by Peter Janney
Six years after my first attempt to interview Ms. Delaney, I called her again in 2010, asking her a second time to confirm or deny her account of Cord Meyer’s statements, attributed in Heymann’s book. Hostile, Ms. Delaney wanted to know, “Are you a friend of the Meyer family?” “Yes,” I said, “I’ve known the family for more than fifty-five years.” But she still wouldn’t answer the question. “Why don’t you send me an email, and I’ll think about it,” she finally said, then abruptly hung up. Her statement was just code for cowardice; she never said anything further, at least not to me.4
The other Cord Meyer tidbit in Heymann’s undocumented book was what the author alleged Cord himself had said to him shortly before his death. Heymann claims he managed to sneak into Cord’s nursing home to ask him about Mary’s murder—specifically, who Cord thought had committed “such a heinous crime”? According to Heymann, Cord “hissed … the same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”5 However titillating the statement, Heymann’s credibility has been seriously called into question over the years.6 Visiting his New York residence, I gently inquired whether he had taped his interview with Cord. He hadn’t.7 When I finally confronted him, he became defensive and insulting. Several days later he left me a voice mail, saying, “I’m beginning to think you’re working for the CIA …”8
It is perhaps inevitable, given Jim Angleton’s ubiquitous CIA presence, that my journey should reach some finality with him. So overpowering was his influence that after his unceremonious dismissal by CIA director William Colby in 1974, two of Angleton’s closest comrades conspired to preserve his reputation and reign by gathering up his files and cultivating sympathetic writers to rehabilitate his tattered legacy. In so doing, they set in motion a complex chain of events that shone the bright light in unexpected ways upon some of the most significant questions surrounding Mary Meyer’s murder. That chain of events bears the most careful scrutiny, not because it is conclusive in and of itself, but because, in the aggregate, and viewed in context of other statements and documented facts, it moves us ever closer to the horrifying truth.
The chief architect of the mission to burnish Angleton’s controversial career was one of the Agency’s most formidable covert action specialists, Robert T. Crowley. A Chicago-born West Pointer who’d served in Army intelligence during World War II in the Pacific, Crowley joined the Agency at its inception and rose quickly through the ranks despite the fact that he lacked the Ivy League pedigree of most of his associates. As assistant deputy director for operations, he was second in command in the clandestine services directorate until his retirement in the mid-1980s. Nicknamed “the Crow,” he was one of the tallest men to ever to work at the Agency, and his career was legendary. Crowley was the chief go-to guy in the CIA’s liaison with multinational corporations—the largest of which was International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT)—which the Agency often used as fronts for moving large amounts of money to fund international covert operations. Intimately involved with the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1973, Crowley had earned the highest regard from his colleagues.
In Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA (1992), author David Wise referred to Crowley as “an iconoclast, and a man of great wisdom with a gift for metaphor.”9 Within the Agency, and particularly within covert operations and counterintelligence activities, mutual loyalty and trust among operatives were always the gold standard of conduct. In evaluating personnel for any covert operation, Crowley’s quintessential question, a reference to the intricate teamwork required in deep-sea diving, inevitably came down to this: “Would I want this guy on my air hose at two hundred feet?”10
Two Crowley colleagues who most definitely wanted “the Crow” on their “air hose” were William R. Corson and the already well-known, mercurial James Jesus (“Jim”) Angleton, the CIA’s notorious counterintelligence chief. Bob Crowley and Bill Corson were “bosom buddies,” the closest of friends and colleagues, and together coauthored a book in 1985 entitled The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power. While Bill Corson was never officially titled in the Agency, his close ties to both Crowley and Angleton, as well as his many covert operations for U.S. intelligence, were well known. Corson was a brilliant strategist, an intellectual powerhouse in his own right, and a man who didn’t want to be ultimately tied to anybody or anything. On the verge of being promoted to brigadier general in 1968, Corson had literally walked away in disgust from his Marine Corps career by doing the unthinkable: exposing in his book The Betrayal President Lyndon Johnson’s White House lunacy and the venality of America’s entire Vietnam War effort.11 As Cold War intelligence historian Fletcher Prouty once quipped to author Joseph Trento, “For Bill Corson, the CIA was support staff. He needed to know; they didn’t.”12
“The Three Musketeers”—Corson, Crowley, and Angleton—thus formed a unique phalanx of “intelligence intelligentsia,” and while it might not have been exactly “all for one” or “one for all,” their commitment and loyalty to each other and, of course, the Agency were legendary, as was their alcohol consumption. When William Colby finally sacked Angleton in 1974, it was Corson and Crowley who devised a plan to secretly squirrel away Angleton’s most highly classified, top secret files out of Langley. The cache allegedly included Mary Meyer’s real diary.
Toward the end of their careers, the Three Musketeers appeared to have decided it was time for the world to know their true history, or at least some of it. It was Bill Corson who initially started to court newspaper reporter Joseph Trento in 1976.6 Forcing Trento to jump through any number of hoops to prove his trust, Corson one day told him it was time he met Jim Angleton. “You’ve got to know him before he drinks and smokes himself to death,” announced Corson, who was far along the same path himself. A few days later, Trento met Angleton for the first time. Sometime after Bob Crowley’s CIA retirement, it would be Angleton who closed the circle and introduced Trento to Crowley. Once a lone pyramid protecting America’s most dastardly deeds, the Musketeers had chosen a scribe, or so it appeared. They were going to reveal to Joe Trento some of “the secret history” of the CIA.
Somewhat reluctantly, Bob Crowley went along with the plan, at least for a while. Crowley, it turns out, may not have trusted Trento in the end. After Angleton died in the spring of 1987, Corson and Crowley began volunteering to Trento some of Angleton’s most cherished secrets, files they had kept “in trust for their old friend.” The deal was that nothing could be published until 1997, ten years after Angleton’s death. When Bill Corson died in 2000, Joe Trento managed to come “into possession of all of his files, tapes, and writings.” When Bob Crowley passed away several months later that same year, “his extensive files—and those of James Angleton—were also turned over to me,” wrote Trento in the preface of his 2001 book, The Secret History of the CIA.13
But very possibly not everything was turned over. At least six years before his death and well before the onset of his final health crisis, Crowley had become a bit disenchanted with Trento. According to this account, Crowley had decided he wanted the truth to come out about the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination. Whether this had Angleton’s and Corson’s blessing wasn’t entirely known. For years, Corson had met regularly and held court with a group of his former students from the Naval Academy. The group enjoyed long lunch discussions together, coupled with a generous intake of alcohol. One favorite topic was the Kennedy assassination, and the flap that Oliver Stone’s film JFK had been creating since its release in 1991. J. Michael Kelly, a former student of Corson’s at Annapolis, gave two interviews for this book in which he stated definitively that Corson had told him in 1998 that he had in his possession, in his safe-deposit box, the critical Crowley document that outlined the CIA’s engineering of the Kennedy assassination “from soup to nuts.”14
Michael Kelly clearly recalled he had asked Corson in 1998, “Bill, don’t you think Oliver Stone did a disservice to America by implicating the Armed Forc
es and the Joint Chiefs of Staff?” Corson was already into his second lunch martini. At that moment, Corson reached over, said Kelly, and slapped him on the arm, saying, “Michael, I’ll tell you, you’ve got my permission when I die to take my attorney, who is Plato Cacheris, go to my safe-deposit box with Plato—he’ll let you in there—and you’ll find out who really killed John Kennedy.”15
Two other former students of Corson’s were aware of this exchange and vouched for it: Roger Charles, who had assisted me in the identification of William L. Mitchell, and who became the executor of Corson’s estate; and a senior FBI agent named Tom Kimmel, the grandson of four-star Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.16
J. Michael Kelly never forgot what Corson had told him. Within two months after Corson’s death, Kelly contacted Corson’s executor, Roger Charles, whom he knew well from their days together at Annapolis. They discussed the matter and agreed the next step was to approach Corson’s attorney, Plato Cacheris, whose office was in the same building as Joseph Trento. Cacheris had been a well-known figure in Washington power circles for years, first defending Nixon attorney general John Mitchell of Watergate fame, then representing Fawn Hall, who worked with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra scandal. His clients included the infamous CIA spy Aldrich Ames, as well as the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, both of whom were able to avoid the death penalty, thanks to Cacheris’s legal prowess. Of course, in exchange, both had to reveal everything they had given the Soviets, before Cacheris brokered the deal.
So Kelly got together with Cacheris over lunch at a restaurant called Morton’s on a Thursday. He told Cacheris what Corson had said to him, and that he had Corson’s permission to open his safe-deposit box, all of which was supported by Corson’s executor, Roger Charles. Cacheris seemed to play along with the request at the time, said Kelly, and was actually enthusiastic about it. He told Kelly he would get back to him on the Monday of the following week. But when Cacheris called, he abruptly stepped back, saying something to the effect that he didn’t have “written authorization” to allow Kelly to open Corson’s safe-deposit box. It would never happen. Kelly has since always suspected that after his lunch with Cacheris, the lawyer had contacted Joe Trento. No doubt Trento regarded whatever was in Corson’s safe-deposit box as a part of Corson’s papers that had been legally bequeathed to him. Thus Trento was able to secure the contents of Corson’s safe-deposit box. According to Kelly, Trento knew the contents were highly incriminating of the CIA.
Though Plato Cacheris would admit he knew Bill Corson, in an interview for this book he said he didn’t think he had ever “represented him.” He wouldn’t say for sure whether he remembered having lunch with J. Michael Kelly, but he affirmed unequivocally that he and Joe Trento never went into Bill Corson’s safe-deposit box. Despite writing a blurb for the back of Trento’s book Secret History, Cacheris said he only knew Trento “very superficially,” though he admitted they did work in the same building at one time.17 However, Roger Charles, Corson’s executor, was adamant that “Plato was Bill’s attorney during the The Betrayal flap. It was definitely a good move on Bill’s part to use Plato, who beat the military brass and LBJ down when they were after Bill’s scalp.” Furthermore, Bill Corson’s son, Chris, was sure “he [Plato Cacheris] was dad’s attorney” during his parents’ divorce. Chris then conferred with his mother and asked her what she recalled about Plato Cacheris. “Plato Cacheris was dad’s attorney,” said Chris to Roger Charles after talking with his mother. “He settled the divorce in 1966 in Washington, D.C. and [it] was stated in court that he [Cacheris] was also dad’s retained attorney for matters above and beyond that.”18
For whatever reason, it seems that Cacheris wanted to distance himself not only from Bill Corson and Joe Trento, but also from having facilitated Trento’s procurement of the contents of Corson’s safe-deposit box. The importance of this event will soon become clear.
In the end, it was not Joe Trento who precipitated Bob Crowley’s most critical revelations of Agency secrets, but a relatively obscure, unknown writer calling himself Gregory Douglas. “Douglas”—whose real name is Peter Stahl and whose email alias is sometimes “Walter Storch”—captured the attention of both Corson and Crowley in 1995, at which point the Crowley saga took a critical turn. It was Corson’s former student, senior FBI agent Tom Kimmel, who brought to his mentor’s attention Douglas’s recently published Gestapo Chief: The 1948 Interrogation of Heinrich Müller (volume 1, 1995). Gregory Douglas, it appeared, had a vast knowledge of Nazi Germany, including the Gestapo, an abbreviation of the German word for “Secret State Police,” of which Heinrich Müller had been director during World War II. In the first volume of Gestapo Chief, Douglas documented the fact that Heinrich Müller and a number of other high-level Nazi officials, scientists, and the like had all become covert CIA assets at the end of World War II. They were smuggled into the United States under new identities to join America’s Cold War against the Soviets. The undertaking was finally revealed as the CIA’s Operation Paperclip and has been well documented since, although there is still debate as to whether Heinrich Müller was part of it. Douglas claims that he met Müller in California and the two became instant friends, with Müller eventually giving Douglas some of his personal diaries.
For some reason, both Corson and Crowley were immediately smitten with the Douglas book; they believed the Douglas account was accurate, and they thought the author had been courageous for stepping forward to write such an account. In fact, they were so enamored that they contacted him and began a collegial relationship. Two years later, in 1997, Corson and Crowley, the two biggest intelligence titans of the Cold War, each contributed a short, highly favorable foreword to Douglas’s second volume of what would become a trilogy about Müller and his life in the United States. Crowley in particular, it seemed, gave Douglas an unqualified stamp of approval: “Where possible, each revelation has been challenged and examined using all available resources to include: individual military records, released US communication intercepts and captured documents. To date, the Müller documents have met every challenge.”19
In early 1996, Bob Crowley and Gregory Douglas began an intense telephone relationship that lasted nearly three years.20 Often speaking with Douglas in substantial detail as frequently as twice a week, Crowley allegedly started to reveal intimate details about people and operations he had been involved with during his CIA career, including the Kennedy assassination. Intrigued by what he was hearing, Douglas allegedly began, apparently unbeknownst to Crowley, tape-recording and transcribing many of the calls.
By the end of 1996 Crowley and Douglas, who had still not met face-to-face, finally scheduled a luncheon for Monday, December 9, 1996, at the University Club of Washington. Tom Kimmel and Bill Corson were also invited to the lunch. Crowley’s plan, according to Douglas, was that he and Douglas were first going to meet alone before noon. Crowley wanted to personally deliver to Douglas a collection of CIA documents relating to the Kennedy assassination, in particular a lengthy document that Crowley himself had written and typed, entitled “Operation Zipper.” This document, reprinted in Douglas’s 2002 book, Regicide, was Crowley’s “personal insurance policy, should someone start to point the finger at him,” said Gregory Douglas in 2007 in an interview for this book. “He would take down everyone if this should happen. He considered the Zipper document to be his most important paper.”21 Douglas was also aware that Crowley had made a copy of the document for Bill Corson, and that Corson was keeping it in his safe-deposit box.
Unfortunately, the day before the University Club luncheon, Crowley was hospitalized with an acute case of pneumonia. Crowley’s wife Emily recalled, “Bob was so looking forward to meeting this guy, but he never did. He felt very bad about it.”22 Douglas showed up in Washington anyway and had lunch with Bill Corson and Tom Kimmel, a fact Kimmel subsequently confirmed.23
The Crowley-Douglas tel
ephone relationship resumed in earnest shortly thereafter, and Douglas allegedly continued to record their conversations, transcribing each of them. But Douglas has never produced any of the actual recordings on which Crowley’s voice might be confirmed. This, among other things—including Douglas’s history of shady dealings and trouble with the law—has led to skepticism regarding the journalistic credibility of “Gregory Douglas,” now considered a pariah within the JFK assassination research community. But it turns out that Gregory Douglas’s material, which precisely matches the sworn testimony of principals in the diary caper, may in fact hold several “master keys.”
Throughout the mid- to late 1990s, Crowley’s evolving admiration of Douglas continued to baffle Tom Kimmel, the senior FBI man. “The guy [Gregory Douglas, a.k.a. Peter Stahl] was obviously enormously bright,” Kimmel recalled in 2007. “But I could never understand why Corson and Crowley embraced Stahl so unequivocally. I just couldn’t understand it because Corson and Crowley were introspective, very accomplished intelligence officers, especially Crowley—not one to go off half-cocked at all. They didn’t raise any objections or doubts, and that was not the way they approached anything. I mean, these guys doubted everything and everybody, but not Stahl. I could never figure that out.”24
Pressured by his family in late 1997, Bob Crowley would again be admitted to the hospital for exploratory surgery for lung cancer. Again, as legend had it, fearing he wouldn’t come out alive, he packed up two footlockers of documents and sent it all by mail to Gregory Douglas before going to the hospital. The deal was that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. Crowley, unfortunately, came back from the hospital with severe dementia, remained mostly bedridden, and died in October 2000.
Shortly after receiving the cache of Crowley documents, Douglas mentioned the transaction to Tom Kimmel. Increasingly concerned by the national security implications, and knowing something of the enormity of Crowley’s involvement in CIA covert operations, Kimmel started pressuring Douglas to reveal what Crowley had given him. But Douglas wouldn’t break his agreement with Crowley.
