Review of Peter Janney’s “Mary’s Mosaic”
Part
1
Review:
Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to
Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace,
author: Peter Janney
Part
1 is a review. Part 2 that follows below is a transcript of an interview with Peter Janney that was
broadcast on November 28, 2019. Video link here.
In
Mary’s Mosaic Peter Janney recounts his lifetime of research on the
unsolved murder of Mary Meyer in Washington, DC in October 1964. Mary Meyer was
a frequent private visitor to the White House during the presidency of John F.
Kennedy, particularly when his wife was out of town. She was also the ex-wife
of high-ranking CIA officer, Cord Meyer, and had a reputation of being critical
of the agency and a passionate advocate for global peace-building and the end
of American hegemony. This coincided with JFK’s famous “turn to peace” during
the last year of his life, and Janney contends that Mary was a strong influence
on his shifting policy after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Peter
Janney’s father, Wistar Janney, was also a high-ranking CIA officer who lived
in the same neighborhood as the Meyers. Peter was the best friend of Mary’s son
until he was killed in a traffic accident at the age of nine. Peter was
comforted by Mary after this traumatic loss, and for him she became a sort of
second mother because, as he says in the interview cited above, she was more
adept than his own parents in helping him process the loss of his friend. Thus
Mary’s death struck him hard, and he ended up pursuing the mystery of her
murder over several decades while her own children, family and friends preferred
to let the matter rest.
Janney’s
thesis is that Mary was killed in a well-planned CIA hit because of her refusal
to quietly accept the official explanation of the JFK assassination. She had
been talking to her powerful friends in Washington and bad-mouthing the CIA to
her circle of friends who were “CIA wives.” She also had a diary that
purportedly revealed shocking details of her private meetings with JFK. What
happened to the diary and what was written in it have never been determined.
Mary
was murdered during her routine walk through a Washington park. According to
Janney’s thesis, an innocent patsy, Ray Crump, was set up and charged with the
murder, but he was acquitted for a lack of forensic evidence. After that,
District of Columbia police dropped the case and were never interested in
pursuing the possibility that the real killer was still at large.
Janney’s
book has been criticized for not convincingly solving the case with reliable confessions
from insiders or forensic evidence that clearly points to the real killers. The
book also involves a great deal of speculation about Mary’s influence on JKF
and what she knew that was so threatening to those who were covering up the
true nature of the assassination. There is no record of her making speeches or
publishing papers about what she knew, and she had no established standing as a
government official or scholar in international relations.
Two
well-respected researchers of the Kennedy assassinations, Lisa Pease and James
DiEugenio, wrote brutal reviews of the first edition of Mary’s Mosaic in
2012, saying that Janney let his childhood attachment to Mary Meyer blind him
to the fact that she wasn’t much of an influence on JFK nor a threat to the
CIA.[1],[2]
Many Washington insiders, some more powerful and influential than Mary, doubted
the Warren Commission report, but the broadcast networks, New York Times
and the Washington Post simply ignored them. It is hard to imagine how
one angry woman could have ripped the lid off the story and woken up a nation
that had already made a firm decision to go back to sleep and ignore all disturbing
questions about the assassination.
As
for her diary, no matter how shocking its contents might have been, nothing in
it could have been corroborated. Its revelations could have been easily
dismissed, and the writer could have been maligned as a liar, a homewrecker of
the Kennedy household, or just someone who wanted to exploit the situation for
her own gain. Assassination isn’t necessary when character assassination would
work just as well.
Skeptical
critics also find some of Janney’s sources unreliable and believe that the
patsy actually did commit the crime. There was enough circumstantial evidence
to point to his guilt. They caution that assassination researchers have to be
careful to not let their theories get ahead of the evidence. And this caution
comes from Lisa Pease, someone who says, in her book about the Robert Kennedy
assassination, that the evidence shows that Sirhan Sirhan was hypnotized at the
time he was set up as the patsy in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.[3]
That is quite a “crazy” and difficult conspiracy theory for people take
seriously, even though she has compelling evidence for it, so it is odd that
she rejects a fellow researcher like Janney who seems like he would be an ally
in the long struggle to reveal the truth about the age of assassinations
(1963-68). Like other theses about the assassinations, his also requires a
similar acceptance that reality is stranger than spy fiction, that government
agencies can and do carry out elaborate secret plots to eliminate people who “get
in the way.”
Janney
contends that Mary Meyer was surveyed by a team for several days until they
knew her routine movements and until the perfect stranger appeared to be set up
as the patsy. It was in one part a plan meticulously made in advance, and in
the other part an act of improvisation reacting to what was happening in the
park on the day she was killed. Janney alleges that the team might have
attempted the plot several times and aborted it several times until the right
circumstances presented themselves. On the day of the murder, the hit team saw
Crump arrive in the park in the morning, after which they assembled a
jacket-and-slacks combination that resembled his outfit and put them on a
stand-in for the killer. That person was made to be seen by a witness standing
over the body, and that witness was made to appear in the park by placing a
stalled vehicle nearby. A call went to a car repair shop at the right time in
order to make the witness (the car mechanic) appear on the scene just as shots
were fired. He ran up an embankment just in time to see, from a considerable
distance, the Ray Crump look-alike standing over the body.
That
scenario seems far-fetched and very difficult to pull off, but as I read it I
thought of something that Janney perhaps never considered as a possible way to
prove the concept. A team of improv actors could simulate this plot by trying
to duplicate it, of course without a murder at the end of it. If one actor
played the part of the victim walking past a known place at a known time, could
the other actors manipulate an unwitting patsy and unwitting witness to be in
the right place at the right time? How many times would they have to abort the
mission before succeeding? In fact this is the sort of thing that reality
television shows do all the time, so perhaps this would be a way to illustrate
to skeptics the way such plots could work.
If
one reads the harsh reviews mentioned above, published when the first edition
of the book was released, they seem quite devastating. However, not every
source Janney used was unreliable, and he admitted the limitations of the ones
that critics questioned. His thesis remains valid because of the other sources
that are reliable and because of the overall weight of the evidence. The
critics chose not to mention one key finding that truly exculpates the alleged
killer, even though it was not in the trial record. He was in the vicinity of
the murder scene because he was hooking up with a woman he wasn’t supposed to
be with. The two of them had got drunk and had sex on the river bank, but he
passed out afterwards and she left him there—with his fly open—and went home.
The accused named her as his alibi, and she confirmed the details. She refused
to testify because she feared being killed “by her husband,” but she might have
also feared being a key witness in a case that was obviously drawing much
official heat and light. She did provide a written affidavit, but the judge
dismissed it.
If
one finds this alibi unreliable, one has to believe that this working class
woman conspired with Crump in a plot in which he was going to commit a sexual
assault and murder and she was going back him up by saying that she was
drinking with him on the riverbank the whole morning, but then she didn’t want
to testify in court. It’s hard to see what her motive to lie could have been.
That she was lying is much more implausible than the theory about how the
assassination team pulled off the crime.
As
an aside, note here the uncanny common story element between two men who couldn’t
be farther apart in the social hierarchy. They were both undone by how they
unzipped. Illicit sex is at the fulcrum of this triple tragedy that brought
down JFK, Mary Meyer and Ray Crump. The young Ray Crump at least had the excuse
of having lived in crushing poverty, but the other two should have known better
by middle age and by their advantages in life. Would JFK have lived longer and
been more effective in politics if his sexual misbehavior had not strengthened
his opponents and exposed him to blackmail? What if Mary Meyer had chosen to
not get involved with her friend’s husband? If Ray Crump had gone to work that
day instead of hooking up with his girl on the side, he would have saved
himself from ruin, and the murder of Mary Meyer might have been called off, at
least for that day, and maybe forever.
There
was other compelling evidence, besides Crump’s alibi, that Janney uses to
support his case. The killer grabbed the victim before shooting her in order to
have her scream be heard by the necessary witness. She fought back more than
expected, which made the first shot to the head fail to penetrate and stop her
on the spot. She ran off a few feet, then was captured and killed with the
second shot. The coroner concluded that the shooter was ambidextrous and
well-trained. The first bullet was shot by the assassin’s left hand while the
last shot was fired by his right hand into the right shoulder blade, pointing
down to the left toward the heart, killing her instantly. This technique was
too professional to be the work of an amateur such as Crump, a man of slight
build who didn’t use guns and had been drinking all morning. The victim was
also dragged back onto the footpath, as if the killer wanted the body to be
seen there.
Another piece of evidence is in the way information about the killing spread to people connected to the victim. Her ex-husband, a CIA officer, had been sent to New York, perhaps to take suspicion off of him. Janney’s father, also a CIA officer, called Mary Mayer’s brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee (future editor of the Washington Post) to tell him of news of a murder near Mary’s home. For some unusual reason he was listening to the radio at work and just happened to hear news of a murder that had taken place about an hour previously. The name of the victim was not announced until several hours later. A worried mother might have a lot of anxiety if she heard about a murder happening in the park that her child passes through every day. She would imagine the worst and not be able to relax until she confirmed that it wasn’t her child. But a disinterested, rational person calculates the odds and assumes the description could be a match for thousands of people in a city such as Washington. Most people would wait for confirmation and not panic. But here we have high-ranking intelligence officer who participated in all the dark arts of the CIA, and we are to believe he listened to local AM radio while at work and suddenly became worried that his colleague’s ex-wife, divorced from him years ago, was the murder victim—so worried that he had to arouse anxiety in others instead of waiting for the police to identify the victim. As it turned out, there was a reason he wanted Ben Bradlee to hurry down to the morgue to identify the victim.
With
all of this evidence in mind, skeptics still could say Crump did it, and this
is what the critics cited above said in their reviews of the first edition.
However, after the first edition of the book was published, Janney received
further help from professional investigators who were able to find a key
witness for the prosecution who had gone missing after the trial. This witness,
William L. Mitchell, appeared after news of the murder was broadcast. He was a
military officer who at the time was said to be assigned to the Pentagon. He
offered to testify that he had been jogging through the park at the time of the
murder and had seen Mary and her alleged assailant approaching two hundred feet
behind her. There was no witness who could corroborate his presence in the park
that day, and he was never questioned about his background, his job at the
Pentagon, or why he was jogging at lunch time in a place so far from his work
place where employees usually exercised on sports grounds nearby. Janney always
suspected he was an intelligence agent inserted into the plot to lend weight to
the prosecution’s case, which was extremely weak without him, but he had
vanished after the case concluded with an acquittal.
For
the third edition of the book, Janney now had an extra chapter on this missing
witness, and with it he was able to refute the critics—the conspiracy
researchers who had dismissed him as a conspiracy nut. He launched a civil
lawsuit and hoped to compel Mitchell to testify. William L. Mitchell had by now
legally changed his name to just Bill Mitchell. Janney hoped that a judge would
agree that, because of his childhood attachment to the Meyer family, he was an
aggrieved victim who could sue for damages. He knew that argument was weak and that
a judge might dismiss it, but the legal danger for Bill Mitchell caused him to
come forward with a proposed deal. He would agree to be deposed, with lawyers
present, if Janney agreed to drop him as a witness in the civil suit. Janney
agreed, knowing that the lawsuit might never occur in any case.
During
the long deposition, Bill Mitchell, of sound mind at age seventy-four,
maintained an unwavering inability to recall any of the details of the
trial—something which for any other person would be an unforgettable
experience. Could you forget participating as the key witness in a high-profile
murder trial—one in which you heroically volunteered to come forward in order to
bring justice to the aggrieved family of the victim?
Bill Mitchell also refused to explain the mysterious gaps in his military career, why he had moved around so much after the trial, and why he had changed his name exactly when the congressional investigations into the CIA were heating up in 1974. Everything about him suggested he had been a covert agent. He showed the sort of stonewalling, denial, and failure of memory that every detective and prosecutor recognizes as an implicit non-confessing confession. As a useful and familiar comparison, one could think of Frank Sheeran in The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s “version of the truth” of the Jimmy Hoffa murder mystery. At the end of the story, the FBI agents come to ask Frank—whom they suspect is the killer—if he wants to shed light on the mystery now that everyone is dead. “Who are you protecting?” they ask, but he maintains his silence. It was a similar scene during the deposition of Bill Mitchell as he steadfastly avoided saying anything that might be incriminating. An intelligence officer is, after all, like the organized crime figures in The Irishman. There is a lifelong omerta that few agents dare betray, either out of loyalty, fear for their own safety, or fear of what psychic pain would come from telling others the truth.
With
the heavy weight of the circumstantial evidence that Janney provides, the
reader can agree that there is a high degree of certainty that Mary Meyer was
killed in a covert operation, but the evidence is not conclusive. The book
still does not provide definitive proof of who killed her, who was involved in
the plot, and precisely why she was such a threat. Just as Ray Crump had to be
acquitted for lack of forensic evidence, every other suspect would also be
cleared in a court of law, unless someone started talking, which is impossible
now that so many years have passed.
It
is also still reasonable to ask how Mary Meyer could have possibly been such a
threat that she had to be killed. Whatever was in her diary could never have
been corroborated, and she had no official role in government that would have
made her a star witness or given her knowledge of government malfeasance. Her
word could have been spun as the unreliable word of a divorcee homewrecker who
had a scandalous affair with the president. This is not the sort of person that
either major political party, the East Coast elite or Main Street Americans
would rally behind. The media would shut her out just as they shut out everyone
else who questioned the Warren Report. It is hard to imagine that someone in
her position could have struck fear into the hearts of Lyndon Johnson and J.
Edgar Hoover or others in the Washington war machine during a time when they
were pre-occupied with civil strife, the USSR, China, Vietnam, Indonesia and
Latin America.
It
is more plausible that Mary Meyer’s murder occurred for no serious reason of
state but rather just because the CIA had such a habituated taste for blood by
that time that personal animosities became the rationale for concluding she was
a security threat that had to be eliminated. Jim Marrs noted in his book Crossfire
that more than one hundred people who knew key details of the JFK assassination
died in suspicious circumstances, thirty of them by gunfire.[4]
As Janney writes, “Mary Meyer’s murder was number fifteen on this list. It
wasn’t just Mary’s murder anymore, but all the suspicious ‘suicides,’ ‘heart
attacks,’ ‘cancers,’ or ‘accidents.’”
Her
ex-husband was displeased by her scandalous behavior during and after the
breakup of the marriage, and she was known to have a loose tongue when voicing
her opinions about the CIA’s crimes. JFK was killed for the threat his policies
posed to varied interests who stood to lose billions of dollars. Mary Meyer was
no such threat. She may have been killed simply because she was undermining
Washington elite society’s faith in its husbands and its institutions. An
example had to be made of someone who was getting too uppity. Janney mentions
several people close to himself and Mary Meyer who refused to discuss the case,
and some resented him for his persistence, which indicates that her murder did
indeed intimidate them into silence. Another explanation might be that she was
rattling the cages of people with guilty consciences, so she may have prompted
them into acting out of fear rather than a logical assessment of the risks she
posed.
It
is also easy to imagine another motive that could have been real, or fabricated
as needed, if a government-linked assassin had ever been arrested. A “lone
rogue agent” might have said he killed Meyer to defend the honor of Jacqueline
Kennedy and the Kennedy family, just as the mob-linked Jack Ruby said,
laughably, after he killed Lee Harvey Oswald.
It
may be slightly unsatisfying that Janney’s book doesn’t definitively solve the
murder mystery, but that is asking too much. He has solved the mystery as much
as anyone could at this point fifty-five years after the crime. This book
should be appreciated more for how it illuminates a distant socio-political era
that still has profound effects on the present.
Janney
devotes many pages to the East Coast private school and Ivy League milieu that
produced the Kennedy brothers and other key figures in this story. JFK knew
Cord Meyer in his youth and competed with him even then for Mary’s attention.
The two men fought in WWII and came back as progressive peace-seeking liberal
journalists, but both of them got eaten up by the cold war political machinery.
One person quoted in the book wrote, “…many of the most percipient men of my
generation killed off those parts of themselves that were most vulnerable to
pain, and thus lost forever a delicacy of feeling on which intimacy depends. To
a less tragic extent we women also had to harden ourselves and stood to lose
with them the vulnerability that is one of the guardians of the human spirit.”[5]
It
was particularly grim to read how Mary’s husband, Cord Meyer, shut down
emotionally as he went from war hero, to honored journalist and essayist, to
peace activist, to ending up as an alcoholic and bitter high-ranking CIA
officer overseeing domestic propaganda, destabilization campaigns, coups and
assassinations. During that time he lost a brother, a son, and his wife, first
in divorce and finally in her death. He didn’t handle any of it well.
At
the same time, Cord Meyer’s rival, JFK, wasn’t a model of emotional health, either.
This is another area in which the book excels because it portrays JFK
realistically. The critics who slammed the first edition expressed disgust with
the way the CIA had conducted a “second assassination” of JFK by leaking sordid
details of his private life to the tabloid press, and they accused Janney of being
part of this trend. They said there was a determined effort to knock the halo
off JFK’s head, starting in the late 1970s when the CIA was under investigation
in Congress. However, Janney’s account shouldn’t be smeared this way because it
refrains from wallowing in the gutter, but it makes no attempt to put a halo on
JFK’s head that never should have been there. JFK was a son of a millionaire,
an aggressive, handsy, entitled serial seducer with a failing marriage that he
didn’t want to deal with until after re-election. His friends, family and
widow—not his enemies—gave corroborating accounts of his “problems with
intimacy,” which is a kind way of putting it reserved only for political
leaders one likes. JKF wouldn’t dare to even enter a presidential primary race
in the cultural climate of the Me Too era.
Most
remarkable, perhaps, is Janney’s unbiased account of his own father, a CIA
colleague and friend of Cord Meyer. Janney tells of how disorienting it was as
a child to slowly realize what a dark world these men inhabited. His father
once blurted out, in describing a family friend that his children knew, “Hod
Fuller was one of the best damn assassins we ever had.” Janney was always
disturbed by his father’s stoic reaction to Mary’s murder, but through his
research he came to believe (as described above) that his father had
foreknowledge of the plot against her. He also came across minutes of a CIA
meeting chaired by his father in which someone said he was certain that New
Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison was going to get a conviction in the
trial of Clay Shaw, which would be a court ruling confirming that there was a
conspiracy to murder JFK. Thus the document showed this room full of CIA
officers admitting to the conspiracy, which meant Janney’s father was a key
figure in the coverup of the JFK assassination.
It
is this dimension of the story that makes the book worthwhile because most
people in such circumstances tend to do one of two things. They idolize father
and country when confronted with such disturbing truths, or the truth drives
them into an impotent depression or a reckless anger, like Hamlet’s tragic
reaction to the ghost of his father demanding revenge. Janney is to be
commended for the courage it took to stare into the abyss and come back to tell
the story of his quest to honor what Mary’s ghost whispered into his soul.
Part
2
An
interview with the author, Peter Janney
Interview
with Peter Janney, author of Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder
John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace.
Lee
Camp (LC): Welcome to Redacted Tonight VIP. I’m Lee Camp. I have a truly
incredible show for you today. I spoke recently with Peter Janney, an
investigator and author who has uncovered the truth about the assassination of
John F. Kennedy’s mistress, Mary Meyer. And, perhaps not coincidentally, Peter
Janney’s father was also a high-ranking CIA official named Wistar Janney. If
you haven’t heard of Mary Pinchot Meyer, it’s now accepted fact that she and
JFK were lovers in the final year of his life, if not before that time. And
then after his murder, Mary Meyer—who was herself part of elite Washington society,
the ex-wife of a powerful CIA official—was furious after his assassination that
the truth was not getting out about the real people who killed John F. Kennedy.
When it became clear that she was not going to stop speaking out, she was
executed in broad daylight on the canal path right here in Washington DC, in
1964.
Through decades of painstaking research, Peter Janney has unearthed the
truth, and it’s as horrifying as you can imagine. He’s put it all together in
the book Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary
Pinchot Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace. So I think you’ll quickly see
why I had to speak to him for the entire half hour. Here’s my conversation with
author Peter Janney.
LC:
Hello, Dr. Janney. Is it doctor?
Peter
Janney (PJ): Call me Peter.
LC:
All right, Peter, thank you so much for being here. Your book is incredible. It
clearly is decades of work, and I want to try and dive into some of this. I
think I want to go in with the assumption that most people know very little of
the backstory of any of this because growing up, I heard rumors that JFK had
some lovers, and maybe one of them had been killed in [Washington] DC, but I
really didn’t know the details. So let’s start with who Mary Meyer was, and how
you knew her personally.
PJ:
She was a fascinating human being, and an even a more fascinating woman, from
my point of view, and of course when I knew her as a young boy, she was my best
friend’s mother. She and my mother had gone to college together. Her husband,
Cord Meyer, and my father both worked at the Central Intelligence Agency
together, and Michael and I were just the best of friends. Michael was killed.
He was hit by a car one evening right before Christmas in the late 1950s. I was
nine. We were both nine, and it was a very traumatic event in my life, and the
loss really put me into what you would call an acute adjustment reaction. And
my own parents were just mostly inept in terms of helping me deal with the
grief around this, but who wasn’t inept was Mary. And she was very, very
helpful to me in terms of just holding me, and not just physically but
spiritually, emotionally during that time. And I really was, I think, saved by
her in terms of her intervention. Mary was not a drinker like most of her social
set, not that she didn’t have a little bit of wine, maybe a Dubonnet here and
there, but she was very avid tennis player, walker, camper. I don’t think she
got into this sort of alcoholic rut that a lot of Washington socialites get
into.
LC:
Well, also she probably didn’t have the guilt to deal with that maybe her
husband and some others at the CIA had. So ultimately she divorced Cord Meyer,
so she wouldn’t have a CIA husband anymore. She had known JFK for years and
years, and ended up having an affair with him—and he had had many affairs—but
this seemed far more serious. And it’s not a rumor. Many people have come
forward and said this is a fact. She was pushing him on a path toward a
peaceful world which he had taken many steps toward, and I think nowadays it’s
been lost to history, maybe intentionally. About those steps he was taking: do
you want to go through some of those?
PJ:
Well, I think the pivotal event was the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962,
where we really, as a country and as a planet, came the closest we have ever
come to nuclear Armageddon. And JFK and his brother were instrumental in
pulling us out of that crisis by not invading Cuba. There was a huge
opportunity in that crisis because JFK and Khrushchev really started to become
friends afterwards…
LC:
… through back channels, secretly.
PJ:
Right. So I think at that point, President Kennedy realized that this Cold War
mentality was a dead-end street, and Mary was always on him saying, “Jack,
you’ve got to open up to something much, much bigger in terms of what you want
your real legacy to be about.” I think Mary’s influence around world peace
really started to have an increasing impact on him, but so did Khrushchev. This
was when there was a possibility of our country and Russia really becoming very
close to being friends. Right before JFK was assassinated in November, he gave
a speech at the United Nations and basically he told the people at the United
Nations that we were going to the moon. Russia and the US were going to go to
the moon together. This was going to be a joint effort. It was the ultimate
symbol of the end of the Cold War.
LC:
So he was pushing for the end of the Cold War. You’ve got the nuclear test ban
treaty. You’ve got him wanting to get out of Vietnam. We didn’t have boots on
the ground there yet, but he wanted to be done with it, and he was butting
heads endlessly with the CIA and basically saying he wanted it not to disband
but greatly decrease its power. So it’s a lot of things that made him… the
military intelligence complex was not happy with JFK in many ways, and it
seems, or I think it’s pretty proven now, that they had connections to his
assassination. So he was assassinated and then almost a year later Mary Meyer
was killed by two gunshot wounds on a towpath here in DC, in broad daylight
while she was walking. And I was wondering if you can go through the details of
who they said initially killed her, and how she was killed on the towpath.
PJ:
So this was about ten months later in October of 1964. Mary had read the Warren
Commission report. She realized that this was turning into the biggest cover-up
this country had ever seen, so she was contemplating going public with what she
knew, particularly what she had discovered in the last year in terms of what
really had gone on in Dallas.
LC:
And she was and talking to some powerful people. She had a lot of powerful
friends.
PJ:
She had a lot of powerful friends, and she had a lot of insider friends who
knew what was really taking place. So she took her daily walks on the towpath
after she painted in the morning. She was an aspiring artist really coming into
her own, so that’s when it was set up to take her out because she was on the
verge of going public with who she was in JFK’s life, as well as what she had
discovered in terms of the media now taking control and convincing the public
that Lee Harvey Oswald had alone been the crazy man who shot JFK. She just knew
it wasn’t true and she really felt the public needed to know. Had that
happened, people would have been very upset to hear this story because she was
not a frivolous human being. This was a very substantial woman who was highly
educated. They
pinned it on a guy—his name was Ray Crump—or they attempted to pin it on a guy
who was down in the towpath area that day…
LC:
… a 25-year-old black man who just happened to be down there. At first there
was only one eyewitness who did not say he saw this man. He just said he saw a
black man who was wearing certain items…
PJ:
… and following her, allegedly.
LC:
So there’s this one eye witness who said he can’t identify the person, and he
gave a completely different size for the man that was much taller, much wider.
Then suddenly a second witness shows up the following day who’s a lieutenant in
the military. He didn’t say he saw the murder, but he said he saw Ray Crump
following Mary Meyer. Then there was a trial and, believe it or not, the state
failed to prove it, and he was found not guilty.
PJ:
Right. That’s because of this legendary female black attorney, one of the first
who passed the bar in the in the DC area. Her name was Dovey Roundtree. There’s
a movie currently being made about her, and the book that’s been written about
her by a very good friend of mine by the name of Katie McCabe called Mighty Justice.
Dovey Roundtree became a legend in Washington legal circles for having gotten
Ray Crump acquitted because she said to the court, “Where’s the evidence? You
don’t have a gun. There isn’t any chemical evidence linking Ray Crump to the
murder scene.”
LC:
There’s no blood on him. He’s a completely different size than the eyewitness
says, and he’s got no motivation other than they claimed he just spontaneously
decided to try to sexually assault her and then kill her within the span of
about thirty seconds. It seems totally outlandish. Your book is pretty
impressive in hunting down someone who basically had been missing since that
trial, the second witness who saw Ray Crump on the path, Lieutenant William L.
Mitchell. The guy disappeared for many years and nobody could find him, but
then you tracked him down. Can you talk about how that went for a bit?
PJ:
Well, when I wrote the first edition in 2012, I hadn’t found Mitchell, and I
thought that he was probably the likely assassin, but then someone pointed out
to me through a very elaborate Google search that this guy was probably out in
California teaching in Cal State Hayward Business School. And he was a very
highly educated guy…
LC:
… having slightly changed his name to Bill Mitchell.
PJ:
Right, from William L. Mitchell to Bill Mitchell. He legally changed his name,
and, of course, I took him to task on that when I finally got him in front of
the deposition.
LC:
So you eventually got him in for a deposition and he answered “I don’t recall”
to just about everything, half of the questions, and when asked why he changed
his name he couldn’t seem to give an answer for that, either. Eventually, you
got his military records which just screamed that he was a part of the
intelligence community because none of them made any sense. They were all over
the place.
PJ:
Yes, I had a lot of help with that. Roger Charles, a world-class researcher,
along with his colleague Don Devereaux. They helped me immeasurably really come
to terms with who Bill Mitchell really was.
LC:
So talk a little about Mary’s diary, which was a big part of this.
PJ:
Well, I’ve never seen the diary. The author who attempted to write a book about
Mary allegedly had some pages of it, but I never was able to get ahold of it.
The only people who did see the diary were people like James Jesus Angleton at
the CIA, and a couple of his colleagues. But from all the folklore around it,
this is the way that Mary kept her record of what she was discovering post
Dallas, in that year from November ‘63 to her death in October ’64. She wrote a
lot of notes about what she had discovered. And in fact, when one CIA person
who had read the diary talked to another researcher many years later, he
confirmed for this guy that it was all there—all the right information, all the
secrets were there in that diary.
LC:
And Ben Bradlee, who was both Mary’s brother-in-law and the managing editor of
the Washington Post…
PJ:
… not at that time.
LC:
Yes, not at that time, but for many years. He said in his memoir that he did go
with, or was searching for the diary, with Jim Angleton at her house
afterwards.
PJ:
There’s a lot of fishy stories about what happened because if you read the
transcript, Bradlee was in her studio the night of the murder. And I think he
was there with Angleton, although he never said that. They got into her studio.
LC:
He didn’t say that in the transcript.
PJ:
No, he didn’t say that.
LC:
He didn’t say that in the 1965 trial in which he was put on the stand.
PJ:
Right.
LC:
From a psychological standpoint, I found this really fascinating. In his memoir
years later in the 90s, he claims that his sister-in-law was shot once and died
instantly, but everyone knows that’s not true. She was shot twice. It lasted 30
seconds or more. She was screaming, which is what got the witness to look in
that direction. So I think he was trying to appease his guilt by thinking she
didn’t suffer.
PJ:
Right. And she knew she was going to die.
LC:
It’s incredibly suspicious. We have to go to a quick break, but I’ll be right
back with the rest of this incredible interview. Don’t change the channel…
Welcome back. I’m still Lee Camp. Let’s not waste any time. Here now is the
rest of my interview with author Peter Janney.
One
document you bring forward relating to JFK’s assassination that I had never
heard of, and coincidentally involved your father, was this. It notes what they
fear might come out of Jim Garrison’s trial. Jim Garrison, people might recall,
was played by Kevin Costner in the movie JFK by Oliver Stone, and in this
internal CIA document, they seem concerned that this trial is going to prove
the connection to the CIA.
PJ:
Well, Clay Shaw, who was being prosecuted, claimed all through the trial that
he never worked for the CIA, had nothing to do with this. At this meeting that
my father was chairing in September of ’67, when Garrison was building momentum
for this trial, they had an upper echelon meeting of which they released the
minutes. I don’t know why they did because it really is a smoking gun. One of
James Jesus Angleton’s chief lieutenants, a guy named Ray Roca, came to the
meeting and basically said Garrison is going to get a conviction at this trial,
which is another way of saying, “Yes, Shaw is working for us, and of course we
were in on it.”
LC:
Right. You would only be worried that this lawyer was going to prove this if
there was something there to be proven, right? It seems like an admission. And,
coincidentally, your father was chairing the meeting?
PJ:
Yes, that’s a whole other dimension of this story, in terms of my own personal
journey, of what I went through in order
to come to the conclusion that I did that not only was my father leading the
cover-up of the JFK assassination, or one of the cover-ups, but he was part of
the conspiracy to take Mary Meyer out. That final realization—we talked about
this a little bit earlier before we went on air—it sent me back into my own
personal therapy. At that juncture I said I just don’t know whether I can do
this. I don’t know whether I can handle facing all of this. And luckily I had
already been in therapy years earlier with a wonderful woman who just was
really great, and so I just went back and saw her for several months and snapped
out of it and got the book done.
LC:
The truth is the truth.
PJ:
Yeah. Dig it.
LC:
Your father and others… One of the key pieces that you circle around and then
pinpoint is when they found out, or say they found out, that Mary had been
killed, and it ends up proving that they knew ahead of time. Can you talk about
that?
PJ:
Well, when you take a look at what happened, and you go through the trial
transcript, and you see all the events that were carefully put in place, you
cannot come away from that… I couldn’t, finally, come away from this without
seeing this was a CIA operation from start to finish. They were controlling
every dimension of the murder itself, post murder, when Crump was picked up,
when the policeman showed up at Bradlee’s house and asked him to come down to
the morgue to identify the body. It was like clockwork.
LC:
It’s tough to keep all those lies straight, which is ultimately what slipped
out because Bradlee said he found out hours before it had been publicly
announced.
PJ: And he found out because my father called and
said, “Ben, have you listened to the radio?” And he said, “Wistar, I’m at work.
Why would I be listening to the radio?” “Well, there’s been a murder down on
the towpath, and I’m just wondering where Mary is.” As if my father sits around
in his office all day long listening to the radio because he has nothing better
to do! It’s just very, very blatant.
LC:
And it seems like they couldn’t exactly keep that straight. I wanted to real
quick get into some of these immediate questions that I had when I first
started reading the book, which was, “If this was a CIA hit, why wouldn’t they
just do it in her sleep where they can control the environment?” There’s no
eyewitness. It’s super easy—just shot in her sleep—no one knows anything. But
then you realize that if she had been going around talking to certain people
about how she thought CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination, killing her
without witnesses is very bad for them. So they need witnesses.
PJ:
Exactly. It was done in a very public place, and I think there was a profound
amount of real engineering that went on where they were controlling the entire
situation from start to finish, and it was done by professionals.
LC:
And similarly, with my next question: when the CIA wants to kill someone, or
any professional hitman wants to kill someone, you assume it can be done very
quickly and easily, unfortunately, however horrible that is, but this sounded
so messy. She was shot once. She was still alive. She was screaming. He dragged
her across the path. He then shot her again. I thought that sounds just far too
messy, but then it makes sense that they needed her screaming. They needed an
eyewitness. They wanted it to look like a sexual assault, which is not an
executioner walking up.
PJ:
No, it’s just a random act of violence. That was the framework that they wanted
to try to do this with. I think they underestimated Mary. One shot wasn’t going
to take her out. She struggled and she fought. As I point out in the book, the assassin
was a very skilled assassin, and when he finally got her in the right embrace,
the second shot just went right through her aorta and that just knocked her
down and that was it. That was lights out.
PJ:
You’ve talked a little about your journey in writing this book. You talked
about the other authors who had tried to write this book. One of them
ultimately decided not to after getting deep within it because he said he
wanted to live. Who knows what kind of threats were made to him? And then the other
one is Leo Damore who’s well known for the book about the cover-up of
Chappaquiddick with Ted Kennedy.
PJ:
Senatorial Privilege is the name of that book.
LC:
Damore got years and years into researching and writing this, and then
ultimately killed himself after becoming more and more paranoid, rightfully so,
about being watched or possibly followed and stuff like that. Just talk about
that, and talk about how that weighed on you while you were writing this.
PJ:
When I found out Leo Damore was taking this topic on—I think it was probably
the late 1980s, maybe very early ‘90s—I went out of my way to contact him and
introduced myself, and he knew who my father was immediately because he said,
“Oh, your father was one of the pallbearers at the funeral.” And I said, “Yes,
that’s right.” I knew the family very well. I grew up with one of the sons who
was my best friend, who was hit by a car and killed. So I befriended Leo
Damore, and we had a couple of years where we would talk sometimes twice a
month. I would go down to his place in Connecticut. We would do interviews, and
he really had painstakingly started to put this together. Just having finished
his book about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, he went right into researching
this book. He befriended the attorney Dovey Roundtree [who had defended Crump]
who started confiding to him all the little nasty things that were going on
during the trial. And she would get these phone calls late at night with people
just breathing on the phone but not really saying anything. They were obviously
trying to intimidate her and scare her, but then something happened with Leo. I
don’t have proof of it, but he complained of being poisoned. Someone might have
“slipped him a mickey,” so to speak. The CIA had a whole department run by this
guy Sidney Gottlieb who created all these substances, all these poisons to take
people out. He wanted to do it to Castro. He did it for another individual that
I talk about in the book, so I don’t think it’s far-fetched. And I have to live
in conspiracy land to believe that someone got to Damore. As one famous ex-CIA
person said, “It’s easy to commit a murder, but it takes a lot of expertise to
know how to commit a suicide.”
LC:
How horrible is that? That’s incredible. So this last question may be the
hardest one. Do you feel anything has changed with the unaccountability of our
intelligence community? If there’s one thing to get out of this book it’s that
they felt like they just ruled the world. They didn’t have to worry even about
elected officials getting in their way. They could deal with them. And you talk
about how Cord Meyer was in charge of a project called Operation Mockingbird
that I’ve talked about on my show before, which was to insert CIA views into
various news organizations so they always could get good coverage, whatever
coverage they needed at the time. Nowadays that program is not around anymore,
but nowadays you don’t have to do it secretly. Our mainstream media just says
here’s our CIA correspondent and they just fawn over their every word. It’s no
longer a secret program. So are things worse than they were?
PJ:
I would say they’re worse in some ways, but they’re better in the sense that
people are waking up. There is an awakening in our culture. You now have over
eighty percent of the population—I think, according to the last research done
on this—believing that the Warren Commission was not truthful, that they
believe that there was a conspiracy in the death of a sitting president. I
think that’s what it takes, and it’s shows like yours and others that really
serve to help educate anyone who’s willing to listen, to really understand what
their government is truly up to. So in this day and age, we live in the
surveillance age. We have whistleblowers like Ed Snowden who really tried to do
the right thing, and John Kiriakou, who we talked about earlier. There are a
number of them now who are coming forward, but this is what it’s going to take.
LC:
Courage is contagious.
PJ:
Courage is contagious, and it’s very, very necessary.
LC:
Well, thank you so much, Peter. The book is Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy
to Murder JFK, Marry Pinchot Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace. Thank you
so much. I highly recommend it. We couldn’t get to half of what’s in there.
PJ:
A lot of people tell me the book reads like a novel, so I think many in your
audience will find it a valuable read.
LC:
Thanks again. All right. That’s the show…
Notes
[2]
James
DiEugenio, “Peter Janney,
Mary's Mosaic (Part 2),” Kennedys and King, July 12, 2012. Peter
Janney’s rebuttal to these two reviews was published here.
[3]
Lisa
Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail (Feral House, 2018).
[4]
Peter Janney, Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy,
Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, Third Edition
(Skyhorse, 2016), chapter 14.
[5]
Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (Pantheon, 1982),
200-201. In Mary’s Mosaic, chapter 7.
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