by Peter Janney
In April 1993, shortly after the Mitchell call, Leo Damore returned to Washington and met with his research assistant, Mark O’Blazney, for lunch at the Henley Park Hotel. In 2008, in an interview for this book, Mark O’Blazney and his wife, Tanya, a Georgetown University Russian language instructor, talked about the luncheon. O’Blazney had worked for Damore for more than two years. He, too, had come to the conclusion that whoever William Mitchell was, he had to have been involved in Mary’s murder.
O’Blazney still vividly recalled the April 1993 meeting with Damore. “Leo was very excited that day,” he said. “He told me he’d taped the call with Mitchell. That day at lunch he had the transcription already completed and kept referring to it.” O’Blazney’s wife, though not present at the luncheon, corroborated what Mark had told her later on that after his meeting with Damore.
“Part of Mitchell’s plan,” O’Blazney remembered Damore saying, “was maybe taking Mary down when a low-flying commercial airplane was flying over on its way into National [airport] … something about muffling the sound of gunshots. But I also remember Leo saying Mitchell told him that witnesses were placed at the murder scene. The whole thing was a set-up.”35
“An operation … standard CIA procedure” was what Mitchell, according to Smith’s notes, called the murder of Mary Meyer.36 Mitchell had been assigned sometime in September 1964 to a surveillance team that was monitoring Mary Meyer. At some point—the precise date is unknown—the order was given to “terminate” her. It was to be done in a public place, then made to look like something it wasn’t. From their surveillance, the team knew Mary’s routine of taking walks around noon on the C & O Canal towpath, that she would typically walk out to Fletcher’s Boat House and then return, a distance of about four miles in total. Within that venue, a designated kill zone had to be selected where Mary would be accessible. By choosing an outside location, rather than her home, the planners wanted to create the impression of a wanton, random act of violence, unrelated to Mary’s identity or political connections. It had to be skillfully executed with Mission Impossible precision beyond the intersection of where Canal Road intersected the busier Foxhall Road. The ideal time for such an operation was determined to be a weekday, when the towpath was less frequented. The operation’s planners very likely were prepared to carry out their mission on any number of days, depending on certain variables—including the availability of an appropriate patsy. These were the kind of painstaking calculations and details that were involved in the extensive planning of professional assassinations.
There were any number of challenging factors to control and overcome; any significant mistake or oversight could be disastrous. As little as possible could be left to chance—including the whereabouts that day of Mary’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer. Was it just coincidence Cord would conveniently be out of town in New York on CIA business on the day of his ex-wife’s murder?
The team put into place to conduct this operation likely consisted of at least six to eight operatives, not including the actual architects of the plan itself, or the ancillary adjacent personnel dispatched to monitor and control other important operational details. In addition, in order to execute an operation of this nature, there had to be some kind of command center in the C & O Canal area to coordinate logistics; it would have to include radio communication to and from Mitchell, and his team, on the towpath itself.
The operational plan of “standard CIA procedure,” similar in design to what had taken place in Dallas, albeit on a much smaller scale and within a shorter time sequence, called for a patsy—someone who could be unknowingly and immediately easily framed. Such an operation required the use of disguises and/or costumes, an absolute necessity. No other entity on earth had resources like the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD) under the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. They could do almost anything, and quickly—from preparing lethal poisons that left no trace, to procuring articles of clothing and undetectable disguises on short notice.37
Ray Crump Jr. had been picked up by his girlfriend, Vivian, in her car “very early that morning,” shortly after eight.38 Crump was playing hooky from work. That morning, Crump and Vivian didn’t have enough money for a motel room. Crump had likely been spotted by the CIA team early that morning, as he and Vivian began walking out from the Georgetown entry point of the towpath to some predetermined area he was familiar with from earlier fishing trips to the area. It was still probably two to three hours before the murder would take place. There may have been more than one candidate for patsy the team was monitoring that morning before a decision was made. Eventually, someone was assigned—with a radio—to keep tabs on Crump and his whereabouts. Whoever the designated patsy, the operation would have immediately had to procure clothing similar to what he was wearing. In Crump’s case, that meant generic dark shoes, dark pants, a light-beige-colored Windbreaker and a dark-plaid golf cap—easily and quickly obtainable from the CIA’s TSD personnel, who were likely standing by as support personnel.
A specialized team from the CIA’s TSD had the capability of transforming almost anyone into whatever was called for, including changing someone’s race from white to black if necessary. But there was a problem not even the elite TSD could overcome on such short notice: immediately finding someone on the operational team that day who had a build and stature as slight as Ray Crump’s. So they had to make do with what was available—the man they used for the stand-in, the Ray Crump look-alike, was larger than Crump. That discrepancy would, in the end, create enough reasonable doubt to enable a masterful attorney, Dovey Roundtree, to thwart one of the key elements of the mission: railroading Ray Crump into being convicted for Mary Meyer’s murder, thereby enabling the cover-up.39 And so the man Henry Wiggins witnessed—the Ray Crump look-alike standing over Mary’s body after the second fatal gunshot—was significantly taller and heavier than Ray Crump.
Until Mary exited her studio that morning and started walking toward the canal, Mitchell’s team would not have been green-lighted and alerted to begin positioning themselves. Another member of the surveillance team—again, someone with a radio—had to be assigned to monitor her whereabouts from the moment she left her house and arrived at her studio earlier that morning. When it was clear shortly after noon that she was headed for her daily walk on the canal towpath, all operational parameters would have been initiated.
The mysterious, stalled Nash Rambler had likely already been placed adjacent to the designated kill zone on the canal. The Rambler could have been set up earlier that morning—or several mornings in a row—before the operation was finally given green-lighted-to-go status. At some point the key(s) to the stalled vehicle would be delivered to the Key Bridge Esso station with a request for someone to fix the vehicle. Henry Wiggins was operating the station’s tow truck that morning. “I was sent from the station where I normally work,” testified Henry Wiggins, “to the other Esso station [at Key Bridge] owned by my employer to pick up a man there and go start a disabled vehicle on Canal Road, approximately seven blocks” away.40
Mary’s surveillance likely began three weeks before her death, maybe even longer. The team already would have had a good idea how fast she walked, and approximately how long it would take her to reach the wooden footbridge, a place where the vegetation around the towpath area became denser. Her assassination would eventually take place exactly 637.5 feet west of the footbridge. There were two sets of spotters, Mitchell admitted to Damore, “a couple walking together” and another runner wearing Bermuda shorts, who were clearly tracking Mary’s whereabouts on the towpath and likely communicating by radio to some unknown command center in the area. Mitchell had indicated to Damore in 1993 that there had been more than one spotter during the operation.*
Immediately prior to the murder, Mitchell could not have been running on the towpath; he and the dressed-up Ray Crump look-alike were positioning themselves on standby status. The entire operational was crystallizing—waiting for whoever was going to be servicing the s
talled Nash Rambler to show up (and unknowingly play the role of “witnesses”), and waiting for Mary Meyer to approach the designated kill zone.
Meanwhile, another member of the operational team had to be monitoring the whereabouts of the real Ray Crump and reporting his activity to the command center. The team had to know where Crump was situated and when he and Vivian reached the spot on the Potomac where their tryst would take place. Even if Crump and Vivian had arrived at the towpath entrance in Georgetown as late as 10:30 A.M., that still gave the team close to two hours to set up, orchestrate, and carry out the assassination of Mary Meyer. It had likely been rehearsed many times.
The story Ray Crump told attorney Dovey Roundtree was that he and Vivian had gone to a particular spot on the bank of the Potomac that he was familiar with, having fished there before. They did some drinking, he said, then “fooled around a little,” at which point Ray passed out on some rocks at the water’s edge.41 Disoriented, perhaps a bit intoxicated, Ray slipped into the river, quickly coming to his senses as the cold water engulfed him. He couldn’t swim; he panicked and struggled to climb out, likely tearing his trousers and cutting his hand in the process.
Vivian had disappeared, however, while Ray was passed out from intoxication. Why she had just abandoned Ray was mysterious. Had she been deliberately lured away after Ray had passed out? If Ray was being monitored and set up as a patsy, then Vivian’s mere presence—an alibi for Ray—was an obstacle the operation had to surmount. Was it just serendipity that Vivian decided on her own to walk away when she did? Or had she, in some way, been forced to move out of the area shortly before, or immediately after, the murder—before Ray awoke from his stupor? The terrified Vivian would never testify, even with Ray’s life hanging in the balance. She told Roundtree she feared “being killed by her husband,” should he discover her affair.42 Whether Vivian was more forcibly threatened by something else will probably never be known.
As soon as Henry Wiggins and Bill Branch arrived at approximately 12:20 P.M., the operation to terminate Mary Meyer would have been fully greenlighted by radio communication. Mitchell would have been signaled by radio that the “witnesses”—Wiggins and Branch—were in place. According to Wiggins’s trial testimony, “less than a minute” after his arrival, he heard what “sounded like a woman screaming.” Mary’s screams from the canal lasted “about twenty seconds,” Wiggins said, before the first gunshot rang out.
As Mary walked westward into the predetermined “kill zone,” coordinated with the location of the stalled Nash Rambler, Mitchell would emerge from the embankment area and approach Mary from behind. In a full embrace, pinning Mary’s arms at her side, Mitchell now needed Mary to scream in order to attract the attention of whoever was servicing the Rambler. As a highly trained, skilled assassin, he could have easily, quickly shot Mary before she was even aware of what was occurring. Or he could have picked her off with a high-powered rifle from behind an adjacent tree as she walked by. Why didn’t he? Because Mary’s screaming, her cries for help, were essential to drawing in the witnesses to the ostensibly random, senseless murder taking place—to motivate whoever was attending the stalled vehicle to run across Canal Road and witness the Ray Crump look-alike standing over her body.
Whether Mitchell underestimated Mary’s strength and lost his grip, or whether he let go of her because he expected she would fall to the ground, fatally wounded, after his first shot, isn’t known. But Mary appeared to have broken away and tried to escape over the embankment, finally grabbing a birch tree limb with her saturated, blood-soaked glove in order to steady herself.
That wouldn’t do for Mitchell, or the operational intent of the mission. Mary had to be positioned close, or right next to, the canal itself where the murder scene would be clearly visible to someone looking across from the Canal Road wall. So Mitchell quickly grabbed Mary again and dragged her some twenty-five feet from the embankment to the canal’s edge, where, with a perfectly placed shot under her right shoulder blade angled slightly to the left, he killed her instantly. Also executed with extreme precision was Mitchell’s escape, quickly accomplished by slipping into the woods, as the Ray Crump look-alike rapidly assumed his position, standing over the now slain body of Mary Pinchot Meyer.
Almost immediately after hearing the first gunshot, Wiggins started moving toward the wall of the canal across the street from the stalled vehicle that he and his partner had come to fix. While he was running “diagonally [to the right] across the [Canal] road,” he then recounted, “I heard another shot just as I was reaching the wall of the canal.”43 Peering over the wall and looking to his right on an angle,44 he witnessed the Ray Crump look-alike standing over Mary’s body, dressed as Crump himself had been dressed that day—dark shoes, dark pants, a light-colored windbreaker, and a dark-plaid brimmed golf cap—someone Wiggins would repeatedly describe as having a “medium build” who was about “5 feet 8 inches” and weighed “185 pounds.”
After Mitchell twice shot and killed Mary, the upper part of his body and/or clothes would have almost certainly been spattered in Mary’s blood. Asked by Dovey Roundtree during his trial testimony the color of the clothing he was wearing that day, Mitchell responded, “I had on a sweat suit…. The sweat shirt, I believe, was red, the sweat pants were blue, and the track shoes were red and white.”45 He may well have been dressed in that manner. The red sweatshirt would have to some degree camouflaged the bloodstains. His likely escape was through the Foundry Underpass, the nearest exit out of the area. As a highly trained assassin from the “Army Special Forces kill teams,” according to Albarelli’s longtime source, Mitchell would have had little difficulty evading detection by police.
While Mitchell had no trouble eluding police, the reader will recall that a man thought to be a “Negro male,” very possibly the Ray Crump look-alike, had been momentarily spotted by officer Roderick Sylvis west of the murder scene more than an hour after the murder had occurred. This “Negro male,” as Sylvis described him during the trial, would also elude capture, disappearing and staying hidden, as he had no doubt been trained to do.
By all accounts, Ray Crump was arrested sometime between 1:15 and 1:30 P.M.46 Yet when he was first spotted by Detective Warner at least ten to fifteen minutes—approximately 1:00 P.M.—before his actual arrest by Detective Crooke, Crump wasn’t wearing a light-colored beige jacket or any cap. Only after Crump was under arrest—now approaching 1:30 P.M.—did Wiggins remark to Detective Crooke that Crump looked like the man he saw standing over the body, but he wasn’t wearing any hat or jacket.47
Indeed, if Crump wasn’t in possession of his jacket or cap when first spotted by Detective Warner, nor at the time of his arrest sometime around 1:15 P.M. or a few minutes later, how could Harbor Precinct policeman Frederick Byers have received a radio call at “about one o’clock” to look for a “light colored beige jacket?”48 Who made the call to Harbor Precinct to initiate the jacket search? How did they know that Crump wasn’t wearing a jacket or a golf cap at the time? How did they know he’d had one on before then? Why was it so important?*
The answer, of course, was that the CIA operation was in control of everything. Once Crump had become the designated patsy, the team knew where he was and what he was doing at all times, and especially what he was wearing. They had gone to great lengths to duplicate his clothing for the man standing over the body, who was to be seen by Wiggins. They also knew, from their surveillance of Crump, that he had jettisoned his jacket and cap, or perhaps lost them when he had inadvertently slipped into the Potomac. It had taken Byers less than forty-five minutes to locate Crump’s jacket. How did he know where to look along the Potomac River shoreline? Likely because he was given enough direction by the CIA’s operating team. Ultimately, without these two critical pieces of Crump’s clothing—the jacket and the cap—there would be no circumstantial evidence against Ray Crump. But with their recovery, there was enough to begin framing Crump for the murder.
By 2:00 that afternoon, Deput
y Coroner Linwood Rayford had arrived at the murder scene, and he pronounced Mary Meyer dead at 2:05 P.M. Meanwhile, Crump was in handcuffs and still at the murder scene. He didn’t leave the scene immediately after he was arrested because too many police cars were blocking the exit at the Foundry Underpass. Crump was finally escorted away from the area sometime between 2:00 and 2:15 P.M. and taken to police headquarters. 49 His jacket would be delivered to Detective Crooke “around 3:00 P.M.” In handcuffs, wearing a white T-shirt, Ray would be photographed and paraded around police headquarters. Before the end of the day, the media would begin drilling Crump’s guilt into the public psyche. The “trial by newspaper” had begun.
The only thing left to do was to establish Mary’s identity for police, but in a controlled manner. A detail such as this was critically important and would be carefully managed; it was part of the CIA’s “operation.”
Here, I must interject an episode that took place in the course of my own exploration of this mystery. By 2006, after several years of painstaking research, I had not yet fully grasped how comprehensive an “operation” Mary’s murder had been. There were still too many unanswered questions, too many lingering details I wasn’t able to resolve, and I had nowhere to go for answers. Early one morning, hours before dawn in February 2006, I awoke disoriented, soaking wet as if sick with a fever in a night sweat. With darkness all around, I struggled to make sense of my current disposition. Had I been dreaming? No, not exactly. I felt as if I’d been talking to someone in another dimension, almost sensing some lingering presence in my bedroom with me. But I could see no one. Increasingly anxious, I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. Like a waterfall, rainbows of cascading images and thoughts from months of intensive study and research tumbled through my awareness. And then it happened. A horrid insight suddenly gripped me, though not yet fully comprehended or understood.