by Peter Janney
2 When first developed by Kodak in Dallas the day of the assassination, the film was still in its unslit, 16-mm wide “double 8” home movie film format, as received from the factory and as loaded into the camera. After three contact prints (copies) were struck at another lab in Dallas, the Kodak lab then slit (or split) the original and all three copies, as was normal practice, and joined the two halves of each of them together, thereby marrying the A and B sides, with a splice so that each film could then be played on a home 8-mm projector.
3 According to Dino Brugioni, the term ‘white glove’ denoted NPIC’s highest sensitivity level used while working on all original film.
4 The 16-mm Zapruder film delivered to Homer McMahon by “Bill Smith” was an unslit double 8 home movie which McMahon believed to be the original film. He vividly and independently recalled during his first (telephonic) ARRB interview that this 16-mm wide film (from which he made enlargements of individual frames for briefing boards) contained opposing 8-mm wide image strips going in opposite directions, the precise characteristics of an original film right out of the camera before the A and B sides had been slit to 8-mm width and spliced together. That is, what had been a slit, 8-mm wide original film on Saturday night (November 23) when it had been delivered to Dino Brugioni, had been magically transformed back into an unslit, 16-mm wide double 8 “original” film 24 hours later, when it was delivered to Homer McMahon. The clear implication here is that the courier from the Hawkeye facility delivered to McMahon an altered film, masquerading as a camera original. Since the film had been altered, it had to be handled by a different group of NPIC employees; therefore at the second NPIC event on Sunday night (November 24), Dino Brugioni, who was the NPIC duty officer in charge that weekend, and his crew were never notified of this event. Instead, Homer McMahon and his assistant Ben Hunter were brought in to handle the altered film, and help create a second set of (sanitized) briefing boards.
5 A retired Veterans Administration doctor recently estimated that the number of Vietnam Veteran suicides was 200,000. The reason the official suicide statistics were so much lower was that in many cases the suicides were documented as accidents, primarily single-car drunk driving accidents and self-inflicted gunshot wounds that were not accompanied by a suicide note or statement. According to this doctor, the underreporting of suicides was primarily an act of kindness to the surviving relatives.
12
How It Went Down: The Anatomy of a CIA Assassination – Part I
Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.
—Abraham Lincoln
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.
He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
WITH NEW ENGLAND blanketed by a winter blizzard in early 2004, I found myself stranded in Santa Monica, California, when my return flight to Boston was canceled. Rescheduling at a local travel agency, I ran into Hollywood actor Peter Graves. Graves, readers may recall, was one of the stars of the 1966 television series Mission Impossible. The show was a fictionalized chronicle of an ultrasecret team of American government agents known as the Impossible Missions Force. Peter Graves played the part of Jim Phelps, the team leader who began each episode selecting a cadre of skilled contract agents to accomplish the assigned clandestine mission. Each week a new episode followed the exploits of the elite Impossible Missions Force as it employed the latest technological gadgets and state-of-the-art disguises in an effort to sabotage unfriendly governments, dictators, crime syndicates—any enemy of American hegemony. The organization that masterminded these covert operations was never revealed, yet a little imagination led to the doorstep of the CIA. So successful was Mission Impossible, it has currently (as of 2011) spawned four blockbuster Hollywood action films starring Tom Cruise.
As Peter Graves and I waited in line, I introduced myself, then started regaling him with how I had watched the show with my father, who had been instantly enamored, never wanting to miss an episode. Mentioning my father’s CIA career, and how he’d been such a fan of Graves’s character, Jim Phelps, I shared with him the memory of one particularly exciting episode, filled with intricate disguises, duplicity, and intrigue. At the end of the episode, my father had abruptly chortled, intriguingly smiling, finally blurting out, “We do it better.”
“I’m not at all surprised,” Peter Graves shot back. “We had several ex-CIA people who worked with the writers for the show. We could never have thought a lot of that stuff up on our own.”
The serendipity of this encounter eluded me for months. For years during my research, the “Rubik’s Cube” of the murder of Mary Meyer had remained impenetrable—until a mysterious linchpin was uncovered and further corroborated. It was only then that I began to understand the ingenious design that had been employed—one that created the illusion of something very different from what had actually occurred.
Throughout the three years Leo Damore spent interviewing attorney Dovey Roundtree, the two were unequivocally convinced that Ray Crump Jr. could never have murdered Mary Pinchot Meyer. The seasoned defense attorney, imbued with an instinctive, gut-level feeling for who people really were—saints and murderers alike—never forgot her impressions upon first meeting Crump. “He was,” Roundtree said in her 2009 autobiography, “incapable of clear communication, incapable of complex thought, incapable of grasping the full weight of his predicament, incapable most of all, of a murder executed with the stealth and precision and forethought of Mary Meyer’s [murder].”1
Yet tow truck driver Henry Wiggins Jr. had, in fact, seen somebody standing over Mary’s corpse within fifteen seconds or so right after the second, final shot rang out. Whoever it was, he might well have been approximately “5 feet 8 inches” in height and weighed “185 pounds.” But it couldn’t have been Ray Crump. Indeed, the most intriguing aspect of Wiggins’s testimony during the trial concerned the appearance, clothes, and demeanor of the man he saw standing over the body. Wiggins had described the color and style of the clothes in some detail—dark trousers, black shoes, a beige-colored, waist-length, zippered jacket, and a dark-plaid brimmed golf cap—all of which matched what Crump had been wearing that day. Prosecutor Alfred Hantman had explicitly asked Wiggins about the appearance of the man he saw standing over the body:
Hantman: Could you tell the court and the jury the state of the jacket at the time you saw it on the individual
who stood over the body of Mary Meyer?
Wiggins: The jacket appeared to be zipped.
Hantman: Did you see the jacket torn in any manner at the time?
Wiggins : I didn’t notice any tear. 2
Nor had Wiggins mentioned seeing any stains—blood or anything else—on the zipped-up, light-colored beige jacket worn by the man who supposedly, just seconds before, had been engaged for more than one minute in a violent, bloody struggle during which the first gunshot, according to the coroner, had produced “a considerable amount of external bleeding.”3 In fact, Wiggins never indicated anything about the man’s appearance being in any way disheveled, given the murder that had just taken place. Neither his demeanor nor his clothes had ever, according to Wiggins’s testimony, indicated the man had been in any struggle just seconds before. His golf cap was perfectly in place; his jacket, clean and zipped.
Also intriguing was the demeanor of the man. Upon looking up and seeing Wiggins staring at him, he was composed and unconcerned—certainly not at all agitated or anxious that Wiggins had spotted him.
Hantman: Now, what, if anything did you see this man do who you say was standing
over a woman on the towpath at that time?
Wiggins: Well, at that time, when I saw him standing over her, he looked up.
Hantman: Looked up where?
Wiggins: Looked up towards the wall of the canal where I was standing.
Hantman: Were you looking directly at him at that p
oint?
Wiggins: I was looking at him.
Hantman: Then what happened?
Wiggins: I ducked down behind the wall at that time, not too long, and I come back up from behind
the wall to see him turning around and shoving something in his pocket. 4
The man then, Wiggins added, “turned around and walked [author’s emphasis] over straight away from the body, down over the hill [embankment].”5 It was as if he wanted Wiggins to see him before he, according to Wiggins, calmly walked away over the embankment. His unflustered demeanor appeared to contrast sharply with that of a trembling, petrified Ray Crump, only because they weren’t the same person.
Nearly thirty years later, in 1992, Leo Damore interviewed Henry Wiggins. The government’s star witness still vividly remembered, Damore said, the man standing over the woman’s body. “He wasn’t afraid,” Wiggins recalled to Damore. “He didn’t appear to be worried that he’d been caught in the act. He looked straight at me.” Ray Crump’s acquittal, however, had come as a surprise to Wiggins. He confided to Damore that he felt “strung along” by the prosecution and had been “used” to present their case. After Wiggins testified, Hantman told him that he “hadn’t done well as a witness.” Wiggins told Damore, “I just told the truth as I saw it. That’s all. The police didn’t do a damn thing to support it.”6
As the interview came to an end, Henry Wiggins proffered one last reflection about what had happened that day. “You know, sometimes I’ve had the feeling I was kinda set up there that morning to see what I saw.”7 It was the kind of remark that wouldn’t have been lost on a crime sleuth—someone like Sherlock Holmes, or Leo Damore.
Almost from the moment Lieutenant William L. Mitchell, USA, had appeared at D.C Metropolitan Police headquarters the day after Mary’s murder, attorney Dovey Roundtree’s suspicions had been aroused. Mitchell told police he not only believed he had passed the murder victim as he ran eastward toward Key Bridge from Fletcher’s Boat House that day, but also that he was sure he had passed a “Negro male” following her. His description of the man and his clothes closely matched Wiggins’s.
In an effort to convict Crump, neither the police nor the prosecution team had bothered to investigate William L. Mitchell’s story. Carefully and methodically during the trial, Mitchell additionally described how he had passed “a couple walking together twice,” as well as another runner, also passed twice, someone that he thought “was a young student … about twenty, wearing bermuda [sic] shorts.”8 Mitchell said he first came upon the couple “on the road leading down to the canal [towpath] near Key Bridge.” Having run out to Fletcher’s Boat House, Mitchell claimed to have passed the couple a second time “half way between Key Bridge and Fletcher’s…. And this time I was running back from Fletcher’s and they were walking West at the time.” Mitchell said he twice passed the other runner “wearing bermuda shorts,” both times “close to Fletcher’s Boat House.” All of this took place, he testified, before he stopped at the westward end of the narrow footbridge to allow the westwardheaded Mary Meyer to cross.9 Nobody, however, had corroborated Mitchell’s story, or ever testified to seeing Mitchell on the canal towpath the day Mary Meyer was murdered.
The reader will recall that police officer Roderick Sylvis, having raced to Fletcher’s Boat House to close off the exit within minutes after the murder, had himself encountered a white couple, “a young man and woman … in their thirties” walking westward about “fifty feet” from Fletcher’s Boat House approximately ten to fifteen minutes after he and his partner, Frank Bignotti, arrived. However, the officers, in a peculiar lapse of procedure, had neglected to get the couple’s names. Moreover, no matter in which direction the “bermuda shorts” runner was headed, at some point he, too, would have run into the murder scene, either before or after the police had arrived. But his identity, like that of the young white couple, would remain unknown. With such an intense, all-encompassing, citywide—even national—media blitz taking place, why hadn’t the “bermuda shorts” runner and the young white couple come forward to police, as William L. Mitchell had? Why hadn’t the police broadcast a request for them to do so?
Throughout their many hours of tape-recorded discussions that began in 1990, both Dovey Roundtree and Leo Damore independently reached the same inevitable conclusion: the personage of William L. Mitchell was highly suspicious. Roundtree had tried in vain to speak with Mitchell before the trial, she told Damore, but he would never return her phone calls. During several years of intense research, Leo Damore did what he did best: doggedly and exhaustively chased down any lead in order to get what he wanted. His signature tenacity took him on a journey that began with Mitchell’s listing in the Department of Defense Telephone Directory [DoD Directory] in the fall of 1964. Upon giving his account to police the day after the murder, William Mitchell said he was stationed at the Pentagon. His listing in the DoD Directory read: “Mitchell Wm L 2nd Lt USA DATCOM BE1035 Pnt.” It included a telephone extension of 79918.10 Mitchell also gave his address as 1500 Arlington Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia—a building known as the Virginian. According to the Arlington telephone directory in 1964, Mitchell lived in apartment 1022, and his telephone number was (703) 522-2872. His name would remain listed until 1968, and then vanish.
During Damore’s extensive search, William L. Mitchell was nowhere to be found. He had left no forwarding address. Neither the directories of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point nor of the Army itself produced any identification or record of any William Mitchell stationed at the Pentagon in 1964. No record was ever located. At the time of Mitchell’s trial appearance, Washington Star reporter Roberta Hornig identified Mitchell as “a Georgetown University mathematics teacher.”11 But no one at Georgetown University could ever locate any record of any “William L. Mitchell” having ever taught there. If Mitchell had been employed by Georgetown University, Damore reasoned, he might have been using a different name, or the record had been intentionally removed.
Sometime in 1992, Damore interviewed former CIA contract analyst David MacMichael, who still lived in the Washington area. The two soon became friends. “Leo wanted to know who this guy [William L. Mitchell] really was,” said MacMichael in 2004 during an interview for this book. He was sure he [Mitchell] had misrepresented himself as to his real identity.” On one occasion, MacMichael recalled, he and Damore drove out to Mitchell’s former address, the apartment building at 1500 Arlington Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia. There, MacMichael confirmed to Damore that the address had been a known “CIA safe house.”12 That observation was further corroborated by another former CIA operative, Donald Deneselya, who added that during his employment at the Agency in the early 1960s, the CIA regularly used faculty positions at Georgetown University as covers for many of its covert operations personnel. That fact was further substantiated by former disaffected Agency veteran Victor Marchetti, whose books—The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence and The Rope Dancer—the CIA had tried to suppress from publication.13 Any trail of Mitchell’s identity or subsequent whereabouts, however, appeared to have vaporized.
Still searching for Mitchell in early 2005, I was introduced to military researcher and investigative journalist Roger Charles. A former lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Charles was a Naval Academy graduate who had been a platoon leader in Vietnam before serving under the late colonel David Hackworth as part of the organization Soldiers for the Truth (now called Stand for the Troops). Early in his journalism career, Roger Charles had fired his first salvo with a Newsweek cover story entitled “Sea of Lies.” The story exposed the Pentagon’s attempted cover-up of the US Vincennes’s downing of an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988. In 2004, Charles had been part of a 60 Minutes II team headed by Dan Rather that aired the first photographs to reveal some of the most unconscionable American military behavior since the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War: the prisoner abuse in Iraq at Abu Ghraib. Charles had been an associate producer for the 60 Minutes II segment, “Abuse at Abu
Ghraib.” He and his colleagues provided the viewing public with a picture of the horrors inflicted by American soldiers on Iraqi prisoners. That year, the segment would win the prestigious Peabody Award.14
Roger Charles had learned his craft under the tutelage of former marine colonel William R. Corson, author of the controversial book The Betrayal. Courageously exposing President Lyndon Johnson’s corrupt, deliberate deception during the Vietnam War in 1968, Corson created a huge crisis that nearly brought him a court-martial. However, had Corson not done what he did, the Vietnam War would undoubtedly have been even further prolonged. Corson went on to write several more books, including The Armies of Ignorance, Widows, and The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power, which he coauthored with Robert T. Crowley, an elite operative in the CIA’s covert action directorate and a close colleague and friend of Jim Angleton’s. (All three individuals will be discussed further in the next chapter.) Not only did Roger Charles become Corson’s protégé and chief research assistant, but a trusted confidant, and eventually the executor of the Corson estate.
With regard to William Mitchell, Roger Charles was asked to review Mitchell’s office listing in the 1964 DoD telephone directory. Through his own channels, he sent an inquiry to the U.S. Army military database in St. Louis for any “William Mitchell” who was stationed at the Pentagon in 1964. There was none. Further examining other Pentagon directories, Charles discovered that Mitchell’s name no longer appeared after the fall 1964 edition. He next investigated the military personnel who were located physically adjacent to Mitchell’s alleged office (BE 1035), creating a list of approximately twenty individuals. Fifteen of those individuals could be verified through their military records, but none of the other five servicemen—Mitchell and four others in adjacent offices—had any military record in any service database. The phantom William L. Mitchell had indeed evaporated into thin air.
