by Peter Janney
GD40
It would seem the elusive, infamous Gregory Douglas (a.k.a. Peter Stahl/Walter Storch) may have been somewhat truthful regarding what had transpired between himself and Bob Crowley. But it will never be known how truthful, unless Douglas produces both the Crowley cache of documents and the recordings he allegedly made of their conversations. Yet despite the remaining ambiguity surrounding the Crowley-Douglas affair, the details purportedly revealed by Crowley—about Mary Meyer, her diary, and her murder—are solidly supported and substantiated by other events and accounts covered in this book.
Ben Bradlee never took kindly to anyone who accused him of having CIA connections. Bob Crowley not only reiterated Bradlee’s role in bringing Newsweek to the Post through the gracious hands of the CIA’s Richard Helms, but he also referred to Bradlee as “one of the company’s [CIA’s] men,” who was “on the Post now.” Had the sale of Newsweek to the Post started opening doors for “good old Ben”? During the 1950s and 1960s, working for, or with, the CIA, directly or indirectly, didn’t necessarily mean being on the CIA payroll as an employee. In the Cold War era, many journalists considered cooperation with the CIA a kind of patriotic duty. After Watergate, however, it was considered deeply suspicious, if not downright duplicitous, because so much CIA chicanery had been exposed.
Deborah Davis and her book Katharine the Great paid the ultimate price in 1980 when, under great pressure from both Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, her publisher, William Jovanovich, recalled and shredded her book—some twenty thousand copies—just two months after the book’s release. (It appears that “Freedom of the press,” as A. J. Liebling once famously put it, “is guaranteed only to those who own one”). It was Davis’s assertion in her book that Bradlee’s job as press attaché at the American Embassy in Paris in 1952–1953 functioned as a CIA front at the time. Bradlee was writing propaganda aimed at “persuading” Europeans that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were spies and deserved to be executed. Of course, Bradlee was purposely not on any CIA payroll as an employee; that would have made it too obvious. Yet his assertion that he “never worked for the CIA” was just semantics.41
In later editions of Katharine the Great, Davis included documents that corroborated Bradlee’s CIA connections. One such document was a United States Government Office Memorandum, dated December 13, 1952, which a Rosenberg case assistant prosecutor named Mr. Maran wrote to Assistant U.S. Attorney Myles Lane describing Bradlee’s request to examine the Rosenberg file, which Maran was safeguarding (see appendix 4). Bradlee stated to Maran that he (Bradlee) had been sent to review the Rosenberg case file “by Robert Thayer, who is the head of the C.I.A. in Paris.” Bradlee also disclosed, again according to Maran, that he was to have been met “by a representative of the CIA at the airport, but missed connections,” and was therefore “trying to get in touch with Allen Dulles but … [had] been unable to do so.”42 Despite the first edition of the Davis book being recalled in early 1980, damage to Bradlee’s reputation had already been done. It upset Bradlee profoundly—and shook the pedestal onto which the Washington Post had been elevated since Watergate.
“He [Bradlee] went totally crazy after the book came out,” said Davis in an interview in 1992. “One person who knew him told me then that he was going all up and down the East Coast, having lunch with every editor he could think of saying that it wasn’t true, he did not produce any propaganda. And he attacked me viciously and he said that I had falsely accused him of being a CIA agent. And the reaction was totally out of proportion to what I had said.”43
It would seem Ben Bradlee’s penchant for impenetrable deception, his playing fast and loose with pivotal facts and events that he hoped had long escaped public scrutiny, has all along been part of the Bradlee persona, karmically following like a shadow. How could Bradlee in 1965 testify under oath during the Crump murder trial that he had entered Mary’s studio with no trouble on the night of the murder, and then thirty years later spin a cock-and-bull story that he only first entered the studio the next day with his wife? “We had no key,” said Bradlee, “but I got a few tools to remove the simple padlock, and we walked toward the studio, only to run into Jim Angleton again, this time actually in process of picking the lock.”44 Part of the Bradlee story may have been designed to convince the public that he and Angleton, and the CIA, had always been adversaries, when they had been nothing of the sort. In this particular case—breaking into Mary Meyer’s studio to find her diary—they were collaborating. Bradlee never once publicly mentioned he had been inside Mary’s studio on the night of the murder. The only revelation of that fact was contained in the 1965 Crump murder trial transcript; it was never again mentioned by Bradlee himself, or anyone else (until now), including journalist-author Ron Rosenbaum or Nina Burleigh.
And who, if anybody, had accompanied Bradlee when he went to the studio on the night of Mary’s murder? According to CIA covert operative Bob Crowley, it was Jim Angleton. It was at this time, said Crowley—who mentioned it twice—that the real diary (not Mary’s artist sketchbook—the decoy) was discovered and given to Angleton for safekeeping. Ultimately, the exact account of what actually took place may never be fully known. But more than likely, as Crowley maintained, the diary was taken on the night of her murder—either from Mary’s studio, or from the bookcase in her bedroom. Mary’s bedroom, according to the statements Jim Truitt made to Ron Rosenbaum in 1976, was where she usually kept it.45
Finally, one last bit of commentary on the 1995 Bradlee memoir. On the one hand, concerning Mary’s murder, the memoir was so rife with factual errors, omissions, and contradictions that it cried out for careful scrutiny. (There was a reason why Ben Bradlee turned down Leo Damore’s request for an interview in 1991).46 On the other, Bradlee had further divulged the most critical and revealing event of the entire Mary Meyer murder conspiracy: CIA man Wistar Janney’s telephone call “just after lunch” informing Bradlee that “someone had been murdered on the towpath … and from the radio description it sounded like Mary.”47
Ben Bradlee was even more circumspect in 2010 when being interviewed for David Baldacci’s Hardcover Mysteries television documentary about Mary Meyer’s murder. Asked off-camera by director Gabe Torres how he first learned that Mary had been killed that day, Bradlee responded cryptically, “A friend called me,” carefully choosing not to reveal the identity of the “friend.”48
Forty-five years earlier, Bradlee had been equally tight-lipped. “Mr. Bradlee, I have just one question,” said defense attorney Dovey Roundtree during the Crump murder trial in 1965. “Do you have any personal, independent knowledge regarding the causes of the death of your sister-in-law? Do you know how she met her death? Do you know who caused it?”
“Well, I saw a bullet hole in her head,” Bradlee replied, dodging her inquiry.
“Do you know who caused this to be?” persisted Roundtree.
“No, I don’t,” Bradlee maintained.49
It had to have been a defining, life-changing moment in the life of forty-three-year-old Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee. Nine months earlier, he and others had conspired to erase his sister-in-law’s private life. Privy to the “master key event” of Wistar Janney’s telephone call, Bradlee, once again, lied through omission, withholding not only the critical evidence of Mary’s diary (the motive), but also the Janney telephone call (evidence of conspiracy). Was it just a case in which the ends justified the means?
At the time of the trial in July 1965, Bradlee’s career was already being transformed. Several months earlier, in March, he had been wooed back to the Washington Post after a fourteen-year hiatus by none other than Katharine Graham herself. That August, a month after the trial ended, Bradlee returned to the Post, where he had once worked as a “crime reporter,” with a new title: “Deputy Managing Editor.” Less than three months later, in October that same year, he would be promoted to “Managing Editor.”50
In 1976, after the first revelation of Mary’s relationship with President Kennedy appeare
d in the National Enquirer, Bradlee told journalist Ron Rosenbaum in an interview that there had been no “CIA angle,” no Agency “shadow” in Mary’s demise. “If there was anything there,” boasted Bradlee, “I would have done it [written the story] myself.”51 The statement was as ludicrous as it was egregious. But it pales against the statement in his 1995 memoir in which he mischaracterizes and thereby minimizes the last moments of Mary Meyer’s life: “She [Mary] was walking along the towpath by the canal along the Potomac River in Georgetown, when she was grabbed from behind, wrestled to the ground, and shot just once under her cheek bone as she struggled to get free. She died instantly.”52
No. Mary hardly “died instantly.” By all police, witness, and forensic accounts, she struggled mightily, screaming for twenty seconds or more, before the first gunshot ripped through her skull. Death be not proud, nor even swift. Whatever Mary’s thoughts or feelings during the final conscious seconds of her life, she had to be aware her death was fast approaching, yet she would not succumb without a fight, before the second fatal shot ended her life. Perhaps Ben Bradlee wanted to assuage his guilt by publicly spinning yet another yarn that his sister-in-law hadn’t really suffered, or that she hadn’t faced head-on the terrifying realization that her life was about to end violently. Whatever his motivation, Ben Bradlee played as fast and loose with the facts in this instance as he had with nearly every other aspect of Mary’s death.
Tony Bradlee, subsequent to the death of her sister and the “shock” of discovering Mary’s affair with Jack, retreated to studying sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art, as well as exploring the mystical and spiritual traditions of George Gurdjieff and his disciple P. D. Ouspensky. During the next few years, her marriage to Ben slowly disintegrated. For the Bradlees, “Jack Kennedy and Mary Meyer had been murdered out of our lives,” noted Ben during his meteoric rise on the Post, “out of our reservoir of shared experience, and we both had changed in coping with their loss.”53
Mary’s death took a severe toll, not only on her children, but also on other members of her extended family. “Mary believed the world could change … she was such a fascinating figure in the family,” said Nancy Pittman Pinchot, daughter of Tony Bradlee by her first marriage to Steuart Pittman. “She had a quality of aliveness. We watched the full flowering of Mary as the kind of woman that Mom [Tony Bradlee] might have become. Instead, Mom lived off the idea that JFK had a crush on her for years—before she disappeared up the asshole of spirituality. It was such a blow to her to find out Mary and Jack had been together.”54
Asked in a letter by Leo Damore in 1991 whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the events surrounding her sister’s death, Tony avoided any possibility of an encounter, replying, “I feel as I have always felt—that the case is closed, that Crump was indeed guilty. Also, I am loathe to get involved in going over that event again, with all its unhappy memories.”55 Tony Bradlee died in Washington on November 9, 2011.
Up until the very end of 2011 (December 31st to be exact) when she died just shy of her ninety-first birthday, Anne Chamberlin, a former Vassar classmate and close friend of Mary Meyer’s, had remained the only person left who could have perhaps unraveled some of the impenetrable, unanswered questions surrounding the last years of Mary Meyer’s life, and death. A known friend to Katharine Graham, regarded as an intrepid, charmingly sharp-witted commentator, who had a “distinguished and eclectic career” as a freelance journalist, Anne also maintained throughout her life an extraordinary level of physical health and vitality through a daily, grueling exercise regime.56 And yet, as adventurous and fearless as she appeared, she refused—even ran—from wanting to be associated with anything to do with Mary Meyer after her death. Her phone interviews with Leo Damore in the early 1990’s indicated she’d been a part of Mary’s Washington “LSD group” that took shape in 1962, yet she became indignant when I asked to talk with her about this. According to Damore, Chamberlin fled Washington for Maine out of fear, shortly after Mary’s murder, side-stepping being named in any of the accounts surrounding Mary’s death. Had Anne Chamberlin been privy to something so dangerous that she feared for her life, should she reveal what she knew?
James Jesus Angleton had what might be called a “second career” sending newspaper reporters and journalists on never-ending wild-goose chases. Sailing on the edge, always well-oiled and three sheets to the wind, Angleton relished seeing how far he could push their limits of gullibility; and, like a Shakespearean actor, he did so convincingly, often leaving many of them awestruck, as if they had just been given the actual location of Noah’s Ark or the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body. There was a reason why former military intelligence officer and historian John Newman, author of Oswald and the CIA, a person with more than twenty years of experience as an analyst for U.S. military intelligence, told me during an interview for this book that he considered Angleton as “one of the most diabolical figures in all of human history.”57 What took place in 1976 after the National Enquirer exposé involving Mary’s relationship with Kennedy supported historian Newman’s point of view.
The 1976 Enquirer story had opened a huge can of worms. It would take a masterful performance from the master Angler himself, along with supporting actors like Ben Bradlee, to neutralize its implications. The elite circle of Mary’s acquaintances—the people who had taken an “omertà oath” of allegiance never to reveal the facts surrounding either her diary or her murder—had to figure out how to hoodwink journalists Rosenbaum and Nobile, who were intent on writing the whole story. The two most high-profile players among them—Jim Angleton and Ben Bradlee—were forced to make a showing. For whatever reason, Cord Meyer and Anne Chamberlin would remain hidden, as would Anne Truitt, and to a large extent Tony Bradlee. Like his misleading trial testimony in 1965, Bradlee’s 1976 selective recollections carefully excluded the most critical events. Dare it be said that had Rosenbaum and Nobile become aware of these linchpin events, the Angleton-CIA house of cards would have collapsed immediately.
But it didn’t collapse, and for several reasons. Within the hallowed halls of the Agency, the ruling leaders of America’s premier intelligence establishment had learned how to manage almost any crisis, particularly when it came to accountability to the public, or even to Congress. In CIA parlance, it’s called “a limited hang-out.” With their backs to the wall, the Agency gives up a few classified, titillating tidbits, making everyone feel as though they’ve actually come clean, when in fact they’ve done nothing of the sort, continuing to withhold what is most critical. No greater master ever demonstrated this technique more skillfully than James Jesus Angleton, the “Delphic Oracle” of counterintelligence, the chief himself. Angleton was the consummate actor and seducer. He completely dazzled Ron Rosenbaum and coauthor Phillip Nobile into thinking that they had closed the door on the case, solving everything. Alas, the authors declared, Mary’s murder, like Jack’s before her, was a random, indiscriminate, violent murder committed by a deranged, lone gunman.
So powerfully beguiling and enchanting was Angleton’s influence on Rosenbaum in 1976, it likely ignited his fascination with Angleton’s mentor, Soviet double agent Kim Philby. Philby and Angleton had met during Angleton’s stint in the OS during World War II, while Philby was ostensibly working for the British Secret Intelligence Service. Under the masterful Philby tutelage, Angleton learned all the fundamentals of the craft of intelligence, including masterminding the world of counterintelligence. Angleton came to revere his mentor just the way Philby wanted him to; it was part of Philby’s strategy. After the war, Philby would come to Washington as the chief British intelligence liaison to the fledgling CIA. The eager-beaver Angleton consulted Philby on almost everything, sharing with him all that was going on at the highest levels of American intelligence. Therein lay Angleton’s tragic fatal flaw—trusting anybody, and particularly Kim Philby. That mistake would eventually eviscerate Angleton, and he would never recover, only deteriorate. Kim Philby, as it was finally reve
aled in 1963, was a Russian spy, an agent allied with the KGB. So deeply had the entire arena of American intelligence been penetrated that Angleton sank even deeper into paranoia, his daily alcohol-nicotine intake dismembering his overall capacity and grasp on reality, cell by cell. Everything, and everybody, viewed through the Angleton prism, was vermin—moles, to be exact—digging relentlessly and eternally, no matter how circuitous the route, toward Langley, Virginia, their final destination CIA headquarters. That was the footprint that “Mother” Angleton would create and leave behind.
To his great credit, in an attempt to further describe what the life of Kim Philby must have been like, journalist Ron Rosenbaum delivered a riveting, quintessential vision of the character of Kim Philby—unaware he was also describing someone he had encountered years earlier:
The mole, the penetration agent in particular, does not merely betray; he stays. He doesn’t just commit a single treacherous act and run; his entire being, every smile, every word he exchanges, is an ultimate violation (an almost sexual penetration) of all those around him. All his friendships, his relationships, his marriages become elaborate lies requiring unceasing vigilance to maintain, lies in a play-within-a-play only he can follow. He is not merely the supreme spy; he is above all the supreme actor. If, as [John] le Carré once wrote, “Espionage is the secret theater of our society,” Kim Philby is its Olivier.58
Indeed, for a time, Kim Philby had been “the secret theater’s” Olivier; and inevitably, that meant James Jesus Angleton had been his understudy. Angleton had successfully modeled his entire being on how Philby had shaped his own. Eventually, karma delivered fate. It was no accident that the obsessive mission of “Angleton the mole hunter,” forever protecting his beloved Agency no matter what the cost, resulted in paralyzing entire sections of the CIA’s operational directorates, and eventually gave rise to the biggest crisis the American intelligence establishment ever faced.