by Peter Janney
A veiled form of the clue had actually been in public view for years, since 1980 in fact, but I hadn’t noticed it then, or even when it appeared more dramatically in 1995. That February morning, I realized the “master key” was in Ben Bradlee’s 1995 memoir, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. There, having waited more than thirty years, Bradlee revealed that the person who had first alerted him to his sister-in-law’s demise on the day of her murder had been none other than my father, Wistar Janney: “My friend Wistar Janney called to ask if I had been listening to the radio. It was just after lunch, and of course I had not. Next he asked if I knew where Mary was, and of course I didn’t. Someone had been murdered on the towpath, he said, and from the radio description it sounded like Mary.”50
The reader may recall in an earlier chapter the mention of the telephone call that Ben Bradlee received “just after lunch” from his CIA friend. The truth was, Bradlee never revealed that his “friend” Wistar Janney was a high-level career CIA officer in this passage.51 This had been the very first moment, Bradlee claimed, when he had learned that something might have happened to his sister-in-law, Mary Meyer. His next sentence reads: “I raced home.”
My father, the reader will also recall, had been a career officer of the CIA since 1949, almost from the Agency’s inception. While not officially titled in clandestine services or the agency’s covert Directorate of Plans, his responsibilities had moved him through any number of different directorates in the Agency during the 1950s and 1960s, including the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), as it was named at the time, and then the newer directorate Science and Technology (S&T).
What time of day did “just after lunch” actually represent? “Probably sometime after two o’clock, two-thirty, somewhere in that region or so,” Bradlee said, in an interview for this book in 2007.52 That, of course, was the time frame when the coroner had arrived (2:00 P.M.) at the murder scene and had pronounced the victim dead (2:05 P.M.). Her identity was still unknown. Ray Crump, it will be remembered, was just leaving the murder scene in handcuffs on his way to police homicide headquarters.53 The only thing left to do for the “operation” was to establish the victim’s identity. The terrible, lingering question, its stench still as foul today as it was on the afternoon of Mary’s murder, was how much did Ben Bradlee really know about what was actually taking place? And when did he first know it?
How uncannily convenient that Wistar Janney just happened to be “listening to the radio” in his CIA office, where he allegedly heard a “radio description” about a murder that had just taken place on the canal. And of course the very first thought that popped into his mind was that it had to be Mary Meyer. For what possible reason would Wistar Janney think that an unidentified murder victim was Mary Meyer? Furthermore, Mary’s outspoken, disapproving comments against the CIA not only drew resentment and outright hostility from other CIA wives, it also infuriated men like my father, whose blood boiled at the slightest criticism of his beloved CIA from anyone. Why would Wistar Janney, a trusted friend of Cord Meyer’s, have been thinking about Mary Meyer that day (or any other day)? Was it possible that his call to Ben Bradlee “just after lunch” was designed not only to notify him of the event, but begin the final piece of the “operation”—establish the identity of the murder victim?
Everything else had been completed. Mary Meyer had been successfully assassinated. The patsy, Ray Crump, had been arrested and was in custody. A conveniently placed eyewitness had identified Crump, standing over the victim just seconds after the fatal second gunshot. The media would soon proclaim him guilty in the public mind. “William L. Mitchell” would show up at police headquarters the next day to reinforce the Wiggins eyewitness account. Crump was about to be convicted in the media in a matter of hours. Game, set, and match.
At the Janney family home during the evening of Mary’s murder, a bit of veiled intrigue was occurring. Away at boarding school that fall, I was unaware of what took place. However, my younger brother, Christopher, fourteen at the time, was living at home. During the course of my research, I asked him to recollect what happened that evening. Christopher recalled that during dinner there had been absolutely no mention of Mary Meyer’s murder. But sometime after dinner, “it had to be quarter to eight, if not eight, Dad was sitting at his desk in the den paying bills,” he said, “listening to music, when the phone rang on his desk.” Christopher was in his bedroom nearby with his door open doing homework. Our mother, he remembered, was in the master bedroom, most likely either reading or working at her desk.
“Dad picked up the phone in the den,” said Christopher. The next thing he remembered was hearing our mother, hysterically crying out, “Oh no! Oh no!” He rushed into the den, wanting to know what happened.
“Mary Meyer has been shot,” he remembered our father saying. Christopher further recollected it had been “the police” who had called our father “because they couldn’t reach Cord, so Dad was next on the list, something like that.” Both parents were upset, Christopher recalled. “Dad was more calm. Mom was more hysterical, but that was the first they’d heard about it.”54
During the seven-year period I worked on this book, my mother volunteered on two separate occasions—and with no prompting from me—her own recollections of that evening. I made a point of not leading her in any direction; I just listened and let her talk. On both occasions, she distinctly remembered the phone call that evening. “That was the first we’d heard about it,” she said repeatedly.
Shortly after “the police” phone call that evening, my father and Steuart Pittman (who had been married to Mary’s sister, Tony, before Ben Bradlee, and who remained close to Mary’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer), drove to National Airport to pick up Cord upon his return from New York.
Had the telephone call to Wistar Janney that evening come from “the police,” or from someone from CIA coordinating the operation? Since Wistar answered the call, it was his assertion alone. What was clear was that it was time to create another illusion: the grieving ex-husband, Cord Meyer, needed the appearance of being comforted.
Recall another extremely critical detail: Sometime during the afternoon of Mary’s murder, after calling Ben Bradlee, Wistar Janney had called Cord Meyer in New York, informing him of what had occurred. Feigning surprise and incredulity in his 1980 book, Facing Reality, Cord acknowledged it had indeed been his friend Wistar who had called him that afternoon: “In October of 1964, I was in New York City attending a meeting when I received a call from an old friend, Wistar Janney. As gently as he could, he broke the news that Mary had been found dead on the tow path along the canal that borders the Potomac, apparently murdered that afternoon by an unknown assailant. To my incredulous questions, he assured me that there could be no mistake. I flew back to Washington immediately to learn all that there was to know … Mary’s friends had identified her body.”55
Once again, “the cat was out of the bag”—as early as 1980: Wistar Janney had known, during the afternoon of the murder, the identity of the ‘unidentified’ murder victim. Yet he had played ignorant when he arrived home to his family, and said nothing until the mystery phone call took place. Cord Meyer, like Bradlee fifteen years later, would conveniently omit the fact in the previous description that his “old friend, Wistar Janney,” was, like himself, a high-level CIA official.
How could my father have known anything whatsoever about Mary Meyer’s death that day, unless, of course, he had been involved? How had he been able to inform both Ben Bradlee and Cord Meyer about it hours before the police had identified the victim? Recall that Mary’s identity hadn’t been established officially until Ben Bradlee identified her in the D.C. morgue, “sometime after six o’clock in the evening,” in the company of Sergeant Sam Wallace of the Metropolitan Police Department. Given the facts established, the only logical explanation was that Wistar Janney was part of the CIA operation to “terminate” Mary Pinchot Meyer, as was Cord Meyer himself, although peripherally and indirectly.
Yet Bradlee’s 1995 revelation of the phone call from Wistar Janney was, and still is, potentially more damaging because his entire memoir account contradicts his 1965 trial testimony. Furthermore, had it been revealed at the trial that CIA official Wistar Janney had called Bradlee to inform him of Mary’s death “just after lunch”—in other words, less than two hours after the murder took place, with Mary’s identity still unknown to police—attorney Dovey Roundtree might have nailed Bradlee as a possible accessory to murder. The trial would have been over as soon as it had begun.
Still another lingering question was whether the prosecution at any time knew about either of Wistar Janney’s calls—to Cord Meyer or to Ben Bradlee. If prosecuting attorney Alfred Hantman knew and withheld that information, he could have been disbarred for suborning perjury. The courtroom proceedings would have been exposed as nothing but a sham (as some believed they had been all along), engineered to convict Ray Crump as part of a greater cover-up, not only of Mary Meyer’s assassination, but of President Kennedy’s as well.
Finally, a more obvious reason that both Cord Meyer and Ben Bradlee felt it safe to reveal their respective calls from Wistar Janney was simply this: By 1980, Wistar Janney was dead; he died suddenly in January 1979 of a heart attack while playing squash with his friend Jack Oliver, just after lunch at the Metropolitan Club in Washington.
And so, on the evening of Mary’s murder, Wistar Janney feigned his entire reaction to his wife and youngest son. Six weeks later, home from boarding school for Thanksgiving, I would sit at our family dinner table and listen to my mother reveal the murder of Mary Meyer earlier that fall. During her explanation, some part of me would also observe my father vacantly staring off into space. It would take more than forty years to finally realize that it had been his ghostly, eerie silence that evening that had so deeply haunted my psyche.
In the post-Watergate era of the late 1970s, the CIA had experienced a slow walk through hell. The Agency was in tatters, its reputation in shambles. As it was, the CIA feared annihilation in the Church Committee hearings, though ultimately, thanks to the machinations of Richard Helms, it had managed to fend off the ultimate, well-deserved verdict for having instigated America’s first and only coup d’état: President Kennedy’s assassination and its subsequent cover-up.
To make matters worse for Wistar Janney, investigative reporting was fast becoming a career choice for talented young journalists. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, under the ironic tutelage of Ben Bradlee and Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, had raised the bar. The Post’s Watergate exposés had made the prospect of journalism glamorous again. Revealing “deep politics” and “secret history” was becoming a national obsession. Cord Meyer’s 1980 memoir, Facing Reality, would reveal Wistar’s knowledge of Mary’s identity long before the police knew. How long would it take before some hotshot journalist would actually read and study the Crump trial transcript, only to then connect the dots buried in Ben Bradlee’s testimony, and possibly persuade Bradlee to reveal Wistar’s call to him that day before Mary’s body was even cold? Or would it be Seymour Hersh himself—already having sacked the venerable CIA sacred cow James Jesus Angleton in 1975—who would finally bring down the hammer on Wistar’s head? Perhaps Wistar thought a graceful, grand exit from the play of life would spare everyone—never realizing that eventually, one way or another, the sins of the father would be visited upon the son.
During the last two years of his life, Wistar Janney was living his own private version of hell. His beloved Agency had fallen into disrepute, and with it the reputation of many of those who had been there at the beginning. Retirement at age sixty loomed ominously on the horizon, and he wasn’t at all happy about it, nor did he have any substantive plans as to how he might occupy himself. Even a doctoral graduate student in clinical psychology such as myself could see he was intermittently agitated, still drinking heavily, sneaking cigarettes whenever he could. His depression, coupled with an ongoing heart condition and no regular exercise, created an ideal prescription for an acute, made-toorder coronary event.
What, indeed, had Wistar Janney been thinking that dreary winter day in January 1979 at the Metropolitan Club? After eating his typical high-caloric, saturated-fat lunch, accompanied by a generous side order of martinis, Wistar went upstairs and played his predictably aggressive game of squash. It was, as the Beatles song lyric echoed, “a ticket to ride,” but one with no return.
13
How It Went Down: The Anatomy of a CIA Assassination – Part II
He was a brilliant tactician who had the patience to cultivate orchids as a hobby. He was the master of manipulation who cultivated evidence. Opening people’s mail—that was his program, collecting their pictures and diaries—this is what James Jesus Angleton did.
When I put on my conspiracy cap and muse about who were the powerful men that are ultimately responsible for JFK’s assassination, be they Mafia bosses or corporate bosses or whoever they were, I cannot envision a plan that did not have designed into its very fabric a failsafe mechanism to neutralize the intelligence and security apparatus and insure that there would be no real investigation. Whoever they were, their reach extended into this apparatus to someone who knew its workings so well that he could design a plot that could do this.
My pick is James Jesus Angleton for who he was, who he knew, and because [Lee Harvey] Oswald was his creature from cradle to grave.
—Professor John M. Newman
Historian and author of Oswald and the CIA1
COMFORTED BY HIS CIA colleague Richard Helms and his close friend Jim Angleton, Cord Meyer had wept openly at Mary’s funeral. His former wife, the love of his life and the mother of his three children, had again departed, this time forever. The finality had to have evoked a myriad of emotions for Cord. Sixteen years later, in his book Facing Reality, Cord starkly concluded the following: “I was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by a single individual and that she had been killed in her struggle to escape.” Cord then proceeded to insist that in spite of unspecified “journalistic speculation that Mary’s death was the result of some complicated Communist plot,” he was absolutely sure there “was no truth whatever to these stories” and “never suspected the tragedy of having any other explanation than the one the metropolitan police reached after careful investigation of all the evidence.”2
Cord’s defense of the official story was nothing less than a ploy—a deflection away from the stubborn facts that have forever haunted this case and remained unexplained until now. It was no coincidence he was out of town on the day of Mary’s murder. His absence had to have been part of the operation, designed to create an appearance of innocence for Cord. Removing him physically from Washington had diverted any suspicion of his involvement. If Mary confronted Cord with her accusations of CIA involvement in Kennedy’s assassination after she had read through the Warren Report—as Leo Damore maintained from having read her diary—Cord’s complicity would have been inevitable. How could one of the highest-ranking CIA covert operatives not know about such an undertaking? Indeed, E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession—that Cord was part of the ‘mastermind’ behind Dallas—might have contained some kernel of truth. Yet there would never be proof, at best only sc
ant evidence—except possibly for the contents of Mary’s diary.
Cord Meyer died in the spring of 2001. To my knowledge, after the release of his book Facing Reality in 1980, he never said anything further publicly regarding the death of his former wife. Two years later, however, Cord’s former research assistant and Meyer family friend Carol Delaney was quoted in C. David Heymann’s book The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club as saying the following: “Mr. Meyer didn’t for a minute think that Ray Crump had murdered his wife or that it had been an attempted rape. But being an Agency man, he couldn’t very well accuse the CIA of the crime, although the murder had all the markings of an in-house rubout.”3 The statement was breathtaking, particularly coming from someone so close to Cord. The only question was, had Ms. Delaney actually said it?
Provocative as it was, the statement was never confirmed by Carol Delaney on the record. Yet in the last seven years, I’ve seen nothing indicating that she ever repudiated it. When I first questioned Ms. Delaney in 2004, she wouldn’t give me an answer. Instead, she immediately called Cord’s widow, Starke Meyer, informing her of the book project I was undertaking. Starke then took it upon herself to “sound the alarm,” calling Mary Meyer’s sons, Quentin and Mark, as well as other members of the Pinchot-Meyer clan, even calling my mother, not only to complain (“What does he think he’s doing?”), but to urge everyone to remain silent. The attempted stonewalling replicated author Nina Burleigh’s experience when she first began her own research for A Very Private Woman in the mid-1990s. The CIA’s community of former operatives, their wives and families, secretaries and research assistants, adhered to a Mafia-like code of silence. To challenge their version of events was to call into question the entire edifice of the secretive house of cards within which they lived.
