by Peter Janney
Leo Damore’s “suicide” had become all the more disturbing, not only to me, but to his dear friend Jimmy Smith as well. Smith became convinced that Leo had been driven to take his own life. “Leo didn’t know anything about guns,” said Smith. “Where in hell did he get a gun?” For years, Smith had warned his friend to “take precautions.” He was sure Leo was becoming involved in dangerous matters. “For Christ’s sake, Leo, be careful,” said Jimmy at the end of almost every phone call. And so, in the wake of Leo’s death, trailing my own journey’s conclusion, Bill Corson’s echo kept dogging me at every turn: “Anybody can commit a murder, but it takes an expert to commit a suicide.”
There comes a time when every journey approaches a conclusion. It took me by surprise, when I met a kindred soul whose father, too, had been a CIA officer. There’s a kind of unwritten, sometimes unacknowledged, bond among those of us whose fathers were involved with the fledgling CIA during the Cold War era. Author Nina Burleigh’s interview with Jane Barnes, daughter of the elite CIA covert operative Tracy Barnes—who Robert Morrow believed was part of Jim Angleton’s inner circle that decided Mary’s fate—underscored not only the experience of living within the “shadowy” world of never really knowing what our fathers were doing, but the fantasy life we as children invented to compensate for this emptiness.
“We thought of Daddy as James Bond,” Jane Barnes recalled to Burleigh. Apparently a Barnes family neighbor, acquainted with all the gadgetry, murder, and intrigue described in Ian Fleming’s and John le Carré’s books, had once said to Tracy, “These books must be nonsense.”
“On the contrary,” Tracy Barnes had replied. “They’re understated.”3 Like Jane’s father, my own had also revered Ian Fleming’s mythic character. He took great delight in family outings to the latest James Bond films that so glamorously dramatized and glorified the swashbuckling world of “secret agents.” But we as children, the Cold War’s “CIA brats,” were not allowed to know the real life our fathers had chosen. “Most people,” said the character of Noah Cross (played by John Huston) in the film Chinatown, “never have to face the fact that at the right time, at the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Such was the double life our fathers led; and eventually, one way or another, it exacted a karmic retribution on us children.
Quentin Meyer, Mary and Cord Meyer’s oldest son, would no longer talk to me after he became aware of this book project, nor would his brother, Mark. Intermittently, and over time since the early 1970s, Quentin’s mental illness had overtaken him with one debilitating episode after another. It was painful to accept, even more so to watch. In the fall of 2009, author Katie McCabe shared with me her experience after a book-signing event for her Dovey Roundtree biography, Justice Older Than the Law, at a Georgetown senior center. There, in the circle of attendees, sat a slumped-over, seemingly elderly man who listened quietly, his head down on his chest. When the talk was over, he approached McCabe and asked her to sign the book, “To Quentin.” The sponsor of the event later told McCabe that the man was Quentin Meyer, son of Cord and Mary Meyer. His mere presence at the event spoke volumes; somewhere within, a part of Quenty still yearned to know the elusive, essential truth that had robbed him of his selfhood, the demons too horrifying to confront. Would it be Dovey Roundtree’s heroic defense of Ray Crump that might ignite a smoldering spark to light? No words were exchanged that day, no more of Quenty pleading, “What happened to my mother?” as he had on the telephone late one night with Timothy Leary so many years before.
And so, it was by serendipity again, that someone I had contacted asked Toni Shimon, the daughter of the late Joseph W. Shimon, whether she would be willing to talk with me. When I met Toni in 2005, our chemistry was almost instantaneous, only because we shared a certain bond of somewhat similar circumstances growing up in Washington. Indeed, Toni Shimon and I had much in common. Like most of us, Toni, during her formative years, hadn’t known the true nature of her father’s work. As a young adult, however, she persuaded her father, little by little, to confide pieces of information he probably shouldn’t have. Joe Shimon deeply loved his only daughter, and he didn’t want to lose her—or himself.4
Shimon was a unique individual. He was determined to remain a faithful, honest father to his only daughter while being called to duty to “take care of” some of the most “sensitive” problems in the hidden cesspools of Washington. Born in 1907, Shimon first worked as a uniformed policeman in the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, starting in the early 1930s. He quickly distinguished himself, rising through the ranks to become a detective. By the time of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, Shimon had already established a reputation for being able “to get the job done” with the utmost discretion. He would gain the confidence not only of President Roosevelt, but each of his successors—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—all of whom revered his many talents.
While officially assigned to the White House as a “Washington Police Inspector,” Shimon was also secretly working for the Justice Department through the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In the late 1940s, though still stationed at the White House, he was part of a secret, organized crime task force. The work was dangerous—so dangerous, in fact, that his wife, Elizabeth, feared for her safety and that of their only child, Toni. The couple finally divorced in the late 1940s, when Toni was just two years old. Elizabeth had pleaded for years for Joe to find a different line of work. She was terrified her husband would be killed, their only child orphaned. Moreover, she abhorred the work hours he kept, the secrecy, people showing up at all hours of the day and night, and the impromptu meetings that took place in her kitchen, when she would have to leave.
It became no secret to Toni that her father carried a gun wherever he went. She had thought her dad was part of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., though not a uniformed officer. Told her father was stationed at the White House during the Roosevelt administration, then a chief inspector for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, all the while maintaining police department status, she began to wonder. Who is he? What does my father do?
Toni Shimon was the apple of her father’s eye. He adored her; she adored him, and the way he always looked after her, even after the divorce. The two missed each other terribly when Toni went back to her mother’s home on Long Island after periodic visits. The divorce had been a huge adjustment for everyone, but Joe Shimon, a true patriot who believed he was working for the betterment of his country, had made his choice.
During one of her visits to Washington in the late 1950s, Toni found herself sitting in the kitchen with her father before he left for work. Her father’s work habits and dress code didn’t escape his growing daughter’s inquisitiveness.
“Dad, you say you’re a policeman, but you’re always at the White House,” inquired the curious young girl. “Why do you need a gun inside the White House?”
Her father looked at her quizzically, she remembered, as though he was wondering if now might be the time he might dare to answer. Isolation, secrecy, deception—all of the required masks—had exacted a toll. Unbearable loneliness and disconnection were often the initial symptoms. With the dissolution of his marriage and family, Joe Shimon had lost the opportunity to share each day of his daughter’s life and childhood.
“My father always believed that he was working for the betterment of the country,” recalled Toni. “It cost him dearly, but his work was everything to him. In spite of the divorce and my living on Long Island with my mother, I would visit him often. We were very close.” Though Shimon did eventually remarry, he never told his new wife the truth about what he really did in the world, fearing it might endanger her life as well.
Perhaps the prospect of a deepening father-daughter relationship with his thirteen-year-old daughter that morning overpowered his usual, sometimes necessary reticence. At that moment, without any further deliberation, father Joe took a calculated risk. Reaching into his coat pocket, Joe Shimon pulled out five
or six different identification badges, said Toni, and dropped them all on the kitchen table for inspection. Eager, Toni looked closely at each badge: D.C. Police Department, U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Department of Justice, White House identification badge, and finally, Central Intelligence Agency. After examining each one, she glanced at her father with confusion.
“Dad, you’re in everything,” she said, now more confused than ever. “Is that why every president gives you gifts?”
“Does that bother you?” said Joe, hoping he hadn’t made a mistake by revealing what he had.5
Shimon’s gamble paid off. The father and daughter would continue to deepen their newfound relationship, despite the divorce and the dissolution of the family. Joe began to share even more. As Toni grew and matured, she considered a career in law enforcement. Joe Shimon made no bones about the fact that he hated J. Edgar Hoover. He had already confided to Toni how corrupt and evil he thought Hoover was; he then told her the truth about Hoover’s sexual orientation, his secret affair with his colleague Clyde Tolson, and how he, Shimon, was always inevitably called in to clean up any number of messes that easily could have embarrassed all of Washington, especially J. Edgar himself.6
Recall in chapter 10 the mention of the Easter weekend in April 1963, when during their final stroll along North Stafford Street in Arlington before Toni went back to New York, Joe Shimon engaged his daughter, alerting her to how Vice President Lyndon Johnson had been intent on getting more security than President Kennedy, just six months before Dallas. Shimon had tested his daughter as to what she thought it meant.
“What’s he [Johnson] afraid of?” Toni wondered out loud, only to then conclude moments later: “Something’s going to happen and Johnson knows about it,” she blurted out.
The uneasy memory of “the Easter good-bye walk” would be eclipsed soon enough by her telephone call to her father’s White House office on November 22, 1963.
“Dad!” she cried out, having heard the news of the president’s assassination.
“These things happen, honey,” Shimon said calmly while his daughter wept. A moment later he told her, “I don’t want to talk about it now.”
Toni was in college in North Carolina in the fall of 1964 when Mary Meyer was murdered. The news of her death came to Toni’s attention the following spring, as the trial of Ray Crump began to take center stage in the Washington media. After the Kennedy assassination, Toni was already witnessing a seismic shift in her father’s disposition. Their relationship had grown exceptionally close, but by 1964 Joe Shimon had become withdrawn, more cautious.
“The only time in my entire life I ever saw fear in my father was when I would ask him about who really killed Kennedy,” recalled Toni. “He would look at me. I could see his fear. ‘Don’t push me’ he would say, adding, ‘It would be dangerous for you to know the truth.’ And then he would just change the subject.”
During her spring vacation in 1965, Toni and her father began talking one day. She was eager to ask her father’s opinion about what had actually happened to Mary Meyer.
“Dad, who was she?” asked the inquisitive Toni. “All these people keep dropping dead.” She was already aware of several suspicious deaths that appeared to have some link to the Kennedy assassination.
“I know,” Shimon responded quietly. Toni remained silent, knowing at some point he would continue.
“She was one of Kennedy’s paramours,” Shimon revealed. “He was very close to her.”
“But what did she know?” asked Toni.
“She knew a lot because Kennedy was fond of her, very fond of her. She was part of his inner circle.”
“But who would kill her, Dad?”
“Who killed the president?” Shimon shot back immediately, almost angrily. It was a rhetorical question, followed by more silence. Toni had learned how to probe her father as much as she could, but there were limits. This time he was more blunt about it. Turning to face his daughter, he looked her in the eyes.
“There are certain things I will never tell you because if anyone finds out you know, or they think you know, your life could be in danger,” he said solemnly. “Honey, I don’t ever want you to be in that position.”
Lost in thought, continuing to comprehend the sea of change she had witnessed in her father since Dallas, Toni started retreating, emotionally withdrawing. Her withdrawal wasn’t lost on the father. Just as he had in the late 1950s morning breakfast encounter, the father again risked something further.
“She [Mary Meyer] was eliminated because she knew too much,” her father blurted out, unwilling this time to look at her when he spoke, though then calmly adding: “People are eliminated. Honey, you don’t know how many people are just eliminated, just on the operating table alone. They just need to be disposed of. And don’t ever believe what you read in the papers. It’s all made up.”7
That day and its memory wasn’t lost on Toni Shimon, nor on me when she revealed it. Author Jim Marrs, in his 1989 book Crossfire, had established a chronological list, based on the dates of their death, of more than a hundred individuals—all of whom were shown to have possessed some important detail of the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Their deaths during the twenty years following the events in Dallas were suspicious. More than thirty people on this list had been killed in violent gun-related circumstances. Mary Meyer’s murder was number fifteen on this list.8 It wasn’t just Mary’s murder anymore, but all the suspicious “suicides,” “heart attacks,” “cancers,” or “accidents”—Phil Graham, Frank Wisner, Jim Truitt, Leo Damore. Even author John H. Davis, who refused to complete Leo Damore’s research about what had really happened to Mary (“I decided I wanted to live”), could be included.
During the 1970s, America’s Bicentennial came and went, its underbelly not lost on Toni Shimon or her father. Chipping away little by little, Toni continued her attempts to bore into her father’s mysterious treasure trove of knowledge. “I wanted to know everything about who my father was, and what he did,” mused Toni. “The problem was, the more I knew, the more complicated—and scarier—it got.”
In 1973, the film Executive Action was released into movie theaters across the country. Directed by David Miller, the screenplay was co-written by Dalton Trumbo, Donald Freed, and attorney Mark Lane. Starring Burt Lancaster, the film depicts the assassination of President Kennedy as engendered by a cabal of wealthy industrialists and powerful rulers who had been angered by Kennedy’s policies—everything from his reduction of the oil depletion allowance, to his approach to the Russians with overtures of world peace and, of course, the possibility of a pullout from Vietnam. For these power brokers, the most frightening prospect of all, however, was the specter of an unbeatable “Kennedy dynasty” lasting decades. The cabal therefore enlisted a group of CIA-backed Cubans embittered over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, along with several high-level, disgruntled American intelligence agents whose best efforts to destroy Castro’s Cuba had been needlessly sacrificed and betrayed. While the film itself was only marginally successful at the box office, it was the first attempt to present a clear alternative to the Warren Report, nearly twenty years before Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Some would later credit the film with reopening the entire debate about Kennedy’s assassination.
“Watch this film very carefully,” Joe Shimon implored his daughter after its release. “That was how it [the JFK assassination] was exactly planned. Think about the state of Texas. What would happen if Kennedy ended the war [in Vietnam]?”
“The economy would suffer,” Toni remembered replying.
“Right!” exclaimed Shimon. “Our country runs on a war economy.” Time and time again, the film kept coming up in their discussions, and the inquisitive daughter would want to delve more deeply into the assassination. Eventually, when things were getting too close for comfort, Shimon would fall back on what would become a familiar refrain: “Honey, I have loyalties. People are eliminated. I will go to my grave with what I know.”9
But
that didn’t stop Toni from continuing to pry. Like many of his generation, Joe Shimon was a drinker, but a careful drinker, not given to excess. As the years wore on, he would talk a little more openly while having drinks with his daughter. In early 1975, in the wake of Watergate, alarmed by allegations of CIA misdeeds, the U.S. Senate—through its investigative body known as the Church Committee—attempted to tread on the CIA’s sacred ground. Joe Shimon would be called to testify, but he told his daughter he considered the committee’s inquest a joke and treated it as such; they weren’t really serious enough to get to the bottom of anything, he told her. What Joe Shimon didn’t tell the Church Committee, he would tell his daughter in 1976, and also disclose to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson in 1988.10
Those disclosures started, recalled Toni, when she brought up the fact that there had seemed to be a lot of strange people coming to her father’s house when she would be visiting during the early 1960s. They would meet in the kitchen in the evening. They would talk; they would drink; eventually, they would leave. Shimon confided he was the principal liaison to the Mafia, a connection that was part of his CIA credentials. When they had started working on Castro’s assassination, the meetings were held at Shimon’s house. People like Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, and the CIA’s William (“Bill”) K. Harvey were regulars at these meetings, along with some sporadic attendance by Jim Angleton. “My father loved Bill Harvey,” said Toni, recalling this time period in her life. “He was also close friends with Jim Angleton, and of course Sam [Giancana] and Johnny [Roselli].”11
William (“Bill) K. Harvey, a pear-shaped, bulging-eyed alcoholic endomorph who had once been paraded before President Kennedy as the CIA’s exemplar of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, had the career track of a bona fide sociopath. He had originally joined the FBI in 1940, only to then challenge one of Hoover’s protocols. The squabble that ensued led Harvey to resign; he joined the CIA instead. Harvey was eventually assigned by Richard Helms to head the Agency’s “Executive Action” program created to develop assassination operations on foreign leaders. The reader may recall that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, contravening all orders from the White House, Bill Harvey had organized and dispatched three commando teams consisting of more than sixty individuals to Cuba to wage any destabilization possible as preparation for what he believed would be an inevitable invasion of the island. When Bobby Kennedy finally found out about what Harvey had done, he was furious. After the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended, Harvey found himself “moved” to the CIA station in Rome, but he quickly returned.