Peter Janney - Marys Mosaic

Copyright 2012 by Peter Janney

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61608-708-1

Printed in the United States of America

by
Dick Russell

E ARLY IN 1976, about six months after I began probing into the Kennedy assassination for the Village Voice, an article caught my attention inof all placesthe National Enquirer. The weekly tabloid was not generally known for its investigative veracity, but this particular story was thoroughly documented. The subject was Mary Pinchot Meyer, a Washington socialite whod been shot twice and murdered while walking near the Potomac River on October 12, 1964. Since the originally accused assailant had been acquitted, the identity of her killer remained unknown. Publicly, so did the identity of her lover, until the Enquirer story alleged that for almost two years before his assassination on November 22, 1963, Mary Meyer had been having an affair with President John F. Kennedy.

The Enquirer recountedand this would soon be corroborated in other periodicalsthat Mary had kept a diary. The weekend after her death, a small group of people were said to have gathered at her Georgetown home in search of it. Cord Meyer, her ex-husband and a high official in the CIA, was there. So was James Angleton, head of the CIAs counterintelligence division, and his wife, Cicely, a close friend of Marys. Also present was Tony Bradlee, Marys sister and the wife of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

The story went that none of them could locate Marys diary and that her sister had later found it inside a locked steel box containing dozens of letters, including some from the slain president Kennedy. Bradlee had then turned the box over to Angleton, who took the material to CIA headquarters. James Truitt, a journalist for Newsweek and another friend of the Meyers, said hed received a letter from Angleton saying, As to the diary and related papers, I burned them.

For more than twenty years, Angleton had been a spooks spook who roamed the Agency corridors looking to ferret out penetrations by the Soviet Union. Then in 1974, a new CIA director, William Colby, leaked word to the media that Angleton had also been in charge of Operation Chaos, a domestic intelligence-gathering program that far exceeded the CIAs original charter. Angleton was forced to resign. Not long thereafter, he began meeting with journalists for the first time, obviously intent on getting his side of certain stories on the record.

I was one of those journalists, although I never really understood why Angleton chose to wine and dine me on three occasions at his customary meeting place, Washingtons Army and Navy Club. After all, the Village Voice hardly seemed like his cup of tea. And I did not disguise the fact I was looking into a probable conspiracy in the death of President Kennedy. Indeed, the first time we met, late on a mid-December afternoon in 1975 in the plush club lounge, I gave him one of my Voice articles to leaf through. Angleton lit a cigarette, took a sip of his martini, and said, The subject is a far more complex one than reflected in your article.

After the assassination, Angletons counterintelligence branch had been assigned as the CIAs direct liaison to the Warren Commission, of which former CIA director Allen Dulles was a member. I wondered, why Angletons office? Because we had the research facilities, knew the mechanisms of the KGB and foreign intelligence, Angleton replied quickly. We knew every assassination in history, knew more about the sophistication of the Cuban DGI, that type of thing. Pretty obviously, he was trying to steer my thoughts toward possible foreign involvement. Angleton dismissed the rumors that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been an American agent as completely false and continued: Unless one knows the dossiers that are in Moscow and Cuba, there can be no ultimate determination. Several times over the course of our get-togethers, he would raise the specter of the KGBs Department 13, which specialized in what those in the trade called wet affairs (assassinations).

Angleton was one of the strangest men I ever met: tall, bespectacled, stoop-shouldered, with his appearance calling to mind the image of an ostrich whose head seemed, despite itself, to be peering out at the world after a lifetime buried in the sand. But what secrets was he willing now to unearth, and what was his motivation? Was he still, in fact, covering someones trackseven, perhaps, his own? In April 1976, we met for the second time, and one of the first things I asked him about was the Enquirers revelatory piece about Mary Meyer and her diary. Angleton gazed out the window for a long moment. Then he replied that he had been acting in a private capacity for the family, and in no way for the CIA, which he hastened to add had nothing to do with her death. He went on to relate a fascinating, even occult, story.

Angleton and his wife had planned to go out to dinner and a show with Mary Meyer that October evening in 1964. When news came over the radio that someone had been killed in a park not far from where she lived, Cicely Angleton had a premonition that it was Mary. So that night, they drove over to her house, but found it completely dark. A grim foreboding grew stronger in Angletons wife. Angleton said hed called Meyers answering service, which at first simply said that she wasnt in. But when Angleton explained they had a date with her, and that his wife was hysterical in the car, he was told of Meyers death.

The entire time Angleton was relating this, I noticed that he was digging his fingers deeper and deeper into the wooden arm of the comfortable chair in the Army and Navy Club.

I have puzzled over that moment for many years. Over the course of time, I read Timothy Learys memoir, which only added to the mystery of Mary Meyer. He maintained that hed turned her on to LSD, that she may even have taken a trip with President Kennedy, and that shed called Leary the day after the assassination indicating that he was changing too fast; they couldnt control him anymore. They clearly implied that JFK had been assassinated by elements within our own government.

Now, with Peter Janneys remarkable book Marys Mosaic, the questions that long haunted me have been largely answered. Now I see how Angleton had been trying to bend the truth, and why. Not only about Mary Meyer, but about who killed Kennedy, which all but certainly involved the same element of individuals.

Those questions had long haunted Janney as well, and in a deeply personal way. For, as a child growing up in close proximity to the Meyer family home in McLean, Virginia, one of the Meyer boys had been his best friend. Peter was himself the son of a high-level CIA official, Wistar Janney. When that son set out on his many-year quest to ascertain who was behind the death of his best friends motherand how this may have been related to the assassination of President Kennedythe journey was one with many surprising, and heart-wrenching, twists and turns. In some ways, this book reads like a murder mystery, but ultimately it is more like a Greek tragedy: one that does not spare the Homer of this saga, Peter Janney himself.