Conversations With the Crow

by Gregory Douglas

RTC: (Laughter) Such an image!

  GD: You see the connection in my imagination, at least, between Wolfe and a pumpkin?

  RTC: It’ll give me something to think about over dinner, Gregory. Or are you equating Wolfe with a tampon?

  GD: Pay your money, Robert, and take your choice.

  (Concluded at 3:11 PM CST)

  Conversation No. 60

  Date: Wednesday, January 22, 1997

  Commenced: 10:01 AM CST

  Concluded: 10:21 AM CST

  GD: Good day to you, Robert. Thank you for the mailing on Costello. I will send you his death certificate after the weekend. Of course it was AIDS. Lee was almost hysterical when I told him this.

  RTC: I wonder why?

  GD: He’ll probably rush to his doctor for a checkup.

  RTC” Now, now, Gregory. Unkind.

  GD: Well why get your balls into an uproar when you find out someone died of AIDS?

  RTC: There could be many reasons.

  GD: Yes, no doubt, but the first assumption is one of personal concern, not sympathy. I understand Costello’s brother, who is in the RN, refused to accept the body. Ah, well, in the midst of life, Robert.

  RTC: Of course. Just the certificate?

  GD: And the post-mortem report. It was the AIDS pneumonia that took him off on the plane. I wonder if rigor had set in when they landed? They would have to carry him off in a sitting position. Maybe they put one of their cheap blankets over him and pretended he was a broken seat.

  RTC: You are in a fine mood today, I must say.

  GD: I beat Jesus at poker last night and he wouldn’t pay up. He keeps hiding cards in that hole in his side.

  RTC: (Laughter)

  GD: I wanted to ask you about this business with Oswald. You know, shooting with two guns out of the window, shooting some Dallas cop, and so on. Can you give me any input here?

  RTC: Oswald had nothing to do with the business. Nothing at all. He was an asset of ONI and he worked for both of us at Atsugi. That’s our U-2 base in Japan. He spoke Russian, after a fashion, and was instructed to act like a Marxist to rope in some Jap spies there. A clever young man but a bit of a troublemaker. No, Oswald had nothing to do with it. I said we had used him once and we had a dossier on him. He was perfect for the role of patsy. Married the niece of a top MVD officer, an avowed Marxist and so on. And, joy of joys, he worked at the book building. We had the presidential cavalcade rerouted to go right past it, to be certain. And we had a resource in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico who swore Oswald was in there trying to flee to Cuba. It does pay to have people in the right place, Gregory. Never know when you might need them.

  GD: Interesting. And he was using an Argentine Mauser which magically turned into a Mannlicher-Carcano. My God, you couldn’t hit a barn with that piece of shit if you were inside it. The Mauser, on the other hand, was a good gun.

  RTC: Yes. The Mauser belonged to the wrong people, so the other piece was substituted. We made sure that it could be traced to him. And we got the wife to admit seeing the wop gun. Of course in her condition, she would identify a crossbow or a polar bear.

  GD: And the Ruby business. Too pat.

  RTC: Of course. Ruby was from the Chicago mob and I had connections with them through my father. You see, Ruby had cancer and knew he was probably going to die soon enough so he was put up to silencing Oswald. Oswald was not involved and if it ever went to trial, it would all come out. The Navy didn’t want it to come out that they hired him and the FBI didn’t want it out that he had worked for them so everyone was happy when Ruby did his deed in the basement. Of course, later he found out they might execute him instead of letting die comfortably in a Dallas hospital so he got alarmed and was trying to get out of it. I don’t know why, Gregory. He knew all about keeping quiet, but he was a Jew and very emotional. Not stable, but he did his work as he was told. And we had some use for him earlier over sending guns to Castro. I suppose you knew that the Company was an early supporter of Castro? Put him in place, as it were. Now that was a classic mistake. I had nothing to do with that. We spent years trying to clean that one up. Kennedy found out about our role in that because he had Bissel’s phone tapped and loose lips can sink careers as well as ships.

  GD: The tangled web.

  RTC: What?

  GD: ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

  RTC: Sounds like Shakespeare.

  GD: Walter Scott to be exact. Anyway, given all the loose ends, I’m amazed none of this has come out.

  RTC: No, we had an army of real idiots running around with fifty different weird theories and stories, so the public had other things to amuse and entertain them. The umbrella man, the man in the sewer, the tramps in the railroad yard, shooting at General Walker and on and on.

  GD: The Warren Report is an un-indexed pack of creative writing.

  RTC: Of course it is. Our many friends at The New York Times have been pushing that and the really silly Posner fairytale. Well, the Times is one of our finest assets right along. Not a bad paper, but they do what they’re told. And Jerry Ford running to Hoover, tongue hanging out, with the latest news of the commission’s meetings. Of course Colonel Hoover knew the whole thing. What a huge farce all of that was.

  GD: I wonder why none of the truth ever came out?

  RTC: Gregory, the American public is as stupid as a post. They’ll go for fried ice cream every time. And the press knows where their bread is buttered, so we never worry about them. Bought and paid for, Gregory, bought and paid for. And we had Ben over at the Post to cinch up matters there for us. Very reliable. He and Angleton cleaned up some of the messes after Kennedy was hit. No, the press can always be counted on.

  GD: My late grandfather used to say something right on point. ‘Once a newspaperman, always a whore.’

  RTC: Was your grandfather a reporter?

  GD: No, a banker.

  (Concluded at 10:21 CST)

  Conversation No. 61

  Date: Thursday, January 23, 1997

  Commenced: 1:45 PM CST

  Concluded: 2:12 PM CST

  RTC: Good morning, Gregory. What can we do for you today?

  GD: I don’t mean to bother you, Robert, but I am doing some research on this Kennedy thing and I have a couple of questions for you.

  RTC: I’ll do what I can.

  GD: If it’s a problem….

  RTC: No, not at all.

  GD: You were telling me Oswald was not involved. Why would anyone want to stick him with the thing?

  RTC: He served his purpose. Jim Angleton was determined to blame the killing on the Russians. He hated them, and Jim was a very single minded man and very determined. I guess later he began to get a little crazy, but at that time he was very good at his job. Look at it this way: Oswald was a public Marxist. He was ordered to be a Marxist by both the ONI and us. He defected to Russia. He married the niece of a top MVD officer. He came back to the States, pretending to be pro-Castro. He lived in Dallas when Dallas was chosen to be the place where Kennedy was nailed out in public. You see, Jim wanted Russia blamed for the killing. He basically wanted to have all paths lead to Moscow.

  GD: He was inviting a war.

  RTC: Of course he was. He wanted a war with Russia and said so many times to me and the DCI among others. Now when Oswald came back, he was still connected and got this classified job with the photography company. We do that for our people. If we hadn’t smoothed his way, he never would have gotten the job there. But he never knew a thing about the Kennedy business. He was a very convenient patsy with a wonderful and provable background of being a Soviet sympathizer.

  GD: I know you were a friend of Angleton and I’m not questioning his intelligence. Mueller told me about him. He personally thought he was crazy however.

  RTC: At the end, everyone else thought so. Towards the end, Jim became obsessed with things better left unsaid. He thought the entire Company was infiltrated by the KGB and that Colby himself, he was the DCI at that point, w
as a Soviet agent. And then there was the Nosenko business. That was this so-called KRG defector. You see, the Russians got wind of what Angleton was up to, stirring up a war and all that, and they sent this Nosenko over to us as a fake defector. His most important mission was to convince everyone that Oswald had nothing to do with their agency and they had nothing to do with him. In short, they had no prior knowledge of the Kennedy business. This terrified Jim who got his hands on Nosenko and locked him up down on the Farm for two years. Put him in solitary and kept everyone away from him. Jim was afraid others would believe Nosenko and then start looking where they should not. Finally, and it really saddened me, Jim got so crazy that they forced him out and cut his department back to almost nothing. Jim had lung cancer…my God, the man smoked like a chimney…and I remember my last visit with him. He died in ’87. We met him at the Army-Navy Club for dinner. Very, very sad occasion. He was a great man, or he had been in his prime, and to see him slowly dying and forced out by that asshole Colby was devastating.

  GD: What happened to the Ukrainian?

  RTC: What Ukrainian?

  GD: Nosenko is a Ukrainian name, Robert. Ends with an O.

  RTC: Whatever happened to him? They let him out, got him a set of new teeth and paid him a stipend for his troubles.

  GD: Was he telling the truth?

  RTC: Oh yes, of course. The Russians had nothing to do with the business. They are far too professional to use someone with such connections with them. A defector, married to the niece of a top intelligence officer, spouting Marxist propaganda on the street corners? No, they would have done what they did when they tried to kill the Pope in ‘81. Get the Bulgarians to hire a right wing Turkish terrorist. Plausible deniability.

  GD: The favorite words of Ronnie Reagan.

  RTC: Exactly so. No, Oswald had much closer connections with American intelligence than with the Russians and we both knew it. Jim did not know it, believe me. Once he got something in his head, he never let go of it. At the end, before they gave him the sack, he was probably paranoid beyond redemption. Not stupid, but very deluded. He saw moles everywhere. He thought LBJ was a spy and half of Congress, for God’s sake. And his fondness for college students was getting a little obvious. A genuine tragedy, Gregory, a fine mind gone to seed.

  GD: Male college students. Mueller caught him in bed with one at the Plaza.

  RTC: Leave town and enter a new and dangerous world.

  (Concluded at 2:12 PM CST)

  Conversation No. 62

  Date: Tuesday, February 4, 1997

  Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

  Concluded: 9:30 AM CST

  GD: Feeling a little better, Robert?

  RTC: Much, thank you. By the way, Gregory, I dug up the information on this Landreth person you asked me about. He used to work for CBS News and his father ran our offices in Havana. Edward Landreth. Used Sterling Chemical Company as a front. I wouldn’t trust this one, if I were you.

  GD: No, I didn’t like him at first sight. And he got some hack named Willwirth at Time Magazine to promise to put me on the cover of their trashy rag if I cooperated.

  RTC: What do they want?

  GD: Anything and everything relating to Mueller’s CIA employment. Anything with his new name, that is. I have an old Virginia driver’s license, a pilot’s license, an old CIA ID card and things like that.

  RTC: Don’t even show them to them and keep the new name to yourself. The first thing they will do, and the Army as well, will be to get out the burn bags and totally obliterate any trace of him. You see, Mueller came in at such a high level and so early that his name is not known. Once your book came out, there were frantic searches of the files but they ran up against the dismal fact that they could not identify his new personality. Beetle Smith knew it, but he’s dead. Critchfield is foaming at the mouth over all of this, but he doesn’t have the name either. Wonderful. But take my advice and don’t give out the name. They would obliterate any trace of it and then piously deny they knew anything about it. Why not try the Army records in Missouri? List five or six names plus the Mueller pseudonym and get a researcher to get the copies of the files. Don’t use your name because you are on the no-no list now. Then, you can take the real Mueller out and toss the rest.

  GD: Robert, how brilliant of you. I did this a year ago but I’m glad to see you’re right up on things.

  RTC: Well, I know the name, you know the name, but Tom Kimmel and Bill Corson do not know the name. I assume both of them have asked you?

  GD: Of course they have.

  RTC: Not surprising. I like Bill but he had gone over to the other side, lock, stock and barrel, so use discretion with him. And you can be polite to Kimmel but shut up around him. Anything either one of them get would go straight to Langley.

  GD: And the burning would commence.

  RTC: Clouds of smoke would blanket the eastern seaboard, Gregory. Help keep America pollution free and keep your mouth closed. No, that’s not what I meant. Your mouth is not a source of pollution. The smoke from the burning CIA records is what I had in mind. What kind of approaches do they use?

  GD: Kindergarten level. ‘We are going to make you famous,’ is the main one followed by such stupidity as ‘you can tell me because I’m your friend.’ With friends like that, who needs any enemies? I wouldn’t let any of them into my house. My grandfather would have had them use the tradesman’s entrance. They don’t do that anymore. One great homogenous melting pot of proletariat idiots, ill-educated twits, liars and chronic violators of deceased prostitutes.

  RTC: (Laughter) Such an accurate portrayal, Gregory.

  GD: It’s been quite an unwanted education, Robert, listening to all the foolishness coming out of these creeps. But, good humored banter aside, I wanted to discuss the Kennedy thing with you.

  RTC: Go ahead.

  GD: I have been reading through all the major books on the subject, and here and there I find something interesting. Mostly, only personal opinion without facts. But in looking through my notes, I am positive that your collective motives were based on what you thought was good for the country and the CIA, in opposite order.

  RTC: Passing secrets to the enemy is very serious, Gregory.

  GD: Yes, but Kennedy sacked your top people and was going to break the agency up. Self-preservation is a powerful motive for action.

  RTC: Yes, it is. We had a similar problem with Nixon, as I recall.

  GD: You weren’t planning to off him, were you?

  RTC: No, but we did get him out of the Oval Office.

  GD: I met Nixon once and I rather liked him. You? What about Watergate?

  RTC: Watergate was our method of getting him out. It wasn’t as final as the Zipper business but he played right into it.

  GD: What did Nixon do to you?

  RTC: Now, that’s a long and involved story, Gregory.

  GD: Well, since you didn’t have him killed, can you tell me?

  RTC: I suppose so. Nixon was no specific threat to us, understand. We worked with him rather well. But he was getting squirrelly the second time around. And the China business was no good. China was our enemy and we had the best relations with Taipei….Taiwan. The very best relations, and very profitable. Nixon threw the entire thing out of balance and then the war in Vietnam was another factor. Very complex.

  GD: I have plenty of time.

  RTC: It was the drug business in the final analysis.

  GD: There have been stories around about that.

  RTC: Can’t be proven. We get curious reporters fired for even hinting at that. Anyway, it started in ’44-’45 with Jim’s Italian connections in Naples and Palermo.

  GD: Angleton?

  RTC: Yes, of course. Jim had lived in Italy as a child and spoke the language fluently. He knew the Mafia people in Sicily and the gangs in Naples, not to mention the Union Corse people in Corsica. I mean it was to get their assistance in intelligence matters. First against the Germans and then against the local Communists. Jim was very effective
but I don’t think he realized that by asking for favors, he put himself in the position of having to give favors back again. That’s how they are, you know.

  GD: I’ve known one or two. Yes, very much that way. Didn’t he realize he was making a bargain with the Devil?

  RTC: No, Jim did not. The Italians he grew up with were not that way. I knew a few of those people through my father. He was involved in politics in Chicago in the old days and that means a guaranteed association with the Mob.

  GD: And they called in their markers?

  RTC: Oh, yes, they did. And that’s how the drug connections got started. The Italian gangsters helped Angleton when he was there with the OSS and then later, they called their markers in with him. Not much at first but much more later. Opium makes morphine and refined morphine makes heroin. You must know that. Turkey has opium fields and so do a number of places in SEA. Burma, for example. Once you get into that sort of thing, Gregory, you can’t get out again. And we comforted ourselves that the actual movers and shakers were doing the dirty work and, at the same time, assisting us with intelligence matters. Killing off enemies, securing sensitive areas and that sort of thing. Naples and Palermo to begin with and later Corsica. And then in Asia, Burma first. We were big supporters of Chiang and when the Commies forced him out of mainland China, he went to Taiwan and one of his top generals, Li Mi, went south with his military command and got into former French Indochina and then into Burma. He had a large contingent of troops, thousands, and both us and the French supplied him with weapons and he, in turn, set up opium farms and we, but not the French, flew out the raw products to be refined in the Mediterranean. The weapons were often surplus World War Two pieces out of Sea Supply in Florida. As a note for your interest, we shipped tons of former Nazi weapons from Poland to Guatemala when we kicked out Guzman there. You have to understand that the Company was huge and compartmented, so most of the people knew nothing about the drugs. Of course the various DCIs did and Colby, who later was DCI, ran the drug business out of Cambodia.