equation. Such were “the best and the brightest” during the Cold War era.
That year, Mary could not have helped but witness McNamara’s betrayal of Kennedy’s peace agenda—a betrayal that permitted Lyndon Johnson’s reckless, destructive escalation to occur. It must have left her utterly demoralized to observe the White House, now inhabited by a ruthless, criminal cowboy, who, after a few years of being hammered by journalists—”Why were we in Vietnam?”—finally gave them his answer. At a private meeting with reporters, according to presidential historian Robert Dallek, President Lyndon Johnson offered his rejoinder: He casually “unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ and declared, ‘This is why!’”74 It must have been so deeply reassuring for all those who would at some point meet their death in Vietnam, as well as for the ones who had already made “the ultimate sacrifice,” to finally comprehend the glorious, principled cause for which they were fighting and dying.
Whatever her suspicions before the release of the Warren Report, Mary’s views had apparently made her a person of interest to someone. Author Nina Burleigh documented the fact that Mary’s “maid found the doors to the garden open on a January [1964] morning while Mary and her sons were upstairs asleep” in their house on Thirty-Fourth Street in Georgetown. Reportedly, Mary filed a report with the police. When she returned from being away the following summer, wrote Burleigh, Mary was sure someone had been in her house. There was also an incident in which Mary found a very heavy door ajar in her basement, “a door neither she nor her sons could open without help.” According to one Burleigh source, who remained anonymous, on more than one occasion Mary had wondered aloud, “What are they looking for in my house?” The incidents escalated throughout 1964. “She [Mary] did say to me she was scared about seeing somebody in her house,” said Mary’s friend Elizabeth Eisenstein in her interview with Burleigh. “She thought she had seen somebody leaving as she walked in. She was frightened.”75
Even more revealing was Burleigh’s interview with CIA wife Joanne (“Joan”) Bross. Her husband, John, had been a longtime CIA covert action specialist, coming out of the OS, another of Allen Dulles’s “dream boys.” With a Harvard blue-blooded pedigree, John Bross eventually rose to become deputy director of the Agency in 1963, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1971. The Brosses were close to all the upper-level CIA honchos, including the Angletons and the Meyers. Joan Bross and Mary were close enough that Mary, who dreaded CIA social functions and parties, would call Joan for information. “She always asked me how many people were going to be there,” recalled Joan. “She was thinking about serious things and hated small talk, I think. She was asking big questions such as, ‘Why are we here?’” Joan Bross also indicated that Jim Angleton had boasted to her that he had bugged not only Mary Meyer’s telephone, but h
er bedroom as well. How long this had been going on, or when it had started, was never revealed, perhaps never known. According to Bross, the wiretaps could have begun as early as 1961 when Kennedy first took office, implying that Angleton may have known of Kennedy’s interest in Mary for some time.76 Without question, Angleton, and every other high-level CIA official, had been aware of Mary’s undisguised contempt for the Agency. From the very beginning of Cord’s CIA tenure, she had increasingly made no secret of her loathing of Allen Dulles; after her divorce, she would have been regarded as even more dangerous.
That spymaster Jim Angleton had the means to accomplish whatever he wanted was never in question. “Angleton ran everything, controlled everything in the CIA,” said Joe Shimon, who served in the White House officially as a “Washington Police Inspector,” but revealed to his daughter he was also working undercover for the CIA, and was their principal liaison to Mafia boss Johnny Roselli.77 If Mary was using her telephone to discuss any of her suspicions or research into Jack’s downfall, as well as what she had come to discover and was recording in her diary, Jim Angleton knew about it.
According to Leo Damore, Angleton’s “Mary spying” escalated into a fullblown surveillance operation at the time the Warren Report was released in late September 1964. She had bought the paperback version, said Damore, and read it carefully, becoming further enraged at the cover-up taking place. According to Damore, her copy had notes in the margins, with a great many page corners turned over for future reference.78
Someone else—a man who never knew Leo Damore or his research—independently came to a nearly identical conclusion just before Christmas of 1992: former CIA contract operative Robert D. Morrow, whose 1992 book First Hand Knowledge largely went unnoticed when it first appeared. Damore, in fact, never mentioned Morrow, nor was there any reference to him in Damore’s notes. Several well-regarded assassination researchers had already documented Morrow’s long-standing role as an undercover Agency employee in the cesspool of the CIA-funded anti-Castro Cuban community that was determined to destabilize Castro’s government. Morrow also claimed he became part of the plot to assassinate Kennedy, though some of Morrow’s claims have also been questioned, even discredited. Nonetheless, Morrow remained, until the time of his death, a widely cited source in the assassination controversy, often consulted as an authority on various CIA operations. One of the best books ever written about the Kennedy assassination, Dick Russell’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, relied on several of Morrow’s accounts, which were corroborated by other books, one of which was author Noel Twyman’s book Bloody Treason (1997).
In First Hand Knowledge, Robert Morrow provides a chilling account of an event that took place prior to Mary Meyer’s murder. Shortly after the Warren Report was released, Morrow claimed, he was urgently called to Washington by his CIA boss, Marshall Diggs, who told Morrow, “There is a very prominent lady here in Washington who knows too much about the Company [the CIA], its Cuban operations, and more specifically about the President’s assassination.” Diggs went on to say the woman’s talking might open up a lot of trouble for the CIA’s anti-Cuban counterfeit money operation, an effort that Morrow himself had been running, and which Bobby Kennedy had shut down before his brother’s assassination. Not understanding the significance of Diggs’s comment, Morrow reminded his boss that the Warren Commission hadn’t found out about the counterfeiting operation, and he therefore thought himself safe.
“I wish his brother thought that,” Diggs reportedly said.
“You mean RFK?”
“Yes, RFK,” exclaimed Diggs. “Now damn it, listen. As I said, there’s a certain lady in town who has an inside track to Langley, and most importantly, to Bobby. Fortunately, an intimate friend of mine is one of her best friends.” It was at that point Robert Morrow learned the identity of the woman that Diggs was referring to: Mary Meyer.79
Morrow’s counterfeit money operation had been run by an anti-Castro Cuban by the name of Mario Kohly, the son of the former Cuban ambassador to Spain under the Batista regime before Castro took power in 1959. At that time, Kohly came to the United States to set up an organization known as the Cuban Liberators. He was introduced to Marshall Diggs, who eventually recruited Morrow in 1960 as a CIA contract agent. Shortly after his recruitment, Morrow met with high-level CIA covert operative Tracy Barnes, who asked Morrow to become Mario Kohly’s CIA contact. According to one account, if the Bay of Pigs operation had been successful, the CIA was going to replace Fidel Castro as the president of Cuba with Mario Kohly.
“To get to the point,” Diggs told Morrow in 1964, “[Mary] Meyer claimed to my friend that she positively knew that [CIA] Agency-affiliated Cuban exiles and the Mafia were responsible for killing John Kennedy. Knowing of my association with [Mario] Kohly, my friend immediately called me.” Diggs urged Morrow to contact Kohly and tell him what was happening.
“So, what do I tell Kohly?” Morrow asked Diggs.
“Tell him what I told you—that as soon as the Meyer woman has the whole story, Robert Kennedy is going to be told that CIA-affiliated Cuban exiles and the Mafia killed his brother. Tell him, for God’s sake, to make sure he has us covered, or Miami and New Orleans will be down the drain, and maybe us with them.” Readers will recall, however, that Bobby Kennedy had already suspected the involvement of a CIA anti-Castro element in his brother’s demise, but he had shared that observation with just a few of his closest, trusted advisers and with members of his family.80
“My God, Marshall, you’re serious?” Morrow exclaimed to Diggs, realizing that his old boss was intimating that Mary Meyer should be eliminated immediately.
“Believe it. Even Tracy [Barnes] is concerned. Even though he could sanction it, he wouldn’t dare put a hit on her [Mary Meyer]. At least not now.”
Several days later, Robert Morrow met with Mario Kohly in New York and, as Diggs had instructed, relayed to Kohly the emerging problem of Mary Meyer’s knowledge.
“Just tell Diggs I’ll take care of the matter,” said Kohly to Morrow.81
A week later, Mary Meyer was dead. Robert Morrow immediately came to suspect his meeting with Kohly had triggered Mary Meyer’s death, and that Mario Kohly had set it all up. The entire incident sent Morrow into despair.
While author Nina Burleigh chose to dismiss Morrow’s account as “rife with holes”—never identifying what exactly those “holes” were82—further inquiry suggests his account of Mary Meyer’s death may well have been reliable. Author John Williams, professor emeritus of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin, befriended Robert Morrow in 1993, and remained close to him right up until his death in 1998. Since 2009, he has been at work on a book about Morrow, based on the four years he spent with him.83
According to John Williams, in an interview for this book, he was with Morrow at his house when Nina Burleigh called to interview him for her A Very Private Woman. Williams recalled his impressions of the conversation. He didn’t think Morrow and Burleigh hit it off particularly well, largely because Morrow was still protective of what he knew, and “he found Burleigh’s attitude devious.”84 Morrow had already shared with Williams his distress over Mary Meyer’s death. His visit with Mario Kohly right before Mary’s death had become the catalyst for her murder. “Bob was feeling deep shame around having told Kohly what he did about Mary Meyer,” said Williams in 2004. At one point, Williams told Morrow’s wife, Jeanne, that he thought Bob was more upset over Mary Meyer’s death than he was with the entire conspiracy to assassinate the president; his wife concurred.85
“Few people understand the kind of pressure Morrow felt during the Warren Commission,” Williams maintained. “He told me he thought about committing suicide on more than one occasion. If the Warren Commission ever got beyond Oswald, it would only be a short time before Morrow himself would be implicated, even though he wasn’t in Dallas that day. But what really impressed me was the intensity of guilt he was feeling about Mary Meyer’s death.”
John Williams had spent four years interviewing Morrow, combing everything Morrow had written and researched. The two talked intimately about all of Morrow’s undercover assignments. Morrow was not only a CIA contract agent, but for more than two years he had also been the right-hand man of Tracy Barnes, one of the CIA’s most senior covert action specialists. They had started working together early in 1961, right after Marshall Diggs had recruited Morrow into the Agency.
“After Dallas, Bob wanted to know what had exactly happened,” said Williams. “He got a lot of information from Tracy Barnes, and others in the Agency, but couldn’t get beyond Tracy to see who was involved in Mary Meyer’s murder, and why it had occurred. For years, Morrow had been riddled with guilt over what he told Kohly and the fact that Mario Kohly had said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’”86 Whether it was his guilt or just an obsessive need to know, Morrow continued to investigate Mary Meyer’s death. According to Williams, he “was constantly sifting through volumes of information.”
Shortly before his death, Bob Morrow’s ongoing research, as well as what Williams called “Morrow’s wonderful, intuitive sense” had changed his (Morrow’s) mind about who had murdered Mary Meyer. “Toward the end,” said Williams, “Bob told me more and more, ‘I don’t think Kohly did it, I think Angleton did it.’”87
