(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."
