Mary's Mosaic (61 page)

Jimmy Smith had returned to his private law practice after a stint as a U.S. magistrate and federal trial judge. A longtime Kennedy insider, and a member of the elite Kennedy “Irish Mafia,” Smith had been one of Robert Kennedy’s chief advance men for his presidential campaign in 1968. As an honorary pallbearer at Bobby’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral funeral in New York, Jimmy had stood by the casket “at the last hour,” along with Kenny O’Donnell, George Plimpton, Jimmy Breslin, and others. Having endured Jack’s assassination five years earlier, Smith was so traumatized by Bobby’s death, he momentarily lost his struggle with alcoholism. Scarred again by the second Kennedy assassination, Kenny O’Donnell lost his own battle and died in 1977. Determined to save himself, Smith had returned to his law practice on Cape Cod and recommitted to a life of sobriety.

“
I
’ve solved the case!” were Leo’s first excited words when Smith answered the phone. Reaching for the yellow legal pad he unfailingly kept on his desk next to his phone, attorney James H. Smith began writing what would turn out to be six pages of notes, all of which he meticulously saved. The following account is reconstructed from Smith’s original notes (see
appendix 3
), interpreted and explained by Smith over many hours of reviewing their meaning and context.

“I cracked it!” Smith remembered Leo shouting on the phone. “I got the guy—and the [JFK] assassination link, too!” Smith quickly began writing, trying to keep up with Leo’s exhilaration. Damore mentioned a name, and Jimmy asked him to repeat it: “William L. Mitchell,” said Damore. “He was an ex-FBI man!” Damore then revealed that he had Mary’s real diary in his possession (“The diary found!”) and that in the diary, Mary had made a connection between the Kennedy assassination and the CIA that involved “James Angleton.” Mitchell, said Damore, had confessed to him a few hours earlier that morning: The murder of Mary Meyer had been “a CIA operation” in which Mitchell had been the assassin.
²⁴

“Mitchell” confirmed that his name, “William L. Mitchell,” was an alias and that he now lived under another alias in Virginia. He said his position at the Pentagon in 1964 had been just “a light bulb job,” a cover for covert intelligence work. He had done stints in the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy, he told Damore, all of which were also part of his cover, and he had also been “an FBI man” when circumstances required it. His listed residence at 1500
Arlington Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia, Mitchell told Damore, was in fact a CIA safe house. He was now seventy-four years old and had five children.

It had been “an operation,” Mitchell disclosed. He had been “assigned” in September 1964 to be part of a “surveillance team” that was monitoring Mary Meyer. Mitchell appeared to suggest that the trigger for the surveillance had been the release of the Warren Report: “24 Sept Warren Report. She hit [the] roof.” Damore reiterated that Mary had bought a copy of the paperback version of the Warren Report when it first came out.
²⁵
She was outraged by the cover-up taking place. According to Smith’s notes, “She went to husb [ex-husband, Cord Meyer] + [and] husb [Cord] to Angleton …” This particular detail came from Mary’s diary. Damore was emphatic: It was the “Angleton connection w/CIA [with the CIA]” and the CIA’s orchestration of the events in Dallas that put her in harm’s way. “Mary – stepped in shit! She would not back down. Her [something] too strong + [and] too powerful.”
²⁶

Throughout 1993, Leo Damore had always been emphatic, as he was that morning with Jimmy Smith, that it wasn’t Mary’s affair with Jack that had put her in jeopardy; it was what she had been able to put together, as Smith’s notes revealed, about “the murder of JFK.” Her indignation at the cover-up in the Warren Report pushed her to confront her ex-husband, Cord, and possibly Jim Angleton as well. Smith’s notes, however, indicated that it had to have been Cord who conveyed to Jim Angleton how infuriated Mary had become. Whether Mary subsequently had a separate confrontation with Jim Angleton alone, or with Cord present, wasn’t clear. But it was almost certain both men realized—knowing Mary as well as they did—that she wasn’t the kind of person who was going to keep quiet.
²⁷

Regarding Mitchell, Damore told Smith: “I got [the] word [about him]—he’s a killer—+ [and] he [also] has 5 kids!”
²⁸
It appeared “William L. Mitchell” had been a trained assassin. Fletcher Prouty’s former network of agents had included FBI personnel as well as CIA operatives.
²⁹
It also gave further credence to what author H. P. Albarelli had been told by his longtime source in 2001: that “Mitchell” had been “involved” in the Mary Meyer murder, and that he, in fact, “did it at the request of the Agency’s [CIA’s] Domestic K [contracts] Office in D.C.”
³⁰
Mitchell, it appears, told Damore something almost identical: “On the murder … A CIA K [contract]…. A CIA individual.”
³¹

On page 5 of his notes, Smith wrote: “Leo had talked to Prouty (Oliver Stone guy.)” It then appeared that Fletcher Prouty had assisted Damore in understanding more clearly how Mary Meyer’s murder had itself been a microcosmic copy of what had taken place in Dallas. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, Ray
Crump Jr. had been used as the patsy. And, as in Dallas, Mary’s murder had all been planned in advance, designed to take place in an open setting, away from home territory—creating the illusion of an arbitrary, indiscriminate randomness to explain the event. The murder, Smith’s notes read, had been “set up away from [Mary’s] home in [a] public place.” It was followed by the speedy apprehension of a plausible suspect, a patsy who happened to have been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The police would also unknowingly feed the details to the media that would, in turn, be used to publicly imply the suspect’s guilt, complete with mug shots of suspect Ray Crump in handcuffs at the murder scene and the police station. It had all been “standard CIA procedure,” Mitchell said to Damore, as recorded in Smith’s notes. The couple on the towpath that morning—and seen by police officer Roderick Sylvis—had been spotters for the operation, Mitchell disclosed, as was “the bermuda [
sic
] shorts” runner that no one had seen except Mitchell.
³²

Scribbled at the bottom of page 3 of Jimmy’s notes were the words “New Agent Richard Pine.”
³³
Richard Pine had recently become Leo Damore’s new literary agent. “Did Leo ever tell you that he thought he had solved the murder of Mary Meyer?” I asked Pine in the fall of 2004.

“Yeah, I believe he did,” recalled Pine. “I remember he had lots of tape. I think I remember he kept them in some kind of private place where no one could get at it…. He felt he had such dynamite material on such powerful people.”
³⁴
Yet despite the Mitchell bombshell revelations Damore possessed, all of which he recorded, he never turned in a manuscript for “Burden of Guilt” to his new agent. Two and half years later, Leo Damore, on October 2, 1995, would take his life one day after William Safire reviewed Ben Bradlee’s memoir
A Good Life
in the
New York Times
.

Damore’s former wife, June Davison, kindly gave me as much assistance as she could in my attempt to locate Damore’s tapes. At my request in 2004, she made searches of their home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, but could find nothing. I even went to Damore’s last residence in Centerbrook, Connecticut, where he had received the phone call from Mitchell and then placed the call to Jimmy Smith on the morning of March 31, 1993. Fruitlessly, I scoured the area around the building, thinking he might have buried the tapes somewhere near, but to no avail.

In April 1993, shortly after the Mitchell call, Leo Damore returned to Washington and met with his research assistant, Mark O’Blazney, for lunch at the Henley Park Hotel. In 2008, in an interview for this book, Mark O’Blazney and his wife, Tanya, a Georgetown University Russian language instructor,
talked about the luncheon. O’Blazney had worked for Damore for more than two years. He, too, had come to the conclusion that whoever William Mitchell was, he had to have been involved in Mary’s murder.

O’Blazney still vividly recalled the April 1993 meeting with Damore. “Leo was very excited that day,” he said. “He told me he’d taped the call with Mitchell. That day at lunch he had the transcription already completed and kept referring to it.” O’Blazney’s wife, though not present at the luncheon, corroborated what Mark had told her later on that after his meeting with Damore.

“Part of Mitchell’s plan,” O’Blazney remembered Damore saying, “was maybe taking Mary down when a low-flying commercial airplane was flying over on its way into National [airport] … something about muffling the sound of gunshots. But I also remember Leo saying Mitchell told him that witnesses were placed at the murder scene. The whole thing was a set-up.”
³⁵

“
A
n operation … standard CIA procedure” was what Mitchell, according to Smith’s notes, called the murder of Mary Meyer.
³⁶
Mitchell had been assigned sometime in September 1964 to a surveillance team that was monitoring Mary Meyer. At some point—the precise date is unknown—the order was given to “terminate” her. It was to be done in a public place, then made to look like something it wasn’t. From their surveillance, the team knew Mary’s routine of taking walks around noon on the C & O Canal towpath, that she would typically walk out to Fletcher’s Boat House and then return, a distance of about four miles in total. Within that venue, a designated kill zone had to be selected where Mary would be accessible. By choosing an outside location, rather than her home, the planners wanted to create the impression of a wanton, random act of violence, unrelated to Mary’s identity or political connections. It had to be skillfully executed with
Mission Impossible
precision beyond the intersection of where Canal Road intersected the busier Foxhall Road. The ideal time for such an operation was determined to be a weekday, when the towpath was less frequented. The operation’s planners very likely were prepared to carry out their mission on any number of days, depending on certain variables—including the availability of an appropriate patsy. These were the kind of painstaking calculations and details that were involved in the extensive planning of professional assassinations.

There were any number of challenging factors to control and overcome; any significant mistake or oversight could be disastrous. As little as possible could be left to chance—including the whereabouts that day of Mary’s
ex-husband, Cord Meyer. Was it just coincidence Cord would conveniently be out of town in New York on CIA business on the day of his ex-wife’s murder?

The team put into place to conduct this operation likely consisted of at least six to eight operatives, not including the actual architects of the plan itself, or the ancillary adjacent personnel dispatched to monitor and control other important operational details. In addition, in order to execute an operation of this nature, there had to be some kind of command center in the C & O Canal area to coordinate logistics; it would have to include radio communication to and from Mitchell, and his team, on the towpath itself.

The operational plan of “standard CIA procedure,” similar in design to what had taken place in Dallas, albeit on a much smaller scale and within a shorter time sequence, called for a patsy—someone who could be unknowingly and immediately easily framed. Such an operation required the use of disguises and/or costumes, an absolute necessity. No other entity on earth had resources like the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD) under the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. They could do almost anything, and quickly—from preparing lethal poisons that left no trace, to procuring articles of clothing and undetectable disguises on short notice.
³⁷

Ray Crump Jr. had been picked up by his girlfriend, Vivian, in her car “very early that morning,” shortly after eight.
³⁸
Crump was playing hooky from work. That morning, Crump and Vivian didn’t have enough money for a motel room. Crump had likely been spotted by the CIA team early that morning, as he and Vivian began walking out from the Georgetown entry point of the towpath to some predetermined area he was familiar with from earlier fishing trips to the area. It was still probably two to three hours before the murder would take place. There may have been more than one candidate for patsy the team was monitoring that morning before a decision was made. Eventually, someone was assigned—with a radio—to keep tabs on Crump and his whereabouts. Whoever the designated patsy, the operation would have immediately had to procure clothing similar to what he was wearing. In Crump’s case, that meant generic dark shoes, dark pants, a light-beige-colored Windbreaker and a dark-plaid golf cap—easily and quickly obtainable from the CIA’s TSD personnel, who were likely standing by as support personnel.

A specialized team from the CIA’s TSD had the capability of transforming almost anyone into whatever was called for, including changing someone’s race from white to black if necessary. But there was a problem not even the elite TSD could overcome on such short notice: immediately finding someone on the operational team that day who had a build and stature as slight as
Ray Crump’s. So they had to make do with what was available—the man they used for the stand-in, the Ray Crump look-alike, was larger than Crump. That discrepancy would, in the end, create enough reasonable doubt to enable a masterful attorney, Dovey Roundtree, to thwart one of the key elements of the mission: railroading Ray Crump into being convicted for Mary Meyer’s murder, thereby enabling the cover-up.
³⁹
And so the man Henry Wiggins witnessed—the Ray Crump look-alike standing over Mary’s body after the second fatal gunshot—was significantly taller and heavier than Ray Crump.