Cord Meyer, the son of
a senior diplomat, was born on 10th November, 1920. The Meyer family
was extremely wealthy and had made its money from sugar in Cuba and
from property on Long Island.
The family settled in New
York City . Cord and his twin brother, Quintin, attended private
school in Switzerland and then St. Paul's preparatory school in New
Hampshire. In 1939 Meyer went to Yale University
to study literature and philosophy. After graduating in 1942 he joined
the US Marines.
Meyer was sent to the South
Pacific and wrote articles about his experiences for The
Atlantic Monthly. Meyer was a machine-gun platoon leader and
took part in the assault on Guam. He later wrote: "As we buried
our dead I swore to myself that if it was within my power I should
see to it that these deaths would not be forgotten or valued lightly.
No matter how small a contribution I should happen to make it would
be in the right direction."
On 21st July, 1944, a Japanese
grenade was thrown into his foxhole. He was so badly injured that
when he was found he was initially declared to be dead. In fact, his
commanding officer sent a telegram to his parents announcing he had
died. Although he lost his left eye he was eventually well enough
to be sent home. Soon afterwards his twin
brother, Quentin, was killed at Okinawa.
While recovered in New
York City Meyer met the journalist, Mary
Pinchot. The couple married on 19th April, 1945. The couple then
went to San Francisco to attend
the conference that established the United Nations.
Cord went as an aide to Harold Stassen, whereas Mary, who was working
for the North American Newspaper Alliance at the time, was one of
the reporters sent to cover this important event.
Mary and Cord Meyer on their
wedding day (1945)
Meyer told te New
York Times that although the United Nations
was a step in the right direction "that the veto power was just
another alliance of the great powers and one that would surely lead
to another war." Cord proposed that the UN be granted authority
to oversee nuclear power installations inside member countries. He
also argued that the UN should be given the authority to prevent war
and "the armed power to back it up."
While at the San Francisco
Conference he met John F. Kennedy for
the first time. They disagreed about the merits of the United Nations.
Kennedy was far more hopeful of its long-term success and disliked
Meyer's ideas on world government. Meyer also objected to Kennedy's
relationship with his new wife.
Meyer had been shocked
by the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. After the war Meyer commissioned
a film by Pare Lorentz called The Beginning
or the End. Meyer wanted this film to be the definitive
statement about the dangers of the atomic age. Cord wrote at the time:
"Talked with Mary of how steadily depressing is our full realization
of how little hope there is of avoiding the approaching catastrophe
of atomic warfare."
The following year he published
a book about his war experiences, Waves of
Darkness. Meyer expressed his pacifist
views in the book: "The only certain fruit of this insanity will
be the rotting bodies upon which the sun will impartially shine tomorrow.
Let us throw down these guns that we hate."
Meyer became an advocate
of world government. In May, 1947, Cord Meyer
was elected president of the United World Federalists. Under his leadership,
membership of the organization doubled in size. Albert
Einstein was one of his most important supporters and personally
solicited funds for the organization. Mary
Meyer was also active in the organization and wrote for its journal,
The United World Federalists.
In 1949 Meyer and his family
moved to Cambridge. He was showing signs of becoming disillusioned
with the idea of world government. He had experienced problems with
members of the American Communist Party
who had infiltrated the organizations he had established. It was about
this time that he began working secretly for the Central
Intelligence Agency.
In 1950 Meyer formed the
Committee to Frame a World Constitution with Robert Maynard Hutchins
and Elizabeth Mann Borgese. As a result of this work Meyer made contact
with the International Cooperative Alliance, the International Confederation
of Free Trade Unions, the Indian Socialist Party and the Congress
of Peoples Against Imperialism. It is almost certain that this had
been done on behalf of the CIA.
Allen
W. Dulles made contact with Cord Meyer
in 1951. He accepted the invitation to join the CIA. Dulles told Meyer
he wanted him to work on a project that was so secret that he could
not be told about it until he officially joined the organization.
Meyer was to work under Frank Wisner,
director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the
espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA.
Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda,
economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage,
demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states,
including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support
of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the
free world."
Meyer became part of what
became known as Operation
Mockingbird, a CIA program to influence
the American media. According to Deborah Davis
(Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham
and the Washington Post): Meyer was
Mockingbird's "principal operative".
One
of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird
was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared
in over 300 different newspapers. Other
journalists willing to promote the views of the Central
Intelligence Agency
included
Stewart Alsop (New
York Herald Tribune), Ben
Bradlee (Newsweek),
James Reston (New
York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson
(Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington
Post), William C. Baggs (Miami
News), Herb Gold (Miami News)
and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times).
These journalists sometimes wrote articles that were unofficially
commissioned by Meyer was based on leaked classified information from
the CIA.
Mary and the family now
moved to Washington
where they became
members of the Georgetown Crowd. This group included Frank
Wisner, George
Kennan, Dean
Acheson,
Thomas
Braden, Richard
Bissell,
Desmond
FitzGerald,
Joseph Alsop, Tracy
Barnes,
Philip
Graham,
Katharine
Graham,
David
Bruce,
James
Reston,
James Truitt, Alfred
Friendly,
Clark Clifford, Walt
Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip
Bohlen and Paul Nitze. The Meyers also
socialized with other CIA officers or CIA assets including James
Angleton (Cicely
Angleton), Wistar Janney (Mary Wisnar), Ben
Bradlee (Antoinette
Bradlee)
and James Truitt (Anne Truitt).
Meyer
worked under Thomas Braden, the head
of International Organizations Division (IOD). This Central
Intelligence Agency
unit helped established anti-Communist
front groups in Western Europe.The IOD was dedicated to infiltrating
academic, trade and political associations. The objective was to control
potential radicals and to steer them to the right.
Meyer
oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student Association,
the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Communications Workers of America,
the American Newspaper Guild and the National Educational Association.
He also provided the money for publishing the journal, Encounter.
Meyer also worked closely with anti-Communist leaders of the trade
union movement such as George Meany of
the Congress for Industrial Organization
and the American Federation of Labor.
In
1953 Frank
Wisner and the CIA began having trouble with J.
Edgar Hoover. He described the Office
of Policy Coordination (OPC)
as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations
into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of
them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information
was passed to Joseph McCarthy who started
making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also passed to McCarthy
details of an affair that Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania
during the war. Hoover, claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent.
Joseph
McCarthy also began accusing other members of the Georgetown Crowd
as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole
of communists" and claimed he intended to root out a hundred
of them. His first targets were
Chip Bohlen and
Charles Thayer. Bohlen survived but Thayer was forced to resign.
In
August, 1953, Richard Helms, Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer
that Joseph
McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal
Bureau of Investigation added to the smear by announcing it was
unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the
FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen
W. Dulles
and both came to his defence
and refused to permit a FBI interrogation of Meyer.
The FBI eventually revealed
the charges against Meyer. Apparently he was a member of several liberal
groups considered to be subversive by the Justice Department. This
included being a member of the National Council on the Arts, where
he associated with Norman Thomas, the
leader of the Socialist Party and its
presidential candidate in 1948. It was also pointed out that his wife,
Mary Meyer, was a former member of the
American Labor Party. Meyer
was eventually cleared of these charges and was allowed to keep his
job.
J.
Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy
did not realise what they were taking on. Wisner unleashed Operation
Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson,
Joe Alsop, Jack
Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed
Murrow all went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently
damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.
Meyer became disillusioned
with life in the CIA and in January, 1954,
he went to New York City and attempted
to get a job in publishing. Although he saw contacts he had made during
his covert work with the media (Operation
Mockingbird) he
was unable to obtain a job with any of the established book publishing
firms.
In the summer of 1954 the
Meyer family's golden retriever was hit by a car on the curve of highway
near their house and killed. The dog's death worried Cord. He told
colleagues at the CIA he was afraid the same thing might happen to
one of his children.
In the summer of 1954 the
Meyers got new neighbours. John F. Kennedy
and his wife Jackie
Kennedy
purchased Hickory Hill,
a house several hundred yards from where the Meyers lived. Mary became
good friends with Jackie and they went on walks together.
In
November, 1954, Meyer replaced Thomas
Braden as
head
of International Organizations Division. Meyer
began spending a lot of time in Europe. One
of Meyer's tasks was to supervise Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty,
the United States government broadcasts to Eastern Europe. According
to Nina Burleigh (A
Very Private Woman) Meyer was "overseeing a vast 'black'
budget of millions of dollars channeled through phony foundation of
a global network of associations and labor groups that on their surface
appeared to be progressive".
On 18th December, 1956,
Cord's nine-year-old son, Michael, was hit by a car on the curve of
highway near their house and killed. It was the same spot where the
family's golden retriever had been killed two years earlier. The tragedy
briefly brought the couple together. However, in 1958, Mary filed
for divorce. In her divorce petition she alleged "extreme cruelty,
mental in nature, which seriously injured her health, destroyed her
happiness, rendered further cohabitation unendurable and compelled
the parties to separate."
Meyer's
career continued to prosper and was now high enough in the CIA hierarchy
to be involved in covert operations. This included working with people
like Richard
Bissell, Frank
Wisner, Tracy
Barnes,
Jake
Esterline,
David
Atlee Phillips, William
(Rip) Robertson
and E.
Howard Hunt.
Bissell, who was now head
of the OPC, described Meyer as the "creative genius behind covert
operations".
As chief of the CIA's International
Organizations Division, Meyer met with President John
F. Kennedy and
his staff. On 18th October, 1961, Kennedy consulted Meyer about the
possibility of replacing Allen W. Dulles
with John McCone. In his journal he reported
that Kennedy was "much more serious and less arrogant than I'd
known him before." He added that Kennedy "still yearns for
a respect that eludes him from such as myself."
It is assumed that Cord
was involved in the plot to assassinate Fidel
Castro but so far no documents have been released to confirm this.
Cord also met Robert Kennedy several
times after the failed Bay of Pigs
operation.
In 1961 James
Jesus Angleton asked Ben Bradlee
to suggest to John
F. Kennedy that
Meyer should become ambassador to Guatemala. Bradlee, who disliked
Meyer, refused. Bradlee later claimed that he did not respond to this
request because he knew that Kennedy would reject the idea. Meyer
also asked Charles L. Bartlett, another journalist friend of Kennedy
to suggest he should be given a political appointment. Bartlett did
as requested but reported back that "due to some incident that
occured at the U.N. conference in San Francisco in 1945 there was
no possibility".
On 12th October, 1964,
Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead as she
walked along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. Henry
Wiggins, a car mechanic, was working on a vehicle on Canal Road, when
he heard a woman shout out: "Someone help me, someone help me".
He then heard two gunshots. Wiggins ran to the edge of the wall overlooking
the towpath. He later told police he saw "a black man in a light
jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white
woman."
Soon afterwards Raymond
Crump, a black man, was found not far from the murder scene. He was
arrested and charged with Mary's murder. The towpath and the river
were searched but no murder weapon was ever found.
The murder of Mary Pinchot
Meyer
The media did not report
at the time that Meyer had been having an affair with John
F. Kennedy.
Nor did it reveal that her former husband was a senior figure in CIA's
covert operations. As a result, there was little public interest in
the case.
During the trial Wiggins
was unable to identify Raymond Crump as the man standing over Meyer's
body. The prosecution was also handicapped by the fact that the police
had been unable to find the murder weapon at the scene of the crime.
On 29th July, 1965, Crump was acquitted of murdering Mary Meyer. The
case remains unsolved.
At
the end of 1966 Desmond
FitzGerald,
head of the Directorate
for Plans, discovered
that Ramparts, a left-wing publication,
had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National
Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize
a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan
Thomas for
his book, The Very Best Men:
"I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and
financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail.
We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."
This
dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts
publishing in March, 1967. The article, written by Sol
Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA.
As well as reporting CIA funding of the National
Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist
front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Meyer
as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the
literary journal Encounter.
In
May 1967 Thomas
Braden responded
to this by publishing an article entitled, I'm
Glad the CIA is Immoral, in the Saturday
Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the
International Organizations Division unit of the CIA.
In 1967 Meyer became assistant
deputy director of plans, a post in which he worked with spymaster
Thomas H. Karamessines. However, the publicity brought about by the
Ramparts revealations did not
help his career.
Meyer role in Operation
Mockingbird was
further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the
publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin
in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was highly
critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast
Asia. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague
of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war.
During the Watergate
Scandal President Richard Nixon became
concerned about the activities of the Central
Intelligence Agency. Three of those involved in the burglary,
E.
Howard Hunt, Eugenio Martinez and
James W. McCord
had close links with the CIA. Nixon and his aides attempted to force
the CIA director, Richard Helms, and his
deputy, Vernon Walters, to pay hush-money
to Hunt, who was attempting to blackmail the government. Although
it seemed Walters was willing to do this, Helms refused. In February,
1973, Nixon sacked Helms. His deputy, Thomas
H. Karamessines,
resigned in protest.
James
Schlesinger
now became the new director of the CIA. Schlesinger
was heard to say: “The clandestine service was Helms’s Praetorian
Guard. It had too much influence in the Agency and was too powerful
within the government. I am going to cut it down to size.” This
he did and over the next three months over 7 per cent of CIA officers
lost their jobs.
On 9th May, 1973, Schlesinger
issued a directive to all CIA employees:
“I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency
to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or might
have gone on in the past, which might be considered to be outside
the legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct every person
presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of
which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same.
Anyone who has such information should call my secretary and say that
he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside the CIA’s
charter”.
There were several employees
who had been trying to complain about the illegal CIA activities for
some time. As Meyer pointed out, this directive “was a hunting
license for the resentful subordinate to dig back into the records
of the past in order to come up with evidence that might destroy the
career of a superior whom he long hated.” Meyer also suffered
during this period and James
Schlesinger moved
him to
London where he became CIA chief of station
in England.
In March, 1976, James
Truitt gave an
interview to the National Enquirer.
Truitt told the newspaper that Mary Pinchot
Meyer was having an affair with John
F. Kennedy.
He also claimed that Meyer had told his wife, Ann Truitt, that she
was keeping an account of this relationship in her diary. Meyer asked
Truitt to take possession of a private diary "if anything ever
happened to me".
Ann Truitt was living in
Tokyo at the time of the murder. She phoned Ben
Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary. Bradlee,
who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair with Kennedy,
knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled what he did after
Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until the next
morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to
Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside,
we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he,
too, was looking for Mary's diary."
James
Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, admitted that he knew
of Mary's relationship with John
F. Kennedy and
was searching her home looking for her diary and any letters that
would reveal details of the affair. According to Ben
Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who found the
diary and letters a few days later. It was claimed that the diary
was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents of the box were
given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary. Angleton later admitted
that Mary recorded in her diary that she had taken LSD with Kennedy
before "they made love".
Leo
Damore claimed in an article that appeared in the New
York Post that the reason Angleton and Bradlee were looking
for the diary was that: "She (Meyer) had access to the highest
levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think
it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It
wasn't Camelot, it was Caligula's court'?" Damore also said that
a figure close to the CIA
had told him that Mary's
death had been a professional "hit".
There is another possible
reason why both Angleton and Bradlee were searching for documents
in Meyer's house. Were they looking for material that Meyer had been
collecting on CIA's covert activities?
After leaving
the CIA
in 1977 Meyer became a a
nationally syndicated columnist. He also wrote several books including
an autobiography, Facing Reality: From World
Federalism to the CIA. In the book Meyer commented on the
murder of his wife: "I was satisfied by the conclusions of the
police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated
assault by a single individual and that she had been killed in her
struggle to escape." Carol Delaney, the longtime personal assistant
to Meyer, later admitted: "Mr. Meyer didn't for a minute think
that Ray Crump had murdered his wife or that it had been an attempted
rape. But, being an Agency man, he couldn't very well accuse the CIA
of the crime, although the murder had all the markings of an in-house
rubout."
In February,
2001, the writer, C. David Heymann, asked
Cord Meyer about the death of Mary Pinchot
Meyer: "My father died of a heart attack the same year Mary
was killed , " he whispered. "It was a bad time." And
what could he say about Mary Meyer? Who had committed such a heinous
crime? "The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that
killed John F. Kennedy."
Cord Meyer died of lymphoma
on 13th March, 2001.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
The
Death of Mary Pinchot Meyer Forum Debate
Cord
Meyer Photographs
(1)
Cord Meyer,
Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (1983)
Looking
back, I think that the impression Allen Dulles made on me was the
decisive factor in my final decision to join the CIA. Behind his
jovial and bluff exterior, he struck me as having a searching and
undogmatic mind and a cosmopolitan and sophisticated knowledge of
the world.... It seemed to me that an organization that had such
a man in one of its top positions was one well worth working for.
In the years that followed, I was to learn that in addition to his
other qualities, he was a loyal and courageous friend in time of
trouble.
(2)
Deborah
Davis, Katharine the Great
(1979)
In 1952
Cord Meyer showed up as a CIA official in Washington knowing the
names and activities of these same trade union and national liberation
organizations, and the public story was that he had defected from
the one-world movement because he had suddenly seen that world government
was in danger of being Communistic. This transformation, so out
of character for a man of his methodical intellect, caused people
within the movement to believe that World Federalism may have been
a lengthy intelligence assignment.
It is 1956,
then, and Ben Bradlee's brother-in-law is stationed as a covert
operations agent in Europe. He travels constantly, inciting "student"
demonstrations, "spontaneous" riots and trade union strikes;
creating splits among leftist factions; distributing Communist literature
to provoke anti-Communist backlash. This localized psychological
warfare is ultimately, of course, warfare against the Russians,
who are presumed to be the source of every leftist political sentiment
in Italy, France, the entire theater of Meyer's operations. In Eastern
Europe his aim on the contrary is to foment rebellion. Nineteen
fifty-six is the year the CIA learns that the Soviets will indeed
kill sixty thousand agency-aroused Hungarians with armored tanks.
All of this
goes on quite apart from his marriage. Mary does not have a security
clearance, so he cannot tell her what he is doing most of the time.
They begin to drift apart, and Mary draws closer to her sister and
to Ben. When in the late fifties her marriage to Cord ends, she
goes to live with Tony and Ben in Washington, where Newsweek has
transferred him, and sets up her apartment and art studio in their
converted garage...
It is only
a matter of time, Angleton feels, until Bradlee makes a serious
mistake, as he eventually does with the publication of Conversations
with Kennedy, in which he mentions that Mary Meyer was murdered,
but only in a footnote. A former Post editor named James Truitt
is enraged at this; according to Truitt, Bradlee has forced him
out of the paper in a particularly nasty fashion, with accusations
of mental incompetence, and now Truitt decides to get back at Bradlee
by revealing to other newspapers his belief that Bradlee's story
on the Cord Meyers in Conversations with Kennedy was not
the whole story; that Mary Meyer had been Kennedy's lover and that
the day of her murder, James Angleton of the CIA searched her apartment
and burned her diary. Their feud unnecessarily implicates Angleton,
to his disgust and bitterness.
(3)
Cord Meyer,
Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (1983)
My participation
in this struggle provided a unique opportunity to learn at first
hand the strengths and weaknesses of Communist organizational strategy.
As nothing else could, it gave me an understanding of how formidable
is that dedicated man, the Communist true believer, and it taught
me never to underestimate the potential strength of a disciplined
Communist minority. It revealed the techniques of covert infiltration
and control, through which Communists have too often captured organizations
from those who awoke too late to these dangers. In microcosm, our
struggle was an extension of the political battle being waged then
in Western Europe between the democratic left and the mass Communist
parties of Italy and France. My role in this small skirmish made
me realize how much was at stake on the larger stage.
(4)
Evan
Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Early
Years of the CIA (1995)
In late
August 1953, just after Bissell had finished advising Frank Wisner
and the CIA on how it might "roll back" communism in Eastern
Europe, he had an experience that made him want to join the agency
full-time. Taking a few weeks off from the Ford Foundation, he went
cruising in Maine on his yawl, the Sea Witch, with Tom Braden and
his wife, Joan. Braden was the head of the International Organizations
Division at the CIA, in charge of running anti-Communist front groups
in Western Europe.
The Sea
Witch was anchored in a harbor in Penobscot Bay when Braden received
an urgent message informing him that the McCarthyites had discovered
a Red at the CIA. The man in question was Braden's deputy, Cord
Meyer, a young war hero from St. Paul's and Yale, who had lost an
eye in combat in the Pacific. The Bradens immediately abandoned
their vacation and drove through the night back to Washington to
stand by young Meyer. The FBI was unwilling to give him a security
clearance, although typically refusing to say why. Dulles, Wisner,
and other top agency officials refused to permit an FBI interrogation
of Meyer. Eventually, they forced the FBI to reveal the charges
against Meyer, which were flimsy at best (he had once appeared on
the same speaking platform as a leftist professor and joined liberal
groups deemed subversive by the Justice Department). In fact, Meyer
was a staunch anti-Communist. After some procedural foot-dragging,
he was cleared just before Thanksgiving and allowed to keep his
job.
(5)
Charles Ameringer, U.S. Intelligence Foreign Intelligence: The
Secret Side of American History (1990)
Tom Braden
later revealed that when he was head of the IOD, he had passed money
to American labor leaders to fight Communist labor unions in Italy
and Germany. Columnist Drew Pearson wrote, "Jay Lovestone,
sometimes called (AFL-CIO president George) Meany's minister of
foreign affairs... takes orders from Cord Meyer of the CIA."
Lovestone, who was appointed executive secretary of the AFL Free
Trade Union Committee after World War II and a dedicated cold warrior,
needed little prodding from Braden and Meyer in opposing Communist
influence in the international labor movement. At about the time
that Meyer took charge of expanded operations in international organizations
as chief of the Covert Action staff, Lovestone helped create the
American Institute of Free Labor Development (AIFLD) for the purpose
of training labor leaders in Latin America in labor organizing techniques
and tactics. The AIFLD was one of several AFL-CIO entities that
received covert funding from the CIA; Philip Agee alleged that its
collaboration with CIA stations abroad was extremely close, amounting
to a "country-team effort."
(6)
Nina
Burleigh,
A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential
Mistress Mary Meyer (1998)
All of Washington
was dying to be part of the new in crowd, and she was there. She
was more inside than most men, including her exhusband, who would
never find his name on a White House guest list even though he was
at the very pinnacle of the intelligence community. When Kennedy
was elected, Cord Meyer had hoped that his long wait in bureaucratic
obscurity during the Eisenhower years would end with the advent
of a Democratic administration. But that was not to be. The bad
blood between him and Kennedy precluded that, as did the president's
apparent fascination with his ex-wife.
First Cord
tried for a diplomatic post. Jim Angleton asked Ben Bradlee to recommend
Cord to Kennedy as ambassador to Guatemala. But Bradlee, who disliked
Cord Meyer and for whom the feeling was returned (probably as a
result of Bradlee's role in the European husband-dumping trip),
never passed on the recommendation to Kennedy. Bradlee later wrote
that he knew Kennedy did not like Cord and neither did he, owing
to Cord Meyer's "derisive scorn for the people's right to know."
In the book where he mentions his and Kennedy's dislike for Cord,
he fails to mention the anecdote, widely discussed in Georgetown,
about the night a drunken Cord Meyer lunged for Bradlee's neck across
a dinner table.
As chief
of the CIA's International Organizations Division, Cord Meyer sometimes
met personally with Kennedy and his staff. Cord might have been
involved in the anti-Castro plots, although his direct involvement
was not revealed in public documents available as of 1997. He was
certainly aware of them. In his private journal he described a 1960
meeting with a man named Pepe Figueres (probably Jose Figueres,
president of Costa Rica, whose nickname was "Don Pepe")
at which they "talked about what to do about Castro/Trujillo."
He met often with Robert Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. In October
1961 President Kennedy called Cord into the Oval Office to privately
ask how to gain agency support for replacing CIA director Dulles
with John McCone. Cord came away from that meeting feeling Kennedy
was "much more serious and less arrogant than I'd known him
before."
Cord was
aware as early as October 1961 of Kennedy's interest in his ex-wife.
Jim Angleton was paying keen attention to the young president's
personal life and he had obliquely warned his old friend, although
it doesn't appear he told Cord all he knew at the time. He later
told Joan Bross, whose husband, John, was a high-ranking CIA official,
that his bugging revealed that when Kennedy first called Mary, she
went to the White House and found herself alone, and she asked to
be taken home again. In his journal, Cord wrote that Angleton had
told him Mary "baffles" Kennedy and that even with money
and power, Kennedy "still yearns for a respect that eludes
him from such as myself."
Cord eventually
became troubled by the situation, although he never grasped the
real nature of the relationship between his ex-wife and the President.
In a long and melancholy journal entry in 1963 in which he listed
his problems one by one, he wrote of "the peculiar relationship
that exists between me and the President." Charles Bartlett,
a mutual friend of Cord and the president, had spoken to Kennedy
about a political appointment for Cord but "was told by JFK
that due to some incident that occurred at the UN. conference in
San Francisco in 1945 there was no possibility."
(7)
Phil Agee, The
National Student Association Scandal, Campus Watch (1991)
In February
1967, vice president Hubert Humphrey told a Stanford University
audience that recent revelations of CIA activities represented "one
of the saddest times, in reference to public policy, our Government
has had." He was referring to the momentous exposures, then
exploding across the front pages, of CIA meddling in the nation's
largest student group, the United States National Student Association
(NSA). The 1967 investigations, initially prompted by the editors
of Ramparts magazine and authorized by various liberal-minded figures
in corporate media and government, brought forth some of the most
fully-disclosed operations regarding CIA influence over academia
and a host of other domestic groups. Only after a presidential directive
and promises by federal agencies to end covert support of domestic
groups did the scandal subside. The damage control ultimately allayed
such figures as Humphrey, Senator Robert Kennedy, and New York Times
editorial page editor John Oakes. Yet subsequent failures to properly
regulate covert actions along with legal loopholes and lack of clear
policies within academic institutions have left persisting doubts
regarding the use to which the CIA has put student groups and the
academic community.
By most
accounts, the relationship between the CIA and the NSA dates back
to the early fifties, when both organizations were still in their
infancies. As Tom Braden, who headed the agency's International
Organization Division between '51 and '54, recounts in an article
titled "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'," the NSA operation
began after Allen Dulles, then in line for directorship, authorized
Braden to provide support to domestic organizations in an all-out
effort against the "international Communist front." Secret
CIA funds were provided in 1952 to then NSA president William Dentzer,
who later went on to become AID director in Peru. The New York Times
also identified Cord Meyer, Jr. as having headed the NSA operation.
However, the ties between the CIA and the National Student Association
may actually stretch back to 1950, when, according to a New York
Times interview with Frederic Delano Houghteling, then NSA secretary,
the CIA gave him several thousand dollars to pay traveling expenses
for a delegation of 12 representatives to a European international
student conference.
(8)
David Corn, Blond Ghost: The Shackley
and the CIA's Crusades (1994)
It was poetic
that on June 17- the day of the Watergate break-in Ted Shackley
was in charge of the Western Hemisphere Division. Three of the five
men who broke into the Democrats' office were Cuban exiles, past
foot-soldiers in the covert war against Castro; another was an American
veteran of the anti-Cuba campaign. They had been enlisted for the
Watergate job by Hunt, who helped organize the Bay of Pigs invasion
and now was part of the Nixon White House's undercover, dirty-tricks
Plumbers unit. One of the five, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, was still
on Shackley's payroll-another headache for Shackley and the Agency.
The day
after the break-in, Shackley received a cable on Martinez from Jacob
Esterline, his chief of station in Miami. The previous November,
Martinez had mentioned his association with Hunt to the Miami station.
But Martinez did not disclose the full extent of his contact-most
notably, that he had participated with Hunt and the Plumbers in
the breakin at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. And
in March of 1972, Martinez had told Esterline that Hunt was skulking
about Florida for the White House and asked if the chief was aware
of all the Agency activities in the Miami area. Clearly, Martinez
thought Hunt was still with the Company - and that Esterline might
be out of the loop. A worried Esterline wrote headquarters requesting
information on Hunt's ties to the White House. The March 27, 1972,
reply from Cord Meyer, the assistant deputy director for plans,
was brusque: don't worry about Hunt in Miami; the ex-spy is on White
House business. "Cool it," Meyer ordered.
In his dispatch
to Shackley after the Watergate break-in, Esterline sought to preserve
a cover story. The chief of station noted, accurately, that Martinez
currently had two responsibilities for Shackley's division: reporting
on maritime operations against Cuba and gathering intelligence on
possible demonstrations at the Republican and Democratic conventions,
both scheduled to be held in Miami. But Esterline deliberately kept
out of his report information about Martinez's prior-and worrisome-references
to Hunt's suspicious activities. Esterline did not reveal that the
CIA had caught a whiff of the scandal to come and did nothing.
(9)
Cord Meyer, journal entry (1st February, 1969)
The day
before yesterday Dick Helms, Tom Karamessines and I met with Nixon,
his new Secretary of State, Rogers, and Henry Kissinger, his aide
for National Security Affairs, in the cabinet room of the White
House. Nixon was very self-assured, quick to ask the relevant questions
and put us at our ease in talking to him. The taut and withdrawn
young man whom I first met at the junior Chamber of Commerce awards
dinner in Chattanooga, Tenn., more than twenty years ago was replaced
by a man who struck me as confidently in possession of the enormous
power of that office. We shall see what successive crises do to
him, but I suspect he will be a far better President than I or my
liberal friends ever expected. We shall see.
(10)
Lisa Todorovich, Washington Post (13th June, 1997)
Many
Deep Throat theorists have guessed that Deep Throat was an FBI
or White House official, but it is possible that a CIA official
would have had access to the same information. In his 1994 book,
"Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA,"
author Mark Riebling suggests two prime suspects from the agency's
ranks.
Cord Meyer:
Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 at the behest of Allen Dulles, director
of central intelligence, after a stint as president of the U.N.-centric
United World Federalists, a post which got him denounced by Moscow
Radio as "the fig leaf of American imperialism" and
accused of Communist activity by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
At the CIA, Meyer adopted a strident anti-Soviet stance and became
a top aide to Richard Helms, director of central intelligence
under presidents Johnson and Nixon. Helms was fired from his post
in 1973 after he refused to help Nixon use the CIA to stall the
FBI's Watergate probe.
According
to Riebling, Meyer fits the Deep Throat profile that Bob Woodward
has sketched: intellectual, combat veteran, heavy drinker and
chain smoker. Like Woodward, Meyer attended Yale. He described
his experiences in a 1983 book, "Facing Reality: From World
Federalism to the CIA."
Meyer
also personifies the uniquely Washington phenomenon of the intermingling
of government and the press. Meyer's wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer,
was the sister of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee's
second wife, Tony Pinchot Bradlee. Meyer was estranged from his
wife at the time of her murder on the towpath along the C&O
Canal in Georgetown in 1964. The case has never been solved.
William
E. Colby: Remembered as one of the last great "gentleman
spies," Colby served as CIA director from 1973 to 1976. During
Colby's tenure, the agency supported opponents of Chilean President
Salvador Allende, a Marxist, who was killed during a 1973 military
coup. While CIA station chief in Vietnam during the 1960s, Colby
had directed Operation Phoenix, pooling U.S. intelligence resources
to identify and "neutralize" Viet Cong leaders, ultimately
resulting in as many as 20,000 deaths.
Colby
is perhaps best known for telling Congress about the CIA "family
jewels" -- detailed accounts of extensive covert operations
that in 1975 prompted Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) to compare the
agency to "a rogue elephant on the rampage." After leaving
the CIA, Colby practiced law at Reid & Priest in Washington,
D.C., and later at Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine in Los
Angeles. He also had a consulting business and spoke on the lecture
circuit. In 1994 Colby signed on with Activision, an entertainment
and video game publisher, to develop spy thriller video games.
Riebling
counts Colby as a suspect because one of his given roles while
working for Helms at the CIA was to protect the agency's image
and thus to prevent it from being tarnished by the Nixon administration's
troubles. According to Riebling, Woodward first met with Deep
Throat within hours of Colby's damage-control assignment, and
Colby was also "rumored to use underground parking structures
for secret meetings."
Colby
became the subject of a different mystery in April 1996 when he
disappeared while canoeing on the Potomac River. He was missing
for nine days before his body was found in a tributary. An autopsy
revealed that Colby, age 76, had possibly suffered a stroke or
heart attack before falling into the water and drowning.
The prospects
that William E. Colby was Deep Throat dim considerably in light
of Woodward's assertion that he would reveal Deep Throat's identity
upon his death. Colby's widow, Sally Shelton-Colby, a top official
at the US Agency for International Development, characterized
the idea of her husband as the secret Watergate source as "preposterous."
"My husband wasn't Deep Throat," she said. "Bill
just didn't have it in him."
(11)
New
York Times (15th March, 2001)
Cord Meyer
Jr., an articulate and passionate strategist who helped guide the
young Central Intelligence Agency's efforts to contain Soviet communism
at home and abroad, died here on Tuesday. He was 80.
Mr. Meyer,
whose career took extraordinary turns, from soldier to author to
liberal activist to spy to newspaper columnist, died of lymphoma
and other ailments at the Washington Home, a long-term health care
facility.
In his 26
years at the C.I.A., where he held management positions in the covert
operations branch, Mr. Meyer drew criticism from many liberals for
his role in efforts to subsidize student and labor groups in this
country as counterweights to Soviet-backed groups in Europe.
Yet, for
all his ardent anti-communism, which associates said was a lifelong
principle, Mr. Meyer faced accusations at the height of the McCarthy
era that he was a Communist sympathizer.
George J.
Tenet, the CIA director, released a statement calling Mr. Meyer
"a passionate defender of freedom around the world."
"Cord
defined the concept, doctrine and implementation of covert action
on behalf of the security and interests of our nation," Mr.
Tenet said....
As Soviet
influence grew in the postwar era, Mr. Meyer spread his hopes for
arms control and a democratic world government led by the United
Nations.
"He
was young and idealistic and very much involved in the one world
movement," said Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a former American delegate
to the United Nations. But, she added, "he was a consistent
anti-Communist" who did not trust the Soviets.
Mr. Meyer
was a founding member of the United World Federalists, where he
fought for controls on the use of atomic weapons. He also helped
establish the American Veterans Committee, a liberal group that
sought to deny preferential treatment for veterans. While in that
organization, he came in direct contact with Communist infiltration
techniques, said his son, Mark Meyer. Mr. Meyer's moves to thwart
Soviet agents helped exonerate him from accusations that he would
soon face, his son said.
With the
explosion of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, Mr. Meyer
saw his hopes for arms control dissipate and was troubled by the
Berlin blockade and the invasion of South Korea. He left his postgraduate
work at Harvard and signed up with the CIA
Two years
after joining the spy agency, Mr. Meyer was accused by the F.B.I.
of Communist sympathies. A CIA hearing board eventually acquitted
him of all charges...
While at
the CIA, Mr. Meyer eventually became second-in-command of worldwide
clandestine services. But, in the public mind, he was more associated
with a number of domestic activities, some of which were denounced
as "dirty tricks" by his critics and are prohibited today.
In 1967,
the leftist magazine Ramparts disclosed that the CIA, under Mr.
Meyer's direction, had provided money to American student groups
and a literary magazine as part of an anti-Communist campaign.
(12)
Washington Post (15th March, 2001)
Cord Meyer
Jr., 80, a figure central to many of the Central Intelligence Agency's
covert operations during the Cold War, including the secret funding
of student, labor and literary groups, died March 13, 2001, at the
Washington Home. He suffered from a variety of ailments, including
lymphoma.
Mr. Meyer,
who was with the CIA from 1951 to 1977, joined as a prominent young
liberal who was active in the world government movement. He advanced
to become the top deputy in a section of the agency called the "dirty
tricks department" by detractors because of its elaborate activities
aimed at curbing communist influence.
Mr. Meyer
gained notoriety in 1967 when it was revealed in the radical magazine
Ramparts that, under his direction, the CIA had been subsidizing
groups such as the National Student Association and the literary
journal Encounter.
In a 1978
interview, Mr. Meyer said of the controversy, which was investigated
by a presidential panel, that "the object was not to subvert
students, of course, but to make it possible for the American point
of view to be represented." At the time, Soviet operatives
were having success recruiting student organizers around the world.
Mr. Meyer
again made headlines in 1972, when it was revealed that he had asked
an old friend from the world government movement, who was then in
the publishing business, to allow the CIA to review the galley proofs
of a book critical of the agency's dealings with the drug traffic
in Southeast Asia.
The instances
offered rare glimpses into the internal mechanics of a shadowy agency
that was coming under increasing scrutiny by critics of its tactics.
In both cases, Mr. Meyer said he had not run afoul of the law and
had the nation's security interests at heart. In a statement yesterday,
CIA Director George J. Tenet called Mr. Meyer "a passionate
defender of freedom around the world."
Mr. Meyer's
official title from 1967 to 1973 was assistant deputy director of
plans, a post in which he worked with legendary spymaster Thomas
H. Karamessines, also known as "The Greek." Among Mr.
Meyer's duties was the CIA's management of Radio Free Europe and
Radio Liberty.
It was assumed
that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance to Mr. Karamessines's position,
but the public disclosure about the book deal and the subsidization
of the National Student Association apparently dampened his prospects.
Over the years, colleagues had described him as intelligent, but
also hard to get along with. He retired from the agency in 1977
after a posting as the London station chief.
(13)
C.
David Heymann, The Georgetown
Ladies' Social Club (2003)
Cord Meyer
gave expression to his support of Angleton in, "Facing Reality,"
an autobiography subtitled, "From World Federalism to the CIA."
In the same volume, he comments briefly on the murder of his wife:
"I was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation
that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by
a single individual and that she had been killed in her struggle
to escape." Carol Delaney, a family friend and longtime personal
assistant to Cord Meyer, observed that, "Mr. Meyer didn't for
a minute think that Ray Crump had murdered his wife or that it had
been an attempted rape. But, being an Agency man, he couldn't very
well accuse the CIA of the crime, although the murder had all the
markings of an in-house rubout."
Asked to
comment on the case, by the current author (C. David Heymann), Cord
Meyer held court at the beginning of February 2001 - six weeks before
his death - in the barren dining room of a Washington nursing home.
Propped up in a chair, his glass eye bulging, he struggled to hold
his head aloft. Although he was no longer able to read, the nurses
supplied him with a daily copy of The Washington Post, which
he carried with him wherever he went. "My father died of a
heart attack the same year Mary was killed , " he whispered.
"It was a bad time." And what could he say about Mary
Meyer? Who had committed such a heinous crime? "The same sons
of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy."
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