by Paul Wolfe
Everything seems to come down to the Bay of Pigs. That’s what I told V. The Bay of Pigs is like a giant force field emanating from a swamp in Cuba. He looked at me without comment.
APRIL 5
The Company has crept into the veins of power, the plodding machinery of government replaced by the silvery apparatus of assassination. Jack was ready to dismantle the whole stinking house of lies. Only I know this footnote to a colossal tragedy.
APRIL 6
Only I know that an infinitesimally small particle of loss among the infinity of loss in Dallas was a skinny boy’s love for a girl.
APRIL 12
V and I met at the Zoological Park yesterday, inside the Reptile House. When we dream of horror, we dream in reptile. Lizards and snakes! You are innocent! You are simply victims of our metaphors! And then it all came pouring out.
I told V once again that I was being followed. My phone was bugged. My house had been entered, my possessions rearranged for no apparent reason. There was no longer safe ground for me to walk on. My ex-husband had removed whatever protection I had. Even Katharine Graham had betrayed my mission to transform the world with LSD. But I promised V that I would tell the tale, our dangerous tale, however I could.
V listened without reaction; there is that in him which I will never reach. He pulled the document from his pocket. “Pontchartrain is a lake in southern Louisiana. The CIA set up a guerilla training camp there, an assassination school for Cuban exiles. The Pontchartrain training camp is overseen by the two men listed below. FERR is David Ferrie—a vicious character, an anti-Castro zealot with long ties to the Marcello family in New Orleans. He’s connected to every part of the mob-connected Cuban exile underground. GUYB is Guy Banister, a private detective and former FBI man who works with Ferrie. These are rabid, right-wing operatives headquartered in New Orleans and up to their asses in CIA anti-Castro operations.”
“Who is CORSICA LSART?”
“I don’t know.”
“HELM?”
“That’s obvious. Richard Helms. The Kahuna. He heads all the Cuban efforts at the Agency.”
“And M?”
“I don’t know.”
I watched a crocodile undulate and ooze through murky green water, separated from the air of Washington, DC, by nothing more than a thin pane of glass.
APRIL 18
I am making a point of not describing V. I am making a point of allowing him to remain a cipher to history. Whatever may become of me, whatever may become of this diary, his journey will be faceless and anonymous, even as he removed the ciphers from an organization chart and rendered them human for history. I am hoping he was wrong about Operation Cleanse.
We met for the last time on a little bridge in Dumbarton Oaks Park. “I’ve got LSART for you,” he said. “It stands for Lucien Sarti.”
“And who is Lucien Sarti?”
V was quiet, looking down at the water. “An assassin and drug runner for the Corsican mafia,” he said finally.
“The Corsican mafia?”
“William Harvey was booted out of the Company by Bobby Kennedy during the missile crisis. But Harvey ended up in Rome, not hell, where Bobby would have preferred he go. While he was based at the Rome bureau of the CIA, Harvey made connections to the Italian mob through his friend Johnny Rosselli. And the Italian mob connected him to the Corsican mafia, based out of Marseilles. The Corsicans are very useful as assassins. They’re legendarily ruthless, barely civilized, in fact, and far enough removed from the fray to remain invisible. Bill Harvey uses Lucien Sarti for his ‘wet work.’”
I listened to the words “wet work” and suddenly heard the gurgling waters churning below the stone bridge. How did a Vassar girl from Grey Towers end up on a bridge, conversing about wet work and Corsican assassins rather than Emily Dickinson and Egyptian archaeology?
V handed me back the document. He didn’t need it anymore. I looked once more at the name on top: JM/RESET. “It’s obvious to me,” I said. “They’re planning another invasion of Cuba. They’re planning another assassination attempt on Castro. This is the team. This is the organization chart. How do we stop them?”
V looked at me without emotion. As if he wasn’t even hearing me. “I thought we could stop it. The Big Event.”
“The Big Event?”
“Dallas. That’s why I started talking to you in the first place. MKUltra was just a place to start. We thought if the secrets started pouring out, we could gum up the works. Confuse them. You know the principle that if even so much as one detail shifts, you can alter history? We failed.”
“We failed. And you think you’re on their list?”
“I know I am.”
I hugged him. It was all I could think of to do. He stood frozen, motionless, as I wrapped my arms around him and placed my cheek against his. Yet another son I was powerless to save.
“Why don’t you just leave?” I asked him.
“Where would I go?”
“You could see the world.”
“I’ve seen it.”
He looked at me as if his personal nature had ceased to exist. Then he walked off, and I was alone again on a bridge.
APRIL 24
This morning, I found a message taped to the back of my shutter.
M stands for Cord Meyer.
Now the picture is complete.
Veritas
MAY 4
I dreamed of Jack. We were on a sailboat heading far, far out to sea. He was so confident and so happy, turning the wheel and pulling those ropes—I’m not sure of the nautical terms, and we were never on a boat together. But the waves grew bigger, and I said we should turn back. He said he didn’t know which way was back and kept grinning. Suddenly my ghost sister Rosamond appeared: she was sitting with her long legs stretched out in front of her, sipping a glass of wine and relishing the wind that splayed her hair back against the sky. I noticed her bare feet, so long and so beautiful, much more beautiful than mine, and she wasn’t scared. We’re never getting back to land! I cried, but she just smiled and said, Jack is a sailor. A wave pounded the side of the boat and drenched us, but Jack kept steering, and I woke up.
SEPTEMBER 1
If you are reading this, Anne, and I am now composed of the cells of memory rather than the cells of biology, please let my sons know that in her own peculiar way, their mother fought in the first fusillades of the battle to restore America. Perhaps they should know that I was a woman alone in that fight, if you care to add that. That the forces of war could not allow the struggle for peace because, as my father, Amos, said when I was very little, war is the business of business. So I will offer up what I know in these pages of high-quality French paper, with my Waterman fountain pen recording the facts and my heart stilled to courage.
SEPTEMBER 7
This morning I passed Packer’s on my way down to the towpath. As I passed, Kirkland Jennings was standing in front of the entrance, staring out at me, just smoking a cigarette, just staring. Why was he there? I nodded ever so slightly, and he nodded back, just as slightly, and just kept looking.
SEPTEMBER 13
Once, under the purple skies of Mexico, I sat by a campfire and heard Timothy Leary say that emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Emotions, the driver of our race, the subject behind the subject of every work of literature, every song on the hit parade, the quivering sensations that we honor, suppress, analyze in therapy sessions, divulge in secret tête-à-têtes, and reveal publicly when our children walk onto stages in caps and gowns, the whole fucking morass and motion of emotions, they’re all nothing but biochemical secretions meant to serve the body in states of emergency.
An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac, Tim said, and it has come to pass. I am no longer a dignified daughter of the WASP ascendancy. I am a blind, crazed maniac. I have abandoned the starry realms of psychedelic freedom, and I am back in the rented room of my biochemical secretions. I am an angry woman, taking my place in a long lineage of angry women.
They killed the love of my life and covered up the deed. An accidental document—and was it really an accident?—says they are at it again, another operation to assassinate Fidel Castro. And V has disappeared. Where is V? I want to talk to him one more time, need to talk to him one more time; who else can I talk to safely? I left a message behind my shutter, then another one in the mailbox, but he hasn’t answered. It is two weeks now. The biochemicals will no longer allow me to remain silent, will no longer allow me to play the role of Georgetown wife, or Georgetown ex-wife, shoving the next drink down my throat and pretending not to know what my husband is up to. Or ex-husband. I call Cord’s office repeatedly, and Darlene hands me over to Cord’s assistant, Ray, who sends me back to Darlene. I paint triangles, circles, squares, as the vortex of forces closes in, but my own ex-husband at Central Intelligence will not take my calls.
I walked with Lorraine Cooper along M Street and said I could not get through to Cord; he would not answer calls, and I was backtracking in my commitment to world peace because I wished nothing more than to strangle him until there was no breath left in his body. Lorraine is a woman, which means that, quietly and calmly, she knows things. With a strange strength in her dark eyes, she said, “Darling, Cord attends the waltz group every Thursday night at the Sulgrave Club near Dupont Circle.” Then she smiled.
Cord is now a ballroom dancer as well as an assassination planner.
SEPTEMBER 18
The revelation of the waltz group detonated in me, and I arrived at the Sulgrave Club last night at eight o’clock, unsuitably dressed. I stormed the sumptuous Beaux-Arts mansion near Dupont Circle in the little beige silk dress of my great-grandmother. Unsuccessful once at a White House banquet, it would be a fashion faux pas a second time at the Sulgrave Club, but I hadn’t come to dance. And what exactly is the dress code for assassins?
I crossed the lobby, crushing in my hand a slip of paper covered with strange names. I pushed open the doors and burst into the ballroom, plunging into a hot, sweaty wedding cake. White moldings dripped like frosting up and down the cream-colored walls and continued in swirls across the ceiling. Heavy purple drapes shielded the glittering ballroom from sunlight, and a gold chandelier the size of my painting studio hovered below the ceiling. Beneath crystal lights, men in white tie and tails waltzed with women in fairy-tale gowns, all to the music of a sweating Viennese orchestra. And there was Cord among the dancers, heavy and slow of foot, dragging a skinny woman across the floor. Her skeletal face was frozen in the grimace of a smile, the smile that corpses hold out to eternity, and she appeared desperate in her attempt to follow Cord’s lead. Cord, certain of a grace and panache that was not there, seemed barely to notice his emaciated partner. He appeared drunk, his cummerbund askew, and I walked up to him and read from the crushed paper in my hand. “Cord, is your friend E. Howard Hunt here?”
He turned to me, shocked.
“Oh, Howard?” I called the name sweetly, gazing around the ballroom. “I know you’re covert, so maybe you’re here and I don’t see you?”
Cord spun around and froze.
“How about William Harvey, Cord? Is your friend William Harvey here? You know, Harvey the assassin? Harvey! I mean William! Are you waltzing around this room somewhere, or are you back in Cuba?”
Cord began quivering, his sense of dignity woefully fragile at the best of times, his toleration for embarrassment nonexistent, while I have never been implanted with the gene for embarrassment. We will all be vacating the stage soon enough. Cord screamed for me to leave, but I was just getting started. I thought of John Coltrane blowing into his saxophone, all that air unrestrained, and I yelled: “Is your friend David Atlee Phillips here, Cord, honey? Mr. David Atlee Phillips, your man in Mexico. Didn’t he handle a client of yours, a young man named—what was his name again? Yes: Lee Harvey Oswald! And what about your friend Santo Trafficante! Your paisan! Santo, are you hiding out somewhere in this room?”
I didn’t care that the gowned and white-tailed of Washington had stopped waltzing and stood staring at me. Or that Marge Babbington, president of the waltz group, was bounding over to throttle me. Her drunk husband had once slavered all over me at a party in Georgetown—he had fat wet lips that were disgusting—so I was not at all impressed with Marge Babbington.
“Mary, you must not be feeling well,” she said. “You must leave this place now. We’re just a dance group.”
“Cord, honey! Is your friend Johnny Rosselli here? Does he like to dance, too, or is it only murder that gets him off? You and Johnny Rosselli and William Harvey, the three of you are all planning outings. I don’t mean outings of spies—that’s a funny play on words, isn’t it?—I mean outings like picnics, right? Hey, wait a minute, let’s not forget about David Morales. What’s an outing without David Morales? Where are you, David Morales, Bill Harvey’s boy? You’re a damn good shot, they say!”
Two gorillas in tuxedos tried to rip the arms from my sockets as they dragged me across the floor, leaving Cord standing there, watching me disappear backward from his evening and his life. I continued to shout, ‘Is your friend Carlos Marcello here? Your business partner? You know, head of the Mafia in New Orleans? You’re both Skull and Bones, right? Of course, his experience of skull and bones is a little more literal than yours, right, Cord? And what about V, Cord, what about V? The young fellow from your office. What did you do to V?”
My last picture of Cord was of a very small man with only one eye and a falling cummerbund, and I wondered how this brilliant young boy I once married could have accumulated so much evil as to be part, when he wasn’t waltzing, of a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro.
SEPTEMBER 27
Entropy is the natural bent of the universe. All explodes, all descends to chaos: that’s the law of thermodynamics, as explained in an article I read in Scientific American. Entropy must be the explanation for the Warren Commission report, a report that would be more accurately entitled “Fictions from an Assassination.” It has arrived in bookstores with the smell of fresh paper and ink and the promise that each new book brings, that of a world made more vivid or at least more comprehensible. It is how Jack must have felt when the fresh copy of Ivanhoe was brought to his room on his tenth birthday, inscribed to him by his mother and father in the handwriting of a servant. He still keeps that copy of Ivanhoe on his shelf in the White House. He showed it to me proudly one night; we kissed tenderly, and I said he was my hero, my Ivanhoe, making an assumption, since I am unfamiliar with the plot.
But the book I hold is no book of heroes. The book I just purchased from the Savile bookstore was not written by heroes. Its purpose is to conceal rather than reveal, printed up in the millions and dispatched to bookstores everywhere. Perhaps only the Bible will exceed it in sales. Yes, the Warren Commission report was released today.
SEPTEMBER 29
The Group is abandoned. I will finish that novel someday. Now I am underlining the Warren report to mad death, dog-earing its pages, scribbling on it, defacing it with questions. With accusations. I write notes in the margins, notes of a madwoman, desperate to return the report back down the vortex from which it arose.
What about the shots from the front? What about the mob and the Cubans and Lucien Sarti and William Harvey and E. Howard Hunt and Carlos Marcello and Jack Ruby and David Ferrie? You don’t think I know? Once again I stand against the grain of the universe, confronting the narrative they have constructed to replace truth, to replace the facts as they occurred to a man whom no one will ever know I loved.
Earl Warren lent his name, but Allen Dulles lent his shame. He is behind this. How could this have come to pass, a man who hated Jack, a man whom Jack fired, a man who continued to control the apparatus of secret intelligence, taking control of the history of Jack’s death? It is a fable and a cover-up. I stand against the grain and wonder how many grains they will allow me to stand against before they revoke my license. I will pursue facts, and there are consequences to a fact-based existence.
As it further states in Scientific American, information is a measure of order in the universe rescued from randomness. I will pursue information.
SEPTEMBER 30
I am an insomniac. I am a citizen of the nation of sleepless, the ones whose minds do not release them even as the moon releases the day. I carry dread to the sheets. One more night when consciousness will not spare me. My brain is a jukebox, and I have no control over the quarters.
And now this report has come to deny me sleep once again, to deny me—how did Edgar Allan Poe put it?—“surcease of sorrow.” I read the Warren report all evening, a substitute nightmare, and once again it feels like they are entering my home, once again they are moving things around, but this time through a book.
Last night I dressed and walked the hill down to Clyde’s on M Street. It was one thirty in the morning and people were still gathered at the old oak bar, forgotten refugees from some Dante’s hell, adjusting their neurochemistry with strong alcohol.
I ordered a bourbon and noticed Lukas Vorst, an attorney for the Justice Department, and moved to the stool beside him, imagining he sleeps no more than I do. “Have you read it?” I asked, with no need to elucidate.
“The Warren Commission report?” he asked. “I mean, the Warren Omission report?”
I nodded. “Yes, one of the great works of fiction this year.”
Chazz, the bartender, set down the bourbon and looked at me, it seemed, mournfully. His life was an immersion in smoke and darkness and secrets; the bags under his eyes suddenly seemed like pouches of secrets, the lies of Washington entering the skin below his eyes and dying there. Was he warning me subliminally not to speak? Was I turning permanently paranoid?
“Not really an investigation at all. They knew the outcome they wanted and built a case to support it, ignoring an encyclopedia of evidence that goes contrary to their conclusion. James Jesus Angleton is front and center, of course.”
“He always is,” I said of my sons’ godfather. “He wasn’t even an official member of the commission.”